Let's go along with this post and see where it goes . . . .
As regulars readers will know, I am not an expert on anything, so to take on the argument as to whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays he is credited with writing, is a tall order for me but when has that put me off?
I have appeared in a few Shakespeare plays and been paid for it as well as doing one when I was at drama school. I must say that I liked it very much. I have a problem watching Shakespeare sometimes with some of the over playing and lack of realism but that's just me.
I remember Jonathan Miller in Beyond the Fringe speaking lines like an Olivier influenced Shakespearean actor which showed up just how ridiculous some of the Shakespearean acting really was; and still is I'm sorry to say.
I remember years ago, Enoch Powell pontificating about William Shakespeare and saying that Shakespeare couldn't have written all the plays – in fact he said he had written none of them and that it was some aristocrat writing them in secret. He said how could he have known all the workings of the court to be able to write in such detail about it?
Like everything else Enoch Powell said, I disagree with him. He was a very clever fella but like a lot of clever people who are nearing genius their brain only has so much it can take in. This is why the absent minded professor or genius mathematician can't do mundane things such as boil eggs.
There has always been a school of thought that agrees with Powell but I have to ask why, after 400 years, would they bother?
Their argument is that Shakespeare wouldn't know the workings of the court or that he wasn't educated enough. Wasn't educated enough????
He went to Stratford Grammar School!! Isn't that enough.
You see because he didn't go to university they don't like the idea that he could write so many plays.
For the record he wrote 38 plays.
Alan Ayckbourn, the modern equivalent of Shakespeare, has written 73 full length plays all professionally produced – and he didn't go to university either.
He came from the theatre where plays are produced, where you learn what is acceptable and what isn't – and if you are a genius, which is what Shakespeare was, it is easy peasy.
One of Shakespeare's contemporaries was Ben Johnson and, even though he went to a posh school, he didn't go to university either. In fact after Westminster School he was a brick layer.
But why do people always question genius? It seems that every now and then they change their minds as to who wrote Shakespeare's plays apart from the great man; it also seems as if they would accept anybody apart from Shakespeare himself!
At one time it was supposed to be Francis Bacon but that went out of fashion then Christopher Marlowe was supposedly the author of the bard's work; he was murdered mysteriously so the theory was that he didn't die at all but that he pretended to be dead – like Elvis, Martin Bormann and Jim Morrison – and Shakespeare was 'his front' and lately it is supposed to be Edwards de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
The theory with de Vere is that he had access to the court, he knew the goings on there and he must have written the 37 plays – all by himself.
Forget the fact that he died in 1604, 12 years before Shakespeare and 9 years before Shakespeare stopped writing.
Why did he stop writing they say. What does anybody stop doing anything?
People are judging Shakespeare by modern standards when writers retire and write their memoirs – did they do that then?
William Shakespeare died a few days short of his 52nd birthday; as we all get to find out that when you reach your mid forties something happens to the eyes; the rods and cones start to go haywire and you need glasses so maybe he couldn't see too good so for the last 3 years of his life he didn't write.
When Bob Dylan came on to the scene in the 60s people questioned whether he wrote all he was purported to have written – the same with The Beatles.
Anyway it is Shakespeare's birthday in a couple of weeks; he died on Saint George's Day – the patron saint of England – and in the next week there will be a lot of coverage on the BBC about Shakespeare; make a change from all the programmes on Charles Dickens and The Titanic!!
Well I never - all my life I thought that Shakespeare was born on 23 April, the day after mine. I am not the only one to think this either as in 1982 I went to the theatre to see a play called Dear Liar with the actor Robert Hardy as it's star. I went backstage afterwards to meet him and mentioned that it was my birthday and he said 'oh, it's Shakespeare's birthday tomorrow, so you have missed him by a day'. I have just checked it out on the Internet and as usual you are absolutely right and this is why I enjoy your blogs so much - you educate me. Thanks Chris!
ReplyDeleteYes the date of birth surprised me too. I have had a lot of private emails about this so let me add to the discussion by stealing a blog post from The Guardian about the movie Anonymous which was released last year and suggested that someone else wrote the plays:
ReplyDeleteIn 1593, an actor and theatre manager called William Shakespeare published his first book, a long narrative poem called Venus and Adonis. It is the verbal equivalent of a Titian painting, which recreates the world of mythology in richly human, erotic language. This love poem instantly became a Renaissance bestseller, though today it is far less famous than his plays. But there is something else significant about it. It is one of the many pieces of evidence that add up to an overwhelming sense, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Shakespeare, the actor born in Stratford in 1564, wrote Shakespeare's plays – a quiet proof that conspiracy theories about the authorship of these works, as peddled by the new film Anonymous, are nothing more than destructive absurdities.
The clue is in the date the poem appeared. Shakespeare had never published anything before. He did his writing for the stage, to be performed. So why the sudden rush into print with Venus and Adonis? There is a very striking historical context: in June 1592, plays were temporarily stopped in London by the Tudor authorities due to an outbreak of the plague. William Shakespeare, man of the stage, suddenly had time on his hands. During the closure of the theatres he tried something new – he wrote Venus and Adonis.
This episode, in other words, completely fits the biography of Shakespeare, theatrical genius from the Midlands – as do so many other details in his plays. Shakespeare breathed the theatre. As the RSC edition of his plays vividly stresses, they were written to be acted (which is why they still are). He constantly used theatre itself as a poetic image, as in the famous speech he gave to Jacques in As You Like It:
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
Images like this of life as theatre recur richly in his works – from the wooden O of the thheatre building itself invoked in Henry V to the play within a play in Hamlet – and they add up to a powerful connection with Shakespeare the man: a man, plainly, who lived theatre so intensely it shaped the way he saw everything else. As any modern actor might say, theatre was his life, his world. Of course it was: he was William Shakespeare, who worked in theatre all his life, and it is this William Shakespeare's experience of life that informs his plays (which also, for that matter, contain reference to his Midlands childhood, such as the Forest of Arden location in As You Like It).
If all that is not enough, what about the testimony of people who knew him? In the first complete edition of Shakespeare's works, the dramatist Ben Jonson comments poetically on his friend's portrait. The book begins with an engraved image of Shakespeare – the man from Stratford. It is a good likeness, confirms Jonson – the engraver fought with nature itself for supremacy. But here you only see Shakespeare's face. The portrait cannot capture the mind within: the artist cannot draw Shakespeare's "wit", and "since he cannot, reader, look / Not on his picture, but his book".
Jonson, who knew Shakespeare in the flesh, testifies that the face printed in the First Folio, that of Will Shakespeare, is that of the plays' author. Except he doesn't "testify" because he sees nothing to "testify" about – there was no mystery to Shakespeare's contemporaries about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. This supposed mystery is a daft later invention.
Anonymous is an insult to a great natural talent. It can only damage and degrade our relationship with our national genius.
Hear, hear - we should all be very proud of this legend and I am doubly proud as I live only about 20 miles from Stratford. Fascinating blog Chris!
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