Biography in his works…

…Shakespeare, whoever he was, has to show himself in his works. Impossible, one would think, for him not to. And so he does, to the max. Only if you’re looking for a Nobleman, you’re looking with the wrong lens.

I’ve been reading Eric Sams book, the Real Shakespeare, and find myself agreeing with his methodology. He does push the Edmund Ironsides connection in almost every footnote. As well as Edward 3, which has been accepted into the canon.

But then he’s looking for any trace of young SH writing works like Locrine and Fair ém plus the contention and the troublesome reign, which then are forgotten or revised into the form we accept into the canon.

Memorial Reconstruction, the idea that bit part actors reconstructed from memory for example the 1603 Hamlet; either for sale, or they were on tour, had a request and no copy of the play: is toast.

A bit ridiculous methought when i first encountered it a decade or 15 years or so ago. And so I thought was generally dropped, as in accepting it never occurred in practice, as it was admittedly by the critic who conceived it, (Duthie) as his own literary critic’s phantasm.

I remember i also found a book on Elizabethan shorthand artists that would go and infiltrate plays and write down as much as they could, to be transcribed later and brought out as a pirate copy for the bookstalls, or to use as a play text for some way down in the hierarchy theatre group.

The fact is we don’t know. But surely, like an archaeologist you can only reveal what is there. Then piece it together to let it tell its own story. Now we know archaeologists are as ambitous and jealous in rivalry as any set of Acting Companies or ‘competing for patrons’ poets. Archaeology being the newest method of discovery.

Sams looks at SHakespeare the man. He examines all the documentation we have on him, his family histories on both sides, the huge Catholic connection on his mother’s and, undoubtedly though less proven, his father’s side. But if you think that people of one religion like to marry someone of the same religion it’s conjecturable.

He wades into the early years, which I like him take as Sh’s training years and apprenticeship and acceptance into the London Theatrical scene. Chiefly through his relationship with the Burbages. Sams has Sh at this time of the mid-1580’s already writing and acting with the Queen’s Men. And writing early versions of popular themes of that time: namely heroic Histories and blood filled Senecan tragedies.

Obviously the horse-holding franchise created by Ostler Sh when he first arrived in London showed his Burbage patrons he could hold his own. This Sh stands on his own two feet and does what he has to do.

No romance, no personal tragedies outside of those that affect us all. The loss of a parent, friend, or child, hurts the King’s feeling no less or more than the beggar or fool. And Sh is genius at showing us that. Everyone is given an inner life even if he’s just handing out the beers.

The Works all show a deep familiarity with country life and husbandry, natural imagery which the author used over and over again over the course of his writing career. He doesn’t shy away from the mechanics of killing and sexing whether human, animal or vegetable.

Purely mechanically, but what gives it energy and distinguishes it, is his use of puns and alliteration and assonance, which remains a feature of Sh’s early, middle, and late language. Though he became more and more economical as he got older. Packing massive emotion into as few words as possible.

‘All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam, at one fell swoop’

from Makkers springs to mind and lumps to throat as an example. That’s what great about SH. He can flip your world in an instant: taking you from the edge of a cliff to a sight gag to deep cruelty balanced with rich kindness. And kindness, inevitably wins, though the bad stays within sight without regrets. Evil for evil’s sake. Kingdoms rise and fall, as do tyrants and all of it made up for those wooden boards and its patrons.

And here is where the Conspiracists have a different lens about SH. Their Shake-speare wrote for posterity, using another man’s name. He knew his works would make it through history and not be forgotten: for they were the very future of the English Literary tradition. As indeed they turn out to be, or… (stop it)!

So their Sh cannot be tainted with the stain of the boards (to be sure you’re no better than a blasphemous whore) or the incky clickety-clack of the printing press. For him only the heighths and depths of all available fame and notoriety, fashion and all-access passes at Court, on the Continent, to books, to entertainments, to Italian models, to obscure esotericists, to any thing that tenuously links him with the genius in the plays we’ve accepted. Plus the apocrypha and how do we measure that?

Theirs is one who explored the frontiers of Renaissance knowledge and spat it together in characters based on their very own lives and all they had been through. Why every play has to echo the author’s life? i have no idea, but that’s their contention. Shaksper stole the stories from foreign sources like most of his contemporaries wrtiing for the stage.

Therefore the conspiracy reaches the very pinnacles of power and was authorised by the authorities. Let’s not forget Sh cobbled together a wonderful legacy of Tudor plays from Rich 2nd to Rich 3rd. Though I don’t believe he could ever have written his Henry 8th while Elizabeth was alive.

They say he’s right there in the plays. It’s obvious this refers to that and that to that in turn and that returns to that; and so he lives in a collective fantasy fully clothed in thought and indeed possible, were it not for the orthodox candidate, who stood idly by and reaped the fame and profit. All his friends and enemies complicit in history’s biggest fraud.

For indeed as his biographical facts show he spent a lot of time fighting things in real-life court. So where do you think he got this astounding legal knowledge? He hadn’t attended the Inns of Court but he had been the butt of their jokes in the Parnassus Plays and Willobie his Avisa.

These are the two other books I perused in their own editions many years ago. Curious how all the main players of the sonnets and Sh fellow actors Burbage and Kemp appear alongside Will. Evidence someone knew something.

Naturally all of this scheming and subterfuge could only have attracted attention on all levels of the connection Shakespeare had to have had to Court, Theatre, and Printing Press.

Absolute fodder for the Elizabethans because that’s how they gossiped. In allusion. Far too dangerous to state straight out what everyone could plainly see. But what do we see in the historical record that is two seperate books whic go through multiple editions. Also they are plainly about Shakespeare as a poet and playwright and actor alongside his patron the earl of southampton, and actors Rchard Burbage and William Kemp and some unnamed dark beauty with a burning chunk of love?

But this conjecture is never found in Orthodox Sh. It has been discounted, and the likes of me disheartened,

‘so I return rebuked to my content,
and gain by ills thrice more than i have spent’.

And now they are going to excavate New Place to examine Sh’s poo as the Stratford Herald reported. I can’t help thinking we’re looking in the wrong places and setting ourselves up to be the butt of a joke here.