On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Mark Bennett wrote:
> "The Authorship Problem" rears its ugly head on LBO?
Indeed, we are a wide-ranging brood.
For anyone interested in a survey of recent developments, this article from the Times Literary Supplement is pretty thorough and satisfying:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111727
And for those who prefer a more indulgent approach, there is this shorter article that appeared recently in the NYT:
http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/28447/an/0/page/0
My personal favorite is library episode of Ulysses, where Stephen proves that Shakespeare is his own father. No, seriously. What that discussion brought out for me is why this was once so lively a topic among serious intellectuals. It's not about settling the facts. It was rather an outgrowth of Shakespeare worship, the elevation of his corpus to a kind of intellectual scripture that could be used to ennoble any argument. This shared belief that Shakespeare was the greatest author who ever lived led naturally to a desire to find the meaning of it all, to be the ultimate explainer of Shakespeare. And the easiest way to organize this quixotic endeavor -- to make all of his plays into a single unity that is connected to the world and can be appealed to as a kind of humanistic scripture -- was to organize around his biography. The main mechanism is simple. People often attribute thoughts to an author based on something one of his characters says. Implicit is always a claim about the extent he identified with that character when he created him. Shakespearology simply took that to a new level, not only because the total canon-text is so huge and contradictory and complex; and the biography of the author is so comically sparse and ready for speculation; but -- most of all -- because what the man ultimately thought was so important to them. They weren't trying to erase the author, but literally to worship him and divine his thoughts.
So what you see in the Library scene in Ulysses where Stephen is holding forth is that each "author theorist" is essentially is free to project a biography one that represents his Theory of All of Shakespeare -- which represents his Theory of All Life and Thought. Who Shakespeare legally was is an afterthought to the much more essential question of What Kind of Person Shakespeare Had To Have Been and What He Thought Was True -- because in the age of Shakespeare worship, what he thought was true was presumptively true. Reconciling quotes from the most disparate texts with the few famous facts we've always know about his life (the second-hand bed, where he lived, his roles as an actor) simply provided the bursts of brilliance that gave the whole activity spice and made it possible for a wide spectrum of people to thoroughly enjoy the exchange. It made worldview clash into something witty and fun. As well as making it the perfect place for thrusters to show off their chops.
BTW, in Ulysses, the Englishman Haines makes a crack somewhere that Shakespeare speculation was the home for minds that have lost their balance. It made it sound like the transformation problem of its day :o)
But really, if you want to hear the closest thing to this sort of discussion today, listen to an auteur theorist talk about films and what the director really meant :o)
Michael