Asphyxiating Shakespeare:

Looking for local Shakespeare: by which I mean the circumstances of the man who wrote these works. Some of you may be rubbing their hands in expectation I will choose your candidate and not the boring old Stratford man. Sorry to disappoint you here in the first of woes.

Some of you will be asking themselves: what on earth, you mean others think it isn’t him? Conspiratorially, Yes is the answer and their number is proliferating rapidly, especially on the internet.

The danger, inevitable as it is, lies within accepted truth. The Stratford man is the historical figure credited with writing these plays, whether on his own or in collaboration, also as being an acknowledged actor with the best acting company in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He played at Court for both Elizabeth 1st and James 1st for the last ten years of his theatrical involvement.

He had come a long way from Stratford upon Avon. He was the provincial made good. His retirement was like the archetypal English yeoman-turned-gentleman’s pastoral dying wish: well-off, content, his family around him. Then he died and was buried April 26th, 1616.

He left us no autograph papers, no signs of his research into the genesis of his plays or poems, no diary, nothing but others talk of him, a friend’s letter never sent asking for a loan, several lawsuits from him claiming money back, a restraining order against him, his non-payment of local taxes, his lodgings with french-speaking Court wigmakers.

He owned property in Stratford: its biggest house and land adjacent and land in the surrounding areas, plus he owned part of the Blackfriar’s playhouse in London City. Quite good going for an illiterate bumpkin from Stratford. These are all facts dear readers; indisputable historical, independent to one another, draw your own inferences, facts.

Could this trifling resume be the life of Shakespeare the author who penned Hamlet the Dane, Othello the Moor, and Shylock the Jew? Why not?
I’ve heard and read people who swear that Shakespeare is Black like the Moor and as Usurious as the Jew, but not the Dane. But not, the Dane, no…Italian yes.

Shakespeare was a writer. Writers in his time had very little concept of the concept of author. It was yet to be named such in criticism and theory. Thanks to the Printing press, written English was in a process of rapid development.

Thinking, and thinking about thinking has changed over the last 400 years. Scientific realities allow us to do this bloggy thing. God has become as existent or non-existent as you care to envision her. The selfish gene is realising its potential.

In fact England itself was in a time of rapid change, the individual Shakspere (spell it how you like. He did, they all did) from Stratford, as well as Bacon, Oxford etc., all Elizabethans in fact had to endure history as it happened. All of whom certainly didn’t know until Eliza’s death they would become Jacobeans for certain.

My Lord of Oxenforde suggested while Eliza lay a-dying, my Lord Hastings to my Lord Lincoln who shatte himeself thinking the deal was done with James and his Danish dish, and tittle-tattled it to Sir John Peyton, lieutenant of the Tower, who in turn brought it to Sir Robert Cecil’s ears. Cecil just said, ‘leave it. it’s not worth it! Not in my manor. Not on my watch.’ in his best big smoke villain accent.

This ultimate act, Oxford’s last fling at the throne, knowing his death was imminent, knowing his real life’s work was yet to be revealed, not knowing his life would be described by french antiquarian and Lyly scholar, Albert Feuillerat as: ‘a debauched epicurean’.

This act ends the days of one of the last of the Great Earls.

He had been a profligate spendthrift, squandering his inherited fortune and his children’s inheritance;
a lucky sob when as a teen, he stabbed an undercook in the femoral artery, which undercook was then judged a suicide;
estranged from Court since his bad behaviour not accepting the defence of Harwich against the Armada, traditional east coast protection the de Vere’s had done for generations in 1588;
played by the Queen and Burghley for his lands, position and prestige;
and loathed by the lower classes (pretty much everyone was beneath his nobility credentials), whose bills he refused to pay.

One who never attained and/or retained any known, functional, and respected position of power;

One hated by enemies his own pride had created, Sidney had hated him, the Howards hated him, the Knyvets too. How did his cousin, Francis de Vere the warrior famoused for fight in the Netherlands feel about him? Do any letters of Francis exist that mention brave, brave, brave Sir Eddy?

Sure he sounds like a Shakespeare?

Shakespeare was a writer primarily for the stages of the Public theatre. Consider the fact that the first public theatre was set up by James Burbage just north of London city walls, across the fields in Shoreditch. He named it the Theatre.

James was the leading player in the travelling troupe of the Earl of Leicester’s Men for about ten years. With foresight, or foreknowledge, he’d asked permission for building his enterprise 2 years before the Act against travelling players was introduced. He rented the Land on a 20 year lease in 1576 and started construction.

