Topic: Why--and How--We Have Shakespeare
From The Passive Voice: How Shakespeare was remembered. Time for a little gratitude, I think.
- max keanu
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Re: Why--and How--We Have Shakespeare
I've often read that the person of Shakespeare was not he, but a man named Devries (I can't remember exact name) who protected his identity thus, and was of the royal court's upper-crust. Alas, the personage of Willy was far too smart for an actor of the ultimate silly, of the literary sacred and deathly sane... Dramas' grand master, the caster of Hamlet, Othello, of the bastard King John hid behind a name, a conspiracy, a game... Willy the real, of fame nil, and yet still... the world persist in naming an actor, a detractor conflated to portray bountifully written intrigues, betrayed royal creeds, love's amorous speed and such dastardly deeds.
- corra
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Re: Why--and How--We Have Shakespeare
Shakespeare was very well known when he died. Queen Elizabeth asked him to write her a play with John Falstaff in it -- The Merry Wives of Windsor. There are court records of the actual Shakespeare existing. It's not like he wrote in a dark room with a mask over his face. He was involved in the productions, wrote them, directed them, acted in them. He couldn't have been more obviously RIGHT THERE. The front piece in his later works named him specifically.
Is the theory that some mystery person wrote Shakespeare's plays and gave him the credit for works that were cherished by everyone high to low ? For what purpose? And he or she never came forward, even in death, to claim notoriety, and none of Shakespeare's friends and family ever accidentally slipped and mentioned that he was a complete fraud, and none of the actual writer's family ever left a single trace of proof about the real authorship? And all of this speculation is in response to what? the fact that Shakespeare acted? All the references to Will in his works -- not at all relevant? The staff (speare) he breaks at the end of The Tempest? just planted there to keep us all throughout history thinking the author was Shakespeare? The side characters named William EVERYWHERE in his plays? Absolutely unrelated?
If the point here is that an actor couldn't write the plays, that's frankly silly. Shakespeare wrote of human nature at all levels -- not just royalty. Of course an actor could capture that.
Pirated copies of Shakespeare's work were circulating all over before he died. His friends made his work known because the copies circulating were supplied by actors who attempted to recite everyone's lines in the work (so they could be written in the pirated copies) & often got the lines wrong. They BUTCHERED Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. That's why there are different versions of Shakespeare's works in circulation to this day. The works published by his friends preserved the more accurate versions. It's likely true that Shakespeare had no idea he'd still be remembered today. He didn't bother updating the stage directions in his plays because he spoke to the actors directly. He probably did want to be known (he wrote all those sonnets) but as a playwright he would have assumed that the play itself was the thing, rather than the script. So yes, absolutely, we owe those friends of Shakespeare's! But not for publishing plays written by a mystery person. For publishing William Shakespeare's plays. (I know you made no such suggestion, njc. Just speaking to all those who believe the conspiracy theories.)
Some say Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays! And some that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe -- a claim made solely because Marlowe died when Shakespeare began writing. I've read Marlowe. Not the same man, folks. And really? Elizabeth I? The Virgin Queen made sexual innuendos and challenged the validity of the monarchy?
Occam's razor, people. It's far more logical to suppose that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays than to assume that some enormous and absolutely meaningless mystery fooled all of Renaissance England for YEARS, and that it was NEVER uncovered, and that an actor named William just went along with it and also got to direct all of the plays and no one, upon no one, ever outed him for four hundred years.
4 2016-04-23 18:43:51 (edited by corra 2016-04-23 18:44:25)
- corra
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Re: Why--and How--We Have Shakespeare
This is the preface from the first folio, published by Shakespeare's friends in 1623. Not only is it clear Shakespeare was well-known and thought of highly, Ben Jonson includes his name & a few words in the preface. Next to Shakespeare, Jonson was the most acclaimed dramatist of his age. He was known for his integrity -- and he puts his name on the folio just seven years after Shakespeare's death. Quite unlikely he'd have done such a thing for a mystery head in the sky, or for an actor who only pretended he'd written the works. One can only assume all of these people in the preface had spoken with Shakespeare himself and had likely experienced his brilliance first hand.
From Jonson's eulogy:
Soule of the Age !
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage !
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome :
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ;
I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses :
For, if I thought my judgement were of yeeres,
I should commit thee surely with thy peeres,
And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund'ring schilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to vs,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread,
And shake a stage : Or, when thy sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
For a good Poet's made, as well as borne.
And such wert thou. Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well toned, and true-filed lines :
In each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance,
As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon! what a fight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !
But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a Constellation there !
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which, since thy flight fro' hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.
Sounds to me they knew just seven years after his death that he was something.
- dagnee
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Re: Why--and How--We Have Shakespeare
What I really appreciate about Shakespeare is how he conveyed eternal truths in a few words:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
This passage from Romeo and Juliette suggested to the reader, amid the backdrop of tragedy, that is not one's name but one 's character that defines them.
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
In this speech Polonius gives his children advice parents would be wise to offer today, the only way to navigate society without getting yourself into too much trouble is to never pretend to be someone you're not.
"Brevity is the soul of wit."
This is my favorite, one I use in writing everyday. Even though having Polonius say this in the middle of a long speech was Shakespeare's idea of a joke, any editor, publisher, or agent will tell you if you can't sum up your plot in a few words it's not a good plot. To take it a step further, intelligence does not require long passages of rhetoric to get its point across.
No matter how often I read these quotes, even though they were written almost 500 years ago, I am amazed that they are still applicable today. Thanks, Bill!
