• North of Shakespeare / The True Story of the Secret Genius Who Wrote the World’s Greatest Body of Literature | Biography Of Shakespeare

  • No Conspiracies, no speculation, just the documented proof that Sir Thomas North wrote the plays and that Shakespeare merely adapted them for the public stage. Yes, Shakespeare wrote everything clearly attributed to him while he was alive; yes, all the Shakespeare-era title pages were correct; but as "North of Shakespeare" shows, most of the plays attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime and even up until 1620 are not the same plays that everyone now believes he wrote.

  • Specifically, a thorough analysis of seven rare documents has confirmed that the impoverished, war-weary scholar-knight, Sir Thomas North, was the one who actually penned the original “Shakespearean” masterpieces and that Shakespeare had merely adapted North’s plays for the public stage.

  • The true story of North and Shakespeare, unlike all other speculations over authorship, whether put forth by orthodox scholars or intelligent dissidents, is devoid of all conspiracies, hypothetical behind-the-scenes-intrigue, or outlandish and dastardly motives.

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• “True, Original Copies”: A Tale of a Shakespearean Paper Trail… or Two… or Three | Regina Buccola @ Roosevelt University

  • I have noticed a curious set of coincidences related to the seemingly endless and boundless cultural preoccupation with not only Shakespeare but also with the Queen who ruled England for most of his life and the majority of his writing career, Elizabeth I. 

  • I have begun to come to the conclusion that Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare maintain their cultural predominance precisely because of the co-dependent biographical lacuna they inhabit.  Not only is frustratingly little known about the personal lives of these two people, who lived in the same place at the same time, but what we do know about them seems to defy explanation, or belief.

  • Elizabeth deftly parried numerous marriage proposals from the crown heads of Europe, the appeals of her own Parliament that she marry and produce an heir, excommunication by the Pope along with exculpation for any Catholic who might find the opportunity to assassinate her heretic self,

  • Enter Shakespeare, pursued by a bear from the Warwickshire hills of Stratford-on-Avon to the seedy theater district of Southwark in London

  • Shakespeare’s plays made him and his theater company so successful that they were eventually able to afford the luxury of two theaters

  • Shakespeare was ultimately able to purchase a coat of arms for his father that enabled him to style himself the son of a gentleman (in other words, “old money”)

  • Who was this Queen, with the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king – and a king of England, too?  Who was this man, who wrote such compelling lines for female characters meant to be played by boy actors and such racy Petrarchan sonnets about ménage a trois with a very un-Petrarchan “dark” lady and a winsome youth, “the master mistress of my passion”?  We don’t really know.

  • In fact, our lack of knowledge about these things makes us call into question the things that we do know: that the powerful, indomitable Queen remained single all of her life and vowed to die a virgin, and that the poet-playwright actually wrote the works attributed to him.

  • How did “gentle Shakespeare,” the unassuming “upstart crow” from the sleepy hamlet of Stratford write Hamlet, among other cultural touchstones?  To close the gap between our bookends, we must shelve the intertwined stories of Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.

  • Enter Thomas Middleton, “our other Shakespeare.”  Rather than issuing a challenge to Shakespeare’s primacy, or even authenticity, there is a paradoxical way in which the presence of an “other Shakespeare” from the same place and roughly the same time ought to reinforce our belief in the possibility of the true original Shakespeare.

  • Spoiler alert: if you’ve not yet seen Anonymous, and have it saved in your Netflix queue, I am about to give away a major plot point. 

  • Elizabeth embodies, within herself, the Madonna/Whore complex.  Anonymous is no different; indeed, early in the film, Elizabeth shoves the randy Earl of Oxford into her throne, and mounts him.  For you see, in the words of Shakespeare, “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em” (Twelfth Night 2.5.126-127).

