steepholm

I once made the mistake of engaging with an Oxfordian, and it is extremely amusing to watch them condemn Shakespeare for usury and associating with prostitutes, whilst bending over backwards to excuse Oxford. But then, as their whole theory is based on replacing the unlikelihood of a middle-class man writing effectively about the aristocracy with the apparently entirely more likely theory that a nobleman concealed his identity so thoroughly that no-one questioned the attribution of the plays for nearly two hundred years, despite them being filled with clear autobiographical references, it's hardly surprising that all their other arguments are illogical special pleading.

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communicator.livejournal.com

It's class prejudice pure and simple, and it annoys the hell out of me.

Worse than the film: Sony pictures have created an 'education pack' for schools, to teach kids this rot. It's the second item down on this list.

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kalypso-v.livejournal.com

It's like intelligent design, isn't it? Aristocratic design.

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kalypso-v.livejournal.com

Vanessa said that? Blimey.

Actually, I love the idea that Shakespeare was a hard-headed businessman in between writing top-class poetry, and was always thinking "Another smash-hit tragedy and I can build a swanky house back in Stratford..."

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calimac.livejournal.com

Well, she's said some pretty silly things on other subjects before now.

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sheenaghpugh

Stupid cow! That really makes me angry.

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OMG I KNOW. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR OWN POLITICS, VANESSA.

Also, there is evidence that Oxford did write plays; unfortunately for the Oxfordians, it mentions him in a context that clearly establishes that he and Shakespeare are not the same person:

The best Poets for Comedy among the Greeks are these, Menander, Aristophanes, Eupolis Atheniensis, Alexis Terius, Nocostratus, Amipsias Atheniensis, Anaxandrides Rhodius, Aristonymus, Archippus Atheniensis and Callias Atheniensis; and among the Latins, Plautus, Terence, Naeuius, Sext. Turpilius, Licinius Imbrex, and Virgilius Romanus: so the best for comedy amongst us bee, Edward Earle of Oxenforde, Doctor Gager of Oxforde, Maister Rowley once a rare Scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Maister Edwardes one of her Majesty's Chapel, eloquent and witty John Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Munday our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.

And then, later on:

As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loves labors lost, his Loves labors won, his Midsummers night dream, and his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

So maybe Oxford did write some comedies, but they are a) not Shakespeare's, and b) lost to the ages. (I don't think it's hugely likely that they were ever produced, either, at least in the public theaters; several of the other writers Meres lists were authors of academic dramas, and there is also precedent for early modern aristocrats writing closet dramas -- FWIW, both examples I can think of are women.)

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As it happens most of those Greek and Latin authors are completely lost except for the odd mention of their names and a maybe a quote or two in ancient lists like that.

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Yes, it's pretty clear that whoever wrote that note cannot have read half the Greek and Latin authors they mention, as their texts were lost long before. What that says about their list of more recent playwrights, I'm not sure.

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It's Francis Meres, and I suspect that, like many Renaissance bods, he's quoting not what he knows from personal experience but what he knows because he's had it on better authority than himself.

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Presumably it means that Oxford had some sort of reputation.

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Well, I was referring to Meres's list of no-longer-extant classical authors rather than his contemporary list. As to the latter, it shows that Oxford wrote plays, but his presence on that list (a list that proceeds, you will notice, in strict order of social precedence rather than of literary merit) may say nothing more than that Meres was after a patron.

The literary productions of royals tend to get more than their fair share of publicity, as we poor children's writers know too well (remember Budgie the Helicopter and the Old Man of Lochnagar?) This doesn't mean that his plays weren't super-duper, of course: the fact that they were not published under his own name after his death (as Sidney's works were) is more telling.

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That's basically what Kathman and Ross conclude -- that he borrowed heavily from William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry and George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie (a work frequently misquoted by Oxfordians).

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I suppose the Oxfordian response might be that writing closet dramas was an option available to aristocrats and women, for whom writing for the commercial theatre would have been unthinkable. What I've yet to see is any evidence that it would have been unthinkable (in the case of males, at least), or that Oxford craved the approval of the groundlings more than that of his fellow courtiers (because he sure as hell wouldn't have been doing it for the money - and what else was in it for him?).

