Mittwoch, 13. Juni 2007
Shakespeare and Shakespere
I’ve been having another Shakespeare binge, having recently re-read the best book of Shakespearean analysis that I have ever read, Ted Hughes’ “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.” Now Hughes has his own barrow to push, but if you skip his repetitive explanations of his thesis, this is the best analysis of the underlying themes of Shakespearean Drama you’ll get anywhere.I have also been reading books about the authorship controversy. I have always dismissed claims about alternative authors as nonsense, but if you look at some of the genuine mysteries surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare, you begin to realise it’s not all pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Certainly there was an actor/ businessman called Shakespere active in the theatre, but it seems increasingly unlikely that we have got the whole story from our brilliant but oh-so-slippery Elizabethan/Jacobean ancestors. For a good overview of this enigma, see ”Who Wrote Shakespeare” by John Michell. Also for an excellent read about the events leading up to the murder of Christopher Marlowe, try “The Reckoning” by Charles Nicholl. It reads like a thriller .Ah, English History of the late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth centuries, a bottomless well of fascination!
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20 Kommentare:
Ted Hughes, WS and renaissance neoplatinism, oh my. Will have to keep an eye out for all three books you mention. thanks for the recommendations.
Ah, Dr. Dee , Wizard Earls , memory theatres, Walsingham's secret service and all that Jazz. It sure beats the hell out of Harry Potter.
Speaking of Poet Laureates and Harry Potter, John Masefield authored 2 of my favorite children's books, "The Midnight Folk" and "Box of Delights". 16th century England is wonderful strange and murky territory. Even homely English gets all slippery in the reading.
I've always thought that the English were probably at their most interesting from the 16th to the early 18th century, while they were still trying to find their way in the world and before they became too "imperial".
I'll seek them out, The first real poem I ever learnt was "Sea Fever,"
Oh, agreed. Everything was much more interesting before the "Horrible Hanovers".I do have a favourite quotation from the incredibly thick George 1. On arriving in England, he is reported to have said, " I hef come for your goots, I hef come for ALL your goots!"
have you felt a connecrtion to any one (or related series) of parallel theories? John Dee? Bacon? or others? What strikes your fancy or reason?Thanks for the recommendation, by the way. I will look for that one. You are right, the sixteenth century has enough wierdness for several lifetimes.
I like Shakespeare as a brand-name with Bacon overseeing a small coterie of writers, (the Earl of Oxford? a not really dead Marlowe? maybe a couple of other aristocratic scribblers), with Shakespere the theatre pro giving the work a play-doctoring before it went before the public. Re Marlowe: Witness relocation programmes are by no means a modern invention.
I like Shakespeare as a brand-name with Bacon overseeing a small coterie of writers, (the Earl of Oxford? a not really dead Marlowe? maybe a couple of other aristocratic scribblers), with Shakespere the theatre pro giving the work a play-doctoring before it went before the public. Re Marlowe: Witness relocation programmes are by no means a modern invention.
many renaissance masters did exactly this, adding some flourishes and worthwhile touces to their coterie of students work and signing it. The tradition is extant so it is not a leap to imagine or hypothesize that it lived on elsewhere. Oxford could certainly have been aware of it.I like it.Sadly the witness relocation programs then would fail for totally different reasons.
No single theory is really satisfactory. Most of the writers of the period were connected to the shadowy world of the Walsinghams' secret-service, so unless new evidence emerges, we may never know. But it is so weird that no-one in Statford or any of his family seem to know anything of Shakespeare the famous dramatist,What totally different reasons?
Outside of any large congeries of folk, relocating within England would eventually be noticed. Everything could be so local and so small town. An outsider who was now Here and present would not, could go unremarked. In London or York perhaps there would be room to hide, yet even then the witness bit would be a large amount of well, largess to dump onto a commoner. So therefore my hypothetical witness would be someone of note, and cities do not rank as habitations for the nobility-too much sickness and other things. They need to move out in the summer and get about to avoid the vicissitudes of the urban set. So the small town or manor.Nowadays the witness program relies on altered identities that can move people into a very different area. Much blending is possible because we are a homogenous society.The sixteenth century, I argue, is Not a homogenous society but a very cloistered and stratified one moving into a more continental model (England always seemed a step behind after William the Conqueror). Move someone famous, inside England. How long would they go unnoticed by a peer? A remote country estate? Didn't Elizabeth make it a habit of going around to just those places and bankrupting her enemies? It would be hard to avoid such scrutiny, and lord knows what spy assets she had in the court-or for that matter anyone else. Cloak and dagger-is that a period term?Witness protection in period style would more likely be shutting someone up in the Tower, perhaps. Or worse, dispensing with them after they were no longer valuble. I do suppose one could simply take vows and enter a monastery too, but I recall some stories of that not being too successful.
