Edward II by Christopher Marlowe

 1/ The Greeks, once known, are seen everywhere. References to the ancient Greeks are scattered all over Marlowe’s play. 

 “QUEEN O miserable and distressed queen!

Would, when I left sweet France, and was embarked,

That charming Circe, walking on the waves,

Had changed my shape! or at the marriage day

The cup of Hymen had been full of poison!

Or with those arms, that twined about my neck,

I had been stifled, and not lived to see

The king my lord thus to abandon me.

Like frantic Juno, will I fill the earth

With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries,

For never doted Jove on Ganymede

So much as he on cursèd Gaveston…” 

(Scene 4)

This is a moving scene. The play is about King Edward II’s obsessive relationship with his minion Gaveston and its impact on the realm—Marlowe begins the play with Gaveston and Edward, then writes about the resentment of the nobles, then lets us see that the one who suffers most is Queen Isabella—it is moving. 

Mortimer Senior also references the Greeks (and the Romans) when defending the King’s relationship with Gaveston: 

“MORTIMER SENIOR […] Thou seest by nature he is mild and calm,

And, seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston,

Let him without controlment have his will.

The mightiest kings have had their minions:

Great Alexander loved Hephaestion,

The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept,

And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped.

And not kings only, but the wisest men:

The Roman Tully loved Octavius,

Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades.

Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible,

And promiseth as much as we can wish,

Freely enjoy that vain lightheaded earl,

For riper years will wean him from such toys.” 

(ibid.) 

Even Edward compares himself and Gaveston to Hercules and Hylas in Scene 1. 

(But then a play about a gay relationship would mention the Greeks, wouldn’t it?) 

2/ Edward II is very different from Marlowe’s other plays. Firstly, it’s about English history. Secondly, whereas his other plays tend to have a dominating character—a Machiavelli or an overreacher—pushing everyone else to the background, Edward II is a much more balanced play and has at its centre a weak king (though in the second half, Mortimer threatens to upset the balance of the play and seems like a typical Marlovian figure). It’s also a more subtle play, with characters plotting and saying things they don’t mean and switching sides.

I can see the influence of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays on Edward II, and in turn, the influence of Marlowe’s play on Shakespeare’s Richard II. 

“EDWARD Nay, then, lay violent hands upon your king:

Here, Mortimer, sit thou in Edward’s throne;

Warwick and Lancaster, wear you my crown.

Was ever king thus overruled as I?” 

(Scene 1) 

Later: 

“EDWARD My swelling heart for very anger breaks.

How oft have I been baited by these peers,

And dare not be revenged, for their power is great!

Yet, shall the crowning of these cockerels

Affright a lion? Edward, unfold thy paws,

And let their lives’-blood slake thy fury’s hunger.

If I be cruel and grow tyrannous,

Now let them thank themselves, and rue too late.” 

(Scene 6)

Edward II and Richard II both explore weak kings, favouritism, and political instability; they both raise questions about the role, power, and responsibility of the king, though I think Shakespeare goes further; Marlowe focuses more on the gay relationship between the king and Gaveston.   

About halfway through the play, Gaveston is killed; his position is then filled by Spencer, an opportunist and flatterer. 

The contrast between Gaveston and Spencer is interesting, because Marlowe lets us see that King Edward II and Gaveston love each other. The former may be an ineffectual king and the latter may be an obnoxious upstart and they both may be cruel to the Queen, but their love for each other appears to be genuine.  

“MORTIMER Why should you love him whom the world hates so?

EDWARD Because he loves me more than all the world.” 

(Scene 4) 

Marlowe does complicate things—what is the relationship between Gaveston and the king’s niece?—but he does give us Gaveston’s soliloquy at the start of the play, and in a few scenes, in Edward’s absence, Gaveston talks about him and not anyone else. It is Spencer who is like the flatterers in Richard II. 

3/ The scene in which Edward seeks refuge in a monastery is so moving. 

“EDWARD […] Stately and proud in riches and in train,

Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp;

But what is he whom rule and empery

Have not in life or death made miserable?⁠

Come, Spenser, come, Baldock⁠, come, sit down by me;

Make trial now of that philosophy

That in our famous nurseries of arts

Thou sucked’st from Plato and from Aristotle.⁠

Father, this life contemplative is heaven.

O, that I might this life in quiet lead!...” 

(Scene 19)

In Shakespeare, there are many speeches about the burdens of being a king (King John, Henry IV…), or about the downfall of a king (Lear, Richard II…). What caught my attention was the word “whilom”—formerly, in the past—which I had never seen in Shakespeare, and possibly had never seen before. 

The abdication scene is even better, and again I can see Marlowe’s influence on Richard II. 

There are some very good lines: 

“EDWARD […] The griefs of private men are soon allayed;

But not of kings…”

(Scene 21)

This is followed by an image of “the forest deer” and “the imperial lion”—Edward refers to himself as a lion quite a few times, but he’s not much of a lion, is he? 

I like these lines from the same speech: 

“But what are kings, when regiment is gone,

But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?” 

This is also good: 

“EDWARD I know not; but of this am I assured,

That death ends all, and I can die but once.” 

(ibid.) 

4/ I note something interesting Marlowe does a few times throughout the play, though I don’t know what you call these pairs of lines—thesis and antithesis? 

“KENT For he’ll complain unto the see of Rome.

GAVESTONE Let him complain unto the see of hell.” 

(Scene 1) 

“EDWARD Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!

MORTIMER SENIOR Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!” 

(Scene 4) 

“QUEEN [to Gaveston] Villain, ’tis thou that robb’st me of my lord.

GAVESTON Madam, ’tis you that rob me of my lord.” 

(ibid.) 

“WARWICK Saint George for England, and the barons’ right!

EDWARD Saint George for England, and King Edward’s right!” 

(Scene 12) 

“GURNEY Your passions make your dolours to increase.

EDWARD This usage makes my misery increase.” 

(Scene 23) 

“EDWARD III My lord, he is my uncle, and shall live.

MORTIMER My lord, he is your enemy, and shall die.”

