Ms. Duncan-Jones promised to elaborate a convincing proof of her Sclater candidacy in a forthcoming symposium on the elegy, to be published in Shakespeare Studies . It almost knocked me out of my chair when I came upon a new letter in the Dec. 5, 1997, issue of the TLS from Ms. Duncan-Jones. loaded as politics: Caliban as the hero of The Tempest? "Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. In addition, according to Mr. Vickers, Leo Stock, one of the foremost John Ford scholars, has lent weight to the Ford candidacy. something that never was? 1-Click ordering is not available for this item. That is, indeed, one of the questions this book is about. Mr. Vickers calls Ford “the strongest candidate yet” and reminds us that in Mr. Foster’s 1989 book, A Study in Attribution , “Foster recorded that Ford, born in the West Country and [like the dead guy, William Peter] educated at Exeter College, Oxford, was certainly known to Peter and his family, and he [Foster] even showed that A Funerall Elegie (1612) shared many phrases, indeed whole lines, with Ford’s poem Christes Bloodie Sweat (1613). What this book attempts to explore, then, is the uncanny connection between Shakespeare's propensity to write ghosts and his continuing capacity to write us. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. Exciting new developments in the controversy over the alleged “Shakespeare” Funeral Elegy . Through their repetitions of motif, incident and phrase, the plays offer us a cumulative portrait of what it means to be a successful adult in a Shakespearean world -- and, just possibly, in our own. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts and ghost writing. Used with permission, Top of Page || Home Page || Stanford University Libraries || Stanford University. Please try again. Sorry, there was a problem saving your cookie preferences. Yet there are analogies to be drawn among many of the plays and many of their characters, signalled by similarities of situation or of language. (The play even contains the phrase “a funeral elegy of tears.”). By not mentioning them I had, (Symptoms of In an almost casual aside, she remarked that she had received a letter from Prof. Donald Foster (the Vassar scholar who claimed in 1995 to have proved that “W.S.” was Shakespeare with the aid of a computer database called Shaxicon)-a letter in which he congratulated her on her essay in Shakespeare Studies identifying “W.S.” as the Rev. The author of. Click the AdBlock Plus button on your browser and select Disable on Observer.com. Freud says of the transference-love between patient and analyst that once it is acknowledged and brought out into the open it cannot be suppressed or denied. One of the difficulties involved in taking the authorship question seriously has been that proponents of rival claims seem to have an uncanny propensity to appear a bit loony -- literally. Lively debate in the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement in particular produced several alternate candidates, although the one that most caught my interest was announced last year by Prof. Katherine Duncan-Jones of Oxford-a formidable figure in the field and editor of the highly regarded Arden edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Or do they? I went back and reread ‘ Tis Pity She’s a Whore and found myself exhilarated by its feverish over-the-top transgressive hysteria. Patterns of initiation and criteria of personal maturity will, inevitably, vary from group to group, or from culture to culture. The chapters that follow will suggest the presence of a number of such rites of passage in the plays. Not only did Ford model his drama on Shakespeare and echo him repeatedly, he even wrote for Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men. But Professor Foster dismissed the parallels as showing that Ford plagiarized from the Elegie without ever considering Ford as the author of that poem.”. Why is it different for Shakespeare? By definition, the fetish and the circumstances I should like therefore to quote the final paragraph of her introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa as a brief preface to my own argument -- substituting only the name of the civilization I propose to explore for that which she has so vividly documented, and noting that similarities, as well as contrasts, are frequently to be found between the practices and beliefs of the two societies. And it’s a dispute about whether a computer can tell the difference. 62-4). If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. “The truth sometimes turns out to be stranger than fiction,” she quoted Mr. Foster telling her, implying that he was conceding the truth of her Sclater theory. The other specters to appear in these pages include Richard III, King Lear, Shylock (present to mind because unmentioned in another essay by Freud), a host of silenced women from Cordelia to Sycorax, and Shakespeare himself. Yes -- but are the ghosts ghosts of those persons, those names -- or are they new originals? Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. Although, as I’ve pointed out in the past, in each case the obviously abashed scholar-editors of those editions were uncomfortable enough to distance themselves from the inclusion as an endorsement of the attribution to Shakespeare. