For a long time, whether Shakespeare's works were written by Shakespeare has been debated. Recently, Professor Daniel Pollack Perzer of Linfield University wrote an article in The New Yorker entitled "The radical argument of The New Oxford Shakespeare", introducing the latest developments in Shakespeare's examination.
Last year, a new edition of Oxford's Complete Works of Shakespeare, of which Gary Taylor was the editor-in-chief, was published, which also made the first of its kind to identify playwrights as co-authors of 15 Shakespearean plays, including the famous playwright Marlowe as co-author of Henry VI. In the New Yorker article, Perzer quoted Taylor as saying that the deification of Shakespeare caused blindness to other playwrights of comparable Renaissance talent, and Shakespeare's view of history and storytelling were recognized as exemplary, while other ways of historical imagination and storytelling were ignored. The following is a translation of the article published in The New Yorker.
New edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Oxford edited by Gary Taylor
In 1989, a young scholar named Gary Taylor published a book called Reinventing Shakespeare, arguing that Shakespeare's supremacy in literature came more from the cultural institutions that had elevated him to the altar than from the greatness of his work itself. Thanks to these cultural systems, Shakespeare prided himself on the playwrights of the Renaissance who had the same talent as him. "Shakespeare is a shining star, but he was never the only one in our galaxy." Taylor wrote. This is not the first time he has thrown out such statements challenging orthodoxy. A few years earlier, he had been one of the editors-in-chief of the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, which considered five of Shakespeare's plays to be co-authored.
At the end of last year, Taylor once again shocked the world, and a new edition of Oxford's Complete Works of Shakespeare, of which he was the first editor-in-chief, was published. For the first time, Christopher Marlowe identifies Henry VI as a co-author of The First Three Parts. In addition, the collection lists the co-authors of the remaining 14 Shakespearean plays—Thomas Nash, George Peel, Thomas Heywood, Ben Johnson, George Wilkins, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher. How did Taylor find evidence that the plays were co-authored rather than Sassy's own? The answer is to analyze the language patterns of early plays through big data. To this end, Taylor quipped at a press conference: "Now Shakespeare has also entered the era of big data."
Of course, the idea that Shakespeare's plays were not his original creations is no longer new, and more and more scholars recognize that theatrical creation in the 16th century is a bit like today's script writing, often modified by many people before it can be completed. The new edition of The Complete Works of Oxford Shakespeare believes that its algorithm can discern which works were done by one person. But the significance of this new edition of the complete collection is not to point out which Shakespeare works are synergistic, nor to rediscover and recognize playwrights who are as important as Shakespeare but ignored, but to point out that the deification of Shakespeare determines the way he tells stories—especially his monarchical view of history—which has become the norm for us, and that there are actually other ways of telling stories, other views of history, in which other playwrights are better than Shakespeare.
Portrait of Marlowe
Scholars have long viewed Marlowe and Shakespeare as a pair of sympathetic rivals. Shakespeare's Richard III may have imitated Marlowe's Timur and Faust, the Merchant of Venice may have borrowed from Marlowe's The Jews of Malta, and Marlowe referenced Shakespeare's historical plays in writing his own tragedy Edward II. However, the new Oxford Complete Works' view that Marlowe and Shakespeare co-authored Henry VI was not shared by the mainstream, and the methodology of his data analysis was widely questioned.
For a century, scholars have been trying to quantify Shakespeare's style. In 1901, a meteorologist hired two women to count the number of letters in each word in the works of Shakespeare and other famous writers. Contemporary methods of verification are more complex, but they differ in degree, not qualitative differences. Taylor has also examined linguistic features such as functional words, such as words like by, so, and from, which are likely to be subconscious and difficult to imitate deliberately.
In response to the identification that Marlowe was a co-author of Henry VI, Taylor mentioned an article in the latest issue of Shakespeare's Quarterly. This article examines how a playwright might use a function word after another. For example, in Hamlet's line "With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage," the defining word is "and with," a combination of functional words that is more common in Shakespeare's work. The Marlowe expression appears several times in Henry VI. The essay acknowledges that their approach is not perfect and may be crowned.
