So the most shocking news of the year may turn out (for me, at least) to have nothing to do with the election. It’s that Christopher Marlowe has been officially credited as coauthor of some of Shakespeare’s plays:
Shakespeare may have had a little more help than previously suspected.
The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of the playwright’s works — which will be published by Oxford University Press online ahead of a worldwide print release — lists Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare’s co-author on the three “Henry VI” plays, parts 1, 2 and 3.
It’s the first time that a major edition of Shakespeare’s works has listed Shakespeare’s colleague and rival as a co-author on these works, the volume’s general editor, Gary Taylor, said in a phone interview.
There’s been literally centuries of dispute on this, with the Shakespeareans accusing the Marlovians of all kinds of bad faith. But it was Big Data that validated Marlow’s authorship:
For the New Oxford Shakespeare scholars ran tests to determine whether authors like Marlowe could be reliably identified by the ways they used language — like frequent use of certain articles, and certain words commonly occurring in a row, or being close to each other in the text. Once this was determined, researchers applied these patterns back to texts, to see if they suggested an author other than Shakespeare. If results came out positive, further tests were run.
Mr. Taylor said that the exact nature of the playwrights’ collaboration cannot be certain, but that they did not necessarily work together in person. Scriptwriting at Shakespeare’s time was often structured similarly to how movie writing happens now: One author would earn an advance for writing a plot outline, and theaters would hire other authors to write other scenes, according to their strengths.
It’s possible that this is how the “Henry” plays were written, Mr. Taylor said, noting that some playwrights also collaborated by hashing through ideas in pubs.
Personally, I find the Big Data angle a bit creepy. I’m happy Marlowe is finally getting his due, and am all for the use of scientific techniques in the humanities. But if Shakespeare’s not “safe,” no one is. What other time-travel toppling of literary and historical edifices awaits us?
PS – someone at Wikipedia needs to get cracking:
The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him….Although the idea has attracted much public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe belief and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims.
Also, PPS – for those who are interested, a reminder. I know some Juicers are planning to participate in NaNoWriMo or AcWriMo, so here’s my resource center for those. Also my SavvyAuthors online class starts Monday (10/31) and will provide great support for all writers in November, and there’s a $5 discount for Juicers. (Happy to answer questions on any of these; email me.)
Jeffro
I think this is pretty cool…the literary equivalent of doing DNA research and finding out where your ancestors came from. Good on you, Will, for being a collaborative soul! ;)
Hillary Rettig
@Jeffro: he was so human / humane he’d almost have to be.
also the NYT article points out that plays are still often written collaboratively.
Emma
If that’s considered a legitimate co-authoring method, there are a few authors that will owe me some of their royalties.
Hillary Rettig
@Emma: :-)
Tom
My all time favorite apocryphal Shakespeare-Marlowe collaboration comes from early in the movie Shakespeare in Love, when Shakespeare and Marlowe are having a drink in a tavern and Marlowe says “How’s the new play coming?” to which Shakespeare replies “You mean Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter? I’m having trouble with the plot line.” Great stuff.
oldster
I assume that you are joking about this affecting the Shakespeare authorship question?
It really has nothing to do with it. It shows that Marlowe contributed something to three very early plays, the rest of which were written by Someone Else.
That’s compatible with either answer to the question that gets people all worked up, namely whether Someone Else was the Stratfordian, or Oxford, or Bacon, or or or….
I’m a staunch Stratfordian myself, and I don’t see anything in this to change my mind–or to change the mind of a Baconian, either.
Hillary Rettig
@Tom: has anyone (on the thread) read Greenblatt’s Will of the World, about Shakespeare’s development as a person and writer? I wonder what Greenblatt will say about this news.
Anonymous At Work
The fringe ideas are ones that attribute the entire plays to someone other than Shakespeare, who had no role in the writing whatsoever, was a pure patsy/smoke-screen, and that there are clues to such “truths” embedded in all manner of document and illustrations in ways that make Dan Brown look like Dr. Seuss.
That he had help, wasn’t the sole author, and/or took lines/blocs from others and reused them? That’s pretty solid. Formal rules for the credit of literary works hadn’t been established yet.
Nom de Plume
I subscribe to the Oxfordian Theory myself. How can you not believe something proposed by a man named Looney?
Hillary Rettig
@oldster: >, the rest of which were written by Someone Else.
…or Elses
Emma
@oldster: When I took lit classes in college, the authorship question often came up. Unfortunately, all the arguments boiled down to “he was a hick from the sticks, no way he could write that.” The classism just dripped off the arguments. Until/if they find a letter from Shakespeare saying “I’m forwarding your share of the profits” I stick to the “yes, he talked over ideas with friends, who doesn’t?” camp.
Hillary Rettig
@Anonymous At Work: good clarification. for the record, I’m not promoting Shakespeare Denial; just saying I just have the feeling that things are only going to get more complicated from here.
Jeffro
@Hillary Rettig: I read it and remember enjoying it but not a whole lot of the details… I have Greenblatt’s next book (The Swerve) in my to-read pile
Hillary Rettig
@Nom de Plume: Surely your nym should be Nom de Loon ? :-)
Bobby Thomson
Yeah, no. Unless they have a TARDIS they’re making an ass out of Uma Thurman.