  • If you want to read a lively and witty refutation of every theory put forward in support of any alternative author of the tragedies, comedies and histories of William Shakespeare, allow me to suggest James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? If you want to read a fantastic review of Anonymous, enumerating every absurdity the film commits, allow me to suggest “10 Things I Hate About Anonymous: And the stupid Shakespearean birther cult behind it” by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate

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• Shakespeare’s Sources – Measure for Measure | Blogging Shakespeare

  • Continuing my series of blogs about Shakespeare’s sources for his plays, we now take a look at one which is currently being staged at the RSC, Measure for Measure. You may recall that in this story the corrupt Angelo offers the innocent Isabella a chance to save her brother’s life if she will sleep with him. Shakespeare manages to find a way for this situation to be resolved without any of the victims having to seriously compromise their morals. In other words Isabella does not have to sleep with Angelo and her brother’s life is also saved. Neither Shakespeare’s first source for the play George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578) nor the tale it was based of Epitia and Juriste by Giraldi Cinthio, (1566).  spare Isabella’s virtue. Here is a summary of Whetstone’s play.

  • For whatever reason Shakespeare seems to have wanted to find a resolution to the story in which he could save his Isabella’s virtue. And he does so by introducing another character and another sub plot. That of the jilted Mariana, whom Duke Vincentio (In disguise) describes to Isabella

  • So Shakespeare manages to write into his retelling of Whetstone’s play a bed trick in which Marianna is substituted for Isabella thus sparing her virtue and insuring Mariana makes the match she desires with Angelo. A rather happier happy ending than Whetstone’s had been. Curious then that Shakespeare adds to his own version a proposal of marriage from the duke to Isabella but does not tell us how she responds to that, so having preserved Isabella’s innocence he leaves her (and us) with an unanswered question as to her future.

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• Film Reviews, Hong Kong Cinema Listings & Interviews – Time Out Hong Kong | Rhys Ifans

  • As the star of the new thriller by Hollywood’s Roland Emmerich – the demolition man behind Independence Day and 2012 – Rhys Ifans has some explaining to do. “We do set the theatre alight a couple of times,” the actor insists; Anonymous, a Shakespearean what-if drama that questions the playwright’s authorship, is unusually bereft of its director’s trademark explosions

  • Anonymous does have a stick of dynamite at its core, especially if you happen to be a Shakespeare scholar. Besides being a zesty dramatisation of the goings-on of Elizabethan England, the movie makes the claim that William Shakespeare was no more than a highly paid beard – illiterate, no less! – for one Edward de Vere (Ifans), the educated 17th Earl of Oxford and incestuous lover of the Queen.

  • Disrespect is something Ifans clearly relishes. He was the narrator of the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop – also, however loosely, about an anonymous artist, the provocateur Banksy. (The parallels aren’t lost on him: “We don’t know who Banksy is; that’s what gives him his power.”) Is Ifans drawn to the controversial? Ask him, and it’s more about telling truth to power. “Especially in those days, theatre was an arena in which ideas could be expressed to wider society,” he says. “It had the power that the internet does now, and would have posed the same threat to a totalitarian state as we’re seeing in the Middle East. That’s why these theatres were razed to the ground, because they were subversive and enlightening to a large populace.”

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• MERCER-GOLDEN: Imagining Shakespearean authorship | Yale Daily News

  • At the beginning of Shakespeare at Yale (SaY), a semester-long program designed to showcase the Shakespearean riches we have at Yale (and oh, what riches!), I thought I’d write something about the question I enjoy being asked least as an English major: Did Shakespeare write his own plays?

    On the surface, this is a simple question: We accept the validity of the claims made on Shakespeare’s behalf, or we start looking for another authorial candidate.

    The problem, unfortunately, is that we imagine authorship differently today than it was imagined 400 years ago.

  • I hope as we move into this semester of SaY that we start asking the right kinds of questions about Shakespeare and challenge the traditional ways we read him, no longer reading his plays through the lenses of snobbery or modern publishing practices but, instead, as works that teach us — in the words of Harold Bloom — not only about our humanity, but also about our history.

