Abstract
William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, is getting
scholarly and critical attention in
multiple ways. This paper aims to explore Shakespeare’s authorship, his
influence and his translation. K.S.Vijay Elangova interviewed Prof. Stanley
Wells, President, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust about Shakespeare’s authorship.
A number of studies took place in recent time to explore his authorship. Nearly
2500 signatories, including writers, academicians, actors and scholars assume
themselves doubtful about his authorship. The book including The Contested Will and the films, Shakespeare in Love and the forthcoming Anonymous dwell on this question. But Prof. Stanley
Wells is thoroughly convinced and declares that there are sufficient evidences
and proof about the authorship of Shakespeare. Further, he is co-editing a
collection of essays with Dr. Paul Edmondson about the Shakespeare Authorship Conspiracy Theory. John Gross in his article
‘‘Shakespeare’s influence’’ claims that even poems, plays, novels of present
time have impression of William Shakespeare. The poetry echoes countless
instances. As W.H Auden’s The Sea and the
Mirror (1945) subtitle A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest
is a brilliant medley of verse and prose in which Auden pursues his own
preoccupations. Pasternak’s Shakespeare paints
a vivid imagined picture of his tavern life in London. Today several plays have prints
of local circumstances and traditions of
his time. Others were ‘ appropriations’
in which Shakespearian material was given a new post-colonial or anti-colonial
twist, as Welcome Msomi’s Umabathu,
for instance (a Zulu transposition of Macbeth).
In recent time, the novelists like,
Anthony Burgess and Robert Nye have succeeded in producing novels about
Shakespeare. Burgess’s Nothing Like the
Sun (1964) is notable for its gusto, wit and linguistic exuberance. Nye’s Mrs Shakespeare offers us an intimate and less than enraptured view
of the great man through the eye of Anne Hathaway. The article ‘‘Shakespeare
and translation’’ by Ton Hoenselaars views that Shakespeare is widely studied
in the works of translation in recent years. Dennis Kennedy and Michael
Billington have championed a multi-cultural
approach to Shakespeare. Thus Shakespeare became a literary saint whose
work was sacrosanct like the bible, yet, the translator became one of the
apostles.
Rethinking William
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is widely known and studied worldwide.
The scholars like David Kathman, John Gross, Ton Hoenselaars, Prof. Stanley
Wells make an authoritative information about his stature in contemporary
period. A number of efforts are made by various critics and scholars about his
authorship. Recently, in The Hindu,
K. S. Vijay Elangova interviewed Prof. Stanley Wells, President, Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust about Shakespeare’s authorship. It out broke a cry over
William Shakespeare’s works about whether he wrote his works or not. Prof.
Stanley Wells viewed that this rubbish came about in the middle of 19th
century when Shakespeare’s genius flourished worldwide. It all started in the
1850’s when the American teacher and writer, Delia Bacon who was even not
related to Francis Bacon, started to suggest that the plays had been written by
a committee of people, led by Sir Francis Bacon. They also think the original
author was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford who had borrowed
Shakespeare’s name for his plays. They contend Shakespeare had only humble
origins and could not have had exposure to royalty and royal atmosphere and did
not possess the aristocratic sensibility which most of his plays reflect.
Another scholar David Kathman in his article ‘‘The
Question of Authorship’’ tries to explore some views concerning Shakespeare’s
authorship. It is also found that some amateurs in this field who argue that
William Shakespeare is actually a pseudonym for a mysterious hidden author. The
anti–Stratfordians accept that the real Shakespeare is 17th Earl of
Oxford, Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. They claim that the Stratford man’s name is
not Shakespeare at all, but Shakspere, the spelling he himself uses in his
signatures. The Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and actor Michael York
also sympathise with those anti–Stratfordians.
Further, Stephen Greenblatt’s book, Will in the World (2005) shows how a man who has only a secondary school
education, becomes the most renowned playwright of all time. It interweaves a
searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the
playwright’s life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family,
and forming a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theatre world, while at the same time
grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less agile
figures to the scaffold. It is found that Shakespeare as the patron Saint of
parking lot attendants, getting his start in the big city holding horses for
rich folks. But he quickly dismisses that image. James Shapiro’s The Contested Will (2010) also
examines authorship’s controversy. It declares that there is fabricated
document about embellished lives, concealed identity, pseudonymous authorship,
contested evidence, bald-faced deception, and a failure to grasp what could not
be imagined.