(Scene 24) 

“LIGHTBORNE What means your highness to mistrust me thus? 

EDWARD What means thou to dissemble with me thus?” 

(Scene 25) 

The best wordplay in Edward II, however, is when Mortimer decides to kill Edward and wants to cover his tracks:  

“MORTIMER […] This letter, written by a friend of ours,

Contains his death, yet bids then save his life.

Reads. ‘Edwardum occidere nolite timere, bonum est’,

‘Fear not to kill the king, ’tis good he die.’

But read it thus, and that’s another sense;

‘Edwardum occidere nolite, timere bonum est’,

‘Kill not the king, ’tis good to fear the worst.’

Unpointed as it is, thus shall it go…” 

(ibid.) 

According to a post I came across, the line comes from Holinshed—sent by Adam de Orleton, not Mortimer. 

5/ In 1970, the BBC broadcast a double feature done by Prospect Theatre Company: Edward II and Richard II with Ian McKellen playing Edward and Richard, Timothy West playing Mortimer and Henry Bolingbroke, Paul Hardwick playing the Earl of Warwick and John of Gaunt, and so on. 

Both are wonderful productions—the entire cast is perfect. Ian McKellen is great, as always (I saw Richard II back in November); Timothy West has a lot more to do as Mortimer; but I especially like Diane Fletcher as she helps me understand better the character of Queen Isabella and her changes throughout the play. 

The more I think about Edward II—such a great play—the more annoyed I get with the Marlovian theory, i.e. the conspiracy theory that Marlowe faked his death and was the real Shakespeare. It’s a distraction from a much more worthwhile pursuit of rereading, rewatching, analysing, getting immersed in Shakespeare’s plays; it’s also a distraction from the brilliance of Marlowe’s actual plays when we should be celebrating and promoting Edward II and Doctor Faustus. 

If you are in the UK and have a school/ university email address, both productions are available on the ERA website. Otherwise, they’re on Youtube, though the quality is a bit lower. 

Jonathan Bate: the influences on Shakespeare

I’ve been reading Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Before this one, I had read two other biographies of Shakespeare: Bill Bryson mostly focuses on what’s fact, what’s myth, and what’s conjecture, and Anthony Burgess writes it from the perspective of a novelist, imagining the man Shakespeare could have been like. Jonathan Bate’s book, as suggested by the title, focuses on the mind: What was Shakespeare (most likely) taught in grammar school? What did he read? Who most influenced him? 

For example:

“The composition of Latin epistles was intended to make the boys skilled in rhetoric, the persuasive use of words for the purposes of argument. Rhetoric meant learning how to order your speeches: exordium, narration, arguments in favor, arguments against, refutation, exemplification, testimony, conclusion. It meant honing your metaphors and developing elaborate figures of verbal symmetry—syllepsis, antimetabole, zeugma, threefold amplificatio (otherwise known as tricolon).” (Ch.5) 

This is how he learnt to see different points of view and argued for different sides. 

“One of the most popular texts in the Elizabethan classroom was the Heroides, Ovid's verse epistles written from the point of view of women in mythology who are deserted by their lovers—Ariadne on Naxos, Dido after the departure of Aeneas from Carthage, and so on. A frequent exercise was to imitate them—“write a letter in the style of X or from the point of view of someone who has suffered Y”—and in this sense they, like the letters of Cicero and Erasmus, would have helped the student Shakespeare to take his first steps in the art of dramatic impersonation. John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe, the two dramatists who most influenced him when he began writing plays himself, both made extensive use of the Heroides as models for the art of a character's self-examination at moments of emotional crisis. The art, that is to say, of soliloquy.” (Ch.7) 

Those who think the real Shakespeare couldn’t have been a glover’s son who went to grammar school don’t seem to realise that grammar school did equip Shakespeare with many skills needed for becoming a playwright. The rest was reading, observation, and genius.

In chapter 7, Bate writes about the translation movement, and the importance of Thomas North (who translated Plutarch) and John Florio (who translated Montaigne): 

“But since gentlemen readers—and even relatively humble aspiring gentlemen such as Shakespeare—could comfortably read Latin texts in the original, why was such a high proportion of the literary canon of the ancient Romans translated into the vernacular in the Elizabethan period?” (ibid.) 

That’s an interesting question. 

“To judge from the authorial prefaces to these and the many other works from the classics undertaken in the 1560s and 1570s, the translation movement formed a concerted effort to demonstrate that the English tongue was dignified enough to express the wisdom of the ancients.” (ibid.) 

The translation movement, he says, was motivated by “nationalism and the ideology of aggressive Protestantism”, but: 

“... as so often with literary publication, the law of unintended consequences came into force: though the translation movement was by and large aimed at the courtly elite and dedicated to Protestant nationalism, it provided literate middle-ranking figures such as Shakespeare with a wealth of material that could be pressed into the service of other intentions— such as the composition of entertaining, thought-provoking plays.” (ibid.) 

Bate then writes about what Shakespeare may have learnt from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. I’m not going to copy anything here, so you should get the book and read it yourself. 

The most important influence on Shakespeare seems to be Ovid.

“Scholars have calculated that about 90 percent of Shakespeare's allusions to classical mythology refer to stories included in that epic compendium of tales.” (ibid.) 

This is followed by a fascinating passage in the book where Jonathan Bate demonstrates that Shakespeare knew Metamorphoses in both the original Latin and Arthur Golding’s translation. 

“Like Ovid, Shakespeare is interested in the mingled yarn of our human fabric. Both are writers who probe our humanity with great rigor, but ultimately do so in a spirit of sympathy for our frailties and indulgences, rather than stern judgment upon our faults. […] 

Though Prospero's speech valuably demonstrates Shakespeare's continuing interest in the minutiae of Ovid's language even to the end of his career, it is exceptional in the detail of its borrowing. Shakespeare's more habitual use of the Metamorphoses was less specific. He would refer to the stories there as parallels, or paradigms, for the emotional turmoil of the characters in his plays. Where Ovid told of bodily metamorphoses wrought by extremes of passion, Shakespeare translated these into psychological transformations and vivid metaphors. In particular, he found in Ovid a great store of examples of female feeling—something that was notably lacking in many of his other models, such as the plays of Marlowe and the history books of Plutarch and Holinshed. What mattered to him most was Ovid's storytelling, and for that the Latin text was not necessary—in rereading Ovid for pleasure after he left school, Shakespeare seems mostly to have relied on Golding's English version.” (ibid.) 

