Oxford wrote Shakespeare, says judge

We never seem to have these cases in Britain… 88 year old judge decides that WS wasn’t the bard after all:

Justice Stevens, who dropped out of graduate study in English to join the Navy in 1941, is an Oxfordian — that is, he believes the works ascribed to William Shakespeare actually were written by the 17th earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Several justices across the court’s ideological spectrum say he may be right.

This puts much of the court squarely outside mainstream academic opinion, which equates denial of Shakespeare’s authorship with the Flat Earth Society.

Yet more on the supposed tomb of Cleo

Rogueclassicism has this update. It’s all about the cleft in Antony’s chin apparently.

Tutorial Report

Our tutorial on Antony and Cleopatra focused mainly on the TMA question, so we spent quite a bit of time discussing Plutarch rather than Shakespeare. A presentation was followed by some general questions, which were meant to give some practice for the assignment. The presentation and the handout are available from the links below. Clearly, a feature of the TMA questions is that the setters are taking very seriously the idea of context; both the Macbeth assignment and the Antony and Cleopatra one are based on the idea of comparing Shakespeare’s version of a familiar historical story with someone else’s. In Macbeth, of course, it was Polanski’s version of Shakespeare. In the present case, it’s Shakespeare’s version of Plutarch. Or rather, Shakespeare’s version of North’s version of Jacques Amyot‘s French translation of Plutarch’s original. So there’s a sense in which Shakespeare’s version is another layer, almost working alongside the others like a palimpsest. The story of Cleopatra was well known in Shakespeare’s time, and not only through Plutarch, so the audience would presumably have been interested in what the bard made of this familiar tale.

The exercise that you are asked to undertake for TMA 03 is not dissimilar to the Polanski assignment, in that the object, fundamentally, is to compare and contrast the different versions. The TMA asks you to write about the different characterisations that are in the two texts. It’s important to emphasises that this doesn’t mean character- it means the ways that the authors present the two central protagonists. So, for example, the very opening scene of the play begins with an unflattering description of Antony, who is characterised as a man who has been emasculated by his love for Cleopatra, who in turn is labelled as little better than a prostitute. This description, in the conversation between Philo and Demetrius, must influence our view of the couple, who are then introduced. Shakespeare has thus placed them in a particular frame, as it were, planting a particular impression in the audience’s mind before they see “The triple pillar of the world transformed/ Into a strumpet’s fool” (I.i)

Plutarch presents his account of these events from the perspective of a historian, but it is worth noting that Plutarch felt Rome’s best days were as a republic, and he is not above making value-judgements on the imperial figures. His intent in his histories is neatly summed up in the passage reproduced on the handout, in which he suggests that the lives of these imperial figures constitute history in themselves. Shakespeare, on the other hand, we agreed, was more likely to be interested in presenting a dramatic narrative that portrayed the personal lives of his protagonists in an entertaining way- so there is more obviously an attempt at displaying the personal lives in Shakespeare than in Plutarch.

That difference in genre can be most clearly examined in Enobarbus’s famous speech, in which he describes Cleopatra on the barge. Again, the placing of the speech is interesting: it is immediately after we discover that Antony is to marry, for political reasons, Octavia. This set-piece speech by Enobarbus is very closely based on the Plutarch, and so a detailed account of this in the TMA would be a handy way to demonstrate the differing approaches of the two writers. Your analysis will need to cover the sort of matters you wrote about when analysing the language of Midsummer Night’s Dream in TMA 01. Certainly, some of the changes made by Shakespeare are suggestive, and tend towards establishing Cleopatra as a goddess-like figure (even, perhaps, eclipsing Venus)- which is why Agrippa’s earthy summation of her as “Royal wench” comes as a shock after Enobarbus’s sublimely poetic description. Again, that seems to be a deliberate juxtapositioning by Shakespeare. The guidance notes suggest that close reading needs to be at the heart of the assignment, so an account of Enobarbus’s speech, and one or two passages should form the core of your response. If you add some commentary on the differences in approach of the two authors, you will soon be approaching the magic 2000 – word mark. Good luck with it!

A+C Powerpoint

PDF of presentation

Handout

Image: Olivander

Henry VIII on the radio

The play that Norton calls All is True gets a rare outing tonight on Radio 3. Details are here.

This is the play that, famously, brought the house down at the old Globe.