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• World is plagued by Shakespearean villains – Ralph Fiennes – UKPlurk

  • Gerard Butler describes Coriolanus as "fresh and relevant" as he joins his co-stars, the film’s debut director Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave for a special screening of the Shakespearean drama in London. Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut is a modern more

  • Gerard Butler talks about how Ralph Fiennes’ modern take on Shakespeare’s political drama Coriolanus is very relevant and fresh today. Rough Cut (no reporter narration)

  • Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus has been reworked by Ralph Fiennes, in his directorial debut, into a timely modern-day tale of betrayal, political unrest and civil discontent. ‘Coriolanus is described in Shakespeare’s play as being “a thing of blood”

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• Shakespeare for All Time » Blog Archive » Occupy: What Would Shakespeare Do? by Dave Paxton

  • What would Shakespeare do, confronted by, as Erich Heller once put it in another context, ‘the amazing scene upon which we now move in sad, pathetic, heroic, stoic, or ludicrous bewilderment’?

  • Well, how do the plays themselves present power and protest?

  • King Lear is a play about a king who loses all of his power, and learns to feel what it is like to be a beggar. More than that: it is a play in which a group of rich and powerful men are wrenched from the corridors of power, dressed in rags, and forced to live outside in the cold. All of these men individually, enduring what they do, come to a new understanding of power, of justice, and of the plight of the poor.

  • Lear’s new understanding of the plight of the poor is moving in itself, but what makes the prayer so extraordinary is that it ends, not with a simple call for compassion, but rather with a demand for economic change, for the ‘superflux’ (i.e. private capital) to be spread around more fairly. The problem of the poor is the problem of the social system itself, and it is the latter that needs to be re-thought and re-constituted.

  • Just as Lear wishes for the powerful to ‘feel what wretches feel’, so too Gloucester wants them to experience hardship, in order that they might learn compassion. On top of this, once again, an urgent economic demand is presented: private capital should be redistributed, so as to ‘undo excess’ and allow everyone their fair share.

     

    These are just two central examples of an intense focus – on class politics, economic justice and human solidarity – that runs through the entire play.

  • Shakespeare’s claim, in King Lear, is that, until systemic injustices are eradicated, no other sort of justice is possible.

  • The Occupy movement would strengthen itself if it realised that its concerns were shared by Shakespeare (along with many other great artists and philosophers of the tradition), and if it looked for ways of using this state of affairs to its advantage. Public readings of Shakespeare plays could be organised within Occupy camps, for example, and protestors could make contact with people at theatres, and at Shakespearean institutions, to see if links could be forged.

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• Sir Ian McKellen: William Shakespeare ‘Enjoyed Sex With Men’ As Well As Women

  • "Romeo and Juliet" may have set a multiple-century precedent for star-crossed — and primarily heterosexual — love stories, but at least one legendary actor of stage and screen believes William Shakespeare enjoyed the company of male lovers in his own personal life.

      

    As the Daily Mail is reporting, Sir Ian McKellen cited the frequently gender-bending plot devices of Shakespeare’s famed plays as evidence that the playwright himself was gay, or at the very least bisexual.

      

    "I’d say Shakespeare slept with men," McKellen, 72, is quoted by the publication as saying. "’The Merchant of Venice.’ centering on how the world treats gays as well as Jews, has a love triangle between an older man, younger man and a woman."

  • The openly gay McKellen, who has starred in several productions of Shakespeare’s works including "Othello" and "Macbeth," went on to note, "And the complexity in his comedies with cross-dressing and disguises is immense. Shakespeare obviously enjoyed sex with men as well as women."

