{"id":20,"date":"2018-10-12T18:36:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T18:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/?p=20"},"modified":"2022-02-06T20:57:15","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T20:57:15","slug":"the-authorship-question-opening-new-possibilities-for-transforming-productions-of-shakespeares-plays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/the-authorship-question-opening-new-possibilities-for-transforming-productions-of-shakespeares-plays\/","title":{"rendered":"Transforming Productions of Shakespeare\u2019s Plays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gary Goldstein<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract:<\/strong> In the present paper, the author explores how the authorship debate can change the ways in which the Shakespeare plays are produced if the true Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and if the plays were written 20 years earlier and then revised.<\/p>

Keywords:<\/strong> Shakespeare, Authorship, Authorship Question, Biography, Staging Shakespeare, Edward de Vere<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When one accepts the traditional author of the Shakespeare canon\u2014let\u2019s call him William of Stratford\u2014both scholars and theatre professionals begin with a blank slate on which to impose their own ideas about the author\u2019s original intent. That is, if the Bard was a self-tutored genius from the provinces with no access to Elizabeth\u2019s Court, his plays are simply imaginative displays of wit by a working-class author, designed to amuse a general public. They are fantasies, in effect, of society and politics in England and Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, the crux of this paper: how does the authorship debate change the way in which the plays can be produced for modern audiences if the true Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and if the plays were written 20 years earlier and then revised?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the question Michael Miller, Dean of the graduate theatre program at New York University, asked me a generation ago, after reading an essay on the authorship written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (1373). I would like to answer that question now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This particular alternate case\u2014that an aristocrat from Elizabeth\u2019s Court wrote the Shakespeare plays under a pseudonym\u2014was introduced in 1920, by English scholar J.T. Looney in his book, \u201cShakespeare\u201d Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Thomas Looney<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Looney\u2019s contention was that the plays take on a different perspective if the true author was the Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). Clearly, they were designed to entertain as well as educate all levels of Elizabethan society: from performances at the Royal Court, to the upscale private Blackfriars Theatre seating 800 spectators, to the two enormous public theatres each seating 2,500 theatregoers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we accept this new identity of an aristocratic author who lived at the apex of Elizabethan society, the plays can then be examined as ambitious dramas on the political crises facing the Elizabethan state: the English and Scottish royal successions, the nineteen-year war with Spain, the French civil war and internal dissension by English Puritans. What\u2019s more, the numerous plays set in Italy and France may be viewed as the dramatist\u2019s lifelong effort to transplant the Renaissance culture of Europe into England through the stage. Indeed, Oxford visited France and Italy for fifteen months while there is no evidence that William of Stratford ever left England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n