Ah March, when a young man’s thoughts turn to love…or backstabbing betrayal. Those cynics among us might says love and betrayal are pretty much the same thing. However, I was mostly referring to the Ides of March upon which day Julius Caesar was famously assassinated. That fact might not be widely known if not for Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar in which the warning to “beware the ides of March” is discussed at some length.
Or was it Shakespeare’s play after all? Shakespeare’s authorship has long been debated and the details which have lead people to believe one way or another can be hard to keep track of. However, last year Blogging Shakespeare created a page to help people understand the controversy a little better. 60 Minutes with Shakespeare provides 60 one minute answers to questions about Shakespeare’s work. (Actually, 61 minutes. Prince Charles has a one minute special guest commentary of his own.)
As you might imagine, most of the segments on Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays refute the notion that it was anyone but he who wrote them. While it is difficult to answer a complicated question in one minute, the segments provide a good starting point to understand the culture and practices of Elizabethan England.
In particular, I think the page provides a good introduction to Shakespeare for people who aren’t familiar or comfortable with his plays (and enlightening for those who are). The tidbits of information help to humanize a figure whose very name is imbued with a deitific aura.
In presenting the arguments about Shakespeare’s authorship in this format, it makes the works even more intriguing. It is easy to gain a basic understanding of all the arguments. It is amazing how many different elements people use as evidence to challenge the authorship and the number of alternatives authors and collaborators that have been proposed. Everyone from Mark Twain to Sigmund Freud and Henry James are cited as having weighed in on the subject.
While literary scholars will have a deeper understanding and much more to say on the subject, the average person can gain a general enough understanding about the topic to identify the elements being questioned when watching/reading one of the plays. Thanks to the short one minute format, you can view a play and then come back to review a specific topic in the context of your experience.
I was left wondering why there are not any similar controversies surrounding some of the great composers. Other than the discredited claim perpetuated by Mozart’s widow that the music came whole cloth from his mind and he never revised or rewrote, I wasn’t aware many refutations of composers’ creativity.
After a little searching, I quickly discovered some questions have been raised about whether Haydn and Mozart wrote everything attributed to them. However, there isn’t much written and I am not sure how much credence the theory has been given.
There is barely anything I could find written on the topic compared with the theories about Shakespeare. I don’t know if this is a reflection of some differences between the way music and plays are composed and performed or simply that the controversies in music have failed to capture popular imagination as well as Shakespeare’s.
We have extensive documentation for Haydn and Mozart as well as most musical and literary figures. That is the reason their authorship is not questioned except perhaps for a few less well known compositions. With Shakespeare there is nothing to tell historians how he was able to accumulate the knowledge to write the plays and poems.
For Shakespeare, there is no record, no letters or correspondence from or to, no manuscripts, nothing in his writing except for six barely legible signatures. There is no record of him having been paid for any of his work, no eulogies at his death, no books or writing materials left in his will, nothing to indicate he was a writer.. He was a well-documented blank. During his lifetime, no one ever claimed to have met the man. Reference to Shakespeare were to the author, the name on the title page only.
That is why there are doubts about his authorship.