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Shakespeare's Lovers - Professor Sir Jonathan Bate FBA CBE
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- čas přidán 28. 01. 2018
- William Shakespeare made his name as a poet before he became famous as a playwright. His erotic poem Venus and Adonis was the most popular work of literature of the Elizabethan Age, while its dark companion piece The Rape of Lucrece set the mould for Shakespeares exploration of the tragic consequences of sexual desire turning to violence.
Jonathan Bate will show how Shakespeare developed these themes from his reading of the great Roman poet Ovid.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac...
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This series is for the lover of poetry for sure since the lecture itself feels like a poem. Truly a masterclass 🙏🏽💖💖
If all of the fine points about storytellers carrying a thread of antiquity are taken--along with all the nuance and creativity the craft STILL affords--we find a formula for a classic. Mastering something gives one room to become prolific. Not about what Shakespeare wrote as much as it is about why his corpus would have, and has, captured generations of minds. I hope we never devolve into a society where we cancel masters of art or science for the sake of cancelling and lose the thread of what works. I hope we've learned better from our environmental plight.
Another excellent lecture by Sir J. Bate! If there is a better scholar who lectures on All Things Shakespeare... please let me know!!!
Brilliant lecture as always from the wonderful Jonathan Bate
Reading these comments - one is certain that the meaning of the authorship question is - imposed upon - the possible author and subject - primarily due, to personal criteria.
How to get at the truth - a generally accepted one - and one that spans the generations - from genesis of the works - until today ?
I work in hospital catering and similar meals - can be appreciated or criticised - in so many personal taste reflections.
The clear way - me heart - 'tells' me .... FB - the central author - with help from Bro. AB and possibly our friend Ben. Keep well - don't get too worked up/complicated or tense. Laugh humbly and walk on.
I love his work greatest Dramatists
I was really enjoying these talks right up until this one. Jonathan Bate following those same well worn tracks of unoriginal and hysterical feminists does not interest me. I can't believe he's really trying to cast Shakespeare as some metrosexual, proto-feminist. Shakespeare is not so cowardly and hen pecked.
just be quiet
Shakespeare was a franchise....like all the so-called great so-called writers and musicians who apparently churned out great work after great work. Outsourced to a team of professional writers. To believe otherwise is naive or misdirection.
That can only come from someone who has never read through all of Shakespeare. We are all kind of stuck in this idea that he is this absolute epitome of perfection. His plotlines are often flawed or entirely borrowed from other plays, some resolutions pointless, characters turn out to be incredibly one dimensional. You might as well be claiming Mozart was a fraud or Picasso unoriginal just because they were incredibly productive.
@@helsingslilly Are you saying that because Shakespeare's supposed body of work is riddled with flaws that it had to be written by one person (i.e. him) and not a team of ''staff'' writers? Can you imagine how bored a bunch of writers must have been on this project...everything in iambic pentameter and conforming to the limitations of the stage. Not surprising they wrote in a few ''in-jokes'' to keep themselves sane.
To believe otherwise is to have a passing familiarity with the works of Shakespeare and the theatre in his era. Since you say that "everything [is] in iambic pentameter", I'm going to conclude that this is knowledge you lack. Only four Shakespeare plays are written entirely in verse: _Henry VI, Part 3_ , _Henry VI, Part 1_ , _King John_ , and _Richard II_ .
There are a handful of plays in the canon that are the result of collaboration, but Shakespeare was always present as one of the collaborative writers. The idea that he would only be present as a name to stick on the plays is to suggest that playwrights in this era were celebrities, which they were not. There was no _point_ to making up a "franchise" name and then getting other playwrights to write under it because hardly anyone gave a toss who the plays were written by. It would be like doing that for the movies today: how many movies do you see solely on the strength of the name recognition of the scriptwriter? Most early modern plays were published anonymously. Shakespeare's own plays were published anonymously between the years of 1594 and 1598 (the year that Q1 of _Love's Labour's Lost_ and Q2 of _Richard III_ and _Richard II_ were published with Shakespeare's name) and many of the plays first printed during this window continued to be published anonymously. Shakespeare had to build his reputation as a playwright on the strength of his works before printers would start putting his name on his plays.