Next thing is the film, Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 British-American romantic comedy
drama film, directed by John Madden, written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom
Stoppard. The film depicts a love-affair, involving playwright William
Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) at the time when he was writing the play Romeo and
Juliet. It has also dealt with the views that whether Shakespeare is
Shakespeare or not. The film begins, as Shakespeare’s patron Philip Henslowe
(Geoffrey Rush) finds himself in debt to loan shark Hugh Fennyman (Tom
Wilkinson). Henslowe offers Fennyman a partnership in the upcoming production
of Shakespeare’s newest comedy, Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate’s Daughter
promising that it will be a hit. This play will later be renamed Romeo and
Juliet and be reworked into a tragedy. Shakespeare is suffering from writer’s
block and has not completed the play, but begins auditions for Romeo. A boy
named Thomas Kent is cast in the role after impressing Shakespeare with his
performance and his love of Shakespeare’s previous work. Thomas Kent was really
Viola de Lesseps who was dressed as a man because only men can be actors. Even,
Faye Kellerman sues about the writers of the film that the story is lifted from
her book, The Quality of Mercy (1989)
a detective novel in which Shakespeare and a cross-dressing Jewish woman
attempt to solve a murder.
A new film Anonymous,
directed by Roland Emmerich, also suggests that William Shakespeare is a fraud
and Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the true author of his
plays. It is a feature film based on the Prince Tudor, variant of the Oxfordian
theory, written by John Orloff , premiered at the Toronto International Film
Festival. De Vere is portrayed as a literary prodigy who becomes the lover of
Queen Elizabeth, with whom he sires Henry Wriothesley 3rd Earl of Southampton, only to discover that he
himself may be the Queen’s son by an earlier lover. He eventually sees his
suppressed plays performed through the front man, William Shakespeare, who is
portrayed as an opportunistic actor and the movie’s comic foil. Oxford agrees to Elizabeth’s
demand that he remains anonymous as part of a bargain for saving their son from
execution as a traitor for supporting the Essex Rebellion against her.
The film shows how plays are written and performed at a
particular place and time, then published under another writer’s name.
Elizabethan public theatres are depicted as places where low-class actors perform
silly plays written by dramatists so mediocre they can’t imagine how anyone can
compose an entire play in blank verse. De Vere’s genius is so towering that it
is unimaginable how he can ever be influenced by these lesser talents. The film
maker Emmerich and script writer Orloff inherits this bizarre about the past of
English. It derives more or less intact from the work of a man named J. Thomas
Looney, who first proposed 90 years ago that De Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
His book, Shakespeare Identified
(1920) becomes the bible of the movement and has shaped the case for De Vere
ever since. Looney was convinced that no commoner like Shakespeare who cared
about money could have written the plays, but it was De Vere who wrote these
plays because his life history was found in these plays.
Again, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition which
announces a one-year Master of Arts programme on Declaration of Reasonable
Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare authorship
studies that is coinciding with Brunel
University. The coalition
aims to enlist broad public support by 2016, the 400th anniversary
of Shakespeare’s death. The academic
Shakespeare establishment will be forced to acknowledge that legitimate grounds
for doubting Shakespeare’s authorship exist. More than 1200 signatures were
collected by the end of 2007, and as of July 2012 the number of signatures had
increased to 2413, including those of 420 former academics. On 22 April 2007,
The New York Times published a survey of 265 American Shakespeare professors on
the Shakespeare authorship question. To the question of whether there is good
reason to question Shakespeare’s authorship, 6 percent answered ‘yes’, and 11
percent possibly.
His influence is also worldwide, as W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror : A Commentary on
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a poem of dramatic monologue. It was first
published in 1944, later it was published in 2003, by Arthur Kirsch. Caliban to
the Audience is a prose poem in the style of Henry James, where Auden reflects
on the nature of the relationship of the author (presum’ably Shakespeare) to
the audience of the Tempest, the
paradoxes of portraying life in art, and the tension of form and freedom. In
the three parts of the poem, where the so good, so great, so dead author is
asked to take a curtain call and being unable to do so. Caliban stands in his
place to take the questions. In the first
section, there is
meditation on the
dramatic arts, in
various personifications, the Muse for the dramatic arts, Caliban as the
Real World, and Ariel as the Poetic
world, The second section deals Shakespeare on behalf of his characters which
reflects on the journey of Life, the down at heels disillusioned figure and the
desire for either personal or artistic freedom. The third section meditates on
the paradox of life and art, with mutually exclusive goals, where the closer to
Art you come, the farther from life you go, and vice versa. It ends with a coda
of sorts, with the paradox is resolved through faith in the wholly other life.
