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…or rather the works that Shakespeare himself would have read and been affected by (choose your candidate, it’s irrelevant to this argument). One of these books is George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. Now Sh must have read this treatise, published in 1589, as this is the basis of his art and artifice, both linguistic and poeticall. He would at that time been have been learning his craft of penmanship and budding as a scribbler of poems and plays.
Gary Schmidgall’s Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life is an excellent examination of the question: Why did Sh give up poetry in favour of playwriting. He adequately supports the argument for the aristos/demos split, the anxiety of performance and jostling for favour.
His work on the dedications and front matter of poems and plays is as refreshing as slurping from a mountain stream after a hard climb. An appendix reproduces John Hind’s dedication to Shakespeare’s patron (Southampton) in almost identical wording to the dedication of Venus and Adonis.
There is no necessity for the dead carcass of another poet upstream to contaminate this kind of scholarship. There is no orthodox short-sightedness and bias here. This work tells more than many a biography.
Of which James Shapiro’s rather good A Year in the Life of WS: 1599 forms more of my present reading and study. Although the speculative factor is great when discussing any of the candidates, it’s always interesting to see how they blend the times and the to few known facts.
Recently I picked up Martin Lings book the ‘Secret of Shakespeare’ and therein lies a tale. It sent me back to Islamic Scientists and Sufism and Archetypes and Symbols and something greater than pathetic Renaissance man. Sheikh Sapir, O sapient one, send me a message via Saker falcon to whet my dull lines and save me from misery.
…his writings on Poetics to be exact. It describes the move from the use of masks and chanted choric tragedy i.e. highly stylised; the movement is towards a spoken theatre and development of character, which needed a popular rhythm.
That rhythm is a breath containing 10 syllables. It is known as iambic pentameter and i.p. as its known amongst thesps is spoken as if slapping a conspiracy theorist:
‘like that, like that, like that, like that, like that.’
It is built into every human, in the rhythm of heart and mind in synch, each informing the other. Passions and reason fighting one another in words meant to be spilt from actors lips, like a will o the wisp, it appears and disappears.
The trick he has of using the same letters in different combinations to almost hide the word he just used. His concepts arise and melt and reappear in a different apparel. He clothes his words and undresses them to expose what they can and cannot contain. Then he elaborates on it or drops it and jumps to another aspect.
My friend Ben said recently in respect to speaking verse, and i paraphrase:
‘the heart lights the fire,
that cooks the brain,
that makes you speak.’
So after quoting my contemporary, we remove as swift as thought, to the old Greek, Aristotle. That student of Plato, who was in turn, student to Socrates. Aristotle, the daddy of Aristotelian logic, which is the basis of Western reason and patterns of thinking, first had this to say about the proper metre for the stage:
‘Once dialogue had come in, Nature herself had discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse;’
p.57, Aristotle’s Poetics with an introductory essay by Francis Fergusson.
Is it any wonder that Iambic Pentameter became so popular in the theatre of the 1580’s and 90’s?
….because big words scare people and bigheads smirk. Tomorrow i’m off to the BSA. I intend and will shake-a-gogo enough to show you tangible results when I return.
I want discourse in the form of an interview.
A very short interview.
There is 1 question.
Do you believe that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Shakespeare?
the 3 possible answers are:
Yes.
No.
Don’t care.
(my money is on the don’t cares as being the majority response).
I do this to raise the authorship question, which is currently riding on increasing publicity, thereby forcing the question into the realm of discussion. Bill Bryson has a new book about it and he’ll sell more than Greenblatt probably.
You will be asked, scholars, by your children who fed off an internet source and finally have something to use against you. Or Shakespeare lovers, your relatives, friends and that loud bloke will be poking fun at you in the pub. Kids in classrooms teachers, will leverage your patience with smartass replies. If they are not already.
The authorship question is out in the open. It came out of the closet and is staring its erudite, esoteric and possibly homoerotic face at you. Condemning you and your gullibility at swallowing the orthdox dross of biography, and offering alternatives of heightened enlightenment. They’re not all mad like Delia, you know. They can be quite intense though, as a rule.
I never set out to be an Orthodox Stratfordian. I just still haven’t met the evidence that shuts the Stratford boy out of the game. Whatever happened, however it happened, it included this man right at its heart. We can’t go around old egghead.
What a con if it would be true, though to what end? Where’s the payoff for the ‘real’ Shakespeare, if not in fame and money. Why would you remain anonymous and frustrated at your own penury, while some other guy runs with your successes and failures on stage and in print? And the man-in-the-middle is always, and will always be, Will.
