Ariel has begun to express an interest in Shakespeare, and Kathleen and I decided to fan the flame of interest before the public school teaching methods of the Bard extinguish it instead. Don’t get me wrong; I’m positive there are teachers out there who are capable of making Shakespeare attractive to young minds. It’s just that I personally never encountered any growing up. All too often, teaching Shakespeare consisted of hearing students essaying the text aloud with often painful consequences, followed by extensive vocabularly quizzes. The result is that the story itself would be utterly lost, except the story was kind of the whole point of the play in the first place.
So last evening we began a three-way reading of “The Tempest.” We divided up the parts, and to make life simple, Ariel is reading every part beginning with the letter “A”…including, naturally, “Ariel.” The hysterical thing is that she made the acting choice of reading “Ariel”–not as a sprite in servitude–but as an annoyed teenager who’s been grounded and is being constantly lectured. When Prospero says, “Dost thou forget from what a torment I did free thee?” Ariel rolled her eyes and groaned in an annoyed here-we-go-again tone, “Noooooo.”
Also of interest is a section of the introduction (unsigned, but presumably written by Penguin edition editor Peter Holland) that, in two paragraphs, puts forward a sweeping argument in the face of all those who claim that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. Since it’s only a small portion of a much larger essay, I think reproducing it here falls under fair use. But I’m putting it in the extended section so as not to unnecessarily lengthen the blog entry.
In discussing those who put forward the notion that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, Holland writes:
“The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs. Every pro-Bacon or pro-Oxford tract sooner or later claims that the historical William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the plays because he could not have had the training, the university education, the experience, and indeed the magination or background their author supposedly possessed. Only a learned genius like Bacon or an aristocrat like Oxford could have written such fine plays. (As it happens, lucky male children of the middle class had access to better education than most aristocrats in Elizabethan England–and Oxford was not particularly well educated.) Shakespeare received in the Stratford grammar school a formal education that would daunt many college graduates today; and popular rival playwrights such as the very learned Ben Johnson and George Chapman, both of whom also lacked university training, achieved great artistic success, without being taken as Bacon or Oxford.
“Besides snobbery, one other quality characterizes the authorship controversy: lack of evidence. A great deal of testimony from Shakespeare’s time shows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays and that his contemporaries recognized them as distinctive and distinctly superior…Since that testimony comes from Shakespeare’s enemies and theatrical competitors as well as from his co-workers and from the Elizabethan equivalent of literary journalists, it seems unlikely that, if any one of these sources had known he was a fraud, they would have failed to record that fact.”
Works for me.
PAD
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Re: the Asimov story –
I’ve heard roughly the same thing applied to Robert Frost and his “Miles to go before I sleep” poem. There’s times I’m convinced that the Literary Criticism movement was started mostly so that scholars could smugly ignore it when the author of a work contradicted their analysis.
Re: the Authorial Debate
Lars Walker’s recent novel, “Blood And Vengeance” (I think) includes discussion of the question of whether Shakespeare cribbed Hamlet from an earlier play by a guy named Kydd.
Posted by Dave Van Domelen:
Re: the Asimov story –
I’ve heard roughly the same thing applied to Robert Frost and his “Miles to go before I sleep” poem. There’s times I’m convinced that the Literary Criticism movement was started mostly so that scholars could smugly ignore it when the author of a work contradicted their analysis.
I’m sure I’ve heard similar stories attributed to various writers. And, of course, there was the gag in Rodney Dangerfield’s movie Back to School where he gets Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper for him, then is scolded by his professor not only because he didn’t do his own work, but because whoever did write the paper knew nothing about Vonnegut.
I’m immeasurably glad that my college years of literary/film/dramatic/etc. theory are well behind me. Still, although academic criticism sometimes (or perhaps often) goes to absurd extremes, I still have some sympathy with the basic idea that the author of a work is not necessarily the be-all and end-all (to invoke a Shakespearianism to keep this on-point) of that work’s meaning. After all, everyone who reads a work reacts to it in keeping with his/her own opinions, history, attitudes, perceptions, etc. and may well come away from the work with some reaction that is wholely logical, and yet is something that the author did not intend or expect.