Emma
@Bobby Thomson: Besides, everyone knows one of his best sonnets was written about Martha Jones.
Hillary Rettig
@Jeffro: Swerve was fun and interesting
scav
This is just the latest iteration of the basic research, they’ve been finding hints of Shakespeare’s collaboration collaboration in works other than the (evolving) canon for a while for a while. Certainly been going on for long enough to get into TV documentaries (I’m pretty sure there were elements of this in Michael Wood’s one, and that’s 2003.) There seems to have been collaboration all over, which makes sense — they had to churn these things out quickly. It’s not as though there are lots of lone geniuses now single-handedly crafting TV scripts. The plays were business, the poems were more the focus of more literary aspirations (although both were important in different ways for cash flow. Getting the right patron for the poems would have ideal.) He still had a distinctive ways with words Besides, we’ve known things have been dropped in and out of the plays, some of the inserts are really jarring.
Peking Man
@Emma: Just as crazy as the idea that someone from the backwoods of Minnesota could write Nobel Prize worthy poems
Jay C
OT, but I found this online today, and thought we should bring it to the attention of our esteemed bloghost:
2015’s version of The Happiest State rankings
Unsurprisingly, Hawaii is #1.
And probably equally unsurprising is who is ranked #50.
Rich Webb
There’s an interesting rebuttal over at The Conversation. I’m agnostic on the question but it’s fun to speculate.
Curiously, given all the stories about Marlow, I think that it’s most likely that he’s really one of the immortals and he’s been going by the name Tim Minchin lately. I mean, look at him! ;-)
prob50
@Jay C:
How can that be? After all, they have John Cole.
j/k
Matt McIrvin
Pericles has been generally acknowledged as partly written by someone else (probably George Wilkins) for a long time, The Two Noble Kinsmen seems to be regarded as a Shakespeare collaboration with John Fletcher, and there has been a lot of theorizing about various other people collaborating on Henry VI, Part I and maybe Titus Andronicus as well. The notion of collaboration is much more generally respected than the idea that Edward de Vere or Francis Bacon wrote them all.
Major Major Major Major
Hooray for text analysis!
@Hillary Rettig: this has been my working theory for a while now. Given the breadth of characters he could write and psyches he could examine so well I have been of the “one guy does a draft, friends rehash some of it, trusted actors really get their hooks into rewriting characters” school of thought.
Major Major Major Major
@Emma: I’m a big fan of that episode. That and the Agatha Christie one.
JosieJ (not Josie)
It’s my understanding that this type of analysis is done in classical music all the time– sans computers, until recently–and that major composers have “lost” credit for pieces to their students or admirers who actually wrote them. So I don’t have an issue with this type of analysis being used elsewhere, or with the collaborative process implied here.
Bobby Thomson
@Major Major Major Major: Van Gogh FTW
Shell
Its all time travel movies on TCM today…The Time Machine, Time After Time, Time Bandits…
Major Major Major Major
@Bobby Thomson: too sad ?
Brachiator
I saw this earlier. Yay for Kit Marlowe!
I wonder, though, whether the Elizabethan equivalent of the SWG (Shakespearean Writers Guild) would have given Marlowe full co-author credit.
In a way, though, this is no big deal. As other posters have noted, it’s long been held that Fletcher, among others, contributed to some of the later plays.
Doctor Cleveland
Well, this is actually a fairly old idea making a comeback. It used to be called “disintegration.” The idea was to find co-authors and collaborators for the less-popular and less-respected Shakespeare plays, so that all the bits of Shakespeare that you didn’t like were actually by someone else. And often the co-authors were playwrights who got much less critical love from Marlowe.
The Henry VI plays are a classic example of this. They’ve always been some of the less-loved and less-widely-taught Shakespeare plays. The new computer-assisted authorship studies, for whatever reason, still tend to focus on finding collaborators in the plays that have weaker reputations, like Pericles. (The only really major Shakespeare play that anyone calls collaborative is Macbeth, because the surviving version of the script is such a mess.)
So the New Oxford Shakespeare editors are assigning parts of the Shakespeare plays with some of the weakest reputations to the Elizabethan playwright with the second-best reputation. But, as far as I can tell they’re giving Shakespeare sole credit for the fourth play in the Henry VI series (which was actually a tetralogy): Richard III. Shakespeare still gets all the credit for the big hit.
Barbara
Christopher Marlowe was born in the same year as William Shakespeare but died before the age of 30 in 1593. It would not be surprising if he did contribute to Shakespeare’s history plays, a few of which were written before Marlowe died, but the most important were ostensibly written after Marlowe died. What if Shakespeare reworked or carried forward Marlowe’s work posthumously? I have seen two different productions of Marlowe’s own history play — Edward II — and it is very dark. It has much more in common with the Henry IV, the second part, and Richard III than it did with Henry V. I think that our own age puts a lot more emphasis on originality than previous generations did. I can only imagine that Marlowe would be pleased that his work lived on after he died even if it took shape under someone else’s direction.
Brachiator
@Shell:
Love, love, love all three movies (assuming that The Time Machine is the 1960 version. “Time After Time” was the first film in which Mary Steenburgen caught my attention (and I think she and Malcolm Malcolm McDowell became a couple during or shortly after the film. David Warner was the reliable baddie here and in “Time Bandits.” Good times.
