Who was Shakespeare?

[Joe Hillshoist]

And this other accidental death is interesting:

One man shot himself in the head while trying to remove an arrow stuck in his longbow

Another tragic death while cleaning a loaded longbow.

Sorry how does that work? Was it Gary Webb's g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandad or something?

[fruhmenschen]

Can readers generate some questions that remote viewer Joe McMoneagle could be asked
so he might determine the true identity of Shakesphere?

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Trek-Explori ... 1878901729

[JackRiddler]

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Okay, so I surrendered some precious cash to the blockbuster machine yesterday to see Anonymous, directed by the same guy who made one of the worst psyop movies of all time (Independence Day) and it was surprising. Emmerich or not, this was epic, exciting filmmaking.

Totally fictional, of course, regardless of the scholarly debate over the authorship question.

(spoilers follow!)








The heavies are the Cecils, advisers to the Queen and haters of the theater. In flashbacks, the swashbuckling total-stud and mildly Hamlet-y young DeVere and Elizabeth fall in love. But she has a fit under the Cecils' manipulative influence and kicks him out of the court, at which point he is forced to marry the daughter of another noble in the cabinet to save his head. Unbeknownst to him (or any history until now) Elizabeth is pregnant and bears his son. Unbeknownst to her, and like her "other bastards" (as the film would have it), the boy is placed as a noble heir, the Earl of Southhampton. Unhappily married, DeVere takes to his study and deals with the voices in his head by writing a bunch of plays he can't publish because he's a noble and a target to the Cecils (except for the plays DeVere did publish, never mind). DeVere recruits Ben Johnson as his beard to put out his plays, but Johnson just can't take credit for what he hasn't written so without asking he sets up quasi-literate actor Will Shakespeare as the beard, causing complications for all. What's great in the movie is the theater scenes, epic reconstructions of the stagings and the beautiful mob in the Globe. DeVere's plotting to use the crowds against the Cecils, who understand that this Polonius character being run through with a sword can only mean them. It all goes south and at the end, although Southhampton is (unbeknownst to him) actually the rightful heir to the throne, he is executed as a member of the Essex conspiracy. Elizabeth dies, DeVere dies, the bad Scotsman becomes king (but he is at least a lover and patron of the theater) and Shakespeare gets all the credit as thanks to Johnson the remaining manuscripts survive and the plays can still be staged.

In other words, total Hollywood, but great, epic entertainment and in a way all's fair, since it does to Shakespeare what he'd done to the stories of Richard III, Julius Caesar, et al. It's in the spirit of the plays and probably makes a better story than whatever the real one that we will never know for sure may have been.

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[Jeff]

Thanks for the review, Jack. I wouldn't have considered watching it if I hadn't read it. (Still haven't seen it, and may not, but if I do, it's your doing.)

On topic, this is from today's Montreal Gazette:

How Shakespeare could write Shakespeare

By Holger Syme October 31, 2011

I don’t think Keir Cutler (“There is method in this madness,” Opinion, Oct. 27) and others who believe Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare are certifiably mad. They are, however, demonstrably misguided.

...

His parents couldn’t write – few women and few Englishmen of the class into which John Shakespeare was born could – but William’s younger brother, Gilbert, his daughter, Susanna, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth, all signed their names – as did William, though in a less fashionable hand than his female descendants or his brother. Shakespeare was not surrounded by illiteracy. He benefitted from the great expansion of middle-class education in Reformation England.

None of this is extraordinary: historians estimate that most of Shakespeare’s social equals were fully literate. Nor is it surprising that the playwright’s will didn’t list any books. Books aren’t mentioned in 90 per cent of the wills of scholars, clerics and professionals analyzed by the Private Libraries of Renaissance England project. Such items would have been catalogued in a separate inventory, and Shakespeare’s, like many others, is lost.

...

The notion that Shakespeare was extraordinarily erudite is a 20th-century fiction, an effect of historical distance. Even now, though, it is easy to identify a truly learned writer: just read Jonson. His Sejanus bursts with classical footnotes; the Venice of his Volpone, unlike Shakespeare’s, is pieced together from a meticulous study of authoritative sources; his scenes debating literary theory are incomprehensible to modern readers. (Jonson was a bricklayer’s son who hadn’t gone to university.)