The poem is not merely a great work but ranks as one of the most profound
interpretations of Shakespeare’s final play in the twentieth century. As, it is
really about the Christian conceptation of art and it is Ars Poetica, in the
same way as believed, The Tempest to be Shakespeare’s.
Boris Pasternak,
a Russian writer wrote Shakespeare,
that is an evidence of Shakespeare’s wide influence, as he writes :
well, master
Shakespeare, i do know your talent.
and i have the seal
of your genius, well.
i think, and i’m sure. you will be so prudent
to agree that this
place is not ready for me!(Pasternak 1)
Welcome Msomi, a South African playwright who wrote Umabathu : A Zulu
transposition of Macbeth, which is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into the tribal Zulu culture of
the early 19th century. It evinces that Shaka like Macbeth visits
early in his career by an Isangoma (with doctor) whose prophesy is that he is a
man who already sees a chief of chiefs. Later in confrontations with the
powerful Isangomas, he defies their superstitious magic and emerges with
undisputed authority. His wife, Pampata, also predicts that he will rule the
entire world they know, like lady Macbeth, or Kamandonsela of Umabatha. Pampata
plays a dominant role in Shaka’s ambitious reign and has, in Shaka’s own words
as, a mind shrewder than that of a
ring-headed counselor. As it is said that the similarities between
Shakespeare’s Macbeth and our own
Shaka become a glaring reminder that the world is, philosophically, a very
small place.
In the fiction, Shakespeare has been vividly seen, as
Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun,
which has subtitle, A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life. It follows Shakespeare as WS, a young man who is struck by the image of a dark goddess to a
man wasting away from syphilis. Naturally, Burgess spends considerable time on
Shakespeare’s relationships with the Dark
Lady and Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, renders here
as Fatimah, a woman of color from the East Indies,
and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. From the first page, you
realize that Nothing Like the Sun is one of those kinds of novels
where, there is some absolutely beautiful language, especially concerning
Shakespeare’s desire for a dark lady and how the abstract fantasy of it does
not quite match up with the reality of it, his dark goddess is always described
as golden. It is never flowery, but it’s often powerful. The novel is very
rich, while the language feels spontaneous and periodic, it’s very specific. The novelist reflects back on
Shakespeare’s early fantasy concerning a wealthy widow of color as he goes
through life, failing an encounter with a black prostitute and his relationship
with Henry, which play with the text of that fantasy interestingly.
The novelist, Robert Nye is also influenced by
Shakespeare. His novel, Mrs. Shakespeare
illustrates Shakespeare. The novel has a central character, Anne Hathaway, who
reveals to us the real Shakespeare. It is written after seven years of Bard’s
death. The novelist carries us Anne’s memoirs, of course, as Shakespearean
gospel. Mrs. Shakespeare has a way of storytelling that the Bard himself will
envy. Not only does she present facts about their life together, she presents
them in a way that relates to all people who haven’t felt jealousy when their
spouse puts work above them. Who is not angry when they lose a child and have
no one to talk about? It is not so much a story of William Shakespeare, but a
story of how his wife sees him. We hear about Mr. Shakespeare from his wife,
the woman who knows him best.
The paper will now discuss the perennial translations of
Shakespeare. As Dennis Kennedy and Michael Billington have viewed Shakespeare
in translations. Kennedy’s emphasis shows the calibre of foreign Shakespeare.
He echoes native British condition, while Shakespeare is performed in non-English-speaking contexts,
without his language. Kennedy’s contentions in Foreign Shakespeare (1993) are the most portentous developments
of Shakespeare on stage since the Second
World War have been of foreign origin, deriving largely from continental Europe, where Shakespeare is practised in languages other
than English. In general, foreign productions of Shakespeare, frees from the
burden imposed by centuries of admiring his language, have been more ready to
admit that the door to the past is locked. In English the language will always
be important to our appreciation, yet our ability to reach the plays directly
in their original language lessens year by year. Our own English continues to
change, and eventually only specialists will be able to read the texts, much
less listen to them comfortably in the theatre. This may well happen within the
next fifty years. Reflecting on performances outside of English, we can see
more clearly how Shakespeare is alien, as well as what we continue to find
indigenous about him.