Brachiator
@Peking Man:
I thought that all his stuff was really written by Leonard Cohen, with an occasional assist by Gordon Lightfoot.
prob50
@Brachiator: Guffaw!
Calouste
Talking about reputations being, uhm, shattered:
Trump’s Hollywood Walk Of Fame Star Destroyed With A Sledgehammer
Frankensteinbeck
@oldster:
I read a short biography of the founder of the Baconian movement. She was a brilliant academic lecturer who succumbed to schizophrenia and ended up publishing a book of gibberish with the help of famous authors who used to admire her. It’s a heart-breaking story.
pacem appellant
I was super excited when this technology debuted. It was used to prove that the author of Frank Baum’s last Wizard of Oz book was actually (mostly) penned by the series’s successor author. It had always been suspected that the publisher had overinflated the hype of “Baum’s last book”, no doubt to sell more copies, but modern text analysis was used to prove it!
Cheryl from Maryland
I wonder if they did a reverse check on the plays attributed to Christopher Marlowe to see if any passages are by Shakespeare. Collaboration is a two way street, and the continued focus on only Shakespeare’s “true” authorship reeks of classism.
catclub
@prob50: Mississippi missed out. Maybe better southern food, better writers, and the blues count for something
in comparison with WV.
Ninedragonspot
@Cheryl from Maryland: I’d bet dollars to doughnuts people are looking for “undiscovered”, “unrecognized”, or “uncredited” Shakespeare in works attributed to others. It would make a lot of money for the publishers and be a feather in the cap of any scholar.
Brachiator
@Anonymous At Work:
True enough. However, many writers were proud enough and jealous enough of their work that they would rhetorically strut their stuff about their own authorship, even as thew “borrowed” stuff from earlier works and the works of contemporaries.
One of the things that bothers me about some Shakespeare buffs and even some scholars is that they continue to push pet theories even when they have been debunked or there is no evidence for them. A Shakespeare buff who also teaches the Bard somewhere once appeared on a radio program claiming that Shakespeare was likely part of the team that helped edit and revise the King James Version of the Bible, citing the language used in one of the Psalms as proof. I sent the guy an email pointing out that this Psalm was pretty much exactly as it was in the earlier Tyndale Bible (and maybe Coverdale Bible). He agreed with me, but went on to say that it was more “fun” to say that Shakespeare did it and maybe Shakespeare had looked over and approved the text.
Dork
What’s this about Shakes Beer, and who brews it?
Paul P
Well, this is not really earth-shaking, and not relevant to the “Stratfordian” question. The three Henry VI plays were almost surely the earliest plays which Shakespeare had a hand in writing, and it’s been known for a long time that there were at least four collaborators, including Will, on these plays. In fact, there’s also quite a bit of scholarship about which lines were most likely to have been written by Shakespeare, and which by other writers. That Marlowe has now been proved to be one of the collaborators is a wonderful piece of scholarship, but not particularly revolutionary.
In fact, we are fairly certain that afterward Shakespeare collaborated with other writers in perhaps a half dozen plays, especially the later ones (Timon, Two Noble Kinsmen, Winter’s Tale, and others). That’s simply how things went in the world of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater in London in the years between 1580 and 1610, when the demand for new plays was high.
What is a separate question–the “Stratfordian question”– is whether the man known as William Shakespeare, born in Stratford in 1564 and referenced in numerous legal documents in Stratford and London, was indeed the celestial playwright revered by millions. In my view (and in the view of many scholars, including most recently professor James Shapiro, author of “Contested Will”), that question has been answered so conclusively that no reasonable doubt remains. Yes, you can take it to the bank that William Shakespeare of Stratford, born 1564 and died 1616, was the author of these brilliant plays, along with sonnets and other poems. And yes, we’ve known for a long time that the Bard collaborated with other writers on several plays that now carry only his name.
Barbara
@Cheryl from Maryland: What it reeks of is an effort to apply modern notions of originality and authorship not to mention academic stature and accomplishment to a time when it meant less or maybe something different. In the day, the person who wrote the words perhaps had to share more with the person who brought the play to the stage. It’s not as if William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe were writing for generations 400 years hence. If you think back, 400 years before 1600, the English language did not exist in modern form, and its literature barely existed at all. Even Chaucer was in the future. More practically, it’s also possible that Marlowe’s name was not used not just because he was dead and couldn’t put the plays on anymore, but because for whatever reason, he fell out with Elizabeth’s regime. There was a warrant for his arrest just before he was murdered in a knife fight. He seems to be to English literature what Caravaggio was to Italian painting.
Brachiator
@Dork:
All’s Ale that Ends Ale.
thafax
@Ninedragonspot: The New Oxford Shakespeare will attribute some passages added to Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy to Shakespeare. There’s probably more Shakespeare out there!
Calouste
@Barbara: Chaucer was 200 years in the past for Shakespeare.
Mnemosyne
@Cheryl from Maryland:
I do agree that the whole Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare! thing has a creepy dose of classism. I think I saw a claim one time that Shakespeare couldn’t have written a specific play (blanking on which one) because he mentions a grove of trees near the Italian city, so he must have been there. Because apparently writers in the 16th century never sat down over a beer and said, “Hey, I’m working on a play about Italy and I heard you’ve been there — can you tell me what it’s like?”