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. There are 0 reviews and 0 ratings from United Kingdom. Click the AdBlock Plus button on your browser and select Enabled on this site. In any case, Mr. Foster raised an obvious and powerful objection: Why the hell would John Ford, who was known to the family of the dead William Peter, sign the elegy W.S. On the night before the Battle of Philippi, Brutus is sleepless while all around him doze off. I won’t presume to pronounce judgment on that issue between Mr. Foster and Ms. Duncan-Jones, but I will say, much as I disagree with Mr. Foster on the Elegy authorship question, I think he was wronged by Ms. Duncan-Jones. Shakespeare would rather die than undertake the task himself for someone he knows far less well than Ford does. Why the emphasis upon the canonical figures of postmodernism and poststructuralism? So both Ford and Shakespeare knew the dead guy, but Ford knew him better. But they’re only 14 lines long: The real issue is whether Shakespeare was capable of being that bad for 578 lines at a time. one The "spirit from the underworld" that has to be interrogated is that overdetermined transference-relation, whether we call it bardolatry, canonicity, or post-structuralist discourse. Which brings us to the first exciting new development: the False Alarm, the Premature Surrender Claim. Most readers will be familiar with Ford as one of that dark and brilliant company of Jacobean revenge dramatists. She had found the true “W.S.,” she said. I was stunned by Ms. Duncan-Jones’ letter. The essay on "The Uncanny" plays a major part in my approaches to these plays, and it is an uncanny fact that the Shakespeare plays Freud singles out -- precisely to demonstrate that their ghosts are notuncanny -- are the plays that appear in my text: Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Most of Shakespeare's plays were printed in quartos, the instant books Consider this scenario: In 1612, Shakespeare’s a few years from his death, he’s hardly writing at all any more, he’s more an investor in his acting company than a working playwright, he prefers to spend his time in rural Stratford engaging in litigious quarrels with the rubes up there. Unable to add item to List. childhood, or rather, his treasured memories of that childhood), or as But I couldn’t quite believe it (however much I might have wanted to), so I tracked down Mr. Foster, who was vacationing in Florida over the holidays. To my melancholy disappointment, The Lover’s Melancholy fell far short of its source’s incomparable brio, its wild and crazy mixture of crackpot scholarship and confused yearning. These essays are about ghosts, and about writing. At the core of the arguments to be advanced here is my conviction, strengthened during the course of this study, that by observing recurrent modes of behavior and speech in the plays, and extrapolating from the certain unspoken but consistent rules of conduct, we can achieve an understanding of "maturity" as it applies to Shakespeare's dramatic characters. This is becoming more than a scholars’ squabble. "Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves -- all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them," writes Freud, "especially when... they prove able to move of themselves." It’s one thing for a poet to go on autopilot for a stanza or three, it’s another to produce 578 lines of virtually unadulterated dimwitted drivel-the Moby-Dick of drivel. In the essays collected here I will explore the ways in which Shakespeare has come to haunt our culture, the ways in which the plays are central not only to English Studies but also to recent, more subversive, theoretical approaches to literature -- new historicism, deconstruction, feminism, and psychoanalysis. The rhetorical similarity of the two phrases -- "Henceforth I never will be..." "Henceforth be..." underscores their functional similarity. cried But advertising revenue helps support our journalism. Who writes -- or what writes, these fateful messages? At this point it may be well to state that despite this brief attempt to explain what I take to be the relationship of maturation, social integration and self-knowledge, I am aware that "maturity" remains a troublesome word, and I have tried to use it with care. But it is nonetheless in the spirit of Mead's inquiry into the cultures of other peoples, and in particular the process of maturation, that this book was written -- and will, I hope, be read. Culture 9), Why is it that parents who would be appalled to find their college-age Readers will note the recurrence in these pages of many familiar ghosts of poststructuralism -- Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Marx, De Man, and Nietzsche -- alongside Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, A. C. Bradley, and Superman comic books. