Ron Andrico <[email protected]> wrote: > > As for the less-than-eloquent William Shakespeare, it's just plain silly to > think he actually wrote the canon commonly attributed to his name. He was a > player, a station lower than that of a professional musician.
He was a landowner, a station rather higher than a professional musician. There are all sorts of indications in the Shakespeare plays that the author had working-class/agrarian/merchant background. When Hamlet tells Horatio, "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” he uses terms that gardeners (or hedge-workers, anyway) were still using in the 20th century, and for all I know, the 21st. His characters will talk of sheep as actual animals, rather than as metaphors for people easily led, which is unusual if not unique at the time, but a natural thing for someone who was in the wool business. The word “cheveril” (glove leather, which needed to be more supple than any other leather) three times in his plays (Mercutio tells Romeo "O, here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad;” the Old Lady remarks on Anne Boleyn’s “cheveril conscience” in Henry VIII; and Feste in Twelfth Night says "A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward”) which is three more times than I’ve ever found it in other other author’s words, almost as if the au! thor’s father was John Shakespeare the glove maker. > I think there is strong evidence that the plays arose from the circle > surrounding Lucy Countess of Bedford, including the likes of John Donne, Ben > Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Danyel. I don’t even want to know what you’d consider “weak evidence." > William Shakepeare the playwright is a successful bit of propaganda that > paved the way for other enormous lies that the public buys. Who would have been part of this disinformation conspiracy, and why? Besides Ben Jonson, of course, and a bunch of London publishers, and the theater companies in which Shakespeare was a partner, and the university-educated writers who bitched about the uneducated upstart, and everyone else until the 19th century. > A thinking person considers that tremendous output and weighs it against the > physical reality of the amount of time required to produce all that > scribbling in light of the work a player like William Shakespeare was > required to do in order to survive. The Shakespeare canon is between 36 and 42 plays, depending on one’s attitude about authenticity. Surely, Ron, as someone who has churned out a large volume of deathless, insightful prose as a sidelight to your busy life as a musician, you’re not seriously suggesting that a gifted writer could not produce those plays over the 25 years we know Shakespeare was active. That’s about a play and half per year, and we know that a number of plays were collaborations. If you want to tell me that Telemann had to be identical triplets, I’m with you, but “Shakespeare couldn’t have found the time” won’t hold water. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
