(no subject)
I recently dedicated a little time on here to the works of William Shakespeare and that has found me, completely by accident, surfing on the crest of the zeitgeist. You see, earlier this week a gaggle of scientists, scholars and clever folk, curiously led by Sir Derek Jacobi, claimed that there is no way a 16th century commoner like The Bard could have written the plays attrributed to him. They are, or so the group claim, too knowledgeable in the realms of history, science, law, politics, sea-faring and geography to have been written by a simple brummie chap with a daft haircut. The notion of his authorship, apparently, is preposterous.
What obviously happened in reality, according to Jacobi and co, is that a group of terribly bright, terribly posh sorts- some of whom were established playwrights like Johnson and Marlowe, some of whom were not- got together, wrote all these plays and sonnets and then took the unusal step of publishing them under an assumed name shared by a well-known actor who regularly performed for King James I. As the works gained popularity and acclaim, they decided to keep so schtum about the whole thing that not even one loose-lipped relative would spill the beans in years to come until Cadfael himself came along four centuries later and figured the whole thing out.
A brief aside: I have to admit that this whole idea has at least some academic credentials behind it and therefore avoids the major pitfall of most conspiracy theories- namely that we should believe that a complex smokescreen perpetrated by the U.S. Government/The Vatican/giant space lizards could be blown wide open by a sociophobe in Denver who hasn't figured out the importance of personal hygiene.
Anyway, returning to Shakespeare (or whoever he was/wasn't), the actual 'expertise' that it is claimed he couldn't possibly possess is a little hard to come by in much of his work. For example, he is apparently blessed with mastery of sea-faring and European geography that is beyond his means and yet he has characters in The Tempest set sail from Milan which is about land-locked as Nebraska- clearly he was either using a touch of literary licence or this is the first appearance in English literary history of the hovercraft. (His spelling wasn't much better- only six copies of his signature are known to exist and he never spells his name the same in any two of them- a frankly appaling hit-rate for the most important writer in the history of the English language).
His references to science, law and politics can easily be explained by the fact that, as an actor in a troupe favoured by both Elizabeth I and James I he would have moved in highly educated circles and asked many a leading light for guidance. Mind you, his grasp of history is, as I've alluded to before, questionable at best- although his historical plays were always much more about England's present than it's past. There was always a monarch to please or forewarn and a touch of religious strife pinging around the court and Shakespeare's preferred way of dealing with this was to focus on the apparnent lessons of the past, particularly if they involved kings called Henry or Richard.
His main lesson appaeared to be that, if you wanted a successful, strong and all-conquering monarch, it was best to call him Henry whilst, tellingly, the two Shakespeare plays about kings called Richard are prefixed by the title "The Tragedie of...". As I said in a previous post, this was at least slightly unfair on Richard II whose short life, whilst featuring it's fair share of 'tragedie' also featured him single-handedly facing down a 10,000 strong mob intent on overthrowing him. There was also a bit of a leg-up for the posterities of the three Henrys focused upon by Shakespeare. Whilst his plays regarding them are full of swashbuckling battles, victorious campaigns in France and stirring "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" speeches, the reality is that one of the Henrys died of dyssentery, one popped his clogs to leprosy and Henry VI, most spectacularly of all, lost the corwn, won it back again, then got captured in his own Tower of London and murdered with a red hot poker up the jacksie. None of these feature in any of the plays and, lets face it, they would have been a hell of a lot better if they did, particularly if Prospero popped by in his hovercraft.
There are three theories to explain the discrepancies in fortunes between the Henrys and the Richards in Shakespeare's work. Firstly, and favoured by most, is that the Henrys represented the Tudor dynasty from which Elizabeth was descended and could therefore be used, as long as they were portrayed in a good light, as the subjects of plays that actually dealt with thw worries over succession prevelant during the childless Queen's reign. The second theory, favoured by Sir Derek Jacobi is that Shakespeare didn't write them cause he wasn't a 15th century king and therefore how could he possibly know anything about them? The third and final favour, which is mine alone, is that Shakespeare, by portraying Henrys as mighty and Richards as fools, was single-handedly gaining revenge for the single greatest injustice in the collected legacies of English monarchs.
