WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

See Also: BEARS Bear Pits; LANGUAGE & SLANG; THE REAL FALSTAFF

 

The Authorship Debate

In the early 19thC the adherents of Romanticism held that works of art should be regarded as being a spiritual autobiography. However, the few surviving documents that related directly to Shakespeare revealed clearly that he had been a litigious moneylender. Therefore, some Romantics sought to dissociate the man from his works. German scholars had brought new levels of scholarly analysis to The Bible and to Homer's Iliad. These critical techniques were applied to the Bard's output.

Delia Bacon, an American lecturer, came to the conclusion that Shakespeare had not written the plays and poetry that had been attributed to him. She decided that these compositions had been created by Francis Bacon.1 She believed that the lawyer and scientist had found Queen Elizabeth I s reign to be despotic and had written the texts in order to try to propagate a republican creed that had ultimately led to The Declaration of Independence (1776). In 1857 she set out her beliefs in a book that she entitled The Philosophy of The Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. Two years later she died in a lunatic asylum.

Bacon s Bacon theory was taken up by numerous enthusiasts in the United States. That the judge-researcher had been known to be interested in cyphers led to Shakespeare's works being closely scrutinised for secreted messages. Orville Ward Owen, a Detroit physician, concluded that copies of the plays in Bacon s handwriting had been placed in waterproof, lead containers that had been cast into the River Severn. The waterway was dredged without any such vessels being recovered. A reaction set in. However, rather than Shakespeare's authorship being reasserted, new alternatives to him were sought. Those who came to be considered included Christopher Marlowe, the 6th Earl of Derby, and the 5th one of Rutland.

J. Thomas Looney was a schoolmaster from the North-East of England. He espoused the candidature of the 17th Earl of Oxford and published his claim in the book Shakespeare Identified (1920). This work held that the plays had advocated a form of feudalism. In the polemicist's opinion the fact that the peer had died in 1604 did not confound the argument nor did the chronological reality that Macbeth had been written two years later and The Tempest in 1611. Facts that were seen as supporting the thesis included: Oxford had married his wife when she had been the same age as Juliet had been; his mother had remarried after his father's death, as Hamlet's had; and he had three daughters, as King Lear had had. In 1922 the Shakespeare Fellowship was set up to promote the Oxonian cause. The organisation's members were soon claiming for the earl much of the late 16thC dramatic canon, as well as advocating a range of fanciful theories that connected him to prominent figures of the age.

Looney s supporters came to include Sigmund Freud. The Anglophile had believed that Shakespeare had written Hamlet after his father's death. The drama had been central to his creation of his Oedipal theory. However, subsequently it had been established that the Bard's father had been alive when the work had been written. Therefore, Freud had felt compelled to believe that it had been authored by someone other than the actor-manager. Prior to Hamlet's composition, the peer's father had died and his mother had remarried. Therefore, the psychoanalyst became an Oxonian.

The Bacon controversy intrigued the American textiles millionaire George Fabyan (d.1935). He owned the Riverbank Laboratories, a private research facility that included a code and ciphers department. Among the people whom he employed at Riverbank was the geneticist William F. Friedman. Initially the researcher was prepared to use his analytical skills to support his employer's opinion about the dramatist. However, over time Friedman, together with his wife Elizebeth Friedman, became an opponent of the theory. The couple's forensic analysis of it destroyed the plausibility of the idea's standing.2

Location: 40 Langham Street, W1W 7AS (purple, blue)

Website: https://malone.com (The Malone Society. Edmond Malone was a barrister who gave up the law in order to become a man of letters. His An Inquiry Into The Authenticity of Certain... Miscellaneous Papers ... Attributed To Shakespeare (1798) demonstrated that William Henry Ireland had faked a number of supposed Shakespearean documents.)

https://shakespearefellowship.org

1. The Bacons were not relatives of one another.

2. In 1940 Mr Friedman played the leading role in breaking the Japanese state's Code Purple cipher.

 

Blackfriars Playhouse

Blackfriars Playhouse was an indoor theatre. It allowed Shakespeare to utilise effects. The Tempest (c.1610) was informed by this development.