So my answer to the question is unequivocally, uni-vocally,
Yes.
What’s yours?
…i’m condensing this stuff coz it’s brilliant scholarship of its day, and says what i’d like to say. I’ve augmented it with the odd comma for emphasis, spaced it into to smaller readable chunks, and condensed the essence without the distracting examples.
Therefore if you is a scholar, identify the authors’ Plays or WORKS, as hit may be, and if you are a neophyte, a fledgling, a mere student, peruse, delight, and learn, taking away an argument that must confound the Conspiracy theorists:
how can you not be influenced by the fashion of the time?
(The original chapter of this e-book can be found in the pages section. The entire manuscript can be found, downloaded and verified at the Project Gutenburg). BTW it’s a long post, which will cost you approx 10-15 minutes of your precious time.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Facts About Shakespeare, by
William Allan Nielson and Ashley Horace Thorndike
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Facts About Shakespeare
Author: William Allan Nielson
Ashley Horace Thorndike
Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22281]
Ready, steady,
JUMP…
The Morality Plays of the early 16thC symbolized life as a conflict of vices and virtues, or of the body and the soul. Allegory gradually disappeared, and the Morality ceased to exist as a definite type, though its symbolization of life; and its concern with conduct were handed along to the later drama.
Realism and satire long continued to characterize Elizabethan comedy, though for a time confined mostly to incidental scenes. Common and incidental to the time also was farce, which is found in most plays of the century whether tragic, comic, or moral in their main purpose.
The Comedy plots of Plautus and Terence offer a series of tricks in which the complications are often increased by having the trickster tricked. Certain fixed types of character play the parts of gulls or gullers, as the old parents, the young lovers, the parasite, the braggart soldier, and the clever slave.
The intrigue is forwarded by the use of disguise, mistaken identity, and most surprising coincidences; and it is accomplished by dialogue, often gross and abusive, but usually lively. This model served every nation of Western Europe. The plots of Terence also gave some encouragement to the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love.
If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. The union of this romance with comedy on the stage began in two ways, and principally under the innovation of two writers, Lyly and Greene.
The taste for pageants, processions, and tableaux grew and flourished under the patronage of the court; and music, dancing, and spectacle were combined with dialogue in various court exhibitions and plays given by the child actors. John Lyly, writing for these choir boys, developed this type of entertainment into a distinct species of comedy.
A common formula was a selection of Classical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, which furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications.
Gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. The witty page supersedes the rude buffoon of earlier plays, and everything is graceful and ingenious, slight in serious interest, but relieved by movement and song.
The second development of romantic comedy came through the dramatization of stories of love, adventure, and marvels.
Tragedy naturally lagged somewhat behind comedy as a form of popular entertainment. Marlowe brought to the popular drama true poetry and genuine passion; but it also established a new type of tragedy.
Marlowe made no effort to retain the structure, or themes of classical tragedy; on the contrary, he made his plays loosely connected series of scenes, dealing with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action.
In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play centers its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment.
With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their direful catastrophes.
Kyd was a student of Seneca. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired.
They were believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues, and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story.
Kyd modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus, long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan structure; but his main borrowing was the essential story of a crime and its punishment. He thus brought to the Elizabethan stage the classical theme of retribution.
Blood revenge was established as the favorite motive of tragedy; the conflict of craft between protagonist and villain made up the action, and the speculations of the avenger gave a chance for wisdom and eloquence.
Indeed the stage for half a dozen years abounded in avenging heroes, diabolical villains, shrieking ghosts, and long soliloquies on fate, death, retribution, and kindred themes.
We have now noticed the most important developments in comedy and tragedy made by the time that Shakespeare began writing for the theaters; and he made quick use of the progress accomplished by Plautian and Lylyan comedy, by Greene’s romances, and by the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe. There were other plays not easily classified under these names and of less service to Shakespeare.
But to the critical playgoer of 1590, few plays would have seemed either ‘right comedies’ or ‘right tragedies.’ The majority were mere dramatizations of story without close construction or selection of material, seeking merely varied and abundant action.
They drew their material from all kinds of narrative sources, Italian novelle, current pamphlets, Latin historians, or English chronicles; and, whether historical or fictitious, were usually known as Histories, i.e. stories. (see title pages for proof of this)!
The patriotic interest in English history fostered the presentation of its scenes upon the stage. The chronicles of Halle and Holinshed furnished abundant material; and embassies, processions, and pitched battles filled the stage with movement.
