I Love Shakespeare

SO Olivier wasn’t a doubter then, not like Gielgud.

If Shakespeare Authorship were a cake.
Doubters make up the icing on the cake. The foundation of the cake is the world of scholars, pejoratively known as Orthodox Stratfordians. It’s a solid base but crumbly.

The filling is the rest of the world. All those people who know Shakespeare and his works but don’t hold any opinion on who he is. All the ingredients anyone ever needs are in the mix known as the Plays and poems. It’s a Shakespeare cake after all.

The icing is very sweet and perfect and higly decorated but it’s not the whole cake and too much of it will make you sick. if you want the full Shakespeare you need to have your cake and eat it too.

Imagine this cake as you read these reviews, and even more pertinent the comments where available. Get to know the vociferous ‘sane’ voices of Heward the Therapist and Peter the Marlovian. Look for the lost boy trying to defend his burrow.

Do you really need so much icing? You might be sick if you eat too much and not enough cake. Go on take a whole piece. It’s good for you!
Salon Review
Actual interview with Shapiro
Bill’s Ben in the Inedependent
The Economist
Comments from the Economist
Financial Times

This last week has been about the reviews for the ‘Contested Will’, which is James Shapiro’s book on the authorship question. James wrote 1599, a tremendous read and year for our Will Shhh!

Richard Whalen over at the Orksfordian site has reviewed it and typically embraces it as a non-threat, and actually believes it enhances the Big Boar’s cause.

And the movie being made in Babelsberg, yikes! They’ll be attacking the Stratfrodian burrows from all angles soon.

A new generation of actors will weigh in yea or nea. the battlelines are being drawn. Will Paris make Oxford her new BFF?

Real world response to it all?
F–k it, just recite another sonnet or read a play.
Or go back to the poems again.

Who cares about the guy who wrote it,
if it’s compulsive reading for so many reasons?

The Orksfordians are always whining about the same old tired issues:
his name and how it’s spelt.
his lack of education and travel,
his stupidity in his craft of acting,
his gullibile friends and fellowes for not knowing,
his keeping the secret for 10 years after Oxford’s death.

No one noticed or said anything? Really?
A mediocre actor in their midst passing off plays written by a Nobleman, who everyone knows as having a vested interest in players, theatre and writing.

Oxford indeed supported other writers, owned a couple of companies of adult and boy actors. He had written poetry and comedies, Francis Meres says, in the same list, same page, he says Shakespeare was known for writing comedies and tragedies.

So where’s the stigma in this much being known about Oxford?

Of course the name of writers was slightly better than actors, whose name was equivalent to that of whores. But even if an actor is a whore, it still doesn’t stop him paying tribute to the Muses, who are there for everyman.

All Shakespeare’s playwright contemporaries came from similar backgrounds: middle-class and lower. But the Aristocracy had the handle on poesy, high art and belles lettres.

Shakespeare’s art imitates these letters and suddenly it’s inconceivable a yoik could have written them. Stratters on Avon being Yoiksville for Warwickshire.

Besides every commentary we have from the time in marginalia identifies themes and copia. Nobody cared about the author. But the author would have cared.

SO either Will Shagsbirds of Stratters on Avon is a porcine mendacious chap, who deceived the London Public whilst being part of one of the best troupes of players in London, cusping Eliza’s demise and James nascence.

Or X, (lest we forget the Orks aren’t alone) wrote them and this goodly business man type was waiting to fulfill his fall-guy destiny by passing off X’s plays as his own.

Oh yes and cashing in on this enterprise, which brought profit to him and his fellow players.

Must have been awfully embarassing at the awards ceremonies that inevitably appear when thesps are involved.

“And the award for best tragedy goes once again to William Shake-hyphen-speare. And here to accept the award on his behalf is no-one less than the Earl of … , no sorry it’s just Will.

Here you go mate. Another one for your collection. not that you care you’ll have pawned it in a week to pay your tavern bill and gambling debts. Schmuck!

So what’ve you got left in the chest of manuscripts the Earl left you when he died? He died like 6 years ago didn’t he? Or is he not dead yet? Marlowe’s still alive kicking round Italy I hear.

I see you’re teaming up with Fletcher and Beaumont too, bless. Those lads really look up to you. Especially Beaumont coz he’s dead now innit.

I hear the Derby family is feeding them manuscripts, which the Earls have got lying around. Yes he might have quite a career, if someone finds those encrypted messages a hundred years from now saying he wrote them.

What? Make Folios of them? Ridiculous idea, would never work. God, don’t let Ben Jonson hear that.

Though you know Will these plays of “yours”, they do read pretty damn good AND they play awfully well on the stage.

Well why not print ’em all so we can have a read? There’s tons of your poetry out there already, as well as about 16 Quartos.

Why not a Folio? Look Thomas Heywood is already talking about it. He’s done hundreds of plays and acted in ’em.

The earl of X and his sister would love you for it. They might even arrange it. Take it all out of your hands. You just need to put your name to it. That’s it. They say she’s pretty good with the blank verse you know.

No risk, no paydirt. Hear what am saying? But hey, what’s the risk? You get the box office split with the other guys, you get recognised and bought drinks and tell everyone about your next play, which will be a tale of romans and old britons by the way.

Then you can bore everyone with the day you met old black-toothed Eliza and she threw that ‘gimme another play with Falstaff in it’ at you. And your earl had to write it in 3 weeks! Sorry you had to write it. What? No one heard me!”

Seriously though, la raison d’etre for public theatres is making money. Oxford’s companies, like everything he touched, bled money. He was the unluckiest last heir to waste a fortune through his own wilful behaviour.

He lived in style and grace, I’ll grant him that. (yes grant, hedgehogs) Aesthete, way before the dandies and Lord bloody Byron who found Shakes a bore. Genius btw. De Vere, read everything, expert in Law, but obviously not Property and Inheritance Law. No Portia’s miracles in Court procedure in his real life.

Oxford’s influence in the world of public theatre is unproven and unlikely. He has no place in it. Except as a punter.

It’s funny how many lawyers and Chief Justice’s are drawn to the authorship debate. The difference being they have to win and convert me to see the sense of Oxfordianism, whereas i don’t need to win.

I have won already.

My candidate is already the acknowledged author of shakespeare’s histories, comedies, and tragedies, plus all that other stuff.

OK sometimes he had help…but AMEST I BOVVEREST?

…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.