In a book that manages the atypical achievement of exercising intellectual caution and good sense throughout, while still providing an exceedingly interesting portrait of the man himself, Oxford intellectuals Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith examine 30 of the best-known rumours about Shakespeare and, overall, flatten them.
This book seeks to cross-examine several things we believe we know about Shakespeare, and we have called this body of knowledge 鈥渕yths.鈥�
Why 鈥渕yths鈥�?
The authors were drawn to this term for the Shakespeare content in each of the chapters because 鈥渕yth鈥� forefronts the act of storytelling; because it underscores the edifying work these stories do rather than their correctness; because it is not about a defined dot of origin but about accepted principles; because it is about the people who accept or invent or need these stories as much as it is about the stories themselves.
This book has been detailed into the following chapters:
Myth 1: Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time Myth 2: Shakespeare was not well educated Myth 3: Shakespeare's plays should be performed in elizabethan dress Myth 4: Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed Myth 5: Shakespeare never traveled Myth 6: Shakespeare's plays are politically incorrect Myth 7: Shakespeare was a Catholic Myth 8: Shakespeare's plays had no scenery Myth 9: Shakespeare's tragedies are more serious than his comedies Myth 10: Shakespeare hated his wife Myth 11: Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech Myth 12: Hamlet was named after Shakespeare's son Myth 13: The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes Myth 14: Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright Myth 15: Shakespeare was a plagiarist Myth 16: We don't know much about Shakespeare's life Myth 17: Shakespeare wrote alone Myth 18: Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical Myth 19: If Shakespeare were writing now, he'd be writing for Hollywood Myth 20: The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the stage Myth 21: Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary Myth 22: Shakespeare's plays are timeless Myth 23: Macbeth is jinxed in the theater Myth 24: Shakespeare did not revise his plays Myth 25: Boy actors played women's roles Myth 26: Shakespeare's plays don't work as movies Myth 27: Yorick's skull was real Myth 28: Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare's plays Myth 29: Shakespeare's characters are like real people Myth 30: Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare
Myths proliferate about Shakespeare in some measure because of half-remembered or out-of-date scholarship from schooldays, because Shakespeare the man is such an intangible and captivating cultural property, and because intercessions in Shakespeare studies, predominantly biographical and theatrical ones, make headline news: witness the 鈥渁uthorship question鈥� (Myth 30) or speculation about Shakespeare's beliefs or sexuality (Myths 7 and 18).
Put minimally, myths are told and retold about Shakespeare because no other writer matters as much to the world: nineteenth-century Germany had a flourishing academic Shakespeare criticism before England did; India had a Shakespeare Society before England; Shakespeare is regularly performed at amateur and professional levels, in translation, worldwide. Shakespeare is not just English (as Germany's 鈥渦nser [our] Shakespeare鈥� attests).
Thus myths about Shakespeare go some way toward telling us stories about ourselves.
We in point of fact know a good deal about Shakespeare鈥檚 life and movements, the authors reveal 鈥� far more than many other near contemporaries.
Along with the plays and sonnets, and plenty of material on his family in Stratford-upon-Avon, we also have documents showing Shakespeare involved in court cases and purchasing property, and we have his will. There are also some significant things Shakespeare didn鈥檛 do, which may help understand his personality. Consider the increasingly popular idea that he was a secret Catholic.
This offers the thrill of the hidden and the illicit 鈥� for example, secret codes in his poems. The way the authors unravel this scrupulous myth is intensely cogent.
Evidence for Shakespeare鈥檚 Catholicism is purportedly the religious landscape of Hamlet, in which the soul of Hamlet鈥檚 murdered father is obviously in hell. The religious references in the plays do 鈥榯heatrical not religious work鈥�, Maguire and Smith assert, and his own 鈥榬eligious beliefs become less a matter of individual biography and more a snapshot of present-day shifts, uncertainties and overlaps鈥�.
Here鈥檚 another myth the book attacks. Far from being only basically educated, Shakespeare would have benefited from the rigorous education of the sixteenth-century grammar school, 6 am to 6 pm every day, with higher classes conducted in Latin.
He never went to university, true, but we can tell from the sources of his plays that he remained a ravenous reader all his life: medieval poetry, Italian fiction, history ancient and medieval, even existing continental philosophy, and he could read in French and Italian, too.
In contradiction of another myth, Shakespeare didn鈥檛 have a principally exaggerated vocabulary by Elizabethan standards. Shakespeare coined some new words, but so did everyone else: Thomas More gave us the word lunatic, Francis Bacon gave us thermometer and skeleton.
It is the utter volume and familiarity of what he wrote that explain why he is so often credited in the original Oxford English Dictionary as the originator of words 鈥� but as the OED has been revised, and as more 16th -century texts have been digitally searched, so the number of new words attributed to Shakespeare has 鈥榮ubstantially decreased鈥�.
The Shakespeare the authors give us is not an especially warm man. They point to an understandable absence of generous giving or concern for the less fortunate. In his will he left the poor of his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, a derisory sum of cash, no bursaries, no scholarships, no endowments.
Everything else stayed in the family.
Not all of the myths are fallacious: in calling these beliefs 鈥渕yths鈥� we are less interested in stigmatizing them as imprudent or unsubstantiated than we are concerned to understand how they become ossified and block, rather than enable, our interpretation of Shakespeare's works.
