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The speculation about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays has been going forward for nearly 200 years, and many academic theorists say that it does not matter who supplies the texts to the laboratories of critical deconstruction. Harold Bloom, by all odds the most appreciative of our Shakespearean scholars, suggests that too full a knowledge of the playwrights life might cast a pall on the prodigy of his genius. It is enough that the plays exist, spells of light or falls of gentle rain, and, because undefined by the graffiti of scribbling biography, an always undiscovered country from whose born no reader returns without having been changed. In their 1986 edition of Shakespeare's Complete Plays, there has been an ongoing controversy surrounding the publication of Editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Harold Bloom was among those that could not have given their personal view of the famous editors work. Bloom seconds the motion proposed in 1753 by Dr.
Samuel Johnson, who said of the plays that they "may be considered as a Map of Life, a faithful Miniature of human Transactions, and he that has read Shakespeare with Attention will perhaps find little new in the crowded world. The statement stands as proven -- in the fabric of almost everything written in English over the last three centuries. Bloom argues that this point was not given enough attention in the Wells and Taylor Oxford edition and it lacked some evidence further after even though it does get some of its major points across. Another focal aspect that was publicly noticed in the course of the Oxford edition on Complete Plays is that it clearly occurs that it does quarrel with the notion of Shakespeare as the progenitor of the intelligence and is reluctant to attribute the inheritance to an unknown parent. Another author that was stating his theories on Shakespeare's authentic and was arguing Wells and Taylors notions was Ogburn. Ogburn's hypothesis could be found somewhat congenial, in part because we could more easily imagine the plays written by a courtier familiar with the gilded treacheries of Elizabethan politics than by an actor peeping through the drop curtains at the decorative company celebrating Twelfth Night at Whitehall.
He had published his works on Shakespeare mystery even before Oxfords research by Wells and Taylor was written. Ogburn in 1984 published The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality; in return to Oxfords edition of Complete Plays there was some arguing at American University in Washington in 1987, three Supreme Court justices entertained arguments about the authorship of the plays and ruled in favor of the heroic arriviste from Stratford; the Public Broadcasting System in 1989 produced a documentary entitled The Shakespeare Mystery; The Atlantic Monthly published a discussion in 1991; and over the last eight years, as the debate has continued to enlarge its audience and frames of reference and now different sites maintained by the Shakespeare Oxford Society, come across reports of sudden resignations at the University of Oregon, the rumor of a duel somewhere in the south of England. So also with whomever it was who wrote Hamlet, the Sonnets, and As You Like It. The form of the poet vanished beneath the powdered pearls and spreading, gilded gauze's of unrivaled language.
Together with Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, most of the writers-writers as opposed to scholars-who have wondered about the provenience of the plays cannot find, either in the portrait bust at Stratford-upon-Avon or the sentimental tale of the upwardly mobile actor possessed of small Latin and less Greek, a convincing likeness of the man who conceived Falstaff and Cleopatra. The proposition that wisdom springs full-blown from the head of Zeus seemed to me far-fetched as long ago as grammar school, and one cannot help but think that even works of genius owe something to the life that gave them breath. Which isnt to say that Edward de Vere wrote King Lear but merely that we can imagine him dancing, in the high Florentine manner, with Queen Elizabeth at Hampton Court. The 1986 work of the Oxford editors hasnt made it any easier to know who is standing behind the arras. Prospero broke his staff and drowned his book, and the matchless spirit of a great but unknown playwright apparently has melted into thin air. We have a voice but not a man, a name but not a face.
William Shakespeare may well have been the greatest man England has ever produced, but he is also one of the most elusive. Virtually everything known of the facts of his life seem to belie the transcendent genius of his plays and poems. His parents were illiterate; he grew up in a small provincial town in which lived no more than a handful of educated men. His schooling ended at thirteen. There is no evidence that he owned a book. No manuscript definitely known to be by him survives.
There are only six copies of his apparent signature, all on legal documents, where a lawyer or clerk may have written the name. Of the seventy-five known contemporary documents in which Shakespeare is named, not one concerns his career as an author. Most are legal and financial documents, which depict him as a particularly cold, rapacious, and successful local businessman and property developer. As it was stated by Wells and Taylor in their work Shakespeare's life between his marriage in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and his emergence as an actor and presumed writer nearly ten years later is a mystery period in which biographers have credited him with all manner of employment, as a law clerk, soldier, schoolmaster, traveler on the Continent, and so on, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. At the age of about forty-seven, after being at the centre of one of the worlds greatest cultural renaissances for more than twenty years, he suddenly retired from London to Stratford, living there quietly until he died five years later.