They recast the chronicle of a reign to fit the accepted subjects of tragedy, the downfall of a prince, the revenge for a crime, the overthrow of a tyrant, or the retribution brought upon a conspirator or usurper.
Those history plays, however, that do not follow the formulas for tragedy, are a heterogeneous group not easily classified. They usually keep to the loose chronicle method that presented a series of scenes without much regard to unity or coherence.
Farce, comedy, magic, spectacle, heroics, and everything that might have happened was permissible in these plays, and perhaps the only thing indispensable was a pitched field with opposing armies.
The early deaths of Greene and Marlowe and the retirement of Lyly, left Shakespeare the heir of their inventions. Though his plays were at first imitative, he soon surpassed his predecessors in gift of expression, in depiction of character, and in deftness of dramatic technic.
The years from 1593 to near the turn of the century are particularly lacking in records of plays or theaters; but it seems clear that the main developments of the drama were in romantic comedy and chronicle history; and it is also clear that Shakespeare was the unquestioned leader in both of these forms.
Imitations indicate that men of Shakespeare’s day realized that romantic comedy and history could not be carried farther. In fact, a certain reaction set in against these forms of drama. Near the close of the century new tendencies became manifest. Comedy tended to become more realistic and satiric.
Jonson announced his opposition to the lawless drama which had preceded whether romantic comedy or chronicle history–and proposed the creation of a new satirical comedy of manners.
He was moved partly by a desire to break from past methods, in order to bring comedy closer to classical example; and partly by a desire for realism, or a faithful presentation, analysis, and criticism of current manners.
The growth of London and the increase in luxury and immorality seem to have encouraged such a movement, and for the decade after 1598 there were many comedies of London life, mostly satiric, and nearly all realistic.
A review of the drama must, however, at least remark the importance of this development of realistic comedy, which flourished in the decade after 1598 and continued to the end. If Shakespeare did not turn to satire or realism or current social problems, he did turn away from chronicle history plays and romantic comedies.
He gave his best efforts of his maturity to tragedy. The day for mere imitation of Seneca, Kyd, or Marlowe, was past; and scholars like Jonson and Chapman as well as Shakespeare, sought in the tragedy of the public theater, an opportunity for wisdom and poetry and a criticism of life.
Yet his great plays may have seemed to his contemporaries to adopt rather than to depart from current dramatic practices.
They belong to the Elizabethan ‘tragedy of blood’; against a background of courts and battles they present the downfall of princes; they rest on improbable stories that end in fearful slaughter; they invariably set forth great crimes, compact of murder, lust, villainous intrigue, and ferocious cruelty.
Some of them follow Kyd, in recounting a story of blood vengeance presided over by ghosts, or discover the retribution due for crime in physical torments.
Nearly all follow Marlowe, in centering the tragic interest in the fate of a supernormal protagonist who is swayed by an overpowering emotion, and in elevating these human desires and passions into tremendous forces, that work their waste of devastation and ruin on character and life.
Later dramatists found greater interest in the study of villainy and intrigue. Revenge is born of depravity rather than duty, and given a setting of physical horrors and unnatural lust.
Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies also suggest comparison with contemporary plays, those either on Roman or on contemporary foreign history. These plays attempted an approach to classical structure and a thorough study and digest of classical history.
This effort to make tragedy a serious and authoritative interpretation of history. Shakespeare sought historical backgrounds for his characters and found a fascination in the interpretation of the motives of the great protagonists of the world of antiquity.
It is worthy of note, however, that he seems to have taken no interest in another class of subjects much favored by his contemporaries. Contemporary crimes treated with an excess of realism and didactic conclusions are common in drama.
About 1607 a new departure appeared in the work of the dramatic collaborators, Beaumont and Fletcher. After some experiments, they won, in their tragi-comedies. and in these plays established a new kind of dramatic romance.
The realistic comedies of Jonson and Middleton, which, along with the great tragedies of Shakespeare, crowd the stage history of the preceding ten years, had offered nothing similar to these romances, which joined tragic and idyllic material in scenes of brilliant theatrical effectiveness, abounding in transitions from suspense to surprise, and culminating in telling denouements.
This new realm of romance is an artificial one, contrasting pure love with horrid entanglements of lust, and ever bringing love in conflict with duty, friendship, or the code of honor.
In its intriguing courts, or in nearby forests where the idyls are placed, love of one kind or another is the ruling and vehement passion, riding high-handed over tottering thrones, rebellious subjects, usurping tyrants, and checked, if checked at all, only by the unexampled force of honor.