Regardless, well, did I mention I’m glad to be past college lit theory?
I second and third the recommendation that seeing the plays staged is one of the best ways to feed an early Shakespeare addiction. That was what happened to me — my first real Bardic encounter was a staging of Twelfth Night at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I was thirteen (thus, a first-rate production; OSF was and is one of the best companies there is). And it was one of those magic nights when the actors and audience were in perfect synchronicity, borrowing each other’s energy and perfectly catching each other’s moods.
This was a part of a summer tour set up by a couple of teachers at my junior high school, for which they hauled six busloads of kids six hours down the freeway, stuffed us into dorms at the local university, and fed us four or five plays over three days (one of the two matinees, a non-Shakespeare show, was optional). We also got the Festival’s backstage tour, which revealed such useful things as the fact that they weren’t using traditional stage blood for that year’s Titus Andronicus because there’d have been too much — so instead, they sewed special fall-away pieces into the costumes and lined them with red fabric and glitter.
Several decades later, I am still a major Shakespeare and theater buff, get back to Ashland — OSF’s stomping grounds — most summers, and spend a fair amount of my writing time borrowing various Shakespearean lore for one project or another.
and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common–they are snobs
Hmm, well I am a closet Marlovian, but that’s because I have a soft spot for Marlowe (he was the subject of my Junior Thesis in high school). Oh and I’m a bit of a conspiracy theorist.
Even better was all the heated debates regarding “Green Eggs and Ham,” a book written–from what I understand–for no major reason other than that Seuss’ editor bet him he couldn’t write an entire book that used only forty different words.
The absolute capper of it all, though, has to be in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” when he’s stuck on a line for a movie behind a pedant who is archly discussing the theories of communications guru Marshall McLuhan. When Woody’s character challenges him, the pedant archly announces that he teaches a course at NYU about McLuhan. “Oh yeah?” snaps back Allen. “Well, I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here!” And he hauls McLuhan onto camera, whereupon McLuhan lays into the pedant by informing him, (I’m working from memory) “You have no grasp or understanding of my theories whatsoever! What sort of educational system could possibly hire you to teach?”
And Allen blissfully turns to camera and says, “Wouldn’t it be great if life was really like this?”
PAD
And I should mention that similar things have happened to me…usually on the internet. Someone will say that I “obviously” put something into a story because of this, that or the other. And I’ll say, “No, that’s not why I did it at all” or “You’re attaching way too much significance to it,” and be told that I don’t know what I’m talking about. That the opinion of the reader carries more weight than the reasons of the writer.
PAD
My own Shakespeare story:
I was in a business class last year where we had to take a Shakespeare play and convert it into a business situation. I rewrote Macbeth as a guy working his way up in a Dry Cleaning business (their motto was “Out, Ðámņ Spot!”), who has the owner sent up the river. The three guys around the water-cooler tell Macbeth that he’ll be president of the company unless he meets up with a man who was “not born of woman.” Turns out Macduff is a real sonavabitch, so . . ..
Rewriting the plays like that really helps to get a better understanding of the stories as well. I also would recommend the late 1970s BBC productions that were done of all the plays. Ah, Felicity Kendal in Twelfth Night. Mmmmmm.
Dale Sherman observes:
Rewriting the plays like that really helps to get a better understanding of the stories as well.
That’s very true. I seem to remember seeing a TV special or something tied to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. Part of it showed Mel Gibson going in to guest-teach at a high school somewhere. Part of what he did was read over scenes with the students, getting through the language so that the kids would understand what the characters are talking about, then have the kids re-do the scene in their own words.