Bate does make me want to read Ovid. He also wrote a book called How the Classics Made Shakespeare, though I’m not going to read it anytime soon as I haven’t read any classical literature. 

One of the arguments of anti-Stratfordians is that there’s no evidence that Shakespeare owned books (but as Bill Bryson points out, there’s also no evidence that he wore pants). James Shapiro also argues in Contested Will that a) Shakespeare’s list of books would not have been mentioned in his will and the full list of things he owned no longer survives; and b) there were many ways Shakespeare would have got access to books without necessarily buying them, especially when he’s a playwright. 

Jonathan Bate makes the same point: 

“As he borrowed words and stories, so he may have borrowed rather than bought some of his books.” (Ch.9) 

Considering that Shakespeare was a playwright and needed material, and also knew publishers, translators, courtiers (he had patrons), and other playwrights, borrowing books or getting them at a discount seems an easy task. The authorship conspiracies all boil down to snobbery and ignorance.  

“Books were usually kept in a chest, which would have been heavy to transport. Shakespeare traveled light. He moved between temporary lodgings in London, where he never had a permanent home. He was said to have traveled back to Stratford at least once a year. It is hard to imagine his book chest being carted along with him. He had a restless imagination, not a Jonsonian predilection for mental hoarding. He would gut a book for its nourishment, then cast it aside. Once he finished his cycle of English history plays, he put away his Holinshed for a number of years. The old play scripts that he recycled in his early work probably went back into company stock. Once he had turned Arthur Brooke's labored narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet into an anything-but-labored play, he would have had no reason ever to pick it up again.” (ibid.) 

Bate then speculates which books Shakespeare must have owned (Golding’s translation of Metamorphoses and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives were surely among them), but it’s very possible that, as he says, Shakespeare “would gut a book for its nourishment, then cast it aside”. I can certainly relate to the idea of Shakespeare not owning many books, as I myself love literature but don’t own that many books (reading and book buying, as you can probably see from Book Twitter, are two separate hobbies). 

I’m very much enjoying Soul of the Age. It’s fascinating to learn about the literary works that inspired Shakespeare and the works that may have shaped him as a writer. Jonathan Bate also makes me love Shakespeare even more. 

Shakespeare and his actors, and the kind of plays he didn't write

I have been reading the brilliant 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro (now James S. Shapiro).

One thing people generally don’t know, or don’t think about, is that Shakespeare wrote for his actors—he didn’t write a play then cast for the roles, but had to write the parts for actors in his company (The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later called The King’s Men). 

“When Shakespeare sat down to write King Lear, he knew that he would be writing the part for Richard Burbage, the finest tragedian of the age. He had already created for him such career-defining roles as Richard the Third, Hamlet, and Othello. Burbage was now in his late thirties, which also meant that Shakespeare could expand his imaginative horizons and write plays that starred more grizzled and world-weary protagonists. Before 1606 was over, he would challenge Burbage not only in the role of Lear, but also in another pair of older tragic roles, Macbeth and Antony (while this same year Ben Jonson wrote for Burbage the brilliant part of Volpone, who play-acts the role of an infirm old man). No actor may ever have faced more daunting newly written roles in so short a time span.” (Ch.1)

It’s like Shakespeare was writing the plays and thinking, “let’s see what Burbage can do”. But imagine being the actor for whom Shakespeare wrote the roles of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony! 

“Genius may be a necessary precondition for creating a masterpiece but it’s never a sufficient one. Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays depended on the raw talent of his company.” (ibid.)

That’s an important point. After writing about the tragedian, Shapiro writes about the comedians: 

“The company’s first star comedian, Will Kemp, had parted ways with them back in 1599, pursuing a solo career, a blow to the company, for audiences were drawn to the theater for Kemp’s clowning as much as they were for Burbage’s tragic roles or Shakespeare’s words. Kemp’s replacement, Robert Armin, was a very different kind of comedian. While Armin could step into some of the roles Shakespeare had written for Kemp (such as Dogberry in Much Ado), Kemp’s improvisational and physical style and commonsensical if at times dim-witted demeanor couldn’t have been further from the sardonic, witty style of the diminutive Armin. It took a while for Shakespeare to figure out how best to write Armin into his plays. He had some early success with the parts of Touchstone in As You Like It and Feste in Twelfth Night, and with smaller roles as the Gravedigger in Hamlet and perhaps Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. But it wasn’t until King Lear that Shakespeare created a truly defining role for Armin, Lear’s Fool (and it was probably with this role in mind that, four years later, John Davies praised Armin as one who could “wisely play the fool”).

The Fool would be a role unlike any Shakespeare had ever written before or after—witty, pathetic, lonely, angry, and prophetic in turn, a part rich in quips and snippets of ballads and the kind of sharp exchanges for which Armin was famous. Armin’s range was extraordinary and it’s not surprising that this almost bewildering role was cut for much of King Lear’s stage history. It wasn’t only Shakespeare’s relationship with both Burbage and Armin that had matured, but also the relationship of the star comedian and tragedian with each other.” (ibid.)

This is one of those facts that make you see Shakespeare’s plays differently. I never thought much about the change in the comic roles in the plays.

These facts also make you realise Shakespeare couldn’t have been an earl or some aristocrat being away somewhere writing alone—it had to be a man of theatre, a man within the acting company, as William Shakespeare was. As Shapiro writes in Contested Will:

“You couldn’t write Rosalind’s part in As You Like It unless you had absolute confidence that the boy who spoke her seven hundred lines, a quarter of the play, could manage it. You couldn’t write a part requiring the boy playing Lady Percy in The First Part of Henry the Fourth to sing in Welsh unless you knew that the company had a young actor who could handle a tune and was a native of Wales. Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of everyone in the company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents.” (“Four: Shakespeare”) 

There’s a mistake—the one singing in Welsh in Henry IV, Part 1 is not Lady Percy but Glendower’s daughter who marries Mortimer—but the point stands. 

