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…constantly keep returning to basics where Sh is concerned. And utterly basic to getting Shakespeare is by experiencing him in the theatre. As stated recently by Helen Mirren, our newest celluloid Prospera.
Helen understands her medium, in that what was performed and edited into the film The Tempest by Julie Taymor, will remain to the test of time more than any play can ever do in a theatre.
But she’s right though. First see a good production of any of his plays with actors fluent in delivering the language and the poetry it contains. And if you don’t know the story? A Winter’s Tale could make you weep at the resurrection scene.
An actor should be able to fill a theatre with sound or silence whilst telling his tale. The narrative has to be good too. But which Sh play should be your first play?
Ours was 12th Night in Bolton with Tom Courtenay as Malvolio.
So ignore the conspiracists, critics and theorists until you have seen his plays acted onstage. That said theatre is not as thick on the ground as when I started.
And X box beats black box any night of the week.
Plus we’ve seen some appalling Sh acting onstage. We think it safe to assume Sh has as many readers, who have no need of players to adorn their own imaginations.
Sh liked to look at the world as a stage. Jacques 7 ages of man speech in AYLI illustrates it:
‘All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
And in his time women were portrayed in England by men.
But we believe he knew women would one day fill his roles. As they did in France, Italy and Spain in his own time. Did he ever think his plays would one day be reverse cross-dressed?
Sh was a man who became a product of the theatre world of Jacobethan England. His only cultural meaning had a theatre base for over 150 years after his death.
When conditions were ripe for his ascension to cultural signifier to happen did he become a catalyst for literary theory.
The first scholars fought over whether the extant quarto forms needed editing or the Folios pruning before collecting them for a new edition of Sh works.
And each new edition brought some brief biographical details. No one had interviewed his family when they had the chance. And the Oxfordians were yet to be born centuries later.
The Theatre proper started in 1576 when Shakespeare was a young ‘un. The common man was at the centre of its rise. A penny entrance to see a tale of horror or wonder.
The Theatre just before it died in 1642, was most influential in Court, and basically a Royalist pusuit.
When they re-opened in 1664 Theatres immediately reversed the old order. The ones who paid the least were now furthest from the stage, and those who paid most, closest to it.
So the question remains hanging in every conspiracy theory. What do you do with Willm Shakspere smack dab in the middle? How do you explain him away? What is his role? Is he doing it willingly?
Was the theatre of his day so corrupt, that they sold out a member of their company, a professed friend and fellow, for his and their 30 pieces of silver?
Or was he really the witty mellifluous Natural they say he was? Other non-actors confirm our claim that others saw him as no one other than who he was.
He retired, he died, his works were collected into Folios one, two three and four. and the ascension began.
That his biography is so far away from the content of his works depends on what you think is so uncommonly brilliant about them. Not a line we love in Shakespeare needs a noble mind to have written it, for we to weep at it.
The historical and anecdotal evidence we have, and we all know: it ain’t much, all points to the actor in the middle.
But for pure sensation and rock and rolliness the Oxford theory will win converts.
The illiterate bumpkin can barely write his own name. And therefore cannot be Shakespeare. He lacks the worldliness, the ease and cares of power.
Oxford milked his life into 36 plays. His family life and fortunes a total mess. But posterity will sort it out.
None of the plays can therefore be collaborations. Sh career shows he may have collaborated in the periods when we might expect it.
As a journeyman playwright and poet, and again towards the end of his career as he worked his way to eventually maybe stopping this keeping up the pretense for the sake of England and Literature and St George too.
Retiring to his illiterate daughters and shrewish wife’s temerities. Visited by his mates Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton both of whom, celebrated playwright and poet, must have known and been complicit in any plot, fictional or factional.
No way Jose or Hose b, this could be he, they say. Look at his biography with these specially tinted glasses that let you see the emporer is wearing no clothes. And his nekkidness ain’t pretty, but you must see with open eyes the truth.
You have to accept that his works were written a lot earlier. Which conflicts with dating them for your average Historian, who usually has no axe to grind in this issue.
And of course it runs contrary to the orthodox dating and chronology, which accepts that Sh was as much a Jacobean playwright as an Elizabethan one.
And if not Oxford was awfully prescient about the details of Jacobean news. Of course these could have been added in by unknown hands. But not Shakespeare of Stratford, no. Never!
We watched the King’s Speech last night and we wonder at Geoffrey’s marvelous performance of the common man done good without a certificate or diploma to his name.
And we eagerly anticipate Anonymous. Mark Rylance plays Henry Condell. Sh bribes Oxford so he can build the Globe. It’s a tale of self-sacrifice on everyone’s part perhaps.