It’s easy to be cynical and look at that as a publicity stunt for the movie, but I was impressed that Gibson had the confidence and ability and willingness to do such a guest-teaching stunt. And it was just plain great to hear kids transform lines like “Season your admiration for awhile/With an attent ear, till I may deliver/
Upon the witness of these gentlemen/
This marvel to you.” to something like “Dude! Shut up for a second. These guys saw your dad walking around last night–your dead dad!” (Or whatever the particular scenes and lines were; it’s been a while since Gibson’s Hamlet, after all, so I can’t recall exact details.)
Here’s a well-loved quote I trot out whenever the Bacon question arises:
“I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.”
– James M. Barrie
People like to shift the argument when it comes to debunking anti-Stratfordians, straying from the central point — which is that, other than phonetics, there is nothing to link Shaksper to Shakespeare. They’ll say, “So — what, just because Shaksper was a commoner, he couldn’t have also been a genius?” And then they tear down the straw man. When the real question is — putting genius aside — why is there no reference anywhere to Guillaume Shaksper being a poet or playwright?
No reference anywhere?
“As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s Labour’s Lost, his Love’s Labour’s Won, his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.”
Francis Meres, 1598.
Indeed it would. And yet, it would be less astounding to find out that an acknowledged playwright had produced them, as opposed to someone who was never referred to as a writer by anyone, ever.
Meres’s encomium qualifies as an acknowledgement. Ben Jonson wrote an ode to him in the First Folio. The claim the anti-Stratfordians have to make isn’t that there is no reference to him, it’s that the references there are must be fraudulent. The allegation is (as it has to be) that these references are to a pseudonym, that Jonson et. al. knew them to be fake and were playing along as members of the conspiracy. The claims usually are that Shakspeare himself was playing along, acting as a play-laundering service.
The problem with that is there are so many of them. Yes, I said “many.” The surprising thing is not the paucity of references to Shakespeare, but the number of references in a barely literate society. We do have Robert Greene insulting Shakespeare in a review written in the 1590s (“tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”). Plays had to be registered, so we do have reasonably accurate dates for the plays, some of which list him as the author. We do in fact know that Shakespeare was an actor, as he was one of the lessees in the Globe, one of the “stockholders” in the King’s Men, and a beneficiary of the will of another actor.
So what we have is an actor claiming to have written a set of plays performed by his acting company. We have contemporary references to his authorship in the stationers’ register and in poems and books that were published under his name, including when he dedicated a poem to the Earl of Southampton, signed William Shakespeare. We have members of the acting company publishing the plays posthumously, listing him as the author. We have the most prominent surviving playwright of the generation writing a poem for that volume. It’s not the tidal wave of correspondence and documentation that one would find for a contemporary author but it’s certainly more than we would find documenting Wat the thatcher’s son from Dursley. As for something beyond phonetics linking Shaksper to Shakespeare (or possibly heredity– Shaksper’s father used the Shakespeare spelling on occasion, including when he WAS GRANTED A COAT OF ARMS UNDER THAT NAME), in the 16th and early 17th centuries it is just not reasonable to expect the stationers to have gotten copies of Shaksper’s driver’s license when he was registering his works.
Apropos of Nothing (a seque of some import, around here), it was my father, a devoted non-reader, who introduced me to Shakespeare. Went line-by-line through the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” scene in JULIUS CAESAR, stressing the manipulation on display. He really admires that scene. It was the best hour of teaching I ever had.
I am not really that well-versed in the Shakespearian debate, but might as well add a few thoughts. It seems to me that in the passage you quote, Francis Meres only mentioned “Shakespeare”, not “that eminent son of Stratford, William Shakespere”, so that quote does identify Shakespeare of London as Shakespeare of Stratford. (Ben Jonson of course referred to Shakespeare as the sweet swan of Avon, but from what I saw in a TV feature, Oxfordians explain that as a reference to De Vere’s country home in the vale of the Avon river, not to the town of Stratford).