Jonson’s learnedness, however, makes his works a hard sell nowadays. Unlike Cutler, I would identify Shakespeare’s very lack of erudition, his limitations, as the qualities that make his works enduringly powerful; his thoughts, and especially their expression, can be startlingly simple. Shakespeare’s language shows more familiarity with rural England than with any field of learning, although he clearly could reference the worlds of law, of alchemy, or of sports like hawking and tennis – he lived in London for most of his life, after all, cheek by jowl with courtiers, and performed for aristocratic audiences every year.

...

It may thus not be surprising to learn that most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t think of him as a once-in-a-millennium genius. There is even evidence that some of his plays flopped as books. Renaissance Londoners would have been more likely to nominate Jonson as their greatest writer: he had a veritable entourage of younger authors, the Tribe of Ben, hanging on his every word. Without such a fan club, who would have felt compelled to collect scraps of Will’s handwriting?

What the intervening centuries have done to his reputation makes it hard to comprehend that Shakespeare in his own time was one among a number of famed writers – highly praised but not unique. Anti-Stratfordian skepticism depends on the notion that Shakespeare was a historical singularity. But if we want to understand him as a historical figure, we first need to shrink him down to size again. Otherwise, Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ reactions to him will indeed remain a maddening riddle.


http://www.montrealgazette.com/literacy ... story.html

[Wombaticus Rex]

How can I rap when neither of my parents did? Pretty suspect. There's probably a team ghostwriting my stuff.

[MacCruiskeen]

Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but another writer of the same name, only posher.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^Cui bono?

(And, anyway, why?)

Cf. [...], John Clare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, [...]

- Surely Joyce was in fact Samuel Beckett? Though very youthful, Beckett at least had the requisite background and education.

[JackRiddler]

Thanks for the review, Jack. I wouldn't have considered watching it if I hadn't read it. (Still haven't seen it, and may not, but if I do, it's your doing.)

In that case the disclosure rules require me to mention I was, erm, enhanced and very much primed for the tactile experience of costumes and bombast. Perhaps I laughed and cried at points that under other circumstances I might not find nearly as funny or moving. Or not. This is definitely in the category of I'd have to see it twice before ranking it within the pantheon, etc., more caveat, no liability acknowledged.

{Queen:
More matter with less art.}

There were some ludicrous aspects, like most of the other playwrights being jealous doofuses incapable of iambic pentameter and overwhelmed by His Singular Greatness, and so forth.

I hope we can all agree it's absolute rubbish to say that a commoner could not have written plays this good. It's the worst of what the skeptics, the Oxfordians especially have to offer, and as has been pointed out here, ignores the cosmopolitan milieu of then London. More interesting are matters indicating specific knowledge of places and things Shakespeare the actor could not have experienced directly, and the many apparent references to DeVere's biography; but these argue equally for an insight and openness to others without which a playwright could not be great in the first place. I am congenitally inclined to the idea of studio or collaborative or partly-shared authorship at the head of a highly productive theater troupe that commerce forced to put out or go under; all the more so when the academics in this debate so blindly refuse to acknowledge anything other than singular-genius theories as a possibility. To them it must be either and entirely X OR Y, and no combination is conceivable. The other aspect that interests is the rich and variable political subject matter of the plays at a time of absolutism, rebellion, intrigue and heavy censorship, indicating either the favor at least at times of influential factions or some other protection or anonymity for the author(s). But the evidence is so thin and constructed that by default you're left with the name on the cover. Let's say it's a low-stakes, relatively harmless way to satisfy the need for secret histories that may or not have happened, because it does no damage to the plays.

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[vanlose kid]

http://www.runleiarun.com/lebowski/

*

[JackRiddler]

http://www.runleiarun.com/lebowski/

*

It's funny because it's true.

[Stephen Morgan]

Dead white man.

[sunny]

I hope we can all agree it's absolute rubbish to say that a commoner could not have written plays this good. It's the worst of what the skeptics, the Oxfordians especially have to offer, and as has been pointed out here, ignores the cosmopolitan milieu of then London.

