grumpy Shakespeare-authorship journalism rant

[a_t_rain]

AARGHH GUARDIAN STOP BEING STUPID!!!

Admittedly, The Guardian is often stupid about Shakespeare, but it's usually in ways that are at least entertaining, like suggesting, on the basis of a wildly out-of-context reading of Sonnet 76, that he preferred pot to the fancy designer drugs of his day. (N.B., "weed" in this poem does not actually mean ... weed, and the "compounds strange" are linguistic ones.) Also, Elizabeth Winkler is exactly the wrong person to hire if you want to make any pretense of doing objective journalism on this particular issue. (And she does, in fact, seem to be ... trying to pretend that she is doing objective journalism? Like, there's enough both-sidesery here that unless you KNOW something about the topic, it sounds superficially like a normal news article, and you miss that the "new research" consists of using a bunch of cabalistic numerology to try to "prove" that a period source is saying the opposite of what it literally says.)

Also ... I dunno why Supreme Court justices and actors are the two professions most prone to embracing this particular brand of weirdness, but you'd think the actors would think twice about it, given that the not-so-subtle subtext is that Shakespeare-the-professional-actor-of-middle-class-origins can't possibly have been smart enough to be Shakespeare-the-poet.

Also-also ... it turns out that Heminges-and-Condell denialism is a thing as well. (Not mentioned in the article -- courtesy of some dude who has been posting his own cabalistic proofs all over a Facebook page that I belong to, until the mods banned him.) It goes all the way back to the late 19th-early 20th century, apparently. Because somebody decided that the Folio dedications are so well-written that they had to be the work of a "man of letters," and came to the conclusion that a couple of actors, one of whom was also a grocer and a pub owner, could not possibly qualify. Never mind that they spent decades in a profession that required you to have some serious rhetorical ability; never mind, also, that these guys were among Shakespeare's chosen circle of close London friends, and one might reasonably expect them to be smart and well-read. (There's a good deal of overlap with Shakespeare deniers, but the Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle.)

Why yes, I do feel all bristly and protective of John and Harry these days, thanks for asking :)

Comments

[landofnowhere]

Oh no, not Heminges and Condell denialism! I wrote about the front matter of the First Folio for a college paper, and am still very fond of it.

Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe : And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.

Reading Shakespeare again and again, of course, is what H&C did as actors!

[a_t_rain]

Indeed! They went to Shakespeare school for years; of course they could write! (And Jonson school. The less-loony permutation of this theory has Jonson as their ghost-writer, on the grounds that there are some similar turns of phrase in Jonson's works -- but this seems totally explicable, given that 1) H&C acted in a whole bunch of Jonson plays, and probably also saw or read most of the ones they didn't act in, and 2) Jonson presumably owned a copy of the First Folio, read the front matter, and could easily have nicked a line or two in his later works from them.)

[moon_custafer]

One of the reason’s Shakespeare’s plays are still popular is because they work so well onstage. They’re very actable, compared with some other Elizabethan dramatic works I’ve read (even the ones I like).

It’s almost like they were written by… someone who was a professional actor for years and years?

[a_t_rain]

... Come to think of it, I think that's probably true of Thomas Heywood as well, who was the other really prolific actor-playwright from this period. I've never had a chance to see any Heywood plays in performance (I wish!), but they read so smoothly that I keep forgetting I'm not reading modern English.

[landofnowhere]

Oooh, I might have to keep Heywood in mind for the Discord play-reading group I'm in. Any particular recommendations? (Or for that matter other recs for Elizabethan/Jacobean plays? From that period we've done all of Shakespeare, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Edward II, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Roaring Girl, and have Ben Jonson on our radar.)

[a_t_rain]

Ooh, yes! The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1, about the adventures of a cross-dressing tapstress-turned-privateer, is really fun. (Part 2, which was written thirtyish years later, is sadly nowhere near as good, although it's interesting to see the racial and gender ideologies getting more rigid, and farther away from modern sensibilities, in the span of just a few decades.) I also really like Heywood's Edward IV plays, which cover roughly the same historical era as Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI and Richard III, but are wildly different in emphasis -- as in, Jane Shore is the main character.

Non-Heywood recs: The Revenger's Tragedy is gloriously over-the-top. (Maybe a parody, maybe just "hey, let's go all-in with the blood and revenge and creative ways to poison people because it's fun, and it would be less-fun if you seriously felt sorry for the characters, so we won't bother with that part.") And The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a HOOT. (Grocer and his wife go to the theater, but they don't understand how it works and insist that their apprentice be cast as a knight in a play that wasn't supposed to have knights at all, and the poor beleaguered actors have to keep up with their increasingly ridiculous demands.)

[landofnowhere]

Thank you so much! I will be looking into these :-)

(We have Revenger's Tragedy and Knight of the Burning Pestle on our list of plays to read sometime, but it's good to have confirmation!)

[a_t_rain]

If you like Revenger's Tragedy, The Devil's Charter by Barnabe Barnes is absolutely wild -- although I think it's not deliberate parody, just ... a playwright with more sensationalism than sense deciding that the story of the Borgias wasn't spicy enough, and what it really needed was some additional devil worship.