Mark is seen rhapsodysing most eloquently on what the authorship question means to him. And if anyone is expert in the playing of these works it is he. His passion for the craft is strong.
Here is a blog post by Holger Syme dealing with Mark’s pour oot.
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Andrew Gurr presents this sketch of the day of your average gallant playgoer by the poet and epigrammist John Davies:
IN FUSCUM. XXXIX.
* Fuscus is free, and hath the world at will;
* Yet, in the course of life that he doth lead,
* He’s like a horse which, turning round a mill,
* Doth always in the self-same circle tread:
* First, he doth rise at ten;3 and at eleven
* He goes to Gill’s, where he doth eat till one;
* Then sees a play till six;4 and sups at seven;
* And, after supper, straight to bed is gone;
* And there till ten next day he doth remain;
* And then he dines; then sees a comedy;
10
* And then he sups, and goes to bed again:
* Thus round he runs without variety,
* Save that sometimes he comes not to the play,
* But falls into a whore-house by the way.
[3]Cf. a somewhat similar description in Guilpin’s Skialetheia (Ep 25).—
* “My lord most court-like lies abed till noon,
* Then all high-stomacht riseth to his dinner;
* Falls straight to dice before his meat be down,
* Or to digest walks to some female sinner,
* Perhaps fore-tired he gets him to a play,
* Comes home to supper and then falls to dice;
* Then his devotion wakes till it be day,
* And so to bed where unto noon be lies.”
[4]If the play ended at six, it could hardly have begun before three From numerous passages it appears that performances frequently began at three, or even later. Probably the curtain rose at one in the winter and three in the summer.
This extra information and more of John Davies’ Epigrams can be found here.
Embedding for Shakespeare. We feel like a press correspondent covering a war. Which the authorship question undoubtedly is. As much as we don’t want to choose sides, we know where we lie. Just as Shakespeare does in his grave.
Yet that would be scanned. Most scholars don’t even believe the body is there anyway. Being buried at deeper than the regular 6 feet as per his dying request. He knew the river avon bursts its banks. And the graveyard and church are right on its path.
Is it deeper so worms wouldn’t eat him? How deep do worms forage?
So if we want to include visuals of sonnet reciting this should work, Easy iFrame loader test…:
Sonnet 71 at Shakespeare’s Grave
so let’s try that.
But that’s just a link to youtube and i’m trying to embed it instead.
Try again.
[iframe_youtube video=”Dx6OWJ7ZBmE”]
ok restart.
Now it bulges off into the sidebar.
frame sizes being adjusted. Should work the next time we try it.
Done. No explanation necessary next time. Keep It Simple Sweetie.
Henry Tudor. We all know him, whether as gouty tub o’ lard or gorgeous hunk o’ flesh. He had six wives we know too: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. The first beheading was Elizabeth’s mum, Anne Boleyn. The first divorce (ever) was Mary’s mum, Catherine of Aragon.
Shakespeare who loved history plays wrote a play about Henry 8th. It centres on Queen Catherine’s disgrace, the aggrandizement (bigging up) of Anne Boleyn, and the birth of her daughter Elizabeth.
Now would it, as Edmund Malone (great shakespearean scholar of the 19thC) states, have been more appropriate to write this play in her lifetime and reign as Queen? Or to write it after her death, in the reign of a very different monarch?
Our gut instinct goes with the latter. We don’t think Elizabeth wanted necessarily to have her life set before her eyes onstage, perhaps sparking some latent patricidal fantasy, or precipitating dammed tears by suppressed memories.
King James on the other hand lived through similar traumas as his cousin, the Queen. James too believed in the Divine Right of Kings. And he was as much an authority on the subject as any Tudor, or Plantagenet. He too ruled a country. He too communicated with Europe, especially France. He too commanded armies, though he didn’t like to fight. He too rode the renaissance wave of the Early Modern Period, he was intrigued by the dark side.
Ten years into James reign
on june 29, 1613, the Globe theatre burned to the ground during a performance of Sh’s Henry 8th. At least six independent eye-witness accounts of the fire exist. Two of these six- July 1613 letters written by the poet Sir Henry Wooton and the London merchant Henry Bluett- refer to the play as being “new”.
This is the first ever performance of this play. It’s an old-school 1590’s history play with pomp and circumstance. Summer time, weather’s fine, thatch is dry. A cannon is fired with blanks to announce the arrival of the King and a spark hits the straw in the roof and starts to smoulder and burn.