So the possibility that the Shakespeare in London was a different guy cannot be excluded totally, especially if we allow for a pseudonym. (And who knows, there probably was a real George Elliot or Elliott who lived at the time of that writer, and maybe there even was a real man called Mark Twain who lived around the time of Samuel Clemens, although the story I read somewhere was that there had been another writer who used the same pseudonym before he did).
It still strikes me as odd that there is so little evidence of Shakespeare’s life in London. Considering in how high esteem he was held by some contemporaries, I find it a bit surprising that apparently no one was interested in preserving manuscripts (if not of the plays, then of his poems) or letters of his, that even though an expensive edition of his plays was produced, no-one who knew him or his friends bothered to write his biography or a eulogy containing hard biographical data, or even to record some anecdotes of his life in London (according to my old encyclopedia, the first biography of Shakespeare was published in 1709 as an introduction to Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays). (Contrast that e.g. with Martin Luther, who lived a century before Shakespeare, in a country that if anything was more subject to the ravages of war than England, but of whom we still have autograph manuscripts as well as hundreds of letters).
Anyway, given the sparsity of information we have about Shakespeare (or the two Shakespeares), maybe the matter isn’t really that important. I like to think of this quote about another famous writer: “No one knows if Homer actually lived. But we do know that he was born blind.”
I’m quite late in reading this, but thought I would add my pennies. First, The Tempest is one of the best plays ever. Yay for Ariel’s acting choice! And yay for you and Kathleen for doing that with her.
As to the whole Shakespeare authorship thing – I’ve only recently become involved in the whole debate and only because I wrote a YA novel Shakespeare adaptation. I tend to agree with the statement that most of the scholars who say WS didn’t write the plays attributed to him start from very thin ice – that he wasn’t educated enough and blah blah. Being a writer myself, I firmy believe that there are times when, even with a woeful education (such as the one given to most kids in city public schools) there can still be blossoms of genius. There have always been artists with the ability to teach themselves and learn outside of a school system. That’s like saying “Well, Homer didn’t go to Cambridge so obviously he didn’t write the Illiad.” Whatever.
But, on the other side of the debate, we have the folks who say “Well, WS obviously wrote the plays because we have all these people of the time saying he did.” Yes, well, wasn’t it supposed to be a *secret* that Oxford or Bacon or Marlowe (who is my particular choice) was the real author. The whole point was that people would think Will wrote the plays because whoever really did couldn’t come out of the closet, so to speak. So, on that front, I think evidence that he DID write the plays is shaky as well.
There are, of course, other pieces of evidence to be examined and I won’t bore you with them here. The main point I’m making is that, on all sides, there is a whole lot of snobbery going around. A whole lot of ignoring evidence as one sees fit. This problem crops up a lot in academia and it drives me bonkers. Especially when I’m trying to do research for stuff.
Argh. Insert “not” or “not conclusively” between “does” and “identify” in the first paragraph of my first post.
David Bjorlin and Menshevik,
In my first post on this thread, I wrote, “I’ve seen lots of interesting arguments from both Stratfordians and Oxfordians …”
Thanks for proving me right! This is why I find the question so fascinating. And neither of you come off as snobs, which I also find vindicating.
Three cheers!
I heartily recommend the book ‘Who Is Shakespeare’ by John Michel, which summarizes most of the different theories on who wrote Shakespeares plays/sonnets/etc.
If nothing else, it might make you think about how easily we fall for conspiracy theories, and how ‘evidence’, like statistics, can be twisted to suit the user.
WRT that Asimov anecdote:
It may or may not be true, but Asimov certainly wanted people to think it was. He not only mentions it in his autobiography, but identifies the lecturer: SF scholar Gotthard Gunther
The comments regarding Asimov and his encounter with a critic remind me of a story he wrote, about Shakespeare, which connects it to the topic quite nicely. It was called “The Bard”. In the story, a science professor approaches an english professor. After some rambling, he reveals to the English professor that he invented a time machine that allowed him to bring famous people into the present. He brought Shakespeare into the present, and the Bard decided to take the English professor’s class on Shakespearean critism– and had to travel back to his own time in shame, after he flunked it.
