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Question from Andrew from the UK: 'Why does everyone believe Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's
first play, was entered anonymously in the Stationer's Register?'
RB: Lots of things were entered anonymously. Venus and Adonis was entered anonymously in
the register.
PE: And actually it raises questions about the difficulty of chronology of the plays.
RB: Yes.
PE: Not everyone would agree it was Shakespeare's first play.
SW: It was 1594. I don't believe it was his first play.
RB: I believe I'm with you, Stanley, on that. 1594 for me, too.
PE: 'What about Shakespeare's acquaintance with Ben Jonson? There is evidence that they
knew each other.' That's from Ellie. Yes, there is. And Stanley, this is posthumous
evidence on the whole, isn't it?
RB: Mmm.
SW: Y...es.
PE: Well except they, well, I'm just thinking it's in the first folio, the list of actors.
RB: Yes, technically those are, only just, but they are also posthumous.
SW: Yes, but, but I believe in posthumous evidence, I've no objection whatever to the
validity of posthumous evidence. Ben Jonson is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.
Ben Jonson was a colleague of Shakespeare, in the sense that one his plays were put on
by Shakespeare's company, or one of them was, and he clearly, he writes very intimately
about Shakespeare, he writes sometimes critically about Shakespeare, but he also writes that
he loved him this side idolatry, he writes the first full critical appreciation of Shakespeare,
the Ben Jonson elegy in the First Folio's a very important piece of criticism, the finest
piece of Shakespeare criticism before Dryden, later in the seventeenth century-
RB: I'm not sure it's criticism, it's one of those sort of -
SW: I beg your pardon, it is criticism.
RB: There's no criticism, it's just a straightforward over-the-top Elizabethan eulogy.
SW: No, I don't think it is.
PE: See the harmony of this discussion continues. 'How do anti-Stratfordians' (or anti-Shakespearians)
'explain away, explain why 'lowly' William Shakespeare of Stratford became the frontsman
for all the works if he had no connection i.e. because he was so lowly', that's from
Jen, from Elsinore, on Twitter.
RB: From Elsinore, excellent!
PE: I know!
RB: That's great.
PE: So, so, how is that connection made? With apparently a person of lowly origins, with
these aristocrats who are being nominated-
RB: Well I think, I think Richard, Richard Field - I don't know about the aristocrat
thing - but Richard Field, for me, is a possible link in terms of knowing, as I imagine he
did know - Stratford was not a big place, he was only a couple of years difference in
age - may well have known him and known of his willingness to enter any kind of deal.
So thats total speculation, I'm just saying there are possible mechanisms by which William
Shakespeare could have been brought in decided to do the job.
SW: Alright, but a Stratford man, who publishes William Shakespeare's first long poem, surely
that's a connection between Stratford and Shakespeare the writer?
PE: Venus and Adonis in 1593.
SW: Yes.
RB: Yes. But we have all the other problems that show that no-one who knew him appears
to - the man from Stratford himself - appears to know him as a writer.
PE: Somebody tweets, Helen tweets, 'I often see sceptics claiming that a man of letters
would not let his daughters grown up illiterate, how do we counter this?' They weren't illiterate.
RB: Well one of them definitely was, she signs her name with a cross, doesn't she?
PE: We have Susannah's signature -
RB: Yeah, she can sign her name.... but Judith can't sign her name, can she?
PE: Rene Weiss at University College has interestingly made the connection that Susannah was taught
to write by her father, because the handwriting is similar with the closing up of 'N's and
so on.
RB: Similarly bad.
PE: Similarly bad, but what's wrong with having bad handwriting? People might have bad handwriting
RB: Well, people who earned a living by the pen, in that day, especially when you had
the blotting issue... I mean, and this is the other thing, look at those signatures
and compare them with what Hemmings and Condell say about what they received, the blotless
manuscripts, I mean this is not a penman who could avoid blots. So therefore they must
have been receiving fair copies. Now, you know what is -
SW: Well they weren't. There's the textual evidence shows that they were just generalising
in a very vague way. If you studied the texts that are printed in the Folio, you'll know
perfectly clearly that some of them were written, printed, from abominable manuscripts.
RB: Exactly. So what's really going on there?
SW: Well what's going on there is that they're just being flattering because they're writing
a preface to the book.
RB: Yeah, but then what does Ben Jonson say about that? It's quite interesting, he says
that they took offense when he said, you know, 'would that he had blotted a thousand'-
SW: By blotted, all he means there is revised.
RB: But how can you say that's what he means, because there are so many different ways of
reading that-
SW: How can you say he doesn't?
RB: I'm simply saying, Stanley, that there are multiple ways of reading any text, and
Ben Jonson in particular is extraordinarily enigmatic and ambiguous in the way that he
writes about Shakespeare.
PE: There's a question here about collaboration, which is an interesting one, about 'is it
possible to conceive of an idea that the King's Men' (the actors Shakespeare worked with for
some of his life, the Lord Chamberlain's Men), 'collaborated on the works, and that they
were involved.' That's a very interesting question.
SW: Yeah, I think to a certain degree they collaborated in the sense that when Shakespeare
was rehearsing, putting his plays into rehearsal, I'm sure that he got suggestions from the
authors, there's a very interesting example in Midsummer Night's Dream, where the first
quarto has one speech spoken entirely by one person, and in the Folio, which is a more
theatrical text, a demonstrably more theatrical text, that speech is the speech of Theseus,
is divided up between Theseus and Lysander, which is clearly a more theatrical way of
putting the speech across, and I think it's very likely that an actor said, 'look, I can't,
you can't expect me to speak all these lines, both questions and comments myself, let's
Lysander speak the comments. That's an example of Shakespeare's practicality, of Shakespeare
being a man of the theatre, working very closely with his actors.
