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This post is about the links: with thanks to the comic talent of Catherine Tate.
If you want to imagine a specific set of circumstances to understand the true meaning of these sonnets, feel free to do so. This young lady learned a sonnet despite her vociferous scottish teacher. He becomes Hamlet for Auntie Beeb’s Christmas TV in 2009.
Feel less free to force-feed me your theory, i’ve looked and look and judged and judge for myself. Nobody coerced or coerces me into believing on the evidence that it could possibly be anybody else who wrote SHakespeare. And i dont care how you spell it! Really, not anyone but the man from Stratford.
I follow the newest scholarship of all the major candidates. I study Sh from any source. If it is a valid source. That I determine. My conclusions on all the arguments for and against that i have read acknowledges both sides. I am like Sh in any argument he ever wrote both pro and con.
But the side that has to do the least fudging or inventing in favour of their candidate remains the Stratfordian. The conspiracy theorists argue from the point that it seems impossible that an unlettered, unscholared, untravelled, unworldly provincial could become a language’s greatest author. Why?
Any trip through the greatest minds of History will prove that nothing is what it seems. But it is nonetheless. Suis je bovvered though?
Stratford Sh had knowledge of pomp and ceremony; albeit when his father was in civic politics. But his dad did travel to London on behalf of the Town of Stratford. He wasn’t a nobody. He did get a coat of arms with or without right, but he got ’em and thus entitled himself and his heirs to be titled Gentleman. Short-lived history shows as his son Hamnet age 6 ended that generational legacy.
Now those noble candidates for Shakespeare may snort and scorn my words but by Occam’s razor edge it is the most likely scenario. The truth is you cannot tell Shakespeare’s story without Shakspere being at the centre of it.
Then two choices offer themselves
either he had to have been co-erced
or he had to have been paid off.
But what was he paid off with?
with gentleman status?
with a nice house in the country?
with a share in the Globe Theatre?
with his name going into literary posterity and not someone else’s?
He could have afforded almost all of the above
only from his acting and ostensible ‘writing’ work.
What’s to say he didn’t hold a stake in his horse-holding franchise at the Theatre? We can never prove something like that. Though it’s only plausible that Sh did have such a franchise as his contemporaries reported. Or were they lying too?
Or was he just an idiot and a willing stooge. Which also doesn’t chime or rhyme with the available facts. All we hear of this guy is that he’s good tempered, and likes to laugh, and make witty. This is from people who hung out with him. Not that that’s factual testimony, it’s just what it is.
If you’ve made your mind up about these sonnets then i hope you will judge my readings kindly despite my non-belief in your cause.
For the majority who have no idea what i’m alluding to in these convoluted lines, welcome to the sonnets. As you’ve noticed by my defence the views expressed on and in the name of these sonnets are quite entrenched and under constant barrage.
I fight on what i consider to be the side of the true english heir to shakespeare’s throne. He’s a Midlands boy with ties to the Catholic North. An actor with the Lord Chamberlains’ Men at the peak of his career.
His two youthful published poems were a smash hit. Both dedicated to his poetic patron, the Earl of Southampton. Southampton is the most likely candidate for being the model for the ravishing lovely boy of the sonnets. Again many candidates vie for biographical and autobiographical identification.
He had many other patrons for his Acting work: Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and the King eventually. He worked in a theatre collective that operated a Public theatre and played at Court. How does this make Stratford Sh ineligible to have written his plays and poems?
The first 126 sonnets indeed echo a presumed relationship in mute dialogue. There are also the poet’s mistress, who betrays him with the sexy young Earl; and a Rival Poet hired by the fashion-conscious Patron, much to the chagrin of our poet’s supposed persona.
Or you can build a monument showing the parallels to the Essex rebellion and Southampton’s imprisonment in the Tower and how each sonnet displays this in ever-growing cryptic narrative.
These sonnets aren’t a flattering display of any of the characters, including the poet’s persona, ie the invention of the poet scratch-scratch-dipping his quill. The thoughts that construct this monument of airy words are of the world and not privy to any one person’s experience.
If the characters aren’t treated as real people and merely represent the feelings of everyman/woman in that character’s position: then you’re absolved from having to look at all the evidence for and against these real people; and why it had to be these real people; and isn’t the work somehow so much better now we know it’s these real people.
Because what’s the upshot if it turns out it was Marlowe or Oxford. What possible benefit lies therein? How do the plays, as mangled as they are by transmission, get better? (study the editing tradition of any play for proof they are mangled).
To be honest I don’t really care that it was the Stratford geezer. But the arguments against him are unconvincing if they don’t convince me how this man played along and didn’t reveal the conspiracy.
NO! The play’s the thing, wherein he caught the conscience of us all. Ring a ding ding. Hamlet is not a real person even if he’s based on one. Neither Shylock, Leontes nor Malvolio. Mark Antony Caesar, and Henry V were real people but not the way Shake-speare (hyphenised or not, it doesn’t matter) wrote them.