Seven years after Shakespeare's death, in 1623, a huge memorial volume appeared, produced by several of his former theatrical associates, which contained nearly all of his plays (many printed in full for the first time). This First Folio does not mention or acknowledge his family in Stratford, although it seems inconceivable that they did not retain some effects left by him that would have been useful to the First Folios editors. There is no evidence that any member of his family (or anyone else in Stratford) owned a copy; indeed, his two surviving daughters were illiterate. It is really important to try to compare the works of different researchers on Shakespeare's life and writings to the one that we are currently examining. Since Shakespeare's recognition in the late eighteenth century as the pre-eminent English national writer, hundreds of archivists, researchers, and historians have poured over thousands of contemporary manuscripts and published works in an effort to learn something-anything-about Shakespeare the man. Their efforts have been almost entirely in vain.
During the twentieth century, only a handful of details emerged. In 1909 two American researchers, Charles and Hilda Wallace, trawling the Public Record Office, discovered the previously unknown Below-Mountjoy lawsuit at which Shakespeare testified. In 1931 Leslie Houston, another American, discovered a curious, almost inexplicable, 1596 writ for the arrest of Shakespeare and two others issued by a criminal figure in Southwark. Potentially, perhaps the most important document uncovered, first noticed in the 1920 s by Sir E. K. Chambers, the greatest modern scholar of Shakespeare's life, was the will of Alexander Hoghton of Lea, Lancashire, made in 1581, which left a small legacy to a William Shake-state now dwelling with me, apparently as a tutor to his children.
Many believe that Shakespeare was Shake-state and spent several years as a tutor in two wealthy Lancashire Catholic stately homes, those of the Hoghton's of Hoghton Tower and Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford. E. A. J. Honigmann, who has done most to popularize the lost years in Lancashire thesis, has discovered that there is a long-standing tradition in the Hoghton family that Shakespeare was employed in their home for two years in his youth. Many recent biographers have adopted the Lancashire thesis.
And some historians have speculated further that the young Shakespeare may have gone from one of the Lancashire households to London as a member of a players company. Others believe that during the lost years Shakespeare was already an actor with a troupe of strolling players. The Earl of Worcesters Men, for example, are known to have visited Stratford-on-Avon on several occasions between 1568 and 1582, and definitely employed Edward Alleyn (the founder of Dulwich College). Shakespeare may have made his way to London with this acting troupe, eventually settling there as a playwright and theatre-owner. Alleyn could well have hired Shakespeare as an actor in London. Though plausible, these theories have been heavily disputed, not least because there is nothing other than the Hoghton will to connect Shakespeare with Lancashire.
For centuries biographers have been puzzled as to how he acquired such a detailed knowledge of the law of his day, and there has been much speculation that he spent his lost years as a law student or clerk. If Shakespeare was a perambulating actor during the lost years he cannot also have readily been a law clerk, or acquired a working knowledge of court life or European politics. In 1818 Richard Phillips, writing in The Monthly Magazine, interviewed J. M. Smith, a descendant through his mother from Shakespeare's sister Joan. Smith told Phillips that he had often heard her state that Shakespeare owed his rise in life, and his introduction to the theatre, to his accidentally holding the horse of a gentleman at the door of the theatre, on his first arriving in London.
His appearance led to enquiry and subsequent patronage. Dr Samuel Johnson (writing in 1765, ) comes into contradiction with Wells and Taylors notion when he claimed that Shakespeare began in London as the organizer of a firm that took care of the horses of theatre goers. This story perhaps deserves more credibility than most about the life of Shakespeare, since it is the only such anecdote to come from a member of his own family, albeit a very distant one. It appears, however, directly to contradict the most popular current versions of how Shakespeare came to London. In striking contrast to the obscurity of his background there is the achievement of Shakespeare the writer. This son of an illiterate provincial butcher had the largest vocabulary of any writer in English in history, using about 37, 000 different words in his works, twice as many, for instance, as the Cambridge-educated John Milton.
