Posted on 01/07/2011 7:24:58 AM PST by marshmallow
Sir Derek Jacobi is wrong to think that Shakespeare could not have written his own plays; the greatest poet and dramatist of all times was an Englishman and a Catholic
The actor Sir Derek Jacobi is currently acting the part of King Lear to great critical acclaim at the Donmar Warehouse. I must get to see it before the production closes just to see if he gets my personal imprimatur or not. But there is one matter on which I cannot agree with Sir Derek: the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Apparently the knighted thespian takes a benighted view on this one: that a semi-educated country boy from Stratford couldn’t possibly have written the works of genius attributed to him.
Indeed, Jacobi has publicly declared, “The only evidence of Shakespeare’s literary life was produced after he died and is open to dispute. Nothing, apart from some shaky signatures, puts a pen in his hand. Legend, hearsay and myth have created this writer.”
This is bilge and balderdash, stuff and nonsense. But rather than rehearse his arguments at second-hand, may I direct readers of this blog to an excellent book, Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University. Shapiro demolishes all the far-fetched and tendentious theories advocated by Jacobi and others – Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain among them – who are too intellectually contorted to see the obvious: that if you are a genius you don’t have to experience at first-hand everything you write about; you use your imagination. After all, Shakespeare did not have to commit murder to be able to write Macbeth; nor did he have to go mad in order to write King Lear.
I understand that Jacobi was a grammar school boy. Presumably it delivered him a decent education. Why should Shakespeare be thought of as a country bumpkin when it is known that he enjoyed the rigours of an Elizabethan grammar school education in Stratford? Obviously, as a youth of preternatural poetic sensibility, he did not over-exert himself with the heavily classical syllabus; ‘little Latin and less Greek’, according to his friend Ben Jonson. Luckily there was no TV in those days, so that instead of slumping on the sofa, young William got much of his wisdom from the university of life.
Well, as I am sure readers will agree with me, I hardly need to preach to the converted. Just one other thing: the greatest poet and dramatist of all time (you can keep your Racine and your Goethe) was an Englishman – and a Catholic. I will readily admit that the evidence for this is disputed (unlike the authorship of the plays for 200 years after his death.) Shapiro does not go into this; he is simply concerned that prove that Shakespeare wrote the plays. But there is still enough contributory knowledge of his childhood influences, his family milieu and his acting circle to make his religious beliefs more than a conjecture. His parents were devout Catholics; so were his school masters; so were many of his friends, his acting troupe and his patrons. (Fr Peter Milward SJ has written about Catholic aspects in the plays themselves.)
Shapiro surmises that one of the reasons there is so little biographical documentation about Shakespeare during his life is that, as the follower of an outlawed faith (he did not want to be hanged, drawn and quartered after all, and who can blame him) he destroyed the evidence. Peter Ackroyd’s biography discusses this question in greater depth, as does Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay, which suggests that the plays are crammed with coded allusions for Shakespeare’s co-religionists.
At any rate, the dramatist is not the atheist that modern (atheist) scholars would have him be, Jonathan Bate and director Richard Eyre among them. Just because they inhabit a bleak, post-modern, Darwinian universe there is no reason to drag Shakespeare along with them. Yes – he could pretend to be a pagan and a cynic, as in the Roman plays, and convey every other position as he chose. But that is the power of his imaginative capacity. To throw out a final intriguing thought for sceptical Sir Derek: is Shakespeare really buried in Stratford parish church?
I have read a most plausible argument by the late Hugh Ross Williamson that suggests the enigmatic words on his tomb – “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear/to dig the dust enclosed here/blest be the man that spares these stones/ and curst be he that moves these bones” – were deliberately composed to stop people opening up the coffin. Why? Because as a loyal though secret Catholic, Shakespeare wanted the Church’s last rites and a Catholic burial – and not to lie in a Protestant church.
Exactly! I admired his ability to remember and act all of his lines between having to do the stutter and the clubfooted limp. He's quite an accomplished actor.
Yes, More was indeed a Catholic; but I do wonder whether Shakespeare really wrote all of The Reign of King Edward III.
Ok, I swear, I'll be good.
Yesterday, I was so taken aback to see such a faithful rendering of Hamlet's speech, that I neglected your comment captured above.
