Hey guys,
I was just wondering what is the most fascinating challenge you have ever read about classic book? Things that made you re-consider your own views?
For example, I read an article about how The Lord of the Rings was a feminist book (contrary to the popular belief of it being pro-men)
Should be fun .. I have a lot of time on my hands and would love to re-read some books with these different perspectives!
Thanks
Joshua
Hi Joshua,
I experienced something like that with a similar type of book. Dune, the Sci-Fi classic and a personal favorite of my youth, was made very much different by the assertion of a post-colonial intepretation. Add to that some 60s feminism with the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and you have an exposition of modern literary criticism. I can't point you to any specific articles (sorry), but the general ideas are enough to spark a much different reading. Very much changed the book, in some ways better, in some worse.
Once read a blog which suggested that Ishmael (of Moby-Dick) is not simply an unreliable narrator but a world class fantasist who has never been on a whale ship in his life. In fact he is the sub-sub librarian who introduces the book. He has spent his life reading and dreaming about whales and the whole story is a figment of his imagination.
Can't remember the exact argument for this but I was quite taken with it. There are several scenes in the book which Ishmael couldn't possibly have witnessed and there seems something very suspicious about his retelling of the Town-Ho's story.
That Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare, which I think is ridiculous. If you can think it reading Shakespeare, why not be the one to have invented it? I should have some good examples from my literature classes, but most people accept the stories straightforward.
Bump. Cool entries guys. Whosis, I've seen a movie and read a few articles that really stretch imaginations about who Shakespeare was (or 'were'??!)
Originally Posted by Whosis
Let me first start off by stating that I am a born skeptic, and therefore tend to not give conspiracy theories the time of day... but, in this case I have to scratch my head, and I'm in some pretty good company...
The great minds who have asked these questions are legion.
Mark Twain, one of the most famous doubters, author of the essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” wrote: “So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.”
“I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction,” wrote novelist Henry James, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”
Sigmund Freud, whose own work is often equated with Shakespeare’s in its cultural impact and who drew heavily on Hamlet for some of his own theories, also believed that someone other than the actor from Stratford wrote the plays. “It is undeniably painful to all of us,” he said, “that even now we do not know who was the author of the Comedies, Tragedies and Sonnets of Shakespeare.”
It's curious that as prolific as Shakespeare was, why haven't they found any handwritten rough drafts of his plays?.. or anything by Shakespeare referencing other literature?
Well, 'they' claim to have found one holograph. Not only that, but it seems like Shakespeare was dyslexic. From Eric Sams' Shakespeare's Hand in the Copy for the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet.[Our] starting-point must be the only extant Shakespearean holograph [the so-called 'hand D' in the Play of Sir Thomas More], hereafter called More. This excerpt is duly reproduced in facsimile, together with expert commentary, in the Riverside edition. Its clearest characteristic is its intense variability of spelling; thus the word sheriff appears as Shreiff, shreef, shreeve, Shrieue and Shreue, all within five lines.
It is no surprise, then, that Hamlet Q2 exhibits this same feature. Even after extensive compositorial normalisation (inferable from such facts as the replacement of More's 'coold', 'should' and 'woold' by the conventional forms, throughout every edition of all the plays and poems) there are still hundreds of variants and other idiosyncrasies. For example, in addition to the triplets (i.e. three different ways of spelling the same word) Angel/Angell/Angle, Denmark/Denmarke/Denmarke and do/doe/doo, Q2 contains hundreds of doublets, from aloofe/a loofe to you'l/you'le. The plain explanation is that these typical Shakespearean variants have eluded the normalization process[...]
But then what of the very same triplets and doublets, in the identical spellings, throughout [the allegedly concocted from memory by some minor reporting actor] Q1 (not just in its first Act)?[...] Q2 misprints as cost (=cast), and sallied (=sullied) occur because (as More shows) Shakespeare's formation of letter a was often indistinguishable from his o or u. But these same misprints also occur in Q1, which plainly implies the same hand behind both.
[...] Shakespeare's own writing was in the highest degree variable; and the[se] twenty-two lines in question [I.i.58-79] come from different editions of different versions set up by different compositors at different times in different workshops.[...] So the Q2 compositors were evidently not just copying from Q1. Yet almost all the shared words in each Quarto text are identical, including such eccentric spelling and typography as smot (=smote), sleaded (=sledded), pollax (=Polacks), strikt (=strict), cost (=cast), Cannon, forraine (=foreign), ship-writes (=shipwrights), ioynt (=joint). [...]All the variants, are prima facie Shakespearean, thus the variable speech-prefixes, the presence or absence of initial capitals or of final -e, the occasional use of ea for e, or ow for ou, the interchangeability of i and y, the otiose apostrophe and the phonetic spellings, can readily be matched from More and other authentic sources, including Hamlet Q2.
[...] The following selection of Q2 spellings, which (being printed from his autograph) are prima facie Shakespearean, is restricted to items which occur in Acts II-V: advise (=advice), borne (=born), cald (=called), cauiary (=caviare), chuse (=choose), cleere (=clear), eosin (=cousin), deere (=dear), Duckat (=ducat), I (=ay), Iigge (=jig), leasure (=leisure), loose (=lose), magicke, mettle (=metal), mistris (=mistress), musicke, neere (=near), Nemeon (=Nemean), of (=off), penitrable (=penetrable), perdy (=the expletive pardieu), prethee (=prithee), prophecie (=prophesy), spunge (=sponge), sute (=suit), tuch (=touch), yeeld (yield) and so forth. But exactly the same spellings and usages appear in Q1, Acts II-V.
Don't take life so serious, son. It ain't nohow permanent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
^
I read somewhere a long time ago that perhaps Francis Bacon might have penned some of the writings attributed to William Shakespeare. God knows what's the truth.
But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel
You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.
ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything.
_Pablo Neruda
Because it was 400 years ago. Even some of his (and others) published work has been lost to history.
There is absolutely no doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
Given the number of times this subject has been aired on the forum, there obviously is some doubt as to whether Shakespeare wrote the plays.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Not from people with a clue.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
'Such as Mark Twain, Henry James and Sigmund Freud, not to mention a fair number of theater folk.'
I happen to believe that Shakespeare probably did write the plays but I also believe that dogmatism
is no criterion where the search for truth is concerned.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Great writers, all three. That doesn't mean they're unable to believe in nonsense. There's some great actors that are 9/11 truthers too. Being a good artist doesn't preclude believing in nonsense, nor does it add credibility to nonsense.
Vladimir: (sententious.) To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
No, but it does mean they fully understood what is required to write at the level of a Shakespeare, and thus found it hard to believe that some of the most astonishingly perfect prose in all of literature was penned by someone who could barely keep a coherent business ledger, and appears to have never referenced another writer, play, poem, or anything of a literary nature.
"We have been able to discover, over many generations, about 70 documents that are related to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, but none of them are literary," says Daniel Wright, an English professor who directs the Shakespeare Authorship Research Center at Oregon's Concordia University.
"They all speak to the activity of a man who is principally a businessman; a man who is delinquent in paying his taxes; who was cited for hoarding grain during a famine," Wright adds. "We don't have anyone attesting to him as a playwright, as a poet. And he's the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career."
Last edited by Iain Sparrow; 08-01-2014 at 08:00 AM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote