The Shakespeare Code

[Note: It’s best to read How Coleridge got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ right AND wrong first.]

A Trixie Special.

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

Why ARE academics so vicious when they argue with each other?

Is it really because……

……as Your Cat was once told by Adolf Wood….

….an editor of the Times Literary Supplement  –

 

……the stakes are so small?

The financial stakes in Academe certainly are!

But, for whatever reason, five years ago the columns of the mighty T.L.S…..

…..shook to…..

THE WARS OF THE ENGLISH PROFESSORS!!!

(and their Seconds…)

The Background was this:

The great Shakespearean scholar and editor, John Dover Wilson…

…..believed that William Shakespeare worked with a collaborator on All’s Well that Ends Well.

He stated this in his edition of the play (with Arthur Quiller-Couch) for the Cambridge University Press in 1929:

To sum up, the editing of this play leaves us with the strong impression that the Folio text is the product of a Jacobean revision (c. 1605) of an Elizabethan play perhaps by Shakespeare but if so probably containing pre-Shakespearean elements, and that this revision was undertaken by Shakespeare and a collaborator, the bulk of the work devolving upon the latter who was indeed left to carry out the final shaping of the play and to finish off many scenes begun by his great fellow-worker.

Dover Wilson repeated this idea three years later in his ground-breaking book The Essential Shakespeare:

And neither All’s Well nor Measure for Measure, I am convinced, is wholly Shakespeare’s; even for this kind of comedy he had no inclination, and left a torso for Wilkins or some other hack to provide with arms and legs.

Nearly five years ago Laurie Maguire (Professor of English at Oxford University)……

……and her colleague Emma Smith (an Oxford English Faculty teacher)…..

……named Thomas Middleton as Shakespeare’s collaborator……

……in an article in the T.L.S. (20th April, 2012)

They acknowledged that Dover Wilson had arrived at the idea first:

We have been anticipated by only one previous critic, John Dover Wilson….

….and quoted his belief that the play had been produced by….

A process of expansion by some inferior dramatist

…..who….

…..had a passion for sententious couplets and a mind running on sexual disease.

This article ignited the wrath of computer whizz…

Prof. Brian Vickers……

….Emeritus Professor at ETH Zurich….

….and HIS colleague, Marcus Dahl ….

…of the Institute of English Studies….

(Academics, it seems, go round in pairs these days…..

…..probably for protection from other Academics..…)

In the Commentary Section of the T.L.S.  for 11th May (2012)…..

…..Vickers and Dahl rubbished not only the work of Maguire and Smith

…..BUT OF DOVER WILSON HIMSELF!!!…

They had the cheek to describe him as….

The Great Disintegrator

…as though he were something out of Star Wars…

They warned the Oxford Girls that to follow Dover Wilson’s path…

…..so many years after his methods have been discredited is to risk a similar fate….

And concluded boldly:

There is absolutely no evidence for another hand in this play….

[Sir Brian Vickers, author of the much-mocked The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose, has form……

He recently engaged in an unknightly punch-up in the T.L.S. with fellow octogenarian Sir Stanley Wells…

…..on Shakespeare’s Sonnets….

Sir Brian argued, preposterously in The Code’s view, that they were fictional.

Sir Stanley argued, correctly in The Code’s view, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were about real people……]

Maguire and Evans hand-bagged back….

…in a letter to the T.L.S. on 8th June, 2012….

They derided Vickers and Dahl as….

Flat Earthers….

…..and….

Canutes trying to stem the oncoming tide…

They defended Dover Wilson…..

…..who frankly needs no defending by Maguire and Evans….

…..and who could eat Vickers and Dahl for breakfast –

……by writing that….

…..he [Dover Wilson] got some things spectacularly right.

The Code believes that Dover Wilson was not ‘spectacularly right’ on this occasion  ….

He was, NEARLY right….

Shakespeare DID work with another collaborator on All’s Well that Ends Well…

But in ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES…

I’ll leave it to our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter…..

…..who himself once worked on the T.L.S……

….. to explain this in the next, dazzling, Shakespeare Code Post…..

‘Bye now!

[It’s best now to read: How John Dover Wilson got ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ NEARLY right. (Part Two).]