February
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 72. Thursday, 28 Feb 1991. (1) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 1991 23:33:04 -0500 (15 lines) From: Nicholas Ranson <R1NR@AKRONVM> Subject: Re: SHK 2.0071 Baconian Theories (2) Date: Thu, 28 Feb 1991 04:58:54 -0500 (10 lines) From: Nicholas Ranson <R1NR@AKRONVM> Subject: Re: SHK 2.0071 Baconian Theories [2] (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 27 Feb 1991 23:33:04 -0500 From: Nicholas Ranson <R1NR@AKRONVM> Subject: 2.0071 Baconian Theories Comment: Re: SHK 2.0071 Baconian Theories The question of ciphers, of Baconian or any other source, was firmly-- and wittily--put to rest by the Friedmans in *The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined* some years ago. The matter is simply of no interest to Shakespeareans, I would hazard, in whatever form the old lure manifests itself. I am always a little suspicious (!) of those who show too much interest in this subject..... No: just kidding. But I think the Friedmans put all attempts in this area--both past and present-- into the arena of farce. If I recall correctly, they extracted, by the same principles and practices as claimed by the Baconians, messages such that Horatio Nelson wrote the plays of Shakespeare. Ah well: it's late at night, so forgive my acerbic response. Best of British. Cheers. NR (2) --------------------------------------------------------------26---- Date: Thu, 28 Feb 1991 04:58:54 -0500 From: Nicholas Ranson <R1NR@AKRONVM> Subject: 2.0071 Baconian Theories [2] Comment: Re: SHK 2.0071 Baconian Theories [2] My immediate response you received late last night when I didn't have my resources with me. The book should have been: *The Shakespeareran Ciphers Examined*, by William F. and Elizabeth S. Friedman (Cambridge U.P.). The sub title was: "An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him." [This second message seems to have arrived somewhat damaged. Any errors in my reconstruction are mine, and not Professor Ranson's. KS]
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 71. Wednesday, 27 Feb 1991. Date: Wed, 27 Feb 91 16:49:28 GMT From: Mike Ellwood <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. > Subject: New(?) light on the Francis Bacon theories This may be "old-hat" to many of you, but I thought I would (should) pass it on for anyone possibly interested. BBC domestic radio carried a programme recently about scholarship done on the text of a scroll that the statue'd figure of the Bard is holding up, in Westminster Abbey. It is based on the text of one of his plays (I confess I have forgotten which, but I'm sure it is well known to many), but the text differs from accepted versions in some ways, which had been noted long ago. Using ciphers which had been public knowledge for centuries actually, a scholar had deciphered the name "Francis Bacon - Author" from the text. I think this work was relatively recent, although Bacon's name is supposed to appear in the Sonnets in cipher form, which has been known for longer, I think. Theories about Bacon having authored the plays are as old as the hills, but I THINK this was a new(-ish) piece of evidence. I think that the fundamental thesis was that the statue of the Bard had been put there by a group of "conspirators" who wanted to perpetuate the "myth" of Shakespeare's authorship, while leaving a clue as to the "real" authorship. I confess I neglected to record any significant details, such as the name of the person doing this detective work. Perhaps the radio broadcast will be repeated, and possibly on BBC World Service, for those (the majority on this list, I presume), outside Britain. Let me add a disclaimer that I have no views for or against any such theories, and no reason to hold any views; I just pass this on as a "conduit", as it were.