>
> On 18 October 2016 at 13:10 "[log in to unmask]"
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> Wikipedia's article on the The Winter's Tale puts unnecessary
> rationalizations of the coast of Bohemia, based on a tendentious ten years
> back in the 13th century, in some much-needed perspective.
>
"Unnecessary rationalisations" is probably right. Michael. Consider: the play
is a *romance*, for god's sake -- unlikelihood is the name of the game. Leontes
talks about "he who betrayed the best" (Judas) not just in a play set in Ye Olde
Tymes but in one in which the bloody oracles appear! Given that it was a
commonplace that the Oracles ceased at the birth of Christ, this is (beyond) a
joke. Of course Bohemia doesn't have a seacoast -- the audience, even probably
most of the groundlings, knew this, and if they didn't one of their
better-educated neighbours would soon point it out to them. Perdita doesn't
just talk, par for the course in this genre for Lost Princesses, in Standard
Upper Register Educated English, she does so *in a context where attention is
drawn* to the fact that everyone else around her talks differently. The
convention of unlikelihood is pushed beyond its limits.
I bet most of the original audience, especially at a time when Romances were the
current Big Thing, got this. That our later, better-educated times manage so
often to miss the point baffles me.
>
> <snip>
>
> The lack of social, historical and literary context in the Declaration is
> dismaying. Its arguments are lumped together in a mass with no apparent
> awareness that some are possibly strong but others are incredibly weak. (A
> typical architectural device of uncritical conspiracy theory: the more mud the
> better.)
>
> Comments about the lack of cosy domestic anecdote from Jonson, or indeed
> the supposed lack of eulogies till a whole seven years after the author's
> death, betray a pretty basic lack of awareness about how differently biography
> and literary status were conceived in the sixteenth century, compared to our
> own individualistic times.
>
> Meanwhile no mention is made of such basic biographical sources as
> Greene's snobbish attack on the upstart uneducated ungentlemanly Shake-scene
> who had the temerity to write plays, or Meres' 1598 list of plays by
> Shakespeare, or of the Shakespeare securely embedded in a wider literary
> community that we might infer from e.g. Love's Martyr in 1601 ("several modern
> writers whose names are subscribed to their several works...").
>
I'd forgotten Greene's Groatsworth, Michael. Odd omission indeed, as most of
the Oxfordians make a meal of it. Though I did notice the absence of Francis
Meres. As to Jonson, that's also rather fun. The Declaration does note the
Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden [unnamed, but coyly and obliquely
described as taking place in the year before Shakespeare died], but somehow turn
a comment on Shakespeare-the-Playwright into one on Shakespeare-the-Actor. And
of course, the longer and more considered Jonson remarks on Shakespeare that he
makes in _Timber_ are passed over in silence.
At that point, I gave up reading, and sighed to myself, "Much thanks for David
Kathman ..." Why keep a dog and bite yourself:
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/kathman.html
>
> That amounts to a mischievous suppression of evidence.
>
Yup. Spot on.
>
> The case that there's something unacceptably odd about Shakespeare's
> authorship fizzles away when we look at a comparable workaday playwrights from
> relatively bourgeois backgrounds like Heywood and Dekker. The almost total
> lack of information about their lives strikes no-one as suspicious. Yet they
> produced plays by the hundred.
>
Not just the Other Ranks. Applies to John Webster too, among others. Don't
even start me on Dekker. What do you mean, "lack of information"? We know he
was banged up in the Counter for debt, for goodness sake! You'll be telling me
he was a plagarist next, or had no sense of humour.
(Sorry, Michael, Quite Unnecessary Digression, but Dekker is one of my heroes,
and I tend to get defensive when his name crops up.)
Oh, incidentally, the absolutely hot-off-the-press scholars-tremble Discovery
About Dekker is that he didn't exist. Thomas Nashe faked his own death in 1601
and re-emerged passing as "Thomas Dekker". Kid you not!
R
>
>
> What I would concede is this. Shakespeare was not just a normal bloke, if
> normal blokes do indeed exist. He has his enigmas, though those enigmas are
> absent from his legal and business records, and it looks like he led quite a
> divided life. Biographical material in the Sonnets suggest he had a pretty
> colourful life in the capital, well away from his wife, children and legal
> business. He did mix with top nobility and he was at least theoretically
> bisexual. The plays suggest someone with a more than exceptional openness to
> an incredible range of society and its interests.
>
> But substituting Shakespeare for someone else (usually someone posh)
> doesn't make him less of an enigma and it generates significant new
> difficulties - such as how this posh person's full-time involvement in the
> commercial theatre for a quarter of a century could pass unremarked. (And
> turning the author into a noble lord makes it only more incredible that he
> could write, for example, the hostler's scene in 1H4.)
>
> Doubting that a person with Shakespeare's apparently commonplace
> background could be so interesting, gifted and enigmatic betrays an
> extraordinary scepticism about the possibilities of the human spirit. That's
> what I think, anyway.
>