During plays that were written to be performed there needed to be breaks in the action so that the candles could be trimmed. Therefore, music and costumes probably became more prominent.

Location: Puddle Dock, EC4V 3DB. The Mermaid Theatre may have been built upon its site. The building is now a conference centre. (orange, blue)

 

The Educators' Embrace

It is possible to make an argument that in the mid-19thC educationalists, such as Matthew Arnold, responded to the decline in the Church of England s moral standing - in the light of natural selection, etc. - by encouraging the teaching of English literature and especially Shakespeare as a means of inculcating spiritual values.

By the close of the 19thC Shakespeare was inside the educational canon. He was a vernacular alternative to the Classics. By the early 21stC its place in the culture was principally as a means of passing exams.

 

The First Folio

In 2006 228 copies of the First Folio existed.

 

David Garrick

Until well into the 18thC Ben Jonson was regarded as being a more important playwright than William Shakespeare.

One effect of the Licensing Act of 1737 was to increase the number of productions of plays by dead playwrights. Shakespeare was of the number.

Garrick s acting style was well-suited to Shakespeare.

From The Bedford Inn in Covent Garden, Garrick campaigned for a Westminster Abbey memorial for Shakespeare. It was part of a campaign to try to make the acting profession more respectable.

Garrick organised a Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon that was held in 1769. It was a rain-sodden disaster. However, it did aid the Bard s reputation. A greatest hits assemblage transferred to Drury Lane and became the longest-running show of the Georgian era.

The actor-manager nursed publicity. He understood merchandising. There are 250 portraits of Garrick. The Garrick Club possesses 21 of these.

His funeral procession was vast.

Location: The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street, WC2N 6HT. (The building stands on the site of Garrick's home at 5 Adelphi Terrace. The plaque that was on the building was re-mounted on 15 Garrick Street, WC2E 9AU.) (orange, grey)

27 Southampton Street, WC2E 7LN (brown, orange)

 

History and Politics

The English history plays were performed by ensembles. The later ones were star vehicles.

History plays were a feature of the 1590s when the succession was an open question.

In 1599 the Bishops Ban made it far harder to write history plays. Shakespeare stopped writing about English history. Essex rebelled in 1601.

Some of the plays were published while Shakespeare was alive. The first printed edition of Richard II omitted the deposition scene.

The three Roman plays gave Shakespeare greater liberty to consider monarchy, e.g. with regard to regicide.

 

Individuality

The poet and satirist Alexander Pope devoted much of his time to translation and literary criticism. He commented that in the works of Shakespeare even those characters who have only a few lines of dialogue sound like no other figure in any of the Bard's other plays.

 

Lost Works ... Possibly

St Faith s-under-St Paul's was the stationers church. It was destroyed during the Great Fire. It was still burning a week later. The Mosley family kept stock there that may have included now lost works by Shakespeare.

Location: St Paul's Cathedral, St Paul's Churchyard, EC4M 8AD. The church was demolished in the 13thC to enable the cathedral to be expanded eastwards. The parishioners were granted a space in the crypt. (purple, turquoise)

 

The Red Book

The Red Book is a text that first owned by Johnston Forbes Robinson. It is meant to be passed from the leading Hamlet of one acting to the leading Hamlet. Those who have received it are believed to have included: Henry Anly, Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, Peter O Toole, Derek Jacobi, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hiddlestone.

 

The Romantics

In the final years of the 18thC a group of German Romantics gathered around the University of Jena. They developed an interest in the plays of Shakespeare. Sixteen of them were translated by August Schlegel (1767-1845) and his wife Caroline Schelling (née Michaelis) (1763-1809). These became the standard versions in the Germanophone world. English Romantics became aware of this development and began to raise their opinion of the dramatist's output.

