The Eastern Regional Library Show

Library staff members Lesley Conway and Pia Butcher run a radio show each Wednesday 12:05pm-12:45pm on Eastern FM 98.1 called The Eastern Regional Library Show. Tune in next Wednesday for a great show.

On today's show

William Shakespeare....the true writer of the plays and sonnets, or the public front of an aristocrat, or a collaboration with one or more others? The debate is raging fast and furiously. There is a distinct heads on conflict between the Stratfordians (for William Shakespeare) and the Oxfordians (for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford), but the debate is more complex than that.

When I first heard of the debate many years ago, it was over the proposition that Christopher Marlowe was the author, and that he had faked his death to escape a history of intrigue in England, and sent his writing to Shakespeare from the Continent. This is a bit far-fetched now, in the light of the work of many industrious scholars over the last decade. Marlowe is a fascinating fellow none the less, and and autobiography by Park Honan Christopher Marlowe : poet and spy is a good introduction to his life.

The next candidate to be introduced was the Earl of Oxford, either as the writer of the plays (detailed in Alias Shakespeare : solving the greatest literary mystery of all time, by Joseph Sobran) or as collaborator with Shakespeare (in Players : the mysterious identity of William Shakespeare by Bertram Fields).

Next we are introduced to Sir Henry Neville, a flamboyant and intellectual aristocrat similar to the Earl of Oxford, in The truth will out : unmasking the real Shakespeare by Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein. The crux of the argument in this and Oxford's case being that the man who wrote the plays had to be better educated and more widely travelled than William Shakespeare was.

My inclination is towards the arguments of Rene Weis in Shakespeare revealed and Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare : a biography, which in essence are that " ..he is in some ways larger than life...but then so is all genius. It is no more possible to explain the secret of Shakespeare's talent than it is to account for Mozart's gifts."

Finally, for a great overview of the dramatists of the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare & Co. by Stanley Wells, which includes biography of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and others. Music today was from the CD A little nonsense.

---- Lesley