And, as a writer myself, I’m always amused by the assumption that writers work totally alone and never talk to anyone else about their work, which springs forth fully-formed from their noble brows.
catclub
@Brachiator: Love’s Lagers Lost
Barbara
@Calouste: Right, 200 years after 1200, which was 400 years before Shakespeare. Sorry if my comment was a little unclear on what I was intending to convey. The point is that Shakespeare and Marlowe weren’t really writing for us, because if you look at the sweep of time, they both probably would have understood how much the language and art would change over the next 400 years, just as it had over the 400 years that preceded them.
Brachiator
@Barbara:
I agree with you, but from another angle. Some Oxfordians I know treat the plays as though they were a perfect text, written and passed down to English majors. But I get a sense that Shakespeare (yeah, Shakespeare) was a working playwright similar in some ways to playwrights all through the ages. He (maybe with some collaborators at times) wrote the plays, tested them out on audiences, re-wrote them as needed, maybe left room for improvisation by his actors, and clearly wrote parts with specific actors in mind.
It is probable that the actor who played Cordelia in Lear also played the Fool, and the part had to be written to accommodate the appearances of the actor in both roles. This also meant that Shakespeare had to be in the theater, writing, watching, adjusting the text, not whipping out the perfect text and sitting back in an armchair while someone else put on the production.
Brachiator
@catclub: Much A Brew About Notting
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Which is, as you know, exactly what modern playwrights do, too, even when they’re not also performing in the play. A couple of my coworkers are part of a small local theater company and the cast just spent a day with the playwright of their next production so they could rehearse and tweak it together.
Aimai
@Hillary Rettig: ive read it. Very interesting.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: hell, I’ve seen modern directors do that with Shakespeare productions.
Barbara
@Brachiator: While reading an obituary of one of the Chess brothers (Chess Records), who recorded some of the most vibrant and enduring Chicago blues musicians and their music, the writer ended with a quote from a scholar who summed up the history of Chess: By being timely, they made themselves timeless. I think a lot of great art balances on a tightrope, trying to be both timely and timeless.
prob50
@Brachiator:
I’m getting a buzz just drinking in the puns.
Mustang Bobby
As a theatre scholar — albeit more of modern American (post-World War II) drama — we used to discuss this all the time back in grad school and the possibility of Marlow as a collaborator was more or less a given. Were it not for copyright and the staunch support of the Dramatists Guild today that protects a playwright’s work, a lot of writers would acknowledge that playwriting is inherently collaborative. Input from the director, the designers, even the actors, can change or refocus a script. But we playwrights are the ones who get stiffed on the royalties.
Four hundred years ago, it would be an event if a play went up strictly as written. For one thing, a lot of the actors couldn’t even read. There was no such thing as a director; that’s a 20th century concept evolving out of the actor/manager persona. So what we see in the folios probably wasn’t what the audience was hearing anyway…
But yay for Chris getting credit.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, that part is just rehearsal, but professional theater folks actually have the writer sitting in and telling them how they’re supposed to say that line, or how they’re supposed to walk when they go from one side of the stage to the other. Theater is very collaborative and the playwright has a LOT of control. In theater, the director is just one of the collaborators and cannot override the playwright like a movie director can.
Mustang Bobby
@Mnemosyne:
That’s because a play is licensed to a theatre; they’re renting it. In film, the producers buy the script and then they can do whatever they want. In Hollywood, the writer is one step above the kid who gets the coffee.
Montanareddog
The Winter’s Ale
Cermet
Sorry but this isn’t proof nor does it rise to a level that requires anyone to acknowledge this via a post in one of the plays. It does add weight to the argument but really proves little. If it gains legal status in the court’s or proves examples that can, by other means,be demonstrates to be true, then and only then, will I consider it reliability enough to believe.
Montanareddog
The Draining of the Brew
Fair Economist
@Mnemosyne:
Or read a travelogue, or got a letter from an acquaintance, or saw a painting, or read somebody *else’s* description or –
Seriously, how can you even begin to think that the only way people learn things is by personal experience? Does it occur to these people that if they apply the same principles to themselves they can’t say ANYTHING about Shakespeare or his plays’ authorships?
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: I know, just sayin’. The academics act like they’ve never been in a play.
Montanareddog
King Beer
Mnemosyne
@Mustang Bobby:
Yep, MFA in screenwriting here. There’s a reason the WGA-West is one of the most active unions in Hollywood.
James E Powell
Using the same method, Chuck Berry should be given composer credit for about 20% of songs in the history of rock music.
James E Powell
@Mnemosyne:
Doesn’t that vary with who the director & playwright may be?
Mnemosyne
@James E Powell:
In theater? Not really. The playwright has more power in the theater than the director does. It’s not like in film, where the director holds all the cards. In theater, the director is just another employee.
Mustang Bobby
@Mnemosyne: Neil Simon sold the film rights to “The Odd Couple” to Paramount in 1965 (I think) for a very small amount and that was it. He didn’t get a dime for the TV series (plural) that followed. He did get screen credit, but as he once noted, “You gonna eat off that?”
Mnemosyne
@Mustang Bobby:
There’s a reason why the title of the textbook for my entertainment law class for my MFA was, “The Writer Got Screwed (But Didn’t Have To).”