Michael Billington has shared his view with his British
Guardian and expected that we can not help but see Shakespeare in terms of our
own language, history and culture. He also hopes that we need to widen that
definition of culture. He wants that we should work towards an appreciation of
Shakespeare in cultural contexts other than that familiar from an English
perspective, Shakespearean translation may be the occasion to enable
non-English speaking people to appreciate Shakespeare. The German-speaking
world prides itself on Wieland, Schiller, Schlegel who have tackled the sonnets
of Shakespeare brilliantly. In France,
Marcel Schwob, Alfred Vigny, Marcel Pagnol, Andre Gide, Jean Anouilh and Yves
Bonnefoy have tried their hands at Shakespeare. In Russia,
Boris Pasternak produces formidable translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Henry IV,
King Lear, Antony
and Cleopatra. His translation of
Shakespeare’s works remains deeply popular with Russian audiences because of
their colloquial, modernised dialogues. Day by day, he reproduces his actions
and he is drawn into some of his secrets, not in theory, but practically, by
experience. As It is found whenever Boris Leonidovich has been provided with
literal versions of things which echo his own thoughts or feelings, it makes
all the difference and he works
feverishly turning them into masterpieces.
Thus, Shakespeare’s relevance and importance has been
analysed in different ways. His authorship has been acknowledged widely. The
works like, Will in the World,
Shakespeare in Love, Anonymous have supported the authorship conspiracy,
but Prof. Stanley Wells is thoroughly convinced and has accepted that
Shakespeare is the author of his plays. If critics and scholars are debating on
his authorship, it means his name and achievements are still remembered and his
influence is also being seen how he influenced different stalwarts of all
decades since the Shakespearean age. A good number of poets, novelists and
playwrights clearly have his influence and his works have widely been
translated in almost all major languages of the world. Shakespeare is died but
he is alive in the thoughts all around the world. Shakespeare is thus not of an
age but for all ages.
References:
1. Auden, W.H. The
Sea and the Mirror : A Commentary on Shakespeare’s
The Tempest. Ed. Arthur C. Kirsch. Princeton : Princeton University
Press, 2005.
2. Burgess, Anthony. Nothing Like the Sun. London : Vintage, 1992.
3. Brantley, Ben. ‘‘Umabatha—The Zulu Macbeth.’’
Wiltern : UCLA News. August 19, 1997.
4. Elangova, K.S.Vijay. ‘‘The real William Shakespeare.’’ Delhi : The Hindu. Sept
14, 2011.
5. Gross, John. ‘‘Shakespeare’s influence.’’ Ed.
Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen
Orlin. New
York : Oxford
University Press, 2003.
6. Greenblatt,
Stephen. Will in the World : How
Shakespeare became Shakespeare. New York : W.W. Norton,
2005.
7. Hoenselaars,
Ton. ‘‘Shakespeare and Translation.’’ Ed. Stanley Wells and Lena
Cowen Orlin. New York : Oxford University
Press, 2003.
8. James,
Shapiro. Contested Will : Who Wrote
Shakespear ? London
: Faber and Faber, 2010.
9.
James, Shapiro. ‘‘Shakespeare—a fraud?’’ London : The
Guardian. Nov 4, 2011.
10. Kellerman, Faye. The Quality of Mercy. New
York : Harper Collins Publishers, 1989.
11. Kennedy, Dennis. Foreign Shakespeare : Contemporary
Performance. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993.
12. Kathman,
David. ‘‘The question of authorship.’’
Ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. New York : Oxford
University Press, 2003.
13. Looney, J. Thomas. ‘‘Shakespeare’’ identified in Edward De Vere
the seventeenth earl of Oxford. London
: C. Palmer, 1920.
14. Msomi, Welcome. Umabatha. Johannesburg
: Skotaville Publishers, 1996.
15. Nye, Robert. Mrs.
Shakespeare : The Complete Works. London : Arcade Publishers, 2000.
16. Roger, Ebert. ‘‘Shakespeare in Love.’’ Chicago : Sun Times. Dec
25, 1998.
17. Williams, Niederkorn. ‘‘Shakespeare Reaffirmed.’’
New York :
The New York Times. April 22, 2007.
Web Links:
1. The Shakespeare Authorship
Page..
2. The Shakespeare Influence
Page..
Dr
H. N. Prasad is an Asst. Prof. of English with the Dept. of English &
MEL, University of Lucknow, Lucknow,
(U.P., India).
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