The place is packed with 3,000 spectators. The cry goes up , the place is emptied, with no damage except for a man’s breeches catching on fire, which someone put out with a bottle of ale. Oh yeah, the theatre burned to the ground and after 14 years occupation of the building its contents are lost too.
Despite their loss, the King’s Men had options. The Globe was their big outdoor amphitheatre, the Blackfriars their indoor all-weather money-maker. Nevetheless it’s a big loss and it’s a day at the theatre six people recounted for us.( i’ll find a link to the orginals. Which is proving difficult but here is an extra witness).
Anyway time to carry on with appendix C’s conclusion on Henry 8th the “new” play.
It is indeed possible that in 1613 Henry 8th was new to the general theatergoing public. De Vere may well have left an incomplete Henry 8th manuscript behind at the time of his death only to be touched up in 1613 by other hands and debuted on the Globe stage.
Hold the bus! Stop that train! It’s not only indeed possible, it’s a fact as far as we can see. Two people who watched the play that day tell us it was new. Irrelevant of course. Try this one.
May well have. May well have? Is that your way of saying ‘possibly maybe perhaps we don’t know? You know like you accuse the Stratfrodians of doing all the time?
And this too. Touched up by other hands? Other hands? Whose hands? How? Blank as the slate of history may be, this is wholesale manufacture of the Emperor’s new clothes.
Mark’s basic argument here is that a pretend other, who might have done something or not, somehow contacted the King’s Men to tell them he had yet another play for Oxford’s pretend Jacobean performance history? We all know he’s been dead since 1604 some say by plague, suicide, or broken heart; we’ll never ever know.
We all need to know the plays were written some decades before and brought out when the time was right. Who authorised the putting on of this play if it treats of Tudor apologies? Why did the King’s Men choose to mount this production?
Perhaps by some coinkidinky it had to do with Sh’s retirement as premiere writer for the company? His handing over of his laurels to John Fletcher who possibly had a hand in writing this collaborated piece of theatre.
If it wasn’t WIll before his final, final collaboration, then why did de Vere even write it? Why write a play that may or may not be elected to be played postumously? We can see leaving unfinished manuscripts to be brushed up for the stage. But not in this case.
Where someone leaves some 8 or more plays dated by generations of literary historians to the Jacobean period. Starting with Macbeth onwards in no particular order: Coriolanus, King Lear, The Tempest, Pericles, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, A WInter’s Tale. All of which we would place in SH’s Jacobean writing period.
Why not Shakespeare the man in the middle, who was stil alive and probably at the premiere, or not? The first bit of his argument made us ROTF. The next part made us LMAO.
Yet there’s also no reason to treat the audience members Wotton and Bluett as expert witnesses either. In December 1663 the London diarist Samuel Pepys also referred to Henry 8th as being “new”.
What? If we were to guess, which one might be telling the truth? We’d go for the ones who first reported it. And let’s just check what Pepys actually said..
Dec 11th 1663, Calling at Wotton’s, my shoemaker’s, today, he tells me that Sir H. Wright is dying; and that Harris is come to the Duke’s house again; and of a rare play to be acted this week of Sir William Davenant’s: the story of Henry the Eighth with all his wives.
Jan 1st, 1664, the first play I have been at these six months, according to my last vowe, and here saw the so much cried-up play of “Henry the Eighth;” which, though I went with resolution to like it, is so simple a thing made up of a great many patches, that, besides the shows and processions in it, there is nothing in the world good or well done. Thence mightily dissatisfied back
So Mark’s inference is what here exactly? Yes they were witnesses but that’s not important, as they are not ‘expert’ witnesses.
So they cannot have known that Shakespere, who may or may not been present, did not in fact write the play. They cannot have known that the play had been written to enrich english literature. And not destined to be read even by the hardiest of Shakespeare lovers, except to say yes i have read it. Theatre companies also don’t play it much, as not much happens. Not like his other stuff.
Ok so the Pepys production would have been new to the Restoration audience that saw it. Theatres had been closed since 1642. We all know Shakespeare’s (ie Oxford’s) reputation was suffering in this period. He was considered a trifle old-fashioned and depeche mode. But Mark goes on to pat the Oxfordian’s on the back for forcing the 1604 Question.
All we can say is if it requires this much mental gymnastics to date a play, you might be in for crash-landing or two.
is a travesty of nature.We have the man with the name wearing the mantle. Fact. The authorship question for the Stratfordians is whether he deserves to wear that mantle. For the truly orthodox Stratfordians the notion that it isn’t he is preposterous. Beneath contempt, infra dig.
All other candidates imho seek to denigrate our true, reigning candidate. He is a puppet being used for others ends. And so they attack all the factual evidence on our parts and fit their particular candidate to that same evidence or reconstrue it in some other light.
