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The Shakespeare myth + N Mailer's fatal friendship + Disastrous judgments of critics

#1
C C Offline
The Radical Argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turn...hakespeare

EXCERPT: In 1989, a young professor named Gary Taylor published “Reinventing Shakespeare,” in which he argued that Shakespeare’s unrivalled literary status derives less from the sheer greatness of his plays than from the cultural institutions that have mythologized the Bard, elevating him above equally talented Renaissance playwrights. “Shakespeare was a star, but never the only one in our galaxy,” Taylor wrote. The book was his second major attempt to counter the view of Shakespeare as a singular genius; a few years earlier, he had served as one of two general editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, which credited co-authors for five of Shakespeare’s plays.

Late last year, Taylor shocked readers once again. "The New Oxford Shakespeare," for which Taylor serves as lead general editor, is the first edition of the plays to credit Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. It lists co-authors for fourteen other plays as well, ushering a host of playwrights—Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, George Wilkins, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher, along with Marlowe—into the big tent of the complete works. [...]

It’s no longer controversial to give other authors a share in Shakespeare’s plays—not because he was a front for an aristocrat, as conspiracy theorists since the Victorian era have proposed, but because scholars have come to recognize that writing a play in the sixteenth century was a bit like writing a screenplay today, with many hands revising a company’s product. The New Oxford Shakespeare claims that its algorithms can tease out the work of individual hands—a possibility, although there are reasons to challenge its computational methods. But there is a deeper argument made by the edition that is both less definitive and more interesting. It’s not just that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights, and it’s not just that Shakespeare was one of a number of great Renaissance writers whose fame he outstripped in the ensuing centuries. It’s that the canonization of Shakespeare has made his way of telling stories—especially his monarch-centered view of history—seem like the norm to us, when there are other ways of telling stories, and other ways of staging history, that other playwrights did better. If Shakespeare worshippers have told one story in order to discredit his contemporary rivals, the New Oxford is telling a story that aims to give the credit back.

In the past few decades, scholars have settled on a standard narrative of Shakespeare’s professional life: he gets to London by the early fifteen-nineties and learns the business by collaborating, perhaps on “Titus Andronicus” and the “Henry VI” plays; he becomes the in-house dramatist for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, and he writes, alone, his masterpieces; then he passes the baton, around 1613, to a new crop of up-and-comers, such as John Fletcher, with whom he works on the plays that ease him into retirement (“Henry VIII,” “The Two Noble Kinsmen”). The New Oxford attributions unsettle this story. Taylor’s team identifies Shakespeare as a collaborator well into the middle of his career, proposing that he co-wrote an early draft of the tragedy “Sejanus” with Ben Jonson and served as a script doctor for Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy” and the anonymous play “Sir Thomas More” right around the time he was writing “Hamlet”—and that Middleton revised several of the plays Shakespeare wrote around “King Lear.” The most surprising claim is that Marlowe—the bad boy of the English Renaissance, an alleged spy, heretic, and homosexual, the star playwright of the London stage until he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in 1593, just as Shakespeare’s career was starting to take off—collaborated on the scripts that popularized the English history play...



Norman Mailer’s Fatal Friendship
https://newrepublic.com/article/140610/n...friendship

EXCERPT: Two men in particular had reason to celebrate the evening of July 9, 1981. One received the Pulitzer Prize the year prior, having refashioned his literary career after a series of controversies, failures, and skirmishes. The other was barely a month out of prison, a murderer whose letters, collected in book form, promised an inside look at the horrors of incarcerated life.

The latter was Jack Henry Abbott. His book was toasted with white wine that July night at Il Mulino in Greenwich Village. The former was Norman Mailer, who had provided the introduction, an extended thank-you for Abbott’s help on writing that Pulitzer winner, The Executioner’s Song.

The celebration was short-lived. Nine days later, the day before In the Belly of the Beast received a rave review in the New York Times, Abbott was a fugitive. He had murdered again. Freedom evaporated. Once captured, in late September, Abbott would never see the outside world again.

Writers like Michael Mewshaw and Felice Picano assigned blame to Mailer in subsequent essays on Abbott’s book, arguing Mailer went out of his way to ignore Abbott’s lengthy criminal record stretching back to age eleven. Those offering support at Abbott’s trial included Jean Malaquais and Susan Sarandon, part of a group of intellectuals and artists claiming Abbott’s literary talent merited leniency. Three and a half decades later, the finger-pointing continues about where violence meets life and art, and where the responsibility falls.

Jerome Loving’s Jack and Norman is a sturdy, competent account of the tangled relationship between the multi-incarcerated Abbott and the variably-celebrated and infamous Mailer. Loving hits all the notes he’s supposed to hit while carving out a slice of literary history, generously quoting from unpublished letters: He sets up Mailer’s fascination with criminality and his failures of empathy, and questions whether Mailer took enough responsibility when his artistic ideals clashed with real-life consequences. Loving also uses the episode to try to illustrate larger failings of the criminal justice system, an issue that fits awkwardly around the contours of a smaller-scale, if still ethically complicated, tale of the ruined remnants of 1950s literary culture. Jack and Norman is a book that makes one wonder why it took so long for someone to write a full-length treatment of the whole mess—and then again, why it can’t quite measure up to the personalities of the people involved.