Nor all his marvellous female characters be they queens or servants, real or fictitious. Must we base them too on real people and not on the characters in the stories on which these plays and poems are based. The only thing Sh needed to appreciate his sources was imagination and wit. He didn’t necessarily need to be a nobleman.
Nor did he need to pretend he was writing works that were his, and taking the praise and profit for them; whilst their true author pretended to be dead under the Elizabethan witness protection program.
Yes I mean the Marlovians. These plays that Christopher would have penned had to find their way to the PUBLIC stage and Printing Press. Really NOBODY knew except the schmuck at the centre of it playing his part? Or if they did, kept counsel?
Don’t doubt dear reader,
go on have a read or a listen.
…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.
…the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare of Stratford were lovers. It’s the only way it all fits together.
Now Sh is free to be who he is and Eddie his own forever true self. It ties in all the counrty metaphor and husbandry imagery Sh brings to the tables. And the personal stories behind all the plays and poems and sonnets like Hamlet, LLL and All’s Well that Ted brings to the moveable feast.
It also accounts for those early plays like The Famous Victories of Henry 5 and The Troublesome Reign of King John and of course the UR- Hamlet. Oxenford wrote them first and then palmed them off to the world via his batty bwa, when the shame of his theatrical double-life became too much.
However you look at it this must be the answer. We can now span 30 years of theatrical and literary history. It lends credence to the shared patron the Earl of Southampton. The 1000 pound annuity given by the Queen and hinted at the one time payment that Southampton gave Shakey. Also that LLL was written at Southampton’s country house.
It allows Shaggy to be the butt of a smear campaign in The Parnassus Plays and Willobie his Avisa. And for Teddy to pursue his tin mining monopolies sans success but hey the writers knew and loved him. All that’s needed is the syndicate who will eventually publish the First Folio, 19 and 7 years after their own deaths.
Now Orksy can concentrate on the immortality he promises in the works and Billy Frodo can fool the folks at the theatre, whether indoor or out, at court or in public. Naturally the highest secrecy is required from both sides.
John Weever and John Davies are two contemporaries who reported on the reputation of Shakespeare/Shakspere without contorting and cutting him in twain. Both are commended for reporting on Sh’s accomplishments in verse and neither condemned for exposing him as not him who writ it.
Both placed him within the writing scene, printshops and theatres, acknowledging in turn, other hardworking dramatists and their patrons and sponsors. Neither suggested it was actually someone else though both are being used as such by the Conspiracists. These two are eye-witnesesses to precioussss or the true identity of William Shhhhhh.
In fact they treat the author of the alluded works as one. Furthermore he’s gentle, witty and hony-tongued. Words repeated by Meres and easily found in the anguished, pain-filled wit of some of the sonnets. Mellifluous is the word you seek. How and why he did it is inconsequential. But Sh’s works show progression and maturity as any artist’s progression and maturity should show if practiced over 20 years.
Not all Sh wrote was a hit in his time. We don’t even know if all the plays were performed at least once. More than half we know, as they were already purchasable from the bookstall in St. Paul’s Churchyard. If you were to be a fly-on-the-wall in Elizabethan London and guaranteed to see every strata and sub-strata of Society: St. Paul’s churchyard is the place to be that fly.
We do know that from 1597 Shakespeare’s name on a quarto or octavo would be a selling point. His name in the next 10 years will also be purloined by several other writers under which to publish and hopefully sell. The only person duped here is the reader. And the writer, doubly so if it was an other than Sh.
A block quote from Giles E Dawson is in order:
The scholar has no axes to grind. He is not eager to prove his own hypotheses correct, but rather to find whether they are correct or not. He is ever ready to reevaluate and reinterpret his evidence and to discard one hypothesis in favour of a better. When he uncovers a fact that does not square with his hypothesis he neither shuts his eyes to it nor tries to explain it away nor trims it to the facts.
Ernst Hongimann and Eric Sams. Both Stratfordians, both not fully accepting of each other within their corresponding Orthodox biographical folds, both anti-conspiracists for Irwin Leigh Matus’ reasons as found in the latter’s book, Shakespeare: IN FACT.
Eric reviews Ernst’s book dealing with the so-called Lancashire connection in Sh’s biography. You can see if you follow the link why the orthodox don’t need conspiracists in their life when the level of disagreement is this strong.
Look at John Weever who wrote epigrams in general and specifically wrote a sonnet-length epigram “ad gulielmum shakespeare”. Now this Lancashire lad (being one mesel ahm dead proud e were) managed a literary life in London and as far as i know had no connection to Oxford, Marlowe or Bacon.
Plus gentle reader he confirms as a contemporary our gentle, honey-tongued, witty Will as the one who wrote Venus and Adonis, Julius Caesar and his Sonnets among others. He was a fan of our man Will.