If _all_ of Shakespeare's plays had been the result of a committee of professional writers, then we would see clear evidence of this in stylometric analysis. It is beyond the bounds of possibility that writers even working together could work so seamlessly in each other's word choices, preference for particular line endings, use of contractions, and all the other quantitative aspects of verse writing that it would fool computer-aided stylometry into concluding that they were all one author. These are writerly tics and preferences that no author would pay strict attention to. And this harmony is certainly not what we see in the collaborative plays. In the collaborative plays, we see writers with very different sets of choices, different grammars, different images, etc. We can tell the parts of _Henry VIII_ that John Fletcher wrote vs. what Shakespeare wrote by their use of the auxiliary "do". In _Henry VI, Part One_ , we see an author who shows off so much about his classical learning-he was almost certainly Thomas Nashe, known as one of the "University Wits"-that he mentions Rhodope, Memphis, and Darius in the space of four lines, and in the next act returns to ancient Persian history when he references "Scythian Tomiris" killing Cyrus (his death in battle against Tomiris is recounted in the _Histories_ of Herodotus of Halicarnassus). If you know Shakespeare, stuff like this sticks out like a sore thumb.
So you can see the problem: if the committee were to work so harmoniously together as to make the majority of plays that Shakespeare wrote seem like the product of one person, it doesn't make sense that for about a quarter or so of the plays they would have clear signs of collaboration, because they'd _all_ be the result of collaboration. Nor does it make sense why a committee that was already working together under the Shakespeare banner would need to expand itself to take on figures like Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, George Wilkins, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher to write the identifiably collaborative works. And why is it that none of these "professional writers" returned, when writing their own plays, to the Shakespearen style that they'd been so successfully practicing? Why do they all have uniquely identifiable styles easily separated from Shakespeare's by stylometry? How _big_ do you imagine the Bankside theatre community of London was in these days? There were only about 100,000 people in London back then. The idea that there was a significant chunk of writers in Shakespeare's day all devoted to producing new works in the "Shakespeare" brand is absurd. Nor was it necessary. Shakespeare only wrote 42 plays in his life (this assumes _Love's Labour's Won_ is an actual title of a lost play, not an alternate title for a play we know, that _Arden of Faversham_ is an early collaborative play, and that _Cardenio_ truly was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher) and additions to a handful of other plays. We know he wrote the three pages of manuscript additions to _Sir Thomas More_ that is called "Hand D", which is in his handwriting compared to his signatures (more evidence that he was a real writer and not just a figurehead), stylometry links him with the additions in the 1602 quarto of _The Spanish Tragedy_ by Thomas Kyd, and he also has been proposed as the author of the 1610 additions to _Mucedorus_ , but I don't believe it personally. I've read _Mucedorus_ with the additions and it's nothing like him.
So 42 plays, and a handful of additions to other men's plays, and that in a career lasting over 20 years and possibly as long as 25 years or more. You don't need to get a committee together to make those kinds of numbers. According to Philip Henslowe's Diary, Thomas Dekker wrote or co-wrote between 40 - 50 plays in a five-year period between 1598 - 1602. Thomas Heywood claimed to have had "a hand or at least a main finger" in 240 plays. Outside of England, Lope de Vega was the most prolific playwright in Europe, and possibly in history ever. A contemporary of his put down his total output as consisting of 1,800 three-act _comedias_ and 400 shorter sacramental plays. And that's not counting his 3,000 sonnets. And this figure of 40 - 50 in a five-year period may miss many plays because Henslowe wasn't involved, since Dekker was a freelance playwright. Shakespeare's productivity is nothing special in light of his contemporaries. As for his quality, he was the best playwright of his era, but _someone_ has to be best. What is typically _not_ the best, however, are the products that are created by committees. The idea that Shakespeare's individual way with words could be generated by a bunch of people bickering around a table is one of the silliest ideas I've ever heard.
@@Nullifidian I think you were close when you admitted that there was 'collaboration and ''Shakespeare was always present''. Your programming regarding the so-called ''genius'' of Shakepeare sadly won't let you see that this was likely the model then as it is now. (42 plays IS a lot of work - 2x big weighty efforts every year for 20 years. Each one probably getting a decent stage run in London (who else has achieved that?) ... Also your line, "hardly anyone gave a toss who the plays were written by" is maybe true but actually lends more weight to MY argument. The ''system'' needs geniuses...artists who can be revered forever more. How that is achieved is largely irrelevant. What is important is that idols and heroes are created. The truth is that he (or they) were fed the plotlines from above in a clear social engineering project - the same way as it is done now.
@@acoustically9201 Not an argument.