Shakespeare: Actor, Playwright, Social Climber

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/theater/shakespeare-coat-of-arms.html

by benbreen • 10 years ago

27 7 10 years ago

mobile.nytimes.com

kapitza4• 10 years ago

These documents sound legit, but methinks Alan Nelson doth protest too much.

All Oxfordians (people who believe "Shakespeare" was a beard/pen name for Edward de Vere) agree that Shakespeare was an actor, ie, "player." It's also well-known that acting was a low-status occupation in Elizabethan society, explaining why people mocked Shakespeare's coat of arms.

Writing, especially writing erudite verse in the Tudor court style, was not a low-status occupation in Elizabethan society. Anonymity/pseudonymity was not universal, but common.

So an Oxfordian would ask: why is Shakespeare, as a social climber, awarded arms for a low-status profession that's considered basically artisanal in caste, leading to general mockery, when in fact he practices the high-status profession of courtly playwright/poet?

Social climbers were not at all unheard of in the Elizabethan world. What is unheard of is a social climber who is not a social lion, whose resume is well-attested, whose presence and personality is constantly documented -- like, say, Ben Jonson.

Doctors say: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Shakespeare wasn't a social climber at all, but remained a country bumpkin his whole life, as he moved from stagehand to actor to what we'd now call a producer? Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late Tudor court poetry? Maybe, like much Tudor court poetry, it was written pseudonymously, not for publication?

The one coincidence that Oxfordians have to explain is how Vere wound up publishing under the name of this real individual, Shakespeare. Who (like Vere himself, of course) was involved in the theater world. Pseudonyms are typical in Tudor court poetry, but "beards" aren't.

My guess, an idea I've never seen anyone else broach for obvious reasons, is that Will Shakespeare's first occupation when he came to London was... male prostitute. Again, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Vere just thought this week's boy had a pretty name.

Here's some Tudor court poetry, by the way:

http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-edw...

Note the second stanza, which sounds exactly like Shakespeare to my ear. No one else from the period sounds like this. An Oxfordian would call this Shakespearean juvenilia.

Chinjut• 10 years ago

when you hear hoofbeats, think horses

Ok. I think the works authored under the name "Shakespeare" were indeed written by Shakespeare.

kapitza4• 10 years ago

So far as I know, the only historical document that even suggests a link between the playwright and the actor is the preface to the First Folio, by Ben Jonson and (purportedly) Hemings and Condell:

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/firstfolio.html

Even in this text, the connection is pretty artful. And the Elizabethan era is not exactly well-known for frank, transparent confessions in print. The Folio is a rather slender evidentiary basis for supporting a large breeding population of zebras.

You have to remember how status-conscious the Elizabethan era was. Imagine if a scathing academic novel becomes a bestseller, nominally fiction, but obviously a scathing roman-a-clef about the NYU English Department. But the name of the author, as shown on the book, is the name of an illiterate immigrant from Senegal, who happens to sell sunglasses on the pavement outside the NYU English Department.

A zebra would be that the immigrant is actually a brilliant writer, who has overheard many conversations among the professors. A horse would be that the novel is written by one of the professors, who asked the immigrant his name and thought it sounded cool. Or maybe was the immigrant's lover. Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

We are inclined to find the "zebra" version heartwarming and believable, because we believe in the American dream. Elizabethans did not believe in the American dream. They would have found the "country-bumpkin actor wrote courtly sonnets" theory preposterous, and paid very little attention to attestations on paper -- which were notoriously fraudulent. Today's professors have all kinds of problems in figuring out which Elizabethan actually wrote what.

pessimist• 10 years ago

The one coincidence that Oxfordians have to explain is how Vere wound up publishing under the name of this real individual, Shakespeare.

The other "coincidence" they need to explain is why all contemporary references to Shakespeare the playwright point to the Shakespeare from Stratford - from other members of Shakespeare's troupe like Ben Jonson, Heminges, Cowell. Nobody questioned his authorship till hundreds of years later.

kapitza4• 10 years ago

See below. By "all" you mean "one," I think.

It's not even clear that the "Heminges and Condell" text was written by Heminges and Condell. More likely it was just written by Jonson.

Your priors need to be adjusted a little to work with Elizabethan texts. A good rule is that if it's printed on paper and claims to convey some factual information, it is probably in some way a lie.

This was because people often got in trouble for writing things that other people didn't want written. So think of it a little like the Soviet Union. Except in the Soviet Union, there is only one KGB.

Eg, if person A is an earl and person B is not, and person B offends person A, person A can pretty much do anything to person B, up to and including having person B whacked. And there are a lot of people with rank A.

In an environment like this, you're going to develop a literature that is very careful about writing some shit down just because it's true. So nobody really trusts anything in print. So why not be in the habit of constantly embroidering, which is after all an art form of its own? What you write down is what should be true, according to whoever you want to please today.

So it's not that the Elizabethans were all chronic liars, or whatever. But decoding what really happened in a period like this, from the various lies and embroideries that people wrote on paper, is never a task to be taken lightly.

spaced_out• 10 years ago

You are aware that de Vere died in 1604, and Shakespeare published 13 plays between then and his death in 1616? Among those 13 are some of his best works, like King Lear and Macbeth, so it's not like he was running out of 'A' material in those years either.

Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late Tudor court poetry?

I imagine you as some sort of cartoonish stereotype of a British noble, twirling your moustache as you say: "Because surely, a mere commoner could never have written such great works!"

The fact is that Shakespeare worked at the Globe Theater as a playwright when these plays were produced, and received much critical acclaim for his writing. No one disputed that during his lifetime. Furthermore, his father was an alderman, the rough equivalent of a town councilman in Stratford, so although Shakespeare was not a noble, he did come from an educated family.

Of course, hundreds of years later, people can make up all sorts of stories to explain why someone would pour hours of work into writing poetry in iambic pentameter, see them praised, give credit to a random bum, and continue to do this for decades (even from beyond the grave, apparently). There is, however, not a shred of evidence to back any of this. The fact that the writer of those plays was clearly very talented is not evidence against them being written by William Shakespeare. The fact that "to [your] ear" they sound like something de Vere wrote is not evidence of anything either.

Shakespeare conspiracies are literally Ancient Aliens level history. "There are some details we don't know about history, so therefore aliens!" is replaced with: "there are some details of Shakespeare's life we don't know, so therefore it must have been some sort of crazy conspiracy!"

kapitza4• 10 years ago

The dating of the Shakespeare plays is incredibly arbitrary and unknowable. Are you aware how thin an evidentiary foundation our knowledge of these issues rests on?

By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the preface of the First Folio.

A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He signed his name with a mark:

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-didn...

The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today. The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly small.

A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set. If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be pretty low.

Shakespeare: Actor, Playwright, Social Climber

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