Sir Thomas More
Richard Nathan
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's edited by Barry Kraft, the OSF
Shakespeare Dramaturg.
One of the things that struck me about the play is how ill-fitting is
the speech credited to Shakespeare - the one about how it is necessary
to follow the rules of the King, because otherwise there will be
chaos. This is a well-argued speech, and during the May Day riots, it
seems to be make sense. However, as the play progresses, More fails
to follow the rules of the King, and he is executed for it. When More
refuses to sign the document declaring Henry is the head of the
English Church, and thereafter for the rest of the play, no reference
is made to More's earlier position that the subjects must follow the
rule of the King.
I suppose the authors didn't get into this, because they were worried
it would prevent the play from being performed - but I don't
understand how any of them ever could have thought this play had the
slightest chance of being approved by the Lord Chamberlain in any
event.
Tom Reedy
news:f1a7073a.02080...@posting.google.com...
That's one theory about the purpose of the revisions: an effort to get
the play approved for the stage.
TR
David L. Webb
Petzold <neogno...@hotmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> I think Oxford had something to do with Shakespeare, so I'll stand for
> this. Why do you suppose that critics have long noted the aristocratic
> bias in most of Shakespeare's heroes?
Precisely *which* critics?
> Does anyone (and I'm asking
> because I don't know)
That's obvious.
> from Elizabethan-Jacobean times write as often
> and as convincingly of the nobility and the court as Shakespeare?
We've been over this ground many times before; I've posted at length
on this subject in response to Ken Kaplan. However, the best succinct
answer was given by Dave Kathman,
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Et6GC7.Gz3%40midway.uchicago.edu&o
utput=gplain>:
"But I've posted on this subject before, and as I see it there's
quite a bit of evidence that Shakespeare was *not* accurate in his
depiction of courtiers, at least as near as we're able to determine.
Rob has already posted a quote from Dryden, who said that Beaumont
and Fletcher were much better at representing the speech of gentlemen
than Shakespeare. Here's another quote from Dryden, from his
'Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age' (1673): 'I cannot
find that any of them [the Elizabethan dramatists] had been
conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not
so much that way as to make an improvement by it.' Dryden was
writing only 57 years after Shakespeare's death, and was himself
quite familiar with Restoration Court life. I'm inclined to
give more weight to his opinion that to the unstudied intuition of
somebody in the late 20th century.
But Dryden's view is supported by 20th-century scholars who have
spent a lot of time studying Elizabethan Court life. The following
is part of a post I made to this group last October, and reposted
in February. I was responding to a claim similar to yours,
namely that Shakespeare was uncannily accurate in his depiction of
Court life.
************************
I would question your assumption that the writer of 'those
plays' must have been a member of the aristocracy. Muriel
St. Clare Byrne (who, apparently unlike yourself, read and
wrote widely on Tudor social history) came to a very different
conclusion. I am inclined to take Ms. Byrne's opinions on this
subject seriously; she was the author of *Elizabethan Life in
Town and Country* (cited above), one of the standard
Elizabethan social histories, and she edited the letters of both
Henry VIII and of Arthur Plantaganet, Viscount Lisle, so she
knew something about sixteenth-century court life. She wrote
the chapter on 'The Social Background' in the 1940 book
*A Companion to Shakespeare Studies*, edited by Harley
Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison. In this essay, she
illustrates that Shakespeare made numerous mistakes in the
depiction of court life in the plays, and that his 'court'
households often bear a much closer relationship to a typical
middle-class household than they do to an actual Tudor
noble household. She also found that the accuracy of his
depiction of noble households increased in the later plays,
as though the author had gained knowledge and experience
(by whatever means). For example, Ms. Byrne writes
(pp.189-90):
'It follows, therefore, that the background of life in the plays
is, and at the same time is not, the background of Elizabethan
life. As an example -- old Capulet is an admirable picture
of a testy Elizabethan parent, and his behaviour to Juliet in
the matter of the match with Paris reminds us instantly of
the perpetually quoted account that Lady Jane Grey gives of
her own noble father and mother. The human reality is
faithfully portrayed, and at the same time the detail of the
portrait is contemporary. If, however, we go on
lightheartedly to assume that old Capulet in his behaviour
as a 'nobleman' bears any resemblance to an Elizabethan
noble of similar standing we shall be hopelessly misled.
