I'm being plagued by emails from anti-Stratfordians again. I suppose it's because of all the current talk and writing about Shakespeare @ 450 years. What really gets me is this: the refusal of anti-Stratfordians ever to talk about the other dramatists of the time about whom we know far less than we know about Shakespeare and yet whose authorship of the plays attributed to them they never deny. Why do they not argue that Jonson didn't write the plays of Jonson or Chapman those of Chapman? George Chapman is an especially interesting case. He was the son of a mere yeoman. He was orphaned. There is no record of him getting *any* formal education, certainly no Oxford or Cambridge career. But then he turns up in the poetry and theatre world, writing works of formidable learning and obscurity. He even translates Homer! How could Chapman possibly have been Chapman? He MUST have been an aristocrat in disguise ... Why, or why, has no one ever seen this?
I've long gone past the point of re-entering these debates, having had my say in my 1997 book on the history of the idea of The Genius of Shakespeare. But if I ever met an anti-Stratfordian who had read every surviving play from the period 1580-1630 and who could produce compelling evidence that Chapman was Chapman, Dekker was Dekker, Heywood was Heywood, Jonson was Jonson, and so on for every dramatist other than Shakespeare, I might begin to listen to their doubts about Shakespeare.
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I'd say that they are "hobbyists" who have seized on an idea and become obsessed with it. To research and analyse other contemporary authors would distract them from their central theme.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit like the revisionists' desire to "prove" that Richard III did not murder the Princes in the Tower. Many judicial murders and regicides took place throughout the centuries from 1066 onwards, but no-one goes on about them.
Wish there could be an email list to receive updates on new posts.
ReplyDeleteStratfordians really get in their own way most of the time. Considering the myriad skills and expertise shared in the eloquent Shakespeare plays with a perspective always emanating from a native or international seat of nobility - doesn't it seem obvious Shakespeare had a platinum card? But it's greater amusement for me when scholars put their self-imposed blinders on and read Shakespeare. They aren't royalist, they can't see aristocratic skills, and after all, Elizabethan Stratford farmers just didn't farm that way.
ReplyDeleteIs English your first language? If it isn't, fair enough, but if it is you might want to try reading and digesting an Orwell essay or two. Oh, and nice surname.
DeleteTim, During the Elizabethan, do you think human geography was still driven by nobility? That's the problem here. It's nothing but agony to see a mainstream scholarship that excels at reading 16th century organizational charts upside down. Almost all their textual sources have to be constantly downgraded because they neither see nor accept the effluence from a significant creative force.
DeleteA decent example of how our present day scholarship turned upside-down was Furnivall's fisticuffs with Halliwell. Whether Shakespeare's source was Amyot's or North's translation. Neither. We can assume the SCF composed it directly from Plutarch. (SCF = significant creative force.) He was a large ship and all other poets comparably small. They had to give way in its wake.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your commentary on anti-Stratfordians, and thank you for teaching me the term for the concept I sometimes experience teaching high school seniors in the United States. I personally would not freak out if Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, just a bit disappointed I'm content to ready, think about, write about, and pay homage to Shakespeare, the concept, the man, the idea. I will make my FIRST pilgrimage to Stratford in a couple of weeks - after my AP Oxford Academy at Worcester College. Researching the campus brought me to your blog of which I have the privilege of reading.
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