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| This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: MFeingold 06:18 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: Waugh descendant picks Oxford as Bard - lordofspeech 03:20 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| They've been at it for over two centuries, but they can't get past the irreversible key fact: No one who wasn't working for a theatre company would bother turning out that many plays and tailoring them so carefully to stage practice and audience taste. The aristocrats whom the doubters invariably pick as candidates were generally much too busy with their social obligations to bother about such things. The best book on how the anti-Shakespearean mythology started and grew is James Shapiro's CONTESTED WILL: WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE?, which I reviewed when it came out in 2010. (Review linked below.) He traces the growth of the idea through the lives of its major advocates, from the days of Delia Bacon's hunt for ciphers down to the internet, Jacobi and Rylance. It's a fascinating and fun read - I was so allured by his narration of their lives that I ended up writing a one-act play about them, called TEXTUAL RELATIONS. The characters, besides Ms. Bacon, are Ireland the forger, and the retired schoolmaster who came up with the notion of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the leading candidate - a man with the unfortunate name of John Thomas Looney. |
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| Link | 2010 VV review of James Shapiro's CONTESTED WILL |
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| re: This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: Ned3301 12:11 am EDT 11/01/17 | |
| In reply to: This old story again (sigh) - MFeingold 06:18 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Some people need to create a sort of elite club of the higher knowledge, in the academic's version of virtue signaling. It takes a thespian, not an aristocrat, to build up an inventory of practical and stageworthy works, as you say. It's simply common sense. But these contrarians like to pretend that common sense is really unsubstantiated groupthink. I wonder if they even believe the nonsense they spout. Their aim is to appear discerning and intellectual, and they think that depends on disagreeing with popular views. If you say "Red," they say "No, green." And if you then say, "Okay, green," they'll say, "No, red." |
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| re: This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: Vivian 06:54 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: This old story again (sigh) - MFeingold 06:18 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Hi, What I find absolutely mystifying in the whole Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare affair: how do you explain that a man who wrote THIRTY-SEVEN PLAYS, was one of the most prominent popular writers of his day-- and an ACTOR, so presumably also an outgoing, gregarious type of person with at least a bit of personality, should not have left ANY imprint on the pop culture of his day?? He HAD to have been the FOCAL POINT of the GLOBE THEATER COMMUNITY-- a sort of Steven Spielberg, right? Thirty-seven plays?? Producer/writer (and actor)?? How was this not a widely celebrated and noted figure?? There are no quotes of his brilliant witticisms, no personal anecdotes that were jotted down and survived, nobody kept a letter this noted person wrote?? Assuming William Shakespeare was fronting for the actual primary author (In my view this lies on the possible to probable continuum--theater writing was NO honor, back then) William Shakespeare walked and talked and ran a theater and wrote a produced play every other week-- how was Shakespeare the Actor not a big celebrity whose personal legends have lived on in pamphlet poetry, dedications, stories?? Or if the guy was a complete drip, why didn't they marvel at THAT? (He can write thirty-seven plays and can't speak a correct sentence). The guy was a pop phenomenon and is a GHOST. IT MAKES NO SENSE. |
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| re: This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: MFeingold 08:35 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - Vivian 06:54 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| This is a complicated question that deserves much more space than one has in a message-board thread. And well worth exploring if you want to immerse yourself in the literature of the period. The concept of the author as celebrity was really just beginning to evolve. Remember tht most of the population was illiterate or in London semi-literate at best. Aristocrats who wrote books were celebrated - but they were already celebrities. Popular poets who'd been read for decades, like Gower, were household words (hence Shakespeare's use of him as a storyteller figure in PERICLES). But a writer as such was only one grade up from a scrivener - a guy who wrote letters at a penny a page for those who didn't know how. Shakespeare was among the writers whose popularity began to change that. And a PLAY was something performed by a company - not particularly a writer's work. Like a movie in the studio era, it might be written by multiple hands. One of the few pieces of writing we have in Shakespeare's own hand is the draft of a scene for somebody else's play of SIR THOMAS MORE. What mattered in a play were the rhymed tags or images that everybody could quote, and the STAR (sound familiar?), like Edwrd Alleyn or the leader of Shakespeare's company, Richard Burbage. One of the earliest allusions we have to WS is a satirical poem about the yokel who couldn't tell the actor from the character, "And when he would have said that Richard died / And cried 'A horse, a horse!' he BURBAGE cried." And as posters below pointed out, Shakespeare was one of the very first to have his collected plays published in a fancy folio volume - by his theatre company after his death. The only other writer of his time to merit that was Ben Jonson - who published the collection himself. And note that Jonson said of Shakespeare "I loved the man, this side idolatry, as well as any." The remark obviously means that Jonson thought too many people were over on the other side, idolizing Shakespeare. So presumably a fair amount of attention was paid to him by cognoscenti. But he doesn't seem to have been an actor whose work attracted great attention. He left that to Burbage, while busily turning out great roles for him. There are a lot of contemporary allusions to LINES from his plays, but with no concern for attribution. Though there is an Elizabethan play - can't remember now by whom - in which, when the King (a minor character) enters, somebody says, "Guards, shake your spears in welcome to our king." Scholars assume this was an in-joke reference to WS playing the part. Lastly, bear in mind that English society was just beginning to secularize and London to 'culturize.' Religion - a source of tremendous conflict - was the center of the nation's consciousness, and one huge sector of the population - Puritan reformers - viewed the theatre as a pit of hell. Not all that long after Shakespeare's death, there was civil war in England. Theatre companies were disbnded and the theatres closed by order of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, for 18 years. The tradition and lore of Shakespeare's company in his heyday were all lost, except for odd scraps here and there. When theatres reopened after the Restoration, England was a very different place with very different artistic demands; it took a lot of reworking for Shakespeare to fit in there. |
