The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1451 Saturday, 3 September 2005
[1] From: Herman Gollob <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 1 Sep 2005 12:06:08 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
[2] From: John-Paul Spiro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 01 Sep 2005 12:23:01 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 16.1421 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
[3] From: Al Magary <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 01 Sep 2005 13:01:55 -0700
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
[4] From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 1 Sep 2005 21:18:43 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Herman Gollob <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 1 Sep 2005 12:06:08 EDT
Subject: 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
"Appropriating Shakespeare" IS essential, especially the devastating
chapter on Greenblatt.
Herman Gollob
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: John-Paul Spiro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 01 Sep 2005 12:23:01 -0400
Subject: 16.1421 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
Comment: RE: SHK 16.1421 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
William S. Niekderkorn asks, Why not make the authorship question part
of the traditional Shakespeare curriculum?
This begs a second question: What does this controversy add to our
reading of the plays?
Not much, I think. The authorship controversy, like so many others,
derives from the paucity of evidence regarding Shakespeare's personality
and from assembling scattered "evidence" from his writings. He left us
so little of himself as a person--yet in the writings there is more than
we could ever digest.
I'm all for getting as much as possible out of the plays. I am
suspicious of hidden codes but there's nothing wrong with putting some
quotes together and finding patterns. Arguments about Shakespeare's
religion, politics, sexuality, and so on, can enrich our reading of the
plays, even (especially?) when we realize that the conclusions we reach
depend much more on us than on Shakespeare. He keeps sending you back
to your biases, and that's always good.
But authorship is different. If Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, then
how might that affect our reading of his works? Greenblatt and others
have made much of the works being the product of a middle-class country
boy with Catholic heritage. If the works were written by de Vere, does
that mean they reflect his aristocratic Protestant background? If they
were written by Marlowe, are they affected by his being dead or exiled?
If Bacon, then should we be more sensitive to their sympathies with
scientific progress--or was Bacon using his pseudonymous poetry to
question the writing and political activity he did under his own name?
I ask these questions only half-facetiously. Biographical criticism is
quite useful for artists who made a big deal of themselves and write
themselves all over their works--Byron, for example, or Dante or Donne.
You can't read their works without dealing with them as real people
who lived real lives. But Shakespeare is different. I am with Harold
Bloom when I read him as like Homer and the author(s) of the Bible: he
was more interested in humanity than in himself. Perversely, this has
sent several people to do little other than wonder who he was and read
him back into his own works. (Less perversely, most of these people are
keen on proving Shakespeare was a lot like them.) There is ample
evidence in and out of the plays that Shakespeare was a bad husband and
father--yet not many people seem bent on arguing this. They're more
interested in making him an aristocrat, a man of faith, a political
partisan, a man with an interesting sex life, a model of the self-made
man, a prophet, and so on.
I don't know about all that. I just know that I can't stop reading him.
His writings are literature, not (just) evidence. They are creations,
yet we want them to be facts.
The authorship question should not be in the "traditional curriculum"
because there is precious little time to read the works at all. So many
students use supplemental materials (Sparknotes and such) and, in my
experience, most teachers offer only the blandest of interpretations.
They read a few plays, perhaps one year, and they usually read very
little else from the English Renaissance. Shakespeare's plays require
time and energy and few high school teachers have it.
The authorship question is a dime story mystery. Why distract ourselves
with that when there are wondrous plays and poems to read, plays that
address far greater mysteries?
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Al Magary <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 01 Sep 2005 13:01:55 -0700
Subject: 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
William S. Niederkorn wrote:
>I am not an Oxfordian, nor a Stratfordian for that matter. I am
>just trying to keep an open mind and sort things out.
I beg you to examine your amazing bias against the man from Stratford.
I have frankly wondered at the judgment of the New York Times in
allowing Niederkorn to so freely assume and express the minority view on
authorship and make that the basis of both cultural news stories and
opinion pieces. (Imagine if all the Times Science writers were so
accepting of creationism, astrology, flat earth theory, etc.)
Here's his Times bibliography of bylined articles (reverse chronological
order) in the last three years:
--The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas From the Traditional
Camp. Aug. 30, 2005
--To Be or Not to Be . . . Shakespeare. Aug. 21, 2004
--THEATER; Where There's a Will, or Two, or Maybe Quite a Few. Nov. 16,
2003
--Seeing the Fingerprints of Other Hands in Shakespeare. Sept. 2, 2003
--All Is True? Naye, Not If Thy Name Be Shakespeare. Aug. 19, 2003
--In Shakespeare, the Play's the Thing, and Here It Is, Trimmed to
Living Room Size. Dec. 25, 2002
--New Chief at Stratford-Upon-Potomac. Oct. 10, 2002
--Beyond the Briefly Inflated Canon: Legacy of the Mysterious 'W. S.'
June 26, 2002
--A Scholar Recants on His 'Shakespeare' Discovery. June 20, 2002
--THEATER; A Historic Whodunit: If Shakespeare Didn't, Who Did? Feb. 10,
2002
I see 10 articles of which one is a news story and one a review; the
eight others may have a "news peg" but are propagandistic in style and
content.