As it is stated in Oxford edition, Shakespeare coined hundreds of phrases (such as into thin air, time-honored, and the be-all and end-all), which are widely imagined to be proverbial. That statement represents one of the most valid arguments throughout the whole scope of the Oxfords edition of Shakespeare's Complete Plays. He apparently also coined at least 1, 500 English words, including addiction, alligator, birthplace, cold-blooded, critic, impede, and amazement. Shakespeare was also, apparently, the first writer to use the word its' as a third person possessive. He wrote convincingly of court life, foreign intrigues, and the affairs of kings and courtiers, subjects of which he could have had no direct knowledge.
As well as law, his works reveal a mastery of science, of classical and European literature, and of other specialized fields, which seem utterly incongruous- indeed, inexplicable- in a poorly educated country actor. It is this incredible incongruity which has led so many to question whether the Stratford man wrote the plays attributed to him-not, as is often alleged by orthodox scholars, snobbery on the part of proponents of other writers, who allegedly insist that only a nobleman could have been England's national poet, not a commoner of humble background. Proponents, in the face of editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, of an alternative Shakespeare do not question that Shakespeare of Stratford existed: he was baptized in April 1564, married in November 1582, and died there in April 1616. The authors of the Oxford edition on Complete Plays do not dispute that he was an actor and theatre shareholder in London, and died relatively wealthy.
But they do question whether he wrote the plays attributed to him, arguing that he acted as a front-man for the real author, that clues exist in his works to this effect, and that the autobiographical material in his works is at variance with the known facts of his life. Unlike Wells and Taylor orthodox biographers reject the question of authorship. They have a point: no one suggests that the works of any of Shakespeare's contemporaries were written by someone else. No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or for the next 200 years questioned that he wrote the plays (although this has been disputed by unorthodox biographers), and Several of his contemporaries, most clearly Ben Jonson, appear to have regarded the Stratford man as having written them. This group attribute Shakespeare's achievement to his unique genius. But Shakespeare's skill involved the successful blending of plot, characterization, language and dramatic effect in an original way.
It seems almost inconceivable that someone from an illiterate home could be a literary genius, let alone the greatest of them all. Furthermore, the previous century had been one of political, religious and economic turmoil. The fundamental aim of Stratford's local elite was to enforce intellectual, political and religious conformity by every possible means. This appears to be at odds with Shakespeare's unprecedented ability to empathize with his characters, among them foreigners, Catholics, Jews, Moors and women, bringing them to life. Orthodox biographers surely gloss over these incongruities too readily. As it is written in the edition, the first man explicitly to believe that Shakespeare's works were written by someone else was the Reverend James Wilmot (1726 - 1808), a Warwickshire clergyman who lived near Stratford.
Wilmot's doubts were aroused by his inability to find a single book belonging to Shakespeare despite searching in every old private library within a fifty-mile radius of Stratford. He was also unable to locate any authentic anecdotes about Shakespeare in or around Stratford. Wilmot's father, like him an Oxford graduate, was a gentleman of Warwick. He might well have met persons who knew Shakespeare, and could certainly have known those who had met his surviving daughters, yet he too had evidently heard nothing about him from any local source. From this and other evidence, Wilmot concluded that the real author of Shakespeare's plays was Sir Francis Bacon, whose activities, it seemed, provided much of the knowledge of court life and politics found in the plays. Wilmot's claims, which encompassed virtually everything said by subsequent anti-Stratfordian's, remained unknown until 1932.
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a number of writers independently concluded that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. Chief among them was an American, coincidentally named Delia Bacon, who, in 1857, published the earliest book expounding this theory, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare. By the late nineteenth century, works propounding the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory had proliferated, though generally they did their cause more harm than good, being chiefly based on alleged secret codes and ciphers in the plays proving that Bacon was the author. The tide of Baconians receded sharply in the twentieth century, as Shakespeare studies became overwhelmingly centered in university English departments.
Here, the anti-Stratfordian position is associated with non-academic autodidacts and crackpots; the idea that a serious scholar would take up such a position is viewed as ludicrous. Nevertheless, the anti-Stratfordian cause widened to include other Shakespeare claimants besides Bacon and, in the...
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