Shakespeare and Myths About Genius

[GreatGazoo]

36. Henslowe is a gold mine

and likely survived, ironically, only because paper was so scarce thus the same folio was reused.

In transcribed and searchable format:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924026121305/page/n95/mode/2up?view=theater

The Shakespeare works were steadily improved over most of a lifetime and perhaps polished yet again in 1623. I agree that having more posh origins is SEEN (perhaps feared) as making the works less attractive to wider audiences but I think their strength and appeal comes from what is on the page -- the economy of the language, the polish, the power to evoke. Eg. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little lives are rounded with a sleep." They show someone who was obsessed with languages, not just English.

It is easy to rule out the Stratford origins based on the available documents which show a person who is nothing like the author. The person in those legal documents is petty and vindictive, leaving his wife only "the second best bed". More damning to the case are the abbreviated "signatures" made on their behalf and in secretary hand. I find it impossible to fathom that the greatest writer in the English language could not sign his own name but it such illiteracy is perfectly consistent with the life of a market town business man whose parents and children were illiterate at a time when most people were.

Some have theorized that the Shakespeare manuscripts were destroyed in the Ben Jonson desk fire. The timing of which fits with the folio publication. Recently Robert Prechter published his work which alleges that the hand behind Shakespeare wrote under a dozen other pennames and he lays out a timeline of when names were introduced and retired. It is fascinating even if not completely satisfying in its proof. He says he published because he wanted feedback and he will revise as facts demand.

Lost in the popular understanding of Shakespeare is that the most popular works published with that name were also the first ones to use it -- the long, erotic poetry of 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece'. These are explained away as something that Shakespeare was reduced to doing during the plague when theaters were closed but they read nothing like a first effort by a market town grain dealer. Far easier to see them as the works of someone in midlife; someone with a strong background in classical literature. IIRC the first printing was anonymous, the second used a hyphen to signal that "Shake-speare" (verb + noun) was a pseudonym. OTOH Shakspere (pronounced like Shack Spur) was a very common surname. Shakespeare is a pseudonym even if Shakspere was the one using it.

Proving who didn't write it is far easier than proving who did. Bacon was never a good candidate and that is why the traditionalist like that to cite that one. Marlowe fits the timing and the style but deVere checks all the boxes. Whole other discussion. Read a great book last year by a journalist who stumbled into the same fire storm that Samuel Clemens, Freud, John Paul Stevens, Mark Rylance and hundreds of others found. Her book looks at the whole phenomenon of the "forbidden" Stratford debate and builds on that by looking at the often dysfunctional dynamics of academia.