Weever’s work was printed by Valentine Simmes. Simmes or Sims printed in Quarto (Q):
1597 Q1 Richard 2nd,
1597 Q1 Richard 3rd,
1598 Q2 Richard 2nd
1598 Q3 Richard 2nd
1600 Q1 Henry 4th, pt. 2,
1600 Q1 Much Ado About Nothing.
1603 Q1 Hamlet, (a ‘bad’ quarto)
1604 Q3 Henry 4th, pt. 1
Close enough to know the man who wrote them, you’d think? He certainly knew and published other contemporary dramatists.
But wait it gets better the links he provides to the Heskeths and the Hoghtons and the Stanleys, and the whole War of the Roses Derby-loving examples in Love’s Labours Lost, as the school of the night. (1594 may be a bit late for LLL)? The connection with the owner of the Mermaid Tavern and the North recorded en passant by Leslie Hotson holds another clue.
The Blackfriars Gatehouse purchase confirms long time links between Shakespeare and the North. The Annotator had also mentioned the Northern connection. Messrs Lubbock and Keen wrote The Annotator during the 2nd WW. what a brilliant book that was! But unfortunately untrue.
Keep looking I say! Bring on Sir Henry Neville and Sir Fulke Greville and Orksy. Some day someone will turn up some absolute evidence. But don’t believe their hype! Do yourself a favour in the meantime and keep reading his plays and poems.
Shakespeare had examples of nobility before he went to London. Manners and pomp and circumstance were a main feature of Elizabethan England as they had been for centuries.
Stratford was not a backwater hick town. It was a major market town close to the city of Warwick inhabited by its very own Earl of Warwick, whose ancestor Richard Neville was a King Maker.
There were the landed gentry Lucy’s who supposedly caught Shakes and held him for his deer-stealin’ just feedin’ the family escapades which led him to escape to London to ‘scape a whipping.
All the anecdotes collected by early biographers taken together and supported by later discoveries bolstering their verity do in the end add up to something like a real breathing human. Unfathomable and easy to project moron status onto, but hey give the guy a break. Literacy isn’t as exalted as the Conspiracists make it out to be.
These plays and poems of his do reveal a seeming biography, peopled by people and characters who occur and re-occur throughout stratty-boy’s life. Nobody of any candidacy would put Winter’s Tale before The two Gentlemen of Verona, nor Julius Caesar before Titus Andronicus. You can experience that by reading them all and giving your first impressions. Historians and scholars do it by looking to their first mention, performance or publication.
Sir Fulke Greville’s biography speaks for itself and yet has given him status as one of the pretenders to Shagsbird’s second best bed. Nonetheless a Baron and within Sh’s ken, or knowledge for those that dinnae ken ken.
Add to that this projected stint in Lancashire, (i know fully blasted by Robert Bearman etc., but i want to believe. ‘My love is like a red, red rose’.). History is not mystery, it is commonplace and in the end the truth will out. Come out come out, you shakespearean moles, you must to the archives to seek preciousssssss…
…over at discover magazine blog this discussion is going on. I replied a looong comment.
Now I don’t say that Will Shakespeare of Stratford did write his works and basta! end of conversation.
I say there is no reason to doubt why somebody in the position he was in couldn’t have written these plays. Negating the need for an alternative candidate.
I agree with Anthony McCarthy and Will Monox that the Stratford biography as known is boring. I want there to be another Shakespeare that fits the bill. The egghead that’s there is not my favourite conception of Shakespeare.
I have given the other candidates a fair and open hearing and found myself sick of all the misreading of the historical record and misappropriations of rhetoric; applied like base lawyers’ tricks. Anything goes for a quibble and the verdict. Ad hominem with reason: you make my candidate, therefore me, into a cabbage brained blockhead.
I have seen Stratfrodians defend their burrows time again with nothing but straws to clutch onto. Not once have the Orksfordians conquered, like Tamburlaine, cruelly dragging the fallen King in a cage and feeding him scraps.
I don’t doubt.
I have read all his plays and seen them all live at least once. I’ve read all his poems and memorised his sonnets. I’ve even read all Oxford’s extant poems, and letters. And believe me if the stratfrodians had a collection that big we’d be cross-examining them for clues to plays, handwriting style to personality etcetera. We know Oxford was a degenerate, that’s why he’s a good candidate. Kick ol goody two-shoes from his throne.
The orksfordians candidate and those conspiracists who would have him Will, (let’s not shy from the ‘C’ word: one is needed for Shaksper to comply) have such letters and do no such thing. Why? Because there is nothing in them to connect him with writing plays and secreting them to be published 19 years after his death. Now there’s a well-thought out plan. What if they all hadn’t been published? would we be having this discussion?
