WHY COULDN’T THE GREATEST WRITER IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE SPELL HIS OWN NAME?

Of the signatures that have come down to us, only six are believed to be  in the authentic hand of …well, of whom, exactly?

                   William Shackper

                   William Shakspear

                   Wm Shakspea

                   William Shackspere

                   Willm. Shakspere

                   William Shakspeare

 Not only are no two signatures the same, the Bard even spelt his name three different ways within one and the same document. The last three of the signatures listed above can be found – where else? – in his Will.

Then  there is the vexed question of the marriage license on which he is called Shaxspere and she is Miss Whately while only a day or two later when friends put up the marriage bond the wedding is to be between Mr. Shagspere and Miss Hathwey.

When he signed his own name he favoured the Shakspere form, which is also the way his father’s name was usually spelt. But wherever the Bard’s name occurred in connection with the theatre and in the folios it was invariably spelt the way we know it today, Shakespeare.

Baffled of Stratford writes…

The fact that the names of the private Shakspere and the public Shakespeare were spelt differently has even led some conspiracy enthusiasts to believe that they were actually two separate individuals.

But then why stop at two when there were a hundred or so variant spellings of the name in the Tudor period?

The confusion is only in the modern mind.  Shakespeare’s age had little or no notion of the need for consistent, never mind “correct”, spelling. Whether documenting affairs of state or penning a note to a loved one, the Elizabethans wrote their words much as they pleesed.

So, although he might have been flattered by the question, the greatest writer in the English language would probably have been more baffled by it than anything else.

What’s in an “e”?

With the revival of interest in Shakespeare after the Restoration, the Bard was known as Shakespear in an attempt to make him seem more modern – that final “e” was considered old-fashioned along the lines of “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe”.

By the time of his apotheosis in the mid-seventeenth century something both more reverent and more antique was preferred and the final “e” was restored while the first one was dropped making Shakspeare the new convention.

After a last ditch effort to revive Shakspere, the issue was apparently settled a mere hundred or so years ago. The Bard’s incorporation into officialdom was sealed with the full majesty of the three ‘e’s in Shakespeare, on the authority of the earliest printed versions of the plays.

By any other name?

Perhaps the final ‘e’ will be dropped once again to make him appear less ye olde barde. Or the first ‘e’ might have to go in deference to the authority of the signatures. Or perhaps Shagspere  is what the future will fancy?

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Written and conceived by Frank Gabriel Perry and Gunnar Pettersson, designed by John Bury. ©1994

 Acknowledgements:

APACS, Applied Holographics plc, Eric and Jean Halvorsen, F E Halliday, Charles Hamilton, Graham and Toby Holderness, William Shakespeare, Gary Taylor.

EVERYBODY IS SHAKESPEARE

For some, the most difficult thing of all to swallow is the utter and glorious banality of the fact that William Shakespeare really, truly and genuinely was William Shakespeare: a writer of some accomplishment and felicity of expression who did not leave much in the way of likenesses  or letters or laundry lists behind him.

After almost 200 years of attempts to identify the “real” Shakespeare, the list of pretenders has grown pretty extensive. Not least extensive in the sense that one of them, Daniel Defoe, lived long enough to see in the eighteenth century. However, since no one can ever be really, truly and genuinely sure we offer you, below, the complete roster.

Just to be on the safe side.

Lancelot Andrewes

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Thomas Bodley

Lord Buckhurst

Robert Burton

Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury

Henry Chettle

Samuel Daniel

Daniel Defoe

Thomas Dekker

Sir Francis Drake

Michael Drayton

Sir Edward Dyer

Elizabeth I

Michele Agnolo Florio

Robert Greene

Thomas Heywood

Ben Jonson

Thomas  Lodge

Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland

Christopher Marlowe

Thomas Middleton

Thomas More

Anthony Munday

Thomas Nashe

Lord Paget

George Peele

Countess of Pembroke

Endymion Porter

Sir Walter Ralegh

William Shakespeare

Sir Anthony Sherley

Edmund Spenser

William Stanley, Earl of Derby

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

John Webster

A MEMORABLE VISIT

For Mr and Mrs Eric Halvorsen of Toronto, Canada, their trip to England this summer produced a wealth of impressions they will always treasure.

Particularly memorable was ‘Shakespeare Country’ which included a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of the Bard.

-I just had no idea it was so small, says Mr Halvorsen.

-He almost had to bend double to get in the front door to Ann Hathaway’s Cottage!

Mrs Halvorsen laughs as she recalls her husband’s discomfort.

-What we found out, continues Mr Halvorsen, was that in those times people were a whole lot shorter than they are now, by anything up to a foot. That explains the size of the houses. And I’m only six-foot-two!