Romance, in short, depends on situation, on the artificial but skilful juxtaposition of emotions and persons, and on the new technic that sacrifices consistency of characterization for surprise.
Characterization tends to become typical, and motives tend to be based on fixed conventions, such as the code of honor might dictate to a seventeenth-century gentleman;
but the lack of individuality in character is counterbalanced by the vividness with which the lovers, tyrants, faithful friends, evil women, and sentimental heroines are presented, and by the fluent and lucid style which varies to any emotional requirement and rises to the demands of the most sensational situations.
Shakespeare was adopting the methods and materials of the new romance. At all events, he turned from tragedy to romance, and produced tragi-comedies that, like Beaumont and Fletcher’s, rely on a contrast of tragic and idyllic and on surprising plots and idealized heroines.
There is ample evidence that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher won a great popular renown, surpassing for a time those of Shakespeare and all others.
Beaumont did not live long after he ceased to write for the stage, dying at thirty, in the same year as Shakespeare. Jonson had given up dramatic writing for the time, and Fletcher was left the chief writer for Shakespeare’s old company and the undoubted leader of the theater.
Including the plays written in collaboration with Beaumont, Shakespeare, and later with Massinger, he left some sixty dramas of many kinds, varying from farcical comedy of manners to the most extreme tragedy.
The comedies of manners present the affairs of women, and spice their lively conversation and surprising situations with a wit that often reminds one of the Restoration.
The tragi-comedies, which display the qualities already noted as belonging to the romances, have the technical advantage that the disentanglement of their rapid plots and sub-plots is left hanging in the balance until the very end.
The happy ending to tragic entanglements won a favor it has never lost on the English stage, and tragi-comedy of the Fletcherian type continued the most popular form of the drama until Dryden.
Shakespeare’s influence is widespread, but appears incidentally in particular scene, situation, character, or phrase, rather than as affecting the main course and fashions of the drama.
After the publication of his plays in 1623, this incidental influence increased, and is distinctly noticeable in the plays of Ford and Shirley. This most hasty review of the Elizabethan drama must suggest how constantly Shakespeare responded to its prevailing conditions.
There are, of course, great variations in the signs which different plays offer of contemporary influence and peculiarity. So it is with most of his fellow dramatists. Shakespeare’s relations to the contemporary drama were manifestly constant and immediate.
If it was rarely a question with him what the ancients had written, it was always a question what was being acted and what was successful at the moment. His own growth in dramatic power goes step by step with the rapid and varied development of the drama, and the measure for comparison must be, not by decades, but by years or months.
A study of the Elizabethan drama may help to excuse some of the faults and limitations of Shakespeare, but it also enforces his merits. Both faults and merits are often to be understood in the efforts of lesser men to do what he did.
We admire his triumphs the more as we consider their failures. Yet they often had admirable success, and their triumphs as well as his are due in part to the dramatic conditions which gave the freest opportunity for individual initiative in language, verse, story, and construction.
Noble bursts of poetry, richness and variety of life, an intense interest in human nature, comic or tragic–these are the great merits of that drama. That in a superlative degree they are also the characteristics of Shakespeare is not due solely to his exceptional genius, but to the fact that his genius worked in a favorable
environment.
…All about the genesis of the plays and poems: this is a work in progress and will eventually be a page.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona- first printed in the First Folio of 1623-one of his earliest written plays. Probably based on Sidney’s Arcadia, where a similar incidents happen as in the play, and the Filismena episode in the Diana of the Spaniard, George of Montemayor in two translations, one by Bartholomew Yong and the other by Thomas Wilson. Another source is namely, ˜The History of Felix and Philiomena”, which was played before the Queen at Greenwich in 1584.
A Pleasant Comedie called Love’s labors lost- as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespeare. Imprinted at London by W.W. for Cuthbert Burby. 1598. Quarto. (Title-Page)- Mentioned in Palladis tamia 1598 by Francis Meres. Alluded to by Robert Tofte in a poem intituled, Alba; or, The Month’s Minde of a Melancholy Lover, Octavo, 1598. Scholars believe it was an early written work.
The Comedie of Errors- is first printed in the First Folio of 1623. It is noticed by Meres in his 1598 list. Scholars believe it was an early written work.
