Graham Holderness

Transcription

PE: Let's open the book and as it were look at its structure. It comprises three parts. The first part is called Sceptics, and there you will find, as it were, some prominent case studies about people who have been nominated as alternative writers of the Shakespeare canon, whatever we might mean by that word canon in that context. So Graham Holderness gets the ball rolling as it were with the person who got the ball rolling, Delia Bacon, in the middle of the nineteenth century. And then the case for Sir Francis Bacon is taken up by Alan Stewart, the case for Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl, and the Earl of Oxford, though his name is missing, Alan Nelson wrote the chapter on Oxford. He really did write the chapter on Oxford- RB: [laughs] PE: - it's not disputed, and the unusual suspects by Matt Kubus. More on that in a moment. But Stanley, these are prominent authorities on these writers. SW: Yes, they are, yes. Graham has written a very interesting piece on Delia Bacon, a much maligned lady, who was a distinguished woman in her own right, a good teacher, even though she went on to take up very unorthodox views, and Graham's piece is a very interesting re-examination. She's always talked about as being unreadable, and Graham is one of the few people who have actually read the unreadable, the unreadable book The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays... SW:...the other... PE: She was interested in collaborative authorship, wasn't she? SW: Yes PE: And in some ways, Ros, I mean, you're sort of perhaps a modern-day Delia Bacon yourself, wouldn't you say. Is that fair? RB: No, I would think that's not at all fair. PE: Okay. Sorry. RB: Thanks! PE: I mean, you look nothing like her. RB: No, and I think we have very different backgrounds. I mean for a start, she was self-taught, as I believe that as a woman she couldn't [go to University] which is very interesting PE: She was questioning, she was questioning. RB: She was questioning, yes, but - SW: She was American. RB: Plenty of people have questioned and not just Delia Bacon, obviously, but she was the first person to put it out there. But she was self-taught, whereas I've done an MA and a PhD, so quite a lot of difference. PE: I was making a comparison mainly to do with the fact that both of you have enquiring minds, scepticism. RB: Enquiring minds, yes. PE: And actually, the collaborative authorship, she was ahead of the game, as well as being the first one to get the ball rolling. SW: Yes, [unclear] was very interestingly...[unclear, words spoken over PE] PE: Absolutely. And you see collaborative authorship, although it was beginning to be acknowledged in Shakespeare studies during that time - SW: Exactly the same time, actually. RB: Yes. SW: The first theories about Fletcher's hand in Henry VIII, for example, comes in then. PE: But the sense in which collaboration is something which has grown within Shakespeare studies... SW: Very importantly in the last thirty years. RB: Yes, absolutely. PE: In some ways, Stanley, you have been at the forefront of this. SW: Yes, I've been with the Oxford Shakespeare, of which I've been journal editor. RB: Yes. I do actually have an issue with the word collaborative, because I'm very interested in words, and I do have an issue with the word collaborative because I think of it very much as co-authorship, I know the Brian Vickers book is Shakespeare Co-Author, and I think that co-authorship can take a number of different forms. SW: Yes RB: Collaboration suggests all sitting round the table doing something at the same time, whereas I think co-authorship gives much more possibilities for a partial manuscript being finished by someone else, or someone gets the beginning, someone gets the end, and especially because you tend to see co-authorship in the Shakespeare canon at the beginning and the end of the canon much more than in the middle - SW: Yes RB: I much prefer the term co-authorship, I think it's a bit more correct than collaboration. SW: Yes RB: Because collaboration is too suggestive of things that may not have occurred. SW: Yes PE: Well her style is difficult to read, there's an example of that just looming, but just to reflect briefly on the cultural moment in which she appeared, detective fiction was on the rise, ten years earlier, Charles Darwin had published Origin of Species, in which he'd removed one absolutely unquestioned theory of the start of the universe, as being the Christian and Judaic narrative of the origins of the world, and put in an alternative theory, and then ten years later, what do you know, something similar is being done with your, Shakepeare's plays, I find that highly interesting, and possibly explic- the reason why this phenomenon didn't start until the middle of the nineteenth century. RB: Yes, I think it's part of the reason. PE: Part of the reason. Now this is an example of what Graham Holderness cites in his chapter as an area of her unreadability, and this is why she's little read today, it's a very difficult style. [Reads:] 'The brave, bold genius of Raleigh flashed new life into that little nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new 'Round Table,' which that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's presence. Over those dainty stories of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it.' I was fine until I got to the Atlantic breeze, and then slightly after that, after knight's adventure I sort of lost my... RB: will to live. SW: Yes, yes. RB: Well she really desperately needs an editor, I have to say. RB: I was having problems with the 'newly' and 'new' and the 'new'. Yes, she's not a great writer, is she. PE: Quite an innovator. RB: But it's very fictive as well, the approach is. And it's interesting to me that the first person to put the Marlowe argument forward, put it forward in a novel. PE: Yes SW: That's true. RB: But this is, you know, very imaginative writing. PE: It is, and it alludes self-consciously to myths, doesn't it, Arthurian especially. RB: Mmm. PE: And I love that cultural clash between the American and the British, the Atlantic breeze coming in, that's very very interesting. SW: The Atlantic breeze is Delia Bacon. PE: She is the Atlantic breeze. But anyway, what arises pretty quickly after, after she gets the ball rolling, in the next seventy years or so, is a sort of Whodunnit scenario, whereby it's beginning to seem that anybody apart from Shakespeare of Stratford is a reasonable suspect. So there we have an image of a man who might be Christopher Marlowe, there's no certainty about that... RB: Yes, that's the putative portrait, yes. PE: ... Francis Bacon... SW: Great writer. PE: ... great writer... SW: Mostly in Latin. PE: ...and the Earl of Oxford, and there we think of the three, as it were, prominent nominees. SW: Those are the three most prominent currently, yes. PE: But there are many others. Some of the people who have been mentioned are Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland, Daniel Defoe, that's an interesting one, Sir Henry Neville, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, Elizabeth the First herself, she crops up in a lot of the narratives about this, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Mary Sidney - the will for it to be a female nominee has also... SW: Just come up in recent years, that one, yes. PE: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, even Ben Jonson's been suggested. Now in our book there is a chapter by Matt Kubus which sort of mops up, at the last count, seventy-seven of the nominees, in which he says 'Mathematically, each time an additional candidate is suggested, the probability decreases that any given name is the true author.' RB: I want to query that, because I want to know is that mathematically true? Do we have any mathematicians listening in to the webcast who could actually tell me whether that's a true statement or not? PE: Mathematicians, we need you at this point. PE: Send a tweet to Stratford-upon-Avon. RB: But it looks to me like an assertion, rather than something that is necessarily mathematically true. But my maths only went to A level, so what do I know? PE: Well, whenever we hit probability, I always imagine large bars of chocolate and fractions and so on. But it seems to me, as I understand the maths there, it's about the more, the more named possibilities that there are, the less a share of chocolate that they'll receive. RB: But you see, does it really work like that? Because, do we not agree that there is someone who is at least the central author of the works of Shakespeare, even if there are other hands involved, that there is a true author? So, I mean, if this was mathematically true, surely that would decrease Shakespeare of Stratford's probability of being the true author, as much as it's saying any given name is the true author. And that would include all the names. So I dispute that as a point of maths. I think that it sounds clever, but probably isn't true.