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 70. Tuesday, 26 Feb 1991. (1) Date: Tue, 26 Feb 1991 07:29:16 -0500 (51 lines) From: Stevesteventhethebibinocnoculularar <SURCC@CUNYVM> Subject: Re: SHK 2.0069 Authorial Revision (2) Date: Tue, 26 Feb 1991 08:43:00 -0500 (14 lines) From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Subject: RE: SHK 2.0069 Authorial Revision (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Feb 1991 07:29:16 -0500 From: Stevesteventhethebibinocnoculularar <SURCC@CUNYVM> [Steve Urkowitz, City University of New York] Subject: 2.0069 Authorial Revision Comment: Re: SHK 2.0069 Authorial Revision Oooh, the unhappy slide into denigrating the theatricality of those early texts! If students don't know what to do with Q and F 2HenryVI and you fear that they will stuporify if you show them, then maybe you're also similarly afraid of giving them 2HENRYVI alive or pickled in a modern version. Do I detect a whiff of irony in the appelation "Q1 Enthusuast"? I'll get a t-shirt made . . . Any of this stuff, edited or facsimiled, is deadly dull if it isn't presented carefully. How come? Well, scripts are not literature. Try feeding someone the recipe for chocolate cake instead of chocolate cake. It ain't mad enthusiasm that leads me to give my students, last night, f'rinstance, the parallel texts of Alexander Iden's self description just before he chops Jack Cade. In Q he says he's equal in size to Cade; in F he says he's MUCH bigger than Cade. So the students grin, and they see that scripts are contingent, at least in this case, upon the physical creatures that are going to play them on any particular day. Hmmm. . . Fat shareholders in F vs impecunious underfed pirates in Q? I leave that to the TheoryofText Department. Or the opening scene in 2H6 where in Q Queen Margaret demurely talks of her modesty, sits next to King Henry, and is welcomed by upright nobles. In F instead she proclaims her own boldness, she does not sit (or she's not invited to sit) and the nobles kneel to her. Oh, yes. The pirates, you see, . . . or they pirated Shakespeare's revision (sez the OUP). I see my job as teaching my students how to interpret theatrical scripts. The q-f variants help immensely in that task, whoever was responsible. They are tools, not relics of the true religion. What is our stock in trade anyway in these classrooms? Well, I work with the documents written and transmitted from the past, my own achievements of professional analytic skills and strategies, and, (wheee!) against all worldweariness, my pleasure, my delight, my giddy enthusiasm over "the achieve" of that theatrical recipe-book-in-many- versions. Werstine sneers at my enthusiasm and he repeatedly misrepresents my conclusions and my program. Well, he's gotta live inside that grumpiness; I, on the other hand, gotta dance. Ya wanna dance? Try finding not the "errors" in the naughtyquartos but the pleasures they offer. One last cookie to look at in 2H6: check out the two versions of the fellas who undo good duke Humphrey. In one they are lively dudes, "All things is handsome" one says about the execution of their command, and in the other they sound like grim functionaries, one with a guilty conscience. Go on, lookit! All it'll take is the time to open that 2H6 facsimile and the Folio. And try it out on your freshmen, or your graduate class. C'mon. Take a brave taste. Ignore the grotty bits that come with any old-typeset stuff. Dig in or sniff and sample. Just a dancin' fool, Urk. When ya gonna grow up? SURCC@cunyvm (2) --------------------------------------------------------------29---- Date: Tue, 26 Feb 1991 08:43:00 -0500 From:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. [Skip Shand, Glendon College] Subject: 2.0069 Authorial Revision Comment: RE: SHK 2.0069 Authorial Revision Janis says that it would take "a real quarto enthusiast" to succeed in giving classroom life to different entrances from different quartos, etc. Not so, I think: It simply requires that we learn, as one of the many strings to our bows, to read playtexts, whatever their authorial provenance, as scripts for performance, manifesting at all sorts of points an intelligent and intelligible openness of a sort which is closed by actorly performance in a BROADLY determinate fashion--that we seek in these texts the living and demonstrable drama and theatre, rather than the will o' the wisp author. I sort of thought this was the old orthodoxy!
