"Shakespeare's Meaning, Motivation and Message" in Concord, Mass.

Next weekend, May 30-June 1, a group of Boston-area Shakespeareans (and your correspondent, a western Mass. holdout) will host three days of Shakespearean presentations, conversations and performance in Concord, Mass., some of which will examine the plays and poems from Edward de Vere's perspective and some of which will hold to the orthodox William Shakspere/Shakespeare of Stratford school.

The Concord Shakespeare Conference and Festival is one of those rare gatherings that will bring both Montagues and Capulets--Oxforidans and Stratfordians-- to the same venue to discuss one thing both sides hold in common: a profound love of The Bard.

I will be giving a talk on Friday night at the Concord Free Library on how Twelfth Night reads like an Elizabethan courtly gossip sheet, circa 1580.

The Friday evening program (also featuring a performance by acclaimed pianist Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell and a discussion on the similarities between Mozart's and Shakespeare's genius) will be free of charge. The remainder of the weekend's full schedule will be held at the Concord Masonic Hall in Monument Square in downtown Concord. A weekend pass for Saturday and Sunday's events is $40.

As local press coverage of the event points out, Concord famous son Ralph Waldo Emerson said that tracing the identity of the Bard is "the first of all literary problems."

And as Orsino counsels his attendant Curio, "Play on."

Counting (Upstart) Crows

[Creative Commons image by Marko K]

Last week on the Internets, two literary bloggers pondered the authorship-related question of contemporary references to Shakespeare. Peter Leithart reprints Bill Bryson's dismissal of the Shakespeare heretics:

In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605 - that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be - Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages of the sonnets and the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Mere in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groat’s-Worth of Wit. John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil. ... The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.

On the other hand, blogger Mundhaus gives a kind tip of the virtual pen to "Shakespeare" By Another Name's discussion of the Robert Greene 1592 reference to Shakespeare the actor as an "upstart crow... beautified in our feathers."

(Some heretics, by the by, make an interesting case that Greene's "upstart crow line has nothing to do with Shakespeare at all but instead was a reference to the Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn.)

Whatever one's interpretation of Greene's "upstart crow" line, though, the larger point in this discussion is not that there are no 16th or early 17th century references to Shakespeare--but instead that those very references leave us with no sense that the man behind those works was the Stratford actor.

In fact, in Diana Price's 2001 book Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography, she painstakingly goes through each of the fabled contemporary references to Shakespeare and demonstrates, to a word, that many in fact suggest the actual author of the Shakespeare works was concealed from public view.

Price examines the paper trail for eleven other writers from the same period (John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, etc.) and finds that each of them can claim at least a handful of documents linking them to their attributed canon of writings.

With Lyly, for instance, we have evidence of his education , record of his correspondence, evidence of a direct relationship with a patron, handwritten inscriptions/letters touching on literary matters, commendatory verses to other writers. With Marlowe, there's also evidence of education, evidence of direct relationship with a patron and contemporary notice of his death.

But with Will Shakspere there is zilch. Plenty of documents about the actor/entrepreneur and plenty of references to the plays and the name on the title page: But nothing that connects the two.

As Price writes (emphases in original),

Shakspere is the only alleged writer of any consequence from the period who left no personal contemporaneous records revealing that he wrote for a living. In contrast, the literary fragments left behind by Shakspere's lesser contemporaries yield more than a name on a title page, a disembodied name in a list or a play review. ...

Scholars have retrieved literary fragments for those lesser contemporaries [i.e. Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, Dekker, etc.] with far fewer man-hours and fewer research grants behind them. Still, in every case, the personal documents reveal writing as a vocation for the individuals in question. If we had the sort of evidence for Shakspere that we have for his colleagues--that is, straightforward, contemporaneous, and personal literary records for the man who allegedly wrote Shakespeare's plays--there would be no authorship debate.

Wright/Obama: "A Christian version of Sir John Falstaff and Prince Hal"

[Creative Commons image by tsevis]

In this week's "Campaign Trail" podcast from The New Yorker, political correspondents/essayists Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza liken the recent kerfuffle over Sen. Barack Obama's retired, contentious former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. to that of a "Christian version" of Henry V.

Hertzberg says:"It's kind of a Christian version of Sir John Falstaff and Prince Hal. The pain that Prince Hal goes through is what Obama is going to have to go through to break this tie."

Elsewhere, the Terre Haute News in Indiana on Saturday weighed in on the analogies to Henry V found in today's headlines:

Shakespeare happens to be pertinent on the matter. The lovable, mischievous, quixotic, boastful, blustering, pretentious, cowardly, hypocritical, deceitful, gluttonous, devilish, joyous, pompous, witty, goodhearted, loquacious, hard-drinking buffoonish and obese sybarite, Falstaff (surely one of the greatest creations in all of literature!) is a fast friend, a bosom buddy of the young Prince Hal, heir to the throne of England and destined to be lionized as Henry V, a great warrior and king of a great nation. Faced with the awesome demands of duty to his country, he brazenly and abruptly breaks ALL ties and allegiances to the old tub of exuberant, joy-generating lard, the beloved and decadent companion of his carousing days of miscreant youth.

