512 First Day
Course outline
NYTimes article
In
"Shakespeare, Co-Author" (Oxford University Press, 2002), Professor
Vickers, 65, shows how numerous tests by many generations of scholars
demonstrate substantial work by other playwrights in five Shakespeare plays.
Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical
habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or
part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit. The overwhelming evidence in the book shows that
George Peele, not Shakespeare, wrote almost a third of "Titus
Andronicus"
Henderson: Joys of collaboration
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/431/TwoPopularKinsmenbolded.html
Title: Two Noble Kinsmennot canonical Shakespeare, collaborative with Fletcher
Importance of Marlowe as begetter of Shakespeare
Marlowes homosexualityCast as Rupert Everett
http://home.comcast.net/~rupever/
Marlowe sections of film and plotcontest between Viola and Marlowethe
heterosexual vs. homosexual romanceinterpretation of sonnet 18
Though
the film ultimately suppresses the queer possibilities each encounter
fleetingly suggests, nevertheless the figures of Marlowe and Viola, like those
of Mercutio and Juliet into which they are transmuted, are the ones who allow
Will to be himself reformed from the callow muse-seeking Romeo of act one into
the tragically inspired poet of Act V
Wills mixture of
indebtedness to and resentment of Marlowes towering talent shapes the films
narrative, shadowing the more obvious romance plot with its direct quotation of
Shakespearean texts both comic and tragic. Will first takes interest in the
actor Thomas Kent (the disguised Viola DLessops) because (s)he speaks Wills
own lines from Two
Gentlemen of Verona ,
rather than Marlowes "Was this the face" speech from Doctor Faustus --lines which Will tries to
discount as his rivals "early work." Not only is this an
ego-assuaging moment for Will but a relief for us all, as we have just been
confronted with a motley crew of ill-speaking auditioners repeating "Was
this the face that launched a thousand ships?" ad nauseum . The tedious
weight of Marlowes fame is one of the films running jokes; even the boatman
who shuttles the lovestruck Will brags, "I had Christopher Marlowe in my
boat once." As The Money observes, "Theres no one like
Marlowe." Thus
it is a fitting sense of parody as well as jealousy that leads Will to assume
Marlowes name when discovered to be a poet at the equivalent of Capulets ball
by the Tybalt- cum -Paris figure, Wessex. And it is the belief that this
misrepresentation has led to Marlowes death that sends Will into a penitent
frenzy --far more
distressing to him than his infidelity to either wife or mistress.
Understandably so; he believes he has killed a man. And not only a man, but a
dramatist for whose resurrection, Will claims, he would give up all his plays
to come. Only we late moderns know what a loss that would be, and hence the
gesture becomes all the more grand for us. At the same time, the film teases us
with the parallel loss occasioned by Marlowes death, a loss now forgotten by
the general public. The screenplay blames the botched printed text of The Massacre at Paris on Burbages cheapness: had he
given Marlowe his money before the fateful trip down to a Deptford tavern, it
posits, we would have Act 5 as the author intended. Having topsy-turvy fun by
mismatching playwrights and acting companies, the film nevertheless reserves a mournful
sigh for another kind of loss besides the sacrifice of heterosexual amour. For those surprised at
Shakespeares sadness at Marlowes death, such as Viola herself, the
screenwriters provide an easy comic answer: Will frankly replies, "He was
not dead before." But the narrative also implies that such writerly
anxiety and rivalry ultimately aren't as important as the bond
among writers, both living and dead. It is left to Henslowe to represent the crassly
competitive model, and he is roundly mocked for mishearing the cause of
Marlowes death as "the billing" rather than the tavern
"bill."
By choosing so well
known a play with such evident sources, and then re-creating its fictional
origin in the life of Shakespeare, requiring the person of Marlowe to save
Romeo from immortality coupled with Ethel, the pirates daughter, the
screenwriters advertise their own playfulness and truth to the spirit rather
than the letter of artistic collaboration.
the
film filches back the authorial credit for Mercutio from Shakespeare to
Marlowe.
On sound of poetryMarlowes mighty line
The filtering and
sound changes that transmute Ethel into Juliet rather than into Viola signify
as much as does the plot change, the play between and among contingent
signifiers and signifieds becoming the very stuff of mimetic art.