He is the fallen Earl, begging for scraps from the monarch’s table. An aristocrat to the end and such a fall. He died in 1604, is buried who knows where, whilst Shakespeare lived to write Timon, Lear, The Tempest, Winter’s Tale and Henry the Eighth, that phoenix-like would fire up the house at the Globe in 1613. Oxford dead near ten years since. Verily.
Oxford straddles the downfall of Noblesse Oblige with loss of Land and inheritance,
as Shagsberds does the rise of the Gentleman and the pragmatic Business classes.
I doubt Oxford’s influence on the world of printers and booksellers.
I doubt Oxford’s influence behind the scenes in Public theatre companies.
I have no doubt my Will knew both worlds from the typeface to the straw onstage.
The doubters doubt because there is no evidence connecting our Will to writing, or even being capable of conceiving these plays, most based on stories stolen from extant sources he did have access to through the printers and booksellers he knew. Esoteric knowledge and foreign languages aren’t a barrier to an inquisitive mind. I speak, read and write four languages, why couldn’t Shaksper learn any? I have a middling grammar school education.
You tell me your Earl speaks, reads and writes five or six languages, and therefore he had access to the source materials necessary to conceive the plays. Well so too the compositor at Vautrollier’s Print shop, have the necessary linguistic chops and access to those same sources. Besides noblesse oblige extended only to the first-born sons: many second and third sons of Noblemen were as illiterate as Shakespeare’s daughters.
Learning other languages doesn’t demand great intelligence, it takes an accurate ear and the ability to imitate what you hear, and then learn to think, read, write and speak it for yourself.
Oxford squandered a fortune, wardship took the rest, leaving him nothing but a name. And then he gives that away so he can use some schmoke from stratford to put his creations onstage and preserve them for immortality under his name. For why?
The crucible of theatrical London involved hundreds of people to sustain it as a viable platform for making money. It happened from the mid 1570’s through the 80’s and into the 90’s, when Shakespeare hits his publishing stride midway through the decade. Theatres slowly start to move indoors and the players and playwrights exploit this fact.
Oxford of course had foreseen this darker trend and written these late plays during the Essex Rebellion and the death of Elizabeth and James arrival. Not to menion tossing out Macbeth to flatter the new scottish King. How he collaborated with Fletcher beats me.
No. The life of Shakespeare were enough if seen as a practitioner of theatre and a best-selling published author in a world where no celebrity scene outside the Nobility, Adventurers, Warriors and Players exists. No authors were famous.
The name Shakespeare as a writer of plays would have been known all over London by readers who bought one of the several re-prints of his 18 published quartos. Plus his pomes in the smaller Octavo size. NO-ONE asked the question, who is writing this stuff?
How is this hidden? How is this secret? Why these plays?
I doubt the alternative candidates more than i doubt Will of Stratford. But please 3 centuries have gone by since Reverend Wilmot, so can’t we just agree it doesn’t really matter, as we have the plays and poems. Stuttering John Heminges and Henry Condell two truer or falser men who ever lived, hit it on the nose in their sell in the First Folio, read him and read him againe.
Sorry for the length of this defence but i am open minded and interested in anything that truthfully examines the historical record and doesn’t try to force it to suit any particular character over all possible candidates. Nor me mine.
Always with Occam’s razor poised and ready to slash away the hopes and fears of biography. So he’s boring, it doesn’t matter, his plays and poems aren’t. Not like Oxford’s poems and letters. Nothing remotely like Shakespeare there. But of course when im reading Shake-speare i’m reading Oxford.
I like Fulke Greville for his proximity and intimacy with Stratford. What, a backwater with no books? Sir Fulke had no library? University of Harvard founder, John Harvard’s mum was a Stratford girl. Could she read?
A small town Stratford, never know who you’ll meet down the pub. Shakespeare’s friends were no dummies and under-achievers.
I just got Mark Eccles book Shakespeare’s Warwickshire.
Why in the name of all the Muses fil’d isn’t this still in print?
….is central to understanding the Sonnets as a complete oeuvre. It is an off-shoot of rhetoric. Now each individual sonnet necessarily has its own argument otherwise it wouldn’t go anywhere or say any thing.
But my argument here is that the cumulative argument of these individual arguments leaves little room for any hidden argument i.e. there is enough matter to consider without adding any further argument.
Let’s defer to Martin Wiggins again:
‘The study of rhetoric gave authors an instinct not only for the order of composition but also for the arrangement of the materials. Schoolboys learned techniques of sequence and digression, repetition and balance, comparison and juxtaposition; they learned how to manipulate listeners by varying the amount of time given to a particular point, by introducing the unexpected, and by escalating to a climax. And what rhetoricians did with words and sentences, playwrights did with characters and scenes.’
Sh’s Sonnets are obviously not as complicated in plot and structure as his plays or poems, nor are they merely mechanisms of rhetorical construction. They are somewhere in between, using the knowledge of both, informing the argument he develops.
