Aristos vs Demos

Establishing shot: terrace outside het ballonnetje on the Roeterstraat, Amsterdam. Man at a round wooden table, sitting on a long wooden bench, typing on a black mac laptop. Sparks fly from an overhead wire as a tram goes by. Zoom in on fingers typing…

The Authorship discussion revolves around this topic: Aristos vs Demos. Unless you believe it was Christopher Marlowe, the Playwright with the most similar biography to, and of an age with, Shakespeare, who wrote Shakespeare.

The difference being that Shakespeare didn’t go to University like Marlowe. Get recruited into an espionage position. Or die in mysterious circumstances at age 29, after a stellar career as Playwright in the late 1580’s and early 1590’s. Marlowe was a playwright like Shakespeare wanted to be. Shakespeare copied him.

He took Marlowe’s mastery of blank verse and bombastic spectacle, which the theatre of the 1580’s demanded, and forged it into the tastes that would be the comic, romantic and historical flavour of the 1590’s, his style changed towards more serious matter when satire reared its cynical head in the late 1590’s. Shakespeare isn’t a satirist, he’s too much for-all-time for that.

His style comes to fruition in his tragedies, late comedies, and late Romances from 1599 until about 1609. This last decade was his most brilliant as a writer. The names of his protagonists almost stand as people in their own right. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Shylock, Portia, Jacques. Shakespeare’s verse of the later plays is highly complex and spare and so shorthand for the moment the character is in. His theatrical sensibility is laid out in complex characters, allowing actors to move through the Concerto that is the Play in full sail.

Marlowe too understood the theatrical pulse of his time and embodied that spirit in Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward 2nd. Shakespeare had serious competition with this guy around. These plays are powerful pieces of theatre. Compare his Tamburlaine with Titus Andronicus, or Jew of Malta with The Merchant of Venice. To my ears they sound completely different. Marlowe had his style, Shakespeare his.

Shakespeare consciously developed his over a 20-25 year period (approx.1588-1612.) But who’s to say Chris didn’t want to rework and disguise his former style after his ‘death’? And live in anonymous exile until his ‘real’ death in Padua in 1625. (I believe we have a record of a death of the foreigner, Marlei or some such spelling),

Marlowe went to Cambridge University, being a low-born native of that city, and having won a scholarship from the Cambridge Grammar School, King’s School. Cambridge University is a school for the elite, the Aristos and the brightest minds of a generation, if recognised as such by watchful teachers.

The Aristos share certain freedoms the Demos don’t have; like privilege and freedom of movement. But they also have obligations; like Land-Owning, Wealth or Penury, and Courtly service. The Court was the ˜nec plus ultra” or place-to-be, as an Aristo. Or the worst, depending on geography and Religious preference.

The Queen was the centre of the Court, and the Aristos revolved around her in varying degrees of favour. Around the Aristos revolved in turn, the poets and painters looking for patronage, also in varying degrees of favour.

In between the Aristos and their suitors for patronage would be a defensive line of loyal or seemingly loyal, servants. The Aristos’ obligation was to support the Monarchy and assist its continued existence at Court and Abroad, whilst wheedling away for personal Royal privilege.

The Court was therefore a microcosm of power, something the Demos were just beginning to share in Elizabeth’s time. Politically in England, the House of Commons represents the Demos, and the House of Lords represents the Aristos. The House of Commons in Elizabethan London represented the new ideas of Commerce and Exploration. The Court represented Status, Religion and Diplomacy rooted in History.

Shakespeare was more of an Oxford boy anyway, and I’m sure ought to have gone there. Shakespeare should have known Oxford University, as it was on the way to London from Stratford on Avon. Shakespeare belonged to the Demos, everyone from the Gentry on down in Societal terms. There has always been a rivalry between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, with the upshot being that Cambridge has always looked down on Oxford.

It’s no wonder Marlowe was recruited to work for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham at Cambridge. Courtly intrigue has to recruit from somewhere and the finest minds of the country do study at Cambridge. Centuries later, the infamous Philby and Co. would be recruited there to spy for the Russians, in a different set of ideological circumstances.

Just as confusing though when trying to unravel what really happened. Heavens, that happened in the 20th Century! So how much harder the evidence for the 16/17th Centuries?

Zoom out to see the same black laptop later that evening on a red formica table, Frank Stokes party shuffling a song on i-tunes. i-will.