If you take a trip to Westminster, you'll find a huge, muscular statue of a man in chainmail sat upon a horse looking, not to put to fine a point on it, nails. This is a statue of Richard I, the Lionheart- the exhalted pinnacle of English monarchial majesty. The King of Kings. The Couer de Lyon.
He was a pillock.
After ascending to the throne by overthrowing his own dad, he promptly fucked off on crusade, leaving behind a country he slammed as "cold and always raining" with a capital "I'd sell if I could find a buyer". He left behind a regent called Hugh, who was immediately the subject of intense scheming and attempted usurping by people who felt they had a far more suitable name than Hugh for running a country, and spent a good few years fighting Muslims, presumably to go with his order to his courtiers to kill all the Jews in England. When he was done he set off home and was captured by the French who imprisoned him for two years before releasing him in exchange for a ransom that practically bankrupted the nation. He swore revenge when he got home, raised an army, marched into France, laid siege to a castle and decided to show them who was boss. He proudly paced in front of the castle without armour in an ill-judged show of bravado and was rewarded with an arrow through the neck and a slow, painful death. The greatest English monarch of them all was buried in Anjou.
So why the hell is he revered so much rather than, say, his ousted father- Henry II? Because quite simply, he was everything that Richard would turn out not to be. Whilst his son's statue stands outside The Houses of Parliament, it was Henry who set the wheels of parliamentary democracy in motion in England. He was also responsible for two other pillars of British society- namely the widespread use right to trial-by-jury and, thanks to wine imports from his dukedom in Normandy, the booze cruise. He tranformed England into a Plantagenate powerhouse that took on all of North-Western Europe and won, frightening the shit out of the King of France who was now forced to play second fiddle to the man who was once his vassal. After a millenia of being invaded by anyone who happened to be passing, England was never to be taken again and Henry was more responsible for this as Elizabeth I or Churchill would ever be.
Oh, and the cross of St George? Guess whose emblem that was.
Surely this is the man we should exhalt as our finest monarch- a swashbuckling clever bugger who had a nice flag. He even got some cool last words in after he's been overthrown by Richard by declaring, in reference to the his illigitimate son Geoffrey who he wanted to put on the throne, that Richard was "the real bastard". And yet it is that bastard himself whose legend stands supreme and maybe, in his history plays, Shakespeare was redressing this balance by giving his Ricks such a hard time.
If, indeed, he wrote the plays at all. He was never a king was he? He couldn't write about kings then. In much the same way that Derek Jacobi wasn't an Ancient Roman.
So that couldn't have been him in 'I Claudius'.
What obviously happened in reality, according to Jacobi and co, is that a group of terribly bright, terribly posh sorts- some of whom were established playwrights like Johnson and Marlowe, some of whom were not- got together, wrote all these plays and sonnets and then took the unusal step of publishing them under an assumed name shared by a well-known actor who regularly performed for King James I. As the works gained popularity and acclaim, they decided to keep so schtum about the whole thing that not even one loose-lipped relative would spill the beans in years to come until Cadfael himself came along four centuries later and figured the whole thing out.
A brief aside: I have to admit that this whole idea has at least some academic credentials behind it and therefore avoids the major pitfall of most conspiracy theories- namely that we should believe that a complex smokescreen perpetrated by the U.S. Government/The Vatican/giant space lizards could be blown wide open by a sociophobe in Denver who hasn't figured out the importance of personal hygiene.
Anyway, returning to Shakespeare (or whoever he was/wasn't), the actual 'expertise' that it is claimed he couldn't possibly possess is a little hard to come by in much of his work. For example, he is apparently blessed with mastery of sea-faring and European geography that is beyond his means and yet he has characters in The Tempest set sail from Milan which is about land-locked as Nebraska- clearly he was either using a touch of literary licence or this is the first appearance in English literary history of the hovercraft. (His spelling wasn't much better- only six copies of his signature are known to exist and he never spells his name the same in any two of them- a frankly appaling hit-rate for the most important writer in the history of the English language).
His references to science, law and politics can easily be explained by the fact that, as an actor in a troupe favoured by both Elizabeth I and James I he would have moved in highly educated circles and asked many a leading light for guidance. Mind you, his grasp of history is, as I've alluded to before, questionable at best- although his historical plays were always much more about England's present than it's past. There was always a monarch to please or forewarn and a touch of religious strife pinging around the court and Shakespeare's preferred way of dealing with this was to focus on the apparnent lessons of the past, particularly if they involved kings called Henry or Richard.