Marlowe probably did die in that tavern but I don't think the other scenario is beyond the bounds of possibility. Famous faces were not plastered wverywhere as they are now, (the only 'possible' portrait of Marlowe was unearthed aeons later.)His best friend (and possible lover) was the head of the sectret police. Both the government and their targets, the Raleigh clique had good reason to want him silenced, but he was a masterly propagandist("The Massacre atParis", and almost certainly the " Dutch Chuch Libel"). I don't think it impossble that he could have been hidden away in the retinue of some discreet lord. The inquest was held a comfortably long time after the event and all the participants were deeply involved in the secret service. The Gunpowder Plot, the Babington Plot. Perkin Warbeck, Titus Oates and the murder of Justice Berry- Godfrey suggest that elaborate plots and deceptions were mother's milk to our Tudor/ Jacobean/ Stuart forebears
I need to do some reading. I like this.
Hey there Bill,Some more joint authorship questions mentioned in an article yesterday. Seeing the Fingerprints of Other Hands in ShakespeareBy WILLIAM S. NIEDERKORNIn matters of Shakespeare authorship, it is often said that nothing is ever resolved. But in a recent book Brian Vickers, director of Renaissance Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare.In "Shakespeare, Co-Author" (Oxford University Press, 2002), Professor Vickers, 65, shows how numerous tests by many generations of scholars demonstrate substantial work by other playwrights in five Shakespeare plays. Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit.The plays are not the top five in the Shakespeare canon. But the overwhelming evidence in the book shows that George Peele, not Shakespeare, wrote almost a third of "Titus Andronicus"; Thomas Middleton, about two-fifths of "Timon of Athens"; George Wilkins, two of the five acts of "Pericles"; and John Fletcher, more than half of "Henry VIII." "The Two Noble Kinsmen," originally published in 1634 as the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, is shown to be about two-fifths Shakespeare's. None of the complete editions of Shakespeare have given a full account of Peele's work on "Titus Andronicus," and they often hedge on the co-authorship of the other plays. Rarely does any edition state with confidence what scenes or parts of scenes are by co-authors. The evidence has been out there, some of it for over a century, some for only a few years, but even experts have found it hard to keep track of the players. Now Professor Vickers has given them a score card.Calling the book "a triumphant application of scientific method to literary-attribution studies," the writer and editor Jonathan Bate, who left Peele out of his 1995 Arden edition of "Titus," wrote in a recent article in The TLS, the British literary weekly, "I am in the privileged — or perhaps embarrassing — position of being able to confirm the accuracy of Vickers's diagnosis." Gary L. Taylor, the co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare with Stanley Wells in 1986 noted that co-authorship credit had been given there for four of the plays and that, based on other research, in the future " `Titus' will be treated in the same way as the other collaborative plays."The Norton Shakespeare uses the Oxford text and generally follows the Oxford's lead on co-authorship. Stephen Greenblatt, the general editor of the Norton and once a student of Professor Vickers at Cambridge, said, "I think the next edition of the Norton Shakespeare should acknowledge the arguments for the collaborative nature of `Titus.' "On Friday Professor Vickers said by phone from London: "The general editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Prof. Brian Gibbons, said to me recently, `Looks as if we'll have to bring out a new edition of "Pericles." ' Let's hope they do. They could scrap their editions of `Timon' and `Henry VIII' too, while they're at it."Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius.But the purists, or fundamentalists, as the 20th-century Shakespeare scholar W. W. Greg called them, are not going to disappear. Speaking of Shaksper (www.shaksper.net), an online discussion group, Professor Vickers said, "My `Shakespeare, Co-Author,' especially the ascription of four scenes in `Titus Andronicus' to Peele, has put me in the unenviable position of being attacked by the diehard conservators determined not to lose a `drop of that immortal man,' while being praised by the anti-Stratfordians trying to use me as grist for their mill."
