05.16.10

Booknotes: another from the Oxonians

Posted in Booknotes at 1:14 pm by nemo

I have just looked at a copy of

Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth [Hardcover]
Charles Beauclerk

Still another book on the Oxfordian Shakes-peare question. I have addressed this skeptically here before in several posts:
Booknotes: Contested Will…

However this book is somewhat more sophisticated than most, despite its outlandish claims.
I remain agnostic finally, but my discussion of Bill Bryson’s book on Shakespeare shows one way to recover from the wrong thinking of many anti-Stratfordians. But this new book is quite sophisticated, so, as usual, I enter a temporary state of neutrality to assess the issues.

I think this question is actually a good sideline to the study of the history of tragic drama, a truly enigmatic aspect of the evolution of world history, so it is important to get at the facts.
I will update this later, probably with a more skeptical take as I, as usual, recover from these books by the Oxonians.

Note the rarity of tragic drama in world history, and the inability that we have to even define it.
It is an impossible task: 1. define ‘tragedy’
2. write down a tragic plot: the plot should be a ‘well-made’ play, but not the Hollywood type of that. Shakespeare’s plots are all well-made plays, the cliche brand, yet ultra subtle. Look at Hamlet, the classic ghost/revenge plot, the type of the well-made play, but what a difference!!! Talents for the ‘well made’ play are rare, and rarely very artistic: they are a Hollywood commodity, but nothing in themselves. That’s a separate talent from poetry, or tragic understanding: so chalk up at least three major talents here.
3. compose the plot, using a verse form (blank verse for english speakers, say). That’s hard, and we still don’t know how Shakespeare’s plays sounded.
4. Produce it in an actual theatre: it must succeed as a commerical drama. No library abstractions.
That’s what I call hard.

Note that the Athenian brand of Greek tragedy flunks many definitions of the genre the Greeks created without quite seeing what they had created. Many Greek tragedies are not correct by any definition, further complicating the question, what is a tragedy (which may have become a red herring)
Nietzsche is interesting here, maybe, but he went off the deep end, so beware of him. There is nothing canonical in what he says, which is probably wrong. I doubt if the Apollian versus Dionysian framework is correct, but his intuitition may be onto something, we know not what.
And again Greek tragedy passed away within a few generations (for reasons Nietzsche did not get right), not to appear again, if you except Seneca, et al., until Shakespearian times! Then once again the brief flowering is over, and the knack for tragedy is lost. (Consider the dozens of failed attempts by the Romantic poets).
Here there is a problem, as raised by George Steiner in his The Death of Tragedy: books like Moby Dick should join the genre, and do, in a way, but they are not plays, have marginal tragic plots (but Moby Dick is very very close), and are not in blank verse. It is a big quibble finally, but the issue is of interest for the history of drama, about which Sommerset Maugham, a very smart fellow, had something to say in reverse, in the ease with which he could grind out fashionable dramas, but no tragedies. He had the knack for the well made play. But as he himself noted, not a single one was memorable. The point is that tragic drama is a mystery, one that Shakespeare resolved in spectacular fashion.
But who was Shakespeare?
It is a fact that this is not a transparent question, whatever the case with outlandish claims about the true author. That’s hard to explain: why is there a void, a smokescreen around the man we call Shakespeare? Even if the wild claims are seen to be false, this basic mystery remains, the strange veil of disinformation around the man.

Actually the sufis have their finger in this pie, with Idries Shah’s outrageous efforts to steal ‘Shakespeare’: as an anonymous sufi.
I don’t think so! But Idries Shah did have a point: the great legacy of Islamic poetry deeply influenced European poetry via the Spanish era of Islam, and the provencal poets. This influence is an underground stream often unacknowledged by scholars, creating bitterness in the Islamic world, which has a stupendous tradition of poetic talents, viz. the sufistic. You can see it as far as Chaucer, and his themes, which go back directly to that source. But, then, so what…???
And Shakespeare is obviously part of that stream, and yet is different, a world in himself.
He needs a study of the eonic effect, and the emergence of greek tragedy, a spectacular mystery of the Axial Age.
I wrote a review of Steiner’s book, at Amazon, on September 11, 2001 ????

http://www.amazon.com/review/R7MZJ5ZNG80SU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

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