William Shakespeare hasn’t had a new play since 1612. But last month in the UK and this month in the US, Arden—one of the most respected publishers of scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s plays—published a “new” play by Shakespeare, edited by Brean Hammond: Double Falsehood, a play that has been lost and found and lost again…

Keep reading at The Millions.

If you haven’t seen the site, of course I encourage you to head on over. In particular, here are a few of my own recent articles:

• Book Review: CONTESTED WILL: WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE? by James Shapiro. I want to be a book reviewer, so I’m taking advantage of having my own platform to review books about Shakespeare. This one has been getting a really great reception from our readers so far.
• When Is Shakespeare’s Birthday? We celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23rd, but we’re not sure when he was born: it could have been any day between April 21 and 25, 1564. I reviewed the evidence that survives.
• Double Falsehood: Shakespeare’s New Play? The Arden Shakespeare is publishing an edition of a “new” play by Shakespeare on May 17. How is that possible? Here’s a history of the play that could be Shakespeare’s.

I also wrote an essay for The Millions on Double Falsehood, which will be appearing the week of May 17. Stay tuned!

A quote to whet your appetite:

We are being conditioned, in this age of 140-character thoughts, to expect novel experiences at every turn. Our brains begin to expect that stimulation not just when we are looking at a computer screen but all the time. Instead of being able to think deeply and read deeply, even when we read offline, after a few minutes we begin itching to check email, check Facebook, play a quick game of solitaire, or tweet something. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs, except that instead of salivating only when we see our feeders, our salivary glands are stuck in the “on,” position, and the drool running down our chins is making us look pretty dumb.

My dissertation discussed whether Shakespeare portrayed writers he knew as characters in his plays. Juliet Dusinberre, who edited As You Like It for The Arden Shakespeare, believes that he often created characters who speak with the voice of the author of the work that was Shakespeare’s source for that particular play. Her examples are Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, Jaques in As You Like It and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. I show however that Shakespeare does not employ such biographical representation. My argument, however, shows what a careful and strategic artist Shakespeare was.

Poet characters in Shakespeare’s plays

First I looked at characters in Shakespeare’s plays who are poets. There are four: Gower, the chorus in Pericles; Cinna the Poet and the Poet in Julius Caesar; and the Poet in Timon of Athens. Gower was a medieval poet whose poem Confessio Amantis was the source for Pericles. Using a poet for the chorus was an out-of-date technique in Shakespeare’s day, and Shakespeare doubled that effect by having his Gower speak in ancient-sounding verse.

In Julius Caesar, there are two poets; the first is Cinna the Poet, who the Roman mob mistake for another Cinna, one of Caesar’s murderers. They tear him apart onstage. The other poet forces his way into Brutus’s tent when he is arguing with Cassius. He offers the two men three lines of terrible verse and is laughed offstage. Shakespeare seems to imply that poets have nothing to do with politics—they either look ridiculous, or worse, are victims of it.

In Timon of Athens, the Poet brings a moral poem to Timon in hope of receiving a reward. Judging by his description, in verse so obscure that it confused even Dr. Johnson, it must be very bad. But curiously, his description of its argument—a warning to Timon against flatterers—sounds suspiciously like Shakespeare’s poem, the play itself. In all three plays Shakespeare compares himself to other poets and implies that he is a superior artist.

Biographical representations of writers

Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare’s source, Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet, Brooke condemns the young lovers for their lust in pursuing a secret forbidden love. Though Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence still is a moral voice in the play, he does not condemn the teenagers. But he does help to form our response to them as seeing their love as authentic and earnest.

As You Like It

Neither Jaques nor any character analogous to him appears in the source, Thomas Lodge’ s novella Rosalynde. Because of this and also because his speeches have such depth, he is often supposed to satirize a real person, perhaps Lodge or Jonson. Lodge’s biography—traveller and libertine—is similar to Jaques’s, but their language is nothing similar. Many of Jaques’s speeches do sound Jonsonian, though their biographies have no correlation. In fact, Jaques is most like the common Elizabethan stereotypes of the satirist and the traveller.

