http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4024132.html wrote:
The curious hodgepodge that is Shakespeare
Bob Ellis has had a long and close involvement with politics, covering as a journalist twenty-four campaigns in Australia, the UK and the USA, and writing speeches or slogans for Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Mike Rann and others. Ellis's work for film and stage has won numerous nominations and awards for writing and direction.
<<Strange how people as learned, experienced and stage-wise as John Bell, whom I saw in brilliant conversation with Ron Blair an hour ago, pooh-pooh so loftily and crushingly the Oxford and Neville heresies, and swear blind that Will Shakespeare wrote alone.
For he did not write alone. It is known that the three Henry VIs, A Winter's Tale, Pericles, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Tragedy Of Sir Thomas More and The Yorkshire Tragedy, to name but nine, had other writers.
It is thought the Porter scene in Macbeth was a 'turn' done, in stand-up comedy style, by the actor. It is thought that the Falstaff scenes might have been in part improvised, or co-written, by the company clown Will Kempe, who in his book Morris-Dancing From John O' Groats To Land's End showed how good a writer he was.
It is also known that parts of Dr Faustus were not by Marlowe, Beaumont wrote plays with Fletcher, Fletcher with Shakespeare, Webster with Beaumont, Webster with Ford, and it is not known for certain who wrote The Spanish Tragedy or The Revenger's Tragedy or the Ur-Hamlet, though Kyd, Tourneur and Shakespeare when young, or Kyd perhaps, or Greene, are at present the prime suspects.
It is, however, certain that about 20 per cent of Julius Caesar was written by Tom North and all of it, including the ghost scene, cribbed from his translation of Plutarch, and about 30 per cent of Antony and Cleopatra. It is also certain that at least one scene, the 'strawberry' scene, of Richard III was lifted word for word from St Thomas More's unfinished biography of him, and the 'never a borrower nor a lender' speech of Polonius was one Lord Burleigh gave unremittingly to anyone who, in his blithering old age, would listen to him.
The 'hey ho, the wind and the rain' song, which appears in both Lear and Twelfth Night, may have been by another hand (the tune certainly was) and a good deal of Hamlet's philosophising was derived from Montaigne and the witch's chant from a Scottish cult known to James I, a direct descendant of Macbeth.
So here we have, almost for certain, 'Shakespeare' working with 22 collaborators in 18 years. Or perhaps only 18. It is not too big a stretch, I submit, m'lud, for 'Shakespeare' to be someone other than Will Shaxper, the jobbing actor, theatre co-owner, grain merchant, real estate speculator and part-time stage director.
In the modern age, films written by the Hollywood Ten were signed — as in The Front — by men of lesser talent who won Oscars for them; C Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, a royalist snob like Edward De Vere, wrote, fearful of exposure, detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake; Gore Vidal ditto under the name Edgar Box; Orson Welles claimed to have written all of the works on his Radio Theatre when other hands, Howard Koch, the co-author of Casablanca, among them, wrote most of them, including the War Of The Worlds script that rocketed Orson to world fame; John F Kennedy signed a book, Profiles of Power, that was written by Ted Sorensen and won the Pulitzer Prize; Paul Keating 'owned' a Redfern Speech that was written by Don Watson and praised world-wide; Julia Gillard 'gives' Gallipoli speeches written by Carl Green; and there were even the strange sur-titles, 'Verdi's Othello', 'Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet', and 'Barry Kosky's King Lear'.
For now as then, authorship is a fluid concept. I wrote episodes of Number 96 that Don Cash and Bill Harmon in some way 'owned'. My wife Anne Brooksbank wrote episodes of A Country Practice that Jim Davern still makes big money from. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks wrote sketches that Sid Caesar miraculously 'owned' and made famous,' Big Julie, I told him, don't go, already'; and so on.
Even so, it was in 'Shakespeare's' time that actors, musicians, royal patrons added lines and scenes (as Hamlet did to The Mousetrap) to texts that differed from week to week and town to town; a longer version at Bankside, a shorter version at Richmond, and so on.
And it may well be that Will Shaxper, as Andrew Upton does now, overvalued his contribution to a text that arrived by messenger from time to time from a lordly, diffident aristocrat, that wrote and did not sign it.
Will would have copied it out several times, or bits of it, in his own hand, and given it to actors that he then cast and directed in it, playing some of the parts himself, as Orson did in his various adaptations of Conrad, Melville and HG Wells; but that is hardly 'writing the plays', as John Bell said he did.
It is worth noting that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and that Macbeth, premiered that year, is half as long as Hamlet, and its hero/villain has no death speech as do all his predecessors, perhaps because the playwright died before he could supply it or work the play over; and that no other dying hero thereafter (Coriolanus, Timon) has one either.
So Doug Quixote's idea that fragments of eight or nine plays were worked on by De Vere's Men not always competently makes some sense.
Nothing after Othello actually works. Cymbeline is ridiculous, and described by the supportive Dr Johnson as 'unresisting imbecility'. Pericles uses a rough-hewn verse form that seems alien to its 'author'. Henry VIII is a cock-up; The Tempest full of lordly debating points but free of narrative.
Oxford, dead, was no longer there to give a work its overarching momentum. Minnows shuffled about, trying to sort it. Coriolanus was not performed till 1632, when most of the company were dead; Timon not even in that century.
It is worth looking up Tom North's Plutarch's account (note how the apostrophes accumulate) of the last days of Julius Caesar, and comparing them with Act 2 and Act 3 of 'Shakespeare's' most enduring and accessible work. It was successful, I submit, m'lud, because it was reportage of actual events more than a work of the imagination. It had no more 'author' than Oliver Stone's JFK.
And a great deal of 'Shakespeare's' work was like that.
And Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, suitor of Queen Elizabeth, the first of that name, who sent his wife, Burleigh's daughter, to a nunnery, could have been part of the mix.>>
