October News Roundup

We know it’s November 2, but it's just the way the calendar worked.

Nov 02, 2024

First item on our October list is the SAT conference on 17 November at the Marylebone Theatre in London followed by a gala evening (sold out we’re afraid). Both the conference and the gala look at the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The conference program is finalized.

We will be treated to an address by Lord Montagu, introduced by a representative of the Shakespeare Southampton Legacy Trust, followed by a pictorial biography of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Alice Oswald, award-winning poet will present her thoughts on Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Throughout the day, Sir Mark Rylance, Annabel Leventon, and friends will read excerpts from these works. SAT Trustee Julia Cleave will give a paper on Shakespeare as a Renaissance artist, Ros Barber will speak on ‘The Unfortunate Dedication,’ and David Richardson will present on the political and literary environment of 1590s London. In the midst of all that, there will be a panel Q&A on potential authors including the man from Stratford, Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford, Derby, Sidney, and Neville each represented by an expert on their candidacy. It will be a packed day. To purchase tickets to the conference, click here.

Marlowe, Porter, and computational stylistics

Darren Freebury-Jones has published new research in Notes & Queries that was followed up in The Guardian proposing that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus was co-authored by Henry Porter. The good news is that the notion that plays were co-authored is assumed. Group Theory aficionados rejoice.

Christopher Marlowe’s classic work Doctor Faustus was first performed in the 1580s or early 1590s but only published in 1604, eleven years after his death. The dramatists Samuel Rowley and William Bird were paid in 1602 to write new additions to the play.
However, researchers have long suspected that the original play was not written by Marlowe alone. Its broader comic parts, largely in prose, have been thought to be the work of a second writer who never got the credit they deserved.
Previous research has suggested one of the dramatists Thomas Nashe or Henry Porter. Nashe left us only one play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592). Porter wrote several in collaboration with other dramatists, but only one sole-authored play survives, The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1599).

The Conversation has published a critical article of the methodological approach—computational analysis of phrases as data sets. Dr. Ros Barber has commented on this as well.

Rumors? PENN Library is awash in them

The University of Pennsylvania Library is investigating the rumor that they own a pair of gloves that belonged to William of Stratford. Where to begin?

Stories passed down through the centuries tell the tale that the gloves could perhaps have belonged to William Shakespeare, or at the very least to have been worn by famous Shakespearean actors hundreds of years ago. They are part of the extensive Shakespeare collection at the Penn Libraries.

“Stories passed down through the ages.” Oral history is wonderful but requires a great deal of interpretation by skeptical inquisitors. See the Icelandic Sagas, for example. The rest of the sentence is in danger of being jailed by the grammar police for the string of hypotheticals: “could perhaps,” or “at least” worn by unnamed “famous actors.”

Essentially, PENN libraries have some gloves that might be from the 16th century. They are looking into it. In the meantime, slapping the name Shakespeare on the efforts generates attention. It also is a clever way to reference the idea that William’s dad was a glover. However, it seems the point of the story is to remind the curious reader that PENN has a strong Shakespeare studies research library.

“I have brought the gloves out for classes to illustrate the development of this kind of worship of Shakespeare and the idea that it's almost like a religious relic,” Lesser says.

Religious relics are lovely, but are primarily beautiful in the eye of the believer.

Shakespeare Shrinkage

Drew Lichtenberg, artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company and a lecturer at Catholic University of America, published an OpEd in the New York Times in October speculating that there are fewer Shakespeare productions across the United States because the work is being politicized. The work has always been political. But it is not completely clear that fewer productions are being mounted.

Over the past ten years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of Julius Caesar depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of fifty percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room.

Some comments published on the Savanna blog about this OpEd note that perhaps theatrical leadership is in transition while Shakespeare remains a common point of reference regardless of the age and predilections of theatre directors beholden to corporate sponsorship. But Mr. Lichtenberg, dramaturg for the Folger, has a new book to promote, “Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company.” An OpEd in the NYTimes is a good place to start.

Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays? 77 names have been put forward.

According to Dr. Paul Edmonson—only one makes sense.

Rob Attar tries to provide a brief history of the “Q” with an interview with Dr. Paul Edmondson for BBC History Magazine. For a more complete version of the history, see Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare was a Women and Other Heresies. One of the enduring Stratfordian tropes used to diminish the authorship debate is to place the premise of the question on economic and social prejudice. In this article, Edmondson starts with Delia Bacon, whom he credits as a “highly intelligent woman” but who was prejudiced and unable to “accept that somebody of his social and intellectual background produced the work attributed to him.” This undermines the authorship debate by claiming it is based on bias, as opposed to an actual lack of evidence that the man from Stratford was ever an author. Edmondson might find it helpful to read some more recent research in the “Q,” including Dr.

Robin Williams

’ article on how to respond to the “snob” argument and

Ros Barber

’s work @

Adventures in the Authorship Question

Jodi Picoult pushes the “Q” into the mainstream

The rest of the October news has been dominated by Jodi Picoult’s new book—a work of fiction about the authorship question. (Ms. Picoult will join us as a guest author here in late November.)

The book titled By Any Other Name is summarized on Good Reads as follows:

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor, Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.

In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theater productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

The novel relies on some solid historical research. Picoult has commented that she was partly inspired by Elizabeth Winkler’s story about Bassano published in 2019 in The Atlantic Monthly. Winkler’s subsequent book on the history of the authorship question has been reported and supported by the SAT. Picoult and Winkler appeared at some joint events earlier this year.

The impact of having an author with the status of Picoult address the authorship question head-on, albeit in fiction, is that the mainstream press is forced to write about the “Q,” if only in the form of a book review. It’s hard to dismiss an author like Picoult as a snob or just a crazy American when she has sold an estimated 40 million books across 34 languages. But, some will try. And, despite her global success, she still feels the misogyny prevalent in the publishing world that labels her works as “beach reads” when they deal with gun control, gay rights, and other serious issues.

The Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Independent are some of the stories we’ve noticed.

Hope to see you in London at the conference.