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12/15/2007
The Return of Eddie deVere
Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an Oxfordian biography of Shakespeare (or Shakespearean biography of Oxford?), references Indiana University's Arden Project on his blog this week:
As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.
While the Technology Review article is indeed rather pessimistic about the project's future (Castronova seems to suggest that this was only an early phase of the project, and that they're going to try again), Anderson's suggestion as to why Arden failed is a little bit disconcerting, mainly because he (as many Oxford-was-Shakespeare proponents do) tries to relate every problem we face in Shakespeare studies back to Oxford. Alas, if only we knew the truth, that Edward de Vere wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, we would all be saved.
My own sarcasm aside, here's what Anderson has to say:
I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off.
Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.
The reason why Shakespeare is so "fragmented," he claims, is that "history has stuck [us] with the wrong guy." I've written before about why the 'one guy wrote another guy's plays' argument is ahistorical in terms of how Early Modern authorship worked, I've discussed how 'traditional' scholars actually don't believe that every word written under the name of William Shakespeare was written by William Shakespeare (in fact, a recent discovery suggest that Thomas Middleton wrote parts of Macbeth), so I won't rehash those arguments now.
But I will note once again that pseudohistory is genuinely dangerous.
17:50 Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this | Tags: authorship, arden, biography, pseudohistory
Comments
Hello, Primrose. Thanks for discussing my blog post, above. I appreciate how the single-author model of understanding the Bard or his contemporaries -- or, indeed, screenplays and TV scripts today -- could not ever, under any authorship scenario, encompass the whole of the canon.
Indeed, in "Shakespeare" By Another Name this very idea is at the core, that what has become known today as "Shakespeare" started off as courtly masques and interludes in the 1570s and '80s (e.g. "A History of Error," Hampton Court, Jan. 1, 1577) primarily by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and over time were revised -- no doubt in some cases collaboratively -- and ultimately released to the public stages in the 1590s and thereafter. Two of de Vere's personal secretaries and collaborators at this time were the writers Anthony Munday and John Lyly, important authors long known to have been Shakespearean influences. And perhaps their authorship needs to be included in the story, too.
I also would like to add a little more nuance to my alleged claim that "every problem we face in Shakespeare studies [traces] back to Oxford." Alas, indeed. Once again, the absolutist slant rather misses the point. As a book review in the latest issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly succinctly notes, "If one takes a Shakespeare play and deletes all plot elements that appear in known sources for the plays, what is left often has startling similarities with details of de Vere's recorded life." (Vol. 76, No. 4. Oct. 2007)
If this be the food of, as you dub it, "pseudohistory," then play on.
Happy Holidays to you and your readers,
Mark Anderson
Posted by: Mark | 12/16/2007
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