Shakey authorship
The TLS has arrived early this week due to the long Easter weekend ahead. The opening review by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate is of a book called Shakespeare, Co-Author, an expensive 500-page study that looks at the compelling evidence to suggest the Fifth Greatest Briton only co-authored many of his plays. This doesn’t interest me but it does come as a surprise. The Elizabethan playwrighting scene is compared to modern day Hollywood, with its more flexible notions of authorship. When the plays came to be published, Bate says, “booksellers reckoned that pinning up a title-page advertising The London Prodigal by William Shakespeare would guarantee more sales than one such � by a whole bunch of dramatists no one had ever heard of.” (Of course, we’ve not heard of The London Prodigal, along with many others attributed to Shakey because they didn’t survive in the canon.) At least this would explain the apparent contradiction between Shakespeare the provincial dullard of biography, and Shakespeare the Classical sophisticate of the plays. Bate is more or less convinced that he isn’t the sole author: “Romantic Shakespeare, with his unblotted manuscripts and solo inspiration, has had a very long run for his money” he says. “What we need now is a pragmatic Shakespeare who is at once back among his fellows and alive to co-authorial reconstitution even after his physical death.”
We’re back in the more general ye olde worlde Authorship debate, I suppose. It won’t die for one good reason: the world loves Romantic notions of lonely achievement. After all, the most solitary of all is the reader of the work. How nice to devise the author as company, even after his metaphysical death.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Othello: a question
- Calm Down Minutes ago, I zapped through the TV …
- Getting Kafka wrong, again
- The Groom of the Stool speaks out
- Judas voodoo kit: twitch, twitch