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• The arts in 2012: the British blind spot | Culture | The Guardian

  • A theatre director recently told me that he would not be applying for the currently vacant job of artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, because he wasn’t sure what any of the three words in the organisation’s name mean any more: monarchy, Elizabethan authorship and permanent acting troupes are all concepts currently in flux. In the same way, anyone seeking to promote "British culture" – a key marketing concept in the year of the 2012 London Olympics – faces the problem that the definition of the United Kingdom is contracting while the definition of culture is expanding.

  • Artistically, 2012 will be dominated by two veterans of our academies and libraries: William Shakespeare, chosen as the focus of the Cultural Olympiad, and Charles Dickens, whose bicentenary falls in February. These are undisputed British – or, at least, English – cultural icons of the kind you would expect to find on banknotes.

  • The worship of Shakespeare and Dickens is a heritage reflex; that the two writers will now double as symbols of Britain in an Olympic year is problematic for two reasons.

  • First, there is the problem of familiarity. For British artistic directors to announce their intention of exploring Shakespeare and Dickens is rather like the owner of a fish shop declaring that next year’s menus will focus on seafood.

  • their dominance has had the unintended but severe consequence of disenfranchising generations of non-white acting talent.

  • The World Shakespeare festival, running from April to September, will also approach the plays multiracially.

  • And it’s on this question – of which flag to put on the badge – that the sweat really starts to pour down the foreheads of the cultural commissioners. In a recent article, the outgoing head of the civil service, Gus O’Donnell, predicted that the breakup of the UK is now a real possibility – an issue largely ignored by politicians and newspapers protective of the Queen, or nervous of traditionalist voters. This potential fracturing has dramatic implications for the arts.

  • As actual or psychological independence accelerates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it may be that the concept of British culture is becoming an impossibility.

  • The economic crisis that has made Britain more politically insular and suspicious of Europe has left its culture ever more dependent on co-funding.

    It is also more divided. The idea of someone from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland all going into the same building at the same time used to be the classic structure of a joke. These days it could be culture department policy. The biggest arts festival the UK has seen in decades will struggle to disguise these divisions.

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• Why PETA’s ‘William’ works | GMA News Online | The Go-To Site for Filipinos Everywhere

  • The easy answer is that William, a production of the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), works because it is able to deal with the difficulty of William Shakespeare’s plays without sacrificing its integrity in the process. But also it works because it succeeds in taking on the challenge not just of drawing a line that connects a literary text and contemporary life, but more importantly between Shakespearean drama and the lives of Pinoy high school students. 

  • Because it is able to actually give us a peek at current high school life, and the concerns of our youth, vis-à-vis how literature—Shakespeare at that—can allow an amount of understanding, if not an explanation, for what we go through and how we feel. Right here is its gift to literature and to teaching: it proves to us its relevance in light of our real lives in the everyday.

  • Yes, this is stuff for soap operas, and here is where William proves an adept hand at turning the story into one that isn’t uncomfortably melodramatic

  • So that Richard faces the homosexual bullying by choosing to recite Shylock’s revenge speech from Merchant of Venice, TJ unravels as bully via the to-be-or-not-to-be speech in Hamlet, Erwin finds his voice and comes out of his shell in defense of Richard through Julius Caesar’s friends-Romans-countrymen speech. Estella forgives her mother, and herself, for the distance and anger via Portia’s speech on mercy in Merchant of Venice, and even Sophia, seemingly petty as her crisis is, ties together a newfound love in the poor boy that is Erwin through Juliet’s what’s-in-a-name speech from Romeo and Juliet.

  • And this is really the success of William. That it is able to traverse all these lines that make Shakespeare and literature difficult—to teach, to read, to learn—at the same time that it also deals with very real teenage problems of bullying and family expectations, peer pressure and difference

  • That in the end we are told there is reason to read Shakespeare toward understanding ourselves better, that it will allow us to let go of the masks we wear, that it will ultimately mean an amount of fearlessness—in relation to Shakespeare and in light of life’s struggles—is what makes William relevant and important for today’s Filipino youth and student. 

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