Posted on 10/30/2005 2:38:07 PM PST by theFIRMbss
In 16th century England many loyal subjects to the crown were asked to make a terrible choice: to follow their monarch or their God. The era was one of unprecedented authoritarianism: England, it seemed, had become a police state, fearful of threats from abroad and plotters at home. This age of terror was also the era of the greatest creative genius the world has ever known: William Shakespeare. How, then, could such a remarkable man born into such violently volatile times apparently make no comment about the state of England in his work?
He did. But it was hidden. Revealing Shakespeare's sophisticated version of a forgotten code developed by 16th-century dissidents, Clare Asquith shows how he was both a genius for all time and utterly a creature of his own era: a writer who was supported by dissident Catholic aristocrats, who agonized about the fate of England's spiritual and political life and who used the stage to attack and expose a regime which he believed had seized illegal control of the country he loved.
Shakespeare's plays offer an acute insight into the politics and personalities of his era. And Clare Asquith's decoding of them offers answers to several mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's own life, including most notably why he stopped writing while still at the height of his powers. An utterly compelling combination of literary detection and political revelation, Shadowplay is the definitive expose of how Shakespeare lived through and understood the agonies of his time, and what he had to say about them.
Clare Asquith has lectured on Shakespeare in England and Canada. Her article on The Phoenix and the Turtle was published in 2001 by the Times Literary Supplement, and her essay on Love's Labour's Lost appeared this year in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England. She lives in London.
"But was he a secret Roman Catholic?"
Actually, I have no idea. The plays were set in the philosophy of the period. Their way of thinking was very different from how we view the world today. Therefore, to appreciate the plays to their fullest, one should also be familiar with that period’s philosophy (and history).
Oh BS. Shakespeare's life is better documented than almost every other playwright of the time, there was no confusion among contemporaries that the man from from Stratford and the author were the same, and there is no evidence - NONE - that anybody named Oxford, Bacon, or the Queen of England wrote a word of the plays.
And another article leading off with how she got her inspiration.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1486634/posts
What familiarity are you talking about? Shakespeare was actually mocked during his lifetime for his geographical blunders (see Jonson's crack to Drummond about the "seacoast of Bohemia" in one of his plays).
Consider the period of time in which William Shakespeare lived, his oft criticized and "unconventional" use of spelling, punctuation and terminology in a time where there was an effort to standardize the English language. King James I acceded to the throne. He published the detailed treatise Daemonology, because of his concern about witchcraft in Britain (this did have an effect on the presentation of Macbeth and other plays).
There is the matter of the King James Bible to consider. There was pressure from the Church and open condemnation concerning secular drama. (English theatres were actually shut down for 18 years before 1663 when a Puritan government came to power in 1645.) Latin was used in the churches, composed the language found in Bibles, hymnals and was frequently used by the nobility in matters of state affairs. Often history has been colored by the occlusion of religious concerns; translations were subject to interpretation not always in the interest of accuracy. King James I, of England, was targeted for assassination and it is generally believed to be a result of opposition to the Bible translation into the English common language.
Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, artfully depicts the dynamics at work in her book Sexual Personae; Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson:
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Freud are the three greatest sexual psychologists in literature, continuing a tradition begun by Euripides and Ovid. Freud has no rivals among his successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art. Spenser, the Apollonian pictorailist, and Shakespeare the Dionysian alchemist, compete for artistic control of the English Renaissance. Shakespeare unlooses his metamorphic flood of words and personae to escape Spenser’s rigorous binding... (Paglia, p. 228)
Unless the whole of the professor’s book is taken in as a scholarly commentary on pagan beauty and it’s relation to sex, culture, politics and art or literature, there is some confusion for most readers concerning the analogies being made here...