RB: We don't know-
SW: There is, by the way, no evidence that Marlowe was an actor.
RB: No, but there's no evidence that the author is working closely with his actors from what
you've said, that in itself doesn't mean anything, we don't know -
SW: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, there's masses more evidence, that's only one detail, there is
for example the evidence that's from the first quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, that the
author of that play had in mind Will Kemp as the speaker of Dogberry's lines -
RB: We-
SW: And Cow- Cowley as the speaker of Verges', which shows quite clearly that the author
had these actors in mind.
RB: You don't know that the copies that the Folio was printed from, or that the quartos
were printed from - where they had the actors' names in place - come from the author's own
pen, or whether they're from copyists, we have no idea!
SW: Er, we have considerable ideas about them, I must dispute that from the point of view
of an editor.
RB: We don't know that that is the author who has substituted Kemp's name, or Sinklo's
name, or anyone else's name, we don't know, because we don't have the original manuscripts,
we cannot see where they've come from, we're not aware of who's been copying and which,
whether it's the authors -
PE: Yes but this, this, this, this is the problem, isn't it -
RB: It is the problem.
PE: there's no smoking gun in history, it seems to me that Shakespeare can't have moved
or breathed or done anything without somebody writing about it before you're convinced that
it was Shakespeare of Stratford, and this is -
RB: Yeah but nobody, nobody said anything about it, it's a pity really -
PE: completely untenable - approach -
RB: you'd think they would be interested in - there he is -
PE: Lots of people have said. You're denying again -
RB: No, it's not about denial -
PE: From CJ on Twitter, who agrees with you, Ros, there's no evidence that links Shakespeare
to the writer - to, of, St - writer of St - no links that link Shakespeare the writer
to Shakespeare of Stratford. Question which often comes up from the anti-Shakespeare side:
'why does Shakespeare, why does Stratford Shakespeare leave no books in his will?' well,
you know, that's again using a gap and trying to turn it into a narrative which you find
convinces your belief and fuels your belief. 'If Shakespeare co-authored with Middleton
and others, are all Jacobean playwrights part of the conspiracy?', well that's what people
believe, Jane, thanks for your question, 'Why would Ben Jonson and the others collude in
this lie?' I love Dame Janet Suzman's point on 60 Minutes With Shakespeare when, you know,
actors couldn't keep secrets. They're told somebody, this conspiracy, and it is a conspiracy,
whether it's a theory -
RB: But I must ask why you think actors would be in on it? What on earth makes you think
that people would be in on it?
PE: Because in order for them to have covered up the real author-
RB: Yeah, but why would they need to? They're given a script, they're given their parts,
in fact, they're given an individual part, and they rehearse them -
PE: I also, I also find it interesting how this discussion hardly ever includes reference
to the sonnets themselves, I know they do in Marlowe's case, you tell the story, but
the poems aren't often under dis- under, at dispute in this, it's always about the plays
people talk about -
SW: One of the poems ends with 'For my name is Will'
PE: That's one of the sonnets, isn't it.
RB: Yeah, I know -
SW: Not Marlowe, not Chris.
RB: I agree, and you know, I agree that he does say 'My name is Will' more than once,
and in The Marlowe Papers I use that as saying him trying to kind of feel his way into the
persona and, you know, feel that 'oh they love these plays', he's struggling with the
idea that people love these plays that are attributed to someone else, and he's saying
'but my name is Will, because that's my pen name, that's who I am'. But he's also playing
on the idea of will, not as in the name,
PE: Molly -
RB: but as in the -
PE: Molly from New York says 'I've spent much of my life devoted to the study of Shakespeare
and for me it always comes down to why does it matter', Molly, there are lots of people
who respond why does it matter, to which I would respond of course it matters, it matters
utterly, wouldn't you like to know as much as possible about the painter of the Last
Supper, or the author of Mrs Dalloway, and those -
RB: So why close down the discussion?
PE: [unclear] absolutely matters, otherwise there wouldn't be the discussion about it.
SW: Yes, to me it also matters that the works, give and take the collaborations, show the
development of an imagination, the development of a mind, and I think this is, to me, it's
rather in the same way that you can see the works of Beethoven, for example, you can see
him developing and growing, maturing as he goes on, this is true of Shakespeare too.
PE: So, we're going to have to wrap up, but I just want to say that our next webinar is
on Monday the sixth of May, four o' clock, reviewing Shakespeare, I'll be joined by Paul
Prescott of the University of Warwick, and we'll be launching a new review site to do
with Shakespeare reviews, international, there'll be no other site like it.
I want to remind you too that happybirthdayshakespeare.com, a project by bloggers around the world to
celebrate the impact of Stratford's greatest son, is still live, and we were celebrating
Shakspeare of Stratford's birthday here in Stratford last weekend, a great celebration
for many round the world, and of course the Birthplace Trust received lots of messages
of goodwill from people who love Shakespeare sending messages to Stratford. I'd like to
thank Cambridge University Press very warmly for sponsoring this most lively discussion,
and I'd like to thank my co-contributors to this discussion, Stanley Wells, and Ros Barber,
very much indeed.
RB: Thank you Paul, thank you Stanley.
SW: Bye!