Thanks for proving me right! This is why I find the question so fascinating. And neither of you come off as snobs, which I also find vindicating.
Actually, I am an intellectual snob: I like smart people. I’m just not that picky about where they come from, Oxford or Stratford. Whoever wrote Hamlet is, in my opinion, the greatest author in human history (no, I’m not exaggerating, that’s actually my opinion), and I would hold that position whether that author were born Francis, Edward, Christopher, Elizabeth, or William. On balance I’m inclined to believe that he was born William, but that’s incidental to the artistic merits of the works.
My position on the authorship boils more or less down to Occam’s Razor, a logical rule of thumb that given two or more competing, equivalently persuasive possibilities, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. In other words, don’t be counterintuitive on purpose. My position on the authorship question would be a lot different if William Shakespeare of Stratford had never left the Warwickshire region. But considering that he was indisputably a member of the London-based acting company that performed the plays published under his name, the burden of proof has to be on the anti-Stratfordians to convince us that the more convoluted (indeed, conspiratorial) explanation is right.
The anti-Stratfordians are asking us to take a huge mental leap. An absolutely ridiculous analogy might be in order, just to drive home the point of just how much of a leap this is. Suppose someone were to say that it’s amazing that a bunch of teenagers from Liverpool could write fantastic songs, and that some established composer like Henry Mancini must have written “Help!” This argument is clearly bogus (among other things there are original Beatles composition manuscripts), but its structure parallels the Bacon or Oxford arguments. It may be true that one of the latter was the true author, but their claims must be viewed with the same skepticism with which we would greet a claim that someone other than John Lennon wrote songs attributed to John Lennon, or for that matter with the skepticism that the anti-Stratfordians direct at Shakespeare’s own claim. If you want me to believe it, bring forth convincing evidence, not speculation, or “Bible Code”-type secret messages. There is less evidence than we might have liked, but the evidence for the other claimants is no better than that for the Stratford native, and Shakespeare of Stratford has to win all ties. There aren’t any surviving Shakespeare manuscripts in William of Stratford’s handwriting, but there aren’t any in Bacon’s handwriting either. Bacon may have been an innovator of codes, but with the words and letters available in the First Folio you can find any message you want if you look hard enough. (See also the “Bible Code.” See also the prophecy of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in the text of Moby Ðìçk.) There ARE valid challenges to the Stratford theory, but no worse than the challenges to the other candidates. (Shakespeare’s problems are actually weaker. Oxford was dead long before The Tempest was performed, but having read the plays I’m firmly convinced that the Tempest was written by the same person who wrote Hamlet. Bacon was smart enough to be Shakespeare, but try finding a professional Bacon scholar who thinks he was imaginative enough to have written the plays. Compare those to “we can’t find his correspondence.”) In short, I believe Shakespeare was the author because we have enough information to support his authorship, and because his authorship makes more sense than any of the remaining candidates’ authorship.
Re. Occam’s razor: Yes, but Shakespeare of Stratford has NOT been indisputably established as a member of a London theatre company. Indeed, Occam’s razor might lead me to conclude that because the documents that indisputably concern Shakespeare of Stratford are related to the Stratford area, it is more likely that he never left the place for a significant amount of time (he e.g. acquired property in Stratford in years he was supposed to have been writing and performing plays in London). As it is, I have to confess I am beginning to feel a bit doubtful about the Stratfordian argument because so many of the so-called facts put forward in its support actually dissolve into speculation when you touch them (e.g. Shakespeare’s attendance of the grammar school in Stratford that was mentioned in the Penguin introduction – turns out that cannot actually be proven one way or the other since there are no records of who attended that school).