Plutarch on Antony and Cleopatra

I came across an interesting review of an obscure book Much of the article is not strictly relevant to us, but one passage struck me:

B. astutely claims in “Antony-Osiris, Cleopatra-Isis” that Plutarch’s Life of Antony is not only an unforgettable masterpiece of Greek literature but also a masterpiece of striking ambiguity in character portrayal. The roles Plutarch assigns to Antony and Cleopatra render them as anti-heroes, an anti-Osiris and an anti-Isis. In an essay like this B. is at his best, marshalling the historical sources and mastering the literary genres to produce a compelling interpretation of this magnificently complex work. The central historical question of whether Antony and Cleopatra had actually assimilated themselves to Osiris and Isis focuses B.’s analysis of Plutarch’s Life of Antony. Whereas the historical sources are more explicit about the assimilation of Cleopatra to Isis, Antony’s assimilation to Osiris is largely inferred from his role as consort to the queen. Still, B. uncovers the historical and literary portraits of Antony as Osiris, especially in Plutarch, where Antony is clearly assimilated to Dionysus, the Greek form of Osiris. In the end B. presents a convincing argument for appreciating this fascinating feature of Plutarch’s Life of Antony.

Germaine Greer’s not impressed…

… with the supposed portrait either: She says

There is hardly an Elizabethan male portrait, genuine or fake, that has not been touted as a possible effigy of Shakespeare. The National Portrait Gallery records no fewer than 48, of which it selected eight for its Searching for Shakespeare exhibition in 2006. Even that was over-optimistic.

That portrait again

Katherine Duncan-Jones is unconvinced, as she reveals in this week’s TLS:

But the man portrayed, with his elaborate lace collar and gold embroidered doublet, appears far too grand and courtier-like to be Shakespeare. Though a leading “King’s Man”, Shakespeare was no nobleman, and even his status as “gentleman” was repeatedly called in question by some of the heralds. (As John Davies of Hereford records, both Shakespeare and Burbage hoped for further preferment from James I, but didn’t get it.) When players dressed above their rank offstage, it tended to get them into trouble. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have been rash enough to permit himself to be portrayed in such grand array.

Shakespeare Productions

One of your number, Cryss, alerted me in a comment a few posts back that the Bristol based Tobacco Factory company are playing in Antony and Cleopatra shortly, having also done their Julius Caesar. I hadn’t thought to list performances so far afield, but actually, since many of you will be travelling about at Easter, it might be worth listing a few likely contenders. There’s Stratford, of course, where the fare on offer includes As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar. In London, the Globe begins its season on April 23rd with Romeo and Juliet and also features Troilus and Cressida and Love’s Labours Lost. Also in London, the National is staging All’s Well in May. The Globe’s touring company also performs A Comedy of Errors in the open air at Heaton Park in June. Another open air production, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will be presented by the touring Illyria company through the summer in various locations.

Let me know if you come across any other productions that may be of interest.

Image: Stagewhisper

Cleopatra’s sister?

There’s a predictable brouhaha about the supposed discovery of the skeleton of Cleopatra’s sister, and the”fact” that she appears to have some African genes. The whole thing is expertly dissected here. A sample:

The headlines of both the Telegraph (”Cleopatra had African ancestry, skeleton suggests”) and the AFP coverage (”Cleopatra ‘was part-African’”) show the leap the press is taking with this one, despite the fact that we are not entirely sure who Cleopatra’s mother was (she is not named in any Classical source as far as I’m aware and the suggestion that it was Cleopatra V (Arsinoe’s mother) is a long-standing conjecture) — she and Arsinoe did not necessarily have the same mother.  But beyond that, we get this skull business and having Arsinoe’s ethnicity actually being determined from a reconstructed skull based on measurements taken in the 1920s?

Nothing to do with Shakespeare, I know, but does indicate the power of the Cleo stereotype, and I’m sure Shakespeare’s play taps in to that to a degree.

Image: Sebastia Giralt

Portrait of WS?

Stanley Wells, the leading Shakespearean scholar, suggests that a painting about to go on show at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is an authentic portrait of our man:

Up to now only two images have been accepted as authentic representations of what Shakespeare may have looked like. One is the engraving by Martin Droeshout published in the First Folio of 1623. The other is the portrait bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon; the monument is mentioned in the Folio and therefore must have been in place by 1623. Both are posthumous – Shakespeare died in 1616. The engraver, who was only in his teens when Shakespeare died, must have had a picture, until now unidentified, to work from. Professor Wells believes it to be the one he has revealed today and that it was done from life, in about 1610, when he was 46 years old.