“The author of Shakespeare’s plays could not have written the great roles of Richard III, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello and Lear unless he knew how far he could stretch his leading tragedian, Richard Burbage. Writing parts for the company’s star comedian was even tougher. How could anyone but a shareholder in the company know to stop writing comic parts for Will Kemp the moment he quit the company in 1599 – and start writing parts in advance of the arrival of his replacement, Robert Armin, whose comic gifts couldn’t have been more different?” (ibid.) 

_____________________________________

1606 has lots of interesting facts and it would take me forever to talk about them, so I’m just going to single out another: the kind of plays Shakespeare didn’t write.  

“Though he was now the most experienced dramatist in the land, Shakespeare had not written the masque and, had he been invited to do so, had said no. It would have been a tempting offer. If he cared about visibility, prestige, or money, the rewards were great; the writer responsible for the masque earned more than eight times what a dramatist was typically paid for a single play. And on the creative side, in addition to the almost unlimited budget and the potential for special effects, the masque offered the very thing he had seemingly wished for in the opening Chorus to Henry the Fifth: “princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene” (1.0.3–4). That Shakespeare never accepted such a commission tells us as much about him as a writer as the plays he left behind. There was a price to be paid for writing masques, which were shamelessly sycophantic and propagandistic, compromises he didn’t care to make. He must have also recognized that it was an elite and evanescent art form that didn’t suit his interests or his talents.” (Prologue) 

1606 is making me love Shakespeare more and more.

Jonathan Bate and the Shakespeare authorship question

I know, I know Shakespeare fans are all (or mostly?) fed up with the authorship question, but in case any anti-Stratfordian wanders to my blog, here are some interesting passages from Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare: 

“If there is one thing we can say for certain about Shakespeare’s plays it is that they were written by a man of the theatre. An early play like Titus Andronicus was composed under the influence of the hit plays of the late 1580s, notably Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta; a middle play like Hamlet was intricately bound up with the rivalry between the adult and children’s acting companies around 1600; the late plays were responsive to Fletcher’s innovations in the writing of tragicomic romance and the King’s Men’s purchase of the lease on the indoor playhouse at Blackfriars. Countless technicalities of staging in every one of the plays reveal that only a professional theatrical insider could have written them.” (Ch.3)

A related point is later made by James Shapiro in Contested Will. 

“There were times when Shakespeare was thinking so intently about the part he was writing for a particular actor that in jotting down the speech headings he mistakenly wrote the actor’s name rather than his character’s. We know this because compositors passed on some of these slips when typesetting his foul papers.” (Section “Four: Shakespeare”) 

The plays therefore had to be written by someone working in the company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, not an aristocrat sitting somewhere away.

Speaking of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the most popular candidate among anti-Stratfordians, Jonathan Bate mentions that he died in 1604, and says:  

“Insofar as Looney and later Oxfordians address the problem of chronology at all, they have to argue that the later plays were written before 1604, kept in manuscript, and subsequently revised by the players with topical allusions to post-1604 events added in. But this argument is fatally flawed in the cases of Macbeth and The Tempest: the former does not merely allude to the Gunpowder Plot, it is a Gunpowder play through and through, while the latter could only have been written after the publication of Florio’s translation of Montaigne in 1603 and the tempest that drove Sir George Somers’ ship to Bermuda in 1609.

Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the technical changes attendant upon the King’s Men’s move to the Blackfriars theatre four years after their candidate’s death…” (Ch.3) 

This is a fact that all Shakespeare scholars discuss and anti-Stratfordians conveniently ignore: Blackfriars, unlike The Globe, is an indoor theatre and candles couldn’t burn unattended for the entire length of a play, therefore plays had to be divided into 5 acts so the candles could be replaced between acts. 

“The plays written after Shakespeare’s company began using the Blackfriars in 1608, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale for instance, have what most of the earlier plays do not have: a carefully planned five-act structure.” (ibid.)

Jonathan Bate also mentions another often ignored fact, that many contemporaries knew Shakespeare and spoke of him as a writer—Bate mentions several names and writes about them at length. I don’t know how anti-Stratfordians explain that to themselves and others—was everyone, especially Ben Jonson, part of the conspiracy?  

But I won’t write more about anti-Stratfordians. There is ample evidence that Shakespeare, the author of the plays, was Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. 

See my blog post about Bill Bryson and the Shakespeare authorship question.  

Shakespeare: 20 điều thú vị, và thuyết âm mưu

Đây là 2 bài tôi viết cho báo Trẻ nhân tháng 4, tháng sinh và tháng mất của William Shakespeare, nhưng không được đăng, nên để ở đây. 

20 CHI TIẾT THÚ VỊ VỀ WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Tháng 4 là tháng của William Shakespeare (1564-1616), nhà thơ và nhà viết kịch, nhà văn vỹ đại và có ảnh hưởng nhất của Anh quốc hoặc thậm chí, theo nhiều người, của thế giới nói chung. Sau đây là vài chi tiết thú vị về cuộc đời và tác phẩm của Shakespeare, có lẽ bạn chưa biết. 

1/ Shakespeare sinh ra ở Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, Anh, bởi vậy được gọi là the Bard (thi sỹ) of Stratford-upon-Avon. Những người không tin Shakespeare thực sự là Shakespeare được gọi là anti-Stratfordian, tuy nhiên đa phần các học giả đều xem đây là thuyết âm mưu và không tự gọi mình là Stratfordian để thành ngang hàng với đám dở hơi kia. 

2/ Không ai biết ngày sinh chính xác của Shakespeare, chỉ biết được làm lễ rửa tội ngày 26/4/1564. Tuy nhiên người ta thường mừng sinh nhật Shakespeare ngày 23/4, cũng là tưởng niệm ngày mất. 

