Post by FilmFlaneur on May 3, 2017 11:55:43 GMT
Apr 27, 2017 23:53:22 GMT @eriknight said:
Many plays, not credited to William Shakespeare appeared under the nom-de-plume Shake-spear, including The London Prodigal, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Puritan, The Widow of Watling Street, The Comedy of George a Greene, Fair Em - the Miller's daughter, The Birth of Martin, The Arraignment of Paris and The Merrie Devil of Edmonton. Since these plays are not believed to have been written by the mythical William Shakespeare, clearly at least one other writer was using the pen name Shake-spear. They have been confidently attributed as the work of other, lesser, (even if anonymous) writers precisely because of the sort of close textual analysis which has established (with a small number of remaining quibbles and academic disputes) the accepted canon. That all these plays have been so firmly excluded really argues for the effectiveness of careful research into the authorship question down the years, not the opposite! And one wonders, why have they not been re attributed by those who doubt their Shakespeare anyway? Is this just a case of cherry picking?
His Vocabulary The works attributed to Shakespeare contain one of the largest vocabularies of any single English writer. John Milton's Paradise Lost, for example has about 8,000 different words. The King James Version of the Bible, inspired by God and translated by 48 of Great Britain's greatest biblical scholars, has 12,852 different words. There are 29,066 different words in Shakespeare's Canon.
By this reckoning then there are three alternatives:
1. Shakespeare wrote the plays.
2. Someone else wrote the plays.
3. The canon is the work of continuous collaboration.
If we rule out the authorship of WS for your reasons, then we are then left, if we assume 2. of finding another author who did display such an astonishing range. The same issues would then apply to the alternative candidate, one we who would reasonably expect to show such talents in their other writing existent, but away from his or her 'Shakespeare project'. I do not know of anyone. As mentioned before, De Vere certainly does not. (And was dead when it counted anyway)
In the case of 3., that the canon was variously worked on, conceived, and finished by a range of collaborators: one would expect to find by close analysis of style and content, the indication of different authors. Such analysis has certainly be made as one might expect, and yes, such as in (lately)parts of H6 with Marlowe now accepted as co-author, or Pericles (half by Wilkins), or various bits and pieces interpolated by Thomas Middleton, etc. But elsewhere scholars see no diverse hands at work. In recent years such research has been much aided - and previous views confirmed by computer analysis EG:
We found Shakespeare's patterns to be strikingly consistent, and often strikingly at variance with those of other Elizabethan poets.. shakespeareauthorship.com/elval.html
In fairness though, it must be said that I found another survey:
www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~datamining/Final.pdf
That offers more credence to the notion for De Vere's claim. But then even this finding is without being able to work from a significant sample of De Vere's, as the researchers readily admit. And, as already observed, it still leaves one having to argue that one person - now De Vere - had that remarkable vocabulary which, apparently must indicate a long lasting and widespread collaboration among many! In short, one would have to have it both ways.
There is a startling incoherence between the story of a young man, with at best a grammar-school education, wandering into London, getting involved in theatre, and then suddenly, even miraculously, possessing one of the greatest vocabularies of any individual who ever lived.
This is exactly the sort of implied snobbery I mentioned before (not from you) eg: How could a grammar school upstart possibly do what a royal or university star could not! It makes out that a genius cannot have the abilities of one - an odd stance to take. Does one deny Mozart's genius, for instance, since he wrote his last three great symphonic masterpieces successively in a few weeks, and no one else could do that? How could Albert Einstein, that young Jewish upstart, invent a whole new vocabulary of physics and up-end centuries of good science in the space of a few years? And so on.
A partial list of the Shakespeare doubters include Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Hardy, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Walt Whitman, Otto von Bismarck, Benjamin Disraeli, James Joyce, James Barrie, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Gielgud, John Galsworthy, Leslie Howard, Daphne Dumaurier, Malcolm X, Helen Keller, Derek Jacobi, US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and Henry James, who wrote, "I am haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced"
'Doubt' of course could be between 'wondering' and 'conviction' over the problems of authorship, while one wonder just how much the views of many of these, such as Malcom X, Chaplin, Bismarck et al is anything more than amateur speculation...
Elizabethan England was a land of brutal censorship. There was no freedom of speech. The Master of the Revels and the dreaded Star Chamber had the power to imprison and torture any writer. The playwright Thomas Kyd was essentially tortured to death. Christopher Marlowe was facing torture when he was murdered or, as some believe, staged his own murder and escaped. Playwrights Ben Jonson, Thomas Nashe, George Chapman, John Marston were all temporarily imprisoned for their writings.
William Shaxper, supposedly one of the most prolific and successful of the Elizabethan playwrights, was never arrested. This fact is particularly astonishing given that the Earl of Essex sponsored a performance of his Richard II to encourage a rebellion against the Queen Elizabeth I. The Earl of Essex was arrested and executed, but Shaxper was never so much as questioned. At such an incredibly dangerous time for artists, remaining anonymous for an Elizabethan playwright would have been a wise choice.
William Shaxper, supposedly one of the most prolific and successful of the Elizabethan playwrights, was never arrested. This fact is particularly astonishing given that the Earl of Essex sponsored a performance of his Richard II to encourage a rebellion against the Queen Elizabeth I. The Earl of Essex was arrested and executed, but Shaxper was never so much as questioned. At such an incredibly dangerous time for artists, remaining anonymous for an Elizabethan playwright would have been a wise choice.
Or, to survive in such an environment one could just have adopted the strategy of writing a series of patriotic history plays, each of which in their way, celebrates the rightful accession of the House of Tudor, and retain ongoing themes emphasising social order and just degree - and, also, writing to order (such as we know happened with the minor work The Merry Wives) to please the court. That said, there is a growing movement of critics who believe that Shakespeare was actually trying to *criticize* the monarchy in veiled ways, so as to get past the censor (the Stationer’s Register) who would not allow the play onstage if they determined that there was any kind of critique of the monarchy or seditious material. So, to get the play performed, it had to appear to flatter the monarch, while (so it is argued nowadays) on deeper analysis, the monarchs all display the worst tendencies of rulers and, in the case of Richard II, could even be said to be modelling before their audiences ways to depose or take power away from a monarch.
Another possible point in the thematic attempts to please the monarchy might be the ways that his early plays feature strong, outspoken, highly intelligent female characters who are seemingly meant to be admirable and appealing and who go against the grain of what society expects of them (just as Queen Elizabeth so obviously did). Then, after her death in 1603, one notes these strong and appealing female characters shift to being strong and rather diabolical characters (Lady Macbeth, for example, or Regan and Goneril) who might appeal to a monarch who was a notorious woman-hater. The appealing female characters during James’s reign seem to be the more reticent and apparently culturally conforming women like Cordelia and Ophelia, who suffer greatly and die. Thus it can be argued that the “shift” in his portrayals of women after James takes the throne help to highlight the ways that WS used his plays to appeal to the monarch in command.
All of this of course is hard to prove either way.