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