Mailer, of course, was a confidence man in the literal sense, brimming with it even when it didn’t become him. The success of his 1948 debut, The Naked and the Dead vaulted him into Great American Novel territory, so he swaggered and swanned and womanized even when subsequent novels fared worse. He benefited from near-universal cossetting after his near-murder of second wife Adele Morales. He ran for mayor (quixotic!), advertised for himself, had little use for feminism, and in between the Sturm und Drang evolved into a formidable nonfiction chronicler of protest (Armies of the Night), boxing (The Fight), and the criminal mind (The Executioner’s Song).

Yet the Pulitzer-winning Executioner was atypical for Mailer, which perhaps explains why it’s so good. The thousand-plus pages on the life, crimes, imprisonment, and execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore—the first man to be put to death after a decade-long moratorium of the death penalty—read fast and lean. A recent re-read consumed three solid days at the expense of nearly everything else.

The material didn’t originate with Mailer, but instead with Lawrence Schiller, the photographer-slash-media hustler who shared copyright and ends up a major (and fascinating) character in the book. We learn as much about Schiller’s ruthless need for exclusivity, promising (and paying) tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of interviewing Gilmore and controlling who else might do so, as we do his growing fatigue for chasing those exclusives all across the country, to the detriment of his health, family, and morality....



Why Great Critics Make Disastrous Judgments
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Gre...ake/239149

EXCERPT: In 1733, a French author exiled in London qualified his grudging admiration of Shakespeare by claiming that his so-called tragedies were actually "farces." Later in life, he would retract his praise altogether and call the English bard a "drunken savage." In 1756, this same critic announced that "nobody reads Dante anymore," labeling his Divine Comedy "monstrous" — before deriding the Confessions, by his contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a project filled with "little miseries" that could never interest "true philosophy."

Was this writer just a hopeless crank? In fact, he was arguably the most celebrated critic of his day, a writer of such legendary acumen that he became synonymous with the age of Enlightenment — which is sometimes named after him as l’époque de Voltaire.

The case of Voltaire’s prodigious errors is all too typical. Here is a sample of some other legendary critical misfires [by assorted reviewers]:

"Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that."
"In the course of 277 pages, the reader wearies of [Salinger’s] explicitness, repetition and adolescence, exactly as one would weary of Holden himself."
"It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards."
"How a human being could have attempted such a book as [Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights] without committing suicide before he [sic] had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors. …"
"If the printing of such trash as [Wordsworth’s poetry] be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted."

In his autobiographical Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie referred to writing reviews as a thankless "mug’s game," bringing to mind his celebrated attack on Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum as "a fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction." But there are hatchet jobs and then there are hatchet jobs: It’s one thing to attack a controversial work of questionable literary value; it’s another to train the heavy artillery on writing later celebrated for its genius.

So how does it happen — how can someone on the order of Voltaire (we can insert many other illustrious names here) end up missing the mark so completely? We first need to dispense with the most obvious and least savory explanation, that the nasty judgment is directed more toward the writer than his or her work....
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#2
Ben the Donkey Offline
Regarding #1 -

Does it surprise anyone, really, that the tail of the "argument" happens to be a conspiracy theory?
"What if..."

Truth is, it really doesn't matter now, does it.
Asserting the unprovable is tantamount to cowardice, really. Sort of like making a Youtube video and disabling comments. Or maybe, to a lesser extent,  posting /thread when one thinks they have made some particularly cutting remark. 

We love our heroes, and yet we hate them too... because we can never be them.
Perhaps the best we can aspire to is to "prove" that they weren't really heroes at all. We must bring them down, and in so doing stand up for ourselves and what we are. 

And so some make their marks upon the world working from the shadows, using excuses such as "truth", "honesty", "scholarship"... or maybe even a gun, in an attempt to show that we are, at the end of the day, all equal. Pat Garret found fame and immortality shooting Billy the Kid in the back. Jack McCall did much the same thing to Wild Bill Hickok. 
Hollywood would have us believe that the men in white hats are at least the equal of their adversaries, and oft times better...  but reality is somewhat different. 
More often than not, it'll take a posse... or, in modern times, desecrating the indefensible dead. 


The world needs Shakespeare more than it has ever needed Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.
Maybe Daniel is a little peeved about that. 


"Good frend for ieves sake forbeare, to Digg the Dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, and cvrst be he yt moves my bones".
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#3
C C Offline
(Feb 22, 2017 05:59 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: [...] The world needs Shakespeare more than it has ever needed Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. Maybe Daniel is a little peeved about that. 

"Good frend for ieves sake forbeare, to Digg the Dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, and cvrst be he yt moves my bones".

Trying to rescue Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, etc from the obscuring shadow of Shakespeare seems a belated or outdated effort, anyway. In the context of the 21st-century's desire to shift away from "dead white dudes" in general.

However, a reformation movement might expect to run into almost zero pickings for alternatives in this particular territory. Even John Webster's *The White Devil* is pure coincidence, and would go no deeper than the facade of a title misinterpreted by the zeal of contemporary ideologies.

Thankfully, female contemporaries of Shakespeare can be highlighted to prevent that era's literary output from being a total wasteland for Millennial readers / observers with tender political sensibilities and allergies.
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#4
Ben the Donkey Offline
Knowledge, or truth, versus Romanticism.
Tough call, isn't it.

Strange how things work out, sometimes. That such an epitaph could be so meaningful now is... almost prophetic.
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