via sovay

[angevin2]

OH MARK RYLANCE NO

...Mark, I love you, but you are embarrassing yourself pretty thoroughly here. It is making me cringe and I didn't think I had an embarrassment squick.

Comments

[nineweaving]

"Masonic knowledge"? Oh dear, oh dear.

Nine

[reconditarmonia]

Trevor Nunn! ♥ The interviewer gives MR a lot more time to speak, but TN wipes the floor with him anyway.

[steepholm]

MR: He never mentions Stratford once in all the plays and sets only one play in England!

*blinks*

[kerrypolka]

Yeah, that was my favourite too.

Bacon could have done that, he had a place in St Albans - a place mentioned 13 times in the plays.

"My proposed author was from Gettysburg -- a place mentioned 13 times in his play cycle about the American Civil War! COINCIDENCE?!"

[angevin2]

I always suspected that Warwick's line about his constituents in 3 Henry VI was a bit of a shoutout to Shakespeare's home turf:

In Warwickshire I have true-hearted friends,
Not mutinous in peace, yet bold in war...

[fallingtowers]

For some reason, the story about the sycamore grove outside of Verona cracks me up. So, a bunch of tree proves that Shakespeare's entire canon was written by someone else entirely? And it's not conceivable that sycamores are what a writer might think of first when trying to include details of typically Italian scenery. It's just such a ... random argument. IDGI.

[kip_w]

The second shooter hid in a grove of sycamores.

[a_t_rain]

Besides, how selectively-observant a traveler do you need to be to notice that there is a grove of sycamores outside Verona, but somehow NOT notice that Italians tend not to be named things like Sampson, Abraham, Laurence, and Susan? The mind boggles.

[angevin2]

It's also associated with rejected love -- cf. also Desdemona's song in Othello. In my Arden edn I've underlined it and made the note "emblematic," which I am pretty sure was a class note because the professor in the class I used this edition for was really big on emblem-books. The Arden editor remarks that "probably there is a pun: sickamour."

[gillo]

A few years ago Rylance toured a show called "I Am Shakespeare", which explored all the theories. None of them stood up even to cursory examination, IMO. The actors, in character, came into the audience to debate their claims - the best Oxford could offer was that he owned a troupe of players, which was how he got the intimate knowledge of the theatre that sings out from every page.

I thought MR's claim that research shows that people went out to sea and returned by river to avoid pirates was the lowest point. He really needs to look at a map of northern Italy.

This is an opportunity to use the icon I stole from you yonks ago!