3/ Cha của Shakespeare là John Shakespeare, thợ làm găng tay và ủy viên hội đồng địa phương. John Shakespeare sinh ở Snitterfield, cũng may là dọn sang sống ở Stratford-upon-Avon nên hậu thế không phải biết tới William Shakespeare là thi sỹ của Snitterfield. 

Mẹ là Mary Arden. 

4/ Trước William, John và Mary có vài người con trai khác nhưng chết lúc nhỏ, nên William trở thành con trai cả trong nhà. 

5/ Bằng chứng hiện nay không còn, nhưng các nhà nghiên cứu lâu nay đều đồng ý là William lúc nhỏ đi học ở trường văn phạm mới của nhà vua (King’s new grammar school) ở Stratford. Không học đại học. 

6/ Năm 18 tuổi, William Shakespeare kết hôn với Anne Hathaway, lớn hơn 8 tuổi và đang mang thai. Một chi tiết thú vị là, một ngày trước khi hai người bạn ký surety £40 để đảm bảo tài chính cho đám cưới của “William Shagspere và Anne Hathwey”, đăng ký giám mục ở Worcester có một giấy đăng ký kết hôn giữa Shakespeare và Anne Whateley của Temple Grafton. Đây là chi tiết gây tranh cãi bao lâu nay—Anne Whateley chính là Anne Hathaway nhưng viết sai trong hệ thống, hay là người hoàn toàn khác? Nếu cùng là một người, giải thích thế nào về câu Anne Whateley đến từ Temple Grafton trong khi Anne Hathaway đến từ Shottery, cùng thuộc Warwickshire nhưng là làng khác? Tuy nhiên, không có một giấy tờ hay dấu vết nào khác về sự tồn tại của Anne Whateley của Temple Grafton. 

7/ Tên của Shakespeare được đánh vần hàng tá cách khác nhau: Shakespere, Shackspeare, Shakespear, Shakspere, Shaxspere, Shaxper, Shakspeare, Shackespeare, Shackspere, Shackespere, v.v… 

Những người theo thuyết âm mưu thường bảo đấy là bằng chứng Shakespeare không phải là tác giả các vở kịch nổi tiếng mà chỉ là một thằng cha bá láp ở Stratford không biết chữ và không viết nổi tên mình, nhưng thật ra tiếng Anh thời này rất linh hoạt, mỗi chữ có thể được đánh vần nhiều cách khác nhau, chưa được chuẩn hóa, và các tác giả khác cùng thời cũng viết tên mình nhiều cách khác nhau như vậy. Chẳng hạn, Christopher Marlowe có khi viết là Cristofer Marley, Christopher Marlen, Morley, Marlin, v.v… 

8/ 6 tháng sau đám cưới, Shakespeare và Anne có một con gái là Susanna. 2 năm sau, có một cặp sinh đôi là Hamnet và Judith. Hamnet, con trai duy nhất của Shakespeare, chết khi mới 11 tuổi, không rõ lý do.  

9/ 1585-1592 được gọi là những năm mất tích (lost years) vì dấu vết không còn và chẳng ai biết Shakespeare làm gì trong những năm đó, trước khi trở thành nhà viết kịch ở London. Trong suốt sự nghiệp sau đó, Shakespeare chia thời gian giữa hai nơi là London và Stratford. 

10/ Người ta thường gọi Shakespeare là nhà văn thời Elizabethan, nhưng cũng thuộc thời Jacobean. Những tác phẩm lớn nhất của Shakespeare như “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “The Tempest”…là viết dưới thời vua James (James VI của Scotland, James I của Anh). 

11/ Trong khi một số nhà viết kịch khác chuyển công ty, Shakespeare gần như cả đời gắn với một công ty kịch là The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, sau này đổi tên thành The King’s Men, do được vua James I bảo trợ. 

12/ Shakespeare có cộng tác với các nhà viết kịch khác trong những năm đầu và những năm cuối của sự nghiệp, nhưng đa phần viết một mình. 

13/ Shakespeare viết nhiều thể loại kịch khác nhau và thành công xuất sắc trong mọi thể loại: bi kịch (như “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Hamlet”…), hài kịch (như “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Much Ado About Nothing”, “Twelfth Night”...), và lịch sử (Henriad, 2 nhóm kịch, mỗi nhóm 4 vở, làm về giai đoạn Richard II sang Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI). Đây là cách chia loại khi Shakespeare được xuất bản chính thức lần đầu tiên. Sau này các học giả xếp một số tác phẩm vào 2 thể loại khác là problem plays (không phải bi hay hài, như “Measure for Measure”, “Troilus and Cressida”…) và romances (“The Winter’s Tale”, “The Tempest”…). 

14/ Không chỉ viết kịch và diễn xuất, Shakespeare còn là nhà thơ, viết 154 bản sonnet, ba bản thơ tường thuật dài (narrative poem) là “Venus and Adonis”, “The Rape of Lucrece”, và “A Lover’s Complaint”, cùng vài bài thơ rải rác đây kia. 

15/ Sonnet là dạng thơ có từ Ý, có 14 dòng. Sonnet ở Ý (nổi nhất là Petrarch) có cấu trúc hai phần (octave và sestet) và theo vần ABBAABBA cho octave, CDECDE hoặc CDCDCD cho sestet. 

Tuy nhiên sang Anh, thể sonnet thay đổi, theo cấu trúc 3 khổ 4 câu (quatrain) với một đôi kết (couplet). Tiếng Anh cũng khó vần hơn tiếng Ý, nên sonnet ở Anh theo hệ vần ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. 

Sonnet của Shakespeare được chia thành hai nhóm: viết cho fair youth (một người đàn ông trẻ tuổi) và dark lady (vào thời Shakespeare, dark không nhất thiết có nghĩa gốc Phi mà có thể nói màu da nâu nói chung hoặc chỉ màu tóc đen).  

Đây là một trong những điều được tranh cãi bao lâu nay, về danh tính của fair youth và dark lady. Tuy nhiên, nhiều học giả cho rằng Shakespeare, cũng như nhiều nhà thơ khác cùng thời, không xem thơ là tự truyện mà chỉ chọn hình ảnh đàn ông và dark lady để đi ngược với quy ước của thể loại sonnet. 