The first edition of Romeo and Juliet- was printed by John Danter in 1597, with the title ˜An excellent conceited tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) plaied publiquely, by the right honourable the L. of Hunsdon’s Servants. The second edition was printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, in 1599, and is entitled, the most excellent and lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet; newly corrected and augmented and amended: as it hath been sundry times publiquely acted, by the right Hourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants. The two remaining editions, published before the FF of 1623, are a quarto printed in 1609, and another without date, both by the same publisher, John Smethwicke. Dated by an earthquake of 1580 described by Holinshed.
The Taming of the Shrew- the earliest comedy in its present form, yet known, is that of the FF of 1623; but in the year 1594 was printed an anonymous play entitled A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called The taming of a Shrew. As it was sundry times acted by the Right Honorable the Earle of Pembrook his servants. Printed at London by Peter Short and are to be sold by Cuthbert Burbie, at his shop at the Royal Exchange, 1594. Its similarity in title and contents raise the question: who borrowed from who?
King John- is the only uncontested play of Shakespeare’s not entered on the books of the Stationer’s Company, was first printed in the FF of 1623. It is also included in Meres list. There is an older drama called the troublesome raigne of John King of England, which brings up the same question as The taming of a Shrew.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream- the earliest editions are two quartos, both published in 1600, one by Thomas Fisher, the other by James Roberts, entitled,
A Midsummer Nights dreame. As it hath been sundry times publickely acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William Shakespeare. Fisher’s impression was duly registered with the Stationer’s Hall; but no memorandum of Robert’s has ever been found: and from this circumstance, and the greater accuracy of its text, the former has usually been considered the authorized version. Yet strange to say the player editors of the First Folio, when they reprinted the work 23 years afterwards, adopted the text of Roberts, and appear to have been unacquainted altogether with the more correct quarto of Fisher. Tradition in Stratford holds that it was first performed under the tree in the garden of Alveston Manor.
Mention Shakespeare here in North Minnesota and people ask where you’re going fishing. Eagle View, the property on which we are vacationing, is the great outdoors where bald eagle, horsefly, loon and lake have precedence over the Dead White Men of history. This trip started on the tri-county border of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, which Frontiers-DWM made sure was DRM or Dead Red Men country.
The trail to the deep north of the USA (for Canadians thats: Us, eh?) proceeded out of American DWM territory via Detroit/Windsor along the northern shore of Lake Erie to the shores of Lake Ontario: the former domain of British DWM. The French DWM settled along the St Lawrence River to the north in Quebec and traded with the DRM of Upper new York State.
After a weeks respite in Port Credit it was off again following the shores of Lake Huron to Sault Ste Marie (formerly the domain of French DWM) back to Upper Michigan. On the way passing through Ojibway, Mississauga, and Huron tribal lands. The Yoopers of Upper Michigan are seperated from Lake Michigan and closer to Lake Superior.
Wisconsin finally arrived and traversing the edge of Lake Superior at Duluth, we entered Minnesota and our final destination in Grand Rapids, which happens to be where Judy Garland was born. The museum and tribute to her life and the Land of Oz is based in the Old Schoolhouse with its own yellow brick road.
Holidays mean reading whatever relates to where i am and this trip I discovered Allan Eckert’s non-fiction narrative histories of the clash between European DWM and Native American DRM like Pontiac and Tecumseh. As usual trying to link all this to Sh I found this book by C.U.P. which i will try to purchase at the upcoming BSA conference. I also came across this article online on Race and Culture in Elizabethan England.
Life is always in the details and there are a couple of events Eckert describes in his book Frontiersman that brought me to link the following passage from Henry VI pt 3 on a field of battle. It seems the frontiersmen and the Native Indians both used to take prisoners and adopt them into their respective societies. Years would pass and during some raid or war blood relative would kill blood relative on a field of battle. Survival of the fittest is made a mockery of when the same genetic stock kills off its own genetic stock.
The creators duty is to the story. So let it be with Shakespeare. His first duty as creator is to the story. So whats the story with his Sonnets?
The facts are we have a quarto of Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint, which some now claim may not even be his. It is agreed, a rare thing where the sonnets are concerned, they were composed over a twenty year period until their publication in May, 1609.
Very little else is agreed upon. But that is his story and what he left us is all that we have of him. The Sonnets and Hamlet are supposed to be his most autobiographical pieces. This is where it gets messy. These pieces of fiction, we try to make into a whole person who lived and breathed, and actually wrote them.
Pen and ink and blots and misspellings and autographed pieces are missing. We lack autograph papers of any of the candidates for the title of the writer Shake-speare. No Oxfordian, Marlovian, Baconian, or Shaxperian can claim that.