Good Title Good Name
Webster sections
Thus the future author of The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil,
notorious not only for blood and body parts but for borrowed lines, is reduced
to a nasty boy, one moreover who spies for the government, reveals Violas
secret, and nearly destroys Henslowes acting company. Here is indeed the
indebted writer as, rather than as experiencing, a nightmare. But of course
blood is precisely what our screenwriters disdain, preferring instead the
milder pains of foiled desire. Distancing themselves from exploitative film
spectacle as descendants of the truer spirit of honey-tongued, gentle Will
Shakespeare, Norman, Stoppard, and Madden instead stress the capaciousness of
collaboration as a concept, with themselves among the happier and more creative
beneficiaries.
Webster remains, the political and artistic destroyer, the voyeur who like
Maddens camera exposes a sexual tryst to the prurient public gaze.
This is art that
playfully alludes to The
Shining and The Young Poisoners
Handbook just
as it does to the plays of Shakespeare and Webster while marketing itself as a
mainstream date movie. Nor does the death of a singular author mean the absence
of all authorship. If we can see Tom Stoppard as one key player amidst the
swirling production, then maybe, just maybe, we can begin to see Shakespearean
texts themselves not as Bardic monuments of genius or anxiety but as analogous
works of popular if thoroughly commercialized collaborationworks that,
despite the occasional barroom flare-up and desire to leave the loathd stage,
came out all the better for that process.
Shakespeare in Love and collaboration
Charles Frey
It may be germane to respond to David Evett's posting on No Bed for Bacon
with a reminder of the plagiarism from that book by Stoppard for his
screenplay, "Shakespeare in Love." I quote from my earlier posting: There have been at
least two references on SHAKSPER to the novel No Bed for Bacon, by Caryl Brahms
(pseudonym for Doris Caroline
Abrahams) and S. J. Simon (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1941). It has
been alleged that this
novel is an unacknowledged source for the film "Shakespeare in Love." I found the
novel in the University of Washington library, read it, and can report the
following. It is set in London in 1594. Henslowe is short of money. In good times he
is friends with Burbage, in bad times, enemies. There is a shortage of players and threat of plague.
Shakespeare is introduced practicing various spellings of his name, and, throughout
the novel, he gets ideas for
now-famous lines by overhearing other persons. There is a rehearsal of
Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare is writing Twelfth Night for the Queen and Essex. Francis Drake would like to ship
Essex to "Raleigh's new colony" (22), and Raleigh's cloak figures prominently.
One Viola Compton is a maid of honor to the Queen, and Essex fancies her. Viola visits
Shakespeare's theater, is attracted to Shakespeare, and tells Elizabeth that she, Viola, wants to go
to Shakespeare disguised as
a boy. Viola, pretending to be a boy actor, recites Shakespeare's lines
at audition and
"There was an expression of awe on Shakespeare's face" (94). Later he
says to her, "you
can speak a line. By God-you can speak a line" (172). Shakespeare is pressured on all sides
to finish the writing of various plays. He gives Viola the part of Viola in
Twelfth Night, and he soon discovers that she is Viola Compton. They seem to love
each other, but no lovemaking is clearly evoked. Near the end, he tells Viola he wants to write a
play for her, "a play that needs a woman and cannot be acted by some
prancing boy" (223). On the last page, Viola, as she is leaving, tells Shakespeare:
"You have never so much as written a single sonnet to me" (224), and the novel
ends with these words: "He reached for another sheet. He thought. Soon he was
writing again. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." According to an article
in Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 12, 1999, "Tom Stoppard says he flipped through
the book 'when he first got the job' and found it 'of no use'." I do think
the film clearly draws on the world and spirit of the book. Stoppard might helpfully
admit that, but he has, in
my judgment, every right to be proud of his (and Marc Norman's?)
contributions to the
plot and proud of his own witty and sometimes trenchant and moving writing.
Greenblatt, via Henderson
And Stoppard
offhandedly gets to take credit for this attitude without taking himself
seriously, sallying in as the bemused British muse, of and yet not of the
Hollywood culture and "the business."
In giving Stoppard
credit for this attitude within the film, though, perhaps I am selling Marc
Norman short. Or, if not Norman,
Stephen Greenblatt. Here indeed is
a collaborator out of left field.
Nevertheless, Greenblatt quickly took credit for two of the more
interesting dimensions of Shakespeare in Love while artfully denying that
the finished products compulsory heterosexuality has anything to do with
him. In an Op-Ed piece for The New
York Times (Feb.