16/ Trong “Romeo and Juliet”, một đoạn đối thoại giữa Romeo và Juliet khi gặp lần đầu tiên có thể ghép lại thành một bài sonnet. 

17/ Kịch của Shakespeare không được xuất bản chính thức khi còn sống—bản First Folio được hai người bạn John Heminges và Henry Condell xuất bản năm 1623, 7 năm sau khi Shakespeare chết. Khi tác giả còn sống, các vở kịch cũng được in và bán dưới dạng quarto, không chính thức và thường không chính xác. Tuy nhiên, những người theo thuyết âm mưu thường tung tin là không có tác phẩm nào gắn tên Shakespeare khi còn sống, đó là sai—tên Shakespeare gắn với “Venus and Adonis” và “The Rape of Lucrece” và các bài thơ sonnet, dù các bản sonnet có vẻ được xuất bản không có sự đồng ý của tác giả. 

Thời Shakespeare chưa có khái niệm bản quyền như thời nay—kịch viết ra là thuộc quyền công ty, không phải của người viết. Chưa kể, kịch chỉ bị xem là chơi, là play—tới năm 1616 mới là lần đầu tiên được xuất bản như sách, như tác phẩm văn chương, và đó là kịch của Ben Jonson. 

18/ Trên mạng hay có nhiều người nói là trong thời của mình, Shakespeare không được đánh giá cao, chỉ bị coi là viết giải trí—điều này hoàn toàn sai. Tất nhiên tới tận thế kỷ 19, Shakespeare mới được nâng thành tác giả vỹ đại nhất của Anh, không ai sánh kịp, nhưng khi còn sống Shakespeare đã là một trong những tác giả được coi trọng nhất, cùng với Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, v.v… Ben Jonson thậm chí còn nói Shakespeare là nhà văn của mọi thời đại (“He was not of an age but for all time!”). 

19/ Chỉ có khoảng 230 vở kịch từ thời đó còn tồn tại tới ngày nay, bao gồm 37-39 vở của Shakespeare, tức là khoảng 16%. 

20/ Có 3 bức chân dung thường được gắn với Shakespeare: Droeshout, Chandos, và Cobbe. 2 bức được gọi là Chandos portrait và Cobbe portrait thường được sử dụng nhiều do đẹp, nhưng không có bằng chứng đó thực sự là Shakespeare. Bức khắc Droeshout xuất hiện trên First Folio, khi kịch của Shakespeare được xuất hiện lần đầu tiên, nhưng không rõ độ chính xác là bao nhiêu vì là di cảo. 

Hải Di Nguyễn 

Nguồn 

“Shakespeare: The World as Stage” của Bill Bryson. 

“Shakespeare” của Anthony Burgess. 

 

SHAKESPEARE CÓ PHẢI LÀ SHAKESPEARE? 

Tháng 4 là tháng tưởng niệm William Shakespeare (1564-1616), văn hào vỹ đại nhất của nước Anh, hoặc theo nhiều người là nhà văn quan trọng nhất của thế giới nói chung. Shakespeare là tác giả của “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth”, “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “Twelfth Night”, “As You Like It”, v.v… 

Một trong những chủ đề gây tranh cãi là về tác giả: Shakespeare liệu có phải là Shakespeare? Hay là người khác? 

Vì sao có cuộc tranh luận về danh tính tác giả? 

Vì William Shakespeare sinh ở Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, Anh quốc, những người cho rằng Shakespeare không phải là tác giả những vở kịch nổi tiếng được gọi là anti-Stratfordian. 

Phe anti-Stratfordian đưa ra nhiều lý do và lập luận để nói Shakespeare không phải là Shakespeare nhưng thật ra tất cả có thể chỉ tóm gọn lại một ý: Shakespeare, theo họ, không có đủ lai lịch và học vấn để viết những tác phẩm hay như vậy. Theo họ, một diễn viên kịch thuộc nhà loàng xoàng không phải quý tộc, có cha là thợ làm găng tay, bản thân lớn lên ở tỉnh lẻ, chỉ học trường văn phạm và không học đại học, không thể viết những tác phẩm bất hủ và trở thành nhà văn hào vỹ đại nhất của Anh như thế.  

Nguồn gốc câu hỏi về danh tính tác giả  

Một ý không phải ai cũng nhắc tới khi nói về cuộc tranh luận về danh tính tác giả (authorship debate) là nó có từ thế kỷ 19 (trong khi Shakespeare sống ở cuối thế kỷ 16, đầu thế kỷ 17) và bắt nguồn từ Ohio, Mỹ. 

Nói cách khác, không ai nghi ngờ danh tính tác giả khi Shakespeare còn sống, cũng không ai băn khoăn gì suốt vài thế kỷ sau đó—chỉ từ thế kỷ 19 mới có lần đầu tiên, một phụ nữ người Mỹ tên Delia Bacon cho rằng các vở kịch mang tên Shakespeare thật ra là của một nhóm cùng viết, đứng đầu là Francis Bacon. 

Theo “Contested Will” của James Shapiro, một cuốn sách đi sâu vào cuộc tranh cãi này, đây là giai đoạn dậy lên cái gọi là higher criticism hay historical criticism, đặt nghi vấn về tác giả của Kinh thánh hay về danh tính của Homer (nhà thơ Hy Lạp cổ đại, được xem là tác giả của “Iliad” và “Odyssey”), nên không có gì lạ Delia Bacon cũng đặt ra câu hỏi về danh tính thật sự của Shakespeare và nhiều người ở Mỹ lẫn Châu Âu đều bị cuốn vào đó, bao gồm những tên tuổi lớn như Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Helen Keller, v.v… 

Các ứng cử viên khác

Theo Wikipedia, cho đến nay đã có khoảng 80 cái tên khác nhau được đưa ra là “Shakespeare thật sự”. 

2 thuyết chính, với nhiều người theo nhất, là về Francis Bacon và Edward de Vere. 