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 69. Monday, 25 Feb 1991. (1) Date: Sun, 24 Feb 1991 22:17:56 -0500 (29 lines) From: Steve Urkowitz <SURCC@CUNYVM> Subject: Re: SHK 2.0066 Authorial Revision (2) Date: Mon, 25 Feb 1991 10:11:36 -0500 (24 lines) From: "JANIS _ LULL" <FFJL@ALASKA> Subject: RE: SHK 2.0068 Authorial Revision (1) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 24 Feb 1991 22:17:56 -0500 From: Steve Urkowitz <SURCC@CUNYVM> Subject: 2.0066 Authorial Revision Comment: Re: SHK 2.0066 Authorial Revision Dear Jean Brink: EEK-mail reply to your call for more careful definition of revision. Why do we have to define a horse before we ride it? Must a specific line or poem be certified kosher before we deign to read it or allow our students to read it? What's to lose if we discover that the Pirate Marcellus, on 3 February 1603 actually memorially reconstructed Q1 Hamlet and, boyoboy wasn't Shakespeare and those other player/sharers furious? That's exactly why we SHOULD read that naughty quarto so we may see what all the fuss is about. As Skip Shand's paper demonstrates, and as I argued way back in 1986 ("Well-sayd old mole" Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions," in Georgianna Zeigler, ed., Shakespeare Studies Today [NY:AMS PRESS]) there's life in those texts. Someone who wrote them (and I think it was WS, but who cares?) knew a lot about how those early plays were constructed. Even must've seen quite a few. Even more than Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, more'n Kenneth Muir even. Why wait til they're certified "good" or "terrible"? We don't know that chunks of ANTONY & CLEOPATRA weren't suggested by the guy who delivered the hazelnuts. Does that make the whole project suspicious? Sure it does, but only if you demand texts virgo intacto. Read 'em to learn how they were manipulated or even (egods) penetrated. Yuch, how violent a term for the imagined pleasure of engaging a warmly imagined theatrical experience. Where is the dancer here? Where a dance? Yrs, Urk. (2) --------------------------------------------------------------36---- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 1991 10:11:36 -0500 From: "JANIS _ LULL" <FFJL@ALASKA> Subject: 2.0068 Authorial Revision Comment: RE: SHK 2.0068 Authorial Revision Hmm. I thought Werstine's point was that we should somehow incorporate compositors, censors, bookkeepers, hired menders, and everybody else into the body of Shakespeare, if not by penetration, then maybe by some kind of protoplasmic merger. He fails to say how this might happen, however, but I begin to get an idea with Urkowitz's picture of using Q1 R&J in the classroom. I THOUGHT he was going to say, just try showing students several different entrances from several different quartos of a Shakespeare play and watch them fall into a stupor. It would, it seems to me, require a real quarto enthusiast to pull it off. And this may be part of the resistance to "revising Shakespeare," penetrated Shakespeare, layered Shakespeare, and all the rest. Some classicists--and I guess we're all classicists--are afraid that the upshot might be that nobody, maybe especially students, cares about Shakespeare any more at all.
Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 2, No. 68. Sunday, 24 Feb 1991. Date: Sun, 24 Feb 1991 21:48:37 -0500 From: Steve Urkowitz <SURCC@CUNYVM> Subject: 2.0063 Authorial Revision Comment: Re: SHK 2.0063 Authorial Revision [This message arrived just moments after I sent the digest containing Jean Brink's message to SHAKSPER. Rather than holding it for another 24 hours, I forward it now, separately. My apologies for any inconvenience this duplication of subjects may cause. KS] Dear Janis, As the lead lunatic in the "Shakespeare Revises" ward of this home for thethe academically out, I'd like to enter the conversation about why consider Shakespeare as the reviser of those funny scripts. Paul Werstine's psychoerotic fantasies of dirty little compositors and apprentices penetrating Shakespeare's manuscripts sounds sadly like the back rooms of nasty adult book stores. Playscripts of most periods may be the product of individual effort, or they may pop out of a community of interest and suggestion and hard thought over tough problems. The consequence of the different imagined narratives though seems to have been significant. When we fantasize that Shakespeare and his company revised a text then we are encouraged to look, to READ, such a text. But when the whole camp, pioneers and all, may have spewed onto the "bad" quarto of MERRY WIVES, then PFUI! Don't Wannit. Though Paul Werstine says otherwise, I keep on encouraging people to Lookit! Whoever may have inscribed those words, they did fascinating work, and we have a lot to learn from it. Werstine says, "Nope. Unclean, unclear. Give 'em edited versions because we can trust us editors." Try, just try, one or two times, to show several neat alternative versions of an entrance from 3HenryVI or a father-daughter dialogue from R&J with your undergraduates. They'll begin to see how text or script may be manipulated to create theatrical effects. Isn't that the goal of reading these old dogs anyway? I tell ya, the "bad" quarto of R&J will help your students understand more about R&J than setting them to read through Brooke's Romeus and Juliet. But I'll betcha not a dozen students (or teachers either) a year read Q1 R&J in a year in the whole wide world. Okay, Urk, back in yer cage! . . . . Steve Urkowitz SURCC@CUNYVM