http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-death-in-la Go ahead and read the article – I couldn’t stomach it. I link it only for the Shakespeare connection.  Spot it?  The article’s written by Germaine Greer, who wrote a book about Shakespeare’s wife (among other contributions to the field). Had to post that.  I try so hard to stay on topic, but the rest of the world is busy talking about Mr. Jackson today, I wanted to get in on the act 🙂

Or so I saw quoted on Twitter today, attributed to one Mr. William Shakespeare.  I was excited, as this almost directly reflects the First Noble Truth of Buddhism which, roughly paraphrased, says “Desire is the root of all suffering.” I’m thrilled when interests of mine cross like that.
But…it doesn’t sound like Shakespeare.  I don’t know if I’m developing the golden ear or what, but I’m finding that when I hear a Shakespeare quote that I’ve not heard before, I have pretty good luck in determining whether it’s misattributed.
And thus far, I cannot find a single piece of evidence that this is indeed Shakespeare.  It’s attributed all over the place, but always just to “William Shakespeare”, never with an associated work – even in lists where they otherwise do specify the work.
Anybody got the scoop?  Surely if it’s in the plays (or sonnets or long poems) then it would pop up in a search, wouldn’t it?

Don’t forget to check out Not By Shakespeare where we track down the source of this and many more quotes mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare.

Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor.  Instead of a typical author interview with press blurbs and bio questions we decided to do something different – Carl’s going to guest blog a series for us based on *your* questions.  Question: I never really appreciated until recently the mystery over the actual publication of the sonnets.  Can you tell us a little bit about who this Thorpe fellow was, and how you think he got his hands on the sonnets?  Who do you think W.H. is?  (* Note from Duane – if you’re not familiar with the so-called “mystery”, here’s the short form – the sonnets were published in 1609, not by Shakespeare, but by a man named Thomas Thorpe. This of course has led to the question of the relationship between the two men – did Shakespeare want them published, or was it against his will?  If he did not want them published, then why, exactly?  Was he hiding an illicit relationship?  Additionally, they contain a dedication to a Mr. W.H, which only adds fuel to the fire as people have forever tried to guess who that might be…) Given the publication practices of the time, I am not sure I would call the publication of The Sonnets mysterious. Much has been made of their being published without Shakespeare’s consent, but we do not even know that for a fact. There certainly are signs that he did not see them through the press. They do not appear to have been carefully proofread. They have no author’s dedication (although this was by no means universal). But in Shakespeare’s day an author’s rights were pretty much limited to selling his manuscript to a printer. He might negotiate the right to see it through the press and have a say over corrections, but he might also merely be left to complain about the sorry state of his printed copy. There is no evidence that Thorpe’s publication of The Sonnets was a problem for Shakespeare. There is no contemporary record of any complaints. The same cannot be said for The Passionate Pilgrim, which raised the ire of Thomas Heywood, whose poem was printed in the volume by Jaggard and passed off as Shakespeare’s. Contemporary accounts record Heywood’s complaint and his note that Shakespeare was also put out by the incident. So although Shakespeare may not have authorized the printing of The Sonnets, it is also possible that he did and just didn’t make a big deal of it. We certainly cannot know whether he gave the manuscript to Thorpe or whether Thorpe obtained it some other way, whether it was in a form in which it was intended to be printed, whether Shakespeare cared that Thorpe printed it (if he did not authorize it), and what the heck Thorpe’s dedication is all about. I long ago gave up trying to decipher Thorpe’s dedication. Not that I didn’t try like the rest. It is just an enigma. And it is completely fruitless guessing at the identity of W. H.: William Herbert, Henry Wriothsley, Willie Hughes, Who-the-Heck. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. As one commentator noted, it more profitable to read Shakespeare than Thorpe. The only good that has come of Thorpe’s dedication is Oscar Wilde’s short story,
"The Portrait of Mr. W. H."   How have the sonnets been treated differently in the last few centuries?  Can you give a couple of examples of the sort of issues that were the focus back then, compared to now? Very interesting. Initially, The Sonnets were ignored. When they were re-discovered, it was Benson’s bastardized edition of 1640 that was first found. It was not until Malone’s edition of 1780 that editors returned to the original text of 1609 (Lintott was the only early exception in 1711).
But even then, they were often viewed with disdain as inferior works. They often were excluded from collections of the complete works. George Steevens’s reason for leaving them out of his 1793 edition is often quoted: "the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed, would fail to compel readers into their  service."  Because of this, early commentary was often scant and mostly centered on elucidating individual words or phrases which might be obscure. There was also some misguided wrangling over emendation of words and punctuation due to a failure to abide by bibliographic principles which only later became better understood (and still now are not often applied uniformly). To my mind, a landmark edition was that of Tucker in 1927, as he was the first to truly analyze The Sonnets from the point of view of their poetry, looking into such things as imagery and metaphor for the first time. The next giant leap was the New Variorum edition by Rollins in 1944, which culled all the commentary which came before. Rollins was heavily indebted to his previous two variorum editors, Boswell (1821) and Alden (1916). Rollins added very little of his own commentary and the volume is filled with concerns about whether Shakespeare authorized The Sonnets, when they were written, the question of autobiography, the identity of the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet and many other trivialities that seemed to be important at the time, but that scholars now do not take seriously. Modern editors have little to say about the authorship question and rarely try to identify characters. They spend more effort on explaining the meaning of sonnets and exploring their imagery and effects–in essence, their poetry. About the Author This book brings together the scholarship of dozens of the most brilliant commentators who have written about Shakespeare’s Sonnets over the past three hundred years. This edition adds the significant work done by modern editors to the most important commentary culled from the two variorum editions of the last century. Atkins presents a straightforward edition without jargon with the simple goal of finding out how the poems work and how they may be interpreted. He is the first to collate the modern texts so that differences among them can be fully appreciated and compared. His discussion of meter and verse is more substantial than that of any other edition, adding particular dimension to this text. Those coming to "The Sonnets" for the first time and those seeking a fresh look at an old friend will equally find this edition scholastically rigorous and a pleasure to read. Carl D. Atkins is a practicing medical oncologist in New York. Got a question for the author?  Send it in and we’ll see if we can get it in the queue!