Anti-Stratfordians, those who doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, might well see a parallel between the derision they face and the ridicule co-authorship scholars were long subjected to. But Diana Price, the author of "Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography" (Greenwood Press, 2000), which updates and sharpens the anti-Stratfordian case, expressed some disappointment with "Shakespeare, Co-Author" for having little to say about the nature of co-authorship arrangements. "Was it an interactive collaboration or an ex-post-facto revision?" she asked. "Did Fletcher get hold of an unfinished manuscript and finish `Henry VIII'?"Professor Vickers acknowledged, "The issue of simultaneous collaboration or not is hard to settle." But he said, "I'd be very unhappy to think that my exposure of Shakespearians' shilly-shallying on the co-authorship issue were to be exploited by the so-called anti-Stratfordians."Another recent book by Professor Vickers, " `Counterfeiting' Shakespeare" (Cambridge University Press, 2002), demolishes the Shakespeare attribution for the poem "Funeral Elegy," using all the weapons familiar from "Shakespeare, Co-Author." The news of this book's imminent publication was at least partly responsible for recantations last year by Donald W. Foster and Richard Abrams on their assignment of "Funeral Elegy" to Shakespeare, and the decisions by Norton and the editors of two other editions of the canon, Riverside and Longman, to remove it. As a curtain raiser, "Counterfeiting" ("CoSh," Professor Vickers notes, was his printer's abbreviation, "as in `cosh,' a blunt instrument"), also takes aim at "Shall I Die?," a poem the Oxford editors inserted into the canon, with the Norton following suit. Will that attack dislodge it from the Oxford's next edition?Professor Taylor said, "At this time, the Oxford editors have no intentions of removing `Shall I Die?,' " but added that he planned to re-examine the Vickers argument soon "with the help of databases that were not available in 1985.""We are also planning to include, as collaborative work, the whole of `Sir Thomas More,' " Professor Taylor said.That's the play in which the hero — later canonized as St. Thomas More by the Roman Catholic Church — uses a urinal onstage in the last act. That's not the part Shakespeare supposedly wrote, though.Many Shakespeare scholars think the manuscript of "Sir Thomas More" includes a patch or two of Shakespeare's handwriting, but some disagree. David Bevington, the editor of the Longman edition, which does not include the excerpts that are in the Norton and Riverside, said he felt it was "rather brash for handwriting experts to claim too much on that score."Ms. Price said it was "an important issue to put on the front burner," because if the manuscript was written by a scribe rather than an author, "then all bets are off."In "Shakespeare, Co-Author," Professor Vickers supports the mainstream position on "Sir Thomas More," reviewing the evidence at length, but he does not subject the play to rigorous analysis. "That doesn't mean to say that in the future I might not attempt to expend it," he said, "but I thought for the time being that that wasn't a priority in the sense that the other plays were."So there is still at least one controversy left on the issue of Shakespeare co-authorship, even with several questions largely resolved.
Curiouser and curiouser. I read of an attributed play today that I was not previously aware of: "A London Prodigal".I had read previous claims that "Titus Andronicus" was co-authored by Marlowe prior to his (alleged?) murder. Now this new guy shows up! "HentyVIII", "Two Noble Kinsmen", "Cardenio" and other more doubtful efforts have been generally regarded as collaborations I always thought "Timon" didn't really read or play like anything else in the Shakespeare "canon".Thanks for the stimulation. This subject, notoriously, has been known to drive men mad.
Curiouser and curiouser. I read of an attributed play today that I was not previously aware of: "A London Prodigal".I had read previous claims that "Titus Andronicus" was co-authored by Marlowe prior to his (alleged?) murder. Now this new guy shows up! "HentyVIII", "Two Noble Kinsmen", "Cardenio" and other more doubtful efforts have been generally regarded as collaborations I always thought "Timon" didn't really read or play like anything else in the Shakespeare "canon".Thanks for the stimulation. This subject, notoriously, has been known to drive men mad.
Titus, the musical (in its punk rock form) has opened nearby... One wonders.
Have you seen Julie Taymor's wonderfully over-the-top Felliniesque version with Hopkins and Jessica Lange? We loved it.There was also a good BBC version with Olivier.When he played Titus to Vivien Leigh's Lavinia in the famous "theatre of cruelty" season, she entered tongueless, handless and ravished. While attempting to write her ravishers names in the dirt, she dropped her staff upon the ground."Butterstumps!", snapped Olivier.
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