Taylor was accused of having a grudge against Shakespeare, but in fact he was an admirer of Shakespeare. But he argues that our deification of Shakespeare's talent has caused us to blind ourselves to other remarkable playwrights and the alternative political imaginations they propose.
"Shakespeare's favorite themes are monarchy, monopoly, monotheism, and correspondingly, his most famous lines and sonnets are monologues." Shakespeare had a soft spot for uniqueness, uniqueness, while Taylor believed in the democracy of the reader, who liked something without the need for a beak.
Scholars have long used Shakespeare's uniqueness to belittle other playwrights. When critics find a bad passage or a violation of a sense of discord in Shakespeare's early and late works, one solution is to blame an inferior co-author. Shakespeare's sanctity is also reflected in the fact that some people will think that other people's colorful passages are actually from Shakespeare's hand. Sir Thomas More, for example, is considered Shakespeare's because the handwriting matches Shakespeare's six surviving signatures. As far-fetched as this argument is, the desire to discover a new Shakespeare manuscript is seductive, and they rigidly associate Shakespeare and More's passages refuting the infiltration of liberalism by the anti-immigrant mob. Is it good as long as it is Shakespeare? Or as long as it is a good work, we think it is The work of Shakespeare?
Because of this assumption, many editors tend to assume that certain passages in Henry VI were written by Thomas Nash or Georges Pierre were considered gross and missing. Rasmussen, one of the editors of Marlowe's complete works, praised Taylor's practice of separating authorship from judgments about artistic value, "If he touted 'Am I Damned', everyone would say that the play was rubbish. But if it is Shakespeare, then everyone will say that Shakespeare should be good, and this film has aesthetic flaws. Miss by a mile! You can find a play anywhere you want to find what we think is the aesthetic bad of Shakespeare. ”
Portrait of Shakespeare
For Taylor, if we see Shakespeare as one of many stars rather than as the only one, it will allow us to see the literary value of other types, rather than thinking that if we are different from Shakespeare, then other playwrights of the Renaissance are not good. For a decade, Taylor insisted that Middleton was "our other Shakespeare." Judging by the recent newspaper reports, Marlowe is expected to become a sexier star. And more importantly, Marlowe's contribution to Henry VI may indicate the existence of another way of telling history.
In the new Edition of Oxford's Complete Works of Shakespeare, one of the original titles of the second part of Henry VI is "The First Part of the Family Dispute between York and Lancaster", and the "First Part" became the second part of Henry VI because Shakespeare rewrote the prequel a few years ago. Shakespeare decided to make his historical drama part of nation-building, to put the monarch in the title, and later plays were printed as well. "If you look at the second part of Henry VI as a co-author, you'll see how a different kind of historical drama is possible." Taylor said.
Taylor's team attributed the possibility of this different historical drama to Marlowe, who focused more on tough female characters such as Joan of Arc and rebellious commoners than Shakespeare's focus on male monarchs.
"Shakespeare did not invent historical drama, he reinvented historical drama, making it more emphasis on monarchs and great men. It's interesting if you realize that Henry VI, especially the second part, has two political imaginations. Taylor said.
Taylor argues that these two opposing political imaginations have meanings beyond the text. "There is not only a political civil war in the play, but also an aesthetic civil war. The First Part of the Contention was the first great British historical drama. Marlowe and Shakespeare are both rising stars, both sons of craftsmen, neither growing up in the metropolis, and both ambitious. These two very good but very different playwrights are imagining what the new theatrical form would be like," Taylor added, "arguably Shakespeare won because Marlowe was assassinated." At the beginning of your career, you can never definitively judge that Shakespeare is greater. If Marlowe had lived another twenty years, we can imagine that he would have offered very different modes of telling history, tragedy, and comedy. ”