But, the writer says, "Obama is no Prince Hal" because at the time the piece was written, Obama hadn't yet cut his ties with the incendiary pastor.

Wherever one stands on the Wright-gate scandal for Obama, scenes from an old history play do seem to be enacted before our eyes on the public stage today.

And now for something completely different

Bet you didn't know the Danish tragedy had a sequel.

When in Romanesca...

[Creative Commons image by evillibby]

Edward de Vere was a lyricist before he turned his literary muse to bigger challenges. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter may have turned in better pop songs over their whole careers, but de Vere -- whose lyrics date mostly from his teenage years and early 20s -- did spin some lyrical silver and gold in his day.

Yesterday, blogger and musician Anchor Mejan posted an adaptation of de Vere's poem "Reason and Affection" for vocals and harpsichord. It's a style of Elizabethan song called the Romanesca. (Alternate link here; lyrics here.)

Mejan writes, "My adaptation does away with many of the standard trills and presents the song as if sung by a local guy in the tavern and in a more relaxed and contemporary vocal style. Song-writing over the centuries still extols the virtues of Love, as does this oldie."

So if you like '60s-style music, give it a listen.

That's 1560s, of course.

Remembering Moses: "Only actors" know Shakespeare

Following actor Charlton Heston's recent death, The Weekly Standard reprints a letter to the editor that Heston wrote in 1997 about an Oxfordian book that had just been published (Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare). Heston agreed with the Standard's reviewer that Sobran was so, so very wrong.

"Sobran misreads Shakespeare as academics do: He treats him as a writer," the rifleman-actor wrote. He goes on to say that Shakespeare had to have been a "poet-player" because "only actors really understand" how Shakespeare works. And, as luck would have it, Heston was an actor. So Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Now go away.

Heston's resurrected missive has been much blogged about over the past few days. The general consensus being: Huzzah, Chuck! You tell 'em!

Still.

For those slightly more inclined toward, say, logic, there's this blog post from best-selling author Michael Prescott, who dissects the Heston letter and the book review Heston references:

We have, then, a playwright and poet who aligns himself with the aristocracy; who shows all the signs of learning and foreign travel to be expected of an aristocrat; who has the temerity to attack the most powerful men in England, and the ability to get away with it; and whose plays repeatedly feature characters and incidents strongly reminiscent of the life of Edward de Vere -- known in his day as a leading poet, though one who (like other nobleman) did not publish under his own name.

Lock 'n' load, baby.

Did Shakespeare visit Venice? ... Does the Pope wear Prada?

[Creative Commons image by Martino Pizzol]

The Times of London this week published an article that reconsiders the "cloak of invisibility" argument: Plays like Merchant of Venice are simply too replete with Venetian lore, geography, etc. that it forces the conclusion that the author must somehow have visited the city he so accurately immortalizes. So, given Will Shakspere as the author, he must have just slipped on his invisibility cloak for a year during those fabled Lost Years and snuck off across the Alps to make his way to La Serenissima -- all, of course, without leaving a single trace in the historical record. And these days, with his place of origin seeming more and more like Speculation-upon-Avon, why the hell not?

Shaul Bassi at the University of Venice recently co-wrote a book with the Italian writer Alberto Toso Fei titled Shakespeare in Venice (published in Italy, in Italian) that weighs in with what looks like not a small chunk of the same evidence "Shakespeare" By Another Name puts forward. Here's The Times:

It was striking that he had given the name “Gobbo” to Shylock's servant, a reference to the carved figure of a hunchback (Il Gobbo di Rialto) on the bridge, a feature well known in Venice but not beyond it. Shakespeare had also used local words such as gondola, as in Act 2, scene 8 of The Merchant, when Salarino remarks: “But there the duke was given to understand that in a gondola were seen together Lorenzo and his amorous Jessica.”

...Shakespeare knew about the Venetian custom of offering pigeons (“a dish of doves”) as a gift, and showed rare insight into cosmopolitan Venice's ethnic and social relations, and its tolerance of foreigners and minorities.

Bene bene! Eccezionale! Couldn't agree more. In fact, if you want to follow "Shakespeare" through Venice -- and the rest of Italy -- there's already a free Google Earth Atlas that let's you retrace his every step from the comfort of your own virtual desktop.

One hitch, though. A slight change of byline is needed.

But if the reader is willing to take that provisional step then, hey, the world is thine oyster.