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Shakespearian Authorship
Oct. 20th, 2011 10:24 amI'm not going to comment on the film Anonymous, mainly because I haven't seen it, nor do I intend to see it. However, I'll make a couple of notes regarding the authorship issue.
1) One of the books that anyone who wants to pronounce on the matter should read first is T.W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greek (which I read about 30 years ago, but we'll skip over the length of the intervening time, shall we?). A quick search shows that the entire text of the book is available at the University of Illinois Press website. (The basic conclusion can be summarized by saying that Shakespeare was better educated in Latin than a typical graduate with a BA in classics today. Ben Jonson was much better educated and probably had a right to make the point from personal experience (cf. the irritation of "would he had blotted a thousand"[1]), but he was also self-instructed.)
2) On the matter of trying to derive authorial background from the plays: this is much broader than the authorship question. Leaving aside the 19th-century attempts to read the sequence of plays as a crib for biography (Shakespeare was depressed and published tragedies, etc.) and the arguments over his religion, there's a long history of people trying to argue that Shakespeare was X during the "lost years" because of how extensive his knowledge of some particular area was. Since the areas are ... heterogeneous, shall we say, they are arguments for nothing more than the futility of trying to read Shakespeare's life out of the plays.
It's an easy trap to fall into. Consider Love's Labours Lost, for example. Quite aside from the whole discussion of the School of Night (and whether it ties into other controversies of the time) you would have to have half your wits removed not to notice that the treatment of Rosaline echoes the Dark Woman of the sonnets. It's a useful observation, if you want to discuss thematic and stylistic traits across works; but I've seen people tempted to try to read LLL biographically as a result. (The assumption being underpinned by the further common but unfounded assumption that the sonnets just because they are lyrics must be direct reflections of Shakespeare's life).
3) The Oxfordians (actually, just about anyone other than the Baconians, as Bacon outlived Shakespeare) have to base a chunk of their arguments on redating the plays, since Oxford died in 1604. It's worth pointing out that the standard dating of the plays, complete with error bars, is not dependent in any way on assumptions regarding Shakespeare's authorship, and only minimally on an argument from developing style. Some plays are anchored by external references to performances, or via publication; some by internal references within the plays to public events which would have been familiar to the audience at the time of performance (this, of course, works strictly for the copy-text, as a reference might be added on revision for a later performance). Frequently sources determine a terminus post quem by their availability. A few are based on performance factors (the building of Blackfriars, or the availability of a performing bear).
4) If you want to have fun with Shakespeare's life and works, there's lots of precedent for doing it in a way which doesn't make you out to be an ignorant idiot. Everyone has been citing Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, but I'll throw in another example: Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth. In other words, make what you're doing obviously a riff on history rather than an attempt to rewrite it.
[1] Regarding a bit of Julius Caesar which is not in our received text.
1) One of the books that anyone who wants to pronounce on the matter should read first is T.W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greek (which I read about 30 years ago, but we'll skip over the length of the intervening time, shall we?). A quick search shows that the entire text of the book is available at the University of Illinois Press website. (The basic conclusion can be summarized by saying that Shakespeare was better educated in Latin than a typical graduate with a BA in classics today. Ben Jonson was much better educated and probably had a right to make the point from personal experience (cf. the irritation of "would he had blotted a thousand"[1]), but he was also self-instructed.)
2) On the matter of trying to derive authorial background from the plays: this is much broader than the authorship question. Leaving aside the 19th-century attempts to read the sequence of plays as a crib for biography (Shakespeare was depressed and published tragedies, etc.) and the arguments over his religion, there's a long history of people trying to argue that Shakespeare was X during the "lost years" because of how extensive his knowledge of some particular area was. Since the areas are ... heterogeneous, shall we say, they are arguments for nothing more than the futility of trying to read Shakespeare's life out of the plays.
It's an easy trap to fall into. Consider Love's Labours Lost, for example. Quite aside from the whole discussion of the School of Night (and whether it ties into other controversies of the time) you would have to have half your wits removed not to notice that the treatment of Rosaline echoes the Dark Woman of the sonnets. It's a useful observation, if you want to discuss thematic and stylistic traits across works; but I've seen people tempted to try to read LLL biographically as a result. (The assumption being underpinned by the further common but unfounded assumption that the sonnets just because they are lyrics must be direct reflections of Shakespeare's life).
3) The Oxfordians (actually, just about anyone other than the Baconians, as Bacon outlived Shakespeare) have to base a chunk of their arguments on redating the plays, since Oxford died in 1604. It's worth pointing out that the standard dating of the plays, complete with error bars, is not dependent in any way on assumptions regarding Shakespeare's authorship, and only minimally on an argument from developing style. Some plays are anchored by external references to performances, or via publication; some by internal references within the plays to public events which would have been familiar to the audience at the time of performance (this, of course, works strictly for the copy-text, as a reference might be added on revision for a later performance). Frequently sources determine a terminus post quem by their availability. A few are based on performance factors (the building of Blackfriars, or the availability of a performing bear).
4) If you want to have fun with Shakespeare's life and works, there's lots of precedent for doing it in a way which doesn't make you out to be an ignorant idiot. Everyone has been citing Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, but I'll throw in another example: Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth. In other words, make what you're doing obviously a riff on history rather than an attempt to rewrite it.
[1] Regarding a bit of Julius Caesar which is not in our received text.
