The Lives of the Artists…

…Let’s start with an explanation of the blog title. Vasari was a contemporary of some of the Italy’s greatest artists from Caravaggio to Michelangelo. He wrote mini-biographies of the most important. These are gathered together in 2 books known as ‘The Lives Of the Artists’.

(not to mention the Dutch mannerist painter Karel van Mander who did the same for Northern European Artists. Query: Is this the same Karel van Mander who did the supposed Ben jonson and Shakespeare playing chess painting)?!

Imagine we had something similar for the lives of the Playwrights of Elizabethan Jacobean England?! The closest we came to having one was a contemporary named Sir Aston Cockaine (i know these names are unintentionally hilarious), who said that he could’ve written the lives of the all the playwrights of his time but couldn’t be bothered.

Obviously this post has to do with the ever-increasing attention for Conspiracy theorists in the media. Especially with the film ‘Anonymous’ being made at Babelsberg real soon.

Here is a reply I wholly agree with to the Conspiracists taken from an ongoing feud between Oliver Kamm and several conspiracists in the comments at Times Online:

Yes, of course there are real conspiracies. There are things that groups of people try to keep secret – and very often they fail. For the trouble with human beings is that it’s very difficult to persuade them to keep their mouths shut.

Thus, in the case of Watergate, even the most powerful government in the world couldn’t cover up a simple burglary for very long.

For me, the key argument against the 9/11 atrocities being “an inside job” is that dozens, if not hundreds of US government employees, from a variety of agencies that are often at each other’s throats, would have to be involved in the conspiracy. The likelihood that not one of them would have sold their story to the press, or spilled the beans in some other way, is precisely zero.

With the supposed conspiracy to pass off William Shakespeare as the author of plays written by the Earl of Oxford, dozens of people in the London theatre industry must have been in the know. All the people who acted with Shakespeare in the King’s Men, the men who published the quartos and eventually the folios, the playwrights who collaborated with Shakespeare (such as Fletcher and Middleton), rival playwrights in other companies, relatives of Oxford and members of the Elizabethan court – yet not one of them said or wrote anything indicating that anybody other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays.

Nobody from the King’s Men got drunk in a tavern and boasted “Guess what – that guy Shakespeare doesn’t write anything, he’s just a front man for the Earl of Oxford”. Nobody attributed the plays to Oxford in any surviving private diaries or letters.

There was plenty of controversy over Shakespeare in the 17th and 18th centuries. He wasn’t much to the taste of post-Restoration theatre audiences – so much so that, in order to make “King Lear” palatable, Nahum Tate gave it a happy ending. Shakespeare was criticised for violating classical dramatic norms, for his puns, and for his supposedly “extravagant” language. But none of these vigorous early critics doubted for a moment that Shakespeare had written the plays.

Indeed not until 1857, well over 200 years after Shakespeare’s death, did anyone argue that the plays were the work of somebody else (Francis Bacon). And not until 1920, with the appearance of Thomas Looney’s book, were claims made for the Earl of Oxford. The claims made for Bacon and Oxford were not the result of any startling new discoveries. No new manuscripts had come to light. The written evidence was exactly the same as it had been for centuries.

In the absence of written evidence, the enthusiasts for Bacon or Oxford fall back on ciphers (the idea that Bacon/Oxford left hidden clues to his identity in the plays), or on class hatred (middle class people who didn’t go to university can’t write masterpieces).

Our response to them should be exactly the same as our response to people who say they’ve been abducted by aliens. Show us something convincing ! Show us a piece of alien technology that couldn’t have been produced on this planet, or show us a scrap of paper from the 17th century that unequivocally identifies Oxford as the author of Shakespeare. If you can’t do that, then your theories are no more than pet obsessions.

Posted by: Paul Fauvet | 4 Feb 2010 00:51:24

And here is a first review of James Shapiro’s new book from publishers online:

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? James Shapiro. Simon & Schuster, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4165-4162-2

Shapiro, author of the much admired A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, achieves another major success in the field of Shakespeare research by exploring why the Bard’s authorship of his works has been so much challenged. Step-by step, Shapiro describes how criticism of Shakespeare frequently evolved into attacks on his literacy and character. Actual challenges to the authorship of the Shakespeare canon originated with an outright fraud perpetrated by William-Henry Ireland in the 1790s and continued through the years with an almost religious fervor. Shapiro exposes one such forgery: the earliest known document, dating from 1805, challenging Shakespeare’s authorship and proposing instead Francis Bacon. Shapiro mines previously unexamined documents to probe why brilliant men and women denied Shakespeare’s authorship. For Mark Twain, Shapiro finds that the notion resonated with his belief that John Milton, not John Bunyan, wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress. Sigmund Freud’s support of the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare appears to have involved a challenge to his Oedipus theory, which was based partly on his reading of Hamlet. As Shapiro admirably demonstrates, William Shakespeare emerges with his name and reputation intact. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Apr.)

And here’s a second review from the Financial Times: I would have copy/pasted but they have a copyright so follow the link to Michael Dobson’s review.