From an anti-stratfordian viewpoint, this is their starting bias. Attack what is known about our candidate and play up the bad parts that evidence may suggest. eg shakespeare the successful poet and playwright (as in he received the monies for their success) becomes Shakspere the bad actor and grain merchant.
Our man is conspiring with some other genius who wishes to hide their light under a bushel and keep his genius behind his mask. For whatever reasons that may be?
Immortalising the one’s that he caused physical and mental anguish in the very explosive life he lead, according to Mark Anderson, author of the book, which coincidentally is the title of our post. We are reading Mark’s book and appendix C is hilarious. Argumentation of the iffiest degree. But who does the historical record back up?
Appendix C deals with the chronology of his plays (Oxenforde died in 1604) and Mark defends back-dating Macbeth, by moving its premiere to the Globe Theatre in 1611. Now this alone is bravado of the first degree.
Historical theatrical anecdote has the play first being performed in 1604/5 for the new King, James the First and Sixth of Scotland. Here was a King with traumas worthy of Oxford’s, even if he was Elizabeth’s bastard son. He was also an expert in demonologie and witches and tobacco, having written pamphlets and books on the subjects.
Even Mark’s argument about Robert Garnett’s use of the Doctrine of Equivocation in 1606, strikes me as being too late for Sh to have written Makkers. This play imho cannot have been anything else than a calling card playing to the new King’s interests.
James had even brought his own player Laurence Fletcher from Scotland, who became one of the King’s Men. The troupe Sh had belonged to since they were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under Elizabeth 1st. What role he played is unknown.
The story goes that Macbeth so displeased James that he ordered it banished from the stage. Apparently theatrical lore has it that the boy actor playing Lady M. succumbed to a fever and Shakespeare himself had to step in. The curse of Macbeth. This information is dealt with best by Henry Paul in his the Royal play of Macbeth.
Besides James interest in withcraft and demons, he liked short plays and his Stuart ancestors were being flattered. He was watching it apparently with his brother in law King Christian of Denmark at Hampton Court August 7th, 1606. James and Christian were quite the pair when they got together.
Surely the Danes or the English have an account of such an event somewhere in their archives. It shouldn’t be too hard to verify or deny should it? The curse of macbeth link is to a conspiracy website, so there’s no telling what little gnome personally told them the secret one trippy day. (Gnomeo and Juliet. Oh Gno! ). The closest we’ve come to historical fact is this argument that it was indeed a compliment to James.
Obviously then in this scenario that it was written for James accession, the King’s Men had soothed his ire bewteen then and 1611, Mark’s date for the premiere. However it didn’t work out because the next recorded playing of it was after the Republican inter-regnum in 1664.
So our immediate question is how many times was it played? Are the Oxfordians correct, or is it just another lacuna in history?
Tomorrow and tomorrow and…the story continues. Off for an audition.
Got it! We film on sunday. But we must post this addendum. Mark states that in appendix C
he hypothesizes that the regicidal anxiety expressed in Macbeth stems from de Vere’s role as a juror who condemned Mary, Queen of Scots, to death in 1586.
And that horrifying little bit of mental equivocation and anxiety anticipated James being crowned King of England. And writing a short play with witches, praising his bloodline. So when do the Oxfordians date Macbeth? Somewhere around 1595? When Robert Southwell was martyred?
Also we ‘thought’ the porter scene may have been written by someone else entirely. Middleton perhaps. Would he have been the ‘other hands’ Mark refers to regarding the performing of Henry 8th?
To the last Oxford was trying to place another candidate for dying Eliza’s crown. He wasn’t taken seriously though. James the SIxth of Scotland became King despite Oxford’s efforts and ruled over bothe countries in peace fora total of 45 years. His divine right of kings lessons to his son Charles weren’t of much use, as the world was changing.
Mark closes his Macbeth arguments highlighting
Burghley’s 1583 and Azpilcueta’s 1584 formulation of the Doctrine of Equivocation the more likely wellspring for the porter’s jesting’ on his equivocation scene.
And that’s it! The proof for dating Macbeth not as plain as the nose on your face that there is really only one common sense proper release date for this play and that is in front of the one it was written for. Anymore than he’s been on the throne for 3 years and it’s pointless.
And to write it before? Why? What on earth suddenly motivated him to write a play that theoretically would scare King James shitless. But of course he wouldn’t have known that. it was just a bit of insurance for if James made it to the throne, that Oxford may be in his majesty’s favour. James would have known who Oxford was one assumes. (I know)!