6 1999), Greenblatt describes how a young Marc Norman took him to lunch, asking
what in Shakespeares life would make a good movie (and Greenblatt is indeed
thanked among many others in the movies final credits). "It would be best, I told Mr.
Norman, to focus on the period of Shakespeares life about which we know next
to nothingthe late 1580s and early 1590s, after he left Stratford and before
he became fully established in the London theater world." Greenblatt, then, gave us our
setting. Moreover, after having
suggested what he says resembled the plot of the years other Renaissance
blockbuster, "Elizabeth" (to no avail), his imagination turned to
Christopher Marlowe: "Why not have Shakespeare," Greenblatt recalls
stating, "have an affair with Marlowe and then become involved, in some
way or other, with Marlowes death?"
While the scholar then wisely turns away from himself to make his
criticism of the films heterosexual contextualization of Sonnet 18, we are
left to contemplate his role as a source for the films more unconventional
strengths: its use of Shakespeares respectful, anxious rivalry with Marlowe,
and its creation of a fictional answer to the question, "How did
Shakespeare become a sharer in Burbages company and such an inspired
writer?" It seems everybody had
a role in authoring this film. And
Greenblatt implies that to the extent possible he played the comparable role
for Shakespeare in Love that Marlowe played within it, saving Will from the mere
conventionality of "Romeo and Ethel, the pirates daughter".
Stoppard
"Shakespeare In
Love was a script which just came through the mail from Universal for me to
look at . It was a very nice idea, nice story written by Mark Norman and they
wanted me to develop this into a movie but they wanted these scripts to have
another eye on it I suppose. I said I would have a go at it and ended up
working on it, on and off for ages. In the event I wrote Mark Norman's
screenplay again as it were, with new dialogue and some adjustments."
"Shakespeare In
Love, in common with many films because it was by no means an unusual situation
in what we call Hollywood, has had quite a sort of chequered history. It's been
in and out of various hands. I think I was working on the Shakespeare In Love,
I'm trying to remember, and I really can't but I would think it must have been
five or six years ago. Then it became a Mirimax film and they were very anxious
to do it. John Madden had directed Mrs Brown and they offered him Shakespeare
In Love as a script; and he liked it and then one went on as one does working
with the director, making the story on the one hand clearer or funnier or
sharper and on the other hand cheaper because one has to make a film within a
certain number of shooting days, you can't go on forever. The script possibly
was just a bit unmanageable, it had a few scenes in which we dropped."
"When it comes to
writing dialogue one is using I suppose the same parts of oneself but really
the situation is that with plays I begin with absolutely nothing and all of it
is mine. Although I've got my name on a handful of films, in every case they
are films adapted from someone else's work, not original screenplays. So one is
a craftsman of a certain kind, and further more one is there to serve the true
author of the piece, who is the director and that situation is almost the reverse
of working in the theatre."
Norman:
His son provided
inspiration with a phone call suggesting the idea of Shakespeare starting out
in the Elizabethan theater business. Norman says, "It was brilliant
because it dealt with Shakespeare whom everyone had heard of, but no one knew
much about. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foggiest notion of what to do with
it."
He turned to
parallels in his own life to present Shakespeare as a frustrated writer who
thinks he can do something better than what he's doing and hasn't been able
to. Norman theorizes, "I
don't know if this is historically true, but it has to be emotionally and
creatively true. There had to be a time in Shakespeare's life when he was a
young guy trying to get a job and figure out whom he was. A time when he was in
development hell."
Norman became
fascinated with the Elizabethan theater. "The young men who created the
Elizabethan theater business, and they did so in about ten years, were the
first to discover that people would pay for entertainment. Once money was
involved, along came producers, backstabbing, lying, cheating, lawsuits and I
thought these are all elements of present-day Hollywood. I had the found the
world of the story and could use it to satirize the movie business."
Before Romeo and
Juliet, Norman
theorized Shakespeare was simply a promising playwright. "Up to that point
Aristotle set the guidelines for good plays which is comedy is comedy and
tragedy is tragedy and you don't mix them. I realized Shakespeare did something
radical in Romeo and Juliet by starting with comedy and ending in tragedy."
This led to Norman
asking what prompted Shakespeare to have this creative breakthrough. The final
piece of his story was in place as Norman reveals, "I turned to the
tried-and-true Hollywood theme that he met a woman who served as inspiration.
By having him fall in love, Shakespeare goes from being a poet who can talk
about love to somebody who has experienced love and can now write about it from
his heart."