Mustang Bobby
@Mnemosyne:
To which a lot of playwrights say, “Whew!” God save us from directors with Concepts about our plays.
Mustang Bobby
@Mnemosyne: Theatre is a writers’ medium; film is the directors’. I used this simple test in my theatre history classes; I’d ask the students who wrote “Death of a Salesman.” All hands went up and knew it was Arthur Miller. Then I’d ask who directed the first production of the play. [crickets] (Josh Logan). Then I’d ask who directed “Schindler’s List.” They all knew Steven Spielberg. But who wrote it? More crickets.
Brachiator
@Montanareddog: Midsummer’s Night Cream Ale
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
In television, the director is just another employee as well.
I supposed that a writer may be as well, not too sure. But I get the sense that the show runner may do rewrites or oversee them.
Barbara
@Mustang Bobby: Seriously! I saw a production of Much Ado About Nothing in which, by the third act, Shakespeare had been utterly subsumed into the director’s High Concept, which actually wasn’t even that elevated or interesting. It was not boring, that’s all I could say about it.
Villago Delenda Est
The Histories were basically products of Tudor propaganda, so it’s really not surprising that they were collaborative efforts of authors seeking royal patronage.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Not all theater companies work the same way. For example, Theater Oobleck, whom I worked with in Chicago and did all original works, had a strict policy of “actor’s prerogative” – which meant that any actor could decide his/her character would/would not say/do a particular thing, and that was that – even the playwright couldn’t override the decision.
ETA: And the “director’s” role didn’t exist for us, so no help for the hapless playwright there!
And everyone has surely noticed how the word is “playwright“, not “playwrite(r)”? Scripts are wrought, not written – a testament to how the artists involved regarded the process.
Mustang Bobby
@Miss Bianca:
I’m not familiar with that theatre, but that would not go over well at all with my playwright cohorts, and if they ever asked for submissions for plays with that stipulation, they’d get a wrathful response, not to mention sanctions from the Guild. There’s a history of benign contempt between some actors and writers; actors think playwrights get in the way of their acting, and playwrights see actors as props with feet.
Miss Bianca
@Mustang Bobby: Your playwright cohorts wouldn’t be solicited for scripts, I’m afraid. The playwrights who work with the group know and accept the conditions under which they work – and usually know all the actors, as well. In fact, they work much more like what Shakespeare, Marlowe, et al. would have done with their companies – they’re usually part of the company, act as well, and write parts and plays with particular performers in mind.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
In TV, the showrunner is better described as the head writer, who also supervises the technical aspects and oversees the director. It’s very much a writer’s medium, more similar to theater in how the creative process flows.
It’s actually pretty common for theater directors to moonlight in TV because they only have to worry about working with the actors — the TV cinematographer usually takes care of the technical aspects. It all depends on the show, though.
maeve
@Mustang Bobby:
On of my favorite bits in “Shadow of the Vampire” (a dark-comedy retelling of the filming of Nosferatu where the actor playing the vampire character (Max Schreck IRL) is a real vampire) – the Max Schreck character asks if he can eat the writer because he doesn’t think they need him anymore.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0189998/quotes
EthylEster
Henry VI…all parts…arguably the worst of the history plays.
Yutsano
@Major Major Major Major: Has anyone ever found out where Christie actually was when she went missing?
Marjowil
This may be a dead thread by now but I just have to speak for my fellow Oxfordians. The authorship question is not a fringe belief and it is not classist, it is based on logic and aptitude. The Shakespearean scholars in the U.K. have a vested interest in the status quo, as does the tourist trap known as Stratford, but substantial scholarship in the US — serious scholars — are growing in conviction that Shaksper (the historical Stratfordian guy) could not have written the plays and poetry. Shaksper did not apparently own a book, his daughters were illiterate, and he left behind NO manuscripts, just six scrawled, illegible signatures on some legal documents. He liked to sue people for small sums of money and is suspected of poaching. There is no evidence he ever left England. He does not seem to have acquired the knowledge that bleeds through every page of the works. Most of what we “know” about him is mythology.
In contrast, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was a known writer of plays and poetry, acclaimed in his time, familiar with the ins and outs of the Elizabethan court, educated in science, law, health, politics and history, who traveled in Italy to the same places portrayed in the plays. He was flamboyant, bisexual, often in trouble, and gave away his fortune to supporting the arts The evidence that he wrote Shakespeare under that pseudonym grows in plausibility as you delve deeper.
It is as if we attributed the authorship of the Constitution to Donald Trump with his poor vocabulary, cultural ignorance and superficial attributes. It just doesn’t ring true once you take a look at the facts. De Vere was the true Renaissance man, comparable maybe to a Hamilton or a Ben Franklin or Jefferson. It is a fascinating area of study and should not be dismissed out of hand.
Marjowil
@Brachiator: And the argument about Italy is that there are numerous very specific parallels bet the plays and locations in Italy, based on an excellent book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels by Roe. It is not classist to assume that people tend to write about what they have seen and experienced. This book doesn’t argue for de Vere but it argues that the country bumpkin who rarely left Warwickshire could not have described the sycamores and architecture and artwork in such exacting accuracy.
Sorry to get obsessive but what is classist is dismissing serious and fascinating theories about a turbulent, tumultuous time without understanding the complexity of the argument.