Meanwhile, SHAKSPER readers might wish to read Mr. Niederkorn's most
recent scattergun piece, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/books/30shak.html then David Kathman
and Terry Ross' letter to the NYT after Mr. Niederkorn's Oxfordian piece
was published Feb. 10, 2002: http://shakespeareauthorship.com/nyt.html
No cheers,
Al Magary
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Kathman <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 1 Sep 2005 21:18:43 -0500
Subject: 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
Comment: Re: SHK 16.1435 Brian Vickers in TLS, Wm Niederkorn in NYT
William S. Niederkorn wrote:
>Al Magary <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
>
>>NYT's resident Oxfordian, William S. Niederkorn
>
>I am not an Oxfordian, nor a Stratfordian for that matter. I am just
trying to keep an open mind and sort things out
>as well as I can.
>
>Best,
>William S. Niederkorn
If you actually believe this, then I'm afraid you're delusional. It's
very clear to anyone who has read your articles that you have a strong
pro-Oxfordian bias, and you have made little or no effort to represent
accurately the real views of mainstream Shakespeare scholars. I realize
that these are feature articles, so I guess the normal rules of
journalism must not apply, but if you were really the open-minded truth
seeker you depict yourself to be, you would have talked to some actual
Shakespeare scholars to get their side of the authorship issue, or at
least to check the factual accuracy of what you had written. The fact
that you did not do so is painfully obvious to any Shakespeare scholar
who reads your work.
For example, in your original Times article of February 10, 2002, you
quote or paraphrase nine Oxfordian advocates (Dan Wright, Minos Miller,
Charlton Ogburn, Roger Stritmatter, Richard Whalen, J. Thomas Looney,
Charles Wisner Barrell, Barbara Burris, and Ruth Loyd Miller), two
Marlowe advocates (Calvin Hoffman and Mike Rubbo), and six non-experts
expressing pro-Oxfordian views (Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens,
William Causey, Sigmund Freud, and Mark Rylance), plus you mention the
alleged Oxfordian sympathies of three prominent actors (Derek Jacobi,
Michael York, and Orson Welles) and one Supreme Court justice (William
Brennan). Of these twenty-one antistratfordians, you appear to have
interviewed Wright and Stevens, and possibly Stritmatter, especially for
the article. Their views are featured prominently are accepted
uncritically, even though many of those views are either extremely
doubtful or factually wrong. For example, you assert that "Oxford had a
close relationship with Southampton" when there is actually no evidence
that the two men even knew each other personally. You also uncritically
accept the conclusions of Roger Stritmatter's thesis, when that thesis
and its conclusions have come under some devastating criticisms. For
instance, see the following, which are only the tip of the iceberg:
http://members.tripod.com/stromata/id288.htm,
http://members.tripod.com/stromata/id317_august_17_2002.htm,
http://members.tripod.com/stromata/id459_february_3_2004.htm
http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare/msg/
5f96b6b678209380
In contrast, you only quote or paraphrase three mainstream Shakespeare
scholars (Irvin Leigh Matus, Werner Gundersheimer, and Gail Kern
Paster), and mention three others (Alan Nelson, myself, and Terry Ross).
You do not appear to have spoken to any of these people for the
article (I know for a fact that you did not talk to me), and the quote
from Gundersheimer is only to dismiss the authorship question
altogether. Your paraphrases of the arguments allegedly made by
"Stratfordians" are frequently oversimplified and/or inaccurate, and
appear to have mostly come from Oxfordian sources rather than the
scholars themselves. Furthermore, following each pro-Shakespeare
argument is an Oxfordian rebuttal which you accept uncritically, even
though many of these rebuttals are themselves factually inaccurate.
For example, you mention Sir Henry Wotton's 1613 letter in which he
calls *Henry VIII* a new play, which appears to be good evidence that
the play was written long after Oxford's death in 1604. But then you
report that Oxfordians say that Wotton was mistaken because "three
other sources do not call the play new and that scholars of the 18th
and 19th centuries dated it to Elizabeth's reign, or before 1603". The
claim that "three other sources do not call the play new" appears to
come straight from the Oxfordian "Shakespeare Authorship FAQ" at
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/faqfina3.htm, but it is a blatantly
false claim -- Henry Bluett, writing independently two days after
Wotton, calls *Henry VIII/All Is True* "a new play called all is trewe
wch had beene acted not passinge 2 or 3 times before". (See *William
Shakespeare: A Textual Companion*, p. 29.) As for the appeal to what
18th and 19th century scholars believed, they had only a small fraction
of the evidence we have, and it is difficult to understand why we should
privilege their opinions over the overwhelming conclusions of modern
scholars; this is a bit like a chemist arguing for the existence of
phlogiston because the best scientific minds of the 18th century
believed in it.
You could have been spared these and many other blunders if you had run
your article by a competent Shakespeare scholar; the fact that you
apparently avoided real scholars while generously quoting the likes of
Daniel Wright does not speak well for your claims of objectivity.
After the article appeared, Terry Ross and I wrote a letter to the New
York Times outlining our objections, but they only printed a soundbite
which omitted the substance of our arguments. We eventually posted the
letter on our web site, where you can read it at
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/nyt.html. Alan Nelson posted his
response to the article on his own web site, at
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/nyt.html; there he especially
objects to the article's ludicrously inaccurate assertion that the
Shakespeare authorship question is widely debated in university English
departments.
Dave Kathman
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