Also, the simplest explanation does not always have to be the true one, especially if it is in itself problematic. So maybe the better conspiracy theory analogy would be the JFK assassination – just because there are so many conflicting and in some details problematic conspiracy theories surrounding it does not prove that the “lone gunman” theory is irrefutable and unproblematic by virtue of its simplicity.
And while there are no manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays left to support any theory of authorship, I think I recall that Oxfordians can point to a bible left by the Earl of Oxford in which passages used in Shakespeare’s plays were marked.
Since I was born in Hamburg (the city that made the Beatles), a few words on the John Lennon analogy: Suppose there is/was another John Lennon who was born around the same time as the one who founded the Beatles. For fun’s sake, let’s say this other John was a native of Stratford. And now imagine a Stratfordian argument that it was John-Stratford and not John-Liverpool who wrote the Beatles songs etc.!
The way we can prove that it was John and not Mancini (or Bert Kaempfert for that matter) is not just because we have actual manuscripts, but also
because there is evidence that John Lennon received royalties for writing those songs and probably can find documentary evidence that these payments went to accounts belonging to John Winston Lennon, born in Liverpool on 9th October 1940,
because we have record of him claiming to have written those songs (mentioning anecdotes about what spurred him to write a certain song etc. and possibly also going into details of his autobiography in the course of one and the same text (e.g. an interview)),
because we find corroboration for this claim in the recorded statements of Paul McCartney and George Harrison who also confirm that this John Lennon is the same one they knew from their boyhood in Liverpool before he wrote the songs,
because we find further corroboration from the collaborators who got to know him later (notably Ringo Starr) and others who report being present when John Lennon wrote and re-wrote his songs or who indeed helped him do it (notably George Martin),
because of the recorded statements (e.g. in autobiographies, interviews etc.) of other people who knew John at the time and either were present when John he wrote a certain song or who record John discussing writing songs as well as e.g. events from his childhood in Liverpool, and
because some John Lennon songs contain disguised and overt autobiography (e.g. “The Ballad of John an Yoko”).
But do we have comparable evidence in the case of William Shakespeare of Stratford?
Re. Occam’s razor: I get very leery when people bring this up in discussions of human behavior. I think the principle is more sound when applied to the hard sciences, but once you start using it in this context, the principle falls apart. Why? because humans are such complex creatures. Very often our actions do not boil down to the simplest explanation at all. As a writer, editor, and teacher I often find that characters in a story fail simply because the plot or motivations or characterization is just plain too simplistic. It’s not real. It’s not believeable. We’re complex! But what amazes me about people is that, even though they are complexity itself, they usually choose to think that the world is a simple place. They want simple answers that don’t take too much thinking about. They *want* the cover story. I mean, look at our political climate today. Bush’s administration is *based* on that fact – that people want the simplest explanation for problems that are complex in nature. If you do that, then issues that really need discussion and time and thought get boiled down to their most simple elements. Why are there so many more black men in jail than white men? Obvously because black men are, by nature, evil. Why did Muslim terrorists destroy the twin towers? because obviously Muslims are a violent people by nature and hate us for our freedom. Why are there so many poor and/or homeless people? because those people are lazy and won’t work.
I could go on and on.
So, to bring this back to Shakespeare. I have no problem believing that WS wrote the plays arrtibuted to him *if* the only evidence against it are that he didn’t go to college and thus could not have possibly had the education or whatever. that’s not enough for me. not knowing the way artistic genius works. But until Stratfordians answer all the questions and issues brought up by the Oxfordians and Baconians and Marlovians and… what are the ones who favor Elizabeth called? Elizabethians? hee. Well, until all those questions and issues are settled to my satisfaction, then I’m not inclined to give the winning point to any side yet.
Ah. Brave new world which has such people in it.
It was definitely inspired for Ariel to add that eye-roll. Well done. Personally, I’ve always wanted to read The Tempest but other books keep taking it’s place on my list of books to read.