But no, an inconsequential scene with a minor but memorable character further proves that the equivocation scene’s sources were: Common knowledge to anyone who had lived through the late 1580’s and 90’s. Jesuits were known to be equivocators, as Jews poison wells. Hatred and slander have a long history.
Next post deals with his dating of Henry 8th. We don’t have the strength to deal with his Tempest stuff. The authorship question is like kryptonite for Shakesperger’s syndrom sufferers. We wake up at night screaming, ‘They keep getting up and coming back for more.’…..
We are not persuaded by such arguments. Please let them bring a conclusive argument, so we can end it all and get back to the works.
…first read this:
Summary of early modern theatres and theatre goers.
This account, which dates from 1596-1598, is probably the single most important source of our knowledge of the internal layout of the London theatres. It consists of a diary note together with a sketch of the internal layout of the Swan Theatre.
FROM THE LONDON OBSERVATIONS OF JOHANNES DE WITT
There are four amphitheatres in London so beautiful that they are worth a visit, which are given different names from their different signs. In these theatres, a different play is offered to the public every day. The two more excellent of these are situated on the other side of the Thames, towards the South, and they are called the Rose and the Swan from their signboards. There are two other theatres outside the city towards the North, on the road that leads through the Episcopal Gate called Bishopsgate in the vernacular. There is also a fifth, but of a different structure, intended for fights of animals, in which many bears, bulls, and dogs of stupendous size are held in different cages and behind fences, which are kept for the fight to provide a most pleasant spectacle to the people. The most outstanding of all the theatres, however, and the largest, is that whose sign is the swan (in the vernacular, the theatre of the swan), as it seats 3000 people. It is built out of flint stones stacked on top of each other (of which there is great store in Britain), supported by wooden pillars which, by their painted marble colour, can deceive even the most acute observers. As its form seems to bear the appearance of a Roman work, I have made a drawing of it:
Early Modern theatre owners in London were in the first show business in Europe. Granted Italy and Spain had public and private theatres. And allowed women to act female parts. But the business end of it flourished in London.
Besides the main companies of players for the City and Court, there were travelling companies working all over England and Europe. As the scene grew in London, the companies in Europe grew. Eventually these groups would take on native players. And partly on these foundations the Dutch, German, Danish and Swedish theatre worlds were inspired.
Playing was becoming acting. Poetry was in the words of some playwrights, who were truly inspired by their time. As one can always only be. A product of their time’s forms and pressures, in which one is always only a grain of sand.
No matter what rank and influence you may have. You cannot engineer a cultural revolution alone. Currents and tides in affairs nothing to do with your own, and impartial to you or your cares, sweep individuals along in an inexorable stream. Sh whoever he was, understood that, or i’m missing the point entirely when i read his works.
He was though only one man in his time. His biography portrays an entirely bland individual who doesn’t fit the profile. However you have to discount the fact that his working life of 25-35 years in the London theatre scene places him in exactly the right place to be the author of plays and poems.
His personal friendships with poets like Michael Drayton and playwrights like Ben Jonson were obviously a sham and based on subterfuge, which most willingly must have been undertaken. By them and by him. And maintained for as long as they knew each other and after their deaths if necessary. To safeguard a secret few knew and everybody except their true author benefited from.
Or it could just have been the one in the middle working slowly steadily, Growing his art with the years and collaborating with the next hot writer if needs be. Whose nature becomes more abhorrent the more I think on’t as a fake. The bare Stratfordian facts produce a yawn. Yet the Elizabethan stage must have been an exciting place to be.
Shakespeare plays and poems were hits of the booksellers stalls as well as being acted at all levels of society. Everyone in the business would have known who he was. He was living the dream. Or he was living a lie.
The earliest plays were eagerly consumed like two for one early matinees at the early 20thC cinemas. Who remembers the names of the early cinema auteurs? Or jazz for that matter? Both those industries grew out of a need for a new entertainment. As did early modern theatre. Both professionally and for amateur ends.
Now HOW can one very powerful man escape any form of scrutiny? under these very public and professional eyes that are watching this superstar of stage and booksellers ? And know or not know that WIlliam Shakespeare the schlemiel from Stratford super Avon was a cheater?
Isn’t it more likely that all these people involved in the theatre and printing world around him actually weren’t conspiring to conceal the real identity of the author. (A word which had no meaning in his time). As if they would even be anywhere close enough to know the real truth.
Bottom line is he wrote plays and poems and is mentioned for their worth. In his time, and again these people who said that, why should they lie? Why can’t the Stratford man be a diamond in the rough?