Summer’s here, and my wife took the kids to the library to start stocking up on reading material.  My 7yr old got her library card last year, my 5yr old excitedly got hers this year. Question : How’s the Shakespeare at your local library?  Do they have more than just the complete works?  In the last year or two look at all the Shakespeare related books that have crossed this one blog alone:

Bardisms, by Barry Edelstein

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

The Sourcebooks Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germaine Greer

FOOL, by Christopher Moore

Will, By Christopher Rush

Shakespeare Wars, by Ron Rosenbaum

Classical Comics

The Master of Verona

The Book Of Air And Shadows

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, The World As Stage

Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare

Interred With Their Bones

And I’ve missed a few!  I think this year I’ll get together much of what’s in my collection and donate them. How about you?  Your local library got any of the good stuff?  Carl reminded me that it’s not always about running out to buy your own personal copy of every book you think you might like.  That’s kinda sort what libraries are for!

Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor. Instead of a typical author interview with press blurbs and bio questions we decided to do something different – Carl’s going to guest blog a series for us based on *your* questions. Question : Let’s start out with the big question – are the sonnets autobiographical, or what?  If they were, then who is the Dark Lady? Who is the “Fair Youth”?    Have these questions always been a mystery, or is it more like the authorship question, where it can all be traced back to one person who originally asked the question (I’m thinking of Delia Bacon, who first posed the idea that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s works). This is a good place to start. Let’s get this out of the way right in the beginning. The presence of some autobiographical elements in at least some of the sonnets were suggested by Shakespeare’s earliest commentators, including the most influential, Edmund Malone, in his edition of 1780. As more commentators found signs suggesting autobiography, the effect  snowballed, perhaps reaching a height with Wordsworth’s romantic outburst
“with this Key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” However, Sidney Lee, a turn-of-the-century Shakespeare scholar and biographer cautions:

“autobiographical confessions are very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made….With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonneteers of his day….At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current conventions of Elizabethan sonneteering, as well as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention…the autobiographic element in his sonnets…is seen to shrink to slender proportions.”

The problem, I think, is that Sonnet commentary began almost 200 years after the sonnet convention peaked. Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609, at the tail end of the craze that was going out of fashion. By the late 1700’s when The Sonnets were starting to be taken seriously as part of Shakespeare’s important works, nobody understood what “sonnet cycles” were.
They looked at The Sonnets as 154 poems and not in the context of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles that were popular in Shakespeare’s day. Taken in that context, we must recognize that it was common for the poet to write “in propria persona”, i.e., as if he were speaking, without regard to whether the subject matter literally applied to himself. The themes were also common
and repeated from one cycle to another–themes that we find in one form or another in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Looked at from this angle, any initial suggestion of autobiography must be regarded skeptically.
An additional problem is that we know very little about Shakespeare himself, so it is very difficult to confirm or refute any autobiographical suggestions made on the basis of an implication in a sonnet. And, of course, The Sonnets themselves are maddeningly vague.  As to the identity of the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, much ink has been wasted in search of them. W. H. Auden did not mince words on the matter. He said: “It is…nonsensical, no matter how accurate your results may be, to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless ad uninteresting. It is just gossip.” Stephen Booth, somewhat less archly decries the “games of pin the tail on the Dark Lady.” Again, we have the problem of the vagueness of The Sonnets and the lack of biographical
information for confirmation that prevents any conclusions from being drawn, even if we were to assume that these individuals were anything more than fiction. I have found nothing in The Sonnets themselves, nor in the extensive commentary I have read, to lead me to believe that the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth were any more than dramatis personae required for the
purposes of poetry (whether or not they bore resemblance in part or whole to persons familiar to Shakespeare). About the Author This book brings together the scholarship of dozens of the most brilliant commentators who have written about Shakespeare’s Sonnets over the past three hundred years. This edition adds the significant work done by modern editors to the most important commentary culled from the two variorum editions of the last century. Atkins presents a straightforward edition without jargon with the simple goal of finding out how the poems work and how they may be interpreted. He is the first to collate the modern texts so that differences among them can be fully appreciated and compared. His discussion of meter and verse is more substantial than that of any other edition, adding particular dimension to this text. Those coming to “The Sonnets” for the first time and those seeking a fresh look at an old friend will equally find this edition scholastically rigorous and a pleasure to read. Carl D. Atkins is a practicing medical oncologist in New York. Got a question for the author? Send it in and we’ll see if we can get it in the queue!