My favorite is still the story (pasted to my office door) proposing that
Elizabeth I is really Shakespeare on the grounds that both had a receding
hairline.
Peter C. Herman
At 08:12 PM 6/28/2004 +0000, you wrote:
>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
>
>==============Original message text===============
>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.
>===========End of original message text===========
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