Accepting the fact that they were written during the 1590’s with the possibility of being revised up until their publication in 1609, they span the changes in rhetorical style that earmark the changes happening in the poetry and theatre of the day.
Accepting that these sonnets were spoken to a select audience of ‘private friends’ as well as being circulated in manuscript, we and they must look to how beautifully, or less value-oriented, how well-constructed they are.
Delivery of a sonnet demands total mastery of its rhetorical framework and a sense of its duplicity in being spoken. The argument mirrors an ‘imaginary’ inner world with a ‘real’ outer world. It seems to tell a truth about the lies inherent in loving.
Remember these are audiences that think nothing of attending a play to listen for hours at a time. They went for the story, maybe for the actors, but definitely not for the author.
A sonnet is over in a minute. This fact convinces me that many of these sonnets were written in pairs or triplets or series. For instance in Sonnets 1-17, I see 5+6, 9+10, 15-17 as deliberate, culminating in the shift of argument in 18.
The argument of these first 17 sonnets is to convince a beautiful fair young man to marry and have offspring or lose his legacy to the world; both at large and for him personally. The argument shifts in 18 to immortalising the FYM through the poet’s lines.
This argument in turn will be mangled as the FYM interacts with the poet’s Mistress and hires a Rival Poet. Despite these other characters our poet’s argument remains remarkably stable. This interaction though allows the poet to throw in extra layers of inner life to deepen his argument.
So when we finally get to the use of the word ”argument” we see that it is a continuation of the argument from the get-go. Let’s look and see what the sonnet sequence says:
Sonnet 38:
HOw can my Muse want subject to invent
While thou dost breathe that pour’st into my verse,
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent,
For every vulgar paper to rehearse:
Sonnet 76:
O know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
Sonnet 79:
I grant (sweet love) thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen,
Yet what of thee thy Poet doth invent,
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again,
Sonnet 100:
Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent,
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
Sonnet 103:
ALack what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside.
Sonnet 105:
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind and true, varying to other words,
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
…so an examination of compositional strategies Sh used in his Sonnets to give them the appearance of depth. Cribbed from the introduction (p. 19-21, 38) of the Art of Sh’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
1. TEMPORAL. The establishment of several retreating “panels” of time, representing episodes or epochs in the speaker’s past, gives him a continuous, nontransient existence and a continuity of memory.
(there is unity in continuity)
eg Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
2. EMOTIONAL.
The reflection, within the same poem, of sharply contrasting moods with respect to the same topic.
eg Sonnet 148: O me! What eyes hath love put in my head,
This can be abetted by contradictory or at least nonhomogenous
discourses rendering a topic complicated.
eg Sonnet 125: Wer’t aught to me I bore the canopy
The volatility of moods in the speaker suggests a a flexibility-even an instability-
of response verbally “guaranteeing” the presence of passion. (yeah baby)
eg Sonnet 29: When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
3. SEMANTIC.
The speaker’s mind has a great number of compartments of discourse
(theological, legal, alchemical, medicinal, political, aesthetic, etc.)
These compartments are semi-pervious to each other, and
the osmosis between them is directed by an invisible discourse-master/mistress,
who stands for the intellectual imagination.
4. CONCEPTUAL.
The speaker resorts to many incompatible models of existence even within the same poem.
eg Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,
describes life
first as a homogeneous steady-state succession of identical waves/minutes (a stoic model);
then as a sharply delineated rise and eclipse of a sun (a tragic model);
and next as a series of incessant violent extinctions (a brutal model).
These models, unreconciled, convey a disturbing cognitive dissonance,
one which is, in a philosophical sense, intolerable. The alert and observant mind
that constructs these models asserts the “truth” of each for a particular occasion
or aspect of life, but finds no “supra-model” under which they can be intelligibly contained.
In this way, the mind of the speaker is represented as one in the grip of philosophical conflict.
5. PHILOSOPHICAL.
The speaker is a rebel against received ideas.
He is well aware of the received topoi of his culture,
but he subjects them to interrogation,
as he counters neo-Platonic courtly love with Pauline marital love
(eg sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds),
or the Christian Trinity with the Platonic Triad
(eg sonnet 105:Let not my love be called idolatry,),
or analogizes sacred hermeneutics to literary tradition
(eg sonnet 106: When in the chronicle of wasted time,).
No topics are more sharply scrutinized than those we now
subsume under the phrase “gender relations”:
the speaker interrogates androgyny of appearance
by evoking a comic myth of Nature’s own dissatisfaction with her creation
(eg sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted);
he criticizes hyperbolic praise of female beauty
(eg sonnet 130: My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,);
he condones adultery
(eg the so-called “will” sonnets 135: Whoever hath her wish thou hast thy Will,
+136: If thy soul check thee that i come so near,);
he sees adultery as less criminal than adulterated discourse
(eg sonnet 152: In loving thee thou knowst I am forsworn,).