And here explore the Roman influence on the theatre of the day.The idea that early moderns had to have been to Italy to appreciate the Romans is unjustified. Roman ruins and roads were all over Early modern England. English mercenaries had fought for centuries in Italy.
But then you might want to remind yourself of the major events in the Early Modern Period. Thanks to Tom Dale Keever you can.
…was given to me by a friend who had the same idea for another medium and then discovered the book. He read it and his after the first 200 pages or so it got better review it didn’t seem particularly thrilling a thriller. But it is Shakespeare based so I took it and filed it under to be read.
Well, over a two month period i skimmed exasperatedly, half read seriously, and finally cajoled the book to an end. And there are just under 500 pages for the turning.
Any serious scholar of Sh will immediately laugh aloud at the plot. Hell, there was enough foofaffery when the Durham First Folio got stolen in real life a couple of years ago.
But this fictive world contains 2 stolen Folios, the burning and rebuilding of Wanamaker’s Globe, chaos in the libraries at Harvard and the Folger in Washington. And murders in all places named. All this occurs in the summer of 2004.
The Global Media’s Breaking News desks would be buzzing if these events ever really happened. In Storyland though the author is Monarch, so our female protagonist is always a hairs-breadth ahead of Scotland yard and the FBI.
Kate Stanley’s her name and intrepid Shakespearean sleuthing’s her game. As her companions drop like flies, she shuttles back and forth between the UK, the USA and Spain. The Old and the New worlds reunited.
The dramatis personae as they are presented to us have Shakespearean names. This book is redolent of Shs plays and Elizabethan England. We move from Prologue to Acts 1 through 5. We end with the Author’s notes, which of course we all wish we had of the main much-maligned subject. Our Will.
The essential fuffiness of the plot is interspersed with real Shakespearean concerns and this is what makes it successful as a read. I won’t spoil it but the authorship question and the missing play Cardenio hold it together.
There are also about five or six flashbacks or interludes to the Jacobethan period to give some added historical depth to the characters. But did I enjoy it?
Now I love slurping up quick read detectives or westerns or sci-fi or fantasy because the narrative and characters are the thing. Give me a semi-realistic hero or anti-hero figure and I’ll usually forgive any gaping holes in the logic needed to satisfy the plot. This book flies in that respect.
But the Sh Secret disappoints ultimately because I know too much. Therefore as a student of Sh. biography i read it to find what the author had invented and what really is accepted as scholarship.
Madame Carrel doesn’t disappoint on her sources. I love the Jesuit, New world, Frontiersmen and Gold Miners references.The Elizabethan Stage by E.K. Chambers deservedly gets named and highlighted. Stratford doesn’t seem to be too high on her list of Sh bardolater spots though.
I’d like to know exactly where she stands herself on the authorship question. The tone of the narrative appears slightly elitist Ivy League despite Kate’s home on the range philosophy.
An ‘if you know the right people, stuff gets done’ ethos pervades the argument and indeed without her philanthropic buddies this story would go nowhere. All reminiscent of Authorship claimants. whose candidate had something to hide, so let’s use the back channels to make it happen.
The book’s victims all die in the manner of famous characters from the plays. So Lavinia and Ophelia and Gertrude and Polonius join the revue in contrived parallels to the plot started by Roz and finished by Kate.
I did laugh aloud at one character whose vero nihil verius bleatings mark her as an Oxfordian. At chapter’s end she reveals her truer nature and exclaims, ‘She means that I am a heretic’. And cliff-hanger like we move on to chapter 26 of 46.
But no one authorship claimant gets head billing and for this, thanks and much relief. Hamlet gets an outing throughout The Howards are highlighted too. However the book’s conclusion is a happy ever after staple of the genre where all’s well that ends well.
If you go the author’s website you will see Kate Stanley part 2 is already out. I for one won’t be buying it. But if someone lent it to me, i’d skim it. Not to denigrate the author who spent 10 years getting this tale out of her tail. And apparently found her flow to follow it up thus quickly.
Many many readers will enjoy this book for what it is. Maybe I’m just projecting too much of the green eyed monster with this review. Maybe I’m glutted with stories and they really have to be tight to keep my interest. Maybe I should take it for what it is.
What it is?
It’s a Sphere original. The backpage bumpff -line is
A Modern Serial Killer hunting an Ancient secret.
Do Albino monks and a chalice come to mind?
And this book methinks will make a great movie. A female Tom hanks as the lead and we’re off.
Btw, the trailer of the Rhys getting his own back on school job will be out soon. And advance publicity is out already for Anonymous.
The author did write a great paper on Sh and the old West frontier. Particularly interesting is the aural/oral nature of memorising, which is where i’d prefer to see a book arriving from this author.