Antony and Cleopatra

Enobarbus stems from two persons mentioned in Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch’s Life of Antonius, but a significant number of Enobarbus’s speeches are taken from Plutarch’s exposition. While this might suggest that Enobarbus is a representation of Plutarch, Shakespeare made strategic additions to his lines so that, more than any other character, Enobarbus guides the audience’s reactions to Antony and Cleopatra.

Perhaps more than anything else, by looking at these plays and these characters, it is possible to see that Shakespeare always had a specific strategy in mind for influencing his audience’s reaction, but most of all—and rather mischievously—he instructs us in his own pre-eminence among poets.

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg on Flickr.

Blog=bad writing

A panel of experts on Saturday fortuitously held both Andrew Dickson, the online arts editor for The Guardian, who also blogs, and Michael Coveney, the well-established theatre reviewer for the Daily Mail, whose negative opinions on blogging were soon aired.

The discussion on blogs might have been informative, but it soon became clear that Coveney’s definition of blogging is something like: “bad writing published online.” He went on to connect this to what he sees as young writers cheapening the profession by writing for free online.

I have two points to make:

1. There is bad writing in print as well as online. There is more of it online because the Internet makes it easy to self-publish, but quality, well-researched articles written by trained writers and journalists are published online every day. Blogging is a form, not an assessment of value.
2. Emerging writers have had to write for free since before blogs were invented. Many publications find it difficult to be profitable and cannot pay writers; and in some cases, publishers suppose that since we love writing, we would do it anyway, or worse, that they are doing writers a favor. Believe me, young writers want to be paid just as much as anyone.

The future of many publications will be online. Good writing will continue to be esteemed whatever medium it appears in.

Preservation

The other issue that emerged is more puzzling. The academics at the conference worried about the availability of theatre reviews published on blogs for future researchers. Newspapers can be archived and scanned to microfiche and thus preserved. But the Internet is ephemeral. Once a blog is taken down, it disappears.

How can blog content remain accessible in the future? It may have been archived by a web server somewhere, but that doesn’t make it accessible for future readers. For now the safest way to preserve content is still in print. There must be another answer.

In college, one of my creative writing professors instructed that a writer is allowed a total of three exclamation points in her life—under that logic, I was too young to risk using one yet. Better to wait until I had a few more years to master my craft and learn when such a powerful spice in the soup of punctuation might be necessary. The practice deleting any exclamation point that snuck its way onto my manuscripts was drilled into my head. (How did they keep managing to appear there?)

Now I find that my pen itches to cross out these devilish little marks any time I see them: for example, when I worked at a literary agency, slush with an exclamation point on its first page was usually sent to the ‘no’ pile almost automatically. I took it as a sign of further excessive punctuation and prose style to follow.

I am not alone in my aversion to exclamation points. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

And Terry Pratchett:

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

So how did these apparently so terrible marks begin? Exclamation points were first used in English in the fifteenth century, probably soon after William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. It was originally called the “note of admiration,” using the Latin sense of admiration to mean wonder, which is why when Ferdinand first sees Miranda in The Tempest, he says: “O, you wonder!” (with an exclamation point).

One romantic theory of the origin of the mark itself is that it was originally the Latin word for joy, Io, printed in abbreviated form with the I above the o. It was in wide enough use by the beginning of the seventeenth century for Shakespeare to create a pun about it in The Winter’s Tale:

First Gentlemen: “I make a broken delivery of the business, but the changes I perceived in the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes.”

However, the exclamation point was not part of a standard typewriter keyboard until the 1970s, which makes me consider whether the overuse of it is a product of the past forty years. Could it be tied to the rise of the computer and the Internet? Before it became a standard keyboard feature, a writer would have to make an effort to include one in her manuscript. Certainly email and text language that commonly uses multiple exclamation points together (“How R U!!!”) may lead writers toward a tendency to overuse them in prose as well.

But there are still those who have a stronger constitution for exclamation points, such as Ariane Sherine, writing for the Guardian. Her argument is that exclamation points are innocuous next to emoticons and text-speech. If I have to pick between prose with too many exclamation points and prose that forgets how to spell out words (of which I have seen a few too many), I’ll pick the former, thanks.