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
There is nothing to support your fantasy but fantasy.
Actually, there are many contemporaneous references to the person who was the most highly esteemed and recognized author/poet amongst the court: Oxford.
On another note, in our modern age, with freedom of speech and assembly, it is difficult to imagine a time when one could be executed or imprisoned for treason/sedition by ridiculing some of Elizabeth's most powerful ministers within Hamlet, Macbeth, et al. Only someone with court protection/stature could have gotten (barely) away with it.
Most people cannot accept the extraordinary.
They think their kid can play in the NBA because he scored 18 points in a 3rd grade game.
The talent at the ends of the bell curve is rare and extraordinary. No amount of "schooling" will ever get you there. I think it is a combination of envy and snobbery that prevents people from accepting great things from a commoner.
I believe Shakesperare was Francis Bacon, who was an embodiment of the Counte de St. Germain, Wonderman of Europe, and that Bacon received his divine inspiration from (Saint) Pallas Athena, known as the Goddess of Truth, often portrayed holding a spear. Thus Bacon used the name, "Will (of God) I Am, Shaking the Spear (of Truth).
I think Bacon would be fried if he were alive and had read THAT post.
You know you've won the argument when they call you a bigot.
So are the signatures of my doctor. You should see some of the contemporary writing in court documents. Spelling was not standardized, nor was the physical appearance of letterforms.
Which may be true, but it is not the same thing as saying that any of these sources suggested that Oxford was, in fact, the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
Now - let us concede the Oxfordian claim that no one dared make such a claim because Oxford would be scandalized by it: noblemen did not associate themselves with anything so vile as the stage. There is truth to this, although givenm that Oxford did not lack for enemies or for scandals attached to his name, and given the undeniable prominence of the Shakespeare plays, it's odd that no one ever made the claim even to deliberately damage Oxford.
But even if not, why the veil of silence even after Oxford's death in 1604? It just strikes me as odd. More than a few people would have to be part of a conspiracy, and they would have to maintain it for many years after Oxford's death.
Not until the mid-18th century do we get even the first suggestion by anyone that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare - and not until many years later than that that Oxford was really the man.
It just seems to me an awful lot to swallow.
On another note, in our modern age, with freedom of speech and assembly, it is difficult to imagine a time when one could be executed or imprisoned for treason/sedition by ridiculing some of Elizabeth's most powerful ministers within Hamlet, Macbeth, et al. Only someone with court protection/stature could have gotten (barely) away with it.
Perhaps, but given how out of favor Oxford was at court in his final years, it seems his status might have been more liability than help.
And of course after James' accession in 1603, Oxford would have had even less cachet at court.
LOL
We also have the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More, where Shakespeare's hand is generally conceded to be that of "Hand D," which contributed a small section to the play.
Of course, Oxfordians, if they are aware of the Hand D question, reject Shakespeare as the author since it would demolish the case for Oxford at a single blow.
The fact that Oxford kicked it in 1604 would have made it rather difficult for him to write any of the later plays, like MacBeth, Lear, or Tempest. He was dead, Jim.
I wonder why these folk never contend that DeVerre was the one writing Marlowe's plays?
I've never bought the theory that the author would be scandalized. Rather, given the times and subject matter, he was allowed a tight rein under the guise of anonymity. Oxford was a typical loony artist who was greatly disdained by his pragmatic and powerful father-in-law, Lord Burghley.
I think the most compelling point, and this comes from personal experience as an author, is that people write about what they know. Whether it's Clemens, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, ad infinitum, authors write about their own personal experiences (directly or indirectly) and what they know.
Could Clemens' have conjured up Huck without growing up in MO? Could Hemingway's alter ego, Nick Adams, had as many and varied experiences? Could East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice & Men and Cannery Row been written by someone not from the Salinas Valley?
Shakespeare's plays & sonnets were not 'throw away' pulp of its time, written by someone without an intimate knowledge of court politics, Greek/Latin, science, warfare and a myriad range of other subject matter. Rather, they were written by someone basically describing the Elizabethan court to a 'T'.
Indeed - and Oxfordians are, I confess, aware of this enormous difficulty. As Joseph Sobran, eminent Oxfordian notes, ten of Shakespeare's play are generally thought to have been written after the year of Oxford's death, 1604. "If even one of the plays can be proved to have been written as late as 1605, the whole case for Oxford collapses."
So Oxfordians try to make the case that these ten plays were in fact written earlier.
But they have to work hard indeed to dismantle the considerable evidence that The Tempest was written no earlier than the fall of 1610. When the Globe theater burned down in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII, at least two separate observers described Henry VIII as a new play, not performed more than two or three times before. More generally, the dating of Shakespeare's late plays is not at all as arbitrary as Oxfordians constantly claim; in addition to external evidence like that for The Tempest and Henry VIII, Shakespeare's writing developed in tandem with the rest of Jacobean drama. For example, Shakespeare's late romances mutually influenced the romances of Beaumont and Fletcher, written between 1607 and 1613. Also, there's plenty of evidence, both internal and external, for Shakespeare's collaboration with John Fletcher, who did not start writing plays until after Oxford was dead. Pushing the dates of Shakespeare's plays back 10 or 20 years, like Oxfordians do, makes a mishmash of Elizabethan dramatic history.
onder why these folk never contend that DeVerre was the one writing Marlowe's plays?
Exactly.
We actually have even less evidence in many cases for Marlowe as his own author than we have for Shakespeare - only one single signature as opposed to the six we have for Shakespeare, for example.
What do you count, words, verses or the psalms themselves?
Right. That's why he brought forth profound truth in the form of the plays, so that mens fears, ignorance and superstitions would not prevent them from seeing it.
It wasn't Bacon. Not his style.
I agree.
Words.
So true. Wasn't it Einstein who nearly failed math?
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