Mnemosyne
@Marjowil:
I forget, how do you guys explain away the fact that Oxford died 10 years before Shakespeare did?
And, no, those of us who actually write fiction do not accept that people tend to write about what they have known or experienced. There are entire genres of writing that couldn’t exist if that were the case.
ETA: The fact that I can describe London as it was in 1812 doesn’t mean I have a time machine and traveled there first hand. It means I know how to do research. And, as a writer of historical fiction, I find it a little insulting when people imply that writers don’t know how to do research.
Miss Bianca
@Marjowil: oh, FFS. Really? People still peddle this tired – and yes, classist – bullshit? Amazing how people will twist themselves into knots to deny the obvious. And yes, to portray Shakespeare as some kind of unlettered boor in their efforts is misleading and classist. His daughters couldn’t read and write? Wow, big shock there. How many women – even aristocratic women – were literate in Elizabethan times?
The only people I’ve ever met IRL who insisted that an aristocrat – and not a reasonably well-educated, middle-class man of the theater – *had* to have been the one who wrote these plays – were people who seemed to be suffering from some deep-seated feelings of inadequacy in their own creative/professional lives. Because if some random guy named Will could write such timeless stuff, then why couldn’t they? Hell, why couldn’t anybody? No, no – had to have been an aristocrat – a societal ubermensch.
I’ve always thought it funny that people whio advance this theory can’t explain why this supposedly brilliant Renaissance man’s writings in his own name are completely forgotten, while “Shakespeare’s” works are still performed and read. It’s almost as if they were two separate guys!
Msb
Lots of useful comments on this thread, especially from a Paul P. If you’re looking for plays on which Shakespeare probably collaborated, look no further than Edward III, most of which seems to have been written by George Peele and Sir Thomas More, which was mostly written by Anthony Munday. Sir T. More is particularly interesting because it had trouble with the censor and Shakespeare was apparently brought in as script doctor. His scenes are excellent, and the manuscript is also famous for containing the one example we have of work in Shakespeare’s own hand (Hand D). No other Shakespeare manuscripts have survived, partly because they would have been the property of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Scholarly analysis by the Oxford team mentioned in the article, however, has identified which of the plays in the first folio were taken from printed quartos, scribal copies or Shakespeare’s manuscripts.
One of the best reasons for discounting the Oxfordians is that they can’t explain how Oxford, who died over a decade before Shakespeare, could have written the works of Shakespeare staged after his (Oxford’s) death. The notion that Oxford left a stack of manuscripts to be doled out postmortem doesn’t explain how collaborators such as Fletcher could have been fooled or silenced or how Oxford could have foreseen the changes in genre that Shakespeare shows in his last plays (the tragicomedies or romances). The Oxfordian arguments cited above are claptrap. Anyone wishing to read a courteous and fascinating discussion of this non-issue can do no better than a James Shapiro’s Contested Will, or the Shakespeare Authorship website.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
Hey, you. Sorry I got a little weird about the Nazi thing yesterday — I had just gotten back from seeing a documentary about a Chinese-American artist and was in Fuck America, what makes us think we were so goddamned morally superior to the Nazis mode, so that’s where that was coming from.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Gotcha. While I’m being so traumatized by Volker Ullrich’s biography that I’m all like, “anti-Semitism is *the* root of Nazi evil, if not all evil!”
And of course, as I pointed out, Hitler got a lot of inspiration from American ethnic cleansing and eugenics efforts, so yeah – we suck too! ; )
SWMBO
@Dork: It is found in some of your finer establishments. Most notably the Merchant of Venice. It is best brewed in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Brachiator
@Marjowil:
I disagree big time (if this thread is still active). Aside from the date of Oxford’s death problem, the biggest issue for me is that the Oxfordians clearly have no idea of Shakespeare as a working playwright. The plays are full of signs that he tailored the text at times for popular actors, and there are also inconsistencies and goofs that suggest that lines were changed when the probable first choice was no longer available.
In short, using logic, the Oxfordians fail to place their man in the world of the theater.
As for aptitude, uh no.
Also, too, a play like Macbeth was not only written to please James, but also reflects changes in contemporary theatrical performance practice. Oxford was dead before this play was performed.
Mnemosyne
Also, too, since we have fans of Shakespeare and good writing here, let’s see if this Google Books edition has the full text of Fritz Leiber’s “Four Ghosts in Hamlet”. Leiber was himself the son of actors and briefly in a Shakespearean repertory company, but the rest of it is fiction.
Marjowil
@Mnemosyne: The dates for the plays are estimated. For example we have lists of plays, names only, with similar names, performed years in advance of when published. There is a proto-Hamlet — we have no text for it, just a name in a list of plays performed. Since one commenter mentioned that plays can be worked on and collaborated upon while being performed, it is not unreasonable to assume a first draft of Hamlet may have been performed a decade before it was published and assigned a date.