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ashkitty.livejournal.com

Why couldn't it have been an open secret? Like how everybody actually knows Anne Rice writes bondage porn as A. N. Roquelaure. IDK, I don't want to start any fights and haven't seen much on the film in question, but 1) the possibility of autobiography in the plays, 2) the records showing Statford Shakespeare was at home in court over a minor matter on the day Hamlet opened, and 3) could apparently barely sign his own name...well, anyway. j

I've just realised I started this comment with a question. I shouldn't have done; I don't actually want to argue about Shakespeare when I have chapter revisions due, and I've forgotten so much of the arguments since I was studying it ten years back. ;)

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Why pretned? no one who repeated those tired canards could be doing anything but provoking.

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calimac.livejournal.com

I've seen the Oxfordian case presented that it was an open secret. This, however, raises three questions that I've never seen addressed:
1) If it was so well-known, why, then, did it have to be kept a secret at all, especially as Oxford was (see quote above) publicly known to write plays;
2) Again, if it was so well-known, how did it come to be completely forgotten;
3) If "the Stratford man," as they call him, was as obviously incapable of writing the plays, why choose him as a beard?

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(2) seems to me to be very important. It is possible that everyone at the time knew that the plays were written by Oxford, but that this knowledge was lost, but crucially, this is not more plausible than that the plays were written by Shakespeare.

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calimac.livejournal.com

this is not more plausible than ...

Matt Taibbi, I think it was, interviewed a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and kept making the point that the conspiracy theory was more improbable than the supposed improbabilities in the official story that the conspiracy theory had been hatched to explain. He never got anywhere with that, because the theorist kept replying that he wasn't interested in improbabilities in his own theory, only those in the official story.

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That seems to be a fairly consistent element in such matters.

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nineweaving.livejournal.com

3) If "the Stratford man," as they call him, was as obviously incapable of writing the plays, why choose him as a beard?

And if the plays were seditious (as Oxfordians love to imagine), why hire one of the best-known faces in London as a front man? All plays had to go through the censor, and halberds could be at the Globe in no time. They could seize the actor and torture Lord Muck's name out of him.

Jeez. It would like be writing political satire as "Stephen Colbert."

Only an absolute fool would suggest it.

No front would agree to it. Not for any money, which Oxford didn't have: he spent most of his life on welfare from the Queen.

If Oxford didn't want to be known, what he wanted to be was anonymous. Nothing easier.

Nine

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"Barely sign his own name" is a tenuous conclusion to draw from the fact that his signature looked a bit squiggly. As many will attest, I have a particularly squiggly and barely legible signature. Am I therefore illiterate?

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In my experience, people who trot out the "couldn't sign his name" line are unfamiliar with secretary hand, which was the most common form of handwriting in Elizabethan England, and which is nearly illegible nowadays if you haven't studied paleography...

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I'm not sure what 1) or 2) are meant to show; but as for 3), if you look at, say, Charles Dickens' signatures using Google Images (he was the first name that sprang to mind) you will find that they vary at least as much. So, for that matter, do mine.

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Also, nobody knows the date that Hamlet premiered! Isn't it a cornerstone of the "case" for Oxford that all the traditional dates on the plays are wrong?

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Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes all had leisure to write and the means to produce their plays at their own expense without the expectation of receiving a drachma from the production. And Seneca was the richest man in the world and the equivalent of the Prime Minister of the Roman Empire, so there is some precedent for aristocrats writing plays, if Oxford had wanted to justify himself.

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Seneca was the example I had at the front of my mind when I asked the question.

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Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes all had leisure to write and the means to produce their plays at their own expense without the expectation of receiving a drachma from the production

That's actually not how play productions in Athens worked. The Chorus was paid for by a rich citizen, for who this was part of their civic duty as a citizen. The actors and poets were paid directly by the state.

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that's not quite write.

I oversimplified a bit for a lay audience, but I know Sophocles and Euripides acted as their own dramatourgoi--I'd have to look up the others. The only contribution from the state was to maintain the theater. There was no cash prize associated with the contests

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On the state paying the playwright and the poet, I merely repeat what is said in the Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization by Pat Easterling, who knows much more about this subject than I do - though it does appear from elsewhere in her article that the actors were sometimes paid by the poet.

