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ROS BARBER'S remarkable book about Christopher Marlowe is many things. It is a historic novel, an interesting if contentious theory and a mystery.
It is also a collection of poems, many of which, when dipped into, stand up perfectly well by themselves, quite independently of the story which they tell. The entire book is written in blank verse; non-rhyming iambic pentameter.
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Marlowe, her subject, is a poet and playwright who is possessed of a doomed rock star glamour straight from Central Casting. He is an elizabethan Jim Morrison of sorts.
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It’s enough to strike despair into the heart of James Shapiro, author of Contested Will, as well as the hearts of all the other Shakespeare experts who refute the so-called “authorship controversy”. This novel, written entirely in fast-moving iambic pentameter, embellishes the notion that Christopher Marlowe wrote the Shakespearean canon after falsely being declared dead in a Deptford brawl.
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It’s enough to strike despair into the heart of James Shapiro, author of Contested Will, as well as the hearts of all the other Shakespeare experts who refute the so-called “authorship controversy”. This novel, written entirely in fast-moving iambic pentameter, embellishes the notion that Christopher Marlowe wrote the Shakespearean canon after falsely being declared dead in a Deptford brawl.
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This weekend’s events for the eighth annual Redlands Shakespeare Festival will include a historical workshop presentation by Bonner Cutting, a member of the board of trustees of the Shakespeare Fellowship and the board of directors of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.
Cutting will present “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 19, in the A.K. Smiley Public Library Assembly Room, 125 W. Vine St., Redlands.
The presentation will explore the fate of writers who pushed the political envelope and challenged Elizabethan censorship during the reign of the queen of Shakespearean times.
“It is incredible to learn about the terrible fates that were suffered by those who challenged the queen and her council with their ‘subversive’ writings,” said Steven Sabel, founding artistic director of the festival.
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Mark Rylance, whom critics call the greatest Shakespeare actor of his generation, believes that Shakespeare is not one man, but a group of authors who wrote under his name.
Rylance is part of a very distinguished and growing group of theatre actors, writers and directors who are convinced that Shakespeare could not have been one author. The question of Shakespeare authorship is an old controversy — there are several books on the subject — but what has given the authorship question renewed energy, focus and vitality is that Shakespeare’s most brilliant interpreter today has come to believe that it is foolish to think Shakespeare could be just one lone genius. Along with theatre legends like Derek Jacobi, he is part of a group that holds the view that Shakespeare was probably made of several writers, including the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Mary Sidney.
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I didn’t realise I was going to be missing was the first of Francesco da Mosto’s two-part series on Shakespeare in Italy. His interest in Shakespeare is genuine:
Among Italians, Shakespeare is certainly the best-known foreign writer. It’s interesting for us to see how he describes Mark Antony, and how his Octavius resembles Machiavelli’s Prince. But the most important this is the way he described emotions that are universal. It hits you like a punch in the stomach. -
he talked about Shakespeare and the universal emotion of love, but the one going out this Thursday looks at the political landscape, visiting Venice’s Jewish ghetto, Rome and Sicily which the Radio Times confidently assures us was the setting for The Tempest. Really?
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Half of the school children across the globe are taught Shakespeare, according to a recent British Council research. His plays are translated and staged in over 80 languages, and countless movie adaptations continue to inspire people around the world.
The World Shakespeare Festival, celebrating the Bard and his work, will be part of the London 2012 Festival, a global extravaganza tying in with the upcoming Summer Olympics in London, celebrating culture through film, theatre, music, fashion, visual arts and more. The festival kicked off last month, coinciding with both Shakespeare’s birthday and his death anniversary.The Festival, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and brought together with 60 major UK and international arts organisations, will be the biggest celebration of Shakespeare. Running until November, over one million tickets are on sale for almost 70 productions, supporting events and exhibitions around the UK in London, Shakespeare’s hometown Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle/Gateshead, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland, as well as online events.
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The Festival will also provide a chance for amateur theatre across the UK, with 260 groups taking part in Open Stages, working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and nine partner theatres around the UK, to share skills and expertise to stage their own Shakespeare-inspired productions. Open Stages will culminate in a national celebration of amateur theatre in July in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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I recently published a book about Shakespeare’s impact on the material world
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but Shakespeare’s influence on politics was the hardest part of the book to write. What were Shakespeare’s politics?
