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…
