Open letter to Julian Fellowes

Dear Lord Fellowes,

I read in the paper today some of the remarks you have apparently made concerning  your recent adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

I'm afraid I have some problems with these. You say that to understand Shakespeare, "you need a kind of Shakespearean scholarship, and you need to understand the language and analyse it and so on. I can do that  because I had a very expensive education. I went to Cambridge."

Ah. So you had a very expensive education, did you? Well, bully for you. I, on the other hand, had a very cheap education (free, actually), and have never had any trouble understanding Romeo and Juliet. I know many people who are like me in this respect. How dare you patronise us in this way?

In the meantime, I suggest you leave Shakespeare alone (after all, he has managed without you for several hundred years, and will no doubt continue being loved and admired long after you are forgotten), and concentrate on correcting some of the clunky prose and glaring anachronisms* in the script of Downton Abbey.

Yours etc

*You see - you don't need an expensive education to use long words after all, do you?


(I apologise to any readers who are fed up with me banging on about Lord Fellowes, but one of the joys of having a blog is that it is my own personal platform my for own personal rants, and at least it  stops me from running amok in the streets, screaming obscenities.)

I'm outraged...

...that Julian Fellowes, he of the clunky, anachronistic prose and see-through plots that comprise Downton Abbey*, has actually presumed to re-write Romeo and Juliet in his new film of the play. Some of it is apparently Shakespeare, but Fellowes has 'improved' on parts of it by altering them.

How dare he? How dare anyone try to better Shakespeare? It's like The Beatles (whom I do respect)trying to re-write Bach. Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet stuck faithfully to the original words,  was perfectly comprehensible, and (I thought) very well done.

That's all.

*I know that DA has lots of fans; some of them are my best friends (yes; really). I also  know that I may well be offending some of those  fans by writing this. But I guess one of the advantages of a blog is that it's my blog, and a forum for my own opinions. No-one has to read or agree with it!