I know that not many people who read this blog are interested in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but for anyone who might be, I thought I'd mention that Diana Price's excellent book "Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography," which previously was available only in an expensive hardcover edition, is now on sale in a much more affordable paperback version.

This is a very well researched, serious, and scholarly book that does not put forward an alternate authorship candidate, but simply points out the many oddities, inconsistencies, and gaps in the biography of Shakespeare of Stratford, while comparing what we know of his life with what we have learned about Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and other contemporaries.

In the US: http://tinyurl.com/d8hxx54

In the UK: http://tinyurl.com/csvpyxe

Diana Price's website is here: http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com

Comments

[alanborky]

Michael my own take on the Shakespeare dispute's much of its based on sheer snobbery.

Cyril Connolly once observed all the greatest most universal English writers've always come out of the lower middle classes ie their backgrounds've provided them with an impetus to climb further up the social ladder and they've had just enough education to combine with their phenomenal natural talents to know how to convey the illusion they know more than they actually do even as their talent as observers equips them as natural learners and blenders in. Russell Crow probably knew bollocks all about physics when he took on A Beautiful Mind but he knew how to convince us otherwise. How much more so a playwright of the calibre of Shakespeare?

And as for all the oddities inconsistencies and gaps Diana Price and others've found in Shakespeare's history they're exactly the same sort of details Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan've long been critiqued for.

Did young Master Cash really hang out with all those dangerous criminal types or did Baby Bob really become addicted to heroin?

But if you read Shakespeare himself you can see why the likes of the Sufis refer to him as Sheikh Pir ie Teaching Master of Teaching Masters because so much of his work as well as the mysterious gaps in his life correspond to the teachings of and mysterious episodes delineated both in his own plays and the lives of the greatest of the greatest Sufis.

[Michael Prescott]

It's not that middle class people can't be great writers. It's that Shakespeare's plays were pretty obviously written by a court insider. "Love's Labours Lost" is the most obvious example - it's chock full of inside jokes about members of the Court of Navarre, which only courtiers would get. And it's one of Shakespeare's earliest works, so we have to assume that he arrived in London from provincial Stratford and immediately became a member of the Queen's inner circle. This is, to put it mildly, unlikely.

What's far more plausible is that Shakespeare was a talented play broker and producer who purchased other people's plays, reworked them to make them more popular, and staged them for the groundlings. Some of the plays he acquired were written by a courtier who either was down on his luck and needed the money, or who simply wanted to see his plays performed publicly.

This would explain why the versions of the plays published during Shakespeare's lifetime were adulterated and corrupted, while the unadulterated versions ("the true and original copies," as the First Folio puts it) appeared only after both Shakespeare and the true author were dead.

Of course, it's impossible to prove this theory, but it makes more sense to me than the traditional story of an unlettered Shakespeare "warbling his native wood-notes wild," who somehow wrote the most sophisticated fiction of his era.

[Roger Knights]

Shakespeare's sonnets, which were published early in his opus, require jumping thru technical hoops that a novice with little schooling couldn't have done.

I hope that Ms. Price includes the probable provider of most of Shakespeare's scripts, Sir Thomas North. The Sherlock who's uncovered North is Dennis McCarthy, whose website gives a boiled-down version of the arguments in his book, North of Shakespeare, at http://northofshakespeare.wordpress.com/

[Nadezhda]

Wow! Let me see if I have this right.A meat puppet is a fake idnteity created to talk as a sort of outside party or to provide a second opinion in the faceless world of the Internet.A sock puppet troll is fake idnteity used to start an argument online.Which all leads to the fun one that being the Dank an idiot who intended to be post the rebuttal to his own comment as the sock puppet troll but forgot to logoff as himself (oh yes, this *IS* a man thing)!FANTASTICALLY DELICIOUS!I am just a simple-minded person. Not clever, at all! Thanks for sharing.

[Michael Prescott]

"A meat puppet is a fake identity created to talk as a sort of outside party or to provide a second opinion in the faceless world of the Internet."

No, "meat puppet" is a term used by materialists to describe all human beings. The idea is that human beings are just sacks of meat manipulated by their genes. The term has nothing to do with sock puppets.

I assume your comment was intended for the "Meat Puppet Madness" thread, even though you posted it here. Not sure who "the Dank" is.

[Tidimatso]

nice site well set out.the new African Caesar is awful.What connection does the grseeatt of Shakespeare's Roman plays have with Africa?Answer none, except in the mind of the producer and the political agenda he wants to plug.The RSC seem incapable of understanding European history and culture in anything other than a kind of muti purpose marxism.So, does this latest production gives us a greater understanding of roman history, and the historical Caesar which presumably Shakespeare was interested in exploring?Have to say this has been rather typical of the ensemble in recent years.