« To be ... what's the question? | HomePage | More From the (J. Thomas) Looney Bin »
08/28/2007
More From the (J. Thomas) Looney Bin
The second volume of E.K. Chambers' The Elizabethan Stage -- I've been reading it at Queens College's library because spending $700 on four books for a qualifying exam would be more ridiculous than arguing that my dad is Shakespeare -- contains some history of the Earl of Oxford's Men, a company supported first by John, the 15th Earl of Oxford, and later by our boy Edward de Vere, 16th Earl.
Granted, Chambers' book was written in 1923 and seems to put forth the idea that Western theatre can be divided into Before Proscenium Arch and Proscenium Arch Era, but it does provide a nice catalog of Elizabethan and Jacobean actors and companies. Chambers points out that there exist documents which refer to Eddie de Vere as a playwright, "one of the best for comedy amongst us" (99-102). So ... if the Earl was already recognized (somewhat) as a poet and playwright, why would he also write under a different (better?) name and style?
Further, why does this poem by Oxford remind me so much of some of the worst 'fanfic' poetry ever written?
Making fun of Oxford doesn't accomplish much (but I'm still going to do it anyway), but I do think those of us who write about and teach the Bard & Friends should note that there are way too many fairly well-designed, relatively academic-looking authorship sites out there, including those used to promote a pair of PBS/Frontline documentaries exploring the "possibilities" that Oxford or Marlowe could be Shakespeare.
While this obviously isn't the most pressing issue in the world for teachers, The Playgoer perhaps puts it best when he notes that the concept of "teach the controversy" sounds awfully familiar, and fears that "the most susceptible to these conspiracy theories will be high school English teachers, desperate to "spice up" their Shakespeare curriculum for their IPod-coma-induced charges."
13:40 Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this | Tags: authorship
Comments
What are the arch eras?
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | 08/28/2007
Apparently, we all have to start somewhere except the so-called deity from Stratford who exploded on the scene fully formed, spitting out Venus and Adonis and Lucrece.
Edward de Vere left a mighty trail of letters, poems, and other evidence of being a learned man through trial and error. Will from Stratford? Not an iota except fully formed brilliant plays and poems.
You tell me. How many young men have you met who can write Venus and Adonis without spitting out half-baked attempts initially?
Also, why would well-established writers in the 1950s suddenly write under assumed names? Because they were blacklisted. I'm not saying de Vere was blacklisted. I'm just saying there are good political reasons why writers will choose to go underground.
Posted by: Chris Kaiser | 08/28/2007
Chris,
Thank you for your response. I tend to agree that we shouldn't start from an assumption or myth and work from there; in fact, I wouldn't want my students to accept a premise as true merely because someone (or a large group of people) says it's true. One can and should be able to question evidence with additional valid evidence.
I would argue, however, that certain Oxfordian arguments -- specifically those that align Oxford's life with Shakespeare's plays and those that assume that without juvenilia or first drafts, we have no basis for concluding that someone could have "developed" into a great writer -- rest on the assumption that "writing" then meant the same thing as "writing" now. In our specifically post-but-still-influenced-by-Romanticism, post-but-still-influenced-by-Freud culture, an author is an individual creator, writing from his or her "personal experience," encoding "real meanings" in characters' stories, working alone, hoping to someday receive royalty checks. In the Early Modern era, the Author was not yet mythologized (and believe me, while I'm 99.97% convinced that Shakespeare's plays were written by William Shakespeare, I agree that the "Shakespeare myth" has intercepted far too many interesting readings of the plays); plays were "wrought" by actors, theater managers, and writers working in tandem, borrowing from each other and from other sources in a time before copyright could be assigned to an individual author. (In fact, copyright and ownership seem to have been issues among printers, not authors.) Which is why I won't deny the possibility that Oxford may have made some "creative" contribution(s) at some point to his company's productions.
Significantly, those pamphlets and books that rail against or defend the theatre mention little if anything about writers. Gosson attacks actors, theatres, poetry in general, dancing, etc.; Heywood defends plays because of the positive audience response that acting can produce. Three generations' worth of primary sources (including Stubbes, Lodge, Prynne, etc) suggests that the Early Moderns did not conceive of The Author as a creative person desiring to create an original work.
Also, while I agree that an Early Modern writer surely could have "gone underground" because of censorship and a threatening political climate, I'd question why Marlowe -- whose plays in my view pack far more of a political/religious ideology-critiquing punch than Shakespeare's -- took credit for his "own" (again, an unclear concept at the time) plays.
Posted by: PrimroseRoad | 08/28/2007
Dan,
Just a bit of theatre humor. The proscenium arch is the "traditional" (i.e. most Broadway theatres and high school auditoriums) design. Chambers' work on the Elizabethan stage suggests that Western theatre history is a history of the eventual development of the proscenium theatre, the be-all-end-all of stage and auditorium design.
For a great example of why this is completely untrue, go see a show at the Swan in good ol' L-town, where the audience sits on both sides of a long rectangular stage outdoors in the middle of the cemetery. Except for the mosquitos, it's absolutely awesome.
Posted by: PrimroseRoad | 08/28/2007
Post a comment