I remember how painful it was for my class to read Romeo and Juliet in high school. It didn’t turn me off from Shakespeare though, it just turned me off from listening to teenagers attempt to recite lines of a play in a painfully stilted manner. I’m pretty sure I did better than most of my other classmates in the readings. And I made one heck of a King Lear in my college English Lit. class.
My issue is that the people making extraordinary claims have the burden of extraordinary proof. The question of “Is the Shakespeare in London the Shakespeare from Stratford?” is not unreasonable, but I’d require substantial proof that didn’t rest on little more than shoddy recordkeeping in the late 16th century. Just showing that either DeVere or Bacon were good (even great) writers isn’t enough.
And Occam’s Razor has plenty of applicability with complex human interaction, it’s just more useful if you are aware of all the various influences on particular actions.
Of course that still leaves the problem of Stratford-sceptics, i.e. those people who doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works of William Shakespeare of London but who do not advance a candidate of their own. (For all we know, the real Shakespeare could have been of even more humble origins than Shakespeare of Stratford, the son of an alderman and thus at least until his father fell on hard times a member of the town’s “upper class”).
Hi there!
I’m a bit of a self-taught Elizabethan theatre and/or espionage buff, with a concentration on the Wills, the Toms, the Johns, Kit, and that Ben guy, and I spent the last year of my life writing a book and a novelette about Kit Marlowe and a novel about Kit and Will Shakespeare (the novelette will be on Ellen Datlow’s Scifi.com website sometime this year; neither of the novels have sold yet). So I’d qualify my credentials as ‘interested amateur historian.’
Certainly not a true scholar on the subject, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I came to the question, actually, with an anti-Stratfordian bias that I think I picked up in college, and in the course of my own research have managed to convince myself that Will of Stratford was in fact the author of the plays (with some assistance from occasional collaborators such as John Fletcher and Kit Marlowe) but also that he was a hard-working jobbing playwright of the day.
The assertion that there are no manuscripts in existence isn’t precisely true; there’s a certain amount of evidence that the man we know as William Shakespeare was also involved in script-doctoring of other plays, including a few pages that aare believed to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting. It’s important to remember that the Elizabethan playwright was more like a modern scriptwriter for movie and television than an ‘artiste.’
Textual evidence, as much fun as it is to play with, is far too subject to interpretation–and supports Shakespeare as much as any of the other candidates–and is, we must recall, fiction. Yes, including sonnets. Fiction writers do not merely write their own lives and experiences; if they did, I’d be a starship captain, Mr. David would be a super-hero, and Connie Willis a time traveling historian (although, are we actually sure she’s not?).
The arguments over the spelling of Shakespeare’s name actively ignore primary documents in which the Stratford Man’s name–both in London and in Warwickshire–is spelled as we spell it in the modern day… and other ways, too. (And also ignore the fact that the man we know today as Christopher Marlowe apparently called himself Christofer Marley, and his friends and enemies spelled his name any which way–and Edward de Vere spelled his title not ‘Oxford’ but ‘Oxenforde.’)
Arguments that there are no connections between the Stratford Shakespeare and the London Shakespeare ignore a plethora of contemporary evidence, including Shakespeare’s will (hah!) which includes bequests to London players of the King’s Men. And interlineations in the royal accounts that list payments and livery cloth to William Shakespeare.
This is a link to the best Q&A site I know of online:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/Shakespeare.html
Of the generally advanced candidates other than the Stratford Man, it’s my considered opinion that Marlowe was the only one with the artistic chops to have pulled it off (Go read Oxford’s surviving work under his own name. It’s doggerel, not even juvenilia. I mean, it’s… egregiously bad. Worse than the Anne Hathaway sonnet by far) and, much as I’d like to believe that Kit survived Deptford, and as charming as the conspiracy theories are, they ignore the fact that a playwright performed in Elizabethan London could hardly be handling last minute script revisions from Verona.