You make a very interesting point, which I should probably not attempt to discuss, but I simply cannot help myself.
Assuming that the children were indeed his own, and further assuming that the works were all Shakespeare's own, I would wonder whether the children were dyslexic, or "word blind," as it was called in another time. The question of what tutors, if any, Shakespeare employed for his offspring would certainly have to be answered, as well.
I have no answers. But it is certainly an interesting point.
Then, there´s the First Folio compiled by Heminges and Condell who had known and worked with Shakespeare, with a dedicatory poem by Ben Jonson, who had also known him.
That Shakespeare was a negligent husband and father is generally known, since he was seldom in Stratford, except as a by then wealthy retiree who had obtained a Coat-Of-Arms primarily for his father´s memory and the attribution of Gentleman for himself.
Though I suppose we could surmise that after he farted in the Queen´s presence and went to travel in embarrassment for some seven years, that it was then that de Vere concocted his scheme of authorship...which makes about as much sense as any other such ¨conspiracy¨, even though no one ever thought of it for at least 150 years after Shakespeare´s death.
All we have in writing from the Stratford man is his will and 5 other signed documents, all of which indicate he had difficulty writing his own name, let alone the plays and other poetry attributed to Shakespeare.
The will famously left his second-best bed to his wife, and the bulk of his estate to his favorite daughter Susanna. There was no mention at all of manuscripts, books, or any other literary property. We are supposed to believe that 7 years earlier in 1609 he had allowed his most famous poems to be published by Thomas Thorpe, and had no property interest in that publication, or in the future publication of his famous plays.
In his book “Shakespeare Revealed in Oxford’s Letters” William Plumer Fowler analyzes 37 of de Vere’s letters and compares the language to the Shakespeare plays. The analysis itself is very interesting, but the frontispiece of the book was stunning to this longtime handwriting analyst. That picture of a handwritten letter by de Vere clearly revealed to me the brilliant dramatic poet who very likely was Shakespeare.
The mystery of who wrote the Shakespeare plays and sonnets will very likely never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. It would be very nice to discover a manuscript of “The Tempest” in de Vere’s handwriting, which would settle all issues, chronological or otherwise. Barring such a miraculous event, we all just have our own considered opinion of the available evidence.
...We are supposed to believe that 7 years earlier in 1609 he had allowed his most famous poems to be published by Thomas Thorpe, and had no property interest in that publication, or in the future publication of his famous plays...
I think that the abdication of property interest makes a very persuasive argument that the works were indeed authored by another or others.
“We are The Reasoning Race, and when we find a vague file of chipmunk tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village, we know by our reasoning powers that Hercules has been along there. I feel that our fetish is safe for three centuries yet.”
Sadly, Lear never wrote back. :(
Sadly, Lear never wrote back. :(
Thank you!
I loved the books. The TV series was also very good
interesting point about the “group efforts” — one can never really know, but logically your opinion makes sense. The actors would improvise and Shakespeare would probably take advice from friends (as do many authors and playwrights today). I think pretty definitely the final “editing” was Willy’s and of course the level of pure “go it alone” would vary from play to play
Take Romeo and Juliet. You can see traces of this from Tristan and Isolde and even back to the Puranas and other Hindu-Aryanic tales
Ditto for King Lear
however, Shakespeare polished these and made them incredible. Why Shakespeare is read not only in english but in a multitude of languages -- I've read him in French and in Polish and my sis-in-law in Japanese and the themes and plots STILL hold
That is mastery.
Sticking to the Japanese point -- have you see Karusawa's "throne of blood"? it's based on King Lear yet stands on its own.
It’s not that people question Shakespeare for being middle class. I think it’s pretty well establishedl that all great figures of the mind stand between the overlords and the peasants. You don’t see much of the titled nobility among the British pantheon. Well, Shaftesbury, Cavendish, Keynes, Russell. But nobody else. And needless to say none from the lower orders.
No, it’s all sons of gentry, merchants, doctors, lawyers, perhaps artisans. Shakespeare falls comfortably into that. The problem is that we have no record of schooling after grammar school, and his plays evince knowledge of the classics. How did he know Latin, or if he didn’t how did he make it look as if he did? “He’s a genius” is hardly an answer.
As for Newton, I don’t know his exact status at birth, but he was educated at Cambridge and therefore there is no similar mystery.
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