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Actually he was a woman.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/28woman.htm
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/28woman.htm
Apologies to all female participants on the forum: the forthcoming anecdote is from unenlightened times many decades ago.Ronson8 said:Actually he was a woman.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/may/28woman.htm
amyasleigh said:,,,Reply from the chap with the interesting theory: “Ah, but it is also my contention that Queen Elizabeth I was really a man.”
Timble2 said:...There is a story that Queen Elizabeth I died as a girl and was substituted by a boy actor. The instigators of the plot were then obliged to maintain the deceit or end up in the Tower. It explains why Good Queen Bess never married. It's an early conspiracy theory and as bonkers as most of them are.
I can't remember the book, it was something about Historical Imposters and Google isn't helping.
Spookdaddy said:Timble2 said:...There is a story that Queen Elizabeth I died as a girl and was substituted by a boy actor. The instigators of the plot were then obliged to maintain the deceit or end up in the Tower. It explains why Good Queen Bess never married. It's an early conspiracy theory and as bonkers as most of them are.
I can't remember the book, it was something about Historical Imposters and Google isn't helping.
That wouldn't be the Bisley Boy bit of (forteanly enough) Bram Stoker's, Famous Imposters, would it?
How should Shakespeare really sound?
Audio: The British Library have released the first audio guide to how Shakespeare's plays would have sounded in the original pronunciation.
Inspired by working with Kevin Spacey, Sir Trevor Nunn has claimed that American accents are "closer" than contemporary English to the accents of those used in the Bard's day.
The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare's accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent.
Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in modern day Shakespeare productions. Well, now you can judge for yourself.
There have been a handful of attempts to revive what The Globe call Shakespeare's "original pronunciation", but until now they have only been put on stage.
The British Library's new CD, Shakespeare’s original pronunciation, is the first of its kind featuring speeches and scenes which claim to be performed as Shakespeare would have heard them.
The CD is said to bring to life rhymes and jokes that are not audible in contemporary English - as well as to illustrate what Hamlet meant when he advised his actors to speak “trippingly upon the tongue”. (‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue’ -- Hamlet, Act 3)
The recording has been overseen by Ben Crystal, who has chosen the actors, and curated and directed their speeches.
"For the first time in centuries, we have 75 recorded minutes of sonnets, speeches and scenes recorded as we hope Shakespeare heard them. It is, in short, Shakespeare as you've never heard him before.
“The modern presentation of Shakespeare's plays and poems in period pronunciation has already attracted a wide following, despite the fact that hardly any recordings have been publicly available," he said.
The CD is also said to illustrate what Hamlet meant when he advised his actors to speak “trippingly upon the tongue”.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... sound.html
On second thoughts, Shakespeare left home while still a young man, and may well have lost any local accent he might have had while working in The Smoke, and touring around the rest of the country.And this also raises the question of how the present day Brummie accent arose (which is a long way from Mummerset!)
Collaboration between Shakespeare and some of the finest playwrights of period. A busy time for theatre, an amazing time for the English language.http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/12/shakespeare-new-plays
Shakespeare's fingerprints found on three Elizabethan plays
Computer analysis gives the Bard a hand in three late 16th century dramas, says scholar Jonathan Bate
The Observer, Dalya Alberge. 12 October 2013
The hand of William Shakespeare has been identified in scenes or passages in three Elizabethan plays previously believed to have been written by others, following linguistic "fingerprinting" tests and other new research.
Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy and Mucedorus will now be included in a major edition of collaborative plays bearing the Bard's name. Jonathan Bate, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, said the evidence has convinced him that specific parts within those plays must have had input from Shakespeare.
The three plays will be included in the edition which he is co-editing with other scholars in a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Palgrave Macmillan. Plays known as the "Shakespeare Apocrypha" have long intrigued scholars, with claims and counter-claims over whether he could have written dramas beyond the 36 in the First Folio, the edition put together by his fellow actors after his death. Arguments over plays beyond the "authorised" collection have raged since the 18th century. The strengthened evidence will be outlined in the book, William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, to be published on 28 October.
Bate, professor of English literature at Oxford University, says the issue is "perhaps the single most significant lacuna in 21st-century Shakespearean scholarship". Advanced computer-assisted analysis of every surviving play of the period has allowed the authors to go "quite a lot further than previous scholars" in establishing Shakespeare's involvement, he said, noting that it presents Shakespeare in a new light – as "reviser, rewriter and collaborator".
Arden of Faversham – which the RSC will stage in spring – is a 1590s domestic tragedy, published anonymously. It tells of a woman from Faversham, Kent, who conspires with her lover to murder her husband, seeking to "wash away this blood" in a manner reminiscent of Lady Macbeth. The book points out that rare words such as "copesmate" (companion), alongside distinctive imagery such as comparing a troubled mind to a muddied fountain, suggest Shakespeare's hand.
"It is a well-known play among aficionados," said Bate, "and there have been many arguments about who wrote it. But our new evidence is that at least one scene – a central encounter between the lovers – is by Shakespeare and that, possibly, Thomas Kyd is the author of other scenes." Kyd is best-known for The Spanish Tragedy, a 1580s revenge drama with later extra scenes which the computer testing now attributes to Shakespeare rather than his rival, Ben Jonson.
"There are some remarkable additional scenes and amazing dialogue about whether it's possible for a painter to portray grief or whether only a poet can produce a portrayal," said Bate.
There is strong circumstantial evidence that The Spanish Tragedy passed to Shakespeare's acting company and that the central character was played by his friend Richard Burbage, for whom he wrote Hamlet and King Lear.
Mucedorus is a 1590s tragi-comedy which Shakespeare's acting company revived in 1610 with extra scenes. Bate said: "At least one of those scenes is, we think, linguistically full of his fingerprints." It uses phrases unique to Shakespeare such as "worthless trunk" (also in Henry V) and "high extolment" (Hamlet) and his famous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear" (The Winter's Tale).
But ultimately, is the writing worthy of Shakespeare? Bate said: "The passages in The Spanish Tragedy genuinely are. That has long been recognised."Another scholar, Stanley Wells, said "Shakespeare was both a great genius and a jobbing playwright. Taking a fresh look at plays that he may have had a hand in doesn't turn them into better plays than we thought they were, but it may well both increase our understanding of his professionalism."
Gregory Doran, the RSC's artistic director, described the new research as "fascinating", although he believes the ultimate test is when words are delivered from actors' mouths. "The plays were much more collaboratively written than we realise. We're suspicious in the theatre – but not in film or telly – of joint authorship," he said.
Commenting on Arden of Faversham, Doran said: "It is an absolutely terrific play. The complexity of the storytelling is brilliant and it does have strokes of absolute genius, so I'm very ready to accept that scholars might think there's Shakespeare's hand in it."
Or perhaps it redresses the balance, countering all those commentators who locked him away as a child of the classical age, all Latin and Greek, and Italian stories, but nothing more.JamesWhitehead said:It was an age of discoveries and playwrights prided themselves on reflecting that. The study of the Bard in glorious isolation risks attributing to him everything of the temper and culture of the age, further obscuring his unique qualities.
Ronson8 said:Let's not forget that Francis Bacon was a scientist.
Ronson8 said:Oh dear, trotter long.
jimv1 said:What if The Works of Shakespeare actually are the result of an infinite number of monkeys?