Posted on 05/31/2005 11:09:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
THE outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and his ebullient successor have clashed over the true identity of the playwright.
Mark Rylance, who leaves the Globe at the end of this year, has always doubted that the author was William Shakespeare. He recently endorsed a theory that Shakespeare’s work was composed by a team of writers led by Francis Bacon.
Dominic Dromgoole, who will join the Globe from the Oxford Stage Company, has branded Mr Rylance’s favoured theory “baloney” and its supporters “snobs”.
“I think that all this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney,” he told The Times. “There is a mass of historical evidence that shows there was a working-class playwright from Stratford writing the plays. All of this other stuff is nonsense. It says more about the people who are putting forward the theories than Shakespeare himself.”
He believes that supporters of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, are motivated by snobbery. “People can’t accept that he was working-class. They can’t accept that his father was illiterate, and that he wasn’t posh.”
Mr Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, last year credited Francis Bacon as the author. “I became more and more convinced that Francis Bacon was the doorway into it and had to be involved in some way,” he said. “Undoubtedly the Stratford actor (Shakespeare) is involved in the creation of the plays because he is a shareholder in the Globe but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays.”
In a foreword to The Shakespeare Enigma, a book by Peter Dawkins that proposes a team of writers led by Bacon, Mr Rylance wrote that he had difficulty reconciling the Stratford actor’s access to learning with the intellectual references in the plays.
“The amount of learning in the plays has been downplayed and the opportunities that the actor Shakespeare had to learn have been played up,” he wrote. “I do argue that there is cause for reasonable doubt that Shakespeare the actor wrote the Shakespeare plays and poems, and alternative theories should be weighed fairly without resort to slander of the individual proposing the theory — an all too common occurrence in the media.”
Mr Rylance has not limited his authorship theories to Bacon. He is listed by the Shakespeare Oxford Society as endorsing Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. “I find that the unfortunately limited evidence of the Stratfordian authorship theory seems to reveal little more than monetary motivation,” he wrote in a 1997 society newsletter.
“I find the work of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reveals a character, in Edward de Vere, motivated to use the mask of drama to reveal the true identity and nature of his time, as only someone in his position would have known, and as was the well established habit so clearly demonstrated in Hamlet.”
Sceptics of the Oxford attribution mention that De Vere’s poems are not of a high standard and that his death, in 1604, is inconvenient for a playwright who went on to write 11 plays after that date.
Professor Anne Barton, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, described De Vere’s death as “an insuperable problem”. “It is like the attempt to attribute Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon. Like that one, this (theory) is a product of snobbery, that a Stratford grammar-school boy could not have written the plays, and I’m thoroughly fed up with it.”
FOR
FOR ‘All this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney. People can’t accept that his father was illiterate and that he wasn’t posh’
DOMINIC DROMGOOLE
AGAINST
‘Shakespeare was involved, but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays’
MARK RYLANCE
I wonder who wrote Jack London's works? His family a a lot poorer than Shakespeare's and he didn't even have a third grade education.
hehe! :)
And I heard he didn't even have a dog when growing up!
It is highly likely (IMHO) that Shakespeare "physically" wrote the actual plays, but that Bacon and Marlowe's input was intertwined throughout..
Think of them as a group of comedy writers, bouncing ideas off one another's heads in a smoky back room somewhere...
Someone noted that Will ended up with all the credit for being one of the greatest writers of his time, and if Bacon or Marlowe actually wrote the plays they "tricked" themselves out of everlasting fame..
That person didn't seem to consider the times and the consequences of expressing certain opinions if one was highly placed in the society..
Much like today, it was "un-pc" to criticize one's peers publicly... In fact, it could be injurious to one's health.. Especially if talking about the Monarchy..
A relatively un-educated commoner could get away with saying things, expressing opinions, that one of rank and privilege (and power) could not...
Check out the following link. Good food for thought...
http://home.att.net/~tleary/twain2.htm
Perhaps Shakespeare was a man of little education, but, I don't recall that Sam Clemens had a college degree. Art can't be learned, IMHO, you are born with it; it is in-bred.
All the educated individuals in the world have not produced anything like Shakespeare, so, logically, one would assume that a lot of education is not relevant to the question.
I would tend to agree with your logic of assessment more than others. Consider the matter of the King James Bible, and its similitude to a Shakespearean play...
I do not by exact recollection know the number of the Psalm, be it 42, 43, 46 or 49. Take one of them, count backward by that number of it and you will find "shake." Count forward by the same and you shall find "spear."
As literature goes, nothing is in more eloquent verse than such epic prose. The King James Bible taught in literary study would elevate education to heavenly regard.
No one has a problem attributing the works of Van Gogh, Clemens, London, the Beatles, etc. to the respective working-class artists for one simple reason: their works where known and their genius widely acclaimed (with the exception of Van Gogh) during their lifetimes.
The usual reason stated by Stratfordians why this isn't the case with their man is that these incredible poems/plays, obviously written for the ages (and recognized as such by the author himself), where *not* art; rather, they were merely the equivalent of TV fare for its day. To wit, who knows who wrote a series of scripts for a cancelled TV show?
If you reject that theory, you reject Stratford. If you read Shakespeare with the knowledge that the author knew exactly what he was doing at the time they were written, and that his genius *was* recognized furing his lifetime by those that had the ability to read & understand the many, many veiled references (ie members of the nobility & court), then you know that the name "Shakespeare" was merely a nom de plume.
I just don't think the record supports that view.
We know from the records that John Shakespeare's son William attended the Stratford Free School (incorporated in 1553). After the schools were nationalized under Elizabeth, the curricula for them was fairly standard: students got a thorough grounding in Latin and the classics. All of the headmasters while Shakespeare was growing up were university graduates with good reputations, and there is a good deal of cirumstantial evidence that Straford was better than most.
I think that critics too easily underrate the very high quality of English grammar schools of the Elizabethan era. Only the elite attended them, and only the smart were able to graduate.
More details on Shakespeare and the Stratford grammar school can be found here
I don't doubt at all that Marlowe had an impact on Shakespeare - how could he not? - but it must be remembered that Marlowe died in 1593, a date almost certainly before nearly all of Shakespeare's plays (and certainly his best ones) were composed.
It's Psalm 46.
The year the KJV of the Bible was released (1611), Shakespeare also happened to be age 46.
One of those wierd quirks of history.
And yet the difficulty remains: there is not a single piece of contemporaneous evidence direclty imputing the authorship of the plays of "Shakespeare" to Bacon or Oxford or anyone else. All such theories are built on conjecture. They all also assume (as they must) a conspiracy of silence among those in the know - which would have to have been more than a few in the London literary scene - who all seem to have taken the secret to their graves.
Whatever the merits of such theories, they don't hold up well to Ockham's Razor.
Or one of those wierd quirks of Shakespearean learnedness?
Puns are the humor equivalent of mimes.
I seem to remember having read somewhere that Shakespeare's family was Catholic, though not publicly. It is possible that he was educated, privately, by a priest, as many young Catholic men were in that time. If he had been taught to read, and took to it with relish, that could account for his not having attended school as his Protestant peers had done, but having had the knowledge of the Classics that they had.
I just saw your post after I'd posted mine. I thought the same thing.
I deny that Beethoven ever existed. His alleged musical works were written by a secret committee of Viennese prostitutes who thought it would be funny to spread rumors of a composer who'd gone deaf.
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