No received idea of sexuality goes uninvestigated; and
the thoroughly unconventional sexual attachments represented
in both parts of the sequence stand as profound critiques of
the ideals of heterosexual desire, chastity, continence, marital fidelity,
and respect for the character of one’s sexual partner.
What “ought to be” in the way of gender relations by Christian and Civic standards
is represented as an ideal in the “marriage” sonnets (sonnets 1-17),
but never takes on existential or “realist” lived validation.
Sh’s awareness of the norms is as complete as his depiction,
in his speaker, of experiential violation of those norms.
6. PERCEPTUAL.
The speaker is also given depth by the things he notices,
from Damask roses to the odor of marjoram to a canopy of state.
Though the sonnets are always openly drifting toward emblematic
or allegorical language. They are plucked back into the perceptual,
as their symbolic rose is distilled into real perfume
(sonnet 54: O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,),
or as an emblematic April is burned by hot June
(sonnet 104: To me fair friend you never can be old,).
The speaker stands poised between a medieval emblematic tendency
and a more modern empirical posture; within his moral and philosophical systems,
he savors the tang of the “sensual feast”.
7. DRAMATIC.
The speaker indirectly quotes his antagonist.
Though no one but the speaker speaks in a lyric,
Sh exploits the usefulness of having the speaker,
in private, quote in indirect discourse something
one or another of the dramatis personae previously said.
In the give and take of prior criticism answered by the speaker,
we come closest in the sonnets to Sh the dramatist.
These rebuttal sonnets are
76: Why is my verse so barren of new pride?,
105: Let not my love be called idolatry,
116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
117: Accuse me thus, that I have scanted all
151: Love is too young to know what conscience is,).
More could be said of the strategies that create a credible speaker
with a complex and imaginative mind (which we take on as reader)
but Helen finishes with her seeing these multiple armatures as mutually reinforcing,
and therefore as principles of authorial instruction.
Her purpose is to set out strategies that make the speaker credible,
that generate an evolutionary dynamic, that suggest interaction among
the linguistic ingredients of the lines, that use the couplet,
that beguile by fancifulness, and so on.
He is a poet acutely conscious of grammatical and syntactical possibility
as an ingredient in invention and routinely he varies tense, mood, subject-position,
and clause-patterns in order to make conceptual or rhetorical points.
(There is)… a formidable intellectual command
of phenomena (both physical and moral),
of means (both human and cosmic),
of categories (both quotidian and philosophical), and
of discourses (both learned and popular)
(which) lies behind the Sonnets in the person of their author.
She hopes to show Sh as a poet constantly inventing
new permutations of internal form –
the permutations of emotional response.
…having read parts of ‘Shakespeare by Another Name’ by Mark Anderson last night and in response to the idea of Roland Emmerich doing a movie about how SHakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
I think it rather interesting that none of the following playwrights have never questioned the fact that Shakespeare didn’t do what is said to have been done by him.
Henrick Ibsen, Emile Zola, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Maurice Maeterlinck, William B. Yeats, John Galsworthy, Bernard Shaw (who did say he would have given SH a run for his money), William Archer. John Millington Synge, Jean Cocteau (though he did believe Sh was a freemason like kimself) Luigi Pirandello, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Giraudoux, Ernst Toller, Eugene O’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Thornton Wilder, Jean Paul Sartre, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Fry, Friedrich Duerrenmatt, Sean O’Casey, Arthur Miller, John Osborne, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Consider that conspiracists. I thought Oliver Kamm stood up very well to the nonsense of Conspiracist attacks on his article exposing their weaknesses.
…or a book called The Pursuit of History by John Tosh. It never fails to amuse my tiny mind how author’s names can be seen as (admittedly lame) jokes on their chosen topic.
Prominently from one conspiracists’ viewpoint, Thomas Looney whose choice of Oxenforde as Shake-speare i would say is ‘looney’. But as they or anyone interested in the Historical truth will tell you, his name is pronounced ‘Low-ney’. So in a paragraph or so onto John Toesh’s book.
If you look at the rise of conspiracy theories related to Shakespeare historically, as Hank Whittemore is doing on his blog, favouring his candidate of course. You find that a contrary reading of History results in a favouritism in analysing the H/historical record.
Notwithstanding our own biases here at YLS. I stand behind the Historical record as to the identity of Shakespeare, until incontravertibly proven otherwise. And the number of good actors, judges, etc remains in favour of my candidate no matter how famous yours get. So nah nah na nah nah…
It behooves us then to look in a more adult way at what historically it all means.
Is it History with a big H, as it comes down to us and yet continuing as we live and breathe?
Or is it history with a little h, that is whatever we and others like us, want it to signify or not?
Hank’s blog is scholarly and impressively filled out with many scholarly-looking and sounding exposes of the Historical record as Historians see it. Their reading ever true to the central idea this dashing, romantic, Super-Earl wrote the lot. Why on earth would he? What is he, a literary Jesus?
