Hamlet, Elsinore and an exploded world

Yesterday, NASA posted as its Astronomy Picture of the Day an x-ray image of something called "Tycho's Supernova Remnant." (Pictured here) What the copy didn't mention is this astronomical object is also arguably known as "yond same star that's westward from the pole" in Hamlet. 

Yet it's predictably opaque and inexplicable why Shakespeare of Stratford (if he were the author of the play) would make such a seemingly random association between an old exploded star and a Danish fable whose inspiration supposedly derived from some kind of nominal homage to his recently deceased son Hamnet. (The boy was named after a Stratford neighbor of Shakspere's, Hamnet Sadler.) 

On the other hand, the allusion fits comfortably within a broader framework that supposes Edward de Vere behind the "Shakespeare" pen. 

Here's the story. 

It's hard to imagine today, but in 1572 when the light from this stellar explosion first became visible on Earth, it was a world-shaking event. Here was a new star -- not on any previous charts -- so brilliant that it was visible even in the full brightness of day. 

There was, simply, no cosmic or scientific explanation for such an unprecedented heavenly phenomenon.  

In England, the mathematician Thomas Digges studied the "new star" and wrote a book about it. Digges dedicated his book to Edward de Vere's new father-in-law Lord Burghley. In Denmark, the legendary astronomer Tycho Brahe made the most precise observations of the object in the world. Thus the object's modern-day name. 

This new star, in effect, upended everything. It provided damning confirmation of an emerging scientific understanding of a dynamic universe. Under the prevailing Ptolemaic system -- which posited all heavenly bodies were unchanging and firmly fixed in place -- such nearly unimaginable notions were heresy. 

Hamlet's reference to Tycho's Supernova (as it's known today) at the beginning of the Danish tragedy, in fact, constitutes a perfect setup to a cosmological debate that takes place throughout the drama. 

Hamlet, in fact, enacts a specific astronomical dispute that Edward de Vere arguably witnessed first-hand in 1583. (Worst case scenario: De Vere did not witness the back-and-forth at Oxford University himself but was privy to courtly gossip about it at the time and enjoyed ample insider access to every detail after the fact.) 

The debate was about old worldviews colliding with new — a familiar and comforting geocentric universe colliding with Copernicus's revolutionary heliocentric one. Hamlet, however, goes into more specific detail concerning both the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (a geocentrist) and the obscure 1583 court appearance of a bombastic Italian scholar (a Copernican) named Giordano Bruno.

There is no explanation for how a 19-year-old Shakspere of Stratford would have witnessed, read about or even cared about this esoteric, egghead dispute, one that was certainly antithetical to crowd-pleasing entertainments at the Globe Theatre. (And that's what we're told a Stratfordian Shakespeare canon is all about.) 

After the jump, two excerpts from "Shakespeare" By Another Name that pick up the story where Tycho's Supernova Remnant leaves off. 

The dumbshow Hamlet - pay no attention to that author behind the curtain

How has it come to this? Hamlet, perhaps the single most celebrated literary work in the English language, is still today widely read as so much dumbshows and noise when it comes to its biographical layers of meaning. 

The editor of the new definitive edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray inadvertently highlights this strange point in a recent interview. 

In the Harvard University Press promotional podcast on its new Gray, editor Nicholas Frankel says

"[Wilde] did say ... that the book 'contains much of me in it.' I think those were his words. '[The characters] Basil Hallward is who I think I am; Lord Henry [Wotton], who the world thinks me; and Dorian Gray, who I would be in other ages perhaps.' I think that's pretty clear evidence that Wilde saw himself all over this novel in all three of those central characters. Although to give him credit, he also said that art generally conceals the artist more completely than it reveals the artist.... So I think he would have been displeased with us wholly reading the novel in terms of himself and his biography. And of course we wouldn't do that with many works of art. We wouldn't do that with Hamlet, for instance. We wouldn't read Hamlet as an expression of Shakespeare necessarily."

Hear the lady protesting too much for yourself below, starting at the 12:20 mark.

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News from Germany (Drei)

From our own Mr. H.W. in Germany today comes this news: Kurt Kreiller's book (Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) will be published in paperback on April 18. This hard-hitting Oxfordian tome, our correspondent notes, has proved since its 2009 release to be "quite a success." Kudos to gentle master Kreiller! 

Moreover, the peerless Oxfordian researcher Robert Detobel (a helpful and careful early proof-reader of "Shakespeare" By Another Name) has a new book coming out in response to James Shaprio's recent anti-Oxfordian diatribe Contested Will. The book cover is pictured here. 

Detobel's Will - Wunsch und Wirklichkeit - James Shapiros Contested Will ("Will -- Wishes and Reality -- James Shapiro's Contested Will") is slated for publication in October. 

According to its press release, the new Will will be challenging Shapiro's "almost unbelievable range of errors... and deliberate distortions."Hear hear! 

Both books are in German only as of this writing. 

"Shakespeare" in Venice - film under construction, carnivale underway soon!

On Wednesday night (April 13), Club Oberon in Cambridge, Mass. will host a fundraising preview party for the film Nothing is Truer Than Truth, a work-in-progress documentary centering around Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and his Shakespearean adventures in Italy in 1575-'76. 

Readers of this blog have been introduced to the filmmaker, Boston-based Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, and to her recent successful Kickstarter.com campaign to underwrite her forthcoming trip to Venice to film on location at many of the sites that de Vere traveled to and immortalized in the "Shakespeare" canon. 