Francis Bacon, Tử tước (Viscount) St Alban thứ nhất (1561-1626) là một nhà triết học, chính khách, và essayist người Anh, cha đẻ của chủ nghĩa duy nghiệm (empiricism) và một trong những gương mặt quan trọng nhất của cuộc cách mạng khoa học ở Châu Âu. Hiện nay có lẽ không có mấy người quan tâm tới Francis Bacon, nhưng vào thế kỷ 19, ông được xem là một những người hiểu biết uyên bác nhất của Anh, hoặc Châu Âu nói chung. Sự uyên bác của Francis Bacon gần như là lý do chính khiến một số người, bắt đầu từ Delia Bacon, cho rằng đây mới là tác giả những vở kịch của Shakespeare, nhưng phải giấu nhẹm đi và để ông diễn viên Stratford đứng tên để không ảnh hưởng sự nghiệp chính trị. 

Một số người nghĩ Francis Bacon để code trong các vở kịch về danh tính của mình, và thậm chí họ còn bỏ hàng năm tìm kiếm và giải mã code chứng minh Bacon mới là tác giả. 

Thuyết Baconian là thuyết phổ biến nhất một thời gian, rồi bị thay thế vị trí số một bởi thuyết Oxfordian, về Edward de Vere, Bá tước (Earl) thứ 17 của Oxford (1550-1604). Edward de Vere có xuất bản vài bài thơ và vở kịch làng xoàng, chẳng mấy người để ý tới, và ngày nay chủ yếu vẫn còn được nhắc đến không phải vì những tác phẩm ký tên Earl of Oxford mà chỉ vì một số người nghĩ đó là tác giả thật sự ẩn sau cái tên William Shakespeare. Thuyết Oxfordian bắt nguồn từ một giáo viên người Anh tên J. Thomas Looney, chỉ vì cuộc đời Edward de Vere có vài điểm khớp với chi tiết xuất hiện đây kia trong kịch Shakespeare; 13 trong số 37-39 vở kịch lấy bối cảnh ở Ý, Edward de Vere đã du lịch nhiều nơi và thậm chí từng sống ở Ý, trong khi không có vẻ gì Shakespeare từng qua Ý; và Looney cho rằng Shakespeare thật sự phải thuộc tầng lớp quý tộc. 

Trên thực tế, không ai tìm được bất kỳ bằng chứng nào liên hệ Bacon, Oxford, hay bất kỳ ai khác với các tác phẩm của Shakespeare. 

Bằng chứng cho Shakespeare 

Ngược lại, mọi bằng chứng còn sót lại, dù không nhiều, đều cho thấy Shakespeare chính là Shakespeare của Stratford-upon-Avon. Phe nghi ngờ thường quên rằng giới văn chương của London rất hạn hẹp, ai cũng biết ai—Ben Jonson, một trong những nhà văn quan trọng nhất thời đó, quen Shakespeare và từng viết một bài thơ ca ngợi; bản thân Shakespeare và công ty kịch The Lord Chamberlain’s Men từng xuất hiện trước mặt nữ hoàng Elizabeth lẫn vua James; John Heminges và Henry Condell, hai người giúp chính thức xuất bản các vở kịch lần đầu tiên là bạn của Shakespeare và thuộc cùng công ty. 

Nói về lai lịch hay học vấn, một số nhà văn quan trọng cùng thời cũng có nguồn gốc tương tự Shakespeare: Christopher Marlowe có cha là thợ đóng giày, Ben Jonson là con của thợ nề và cũng chẳng học đại học. Một số người khăng khăng là tác giả phải thuộc dòng dõi quý tộc mới viết được về giới thượng lưu, nhưng trong tác phẩm của Shakespeare cũng có tầng lớp thấp, nhà nghèo, đám tội phạm, gái điếm…—dùng cùng lập luận, làm sao các ông như Edward de Vere biết được tầng lớp này? Hơn nữa, kịch Shakespeare có nhiều hình ảnh hoặc ẩn dụ về đồng quê Warwickshire hoặc liên quan đến ngành làm găng tay da (như cha Shakespeare). 

Các dấu vết còn sót lại (chẳng hạn đôi khi Shakespeare viết nhân vật cho một diễn viên cụ thể nào đó nên viết lộn tên diễn viên thay cho tên nhân vật) cho thấy tác giả phải là người đang làm việc trong công ty kịch, biết bạn diễn gồm có ai, khả năng thế nào, diễn được loại vai nào, nếu viết một vai khó (như cần nói được tiếng Welsh hoặc biết chơi nhạc) thì có người để đóng không, v.v…, chứ không phải một ông quý tộc ngồi viết từ xa rồi tuồn ra. 

Quan trọng hơn hết, Edward de Vere chết năm 1604, sau đó vẫn xuất hiện nhiều tác phẩm khác của Shakespeare như “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “Antony and Cleopatra”... và nhiều vở kịch cũng thay đổi phong cách sau khi công ty kịch của Shakespeare chuyển sang một nhà hát khác, với điều kiện hoàn toàn khác—một điều Edward de Vere không thể đoán trước. 

Nhiều lập luận chống Shakespeare cũng bắt nguồn từ thiếu hiểu biết hoặc hiểu sai về thời Elizabethan hay Jacobean. Chẳng hạn, nhiều người nói Shakespeare không nhắc gì tới sách vở hay bản thảo trong di chúc, nhưng di chúc thời đó chỉ nói sơ sơ vài thứ, không kể hết mọi của cải đồ đạc của người viết. 

Vậy tại sao một số người vẫn nghi ngờ danh tính của Shakespeare, và đi theo thuyết Baconian, Oxfordian, hay một thuyết khác? 

Có trời mới biết được. Người ta có thể theo thuyết âm mưu vì hàng ngàn lý do, không cần logic hay bằng chứng. Trong trường hợp này, một số người chỉ đơn giản không thể chấp nhận con trai một thợ làm găng từ tỉnh lẻ có thể trở thành đại văn hào vỹ đại nhất nước Anh và thay đổi cả Anh ngữ. 

Nhưng bằng chứng chẳng hướng tới ai khác, ngoài William Shakespeare của Stratford-upon-Avon.  