Alas.
Romance is dead. I had to replot an entire novel. Even when we wish to believe otherwise, we are left after a logical analysis with the Stratford Man, a glover’s son from Warwickshire with little Latin and less Greek, and it’s not even Occam’s Razor that does it to us, but the overwhelming weight of contemporary evidence.
Hey, PAD…I don’t know if you’re still reading through this thread, but I just remembered a newish book that, given the parenting anecdote that started this whole thing, you might enjoy. (It’s got nothing to do with the whole who-really-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays controversy, though.)
“Shakespeare’s Daughters” by Sharon Hamilton is a collection of essays examining the father-daughter relationship in Shakespeare’s various plays–tragedies, comedies, and romances alike. It’s accessible and a fun read, and might well be food for thought for any father of daughters, whether Dad’s a Shakespeare-phile or not…
The publisher’s website has a description of the book for anyone’s reference at:
http://tinyurl.com/38uha
I think a lot of people are misconstruing my Occam’s Razor invocation. I never said it was anything more than a rule of thumb, but I do believe that it generates a useful insight: if your explanation for a phenomenon has to become increasingly convoluted to explain the available data, and another simpler explanation explains the data just as well, you have a problem. Mr. Shea above phrased it a little more clearly than I did with my probably ill-considered John Lennon alalogy, “the people making extraordinary claims have the burden of extraordinary proof.”
As to whether William Shakespeare of Stratford was really in London, I think that argument collapses easily. Clearly there was A William Shakespeare performing in London. There’s documentary evidence of a William Shakespeare living in London; pseudonyms don’t generate depositions in court cases, but William Shakespeare, tenant of the Mountjoys, did. He’s mentioned multiple times in records of performances, getting paid for performances, owning real property (his share in the Globe), and generally establishing his existence to any reasonable standard of proof. If the claim is that there were two actual William Shakespeares, then the problem is that the one in Stratford had the coat of arms conferred upon his father, but the one who owned the Globe is listed as a “gentleman” in the transactions. Perhaps a bigger problem is that William Shakespeare of London was the prosperous theater manager, actor, and playwright at the time the William Shakespeare of Stratford appeared to be doing nothing but generating money hand over fist and accumulating land. If Shakespeare of Stratford were doing so through commerce, we would expect to have records of his transactions, as we do for his father’s business adventures. Plus, the Stratford Shakespeare’s will left bequests to a neighbor in Aldersgate in London, and the principal actor of the King’s Men (Richard Burbage), and to Hemmings and Condell, the people who would coincidentally publish the First Folio ascribing thirty-odd plays to William Shakespeare.
I lucked out on Shakespeare in school. My History teacher, who I also had for english and latin, went over Anthony’s speech not as a piece of literiture but as an example of how a good politician can manipulate a mob using rhetoric. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Since then I get my Shakespeare fix where ever I can get it though I preffer the more creative interpretations. The best of these was a production of one of my favorites, Julius Ceaser done by Trinety Repetory Theater in Providence RI. It was done in 1960s dress as an analogy to the epedemic of political assasinations of the time. Let me tell you there is nothing more terrifying then watching Anthony’s speach TELEVISED.
As for good movie adaptations to plug, I can’t help noticing no one has mentioned Kurowsawa’s Ran on of the best interpritations out there. I would also highly recomend Al Paccino’s Looking For Richard which is a brilliant micro analysis of Richard III. And for just shear fun, Shakespeare In Love is a guilty pleasure of mine with all of the in jokes and, or despite of, the deliberate annachronisms.
Does anyone have a video of Jarman’s “Tempest” which they are willing to copy/sell/give to a school whose copy has been lost?
Does anyone have a video of Jarman’s “Tempest” which they are willing to copy/sell/give to a school whose copy has been lost?
Does anyone know how Ican get a copy of Julius Ceasar