Eagan-Donovan has also recently signed Deborah Cesana, location assistant for recent Hollywood films The Tourist and The Merchant of Venice, to be the production coordinator for her film's Venice-based shoot.

According to Eagan-Donovan, she will be traveling in May to Italy for on-location photography and also this spring and summer will be filming interviews in the U.S. with Oxfordian scholars Roger Stritmatter and Richard Waugaman, authors Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) and Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought), as well as Tina Packer (founder of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.) and Academy Award winning actor F. Murray Abraham.

This. Looks. Big.

Anonymous teaser trailer out today. Wow.  (Postscript: The movie's worldwide release dates are logged here. As of June 29, Anonymous will debut in cinemas in the US & UK on Oct. 28.)

"Shakespeare" = salty dog

Thanks to reader R.H. for passing along this great little excerpt from the book A Gipsy of the Horn: The Narrative of a Voyage Round the World in a Winjammer (Rex Clements, 1925).

Upshot: The Bard knew sailing and nautical terminology first-hand. Almost as if, say, he had crossed the English channel at least four times (SBAN pp. 70-71, 75 & 113), had circumnavigated much of Italy in a Venetian galley (pp. 85-92) and likely plied stormy seas on the open Atlantic, in advance of the Spanish Armada attack (pp. 222-29):

The books that had survived the West Coast had succumbed to the rigours of the Horn and had been dumped, a sodden pulp, overboard.  My battered old Shakespeare was the only book left in the half-deck and I hung on to that with grim solicitude. ... 

On one occasion, when the bosun came in I fired off the first scene of the The Tempest to him. He was immensely taken with it, but would hardly believe it was Shakespeare at all.  However, he knew what "bring a ship to try" was, which was more than I did at the time or, I dare say, a good many others who have read the play.  Shapespeare’s knowledge of the sea always struck me as remarkable.  For an inland-born poet he was very fond of similes, and astonishingly accurate in his use of nautical technicalities.  How did he acquire his knowledge? One ignorant of sea-life would hardly use the phrase "remainder biscuit after a voyage" as a synonym for dryness, or talk of a man as "clean-timbered." I like to think that in the obscure early years of the poet’s life in London he made a trip to sea, perhaps as an adventurer in one of the ships that smashed up the Armada. ['cuz why not? –Ed.] At least, no one can prove he didn’t; [!] and to my mind what more likely than that a high-spirited youth doing odd jobs about the old Shoreditch theatre, in the scampling and unquiet times when Medina Sidonia was fitting out should join some salt scarred vessel. ...

Paula Slater - Sculptor, Iconoplast

Last week, the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Blog featured an interview with Ben August, the Houston entrepreneur who a week ago unveiled one of the most ambitious art projects in the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy -- a life-sized bronze bust of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Below we'll be featuring an extended interview with the bust's sculptor, Paula Slater. 

The de Vere bronze August says, will soon be for sale in a limited edition casting as well as in marble resin and Hydro-Stone. More information on this, as well as August's painted duplicates of the "Wellbeck portrait" of Edward de Vere (on which the bust is based) can be found on his website: VerilyShakespeare.com. 

August said in his interview that once he had the idea in 2008 of replacing his old Shakespeare bust with that of the true Bard, he began looking online and at art exhibitions for the right sculptor to take the project on. Last year, after interviewing and rejecting several other artists, August said he'd finally found his ideal. He commissioned Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.-based artist Paula Slater. 

Slater, pictured here with a rough of the de Vere bust before its layers of patinas had been applied, had sculpted many monuments but in 2009 earned international acclaim as the sculptor of a memorial bust of Iranian revolutionary martyr Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old protestor whose shooting death by Iranian government forces was captured on a widely distributed video on the Internet. Within days she'd  become memorialized around the world as the "Angel of Iran."

I spoke with Slater by phone in early March, as she was putting the finishing touches on her de Vere bust. 

SBAN BLOG: When did Ben August first approach you with his possible commission for the Edward de Vere bust, and what was your first response?

PAULA SLATER: Ben came to me in July [2010]. He sent me an email saying he was interested in commissioning a portrait. We talked about how I do portrait bronzes. Then he emailed that picture [i.e. the Wellbeck portrait of de Vere], and I about flipped over the moon!

SBAN: Why?


SLATER: I sculpt congressmen and senators and leaders of industry. And this was so different. I love doing anything that has period clothing. Anytime there's period clothing, it's a challenge and a stretch.

Then when he emailed me more about the Oxfordian theory and who this actually was, I was totally captivated. I started reading more.

SBAN: How would you describe your own style -- and how would you be applying that for this commission?

SLATER: I like to sculpt in high detail and with museum-quality finishing -- in the style of [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini and Jean-Antoine Houdon.

The Wellbeck is a very flat painting. I really felt that I was going to need to bring it to life. I wanted that knowing look -- yet also knowing there's something hidden behind those eyes. That's what I wanted to capture. 

First I became enthralled with sculpting this portrait, and then I became enthralled with this story. And then I purchased those ["Shakespeare" By Another Name] CDs. You just can't listen to those CDs and believe that anyone else was the author of the works.

I think in hearing about Edward de Vere, I felt there was an intensity and a lust for knowledge, certainly. And a bravado. At that age too, there is an invincibility. I think he displayed all of that. Some of that came across in the Wellbeck, and some of that was my feeling.

He was an aristocrat, and he had that flair with the clothing. He was an extravagant personality. But there's this mystery. He was really a deep thinker. I felt I needed to have this mystery behind the eyes and have this depth of thought.

SBAN: Could you describe the process of making the de Vere bust?