His main lesson appaeared to be that, if you wanted a successful, strong and all-conquering monarch, it was best to call him Henry whilst, tellingly, the two Shakespeare plays about kings called Richard are prefixed by the title "The Tragedie of...". As I said in a previous post, this was at least slightly unfair on Richard II whose short life, whilst featuring it's fair share of 'tragedie' also featured him single-handedly facing down a 10,000 strong mob intent on overthrowing him. There was also a bit of a leg-up for the posterities of the three Henrys focused upon by Shakespeare. Whilst his plays regarding them are full of swashbuckling battles, victorious campaigns in France and stirring "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" speeches, the reality is that one of the Henrys died of dyssentery, one popped his clogs to leprosy and Henry VI, most spectacularly of all, lost the corwn, won it back again, then got captured in his own Tower of London and murdered with a red hot poker up the jacksie. None of these feature in any of the plays and, lets face it, they would have been a hell of a lot better if they did, particularly if Prospero popped by in his hovercraft.
There are three theories to explain the discrepancies in fortunes between the Henrys and the Richards in Shakespeare's work. Firstly, and favoured by most, is that the Henrys represented the Tudor dynasty from which Elizabeth was descended and could therefore be used, as long as they were portrayed in a good light, as the subjects of plays that actually dealt with thw worries over succession prevelant during the childless Queen's reign. The second theory, favoured by Sir Derek Jacobi is that Shakespeare didn't write them cause he wasn't a 15th century king and therefore how could he possibly know anything about them? The third and final favour, which is mine alone, is that Shakespeare, by portraying Henrys as mighty and Richards as fools, was single-handedly gaining revenge for the single greatest injustice in the collected legacies of English monarchs.
If you take a trip to Westminster, you'll find a huge, muscular statue of a man in chainmail sat upon a horse looking, not to put to fine a point on it, nails. This is a statue of Richard I, the Lionheart- the exhalted pinnacle of English monarchial majesty. The King of Kings. The Couer de Lyon.
He was a pillock.
After ascending to the throne by overthrowing his own dad, he promptly fucked off on crusade, leaving behind a country he slammed as "cold and always raining" with a capital "I'd sell if I could find a buyer". He left behind a regent called Hugh, who was immediately the subject of intense scheming and attempted usurping by people who felt they had a far more suitable name than Hugh for running a country, and spent a good few years fighting Muslims, presumably to go with his order to his courtiers to kill all the Jews in England. When he was done he set off home and was captured by the French who imprisoned him for two years before releasing him in exchange for a ransom that practically bankrupted the nation. He swore revenge when he got home, raised an army, marched into France, laid siege to a castle and decided to show them who was boss. He proudly paced in front of the castle without armour in an ill-judged show of bravado and was rewarded with an arrow through the neck and a slow, painful death. The greatest English monarch of them all was buried in Anjou.
So why the hell is he revered so much rather than, say, his ousted father- Henry II? Because quite simply, he was everything that Richard would turn out not to be. Whilst his son's statue stands outside The Houses of Parliament, it was Henry who set the wheels of parliamentary democracy in motion in England. He was also responsible for two other pillars of British society- namely the widespread use right to trial-by-jury and, thanks to wine imports from his dukedom in Normandy, the booze cruise. He tranformed England into a Plantagenate powerhouse that took on all of North-Western Europe and won, frightening the shit out of the King of France who was now forced to play second fiddle to the man who was once his vassal. After a millenia of being invaded by anyone who happened to be passing, England was never to be taken again and Henry was more responsible for this as Elizabeth I or Churchill would ever be.
Oh, and the cross of St George? Guess whose emblem that was.
Surely this is the man we should exhalt as our finest monarch- a swashbuckling clever bugger who had a nice flag. He even got some cool last words in after he's been overthrown by Richard by declaring, in reference to the his illigitimate son Geoffrey who he wanted to put on the throne, that Richard was "the real bastard". And yet it is that bastard himself whose legend stands supreme and maybe, in his history plays, Shakespeare was redressing this balance by giving his Ricks such a hard time.
If, indeed, he wrote the plays at all. He was never a king was he? He couldn't write about kings then. In much the same way that Derek Jacobi wasn't an Ancient Roman.
So that couldn't have been him in 'I Claudius'.