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*spork*

  • Nov. 19th, 2005 at 11:21 PM
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Dear Mr. Ackroyd:

The play performed before Elizabeth on the eve of Essex's rebellion is reported to have been Richard II (a significant choice for her Majesty, as history will report).

It may interest you to know that the chubby Shakespeare in the Stratford-upon-Avon memorial bust dates from the 1700s. The original bust was also created after his death, but some believe his daughter Susanna Hall provided a death mask for the likeness. In surviving sketches, it doesn't look much at all like the water-retention Shakespeare we all know and love. 

(We can at least take a pretty good guess that he was a victim of male pattern baldness, I'll give you that, and I did like the bit of a chapter on the presumptive targeting of good old satirical philandering "Adam Prickshaft" at our boy Will.)

Also, many critics believe that the earring on the so-called Chandros portrait that may or may not be Shakespeare is a fanciful later addition.

Love, ebear.

*spork*

And yes, I used the earring as a plot point in my book.

Because (all together now) I write fiction.

And so apparently does Mr. Ackroyd.

Gah, there's not enough spork in the world, Spleen.
  • Mood: why am I still reading this?
  • Music:the sound of sporking

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( 24 comments — Leave a comment )
[info]angevin2 wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:34 am (UTC)
The play performed before Elizabeth on the eve of Essex's rebellion is reported to have been Richard II (a significant choice for her Majesty, as history will report).

What's he say about it? The Richard II-Essex connection is a big deal in my diss, though it's frustrating because we're not absolutely certain that the play in question is Shakespeare's; the pertinent record (i.e., the deposition of actor Augustine Philips) simply says "the play of the deposing and killing of Richard the Second." Now, it's very likely that Shakespeare's play is the one in question (why would the LC's men have had another one in 1601? As it turns out the company had another by 1611, but that's a fair deal of time), but technically we don't know for sure.
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:43 am (UTC)
Oh, he simply fails to even bother to mention the name of the play. This after he's assigned everything from King Leir to The Troublesome Raigne (Basically, any play he can get his hands on that's even vaguely associated with Lord Strange's Men)to the young Shakespeare through the incredibly annoying technique of saying "This play has textual similarities to later Shakespeare plays on the same topic, so it is possible or likely that--" (without actually mentioning any of them in particular) and then, later on in the book, going blithly "As we have seen, Shakespeare's early work--"

...meanwhile, commenting about our boy Will copying bits of Hollingshead all but verbatim.

This guy is thoroughly fabulous in his sporkishness. I'm running out of sporks, this book is so sporktastic. *g*

Honest, I didn't even froth this much when I was reading the Kuriyama biography of Marlowe that does this lovely little jig of tapdancing like mad to distract you while it sweeps any possible connection between Kit and those nasty spies and moneylenders behind the arras.

And when did we get an arras, anyway?

*g*
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[info]angevin2 wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:51 am (UTC)
He doesn't even mention it? That's really weird.

(And Shakespeare did occasionally lift fairly wholesale from Holinshed, in the more expository bits of the histories -- for instance, the Salic Law speech in Henry V. ;) )

Ackroyd is a popular historian, at any rate, not a scholarly one, so take him with a grain of salt, and don't consider him representative of serious scholarship. For my money, the best recent Shakespeare biography is Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life, which is less fanciful generally, but you may well have read it...
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:55 am (UTC)
(And Shakespeare did occasionally lift fairly wholesale from Holinshed, in the more expository bits of the histories -- for instance, the Salic Law speech in Henry V. ;) )

Yes, that's my point. He'll blithely point that out, and then go on to discuss how he must have written the earlier King Leir or Shrew, for example, based on textual similarities.

I realize that he's a popular historian, but damn, if *I* think your scholarship stinks, sir, you need a new job....

The Honan is next on my list, having recently sporked my way through Will in the World, more fucking biography based on textual analysis. *g*
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[info]princejvstin wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 02:53 pm (UTC)
You read all of this, to save all of us not grief, but being misinformed.

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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:04 pm (UTC)
Indeed! For the grief, I'm apparently willing to share in detail....
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[info]silme wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:38 am (UTC)
I'd thought you'd finished it!

You might appreciate this review. http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,1567062,00.html
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 07:50 am (UTC)
It's five hundred pages! Give a girl a break! *g*

And yeah, I like that review.

My emotions are very mixed.
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[info]callunav wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 02:49 pm (UTC)
Because (all together now) I write fiction.

And so apparently does Mr. Ackroyd.


Hee hee hee hee hee.

You know, this is very, very far out of my realm of geekery, but you're awfully fun to watch when you're geeking, even if I'm not there alongside you. :)
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:03 pm (UTC)
*falls over sideways*

I stayed up reading the end, too, so I wouldn't have to come back to it in the morning.

Next up is the two Park Honan biographies, however--Shakespeare: A Life and Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. Based on Mr. Honan's reputation, I expect MUCH LESS SPORKING THERE.

In the mean time, I'm crawling back to Sejanus like the whipped puppy I am. *g*
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[info]callunav wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:09 pm (UTC)
Sejanus. Ben Jonson?
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:24 pm (UTC)
Yes.

