Today’s Totally Random
Lines
What’s
he comes here?
King
All’s Well That Ends
Well Act I, Scene ii, Line 18
Well, there are several answers I could give to What’s he comes here?
Considering that it’s just about seven a.m., and Walker Peter’s got to be in to work at seven, I believe this is he that I hear coming down the hall.
Or, considering
that it’s just about seven a.m., and the electronic picture frame turns on
automatically at seven, I can see that it’s nephews John and Caleb showing up on
the frame here in my living room all the way from Japan.
Or, more to the
point, seeing that it’s the king asking the question, I can read ahead and tell
you that the answer is Betram, Lafeu, and Parolles.
Which leads me
to another discussion.
I went to
Whitlock’s Book Barn yesterday, and I picked up yet one more book on Shakespeare;
this one entitled Discovering Shakespeare by Edward Holmes.
It’s a book about the conjecture that a fellow named Edward de Vere, Earl
of Oxford wrote Shakespeare, and it’s based on the premise that de Vere had all
these different experiences that the fellow who wrote these plays might have
had: experiences that fit in very neatly to the plays, and experiences that
Will never could have had.
The first play
discussed in the book is, you guessed it, All’s Well That Ends Well.
It explains who all these people in the play were in real life and the experiences
that de Vere had with them (Bertram, by the way, is Edward de Vere according to
Mr. Holmes).
Now, this is
the second book I’ve got that works this same premise. Each of them go into the
historical facts and characters of de Vere’s
life (a life, unlike Will’s, that was quite well documented), but here’s the
thing: neither of the books explains how de Vere’s words ended up with William Shakespeare
as the listed author (granted that I’m only in chapter two of this new book,
but I’ll keep you posted). They both seem to assume that it must’ve been de Vere
as the author. But then, what about William Shakespeare? Who was he?
Whilst, as we
well know, there is very little documented detail of Will’s life, we do in fact
know that he existed and that he was given credit as the author. It is, however,
the exponentially more documented detail of de Vere’s life that makes the arguments
of these two authors so persuasive. Edward de Vere’s life fits so very well
into the detail of the plays. But again, how do de Vere’s words end up credited
as Shakespeare’s?
I’m hoping that Mr. Holmes comes up with some viable answer to this question. Perhaps Edward de Vere and William Shakespeare were friends who would meet and share stories of their lives over glasses of ale? And perhaps de Vere did a lot more sharing? This, at least, would still give Will authorship.
Or perhaps,
unlike Severus Snape, we’ll just
never
knooowwww.
The heck with this Snape guy, how about when my next treat will be showing up?
Do we know that?
No comments:
Post a Comment