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Coriolanus demonstrates brilliantly how well Shakespeare can be adapted to a modern context, with the setting allowing for sharp commentary on the political situation in the Balkans. As the innumerable modern revisions of Shakespeare have shown, it is astonishing how universal the themes the Bard tackled are, and Coriolanus is no exception: the turbulent politics and the conflict between the aristocracy and commoners of Republican Rome translate extremely well to the modern setting, and there are more than a few echoes of the Occupy movement in the plebeians’ criticisms of the patricians.
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The play, one of Shakespeare’s longest, has been edited down considerably to fit into a two hour run time, but the resulting increase in pace fits the modern setting very well. While I do wish it had been longer so the characters and their motivations could have been explored more, there’s never a feeling that material has been left on the cutting room floor. Coriolanus is an extremely refreshing film; not a stately Roman play, but a raw, fierce, exhilarating take on one of the Bard’s least known works.
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Could A Midsummer Night’s Dream contain allegorical references satirizing Queen Elizabeth’s long & melodramatic courtship with Francois Hercule Valois, the Duc of Alençon?
In this podcast, Dr. Earl Showerman takes us on a visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth I in the 1570s. Statesmen, nobles, and perhaps even Elizabeth herself are divided over whether or not the Virgin Queen should marry the younger brother of the King of France. Dramatics ensue onstage and off, in a surprisingly strange and significant episode of English history. And what’s most surprising is that this colorful, contentious time may be preserved in all its absurdity and otherworldliness in one of Shakespeare’s best known plays.
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All's Well That Ends Well has another author as well as William Shakespeare, according to research from Oxford University academics.
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Professor Laurie Maguire says the latest literary research shows groups of writers working together on plays.
"The picture that's emerging is of much more collaboration," said Prof Maguire.
"We need to think of it more as a film studio with teams of writers."
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One colleague, who teaches Shakespeare to undergraduates, reports an increasing fascination, almost obsession, among her students with the authorship debate, perhaps only encouraged by the recent release in Japan of the film Anonymous.
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World-renowned American scholar Professor James Shapiro re-examines the work of the world's greatest playwright during the troubled first decade of King James's reign, in this new three-part documentary series.
This is not the familiar Shakespeare of the time of Elizabeth, but the dark, complex Jacobean Shakespeare, at the height of his powers in truly turbulent times.
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Anonymous was created to further the cause of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. It represents the beliefs of a fringe group of scholars who believe that Shakespeare was merely a front and that his works were actually authored by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. It is a theory that has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked over the last few decades, and the movie does little to raise its status. It is a lavish spectacle that is reasonably entertaining, but its insistence that it is presenting the truth creates a few problems.
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The movie spins a compelling yarn; one filled with intrigue, politicking, secrets, lies and just a hint of incest. It’s a fantastic story, but so little of it is true. Normally it wouldn’t be that big of a problem. Historical accuracy tends to be less important in cinema than thematic relevance. But the film is trying to make a case for a rather controversial theory. Its manipulation of history to make that case just doesn’t help its cause. Some artistic license might have been forgiven, but the film strays too far from the truth to ever be convincing.
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In June 1594 a new play was placed on the Stationers’ Register: The True Tragedy of Richard III. It was published anonymously and endorsed: As it was played by the Queen’s Majesty’s Players.
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The play was not printed again until 1821 or studied in any depth until 1900, but since then there has been much speculation as to the relationship between this play and Shakespeare’s Richard III. (for convenience we’ll distinguish between the two plays by calling them the True Tragedy and Richard III)
The major theories have been:
a) The True Tragedy is a memorial reconstruction i.e. bad quarto of Richard III.b) This version of the True Tragedy is a bad quarto of the real True Tragedy.c) The True Tragedy is the source of Richard IIId) The True Tragedy is Shakespeare’s own earlier version of Richard III - 2 more annotation(s)...
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In the invigorating “Being Shakespeare,” now playing at the BAM Harvey Theater, Mr. Callow testifies in support of the playwright. His collaborator, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, has supplied all sorts of contextualizing facts, figures, segues and suppositions, allowing Mr. Callow to point his finger unwaveringly at the title character: He did it.