Hải Di Nguyễn 

Nguồn 

“Shakespeare: The World as Stage” của Bill Bryson

“Contested Will” của James Shapiro 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question 

Bill Bryson and the Shakespeare authorship question

I’ve just finished reading Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage. It’s a fun, short book.

The interesting thing about it is that it’s written by an amateur rather than a Shakespearean scholar, so the author writes about what he has found about the life of Shakespeare—he writes about what is known with certainty, what is commonly believed but not definite, what is pure myth, and what is not known. And we know very little about Shakespeare the person. 

Here is my full twitter thread about the book:

https://twitter.com/nguyenhdi/status/1368001479240544257

The book makes me fancy Shakespeare even more (which makes things rather awkward, considering that the man’s been dead for over 400 years).

Anyway, one of my favourite parts of Shakespeare: The World as Stage is the final chapter, “Claimants”, which is about the authorship question. 

“So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment – actually all of it, every bit – involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare ‘never owned a book’, a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.” (Ch.9) 

Hilarious. 

After he talks about Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere:

“A third – and for a brief time comparatively popular – candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.” (ibid.) 

I like that. 

In the same chapter, Bill Bryson writes about the words and word forms that Shakespeare prefers: “hath” more than “has”, “doth” and then “dost” rather than “does”, “brethren” more than “brothers”, etc. 

Then he says:

“In short it is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the necessary time, talent and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so. These people must have been incredibly gifted – to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterwards. The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that is genius.” (ibid.) 

HAHAHAHAHA. 

Bill Bryson also argues convincingly against the idea that the plays must have been written by an aristocrat because Shakespeare lacked the background or the education to become such a great writer. In an earlier chapter, he writes about the mistakes in the plays, such as geography:

“He was routinely guilty of anatopisms – that is, getting one’s geography wrong – particularly with regard to Italy, where so many of his plays were set. So in The Taming of the Shrew he puts a sailmaker in Bergamo, approximately the most landlocked city in the whole of Italy, while in The Tempest and The Two Gentlemen of Verona he has Prospero and Valentine set sail from, respectively, Milan and Verona, even though both cities were a good two days’ travel from salt water. If he knew Venice had canals, he gave no hint of it in either of the plays he set there.” (Ch.5)

Why do Oxfordians keep insisting that the true author must have been Edward de Vere, who travelled around Italy for a while and knew all important Italian locations?

Bill Bryson writes more later on:  

“Shakespeare lacked a university education, to be sure, but then so did Ben Jonson – a far more intellectual playwright – and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney sweepers, come to dust,’ which takes on an additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper. Who was more likely to employ such terms – a courtier of privileged upbringing or someone who had grown up in the country? Similarly, when Falstaff notes that as a boy he was small enough to creep ‘into any alderman’s thumb-ring’ we might reasonably wonder whether such a singular image was more likely to occur to an aristocrat or to someone whose father actually was an alderman.

In fact a Stratford boyhood lurks in all the texts. For a start Shakespeare knew animal hides and their uses inside and out: his work contains frequent knowing references to arcana of the tanning trade – skin bowgets, greasy fells, neat’s oil and the like – matters of everyday conversation to leather workers, but hardly common currency among the well-to-do. He knew that lute strings were made of cowgut and bowstrings of horsehair. Would Oxford or any other candidate have been able, or likely, to turn such distinctions into poetry?

Shakespeare was, it would seem, unashamedly a country boy, and nothing in his work suggests any desire, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, to ‘repudiate it or pass himself off as something other than he was’. Part of the reason Shakespeare was mocked by the likes of Robert Greene was that he never stopped using these provincialisms. They made him mirthful in their eyes.” (Ch.9) 

If an anti-Stratfordian tells you that the author of the plays must have been someone like an aristocrat, give them that.

Contested Will by James Shapiro

I’ve just finished reading Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro.

It’s about the Shakespeare authorship question and divided into 4 sections: “Shakespeare”, “Bacon”, “Oxford”, and “Shakespeare”. The first 3 sections are not really about the arguments of anti-Stratfordians, but more about the history of the authorship debate; the culture, the environment that led to the first expressions of doubt; the development of the Baconian theory (Francis Bacon was the most popular candidate for a while) and then the Oxfordian theory (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford is now the most popular candidate), etc. The main point of the book, I think, is to understand why the authorship question was first raised a few centuries after Shakespeare’s death, why the first candidate (a Bacon-led group) was proposed in the 19th century in America, and why de Vere replaced Bacon as the most popular candidate. 

In the last section “Shakespeare”, Shapiro writes about the evidence proving that Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. He also explains why many of the arguments against Shakespeare come from ignorance of, and mistaken assumptions about, life and writing and relationships in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.

Here is my full twitter thread about Contested Will, with photos of many interesting passages from the book: 

https://twitter.com/nguyenhdi/status/1362781239112044546

Interestingly, James Shapiro also warns about the danger of reading Shakespeare’s plays and poems as autobiographical and assuming that he drew from personal experience, which is done by both anti-Stratfordians and Shakespearean scholars who believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare—things were different back then. 

Many anti-Stratfordians tend to say that, besides what they call a lack of training and personal experience, Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon doesn’t have the personality of the Shakespeare of the plays, but what personality? J. Thomas Looney, the first proponent of the Oxfordian theory, even makes a list of personality traits and I personally don’t know how anyone can do so. Recently I’ve read 3 tragedies (Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet), 3 comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing), and 1 history (Richard II), before this, I read another 3 tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar) and 2 comedies (Twelfth Night, As You Like It)—they are all different and Shakespeare speaks in so many different voices and never in his own voice that it’s impossible to know his personality. I cannot see his personality and views the way I can see other authors; I can or at least think I can see authors who try to be invisible on the page, such as Flaubert or James, I can even see Jane Austen’s moral vision, though Woolf says Jane Austen’s mind “consumes all impediments” and we cannot know her; but I cannot see Shakespeare because his plays have such a great range, a diversity of voices and views and subjects, and do not share a single vision. 

Back to Contested Will, it’s a good, enjoyable read, and especially useful if you want to learn about the different norms and habits during Shakespeare’s days, and the development of the authorship debate.