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. "Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. I was not only saddened but profoundly disturbed. and over 8 million other books are available for, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. 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 . 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. culture, not as the icon of high art he has become today. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. To read our full stories, please turn off your ad blocker.We'd really appreciate it. Exciting new developments in the controversy over the alleged “Shakespeare” Funeral Elegy. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. “Ford was Shakespeare’s most ardent epigone,” Mr. Foster wrote. 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. The rhetorical similarity of the two phrases -- "Henceforth I never will be..." "Henceforth be..." underscores their functional similarity. 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. 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. childhood, or rather, his treasured memories of that childhood), or as It stumped me for a while. Shakespeare’s Ghostwriter: The Elegy Mystery Solved? Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written.. 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. Exciting new developments in the controversy over the alleged “Shakespeare” Funeral Elegy . Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. This was a letter posted from Zurich by Prof. Brian Vickers, a well-known Shakespearean scholar who was one of the first Britons to weigh in against Mr. Foster’s Shakespeare attribution of the Elegy . nostalgia for the certainties of truth and beauty -- a nostalgia 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. Used with permission, Top of Page || Home Page || Stanford University Libraries || Stanford University. It was only in the 18th would do well to remember that Shakespeare himself began as popular 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. When Romeo doffs his name, declaring in the balcony scene "Henceforth I never will be Romeo," he transforms himself. Not Shakespeare, but a little known Puritan preacher named William Sclater. Because, once again, what interests me is the uncanny extent to which these writers are themselves haunted by Shakespeare, the way in which Shakespearean texts -- and especially the most canonical texts of Shakespearean tragedy -- have mined themselves into the theoretical speculations that have dominated our present discourses, whether in literature, history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, or politics. An act of transformation -- literally of "translation" from one name to another -- is taking place. has been added to your Basket, Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of English at Harvard University. 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. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.". 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. There is, however, yet another way in which Freud inflects my argument, and that is through the concept -- and the mechanism -- of transference. One is that he’s working on a book about the whole Elegy controversy with the sure-to-inflame title Counterfeiting Shakespeare: The Politics of Attribution . Most readers will be familiar with Ford as one of that dark and brilliant company of Jacobean revenge dramatists. The wretched Funeral Elegy by W.S. Voilà! and why now? In addition, according to Mr. Vickers, Leo Stock, one of the foremost John Ford scholars, has lent weight to the Ford candidacy. Yes -- but are the ghosts ghosts of those persons, those names -- or are they new originals? What is it about the humanities The transferential relationship Freud describes as existing between the analyst and the patient is, I will argue, precisely the kind of relation that exists between "Shakespeare" and western culture. Good question. Please try your request again later. 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. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures – metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting of us, and in particular theorists such Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud – the figure of Shakespeare constantly made and remade by contemporary culture. This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. Instead, they either sneered at the Elegy , or characterized the inclusion with weasel words about how it would provoke debate about the “meaning of authorship” and other temporizing blather. But whether concerned with sexuality and marriage, with naming, with language, or with self-comparison and self-judgment, each rite conforms to the basic sequence of separation, transition and incorporation as documented by van Gennep. It was something new Mr. Foster said he’d discovered that suggested to me a novel solution to the puzzle. Few [students] recognized that the study of Elizabethan culture and language was at all relevant to our own. 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. Why is it different for Shakespeare? It was at times stilted, at times sententiously conventional, at times awkward and dull. And Ford and Shakespeare knew each other. 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. So Ford takes his resentment out on the Elegy -he cranks out some torturously blathering, sententious twaddle full of bloated, self-satisfied piety with a few subtle gibes at the theater and theatricality to express his disgruntlement with Shakespeare and the whole ghost-writing deal. 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. It seemed to indicate that the chief proponent of the attribution of the Elegy to Shakespeare was conceding defeat. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. This Routledge Classics edition contains a new preface and new chapter by the author. A dispute about more than the authorship of a relentlessly inept, clumsily sententious 578-line poem signed in 1612 with the initials “W.S.,” a poem so mind-numbingly destabilizing, a work of such prolonged and painful mediocrity, that reports are already filtering out to Amnesty International that Saddam Hussein is using staged readings of it to torture his most hated political prisoners. century that the myth of "Shakespeare," and of the Shakespeare text, Plays in What is uncanny is not that the moving finger writes but that the writing finger moves. Ghosts take the form of absences, erasures, even forgeries and signatures metaphors extended to include Shakespeare himself and his haunting o 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. Batty or loony, the ghost seekers' name is legion, and they have left an impressive legacy of monuments to human interpretative ingenuity. But advertising revenue helps support our journalism. Try again. Who writes -- or what writes, these fateful messages? If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Unable to add item to List. 1-Click ordering is not available for this item. He confirmed my suspicions: He had not in any way conceded defeat to Ms. Duncan-Jones. "Without possibility of question," maintains the Folger ghost-buster, "the actor at the Globe and the gentleman from Stratford were the same man." This is becoming more than a scholars’ squabble. 