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| re: This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: Vivian 09:18 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - MFeingold 08:35 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Thank you for your knowledgeable comments, Michael. They provide insight into a completely foreign mindset, and are a lot to think about. Thanks also for all you do for this forum--you consistently make it so much more informed and interesting. Vivian |
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| Well said, Michael! | |
| Posted by: showtunetrivia 09:17 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - MFeingold 08:35 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Excellent! Laura, between innings |
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| re: Well said, Michael -- Yep | |
| Posted by: Whistler 12:15 am EDT 11/01/17 | |
| In reply to: Well said, Michael! - showtunetrivia 09:17 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Yep, you managed to squeeze quite a lot in there, Mr. Feingold. Nice. And thanks. | |
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| Elizabethan/Jacobean Society | |
| Posted by: Whistler 07:17 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - Vivian 06:54 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Perhaps the reason no one treated Shakespeare as a celebrity lies in the workings of Elizabethan/Jacobean society: writers weren't important. The same way they're unimportant in film, television, theater, and probably any other aspect today. All people wanted was entertainment, and the differences among seeing a play, watching a chained bear kill dogs, or going to a public execution were minimal. Besides, he was a very busy businessman: those plays didn't write themselves, theaters didn't run themselves, and he was always in rehearsal, learning lines. And he had a couple of affairs, a slightly distant family, and there were those constant plagues. |
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| re: Elizabethan/Jacobean Society | |
| Posted by: Vivian 07:40 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: Elizabethan/Jacobean Society - Whistler 07:17 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Dear Whistler, Very cool ideas, thank you. I don't agree that writers are unimportant, though. To many people (particularly less successful writers) they are fascinating--and those writers do what they do, they write -(there is one contemporary who libeled Shakespeare in a few lines, Robert Greene). You will agree with me, thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Shakespeare--you're gonna tell me that in his time, NO ONE cared enough to write ANYTHING? My theory is, people knew not to go there. Power and politics is behind the complete silence. |
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| Oddly... | |
| Posted by: Whistler 08:48 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: Elizabethan/Jacobean Society - Vivian 07:40 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Oddly, people in Shakespeare's time didn't care a lot about reading, and a lot of them simply couldn't. People who were around the court knew about the queen and later the king, so -- as Laura says below -- they didn't need biographies. And paper was expensive, so books were scarce. Reportedly, even Shakespeare borrowed a lot of his. Also, because there were so many versions of the scripts, adapted for so many occasions, it seems playwrights didn't see a profit in publishing. The early quartos were often mangled versions of the scripts, printed illegally. Shakespeare's poems were privately circulated among his friends and frequently condemned for their obscenity. The folios were perhaps homage printed by Shakespeare's friends, years after his death, or perhaps the friends just wanted some money. As for writers today: there's an enormous number of good ones, and some are very well paid. But think of how much TV and film production there is, and how much is produced and published on the Internet, and the handful of writers whose names we immediately know is tiny. And very few people want to read about them. |
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| re: Oddly... | |
| Posted by: ashleylm 01:25 pm EDT 11/01/17 | |
| In reply to: Oddly... - Whistler 08:48 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| But think of how much TV and film production there is, and how much is produced and published on the Internet, and the handful of writers whose names we immediately know is tiny. And very few people want to read about them. This, yes, a hundred times. I'm as guilty as any--raving about some episode of The Good Place or The Leftovers or Community and not having a clue who wrote them. In fact, the only show I can recall watching for and remembering each writer was Buffy the Vampire Slayer ... for no show before, or since, have I known (save for the handful which are apparently entirely written by a much-lauded showrunner). It's unlikely that my favourite TV shows are being written by Bill Gates, Caitlyn Jenner, and Princess Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis ... and just as you don't have to invoke conspiracy to explain today's lack of interest in the actual authors, you also don't have to invoke it to imagine the Elizabethans were much the same. Shakespeare's famous now, but back then, he wasn't. Today there's a select group of people who know perfectly well who Steven Lutvak is, but he's hardly Andrew Lloyd Weber or even Pasek and Paul. Maybe a 100 years from now he's be our most celebrated composer, and the internet forums will be abuzz about how little gossip there was about Lutvak in the early 21st century ... |
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| re: This old story again (sigh) | |
| Posted by: MockingbirdGirl 07:05 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - Vivian 06:54 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| But he was widely celebrated, of course -- his plays were collected and published in a single folio, for which there was no precedent, with prefaces by those who knew him and his works. (Leonard Digges, who was one of the overseers of his will, also references his "Stratford monument" in the preface.) There really was no biographical genre at the time, however, which is why even Queen Elizabeth, the FOCAL POINT of the ENTIRE KINGDOM (to use your hyperbolic phrasing) does not have a contemporary biography of her life. | |
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| Shakespeare... | |
| Posted by: Vivian 07:23 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: re: This old story again (sigh) - MockingbirdGirl 07:05 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Hi, Mockingbirdgirl, I'm not talking about a contemporary biography so much as cultural traces--presumeably Shakespeare lived a highly public life among people who tended to scribble things down, and yet there are no marks of a life lived in a social context. There's no gossip--good, bad or indifferent, and I want to know why that is. I'll pay. |
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| re: Shakespeare... | |
| Posted by: MockingbirdGirl 07:32 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
| In reply to: Shakespeare... - Vivian 07:23 pm EDT 10/31/17 | |
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| Well, both Robert Greene and Ben Johnson mentioned him -- the former offering criticism, the latter praise. So that's two people who "scribbled things down" about him... but yes, about his writing, not his "social context" (though I'm honestly not sure what that means). | |
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