Sophocles was certainly rich enough to have acted as his own choregos (dramatourgos doesn't appear to be found in Classical Greek), and there's evidence that he did for his final performance. But he didn't always act as his own choregos, nor did Aeschylus - I haven't checked out Aristophanes or Euripides, but I doubt they acted as their own choregos for their entire career. And since the choregia was essentially an act of taxation imposed upon wealthy citizens by the state, I think it's misleading to suggest that those four poets made their careers and mounted their plays entirely from their own resources, without any financial support from the state.

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wemyss.livejournal.com

... is the theory that only James 1st and 6th cd have written the plays.

Proposed, I note, by Malcolm X.

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That is strange indeed. Perhaps Malcolm X was descended from Malcolm III?

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wemyss.livejournal.com

As I recall, I ran across that gem long ago in an essay by the American critic Paul Fussell. It's really startling. But, as you say, scratch a lefty....

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larryhammer

To be fair, idea of the stigma of print and performance has long been around, and hardly originated with the Oxfordians. It is used to explain, for example, why Sidney didn't publish in his lifetime.

That said, I recently heard that there's one or two new studies out that show that while the stigma was real earlier in Elizabeth's reign, a) it was not as strong as the conventional statement makes it out to be and b) had significantly weakened (possibly to the point of being close to nonexistent? I didn't quite catch this part) by the 1590s.

---L.

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This is partly what interested me. It's true of course that Sidney refrained from print circulation of his work, although some clearly circulated very widely in manuscript (e.g. Astrophil and Stella). But it's quite a leap from this to conclusion that this was because print held a stigma for him. Perhaps it was more a case that he saw no need for it, since he could reach his intended audience (an educated and courtly one) through MS circulation? While I certainly don't rule out the stigma idea, I just don't recall ever seeing any positive evidence that this was the reason behind the custom of aristocratic non-publication - such as a slighting remark about someone's lowering themselves in that way.

As I mentioned above, the example of Sidney raises two different difficulties for the Oxfordians. First, why did he feel the need to circulate his work beyond the customary elite audience? (The film's answer seems partly to be so that he could use it for political and propagandistic purposes, but this can only apply to a few works.) Second, why didn't Oxford's many admirers publish his works under his own name posthumously, as Mary Herbert did Sidney's? Oxford may have been a notch or two higher than Sidney socially, but after all they belonged to the same tennis club...

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There's a good article on the whole concept here (and it was published in 1980; it's just generally impossible to convince conspiracy theorists).

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Thank you. James VI and Sir John Harington (who was so far from wanting anonymity that he even had an engraving of himself and his goofy dog used as a frontispiece, iirc) are certainly strong counterexamples to the stigma idea.

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larryhammer

Ooo -- useful. Thanks.

---L.

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gillo

1 .I hadn't realised the Redgrave was such an obnoxious snob.

2. Of course, it's not just classist, it's also the Everything Worthwhile is London-based trope isn't it? (Chaucer,Jonson...) Most people don't even recognise the Midlands exist, so how could a world-class (the world-class, I might say) author possibly come from a little town in the sticks without even a theatre? Sined Grumpy of Warwickshire

3. The idea that writing for the theatre was unacceptable perhaps comes from the Victorians, who pretty much invented the conspiracy theories. Dickens would surely have written more for the theatre if it had been more respectable and profitable, after all.

4. It annoys me deeply when actors who have made their careers in part out of this man's work can reveal themselves to be so snobbish and irrational. Rylance toured a show about it a few years back to which I took a bunch of sixth-formers. Mind you, he didn't have a lot of chance persuading an audience at Warwick Arts Centre!

5. I think it's fractionally more likely that someone else wrote the plays than that there was no moon landing or 9/11 was orchestrated by Mossad, but less probable than that Elvis is alive and well and living under an assumed name.

6. Why are these idiots so ready to assume a vast conspiracy amongst people who actually knew Shakespeare rather well, in an age when conspiracy tended to be assumed to be political and punished appropriately.

7. Gah.

8. Using

angevin2's fine icon which I keep just for this sort of nonsense.

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