*pets*

Who has the excuse of having been dead for over three hundred years, so when he pisses me off, it's more an amusing reminder of the transitiveness of my own cultural values. *g*
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[info]faithhopetricks wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 11:03 pm (UTC)
((pets Our Ben))

I do wish Our Ben got more press. But then I'd have to put up with louts like Ackroyd writing about him.
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[info]kajicarter wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 03:36 pm (UTC)
Not enough sporks in the world?
Try here:

http://www.bigidea.com/videos/veggietales/vt026/concept05.htm
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:06 pm (UTC)
Re: Not enough sporks in the world?
Ah, the glorious phalanxes of marching sporks, striding out through the glowering mist to lay waste upon our enemies!

...does anybody wonder if teaching kids to personify vegetables is a bad idea for their future dietary balance?
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[info]shewhomust wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:05 pm (UTC)
Because (all together now) I write fiction.

And so apparently does Mr. Ackroyd.

FWIW, I do think of him primarily as a novelist: his Hawksmoor and Chatterton have fun dancing around the facts, without asking the reader to believe anything outside the context of the book. When did he jump the line (and, evidently, why?).
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[info]cheshyre wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:28 pm (UTC)
Because (all together now) I write fiction.
And so apparently does Mr. Ackroyd.

While in London, I picked up Rodney Bolt's History Play, which I'm not sure whether I'll be able to read completely through, because he does things like:
Later in life Marlowe was to leave us an extraordinarily evocative recollection of how, as a young boy visiting his maternal grandparents in Dover, he would lie at the very edge of the cliffs, gazing below him or staring out to sea.
followed by an excerpt from King Lear

Hard to read, but the guy insists he's not an authorship freak. He's doing it on purpose to show just how much fiction the mainstream biographers stuff into accepted works.
But it's a tough read, because I'm never quite sure how much credence to give any new material he provides.
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 21st, 2005 04:48 am (UTC)
*g* I hear the best way to handle History Play is to treat it as (a) fiction and (b) a deconstruction of the Authroship Silliness.
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[info]lake_effected wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:34 pm (UTC)
These posts are so very interesting! I don't know if I'm asking you to repeat yourself, but I would be interested to hear more about how you use your research in the fiction you're crafting--I'm more familar with research in the (allegedly) non-fiction context, though as you point out the line gets sloppy/fuzzy right quick. Is it in creating the setting, as you talked about earlier?
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 21st, 2005 04:42 am (UTC)
Oh god, I use it in everything. I mean, there is no fiction without inspiration, for me. And it comes from everywhere.

And it's a synthetic thing.

(CAUTION: other writer's processes will differ extensively.)

Frex, my short story "Two Dreams on Trains." I had an idea for years and years that I wanted to write a story about tattoos and scarification. And somehow, the elegaic Arlo Guthrie song "The City of New Orleans" turned in my head into a song about the persistence of a city rather than a song about a train, and then I heard an interview on NPR with a young tagger in NYC, who was painting his name on subway trains.

And he said something to the effect of "People are going to see that, and people are gonna know my name."

And I went *whooooaaaaaa*.

Right now, I just got mugged with a story about boxer Sonny Liston, and it was from the Mark Knopfler song "Song for Sonny Liston" and the John Gorka song "Dream Street" and this photograph, right here:

http://www.stripes.com/photoday/030404.jpg
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[info]truepenny wrote:
Nov. 20th, 2005 04:35 pm (UTC)
I read somewhere (where, oh where?) that high foreheads were considered a marker of great beauty by the Elizabethans, so that what looks like encroaching baldness to us may actually be a deliberate aesthetic choice.

I realize this would be a much more valid hypothesis if I could remember where I read it. ::sigh::

Brain like a ... what's that thing called? Can't carry water in it ...
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[info]lenora_rose wrote:
Nov. 21st, 2005 04:27 am (UTC)
That's definitely true seventy-five to a hundred years earlier in Italy, but I don't remember anyone confirming it'd travelled to England.
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[info]matociquala wrote:
Nov. 21st, 2005 04:29 am (UTC)
Elizabeth lost most of her hair, but I can't recall if it was the smallpox or something else.

The plucked foreheads were more women than men, though. And Will is pretty much showing a horse-shoe in any of the putative images that date after about, oh, 1590 or so, which goes a bit beyond the plucked brow stage.
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[info]enevarim wrote:
Nov. 22nd, 2005 02:17 am (UTC)
I gave up on Peter Ackroyd after his review of Alfred Smyth's Alfred the Great, which was largely a vituperative calumny of twentieth-century Cambridge scholars which could only be explained if they had all ganged up and poisoned Smyth's pet dog when he was three. Not that that was Ackroyd's fault, but his review (in The Times, 14 December 1995) lapped it up uncritically. And he does there mention someone "who realised that fiction has a greater hold over the public and historical imagination than mere fact", which may relate to when he crossed the line, and why.

I broke my rule and picked up Ackroyd's Albion, because I thought it was a really neat idea, but in spite of snippets of Really Neat Ideas, there was too much fiction in the bits that were supposed to be facts.

After that, I didn't pick up his Shakespeare, but I am interested to see that he is continuing in the same vein.
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( 24 comments — Leave a comment )

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