His trade was a Joiner or carpenter. (important because actors didn’t have a guild, so always had to be an apprentice in something other than their craft of player. Doubly important to the Bradbrook book Shakespeare the Craftsman. Her thesis is that actors and playwrights were striving to become craftsman and deserving of a guild).

He did a good job because 20 years later his sons tore down the structure and set it up on the other side of the river on the Southbank at Southwark. They renamed it the Globe.

The Globe was home to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later renamed the King’s Men, the group which Shakespeare was an acknowledged member of. (Yes the ‘of’ hangs on purpose. To send a shiver down pedants spines).

The Globe is now once again one of the most successful public theatres in London. Their first artistic director Mark Rylance advocates doubt as to the identity of the Bard. The Original Globe’s actual location is around the corner opposite the excavated ruins of the Rose: a theatre Shakespeare is rumoured to have played.

Whether William Shhh was fake or real, still remains to be definitively proven: if only to finally stop the vents of those doubters and revisers of history. But I will say the argument is proven enough for me, until such day irrefutable evidence is shown one way or another.

I accept the Stratford man because he is the one true candidate in his very motive for writing his works. He was an artist who struggled to release his art, as he and it developed. Just like his exact contemporary Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler’s son from Canterbury who at 29 disappeared from regular history’s books, presumably killed and buried. Some say he lived and didn’t die until 1625 in Italy.

He left us an unfinished narrative poem called Hero and Leander, then Some would say posthumously re-wrote his own masterpieces, like the Jew of Malta turned into The Merchant of Venice,. Instead of being engaged and winning in healthy competition of another young upstart. How those so young could have written with such maturity!

Marlowe’s death in 1593 left Shakespeare alone in stature in the vortex of theatre-making throughout the 1590’s until the young talents rose in the 1600’s. Yes that also puts him in the right place for being a patsy, but why?

Was it merely to put money in his purse? Were the lives of his family and loved ones at stake? Was he being sexually blackmailed?

What shame co-erced him to sell his soul and force it so to his own conceit that literary eternity falsely rests on his shoulders and borrowed laurels hang on his brow?

Why would he spend his whole working life in the theatre and printing worlds of Elizabethan London pretending to be the writer of hit play after hit play? Presumably lapping up the praise and the profits; a benefit most working actors only dream of. The praise would be from his peers, not the public who, remember, had never heard of an author.

Why would he not be an honourable man practicing his craft driven by those invisible forces that we call muses?

Why would his colleagues John Hemiges and Henry Condell, men he worked with for 20+ years, men he remembered in his Will, not be honourable men? The conspiracists will always remind you here this remembrance was an interpolation and inserted later into the will.

Though why then had Augustine Phillips, a former leading actor/sharer in the Company remembered Shakespeare in his will with a similar amount in 1605. So it was an after-thought he put their names in? So what?

These same men go on to spend the next 7 years making sure his plays got published in their entirety of copies that could be collected, involving a syndicate of different printers who owned the rights to individual plays.

They who published his works seven years after his death in the second-ever Folio collection of Plays? The first-ever Folio of plays was Ben Jonson’s Works published the year Sh died. They had no conception these plays would be studied so closely. They might have hoped and wished for it. Or they could be trying to make a buck.

Was Ben not an honourable man? Yes Ben was a bricklayer before he became a writer, but bricklayers can be honourable men, and work to advance their state and situation. Ben eventually hit the Masque circuit at Court, thanks to King Jame’s lively relatives and made a killing with Inigo Jones, who designed the Masques and is probably responsible for the worst excesses of Opera scenery. Though at this point in history yet to be invented.

Even though there is no solid prima facie evidence of Shakespeare ever attending grammar school, or socialising with Noblemen whose lives he apparently portrays in his plays with such veracity, and writing the plays everyone says he wrote: I accept him for being in the right place at the right time. The inference is all.

The problem is in the passage of time. Now is not then. Now is not what will be. Now is now. We cannot revive history to see exactly how it lived and breathed. Even recording media such as we have now cannot lay down an exact list of anything except external events.

Our inner motives are lost unless we communicate them somehow and even that is subject to interpretation and perception. What use is your storehouse of memory after you are dead? Even those that mourn you with memories of you, will eventually perish and what use these memories then?

A writer’s memory is his writings. That is his monument. How the writer felt about his works is actually irrelevant to the enjoyment of those works. It is an artefact produced for deriving some kind of pleasure: whether tragicall, comicall, or historicall. This writer’s name is Shakespeare and he lived in interesting times.

And for now, he came from Stratford. Yes i agree Stratford is boring, provincial and old-fashioned. It’s probably the reason he left. Let’s stop choking him with slander and see where his judgement may lie. I will be true, to all sides of the story.