If we compare him with the genuine article we realise at
once that the intimate "realistic", or Elizabethan, scenes
in which he appears are purely "romantic", or, if we prefer,
untrue to the facts of contemporary noble life. Shakespeare
may label Capulet the head of a noble household, who
can treat Paris, "a young Nobleman, Kinsman to the Prince",
as his equal, and a proper match for his daughter; but when
it comes to a scene like Act IV, Sc. iv, which shows the
home life of this supposed nobleman, we realise that the
setting is not Verona but Stratford, and that the most likely
person to have sat for that very realistic portrait is John
Shakespeare, or any of the good burgesses who were
William's father's friends. They probably got in the way
of all their busy servants and kitchen staffs on the occasions
of daughters' weddings: but it is quite certain that an
Elizabethan nobleman, with his retinue of anything from
twenty to eight hundred gentlemen officers, and from a
hundred to five hundred yeomen servants, did not come
into personal contact with Antony and Potpan, Peter and
Angelica, and did not himself have to issue orders for
the quenching of fires and the turning up of tables. In
these scenes Capulet is brother to Dekker's jolly
shoemaker, Simon Eyre, not to Lord Burghley.'
A little later (p. 199):
'The etiquette and ceremonial complications of regal
life find but little reflection in the plays. What
Shakespeare either did not know, or else deliberately
rejected for dramatic purposes, was the circumstance
and order of life in a royal household. By ignorance
or design -- more probably a mixture of both -- he
has given us a romantic picture. It was natural that
he should seize upon as apt for dramatic purposes the
popular aspect of royalty, with which Elizabeth's
subjects were well acquainted: Shakespeare and his
Queen both possessed a superb sense of the theatre.
What is surprising, however, is that he should so
entirely neglect the dramatic opportunities offered by the
intimate-formal routine in Court life, had he been
acquainted with it. *Henry VIII*, in which we must
allow for the collaboration of Fletcher, is the only play
which exploits it in any way, though the natural dramatic
value of this carefully staged remoteness is enormous.
But Shakespeare will have none of it. Court life in
the plays is definitely a homely affair in comparison with
Court life at Whitehall.'
There is much more in Byrne's article, but these excerpts
give the gist. You are free to disagree with Byrne if you
choose, but if you want anybody to take you seriously
it would be a good idea to present some sort of evidence
other than your own pronouncements and opinions."
I couldn't agree more.
> If
> not, then aren't you at least somewhat obligated to wonder at this
> predisposition?
No, because no such "predisposition" is evident.
> Seriously. Don't cut yourself off from asking this
> because of your lack of imagination; force yourself to inquire after
> the habit. Shakespeare writes about the aristocracy a lot because
> (fill in the blanks)?
Because people like to watch it -- just as television writers write
about the rich and famous because people like to watch it, not because
the writers themselves have any familiarity with or sympathy with that
cohort.
> > You aren't bothered that he wrote about ancient
> > Romand or magicians or black men without being an ancient Roman or a
> > magician or a black man - but you can't imagine him writing about a
> > nobleman without being a nobleman.
> It isn't possible that the Author was Roman or black (and I would
> strongly doubt that he was a magician, either), so I am left with no
> choice but to chalk some part of those characterizations up to
> sympathetic imagination. But, when faced with the possibility of the
> Author's noble status, I cannot, as you do, dismiss it as idiotic or
> nonsensical. On the contrary, I believe it to be highly likely, for
> reasons that I have made clear for the almost two years I've been
> posting here.
You are, as usual, misinformed, as I hope that the excerpt from
Dave's post makes clear. You really should read more.
[...]
David Webb
Christian Lanciai
> On 6 Aug 2002 07:27:46 -0700, Neogno...@hotmail.com (Toby Petzold)
> wrote:
> >Nathan wrote:
> >> We are never told what the document contains. As I see it, that is the
> >> source of the main weakness of the play.
>
> >But, wouldn't theatergoers have understood what the document
> >represented?
>
> You're touching on a point I was wondering about. How
> well-informed would the Elizabethans have been about their own
> history? Many were illiterate and so incapable of reading any history
> texts. History doesn't seem to have been taught in the grammar
> schools. Word-of-mouth would have occurred, but is unreliable. It
> would seem that history plays would have been a major vehicle for the
> teaching of history to the general public. Which may explain why the
> authorities were so carful to ensure that the 'correct' version of
> history would have been expounded in these plays.
>
>
>
> - Gary Kosinsky
Right, Gary. My impression of the More play (whoever wrote what parts
in it) is that it was made for the purpose of giving the audience a
correct illustration of what really happened, like in "Henry VIII"
("It's all true"), for once neglecting dramaturgical art and effects
to just be faithful to the truth, above all concentrating on
emphasizing the earnest character of More and his honesty. "A Man for
All Seasons" gives almost exactly the same impression, thus being very
remindful of the Shakespeare apocryphal play, as if it was based on
it.
Chris