Spenser’s radiant Apollonian armouring becomes Milton’s louring metallic daemonism, militant and misogynistic. Satan’s legions gleam with hard Spenserian light. Milton sinks when he sings of the foggy formlessness of good. His God is poetically impotent. But his noisy, thrashing Spenserian serpents and monsters; his lush Spenserian embowered Paradise; his evil, envious Spenserian voyeurism: these are immortal. Milton tries to defeat Spenser by wordiness, Judaic word-fetishism, tangling the Apollonian eye in the labyrinth of etymology. Shakespeare succeeded here by joining words to pagan sexual personae... (Paglia, p. 228-229)
This "Judaic word-fetishism" from the above is most illustrative. Like the complexities of the Elizabethan court protocols (relaxed under King James I), the use of language, definitions, etymologies, and the recording of history has also suffered a suppression by those with an interest to keep some things hidden. This is why I will assert that despite authoritative and scholarly denials, William Shakespeare had privy to occult knowledge not commonly available to others in his time, as well as a powerful English King’s ear and patronage.
Actally, there is an absence of a paper trail to document Shakespeare's (the actor) life.
What are you talking about? Our only true sample of Shakespeare's spelling and grammar is in the "Sir Thomas More" fragment, and it conforms generally with the (free) conventions of the period. I am unaware of this criticism you cite.
The rest of your post seems to have nothing to do with any matter here.
Well, it is very simple. The Earl was never at the seacoast in Bohemia.
Actually, there is not. Among playwrights, probably only Ben Jonson is better documented. Here's one scholarly page: http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html
What's not so simple is why you believe any of the geographical details in Shakespeare's plays indicate personal familiarity.
As I said in the beginning, "everyone has the right to believe what ever he/she wants."
But here, a parting thought:
"Why do people doubt the traditional story about Shakespeare?"
"The reasons for doubt are many and varied. Primarily the doubts spring from the complete misfit between the life of the alleged author and the character of the literary work which has been attributed to him."
The idea that people were forced to choose between God and Monarch is total Bullsh!it. They may have had to choose between The Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England but that's it.
I think Shakespeare was privy to Catholicism, which even by his time would have appeared to be pretty occult. Protestantism, including the non-doctrinal pragmatic variety introduced by Henry VIII, immediately stripped the supernatural from religion. Shakespeare, on the other hand, still had that component in whatever it was he believed.
As for Camille Paglia and Freud, she's wrong. He didn't write science or art: he wrote religion. Freudianism is essentially the religion of the modern world. The Freudian view of man definitively replaced the traditional Christian view, including in most Christian churches, about 40 years ago. We are living with the results of Freud's religion, his strange ethic and his fight against the "mud tide of obscurity."
The fact that Freud's contorted sexual vision is more obscure than any Thomist argument doesn't matter. Protestantized, secularized people believed Freud because he was the prophet who told them what they wanted to hear. And now everyone, including most in the Church, have enshrined him as their source of ethics and morality.
Look at your dictionary. Thousands of word etymologies in our language are attributed to Shakespeare...
My experience is that people who doubt Shakespeare wrote the plays pretty much know nothing about the period, don't read any other writers from the period, and (I suspect) sometimes don't even read Shakespeare himself. I mean, if you're a lucid person who believes in following the evidence, there's no way you can buy into the nom de plume theory, since there's no evidence whatsoever for it. It's wholly a territory for the cranks.
As for this so-called "misfit" between Shakespeare's life and works, I don't see it. I don't see a misfit between the slow-thinking, cart-horse family business John Webster and his plays either, whose life and career is even less documented than Shakespeare's. But you don't see people claiming he was really the Earl of Essex.
Bravo! Well said.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates advanced argument that piety to many gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible. Socrates exposed pagan esoteric sophistry.
Morality and all of its associated concepts are from the belief some higher power defines what is correct in human behavior. Today, “morals” are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.
Was Freudian psychoanalytic theory of sexual stages in psychological development more accurate than accredited? The Michael Jackson Complex is fixation on mutilation of and deviance with human anatomy in the media. It is a social psychosis catering to the lowest common denominator and generated with Pavlovian behavioral conditioning in popular culture.
Okay, I can accept that Shakespeare was a good word-coiner, but where do you get this stuff about his spelling and punctuation? And that others would (I guess) somehow find it threatening?
That doesn't change my question. A few or many, how do you glean personal acquaitance out of his plays? Jonson never visited Bohemia, but that didn't keep him from gleefully correcting Shakespeare's blunder.
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