 

The Rose Theatre

Philip Henslowe was a Bankside businessman who had interests in several different trades. His interests included involvement in the local entertainment industry. He owned an animal baiting pit in what is now Paris Gardens. In 1587 the entrepreneur commissioned the erection of The Rose Theatre upon one of his properties. The fourteen-sided polygon was the first purpose-built theatre in the district. The venue was run principally by his son-in-law the actor-manager Edward Alleyn. Many of Shakespeare's plays were staged there, as were those of Christopher Marlowe, with whom Alleyn was associated.

The theatre appears to have fallen out of use during the first decade of the 17thC. The structure's archaeological remains were identified in 1989.

Location: 56 Park Street, SE1 9HS

See Also: PHILANTHROPY Alleyn's College of God's Gift

Website: www.rosetheatre.org.uk

 

The Royal Shakespeare Company

Website: www.rsc.org.uk

John Barton

In 1960 Peter Hall persuaded John Barton (1928-2018), a Fellow of King's College Cambridge, to join the Royal Shakespeare Company in a variety of functions. These included writing, adapting, acting as a dramaturg, and instructing the actors about what they were going to perform. The pair's The War of The Roses trilogy merged four plays into three. Fifteen hours were reduced to ten and 60 characters were removed. Much of dialogue was composed by Barton. He could be very absent-minded. He once lit a new cigarette without appreciating that he already had five on the go.

 

The Shakespearean Car

Charles Ware (1935-2015) was an art school lecturer-turned-property tycoon in Islington, Camden, and Bath. In 1971 he went bankrupt. In 1976 he opened the Morris Minor Centre in Bath. He was of the view that cars should last for decades.

Website: www.mmoc.org.uk https://shakespeareanbeyond.folger.edu/2016/03/18/would-you-buy-a-used-car-from-william-shakespeare

 

Shakespeare Globe

In 1979 the American movie director and actor Sam Wannamaker commissioned the theatre historian John Orrell to produce a short report on what evidence remained to enable a recreation of The Globe theatre. From this task a book emerged. For it, Mr Orrell laid Wenceslas Hollar's Long View (1644) panorama of London - which included the second Globe (1614) - onto a modern Ordnance Survey map thereby proving the accuracy of the drawing.

Wannamaker made a series of presentations about his desire. The Futurist architectural thinker Theo Crosby (1925-1994) attended one of these. He had been a member of both the Independent Group and Archigram yet appreciated that his knowledge and professional skills could contribute to the realisation of the project and chose to involve himself in it. He became the theatre's principal architect.

Crosby and the polymath Polly Hope created the idea by which the Globe became its own contractor. This meant that construction was able to stop and start according to whether there were funds available. In 1987 work was started on London's South Bank. Among the things that was learned during the building process was that modern cows were not as hairy as their 16thC predecessors had been - their hair proved to be inadequate for the traditional use of cow and goat hair in plaster. In 1989 part of the original Globe s foundations were uncovered. These suggested that the building had had twenty sides rather than 24 as had been believed up until then.

The Shakespeare Globe theatre opened to the public in 1997.

In 2014 the Sam Wannamaker Theatre opened as a satellite of the Shakespeare s Globe. It is an indoor theatre that is illuminated solely by candlelight. The space has an audience-capacity of 320 people. Its purpose was to help to further the appreciation of those of Shakespeare's plays, such as The Winter's Tale (1611), that were written to be performed in indoor theatres.

Location: 21 New Globe Walk, SE1 9DT

See Also: ENTERTAINMENT, DISAPPEARED; NON-WEST END THEATRES

Website: www.shakespearesglobe.com

 

A Weighty Matter

The actor Sir Ian 'Gandalf' McKellen once asked his fellow thespian Sir John Gielgud about how he should play King Lear. 'Get a light Cordelia!' came the reply. (The play requires that, during Act 5, Scene 3, the monarch should carry the corpse of his youngest daughter.)

David Backhouse 2024