can i just say that shakespeare authorship theories are THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN THE WORLD AND CAN PEOPLE PLEASE STOP?????
sounds like it all started from someone who was annoyed that shakespeare, who was a ‘country bumpkin’ even to the other playwrights of the time who were no members of ~High Class~ as it were, could write so many fucking brilliant plays.
like people of the time were impressed with the speed that he wrote shit and he had rivals and i just-- it’s perfectly fucking plausible that he wrote them. it’s not a giant fucking conspiracy. WHY WOULD IT BE?
like can someone explain WHY these other authors would BOTHER going through the MASSIVE HASSLE of FAKING AN ENTIRE FUCKING AUTHOR???? like why?! WHY?! what would be the POINT?!
if you can’t answer that then any fucking theory about HOW is utterly useless. if there’s no point to these possibilities or choices, then please stfu.
these playwrights were collaborators or thieves of each other’s work, they were clearly influenced by each other, none more so than shakespeare most likely.
if marlowe faked his death it was for unrelated circumstances. it literally can’t even come close to accounting for shakespeare’s earlier work.
and also the fact THAT HE FUCKING EXISTED AND WE KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THAT TO BE PRETTY DAMN SURE ABOUT HIS START AND END DATES.
it just really pisses me off.
like hi yes we understand that art is often collaborative in this way, especially throughout classical european history, like we get it. okay? nbd. that’s fine.
but these people INSIST that it couldn’t have been shakespeare, or shit’s suspicious, and it’s like--WHY? LITERALLY WHY? WHY WOULD ANYONE BOTHER CONSTRUCTING THIS ABSOLUTELY LUDICROUS CONSPIRACY?
some fucker tried to say--and had QUOTES about this from other fuckers who tried to discredit shakespeare, too--that shakespeare’s works show absolutely no evidence of his lived life. that in every author’s work, it’s easy to see the influence of the life they lived and the perspective they had.
and that, somehow, shakespeare’s plays don’t show that at all.
to that i say
WHAT PLAYS ARE YOU FUCKING READING?
- he takes the unorthodox, progressive approach to topics when others would not, and did not--esp his contemporaries - EVERYONE BORROWED PLOTS CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME AND TROUPES WOULDN’T HAVE SURVIVED IF THEY’D WRITTEN CONSTANTLY ABOUT THE AVERAGE LIFE OF THE COMMONER??? that shit wasn’t even popular until like, the fucking 1800′s! and that was a literary/theatrical MOVEMENT! like--a doll house, anyone?! IBSEN?! FOR FUCK’S SAKE! - he literally had a son called hamnet, for one thing. i’m not even making a point with this one. - iirc, he had twins, and either both or one of them died. and twins feature A LOT in his comedies. - the tempest or twelfth night or some other play features a specific kind of happy ending--perhaps twelfth night--that ties SPECIFICALLY to an event in his life, and the death of one of his children. - his sonnets are so clearly about certain people. - THEMATICALLY his work is SO ASTOUNDINGLY CONSISTENT. - the shit that’s NOT totally consistent? heavily co-authored and early in his career and based super heavily on historical accounts like plutarch and shit. GEE WHAT A FUCKING SURPRISE ?????
anyway i’m furious about it all and it’s 4 am and i am TIRED and i was just listening to TAZ but took a quick break to do something, ider what it was at this point, saw an article someone posted on fb about this ~brand new info~ about how his plays were co-authored or collaborative works, like up to 17 of them or something.
and honestly? not surprised, don’t care, he was still the driving force, doesn’t delegitimize his genius and effort.
and honestly it all seems like this huge effort to undermine the sheer lasting power and brilliance of his work.
because it seems that people can’t accept that brilliance can be innate AND learned, can be individual AND cooperative, can come from someone with limited schooling who had resources and contacts with people and volumes who could teach him a lot.
they refuse to accept that works so incredibly powerful, memorable, amazing, brilliant, etc., could possibly have been written by one dude in a relatively short lifetime with limited education and life experience.
and that pisses me off.
shakespeare’s works, his ideas and themes and impact, the stuff that HE focused on and was obsessed with, are RIDICULOUSLY evident in every single thing he wrote.
like the fucking poem i wrote about hamlet? i pulled shakespearean quote from a sonnet and THREE PLAYS. and they were ALL THEMATICALLY RELEVANT.
so kindly shut the fuck up and stop derailing important conversations about shakespeare.
i want to know who he was, not your bullshit insulting shitty theories about how he didn’t actually do shit.
i want to know more about him. i want to know everything he wrote. i want to hear about his collaborative process. i want to know why he focused so heavily on these particular ideas.
like it should be poignantly telling that the concept of achieving immortality through writing and fiction features so heavily in almost all of his works. he has sonnet after sonnet about the same exact thing from different angles. hamlet is literally a meditation on the concept of life as a performance, with the effect of fate, and how you achieve life after death, what it really means, and what immortality means and do you really want it or can you achieve it by other means? what effect will that have? even his comedies touch on similar concepts and ideas, though briefly and loosely.
i’m sure he wasn’t The Most Unique in covering certain topics or writing about certain ideas or themes.
but it’s outright ignorant and offensive to claim that there’s no evidence of shakespeare’s life and experience and upbringing in his plays. he’s in everything he wrote.
i wouldn’t connect with hamlet that much otherwise.
there’s someone in that play. i don’t know how else to phrase it.
and it’s useless and ignorant to claim that he couldn’t have done it for some reason or another.
because people never seem to answer WHY people would’ve FAKED this authorship.
ETA: and what’s more, not to discredit investigative/forensic linguistics, but holy shit y’all are analyzing text that’s like 400 years old and has likely been gently edited countless times, and what’s more is that the original versions of these texts were collaborative in the way that these playwrights saw and read each other’s work FREQUENTLY, perhaps had actors or editors etc who had worked with other playwrights, etc. it’s literally not surprising at all that they would either lift a few lines several times within a play wholesale, or pick up certain turns of phrase from other writers. my point is, it’s kind of absurd to assume that forensic linguistics will be totally accurate and definitive on what kind of conclusions you can draw based on analyzing later editions of works that are over 400 years old. i’m just fucking saying.