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Exciting new developments in the controversy over the alleged “Shakespeare” Funeral Elegy. “Ford was Shakespeare’s most ardent epigone,” Mr. Foster wrote. Now, nobody would love to see the Shakespeare attribution exploded more than I, but my initial reaction to the Ford candidacy is similar to my problem with the Shakespeare candidacy: He’s too good a writer to have perpetrated this epic crime against poetry, this brain cell-killing assault on the senses, this challenge to the limits of human tolerance for tedium. century that the myth of "Shakespeare," and of the Shakespeare text, they would discredit the value of the whole. Another book on Shakespeare? Ford is best known for ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore , a play which memorably features an incest-crazed brother running into a fifth-act scene with his pregnant sister’s bloody heart on his dagger. Why is so much apparently invested in finding the "real" ghost writer, or in resisting and marginalizing all attempts to prove any authorship other than that of "the poacher from Stratford" (to cite the title of a recent book on the Shakespeare authorship)? This, of course, is precisely the point. One of the most articulate defenders of the Earl of Oxford authorship is one John Thomas Looney. The Shakespearean novice, like his or her counterpart in society, must be separated from a former self before he or she can be integrated into a new social role. one academic traditionalist. Suddenly, it occurred to me: John Ford ghost-wrote the Elegy for Shakespeare . Aspiring playwright and poet John Ford comes to Shakespeare and says: William Peter’s died, his family has asked me to ask you, O great bard of our age, to write an elegy commemorating his death; you know, maybe the usual 600 lines or so. "Then I wouldn't know what the play The essay on "The Uncanny" plays a major part in my approaches to these plays, and it is an uncanny fact that the Shakespeare plays Freud singles out -- precisely to demonstrate that their ghosts are not uncanny -- are the plays that appear in my text: Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Nor is it Mr. Looney the only contender for unfortunateness of name: a zealous Shakespearean cryptographer, who proves by numerological analysis that the real author could be either Bacon or Daniel Defoe, is George M. Battey ("no more fortunately named than Mr. Looney," comments an orthodox chronicler of the controversy, and, "quite properly, no more deterred by it"). In one of those curious coincidences that seem to illumine our lives, I found myself on the morning of 15 November 1978, having completed at last a draft of this book, listening to a radio report of the death of Margaret Mead. and thematics ("What about the animal images in King Lear?" Again and again in Shakespeare's plays ghosts and writing occur together, are twisted together in the same skein: the letter read by Lady Macbeth, or the "letter G" that Richard makes stand for both George and Gloucester; Hamlet's "tables" and his "new commission" commanding the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the letters thrown in at Brutus's casement, urging the assassination of Caesar. children studying the same chemistry textbooks, or economic theorems, inadvertently to be sure, taken away something of his treasured He confirmed my suspicions: He had not in any way conceded defeat to Ms. Duncan-Jones. While I disagree with him on the Elegy , I admire the comprehensiveness of Mr. Foster’s erudition and his scrupulous, scholarly intellect; I only regret he allowed himself to be swayed from original agnostic position on the authorship of the Elegy . The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. Way too good for “W.S.” Then I plunged into one of Ford’s earlier plays, The Lover’s Melancholy , one I’d never read before, one I was thrilled to discover was inspired by one of my favorite works in the language, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy . It was at times stilted, at times sententiously conventional, at times awkward and dull. So he tells Ford, Why don’t you work something up and sign it for me? would mean." Keats' poem "This Living Hand," with its closing trompe-l'oeil gesture across the boundaries of life and death, writing and reading, makes a move very similar to that figured by Shakespeare's ghosts: The act of writing is a sleight of hand through which the dead hand of the past reaches over to our side of the border. I think I just may have solved the damn thing. instead of John Ford or J.F.? Was there a Caesar or an old Hamlet, before their ghosts appeared? Such a tactic is surprising and disturbing, but perhaps an indication of how high passions run on this question. Shakespeare’s Ghostwriter: The Elegy Mystery Solved? The ghostly traces I have followed have led me on the kind of journey that Freud describes in his essay on "The Uncanny" (1919), when, in trying to hasten away from the red light district of a small provincial town in Italy, he found himself, again and again, "back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. Good question. It seemed to indicate that the chief proponent of the attribution of the Elegy to Shakespeare was conceding defeat. The wretched Funeral Elegy by W.S. It was something new Mr. Foster said he’d discovered that suggested to me a novel solution to the puzzle. It’s a dispute about what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, what makes poetry “Shakespearean,” what makes poetry poetry -what makes it a source of wonder, challenge and amazement that speaks across centuries, as opposed to lines of leaden hack-work laden with dimwitted piety that happen to rhyme or scan and are set out in stanzas. Few [students] recognized that the study of Elizabethan culture and language was at all relevant to our own. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts – and ghost writing. There is, however, yet another way in which Freud inflects my argument, and that is through the concept -- and the mechanism -- of transference. And it looks like the fever pitch of passion and intrigue is not going to diminish. 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