But then it would be from a scholarly press and more expensive and no one would buy it.
Our thanks to all the readers of this blog.
May the New Year bring us that long awaited personal diary of William Shakespeare, another 20 First Folios and the Earl of Southampton’s or Ned Alleyne’s personal annotated copy of Q1609 Sonnets.
Let the fireworks commence!
…from the 1580’s until 1610’s.
Like Quincey Jones our Will’s career be it as lame actor or genius writer spans 30-40 years. Assuming his career start to be in the London theatre milieu of mid-1580’s. He may have had some amateur practice if these events are taken into account as by Eric Sams.
In any case troupes of actors had played in Straford about 18 times during Sh’s childhood up to and possibly including his leaving. And even beyond through the 1590’s. By early 1600’s Stratford council was paying actors not to play. The town was becoming a little more Puritan and conservative perhaps? In any case Sh the fraud or fact would have observed this, not dying until 1616.
The only place for a rube from Stratford to realistically realise his theatre and writing career was the Theatre in Shoreditch. Next door was the Curtain Theatre, opened first as competition then to receive the overflow from the Theatre. The 2 managements co-operated and this monopoly dominated what the Public got to see in North London.
We know Oxford was an habitue in this neighbourhood up to his death in 1604. Sh therefore knew him, but whether as his shill or worst nightmare is what’s in discussion. Oxford had a long theatrical dalliance alongside his duties as England’s most profligate nobleman. His Fisherman’s Folly in the 1570’s was the equivalent of the Mermaid Tavern.
The Theatre was run by an old school Elzabethan actor, James Burbage. He had been a leading player in the Earl of Leicester’s Men for about 10 years? His trade was as a joiner. And his family’s origins are considered to be Stratford on Avon!
There are descriptions of Sh’s father and Burbage and they both portray the same kind of confident bon-homie combined with severe gravitas when necessary.
If Sh the rube were to leave his new wife and newborns, it would be no big news in Elizabethan society. Women were expected to be domestic and run the affairs of the household. Sh must have met Anne at age 10 when she was about 16 and her father was borrowing money from his dad. Illegally I might add, but a policy quite in practice I would assume in Early Modern economies.
Anne Hathawey, six years older than he, married Will age 18 when he got her pregnant the first time, twice in the space of 3 years. Him off working. She tending domestic affairs. He got her New Place, the biggest house in the Town in 1597. He must have been master of the universe in Stratford yet no-one talked of where he got his money.
Maybe she preferred it that her husband go to London to pretend to be somebody else, or become the greatest playwright who ever breathed. Maybe she wrote the plays? And he hung out reaping the girls and the glory. She should have taught her daughters to write at least.
Sh’s Stratford was also not the backward place the Oxfordian’s make out. Either geographically or socially. How could it be with people like SIr Fulke Greville and Sir Thomas Lucy and Sh’s mums relatives the Ardens?
The Quiney family is as middle class as the Shakespeare’s and their sons did just as well in their way. Sh understood friends and family. His plays reveal that. Of course a beleaguered bastard orphaned Oxford also knew the treachery of false friends and family. Or should that be that him being false to his friends and family?
These people who undoubtedly knew Sh either as fraud or fact are all smack in the middle of the telling of Elizabethan history too, involving Court, love of country and freedom of speech.
The difference that must have been discussed was religous and the freedom to practise that Religion. The Theatre and Bear-baiting arenas were Early modern distractions from this elementary division. Elizabeth famously turned a blind eye to it, which policy she may have imitated from the Dutch.
Her support for the Netherlands throughout the formation of the United Provinces ensured a humanistic link of scholarship and printing. Early modern Naturalists too were reaping the benefits of this co-operation.
London’s nascent printing industry was built on the sharing of knowledge from Europe. The Monarchy of course had a handle on censorship but to the relative degree governments have today on the internet. There was no infra-structure in place outside the established European-wide espionage networks to exploit such a wish, however devoutly one considers it.
That Marlowe was an espoionage agent is obvious. That he also wrote his own plays as well as Shakespeare’s is obscene. Unless you fudge the historical record with airy fiction, this theory collapses.
Read them side by side and tell me again how Marlowe is Shakespeare. The tone, the argument, the stories; megalomaniac in the one, humble and non-existent in the other. Marlowe’s career shows a development in craft and versification. That that stopped. And he re-wrote his Barrabas into Shylock, never, never, never, never, never.
