Dear Anne (and all),
I missed the news story (thankfully -- this stuff always gets under my
skin), but the idea of Mary Sidney as Shakespeare is not actually new.
Schoenbaum (Shakepeare's Lives, 428-29) cites Gilbert Slater, whose
"Seven Shakespeares" (1931) posits a collaborating group of rival
authors. Slater detects "a female bouquet" (Schoenbaum's metaphor) in
Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, and King Lear, and
apparently this is due to the contributions of Mary Sidney. He even
suggests that Jonson's address to Shakespeare as "sweet swan of Avon"
indicates his awareness of Sidney's involvement. The other members of
Slater's group, by the way, are Bacon, Ralegh, the earls of Derby,
Rutland, and Oxford, and finally Marlowe. Why pick and choose from among
rival claimants when you can have them all!!
Hannibal
Hannibal Hamlin
Department of English
The Ohio State University
1680 University Drive
Mansfield, OH 44906
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On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 11:36:52 -0400 [log in to unmask] wrote:
By the way, did anybody else notice in the recent Newsweek a little notice
about a scholar, I think the story said Robin Williams, but I may be
recalling the actor, who is arguing that the real author of Shakespeare's
plays is Mary Sidney? Is this a joke? The idea is that she was an
aristocrat and so knew about power and courts and such AND she wrote
plays. Nothing in the short news article about why she would be so good at
writing tavern scenes, but maybe some Sidney scholar could explain. Anne.
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