And, to complicate it more, today I heard a part of an interview with a Shapepearean 'Expert ' a Sassenach, who was positive the Henry plays were mostly written by Marlowe, and Titus And. was written by some other dude.
So, to, me, it's a perilous 'ascription
', if you like...
Ralph...I realise that this diversion has landed us in regions more suitable for discussion on a literary forum than one concerned with music but I will give my thoughts on one or two points raised by your reply.
Firstly, as to Shakespeare's familiarity with catholic doctrine it is known that William Stanley 6th Earl of Derby was suspected of having catholic sympathies ....this, taken by itself, proves absolutely nothing but might be significant when viewed as part of a bigger picture.
Secondly, in addressing the matter of how imprtant it is to know the authorship of a work I'll return to music to draw an illustration by stating a hypothetical scenario. Supposing a listener was introduced to Berlioz' Fantastic Symphony by means of an "Innocent Ear" performance with no information about the composer and the work being given to him. There's every probability that the listener would appreciate the work for the tremendous, exciting piece of music that it is but it would be a dull mind indeed that wasn't curious about who wrote it and what was the inspiration behind it. Knowledge of the inspiration of the symphony surely adds to our appreciation of the work and, putting it crudely, why it makes the sounds it makes. There was a time in all of our lives when we were fairly innocent about Berlioz (as well as every other composer) but interest led us to inform ourselves about the composers of the music we listen to in order to understand it more and what led the composers to compose as they did. The popular, but historically far-from-truthful, Hollywood "Biopics" were a response to this sort of interest but unfortunately led to a host of mis-information about some of our great men and women....maybe there are still some people who, as a result of watching re-runs of old films on TV, think that Chopin looked like Cornel Wilde or that Clara Schumann (Wieck) couldn't perform a concerto in public without her father sitting at her side giving running instructions on how to play it ! Many authors have created lengthy spurious biographies of Shakespeare to satisfy this need for knowledge about the author of the plays but they were based largely on supposition because so few verifiable facts about the Stratford man actually exist.
As to the notion that the plays might have been the result of a collaborative effort (and it occurs to me that some very fine films were the product of several writers working together whose scripts show no signs of seams showing) I don't mean to suggest that the plays were made up of Mr.X adding a scene here, Mr. Y a scene there , Mr. Z a separate act somewhere else and the whole strung together unedited (although there is an understandable view that Pericles might be just such a piece) but that they may have been the product of some exceptional minds working together contributing ideas and suggestions and the whole being revised by some master-hand (Shakespeare) to produce what we have now (the thread would become far too bulky, discursive and irrelevant for a music forum if I expanded on the idea). It's noticeable that Ben Jonson , in his highly equivocal, "To the memory of my beloved Master William Shakespeare" slipped in the word "Constellation" in reference to the poet's figurative transformation into the Cygnus constellation...a possible comparison to those groups of poets who were named after the Pleiades constellation.
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