The basic Post-Modern premise of his/her/our/story is that History can never fully define itself; without recourse to the greater, or more primary influences of the history of language and thought.
History then, now means it cannot exist outside the individual applying it here, in the present. Past, now, as writing turns to reading and i give up any claim to the words, or their truth, or their meaning, by publishing it.
This conundrum, and obviously in his book he explains it much better, means metaphorically beached up on the shores of History worldwide, Historians are left bellowing their legitimacy. But not so loudly that they should speak up when politicians take a slice of history and equate it to our times. Examples are profligate. Whether the media is manipulated or not, you be the judge.
Once again, thanks to the new technology things can never be the same again. This web is not a material world, dependent on yes, but entirely insubstantial. Yet it speaks volumes and its influence is for history to decide. I can change this text at any moment, whilst I am living. But once gone? I, to all the world must die, and my memory is these words.
I have nothing against anti-traditionalist, anarchic analysis. But don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. History doesn’t repeat itself, it cannot. History cannot be made, it can only be interpreted. History is bigger than the author, the politician, the economist, the social worker, or anthropologist. History is getting even bigger than the Historian.
And likewise many Historians remain unwilling to give up their academic objectivity by participating in political, economic, or social forums with CNN or BBC Worldwide. Which political commentator is not a small h, historian. Any connoisseur of any art form, or sport, or craft? Are they not in a sense an historian of that particular subject, be it hacky-sack or single malt-tasting.
Essentially History is memory. But is it individual or collective? And is there a difference? YLS can’t stand the fact, that facts are not facts, unless they are scientific, reproducible, and eternally verifiable facts.
Value facts are facts too. But value facts are open to interpretation. So the same fact can be manipulated to serve both extremes of the argument. A conspiracist and an orthodox look at the same Shakey topic produces diametrically opposed responses. Yet the central Historical fact or text of that fact remains.
How we choose to interpret History is then as personal as our thought processes. Go ahead change my mind or me change yours. Without co-ersion, threat, or torture you cannot, until i want to do so.
Unlike my ramblings on what history kinda sorta means to me, John Tosh neatly slides down occam’s razor’s edge (ouch)! in balancing his argument for distinction and preservation of the best of Historicism and an embracing of the influence of theory on Social memory and its influence on history.
Let’s not forget Philosophy killed God in the 19thC, language and Literary Theory killed the Author in the 20thC, and New Media killed History, which ended in 1992.
Welcome to the 21stC! Remember, back when the cyber-age began our Shakespeare was one of the first authors cruising the world wide web. I think the Aussies took the honour there mate. Collected works of course. Should find out what edition they used.
Actually I don’t think Shakespeare would have minded the questions raised by Theorists or being called a scriptor as Barthes coins it or an author-function as Foucault does.
Mention the name and a host of voices, living and dead, are conjured up. Their judgements are often contradictory and so the battle continues.
Undoubtedly a man bearing that name lived and breathed and created under the form and pressure of his times. We know this man wrote 2 popular narrative poems and a 154 Sonnets. We know he wrote and acted in 36 plus Plays written in the genres of Histories, Comedies and Tragedies. And as fashion changed in Tragi-comedies or Romances.
Rather we know 2 poems, 154 Sonnets and 18 Quartos of different Plays were printed and published during his lifetime. Seven years after his death a further 18 Plays were added to the list to make a total of 36, and published in the First Folio. These all were attributed without doubt to old egg-head.
Now on the day he died (his 52nd birthday) the writer logically ceases to exercise any more influence on his literary legacy. But conspiracists at this point weave a different story.
Those that believe their candidate was still living (Marlowe, Bacon, Mary Sidney) say that the syndicate moved to print the First Folio was influenced by their candidate. Those whose candidate was dead (Oxenforde) claim the same but have to work harder to convince posterity.
Shakespeare the schmuck from Stratford had 2 things going for him that would turn him into the demi-god we now realise in pop culture and higher education.
First his printed work sold well from the bookseller’s shelves. In fact he was the most published writer of Plays in his time! No-one comes close to his output in print. His fame started in 1593 and 1594 with the 2 poems, both bestsellers in his lifetime, changing size from Quarto as first print, to Octavo in subsequent re-printings. Then individual plays also appeared from 1594 until beyond his death, using his name on the Title-Page as an extra selling point from 1598. Publications of Quartos of his plays continued well past their collection into the one volume First Folio in 1623.
Second his Plays continued to meet the fashion of the times in the theatre. Okay he lost favour slightly as old-fashioned up until the closing of the theatres in 1642. But after the Restoration in 1660 his Plays were re-discovered and altered to suit the fashion, e.g. King Lear got a happy ending.