In one of Stratford’s many shops selling Shakespeare souvenirs, the Halvorsens bought a cotton table-cloth  printed with scenes and quotations from the most famous plays.

-We use it for when we drink tea, Mrs Halvorsen confides. It makes for a sort of old English atmosphere. It brings it all back to us.

As part of  ‘Shakespeare Country’ the Halvorsens spent the evening watching The Royal Shakespeare Company perform ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

-That night was the highlight of our trip, enthuses Mr Halvorsen. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.

-And heard! adds Mrs Halvorsen.

-And heard, her husband agrees. The way those actors spoke those words… Shakespeare really is the English language at its best. There’s no more beautiful language in the world.

-And Eric of course has a little Norwegian, from his father.

-I don’t get a chance to speak it very often, though. But this – this was something else…

Asked if they would like to return some day, Mr Halvorsen does not hesitate.

-Oh yes, no question about it!

Mrs Halvorsen has a particular reason to want to revisit ‘Shakespeare Country’. She gets a dreamy look in her eyes.

-I always wanted to see ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Unfortunately it wasn’t showing this time. But that’s what I’d really go for. ‘Romeo and Juliet’…

SHAKESPEARE? WELL, HE’S NOT ALL HE’S CRACKED UP TO BE, IS HE…?

“The works of William Shakespeare – borrowed as they are and externally, like mosaics, artificially fitted together piecemeal from bits invented for the occasion – have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry.”

(Leo Tolstoy)

“Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault”

(Samuel Johnson)

 “…inferior and muddled”

(T S Eliot)

 “…a wordsmith rather than a poet”

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

 “I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and secondhandedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.”

(George Bernard Shaw)

“The divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world”

(Henry James)

 “…forced humour, far fetch’d conceit, and unnatural hyperbole.”

 (Oliver Goldsmith)

 “The great poems [of the past], Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of Democracy”

(Walt Whitman)

 “…the prolixity and repetitiveness in many of the plays, […] the intrusion of vulgarity and waste motion into even major texts (how many of us have ever seen a production of Othello which includes the wretched exchanges with the Clown?) How much there is in the comedies which is rancid and verbally witty rather than funny in any real sense.”

(George Steiner)

YES, BUT WHO WAS HE REALLY?

Shakespeare was born and died on the same day of the month, 23 April.

23 + 23 = 46.

The King James version of the Bible appeared in 1611, when Shakespeare was 46 years old.

In Psalm 46 in the Authorised Version, the 46th word from the beginning is ‘shake’ and the 46th word from the end is ‘spear’.

In this not uncommon spelling of the Bard’s name, ‘Shakespear’,  there are 4 vowels and 6 consonants.

46 + 46 = 92. In Elizabethan reversed cipher (Z=1, Y=2……B=23, A=24) the number 92 is the equivalent of ‘Bacon’.

Francis Bacon was overall editor of the Authorised Version, with 47 translators working under his direction.

47 – 1 = 46.

Again in Psalm 46, the number of words between ‘shake’ and ‘spear’ is 111.  This number is the equivalent of ‘F. Bacon’ in reversed cipher.

The total number of words in Psalm 46 is 203, i.e. 46 + 111 + 46.

203 can also be expressed 100 + 103.

In Elizabethan simple cipher (A=1, B=2……Y=23, Z=24) 100 is the equivalent of ‘Francis Bacon’ and 103 is ‘Shakespeare’.

I.e. Francis Bacon was William Shakespeare.

Or was he…?

Modern technology provides us with a sure-fire method of determining once and for all the authorship of literary texts.

Using powerful computers, the average number of letters per word in an author’s work can be exactly calculated.

The average for the works of William Shakespeare was found to be 4.242.

There is only one other writer whose works show exactly the same average, down to three decimal places, as Shakespeare’s.

That writer is NOT Francis Bacon.

It is Jackie Collins.

Is Miss Collins….?

(With grateful acknowledgement to WF & ES Friedman: The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined [CUP, Cambridge 1957] and G Phillips & M Keatman: The Shakespeare Conspiracy  [Century, London 1994])

Det här är nog första gången jag lagt upp en panelutställning på Pressylta. Det hände sig så att vännen och kollegan Frank Perry och jag fick i uppdrag av Barbican Arts Centre att write and conceive, som det heter, just en sådan utställning med anledning av festivalen “Everybody’s Shakespeare” som ägde rum oktober-november 1994. Vi hade nämligen året innan satt ihop en panelutställning för den stora nordiska kulturfestivalen på Barbican, “Tender is the North”, som väckte en hel del uppmärksamhet.

Jag ska alltså lägga upp de huvudsakliga textpanelerna, för själva designen finns tyvärr inte kvar, och börjar med introduktionen, en slags pocket history…

WHOSE SHAKESPEARE?