Even the idea that he is more than ever impenetrable, always key to any 鈥楽hakespeare was really someone else鈥� theory, is point-blank false.
And as the authors themselves declare: 鈥淭he temptation for a book of this sort is to focus on Shakespeare's biography. Shakespeare biography is a fruitful field for myths, from the youthful deer-poaching episode (described by Nicholas Rowe at the beginning of the eighteenth century) to the technicalities of the marriage (attested by the record books) to the missing years (documented nowhere). Inevitably, we have included some of these examples but we have tried, wherever we can, to move the discussion on to the plays and poems themselves. Whereas most of our myths involve layers of interpretative accretion between us and the Elizabethan period, reading Shakespeare's works themselves can shortcut some of this narrative padding.鈥�
Maguire and Smith's book refers to myths in the sense of series of beliefs rather than things which are untrue. They explore 30 areas of interest around Shakespeare including he was not well-educated, he hated his wife, we don't know much about his life and the, evergreen, did he write the works attributed to him and explore each one in a contained short essay. It's very readable as well as learned and would be good for those who know a little about Shakespeare, a lot about Shakespeare or sit somewhere in the middle.
Un saggio dedicato ai grandi miti su Shakespeare diviso in 30 capitoli. In ogni capitolo le autrici affrontano uno dei grandi miti che circondano la figura di William Shakespeare, dal fatto che fosse lo scrittore pi霉 famoso del suo tempo, alla leggenda che dice che non rileggeva i suoi testi, dal fatto che le sue opere non avessero scenario, al tipo di pubblico per il quale scriveva. Il risultato 猫 un testo denso di riferimenti e informazioni, interessante e decisamente arricchente anche se perde un p貌 di ritmo e di intensit脿 in alcuni passaggi.
The essays in this book average 4-5 pages, and each addresses a single question. In general, these essays are of great interest, and all exhibit a tremendous knowledge of Shakespeare and his context. A few of these essays address questions that seem very irrelevant (e.g., "Yorick's skull was real"), but most of them are excellent. The final chapter addresses the Shakespeare authorship issue, and the authors clearly feel the same weariness about the issue that I do.
What is so lovely about this book is that most of these ideas are things you have heard about Shakespeare and kind of accepted. What the angelic Smith and Maguire then do is expose these beliefs to the current knowledge we now have: many of them are guesses, some are simply wrong.
As with anything by either Emma Smith or Laurie Maguire, it keeps directing you back to the text with a new reading.
Maguire and Smith do a good job of complicating many "Myths" around Shakespeare--although it is important to note that many of the "myths" aren't factual statements, but more general sentiments about the author. While Maguire and Smith do some outright debunking, most of what is done is just "complicating" the "myth" because it was based on out-dated scholarship, Victorian or early 20th century theoretical concerns, or just cliches. In the end, while Maguire and Smith are perfectly readable while being very scholarly from entry-to-entry, the book still feels uneven. The essay on Shakespeare's authorship won't change most opinions nor does it have space to do so: that task requires a book-length treatment. Other topics, such as the relationship of "Shakespeare" to film, either need to be books or they need to be shortened, but the essay is just long enough to be tedious without being exhaustive. Furthermore, on Shakespeare's class concerns or his Catholicity, Maguire and Smith do not earn their outright dismissal with enough evidence to completely undo what are, to many including me, fairly sound arguments. Despite those concerns, these is an interesting book and an enjoyable read filled with facts and "complications."
This is such a fun book. It is marketed to a non-scholarly readership, yet the scholarship is there if pedagogically light. It clears up a lot of obvious nonsense such as who wrote Shakespeare's works and the claim that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, corrects claims that are unfortunately evergreen such as the Tempest being Shakespeare's farewell to the stage and the plays being timeless, and navigates some things that may not be myths, such as the sonnets being autobiographical and that Shakespeare did not travel.
The difficulty this book is that unless you read it carefully you may receive a false impression. Take for example that "myth" that his plays had no scenery. Well, if you go by what we mean by scenery today, that is more or less true. The slight indications of place used in early modern theaters are not the same, yet they existed. Just read the title of that one, and you may come away believing that Shakespeare's plays had scenery in the same way that modern plays have it. It is best to read this book for the answers are not always yes or no.
Like any serious books about Shakespeare, this book doesn't forward lavish or spectacular theories about Shakespeare- it just uses the facts we have in a serious way. Did Shakespeare hate his wife? Was he a Catholic? Was Yorick's skull real? The 30 myths explored range from serious to silly ones, and each one is discussed seriously.z Most of the time the author has no definitive "true" or "false" response to these myths but he does have a lot of data 麓which reshape our view of the playwright and his time. Very good work.
Maguire and Smith present an interesting cross-section of Shakespearean history and scholarship. The overall tone is reader-friendly and accessible. The individual essays make it an easy read, although some of the topics are curious. And, like most books concerning Shakespeare's authorship, it won't likely convince anyone to switch their allegiance from their favorite alternate author candidate. Still a decent read for any Shakespeare enthusiast.
Emma Smith, the wonderful Shakespearean co wrote this fascinating book by Laurie Maguire. It's full of illuminating ideas and examples of how Shakespeare created his effects. Clear, accessible and yet scholarly