True, it's terribly elitist. But while I can almost believe Oxford allowed Shakespeare to take credit for his [best] work [while publishing lesser works under his own name ] there is no way I will ever believe the profligate Oxford allowed a common actor to get rich off his works while Oxford himself steadily sold off all his ancestral properties and had to take hand-outs from the Queen so he wouldn't die a pauper.

[kenoma]

Interesting thread, but in need of some anti-Stratfordian provocation. So...

I hope we can all agree it's absolute rubbish to say that a commoner could not have written plays this good. It's the worst of what the skeptics, the Oxfordians especially have to offer, and as has been pointed out here, ignores the cosmopolitan milieu of then London. More interesting are matters indicating specific knowledge of places and things Shakespeare the actor could not have experienced directly, and the many apparent references to DeVere's biography; but these argue equally for an insight and openness to others without which a playwright could not be great in the first place.
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We can certainly agree a commoner could write plays this good, because some plays by Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd and Middleton are far better than most of Shakespeare's. The issue is rather what one would reasonably expect a talented Elizabethan commoner to write about.

Shakespeare, it is inferred, rose from a mostly-illiterate rural backwater to the centre of court society. In that time, he must have experienced countless social embarrassments and put-downs, committed any number of humiliating faux-pas, keenly felt the degrading limitations of his class position. Yet while Cambridge-educated Marlowe created the ultimate tragic parvenu in Dr. Faustus, almost all Shakespeare's social climbers are buffoons (with the exception - perhaps- of Othello).

Or what about the years he presumably spent as a struggling actor in seedy London pubs, dosshouses and brothels? From all those lost years, where is his Volpone, his Bartholomew Fayre or his Chaste Maid in Cheapside? His single fully-rounded, sympathetic 'earthy' and 'demotic' character, Falstaff, is a 15th century knight, based on a high-ranking member of Kent's nobility. Why did Shakespeare so studiously avoid writing in the popular bourgeois genre of the City Comedy? Especially since as a theatre manager he was concerned with bums on seats. Why did he set all his dramas everywhere but contemporary 'cosmopolitan London'?

There's no obligation for a writer to write about 'what you know', but it comes in handy, especially if what you know chimes with the experiences of your audience. So why did this upstart Warwickshire autodidact seemingly spend years in accumulating the recondite details of courtly life and manners, or legal and scientific terminology, or the plots of Italian novels - to the exclusion of practically everything else in his life experience?

He's an implausible character, this Stratford Will.

Mac asks Cui Bono? Well, hasn't it been much more useful to have a stout ale-swilling, stock-jobbing, famine-hoarding, resolutely 'unintellectual' yeoman - the one and only Will Shakspear esq. - 'spontaneously' and naively reproduce the ideology of rigid class stratification, rather than some effete aristo with a dodgy French name?

[JackRiddler]

I hope we can all agree it's absolute rubbish to say that a commoner could not have written plays this good. It's the worst of what the skeptics, the Oxfordians especially have to offer, and as has been pointed out here, ignores the cosmopolitan milieu of then London.

True, it's terribly elitist. But while I can almost believe Oxford allowed Shakespeare to take credit for his [best] work [while publishing lesser works under his own name ] there is no way I will ever believe the profligate Oxford allowed a common actor to get rich off his works while Oxford himself steadily sold off all his ancestral properties and had to take hand-outs from the Queen so he wouldn't die a pauper.

This is why De Vere theory requires the additional political intrigue, the idea that he couldn't risk identifying himself as the author of the plays lest he lose his head. Which seems speculative, if plausible. (Why the movie works even though it's completely made up.)

It's all circumstantial. The strongest argument seems to be that theater patron De Vere was celebrated for his literary biography but left (almost) no works (and no plays) behind, whereas there is no contemporary mention of Shakespeare's literary biography although 30 or so major works bear his name.

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[Harvey]

I was in a London taxi recently. The driver asked me if I needed a prostitue. After reassuring him that I probably did but I could only just afford to pay the taxi fare he reluctantly agreed to take me to my destination instead of the house of ill repute.

The he leaned back conspiratorially at the next traffic lights and confessed:

"Had Stephen Fry in the cab the other day." The cabbie laughed incredulously. "He's got vis feory an't he. He reckons Shakespeare was Shakespeare!"

Oh, how we both laughed.