That would clinch the argument. If only the fingerprint of time would show us his on the smoking gun. He sweat, and breathed these words of magical mystery and enchantment. Words meant to be sounded, even if only for the inner ear: their inception in his inner ear.
There are 154 sonnets in that quarto of 1609 and they are the focus of over a decade of my studying. I learned them to recite them at the drop of a hat. Ive read and heard an awful lot of opinions about the sonnets particularly, but as much again about Shakespeare generally and at large.
Ive seen the movies, the comics, the adaptations, and all of his plays in the theatre from puppets and masks to outdoors to the RSC and the newest Globe on the Bankside in London.
Im a Shakespearean dilettante. Deep down I too dont like Billy Shagsbirds from Stratters with his domestic woes and country cares. How could he possibly have experienced the lives of his plays characters?
Now there were stories. Those characters were Kings and Earls and Romans and Trojans and Greeks and Britons. His story is simply history in comparison: a history rolling on around him, telling of a newly emerging nation and nascent world power.
I repeat: stories are not history.
…sometimes these things deserve a place:
As I Mature
I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just assholes.
I’ve learned that it takes years to build up trust, and it only takes suspicion, not proof, to destroy it.
I’ve learned that you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes. After that, you’d better have a big willy or huge boobs.
I’ve learned that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others – they are more screwed up than you think.
I’ve learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you’re finished.
I’ve learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are celebrities.
I’ve learned that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, the passion fades, and there had better be a lot of money to take its place!
I’ve learned that 99% of the time when something isn’t working in your house, one of your kids did it
I’ve learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon and all the less important ones just never go away.
This internet wisdom was sent to me as a jpg, which i googled and copied the text from 1st holistic.com, who in PC turn had edited out the assholes.
…thinking about the authorship question.
How did Oxford ever buy the silence of his shill William Shakspeare? For that same matter how did Marlowe or Bacon? These three candidates were all broke for most of their lives.
Did Oxenforde give his 1,000 pond annuity he got from his sister mother father Eliza to SHaksper for his silence? and he Shhh in turn with that money bought his share of the Globe. A three thousand capacity means lots of shiny grubby coins pass hands. None of it Oxford’s or Marlowe’s or Bacon’s. That must have stung!
Funny what people do when in need of money. Sometimes they end up begging from their better-offs for it. Marlowe obviously had some clandestine slush fund set up by Walsingham . Oxford received in 1586 an annual stipend of a thousand pounds from Queen Elizabeth. Bacon ended up marrying a 14 year old heiress when he got the chance. Suddenly his money worries were over. His suga momma hit his block!
In Oxford’s case that never happened. He was a profligate and spendthrift. On quality things granted. I’m sure his taste was exquisite. Oxford was also a highly intelligent courtier with a keen interest in the esoteric forms of humanism. Plus he jousted and won, danced a galliard, and consorted with the Queen throughout their early lives.
The modern day Oxfordian dance around Elizabeth’s kinship to Oxford, or coition and reproduction with Ed de Vere confuses me. The fact is they are of an age and proximity and all slander will stick. Eliza’s life was 3 lifetimes worth of Freudian therapy. For starters her dad divorced himself from the power of Roman religion when he divorced and beheaded his wife.
Her name was Anne Boleyn. She was dutch and the mother of Elizabeth the first, Gloridiana, etc. Dad now goes on to marry no less than 4 more wives. Big Daddy dies and she lives through her half-brother’s little reign. Hij krijgt de pleuris!
Her half-sister Mary, descended from Catherine of Aragon, Henry 8th’s first wife, er-hem sorry Liz i was first, pushes off the pretender Lady Jane Grey from the throne, who 15 year old edward 6th had supported in his will, and starts a reign of Catholic retribution. Lasting 5 years. How was young Lizzie to know she would one day lead the country for 44 years starting in 1558? Now in 1553 her sister Mary had a lot to revenge upon. The protestants had been very thorough in reclaiming land from the one true etc.
The Earl of Warwick championed the desecration of Roman idols and hangings and all things bright and beautiful Church artisans had created, long before the reign of Edward, who ordered it done. He paid the price with his head under Mary 1st.
So to recap Queen Elizabeth 1st had a domineering father who beheaded her mother, a number of step-mums, a half-brother and half-sister who ruled and blocked her accession to the throne, and a religious split she had to resolve when she ascended the throne.
‘Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which prove more short than waste or ruining?
…
Hence, thou suborn’d informer, a true soul
When most impeached, stands least in thy control.’
Sonnet 125: 1-4, 13-14.
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.
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