New blog for SSOS

 The SSOS has a new blog 

http://seattleoxford.blogspot.com/

and an email addresss:

 seattle.oxford@gmail.com


Now that we know just what Bottom represents, perhaps it's time to let this asinine vision go.

Mary Stuart, playing at ACT Theater in Seattle, September 9 – October 9, 2011

This production of Frederick Schiller’s 200-year old play about Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth is a treat --beautifully acted, and a fascinating imagined version of the two queens and their political situations.

From an authorship-doubt angle, it has a lot to offer. The Elizabethan court is shown as a  world of secrecy, hidden actions & agendas, and plausible deniability. William Cecil and Robert Dudley come off as cold, calculating, and entirely self-interested, a perspective familiar to Oxfordians but less so to the general public who know them from popular films as loyal, decent servants to QE. Elizabeth herself is conflicted and isolated, using sex (or its promise) to influence men in her orbit, and is revealed as a woman whose whole identity has been dominated by the scandals of her parentage.

The play has political relevance to our own time too, implying that a high level of state secrecy has disadvantages for the ruler(s) as well as the ruled. When truth can’t be freely voiced, it can be easily manipulated, leaving even an absolute monarch in the dark as to what is really going on and what kind of characters exist behind the smiling servile masks of advisors and attendants.

 

Mary Stuart offers a view of the Elizabethan period that could pave the way for more openness to the AQ--- it suggests that the roles and motivations of key court figures as they have come down to us may be incomplete or even doctored versions, and that “history” itself may actually be a sort of mask.

Review by: Jennifer Newton, member Seattle Shakespeare/Oxford Society

Tom Coad's comments on Shakespeare Authorship as a collaborative venture

Presentation at the December 15, 2010 SSOS Wessex meeting in Seattle

Shakespeare Authorship
Tom Coad

Theatre productions were major entertainment in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Aristocrats financed groups of players, such as

Lord Chamberlain’s Men

Children of St. Paul

Oxford’s Boys

Earl of Warwick’s Men

Oxford’s Men

Hundreds of plays were given at Elizabeth’s Court. Records of Court Revels name no authors.

Some plays had titles similar to Shakespeareplays, and may have been early versions of some of his canon.

Queen Elizabeth actively supported the court theater. She may have suggested plays to promote the monarchy.

Players, as well as aristocrats, could have participated in modifying or suggesting language and plots.

The court provided an unusually creative situation in which gifted individuals participated and vied for the Queen’s attention.

Collaboration, with intelligent participants, is a productive way to enhance creativity. We know that “Hamlet”had earlier versions, as did “Twelfth Night,” “A Midsummer Nights Dream,” and others, which may have been modified by others in the Court and elsewhere. Some plots existed in Latin literature.

Collaboration was used to produce Homer, Beowulf, the King James Bible (which the 17th Earl may have helped edit if he “disappeared” but did not die in 1604), clever TV episodes (such as Seinfeld), and many movies.

The argument in favor of collaboration, while only a theory, fits the circumstances. By supplying a different perspective, it also describes a situation in which the plays could grow and take shape during the years when Edward had time for revision and rewriting. There was no pressure of deadlines, and the annual royal stipend of 1,000 pounds removed financial worries after 1586.

One can picture the plays as relatively empty boxes that Edward filled with poetic lines that he changed and massaged over a long period of time. His creative process probably did not take place in short bursts of genius. The lines were too deeply felt and carefully crafted. They seem to have evolved, rather being fashioned spontaneously to satisfy demands of a plot.

More research needs to be done. A first step might be to find records of the plots and language of plays delivered in public venues without specific attribution. There may have been more early versions of plays that evolved, and ended up in the Shakespeare canon.