Thus Shakespeare gained his audience of readers and spectators. His language, as we know it through his pomes and plays, is the nexus of language, literature, and drama of a writer writing for a Reading Public and a Professional Troupe of Players in a unique period in theatrical and literary history.
Sh the schmuck couldn’t know his poems would rival Sir Philip Sidney or Spenser. He couldn’t know his Plays would outlast his contemporaries like Marlowe and Kyd from the old-school or Beaumont and Fletcher from the new-school.
He did know from the example of Richard Burbage that his characters made actor’s careers. He did know his plays contained enough philosophy and psychology that reflected his age and therefore any other age.
He may have had an inkling being the ink-fish he was, but he couldn’t have anticipated what he has become. How he felt about his works, and what he thought might happen to them, cannot be retraced. The paradox herein of course is promising immortality and eternity in the works and not preparing them for either after his death.
He cannot have known either that the theatres would be closed for England’s only stint at Republicanism under Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan hosts. After all Plautus and his cohorts had made it to his time through the mediums of theatre and education.
Maybe the theatrical and printing success achieved in his lifetime gave him assurance his works would live on. His prologues and epilogues prove he knew he had readers as well as spectators, idiots as well as the wiser sort watching his progress.
I think Shakespeare and his contemporaries would be shocked at his success since his death. Whilst he lived he at least got paid for his work. But his family line died out in 1649, so not a penny earned on his name since has paid this original debt.
The other aspect that ensured Shakespeare’s longevity is the education system. The Statue of Anne in 1709 laid the base for Copyright Law. Sh’s plays were re-printed ad nauseam in the 18thC. Familiarity breeds contempt.
The Germans in Europe adopted Shakespeare as their own and set up the first Sh. Appreciation Society. The Romantic poets of the 19thC German and English and the actor/managers of English Theatre deified him further.
But Garrick’s Jubilee in Stratford may be said to be the turning point in the immortalisation of the Bard. We all love a parade! That day in Stratters in 1769 was a disaster and a historical success.
Garrick and his first english dictionary writing friend and teacher, Samuel Johnson brought Shakespeare back to the masses from whence it came. Garrick, the 18thC’s ‘natural’ actor re-defined Shakespeare, the ‘natural’ writer, for his time, rescuing theatrical performance from the bombast it had become.
Shakespeare influence on the education system in the 19thC when the British Empire’s expansion force-fed South-Africans, Indians, Australians, Kiwis, Canadians and Americans, their dose of the Stratford Burgher. Most wishing in all likelihood he would just burgher off back to Stratford! (For a rather startling defence of British-American Colonialism try this 57 page pdf.)
By the time we hit the 20thC Sh was culturally embedded, as inseparable from the English language (co-creator some might say) as breath from life. Then 2 World Wars, Radio, Television, Film and Video and DVD recording happened.
Eastern Europe under International Communism embraced Shakespeare to comment on the corruptness of Courts, Regimes and Dictators. The Russians had long before the Revolution taken Shakespeare into their salons and theatres. But after that revolution until its end in 1991 prompted by the Revolutions of 1989, Shakespeare was slight solace for a soul that had to remain hidden. A secret language but an innocent one if the authorities asked. Rather like the State control of Elizabeth when he wrote the plays.
Japanese cinema of the 20thC produced some amazing renditions of King Lear and Macbeth with Ran and The Throne of Blood. The cinema was giving Shakespeare a new life. Japanese Theatre has an unbroken theatrical tradition from the same period as when Shakespeare was practising on the Southbank. Japanese scholarship doesn’t seem to include many conspiracists.
Leave that to the Koreans. (That’s a joke. I know their martial arts and they are NOT to be messed with). Korea has a strong Shakespeare interest and an unheard of history in our northern hemisphere, as long and unbroken as ours if not by a thousand years more.
Theory killed the Author, which term Shakespeare would never have used as we use it. The concept being in its infancy then. By the end of the 20thC various disciplines within theory were unreading his works, uncovering his alterity or lack of it, chastising and exposing this phantom author as mere phantasm and the worst form o the will o the wisp.
The lunatic fringe has hit the mainstream, and in some Universities you can study Shakespeare as not Shakespeare and attain a degree. (adopt a Chopper Read accent: and he couldn’t even spell his name)!
You can spread doubt but you can only uncover the truth, so what’s the harm really. I’m not so attached to dear Will, I wouldn’t drop him like Milli-Vanilli if it turned out to be someone else.
Suddenly with the advent of this new media Sh is downloadable on my I-phone. We’re not yet at the stage where full plays commissioned by the rich of their favourite theatre groups or actors can be made to order, but it’s within reach.
Sh is now a massive industry, and a cultural icon, and a frikkin genius. We have to learn about him, one thinks. and when one tries, encyclopaedias need to be digested and know-it-alls need to be deflated. s’easier to rap his asperity.
Cue laughter from the ‘real’ WS…
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Online Works of Shakespeare
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