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Posted: 07-11-2011 15:37 Post subject:

Actually he was a woman. Very Happy

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/28woman.htm

Posted: 14-11-2011 00:03 Post subject:

A woman? Nah!! But a common thug...yes!

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/william-shakespeare-gangster/

Posted: 14-11-2011 20:56 Post subject:

I check out Project Gutenberg every day and a book has just been digitised for those interested:

"Bacon Is Shake-Speare by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837 - 1914).

The link is:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9847

Posted: 20-11-2011 13:56 Post subject:

Posted: 20-11-2011 15:36 Post subject:

Posted: 20-11-2011 19:10 Post subject:

Historical-fiction authors nowadays seem to churn out an endless flood of novels about the various Tudor women -- of which I've read a certain number, some of them postulating decidedly interesting scenarios about Liz's putative love/sex-life. This tale about her, would seem potentially splendid grist to these writer's mill...

Posted: 21-11-2011 18:24 Post subject:

The problem I always have with these theories is the sonnets.

Writing plays was seen as "beneath the station" of someone of noble birth, certainly, but writing sonnets is something that the nobility did without shame.

Even Queen Elizabeth wrote the odd rhyme, which is still attributed to her. (Although Shakespeare may have helped her with the title.)

So if Queen Elizabeth, or whoever the suspect du jour is, wrote the Shakespeare plays, and presumably the sonnets, why are there poems and other literary works attributed to them under their real name? And why is the one example of Elizabeth's poetry I've read so dull? (No, I don't mean the one I alluded to above.)

Posted: 21-11-2011 19:05 Post subject:

Posted: 21-11-2011 19:42 Post subject:

Posted: 23-11-2011 01:52 Post subject:

Shakespeare is an immortal figure and therefore probably still alive in some sense his/her/its attributes therefore being possibly very variable

Posted: 20-08-2012 07:58 Post subject:

Luvvies fall out:

Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance criticised for doubting Shakespeare wrote plays
Leading theatrical figure Dame Janet Suzman has dismissed two of her fellow actors for believing the “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by an aristocrat.
By Martin Beckford
1:21PM BST 19 Aug 2012

Dame Janet Suzman, who has starred in and directed many of the Bard’s plays, said it was “snobbish” to believe that the true author could not have been a playwright from Stratford.
She said it was “strange” that the acclaimed Shakespearean actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance took the “haughty” view that the dramas must have come from the pen of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Dame Janet added that last year’s film Anonymous, which portrayed Shakespeare as a drunken idiot and the Earl as a literary genius, was “far-fetched” and a waste of money.

The South Africa-born actress and director, ex-wife of former Royal Shakespeare Company director Sir Trevor Nunn, told a Sunday newspaper that she got “mad as a snake” about what she sees as the myths surrounding Britain’s greatest playwright.
“It annoyed me… I suddenly felt like Joan of Arc riding into battle.”

Earlier this year Jacobi said that Shakespeare was just a “frontman” for the 17th Earl of Oxford, because the nobleman could not be seen as a “common playwright”.

Rylance, currently performing in Richard III at the Globe, has pointed out that the details about Italy in Shakespearean plays are “exact”, and that the Earl knew the country well.

But Dame Janet wrote in a new book: “You have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine the earl secretly wrote 37 plays, performed and printed over a quarter of a century, without being found out.
“And you have to be a snob if you just hate it that the greatest poet the world has produced was born into the humble aldermanic classes of a provincial town.”
She went on: “How strange it is that Jacobi and Rylance, hundreds of years later, with their outstanding acting instincts, should embrace such a haughty view of the man who has made them as big as they are.”

A spokesman for Rylance said he did not only promote the “Oxfordian” theory while Jacobi was unavailable for comment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-news/9485729/Derek-Jacobi-and-Mark-Rylance-criticised-for-doubting-Shakespeare-wrote-plays.html

Posted: 20-08-2012 20:34 Post subject:

Posted: 20-08-2012 20:53 Post subject:

A good find and thanks for posting it.

I might use those clips when I'm next faced by pupils protesting that Shakespeare is posh!

If I have doubts, it's about the way those very intimate readings would have projected.
Macbeth, certainly, could not have used a microphone voice way-back! Smile

Posted: 20-08-2012 21:09 Post subject:

Posted: 23-04-2013 08:00 Post subject:

Shakespeare scholars try to see off the Bard's doubters
By Sean Coughlan, BBC News education correspondent

This is the 449th birthday of William Shakespeare. Well, actually, it might be his birthday, because we don't really know when he was born.
There is a date for his baptism - with his name recorded in Latin as "Gulielmus" - and then it's a case of working back a few days.

It's an educated guess. And much of the endless debate about the identity of the author of Shakespeare's plays is because so much of the presumed life story is educated guesswork.

But a new book - William Shakespeare Beyond Doubt - wants to put the record straight once and for all, as a forthright counterblast against those who question his authorship.

Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and eminent Shakespearean scholar, now aged 82, has marshalled an international line-up of academics to defend the Bard.
This literary raiding party rounds up and brings to book claimants such as the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.

But why have there been so many questions about the identity of the author?
"I think the phenomenon goes down partly to snobbery; to a feeling of resentment, even anger, that someone from a relatively humble background should have been able to create such works of genius," says Prof Wells.

He also rejects as ill-informed the suggestion that Shakespeare's limited formal education rules him out as the author of the plays.
"A lot of it is due to ignorance, especially of the Elizabethan educational background, of the sort a boy in Stratford could have got at the local grammar school.
"It was rather limited, but a very intense classical education, in rhetoric and oratory, speaking Latin from the time they were eight years old, having to speak it in the classroom and the playground."

Co-editor Paul Edmondson, head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, says the authorship attacks are part of a wider culture of conspiracy theories.
There is a constant curiosity to show that "reality is not what it seems".
But the book also shows how long this struggle has been running.

In the 1850s there were claims for Francis Bacon. When this fell out of fashion, Christopher Marlowe was touted as the secret author, with the argument that he had faked his death and borrowed Shakespeare's name for his writing.

This theory was somewhat scuppered in the 1920s when the coroner's report from Marlowe's inquest was discovered. He might have been killed in very suspicious circumstances, but he was fairly unambiguously dead and buried before many of Shakespeare's plays had been written.

etc, etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22206151

Will's DoB may be slightly iffy, but today is also the anniversary of his death in 1616.