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Shakespeare’s authorship has come under increasing fire in recent decades, with challengers disputing that a man of his relatively humble background could have amassed the knowledge — the book smarts, street smarts and existential smarts — to write the way he did. Various high-born types have been suggested instead, as well as the comparably middle-class but Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe.
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Lifting this veil is, to my reading of it, the major triumph of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Both history and historiography, this book examines the case both for and against Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to his name – and comes down, quite definitively, on the side of Shakespeare. Shapiro notes, in the opening pages of the book, his interest, which lies “not in what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why thy think it. No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world in which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story.” Noting the prevalence of opposing viewpoints in modern society – such as those on creationism vs evolution, whether or not man walked on the moon, and “more disturbingly,” those who deny the Holocaust deniers – Shapiro states, “I don’t believe that truth is relative or that there are always two sides to every story. At the same time, I don’t want to draw a naïve comparison between the Shakespeare controversy and any of these other issues. I think it’s a mistake to do so, except insofar as it too turns on underlying assumptions and notions of evidence that cannot be reconciled. Yet unlike some of these other controversies, I think it’s possible to get at why people have come to believe what they believe about Shakespeare’s authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book.”
- COMMENT: Also on-going in the Shakespeare authorship debate are new reviews of James Shapiro's 2010 Contested Will. This one from "Incurable Bluestocking" is notable because it looks deeply into what Shapiro has to say about the debate and approves 100%. Even as a film like Anonymous will have its effect, so too will Shapiro. - William Boyle on 2012-03-23
- COMMENT: Another review of Anonymous, now out on DVD. This is a very positive, enthusiastic review, and augurs well for the effect Anonymous may yet have on the future of the authorship debate. - William Boyle on 2012-03-23
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‘Anonymous’ is a great movie. Based on fact, and conjecture, it is a “what if” tale that settles the true authorship of the William Shakespeare catalog once and for all. In fact, it ties up a lot of other loose ends as well. Having just finished ‘Players-The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare’, by Bertram Fields, earlier in the week, it has become evident to me that the producers of this film have exercised a large amount of artistic license. I guess you could say it falls into the category of historical fiction, based on the assumptions that are made. But it is also true, based on the limited facts that are available from 400 years ago, that it could have happened as presented. We will never know for sure.
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But you can say one thing for sure. All of the latest developments in the Shakespeare legend have also “punched-up” that story. No longer will he be remembered just by the long dreary dissections we are all forced to undergo in English class. We can now consider that this whole thing may have been the biggest put-on in history. But one thing is for sure, once you get past all of the hype, there can be no denial that this canon of work stands alone. No matter who did it, it is likely never to be matched.
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Are you a Stratfordian or an Oxfordian? For a long time I’ve avoided the debate around Shakespeare’s ‘true identity’. Partly because, like many people, I enjoy the romantic idea of the enigmatic genius. And partly because any debate around authorship (I believed) could potentially take away from the focus on, and the enjoyment of, the words themselves.
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Are you a Stratfordian or an Oxfordian? For a long time I’ve avoided the debate around Shakespeare’s ‘true identity’. Partly because, like many people, I enjoy the romantic idea of the enigmatic genius. And partly because any debate around authorship (I believed) could potentially take away from the focus on, and the enjoyment of, the words themselves.
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- COMMENT: This is a combined review/essay on Anonymous at the LiteraryMinded blog. Nothing new, but it does have a number of comments at the end, including several from William Ray, who manages his own website on the Oxfordian thesis. - William Boyle on 2012-03-18
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Retired emergency room physician Earl Showerman believes that a detailed description of syphilis symptoms in "Timon of Athens" helps prove that the Earl of Oxford is the real author of plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
Speaking to a pair of prostitutes, Timon directs them to sow a disease that will collapse men's noses, ruin their voices, make their hair fall out, cause their shin bones to develop sharp edges and quell their love-making abilities.
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Showerman is among those who think the advanced medical knowledge displayed in the plays proves they were authored by the highly educated and well-traveled Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Showerman and others argue that Shakespeare — a successful merchant involved in the theater — didn't have the earl's access to learned people and extensive private libraries that included medical literature.
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