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. Then I looked more closely at Mr. Foster’s description of the relationship between Ford and Shakespeare. Then why does the question persist? I was in the midst of studying Ms. Duncan-Jones’ case for William Sclater as W.S. Yet no on quarrels about Spenser's authorship, or Ralegh's, or Webster's, or Milton's. (Shakespeare's Ghost Writers xiii-xv). Shakespeare's Ghost Writers is an examination of the authorship controversy surrounding Shakespeare: the claim made repeatedly that the plays were ghost written. 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. and thematics ("What about the animal images in King Lear?" Was there a Caesar or an old Hamlet, before their ghosts appeared? I sense there might be an answer here. She had found the true “W.S.,” she said. Some of those described in these pages correspond directly to rites practiced by tribes or sects that have received extensive scrutiny by social scientists, while others may seem less broadly based, more specific to their Shakespearean context. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. 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)? alumnus asked me after a public talk. Click the AdBlock Plus button on your browser and select Enabled on this site. 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. Suddenly, it occurred to me: John Ford ghost-wrote the Elegy for Shakespeare . The plays of Shakespeare are filled with ghosts and ghost writing. We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Mr. Vickers’ letter drops a couple of bombshells that portend even more bitter battles to come. Culture 9), Why is it that parents who would be appalled to find their college-age would mean." 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. 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. While it never approached the abysmal depths of poetic decrepitude the Funeral Elegy sustains for intolerable lengths of time, it had a certain je ne sais quoi of amateurish badness that made it just possible, just conceivable, that the same author might -after suffering a serious concussion, say- have composed the Funeral Elegy . Just as an anthropologist visits an alien people and observes its customs, deducing from them the values of that society, so the critic of Shakespeare's plays may visit his dramatic world and deduce its values from what can be observed there. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness. (Symptoms of Culture 167-168), (c) 1981-87 Marjorie Garber. 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. 62-4). Why the emphasis upon the canonical figures of postmodernism and poststructuralism? One of the most articulate defenders of the Earl of Oxford authorship is one John Thomas Looney. inadvertently to be sure, taken away something of his treasured So both Ford and Shakespeare knew the dead guy, but Ford knew him better. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads. children studying the same chemistry textbooks, or economic theorems, (Symptoms of Library, refused to have such "playbooks" in his collection because Manifestly, each play has a world all its own, which may be compared to, but cannot be identified with, that of others of indeed with the world of the reader. I think I just may have solved the damn thing. in general, and Shakespeare in particular, that calls up this 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 . In fact, he claimed he had plenty of ammunition to blow her out of the water: He could disprove her key contention that her candidate, William Sclater, was linked to William Peter, the subject of the Elegy , through Puritan religious ties. (Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2-3), Those who inveigh against mixing high art with popular culture 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"). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the tide of opinion was running in the opposite direction, with most leading British Shakespearean scholars dissenting from the attribution of the seamlessly second-rate Elegy to Shakespeare. Most of Shakespeare's plays were printed in quartos, the instant books We get it: you like to have control of your own internet experience. 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. children will learn the same things about Shakespeare that they learned But Professor Foster dismissed the parallels as showing that Ford plagiarized from the Elegie without ever considering Ford as the author of that poem.”. Here I mean something as trivial as imagery The author of. 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. "Shakespeare" is the transferential love-object of literary studies. 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. 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. 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. Shakespeare's Ghost Write... 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. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. 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 . I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place." But he wants to write for Shakespeare’s acting company. I went back and reread ‘ Tis Pity She’s a Whore and found myself exhilarated by its feverish over-the-top transgressive hysteria. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, probably written just a year or two before Hamlet, a ghost also appears to a leading character on the eve of battle. It was Looney, appropriately enough, who won Freud to the Oxford camp.) The thanes are to doff their former titles, and take new ones; again a rite of passage is ordained -- one which will signal a separation from the old Scotland, and a movement toward to unified country under James I's reign. (Coming of Age in Shakespeare 25-26). After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. when they themselves were in college? And the "question" -- the question raised in the course of the analysis, the question it would be folly to repress and not to ask the conjured spirit -- that question is the question with which this book begins: Another book on Shakespeare -- why? I was stunned by Ms. Duncan-Jones’ letter. Such a tactic is surprising and disturbing, but perhaps an indication of how high passions run on this question. It’s turning out to be one of the great emblematic intellectual debates of our time. He told me he’d uncovered previously unknown links between the dead guy, William Peter, and Shakespeare. Please try again. This is becoming more than a scholars’ squabble. One of the things those topics have in common is that they stand in the place of something that -- perhaps -- was once present, and is now gone. But in any event, the second bombshell Mr. Vickers drops in his letter is the unveiling-or revival-of a powerful new contender for authorship of the elegy: John Ford. The publishers of three new editions of the complete works of Shakespeare (perhaps intimidated by the supposedly scientific computer-generated “proofs” of the attribution) have included the wretched Elegy in what I believe were ill-advised attempts to cash in on the publicity over the Elegy and demonstrate how au courant they were. in Shakespeare Studies (and finding it disappointingly far less conclusive than I’d hoped) when I came upon another outburst of contentious polemic on the letters page of the TLS , this one introducing an entirely new candidate for the mysterious W.S. Every life is many days, day after day. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It is not my purpose to judge Shakespeare's characters, except to the extent that the plays encourage us to judge them. "See -- here it is -- I hold it toward you." Another book on Shakespeare? By definition, the fetish and the circumstances "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." William Sclater. 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).