Secondly, just because today we have libraries and internet to research places we have never been or topics we didn’t go to school for, don’t assume that knowledge was as easily acquired by the lower classes. There is no evidence Shows per attended schooling, only an assumption that he must have gone to grammar school though he name does not appear on the record. Books were not as readily available, they were precious commodities. We liberals talk a lot about privilege. Upper classes had access to knowledge that middle or lower classes did not. To say that a man did not have access to the sort of in-depth political, legal, scientific knowledge than a privileged one is not classiest, it’s reality. If a person has a GED we do not expect that person to have knowledge that an ivy league lawyer or doctor or scientist would have. It’s not impossible but unlikely, and doesn’t speak to intelligence or imagination as much as access and opportunity. We expect a surgeon of lawyer to have specialized knowledge. The plays show specialized knowledge that not many people would have, as well as observation of kings and queens and the highest levels of society than the average person would not have. I’m saying the likelihood that a country businessman would have this knowledge of Queen Elizabeth is unlikely no matter how much of a tale spinner he might be.
marjowil
@Mnemosyne: The dates for the plays are estimated. There are lists of plays performed in prior years, with names similar to later plays, such as what scholars call “proto-Hamlet.” Since a previous commenter said that plays are often worked on and collaborated on while being performed, it is not unreasonable to think that a first draft of a play such as Hamlet or the comedies may have been debuted and revised and tweaked for years before ultimately published. Most of the plays were published after Shaksper’s death anyway. When a play was published, a date was assigned to it.
Secondly, it is not classist to acknowledge that privilege was (and is) a huge factor in the acquisition of knowledge and access to the inner workings of power. Just because today we have libraries and the internet doesn’t mean there was easy access to books in Elizabethan times. Nobility had libraries but books were considered precious, yet Shaksper’s will mentions not one book. We accept that lawyers and doctors and scientists have degrees and certifications from ivy league schools which gives them opportunities to be involved in the practice of law, medical, politics, etc. It is not classist to admit that you would not presumably go to someone with a GED for your heart surgery. That’s not to say that the person with the GED is less intelligent or even less imaginative, only a person lacking the access, resources, opportunities that the privileged class has. The works show show specific knowledge of laws and science that were not mainstream; intimate knowledge of the court of Queen Elizabeth. Shaksper at best is assumed to have a grammar school education even though his name is not recorded as having attended the school in Stratford. I’m not saying he could not have written the plays and poetry, just as it is possible that Donald Trump wrote some secret opus, but I find it highly unlikely based on what I know about Donald Trump and his abilities, his education, etc. It is unlikely that a businessman, middle class at best, wrote Shakespeare’s works because he probably did not have the knowledge base evident in the text.
marjowil
@Miss Bianca: You don’t know anything about me to assume I have some deep-seated NEED for an aristocrat to have written Shakespeare. Edward de Vere daughters not only could read and write but they were instrumental, with their husbands, in publishing the first plays WHETHER OR NOT DE VERE WROTE THE PLAYS. His daughters were patronessess of the arts. Now of course it could be coincidence that de Vere’s daughters were instrumental in publishing the workds of a (as you characterize him) “a reasonably well-educated, middle-class man of the theater,” or you can reason that perhaps they were publishing the works of their father who, as a member of the Elizabethan govt, wrote under a pseudonym while alive. Either way, I would prefer to think that the man who wrote such lively and intelligent female characters had daughters who were lively and intelligent and not illiterate. But that’s just me, twisting myself into knots.
I guess I had better go nurse my deep-seated feelings of inadequacy because you cannot even entertain the hypothetical idea that the politics and realities of the time were maybe a bit more complex than you are aware of.
marjowil
@Msb: The points you raise have been discussed by Oxfordians, such as the estimations of dates, the events that may or may not have inspired events in the plays, etc. Even if only as an intellectual exercise the body of scholarship on the topic is very interesting. At least your tone was less dismissive than others’ and I appreciate that.
marjowil
Sorry for the almost double-post up there, thought I had lost the first one. People who want to accuse Oxfordians of being crazy or conspiracists or whatever cannot explain why the intellectual question, mystery if you will, seems so threatening to them that they rush to judge without even reading the full case. I am an Oxfordian — an amateur at best, compared to those scholars who do study this in depth — because it is a fascinating puzzle. That doesn’t mean I am addled or insecure or irrational. It means I have opened my mind to a period of history that is not as cut and dried as many would believe.
marjowil
now for sure I have murdered the thread.
Mnemosyne
@marjowil:
I didn’t mention books. I said that Shakespeare could easily have sat down with people who had traveled and asked them questions about it. It’s what writers do.
You know who else would have had an up close and personal view of everything going on at court? The servants. And it’s human nature to gossip about one’s boss.
I get a little pissy about this because a lot of the people who claim it wasn’t Shakespeare don’t seem to know much about the creative process of writing and assume that people can only write convincingly about things they have first-hand experience with.
And, yes, in Elizabethan times, it was uncommon even for aristocratic women to get more than a basic education. Shakespeare would have gotten a better education at his grammar school than the majority of female aristocrats. Those were the times.
Barbara
@Marjowil: John Keats had no more than eight years of formal schooling. What we have in abundance of books we have definitely lost in oral poetry and rhetoric. It is hard to reconstruct past probabilities based on the way we presently acquire skills and knowledge. The theory I presume is that some upper class person fed Shakespeate language so as not to have his name associated with something as lowly as the stage. If such a person fed him at all why would he not have been available for consults on faraway places Shakespeare never saw?
Miss Bianca
@marjowil: I said “people *I* knew IRL”. I said nothing about you, per se. But since you’re determined to cram your foot into the shoe, by all means wear it.