Hold a NatWest Servicecard up to the light and a solemn face, set in a silver seal, suddenly appears in the bottom right hand corner. The wispy beard, the receding hairline: it’s a face we recognize at once.

(more…)

(1) På tal om branding… CNN publicerar en artikel som spekulerar hur Ku Klux Klan skulle kunna förbättra sitt varumärke (via Gawker).

(2) Att få en hurlingklubba i snytet.

(3) Mesost.

De åtta kortlistade finalisterna som tävlar om att designa Storbritanninens paviljong i Milano nästa år har just fått sina förslag offentliggjorda här (skrålla ner) fast, som vanligt i dessa sammanhang, under anonymitet. Jag kan därför inte berätta vilken av dem jag varit med och jobbat på, minst två dar i veckan, under de senaste månaderna. Utom att det är det bästa förslaget, förstås.

Jag har däremot inte lyckats googla ut om Sverige kommer att ha någon paviljong…

Wally Olins dog rätt nyligen. Han är engelsmannen som på sextiotalet mer eller mindre uppfann idén om branding och corporate identity (och tittar man på fotot på honom i den länkade runan så fattar man ju det med en gång…).

Branding är egentligen inte så mycket en utlöpare från PR- och reklamvärlden som den är en gren av retoriken. För otroligt dyra pengar totar man ihop en blandning av haktappande självklarheter och nära nog utomjordiskt skitprat. Nice work if you can get it.

Nå, en liten men betydelsefull del av brandingen är the mission statement. Dessa kan vara lyckade, och de kan vara mindre lyckade. GAIS’ hör ju till den förra kategorin: “Stil, klass och tradition sedan 1894”. En mindre lyckad fick jag syn på idag, på en skåpbil. En mer än lovligt snobbig vinhandlare som heter Bibendum har detta MS: “Re-thinking wine-drinking since 1982”.

Låt oss se nu… Öppnar flaskan. Gluggar ut ett glas. Dricker glaset. Blir humoristisk. Kapsejsar. Somnar. And that’s it… Vad i hela friden är det man behöver ta under omprövning…?! I trettiotvå år…??!!

Var och en av oss skulle ju kunna sätta på oss våra runda glasögon, våra trademark bow-ties, våra färgglada strumpor, och komma på något bättre. “Bibendum – wine for the better class of alkie”, till exempel.

Jesse Winchester, som har gått och dött vid 69 års ålder, kommer för evigt att förknippas med ordet bittersweet. Det är väl en ganska rättvis beskrivning, egentligen, om man lyssnar på hans sånger, och hans sätt att framföra dem. Bitterljuv är ju ofta bara ett annat sätt att säga sentimental, en känslosamhet helt renons på ironier: “…if we’re treading on thin ice / then we might as well dance“… och sånt…

Men anledningen till detta är egentligen mer bitter än ljuv: att hans tidiga löfte, i alla fall vad gäller berömmelsen, aldrig kunde infrias. Han levde som draft dodger i Kanada och kunde alltså inte turnera i USA förrän Carters amnesti. Det var för sent, han fick aldrig det stora genombrott han annars säkert skulle fått. Och när han väl kunde turnera i sitt hemland kändes det heller inte rätt, enligt vad runan berättar.

Amerikanska desertörers och draft dodgers förhållande till sitt hemland var en komplicerad och vemodig aspekt av deras exil. Larry T, som deserterade från Tyskland, integrerade sig snabbt och så gott som hundraprocentigt i det svenska samhället. Men en gång åkte han till Kanada och promenerade över gränsen några kilometer, bara för att kunna säga sig ha varit hemma igen, en slags långfingersalut till de omständigheter som format hans liv.

Stevie M deserterade från Vietnam, via Japan, och lärde sig antagligen inte mer än tretton-fjorton svenska ord allt som allt. Heroinet blev ett substitut för ett hemland han saknade vilt och vårdslöst, så mycket mer för att han aldrig kunde åka tillbaka, amnestier eller ej. Han kom från en liten skithåla i Tennessee där man satt ett pris på hans huvud, bokstavligen, för att han vanärat dem. Stevie var den enda människa jag nånsin känt som det var skottpengar på.

Jesse Winchester spelade en gång på Dingwalls i Camden Town, av alla ställen, det var mitten av 1970-talet. Niema, som jag då bodde hos, kände honom väl och efteråt åkte vi hem och lyssnade på Firesign Theatre hela natten. Jesse W hade aldrig hört dem, blev helt begeistrad, och jag förstår liksom varför: något mer “amerikanskt” och”samtida/sjuttiotal” än Firesign Theatre får man väl leta efter. Han kände sig hemma.