http://www.samsloan.com/shakespe.htm No, not really. I just thought it was funny, given the whole new “Authorship Coalition” thing. This “proof” showed up in my feeds today. I can’t really tell, since the argument is all over the place, but I think his argument is that there can’t even have been such a person as Shakespeare – most of the piece is about how surely there’s nothing but a bag of rocks buried in Shakespeare’s grave. Ummm….isn’t that one of the points not being questioned? There certainly was a Shakespeare, we have loads of records to prove it, including his will and signature. The question is whether that guy wrote the plays. The author of this particular piece believes that “the true author of Shakespeare was a woman. In general, women make better writers than men. This is a proven generic fact.” I think perhaps that a woman should have written his article for him :).
I am quite surprised of this continued noise about Shakespeare, especially when it comes from actors and one of the founders of the Globe Theatre. I am surprised because of the inconsistencies of their questions:Edward De Vere. How can he be Shakespeare, when he was an author of plays and poems, and they passed away almost without notice in his time and in the following years. And what on this earth could bring him to write the fantastic Shakespeare plays and not tell to anyone, relinquishing all fame and money to an unknown person named William Shakespeare?Francis Bacon: god save us. The Bacon theory was proposed by a woman clearly not in possession of her mind. No one ever read the 653 dull and thick pages of her book, that proved nothing. But. But still people keeps talking about all the nonsense. And all the rest. I’d say Bill Bryson explained it all better than me. I only wish we could and would spend our energies in a better way than talking about non existent proof of how Marlowe/De Vere/Bacon/Kermit the Frog/Who Else wrote Shakespeare plays… ;)My respects..
A ‘proven generic fact’? Eeeeesh… I don’t think I even want to touch that one.
I don’t so much find fault with the fact that people love to question Shakespeare’s true identity, it’s their reasons for questioning that leave a bad taste.
If he was a woman, though, I bet he’d have been clever enough to find a way to get the women to play the man’s roles instead of the other way round.
Here’s a quote from Harold Bloom, a giant of Shakespearean scholarship:
“Yet Marlowe, himself a wild original, was Shakespeare’s starting point, curiously difficult for the young Shakespeare to exorcise completely.… And yet that means the strongest writer known to us served a seven-year apprenticeship to Christopher Marlowe, only a few months older than himself, but London’s dominant dramatist from 1587 to 1593, the year of Marlowe’s extinction by the authorities.”
(Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Major Dramatists: Christopher Marlowe, 2002 p.17)
This kind of statement occurs often in Shakespearean commentary, which led me to wonder if perhaps there might be some truth to the Marlowe theory. It’s a possibility worthy of consideration. The motive here is simple curiosity, nothing more.
Cheers