I’ve long believed that the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford were originally written by someone else – someone who had the benefits of more extensive education and life experiences.
Maybe. But it requires one to wilfully ignore the obvious in favour of maybes to back up conspiracy theories. The idea that Oxford, North or Marlowe just happened to have written a play years before that fitted the weather was an incredible stroke of luck for their executors. It was topical, as was the Strachey report.
When death is no impediment to writing plays anyone can be proposed as the author. Clearly North was a major source but just as clearly not the author of the later plays.
Depends on when those plays were written. Were they new in the 1600s, or were they revivals of old plays? For instance, Pericles is considered one of the "late romances" and is dated to 1608-1609 based on what may be its first performance and its quarto publication, but Ben Jonson (see link) called it a "moldy tale" pieced together out of old scraps. Did he mean it was old-fashioned, or did he mean it was actually an old play moldy with age? Given that plays like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are far from first-rate Shakespeare, we have to believe either that he lost his knack for writing masterpieces or that these were early efforts later revised and restaged.
Hi Michael, once you know that the first 3 acts of Pericles are by George Wilkins you can clearly hear 'Shakespeare' arrive in act 4. It's almost like he's been held up in traffic! So I would suggest that's what Ben Jonson was referring to. There's one thing about The Tempest that no amount of arguing over the Strachey report can discount:the weather. As freak weather conditions battered Western Europe, Contarini, arrived in the middle of a furious tempest. Setting foot on solid - if not dry - land, he described how ‘the violent winds of these last days have caused great floods in the Low Countries, such as have not been seen for forty years. The city of Amsterdam has suffered greatly, for the streets were flooded and the warehouses too, and the merchandize ruined. There is a rumour among the merchants that four ships, bound for Italy and for Venice in particular with cargoes of fish, had fallen into the hands of pirates. God grant it be not true.’ The fierce weather that lashed northern Europe in January was just the start of a devastating year as severe floods swept across the west of England. When the rains finally subsided at the end of February the country was hit by a drought. In June the ‘great rains’ returned. July and August offered no respite as severe weather damaged the crops and caused flooding in many parts of the country; November and December brought more floods. The ferocious weather apparently inspired the setting for what is considered to be the last play to come from the pen of William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
Once you start using 'maybes' to avoid the obvious in favour of a conspiracy you can go anywhere. Maybe Marlow/de Vere/North didn't die... It just gets silly. The weather in 1609 was extraordinary, and the idea that any candidate had previously written a play that foretold the weather and the Strachey report is just stretching credulity for the sake of it. The North source material is a great discovery in Shakespeare studies, it's a shame to spoil it with nonsense suggestions like 'a revival of The Tempest' just to make it fit your bias. If we're to advance the authorship question we need to learn to accept when our bias is leading us off the path.
How do you explain the thousands of unique verbal parallels documented by McCarthy and his colleagues? This goes well beyond merely using North as a source.
It's a fascinating discovery, but North dies before half the plays are written. As with other candidates you then have to start down a road of less and less plausible versions of reality than it being William Shakespeare in the first place. I'd say let the North discovery permeate the mainstream rather than taint it with claims of authorship. Several anti-Stratfordians including myself and Ros Barber have already expressed our doubts so what hope have you got of ever convincing the mainstream? I'm willing to be convinced but a third candidate that was dead by 1605 just makes me despair. If anything the real author outlived William Shakespeare and was around to oversee the first folio in 1623.
Let's not forget that one of the constant criticisms aimed at the clandestined author was rampant plagiarism. See Ben Jonson's poem On Poet Ape (1616) a decade after North and de Vere had left the stage.
Maybe. But it requires one to wilfully ignore the obvious in favour of maybes to back up conspiracy theories. The idea that Oxford, North or Marlowe just happened to have written a play years before that fitted the weather was an incredible stroke of luck for their executors. It was topical, as was the Strachey report.
When death is no impediment to writing plays anyone can be proposed as the author. Clearly North was a major source but just as clearly not the author of the later plays.
Depends on when those plays were written. Were they new in the 1600s, or were they revivals of old plays? For instance, Pericles is considered one of the "late romances" and is dated to 1608-1609 based on what may be its first performance and its quarto publication, but Ben Jonson (see link) called it a "moldy tale" pieced together out of old scraps. Did he mean it was old-fashioned, or did he mean it was actually an old play moldy with age? Given that plays like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are far from first-rate Shakespeare, we have to believe either that he lost his knack for writing masterpieces or that these were early efforts later revised and restaged.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55279/ode-to-himself-come-leave-the-loathed-stage
Hi Michael, once you know that the first 3 acts of Pericles are by George Wilkins you can clearly hear 'Shakespeare' arrive in act 4. It's almost like he's been held up in traffic! So I would suggest that's what Ben Jonson was referring to. There's one thing about The Tempest that no amount of arguing over the Strachey report can discount:the weather. As freak weather conditions battered Western Europe, Contarini, arrived in the middle of a furious tempest. Setting foot on solid - if not dry - land, he described how ‘the violent winds of these last days have caused great floods in the Low Countries, such as have not been seen for forty years. The city of Amsterdam has suffered greatly, for the streets were flooded and the warehouses too, and the merchandize ruined. There is a rumour among the merchants that four ships, bound for Italy and for Venice in particular with cargoes of fish, had fallen into the hands of pirates. God grant it be not true.’ The fierce weather that lashed northern Europe in January was just the start of a devastating year as severe floods swept across the west of England. When the rains finally subsided at the end of February the country was hit by a drought. In June the ‘great rains’ returned. July and August offered no respite as severe weather damaged the crops and caused flooding in many parts of the country; November and December brought more floods. The ferocious weather apparently inspired the setting for what is considered to be the last play to come from the pen of William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
Maybe the weather prompted a revival of The Tempest, rather than inspiring the writing of it. Or maybe there’s no connection.
Once you start using 'maybes' to avoid the obvious in favour of a conspiracy you can go anywhere. Maybe Marlow/de Vere/North didn't die... It just gets silly. The weather in 1609 was extraordinary, and the idea that any candidate had previously written a play that foretold the weather and the Strachey report is just stretching credulity for the sake of it. The North source material is a great discovery in Shakespeare studies, it's a shame to spoil it with nonsense suggestions like 'a revival of The Tempest' just to make it fit your bias. If we're to advance the authorship question we need to learn to accept when our bias is leading us off the path.
How do you explain the thousands of unique verbal parallels documented by McCarthy and his colleagues? This goes well beyond merely using North as a source.
It's a fascinating discovery, but North dies before half the plays are written. As with other candidates you then have to start down a road of less and less plausible versions of reality than it being William Shakespeare in the first place. I'd say let the North discovery permeate the mainstream rather than taint it with claims of authorship. Several anti-Stratfordians including myself and Ros Barber have already expressed our doubts so what hope have you got of ever convincing the mainstream? I'm willing to be convinced but a third candidate that was dead by 1605 just makes me despair. If anything the real author outlived William Shakespeare and was around to oversee the first folio in 1623.
Let's not forget that one of the constant criticisms aimed at the clandestined author was rampant plagiarism. See Ben Jonson's poem On Poet Ape (1616) a decade after North and de Vere had left the stage.