As a Shakespeare
dilettante, I find some of the attributions regarding collaborations slightly
worrying. I'm not quite sure why this has been worthy of research. One of the
more risible of 'evidence' put forward, I forget where, was that Middleton was co-author
of “All's Well That Ends Well” (incidentally Wells also professes this
attribution). The argument was: 'As an
example, the word "ruttish" appears in the play, meaning lustful -
and its only other usage at that time is in a work by Middleton' or something
to that effect. So, creative writers are supposed never to have used a word
only once in their entire oeuvre? This is quite typical of academics who have
no idea how creative writers - and particularly dramatists - work. But the most
preposterous of all must surely be their citing of the stage direction 'all':
'"All" (preferred by Middleton)
only occurs twice in the Folio - both times in All’s Well.' Playwrights
were writing their plays on the hoof to impossible deadlines. Stylometric analysis is a method which has been seriously challenged and is evidently
flawed because it takes no account of how writers write. Only a few obsessives
really care, those of us who can bring ourselves to watch Shakespeare,
generally just enjoy and don't really worry about whether he might have had
assistance from this or that writer. We know he collaborated as a matter of
habit, so one for the historians to mull over, the rest of us will focus on
what is best, the often-astounding dialogue...
Statistics is a very dangerous tool for
someone to use who is not experienced with the kind of mathematical artifacts
which can be produced in complex analyses. It is VERY easy to amend the
modelling parameters slightly to produce the answer you are hoping for, and few
people will ever delve into the workings of a complex statistical algorithm to
see whether the weights put on different variables are justifiable or not. In
practice, skilled English professors are not going to have the mathematical
experience to challenge the findings.
John von Neumann
famously said, of graphical mathematical models: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make
him wiggle his trunk.” By this he meant that one should not be impressed
when a complex model fits a data set well. With enough parameters, you can fit
any data set, even a requirement to draw an elephant on the output graph. I
fear that this authorship assertion may turn out to be an elephant...I
struggled with this when I was learning foreign languages. I had some naive
hope that by applying mathematical modeling to some issues they could be put on
a firmer footing than is usual in linguistics. It didn't take me very long to
realize that what I was doing was merely recreating the limited data set
available, by turning it into formulas rather than raw data. My formulas,
simple as they were, described the data set with great accuracy. But if the
data set would have been slightly different (say, by some anthropologist
discovering some as-yet undocumented languages spoken in Papua New Guinea or
somewhere), my formulas would have been slightly different too, and still be
equally accurate. I did get very high marks on a paper I did on the subject,
from a professor who clearly didn't know much about statistics (very few linguists
do), but thought my approach was highly original, and encouraged me to explore
it further. I gave up on linguistics soon after that. At least on that kind of
linguistics. Sometimes, even mathematical physics, or anything very deeply
mathematical is the same. It takes some years to be able to sort the dross and
put it to one side.
But whatever the
case, I confess to be a Marlowe admirer (not so much with Kyd, Fletcher or
Beaumont):
'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.'
In “Shakespeare
and Co.” by Stanley Wells
Those first two
lines rank among the best in the English language.
If Shakespeare
is not the author of his plays, it is remarkable that so many of his
contemporaries accepted he was - Jonson, Heminges & Condell, even the
bilious Greene in his own way accept Shakespeare as the author. Others might
have contributed a few bits here and there, but Shakespeare was light years
ahead of them. Marlowe was not always an astonishing dramatist himself -
Faustus contains lots of rather naff comic scenes, in among the good bits.
Barabus is presented as entirely unsympathetic and hateful, whereas Shakespeare
makes Shylock human. Jonson was still writing plays about 'humours' when
Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Shakespeare's plays junked the unity of time
and space conventions that his contemporaries valued. It's entirely likely that
some parts of his plays were written by others - but no more than a passage
here or there. There is something different about Shakespeare's plays that
suggest they were the work of one, very unique, person. Out of interest, why
does no-one question the authorship of Marlowe's plays, Jonson's, Fletcher’s,
Beaumont’s? Maybe we should be looking for evidence of Will's handiwork in
them, rather than expending so much time and energy trying to diminish the
Shakespeare's achievements, just because he didn't go to bloody Oxford and his
dad made gloves.
Then there's the
actors - you think if Kemp, Burbage or Armin came up with a funny line or a
nice plot twist, that Shakespeare would have been in any position to say
"no, this work is evidence of my brilliance and none shall
interfere!" I think not.
Then there's the
editing. For the 12,542nd time, I tell you. Do you really think the plays are
three hours long because anyone actually wanted to be on stage that long? No!
Shakespeare wrote far more material than was needed because they would have
edited every performance, using different scenes and different lines for
different shows (especially useful when switching between playhouse and court).
Is this not a form of authorship? But this is all detail. The big problem is
more cultural - we primitively need to believe that a work of art is a window
into a single brilliant artist's mind. It is this old fashioned need to see art
almost biographically that holds us back. Put simply, we need to think
differently about what literature is. This was a world with no copyright, where
audiences would often miss the first half of a play, arriving halfway through
with totally different attitudes to so many things. I think also a lot of it is
snobbery. People don't want to believe that a man without a university
education could write brilliant works. I'm sure in the future many will say a
man from a London slum (Chaplin) could never have made such films or an
uneducated man like Twain could be so wise. Maybe they didn't. Does it matter?
The works are timeless.
Those who don't
want to face it are fundamentalist Shakespearean scholars, and the town of
Stratford-on-Avon, the livelihoods of both depend on the myths and legend. I
thought Anonymous was brilliant by the way. Even if it wasn't true. Which it
might have been. And it was good enough for Mark Rylance to appear in the film.
Another
non-book, I fear. I'm gutted about this to be honest. It's like Milli Vanilli
all over again. I threw out all their LPs, and have just tossed my original
copy of the First Folio into the recycling. Nah, just kidding; I love Milli Vanilli…
Some days when I wake up, I’m sometimes convinced I authored several Acts from
Hamlet. But the computer always says, 'No.' Alas. No such luck…
