Posted on 04/23/2006 4:42:55 PM PDT by nickcarraway
AN academic colleague of mine once asked me who had made me into a writer. "And I don't mean one of those creative writing professors," he said to me, a creative writing professor.
"Well, who do you mean?" I asked, probably ungrammatically, a thing creative writing professors get to do.
"I mean, who was your Shakespeare professor?" he asked; he was of course a Shakespeare professor himself.
I understood what he meant: Shakespeare was elemental, formative, fateful. Unlike the work of any writer before or since, Shakespeare's plays and poetry, while taking advantage of an audience's church-acquired tolerance for long speeches, celebrated the relatively new language of English and explored the strangeness within the ordinary and the familiar within the strange the task of every artist. He returned again and again to the pathologies of love, marriage and family interest in which is a prerequisite for embarkation on an American literary life.
My own Shakespeare professor, now a fellow at the Folger Library, was a brilliant, handsome, manic young man fairly fresh from Duke, who on the first day of class sang an entire verse of "Afternoon Delight," clutching the lectern with bitter energy, to demonstrate to the students the all-pervasive and maddening junk he, as a Shakespearean, had been up against all summer.
He once diagrammed Hamlet as a sort of Pollock painting, with color-coded chalk for the characters. He directed us in a homemade film of "Romeo and Juliet," the Capulets in red pinnies. But in general, he simply, convincingly communicated his love of the work and helped the plays come alive. When I recently met him again in Washington, he said, with unsuppressed glee: "How long are you in town for? The Queen's Folio is here!"
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
Ultra-violence, Oh MY!
How did Shakespeare slip into the New York Times? Aren't there any commie birthdays to celebrate today?
Today is the anniversary of when Harry S. Truman unilaterally began the Cold War, by speaking disrespectfully to Vyacheslav M. Molotov when he stopped in Washington 11 days after FDR's death. If only Henry Wallace had been kept on the ticket in 1944...there wouldn't have been a Cold War. Of course, by 1948 the Iron Curtain would have run along the Pyrenees.
There's been some excellent new biographies of Shakespeare in the last several years. For those interested, I'd recommend checking the interlibrary loan computer at your local library and doing a search for "Shakespeare". In fact, I plan to do that myself. About time I read another homage to the bard. I'd like to check the system and see if anything new is available.
Paging all English majors: let's raise a glass in toast to the bard's birthday!
here, here
No one knows for certain who wrote the Shake-Speare plays, so celebrating the "author"'s birthday is unusually silly. I, like many, think the most likely bard was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, but it's very improbable that we'll ever know for sure. William Shagsper of Stratford on Avon, a man whose daughter was illiterate, and whose last will and testament makes no mention of any manuscripts or other literary property, is in my opinion unlikely to have been the author.
You mean that he didn't leave the movie rights to his heirs? In our day, it seems odd that he may not have put that in his estate, but in 1616, it would have been unusual.
Pathologies? Oh, I get it. Nobody has difficulties any more. We have pathologies. And a writer is really a psychiatrist pretending to be a writer.
Embarkation on an American literary life? Is that anything like starting a career in writing?
"It's impossible that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's plays."
I'm not sure where you get your "information". The only serious argument that has ever been proposed againt de Vere's authorship is the conventional dating of some of the plays ( especially "the Tempest" ) as having been written after de Vere's death. Among the eminent Shakespearean actors who believed that de Vere was the author of the plays were Orson Welles, John Gielgud, Leslie Howard, and Derek Jacobi. Do you consider them all fools in their own area of professional competence? Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Henry James were all convinced that the Stratford man could not be the author, but lived before the de Vere hypothesis was proposed. "Hamlet" has striking autobiographical references to de Vere's life, and in particular the character of Polonius is a thinly veiled caricature of de Vere's father-in-law, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was Prime Minister to Queen Elizabeth. Since conclusive evidence has never been found ( a manuscript would be most helpful ), the authorship of the plays will never be certain.
"You mean that he didn't leave the movie rights to his heirs?"
Not only that, but he didn't mention owning any books in his will. In the early 17th century books were scarce and very valuable property. It seems that the purported author of all of those great plays didn't own any book. He did pointedly bequeath his second-best bed to his wife, and a goodly sum of money to his illiterate daughter.
Well, maybe you should read a little bit more. I'd like to discuss it more with you, but you are coming off as a bit onboxious. You apparently haven't read about many of the issues surrounding authorship, so when confronted with them, you don't even bother to address them, but refer to "your 'information.'" Do you see how that could be construed as obnoxious? Thank you, I have studied Shakespeare for years, and it was my emphasis in college, I think I have more than a passing familiarity with it.
"I'd like to discuss it more with you, but you are coming off as a bit onboxious."
A dislike for my personality does not constitute "information" or evidence. If that's the best you can come up with, I think any reasonable person would conclude that you've lost the argument.
What I've read is that de Vere's known publications were from early in his life. Do you know of anything he is known to have published under his own name during the 1590s? De Vere is known to have personally visited all of the Italian cities featured in the plays, was a "Law Lord" ( Shake-Speare's fondness for precise legal terminology has oft been noted ), and like Hamlet de Vere was attacked by pirates while returning to England!
This is a good article on the authorship controvery:
http://shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/begguide.htm#Introduction
I always do. :-)
Oh good greif...not this ^$#$^&*((&^%%$$ again. :-P
Happy 442nd, Will!
Happy birthday Bill. You don;t look a day over 400.
My favorite sonnet:
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,-- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate,;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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