Wednesday, August 3, 2011

I Can't Write

Last fall when I learned the release date for the upcoming movie 'Anonymous' I decided that I wanted to spend some time in Castle Hedingham while it was still a quiet place. The authorship problem doesn't seem to be a big topic of conversation there - even in The Bell and The Wheatsheaf they hadn't heard that there was a movie about Edward de Vere being released, and the owner of the cottage we stayed in didn't know anything and she's a second or third generation villager.

I also wanted to go to Warwick to see St Mary's Church and Fulke Greville's monument, and Greville's one-time possession, Warwick Castle.

We had a great time - I enjoyed living in the village for a few days, wandering around the village in the middle of the night, and ended up spending an inordinate amount of time at The Bell. (I blame that on my 'real ale'-loving husband and my cousin, who travelled with us).

While we were in Warwick, we went to Stratford-upon-Avon. All of my imaginative energies must have been expended, because the place had almost no significance for me. For me it is a place of scorn - where Oxford's fame lies buried. It is the place held by the Cipher.

Yet it is also THE place for giftshops. I knew what I wanted for a souvenir - a poster of the Droeshout Engraving. I'd recently received some comments about my home decorating skills and had been given the well-meaning advice that I should show more of my 'self' or personality in my rooms. I think this meant that I was to remove some of the stacks of books and start investing in throw pillows. I'm not sure a two foot high poster of the dopey-looking Droeshout was what she had in mind.

But if I'm supposed to show more of my 'self' in my rooms, then I thought I ought to have a picture of the particular angel that I wrestle with.

As a compromise, I thought I'd get it professionally framed - so I took it to a local artist. Now I have become an expert at not talking about what I do in my (considerable) spare time. As every Oxfordian knows TOO WELL, people who have not read a single play of Shakespeare's become authorities when it comes to knowing who wrote them. It is plain and simple, as all the best facts are. His name is on the plays. End of. And in the face of this certainty any attempt on my part to suggest otherwise has the potential to activate another cultural judgement - that of  'conspiracy theorist'.

One friend, who has read quite a number of the plays, began to say something to me about Shakespeare and then suddenly stopped himself.

'Oh, I forgot, you don't like Shakespeare.'

Don't like Shakespeare? Whaaaaat?

In order to survive as an Oxfordian, I've developed a healthy sense of the absurd. And I've learned to keep my mouth shut.

Yet as I unrolled the poster of the Droeshout engraving I couldn't resist.  After all, didn't I have a live artist - an expert in drawing - standing next to me? Was I going to waste his skills on deciding on a frame with beading or without?

But I was pretty cagey. I asked him his opinion of the engraving. The proportion. The shading. The buttons. He observed that the head appeared to be floating. He agreed that the figure was odd, that the eyes were strangely made - in fact, he said that artistically speaking, it had so many things wrong with it that it was difficult to point them all out.

And then I played my big card - the doublet. The mismatched front panels. The two left arms. He conceded that the artist had made an error in the doublet. But there were many errors in drawings from this period. There could be distortions from the enlargement of the poster. He said something about folds in the material. He gave many good reasons.

But such was my mania...

I think I controlled myself pretty well. I said that other work by Droeshout shows that he was a very accomplished artist - and did he think it was strange that anyone could make this number of errors in a relatively simple figure? Was it possible that these errors were deliberate? Could anyone screw up the pieces of a man's jacket so badly? Nabokov wrote that the figure had two left arms, I wanted to say. An author with two left arms is incapable of right or correct writing, I wanted to say. The man who approved this drawing was a classicist, who worshipped correct form, order and proportion, I wanted to say.

By now, and this is only a five minute discussion, I'm feeling like I've seriously overplayed my hand and he's thinking that someone had better adjust my medication. But I couldn't help myself. I bit again. Hard. I had to ask this question:

"If there is a message behind this figure, what would it be?"

He studied the figure quite seriously for a few moments, bless him, and then stated --

"I can't draw."

I stared at him, and then I laughed. Really laughed. Delighted laugh. Because what I heard was Ben Jonson saying of Shakespeare, for Shakespeare, and about Shakespeare -  'I can't write'.

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And in moments like that it's like being hit with a huge wave. You stand in a moment of clarity and understanding, and then you are smashed by a wave - a wave made up of the massive impossibility of what you have just thought. The impossiblity that ANYONE could have thought that SHAKESPEARE could not write. A thought that even other Oxfordians might not entertain.

But I'm used to the wave. It knocks you topsy-turvy for a moment, and your heels end up where your head was for awhile. But the wave recedes and all you can do is laugh. Because the world is absurd and I am absurd, and language and figures and symbols will always breed confusion and error. And I don't share Ben Jonson's faith in Reason; that if we discipline ourselves to write correctly and to rule, and control our use of figurative language we can control error (because of course Shakespeare could write but the faults in the Droeshout indicate that he did not write rightly or correctly). But I do see hope in Shakespeare, who seems to have believed that although man is a 'giddy' thing prone to confusion and error, he can take steps to ensure that these errors can be safely laughed at, lived with and even loved, and that they are not permitted to grow uncontrolled into something antagonistic and deadly.

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And yet.
1623 - Publication of First Folio
1642 - King Charles raises royal standard at Nottingham
1642 - Battle of Edgehill

Casualties English Civil War:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
As usual in wars of this era, disease caused more deaths than combat. There are no accurate figures for these periods, and it is not possible to give a precise overall figure for those killed in battle, as opposed to those who died from disease, or even from a natural decline in population.



Figures for casualties during this period are unreliable, but some attempt has been made to provide rough estimates.[112][113] In England, a conservative estimate is that roughly 100,000 people died from war-related disease during the three civil wars. Historical records count 84,830 dead from the wars themselves. Counting in accidents and the two Bishops' wars, an estimate of 190,000 dead is achieved.[114]


Figures for Scotland are more unreliable and should be treated with greater caution. Casualties include the deaths of prisoners-of-war in conditions that accelerated their deaths, with estimates of 10,000 prisoners not surviving or not returning home (8,000 captured during and immediately after the Battle of Worcester were deported to New England, Bermuda and the West Indies to work for landowners as indentured labourers[115]). There are no figures to calculate how many died from war-related diseases, but if the same ratio of disease to battle deaths from English figures is applied to the Scottish figures, a not unreasonable estimate of 60,000 people is achieved.[116]


Figures for Ireland are described as "miracles of conjecture". Certainly the devastation inflicted on Ireland was unbelievable, with the best estimate provided by Sir William Petty, the father of English demography. Although Petty's figures are the best available, they are still acknowledged as being tentative. They do not include the estimate of 40,000 driven into exile, some of whom served as soldiers in European continental armies, while others were sold as indentured servants to New England and the West Indies. Many of those sold to landowners in New England eventually prospered, but many of those sold to landowners in the West Indies were worked to death. Petty estimates that 112,000 Protestants were killed through plague, war and famine, and that 504,000 Catholics were killed, giving an estimated total of 618,000 dead.[117]


These estimates indicate that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population, Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population.