And Bacon. That needs to be smoked out. Before I knew about Oxford, I knew about Francis. Ever read him and Sh side by side? To think that know-it-all’s profusely Latin and Greek strewn works were dumbed down into Sh’s plays for the public theatres! Just preposterous. Have you seen the scribbles in Promus that are supposed to prove it was him? Patent nonsense, scribbles of a frustrated fan. Horrificabilitudinatatibus!
But back to my ramblings on how I think Sh grew to be Sh by being in the right place at the right time surrounded by the right people. England had flip-flopped within Sh’s parents living memory a few times on the ‘we’re Protestant now, no we’re Catholic now, no Proddy definitely’ question for all of Eliza’s reign from 1558 until Sh’s earliest possible non-recorded professional appearance in the 1580’s.
Now for me this kind of suggestion seems appropriate. My potted history justifies my conclusions. Stratfordianism controls my fingers as I type these words. The Bible is used immensely as a source for Sh but almost never as an inspiration. The imaginary Muses please him more than does the blood of Christ. Though the symbolism isn’t lost on him.
For we few who follow the arguments of the Oxfordians, we know there is an annotated Bible once belonging to Oxfenforde, which wants to show the parallels but has been busted open as a wishful thinking project for us.
But not of course for them. It is strong evidence and will remain in their arsenal of arguments. Will the film show some underlining by Rhys? I hope so. I’m looking forward to seeing it to see how many of their arguments are included. The pirates for sure has to be in there. Bohemia will be mentioned. Bermoothes maybe, definitelyTempests somewhere along the line.
You do wonder why Sh never really defines his God in his plays and poems. Perhaps he must have heard enough secret talk and whispered discussion in his childhood about very real conspiracies and awful burnings that resulted if caught.
The tortures and the horrors endured by men of Faith throughout the ages boggles the mind. The exact opposite of the gentleness of their saviour. Same saviour too. And to trivialise the issue: for a difference in opinion on how many angels fit on a pinhead or not, you burn.
I’ve been looking back on the year’s blogs and finding most to be about the authorship question. It fascinates me how much these people know and how wrong they are. We are all the Shakespeare faithful. And this plurality of identification with the author arises from his palys and poems which was the origianl source before we started to question who he was and not accept who he was.
I too looked at the Sh biography and went, oh cmon, this is it? You’re shitting me. And every piece of the biography is contested as to when or where or if ever it happened. Maybe this dude, for Shakespeare most definitely was a dude among dudes, didn’t want to be known? He kept his head down and lived. And wrote. And left posterity to be his slave.
His impact on the Theatre is global. But its genesis was anything but. One man’s mind mixing with the minds of his time, specifically pursuing one single career in the theatrical and briefly patronage, poetical life of his time.
He followed his Muse from whenever it first inspired him to the supposed career end in collaboration in 1613. Then died 3 years later of a fever supposedly contracted on a drinking binge with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. Managed to die on his birthday too. A feat I like Sh for. Or was it planned?
To establish the myth of St George’s Day, retroactively making his date of birth the 23rd April; when we all know the only record is the 26th when he was christened. Did Jonson and Drayton posion Sh and attend on his death?
Drayton was a life-long friend and fellow poet. Yet Drayton doesn’t mention WIll in his letters to Drummond of Hawthornden. Presumably they knew he was a fraud or a fact. Drayton’s physician was SH’s son in law. Dr John Hall ‘s recordings of his wide and socially varied patient list starts the year after SH’s death.
Such are the ironies of Orthodox Sh biography. On every point there’s a melancholy missed that possibility counter-point. That his wife, daughters, and grand daughter were not interviewed in the 17thC. They living up to 1664. Almost 50 years after his death. Nada.
Drummond certainly accepted Jonson and Drayton’s stories as true. And he collected quartos of Shak’s plays which he marked as such. Both Jonson and Drayton leave their own poetic memorials to their friend. Or they were lying? But who to whom?
My methodology always leads back to Will in the middle of a bunch of people aspiring to be the best in their chosen profession. If I accept an alternative it means this guy lies as deep i’ the throat, as do all his friends. No conspiracy can encompass so many different people’s silence. And these are his friends and relatives.
That is outside my conception of what Shakespeare represents when I read him. That he cared about his characters and their life as words on paper. The passion that drove him to do that is what drives any man to pursue his dreams.
Surely the man couldn’t keep up deception for 30 years on his being a successful playwright and poet, whilst actually only pretending to and creaming off the benefits. If it ever proves to be true what a poor schmuck lived there.
Eventually in the 20thC a fellow Stratfordian of higher rank will be ordained as the true Bard, which rings truer to me than Oxford. Btw I would have scanned his tomb by now and revealed its maybe-not-even-there secrets.
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