Barbara
@marjowil: Whether or not Shakespeare had external collaborators it seems improbable that if someone else had been mostly responsible they would not have taken more credit contemporaneously for such a vast body of work. For all your assertions about how hard it is to write without direct knowledge — something I find to be questionable — it is also hard to stand by and allow someone else to receive praise for your own work.
Miss Bianca
@marjowil: and since FYWP won’t allow me to edit, I’ll go on to say this: Since my undergraduate *and* graduate level work in theater history means that I’ve studied both Shakespearean theater and early modern English history pretty intensively, don’t *you* make any presumptions about my level of knowledge of the period, or of the many (nauseatingly many) theories about Why Some Aristo Had to Have Written Shakespeare’s Plays. I’ve read all of them, and been convinced by none of them.
Mnemosyne
@Miss Bianca:
I am merely an amateur Tudor historian, but it always strikes me as odd that people assume that the royal court was some kind of hermetically sealed bubble rather than the focus of gossip and public attention that it was, at least for Londoners. The ordinary people who worked there or worked nearby knew everything that was going on.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: There’s also the little matter of how Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men (or the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) had aristocratic patrons and performed at court as well as at the Rose, the Globe, and other public theaters. Shakespeare would have had plenty of opportunity to observe court intrigue and the nobility at play. There were travelogues, histories, and translations of classical texts to be had.
The thing is, that our friend marjowil is not unique – hundreds of people for hundreds of years have simply not been able to accept that some guy from the sticks could have come to London and made good like that – even tho’ hundreds and thousands of others have done so in their professions. The fact is that over 70 different people have been cited as “the real Shakespeare!” over the course of 400 years. It’s one of the world’s oldest conspiracy theories. The Earl of Oxford is just the latest, most fashionable flavor of the month. And as others have pointed out, it’s almost impossible to conceive that the “real” Shakespeare wouldn’t have come to light a lot sooner and a lot more conclusively than this by now if it hadn’t been that guy from Stratford.
pseudonymous in nc
@Barbara:
Not really that improbable. The idea of an English playwright binding up collected plays in a big fancy folio with the author’s name in big letters, destined for an aristocratic library… well, that was Ben Jonson’s doing in 1616. The Shakespeare First Folio was a cash-in after his death by people who saw that Jonson had done well out of it. You don’t get formal acknowledgement of co-authorship on quartos until the 1600s. Authorship mattered for bureaucratic reasons (Stationers’ Register) and to some degree for reputation, but the London theatrical community was small enough to know all its members and richer patrons.
The Sonnets and the earlier poetry got proper formal publication because poetry was meant to be captured in books, not performed on stage.
Anyway, late to this, but the interesting thing about the hunt for collaboration through stylometry — which I think is a legit scholarly exercise — is how confined it is to the Eliz/Jac theatrical era and particularly to Shakespeare. Like I said, ideas of authorship and ownership and the business side of the theatre were still coalescing,and playtexts were more like operating manuals than literary works,
(Even though 18th-century scholars know that Pope, Swift, Gay and others worked together on certain projects — collected essays than co-authored pieces — they don’t really bother looking at works published under a single person’s name for things that might be collaboration. The assumption is that in an era of copyright, attribution mostly sorts itself out.)
So there’s irony here: stylometry is a genuinely useful scholarly sub-discipline, but I doubt it would exist to the same degree without the WHO R SHKSPR THO types to generate publicity every time a set of editors run their corpus-crunching programs and get a statistically-significant correlation that seems to support older, more traditional historical research.
It’s very similar to the toolkit that biblical scholars use.
pseudonymous in nc
Though to clarify, I agree with your point: attribution is messy, but thinking about collaborative authorship by seeking correlations within an existing theatrical corpus is different from looking for Some Other Bloke.
And theatre was dirty, hard work. Poetry was for the aristos.
Msb
Though this feels like beating a dead horse, I can’t resist.
Almost all anti-Shakespeareans use the “uneducated pleb” argument. Yes, Shakespeare had “only” a grammar school education. But that meant rigorous training in rhetoric and Latin, not what a grammar school education means today.
Yes, Shakespeare was a commoner. But his company often played at court. As a member and part owner of the King’s Men, he actually took part in James I’s coronation.
Shakespeare’s name was used on printed editions of his plays as a selling point during his lifetime.
Nobody ever doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare for 200 years after his death, until a general climate of doubting accepted wisdom about figures of cultural authority combined with the Romantic cult of the author and the tradition of biographical criticism to raise this non-issue.
Barbara
@pseudonymous in nc: That’s why I used the word “mostly.” I think if someone else had been MOSTLY responsible for the content of plays that were widely attributed to Shakespeare, attribution would have been made earlier and more reliably. I definitely think it is possible and maybe even likely that others contributed, maybe very substantially in some cases, but that’s different from finding a ghostwriter who was the “real” creative force behind Shakespeare. We are so besotted with how we appropriate knowledge in the era of widely available written texts that we find it nearly inconceivable that people in earlier times absorbed knowledge through hearing — for instance, dictation exercises in Latin read by a teacher. The link between memory and oral culture has been established in many places. For a modern analog, I can do relatively complex math in my head because I never laid eyes on a calculator until I was in my last year of high school. My kids are utterly astounded by my “skill,” which was common enough in a lot of people prior to calculators.