RogueBelle

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 95, c. 1590

Thomas Wyatt, c. 1530

(Source: real-tudor-confessions, via jesatria)

Thomas Wyatt, c. 1530-1535

Forbidden love, callous murders, frantic bids for power, innocence shattered, impulsive actions with disastrous consequences, a rotten world falling to pieces at the slightest touch — is this a 21st century fantasy series, or a 17th century tragedy? Both, as it turns out — ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Game of Thrones both explore some of the darkest twists of the human heart and the most depraved and desperate actions of our minds. The titillation of watching such egregious violations of societal taboos is as strong now as it was four hundred years ago. We’ve assembled a list of some of the greatest similarities between the shocking HBO series and John Ford’s equally astonishing play.

—from the American Shakespeare Center

One of the greatest challenges for a modern historian is to remove the filter of Romanticism and Victoriana when we look backwards through time. Modern society has inherited a lot of inaccurate notions about the pre-Industrial world from our more immediate forebears, creating an assumption that the medieval and early modern worlds shared the same values, the same culture, the same societal structures, the same goals as the Victorian world – an assumption that is, in many ways, far off the mark. To achieve greater understanding of anything early modern, a historian – professional or recreational – must first clear her eyes of the haze which the nineteenth century imposed on them.

Lifting this veil is, to my reading of it, the major triumph of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Both history and historiography, this book examines the case both for and against Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to his name – and comes down, quite definitively, on the side of Shakespeare.

[…] The final chapter of Contested Will ought to hammer home, once and for all, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, setting the matter entirely to rest. Except, as Shapiro ably points out, there is no arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Any evidence just gets twisted to support the idea of a vast cover-up. Nonetheless, Shapiro’s book is a veritable armory of weapons, both offensive and defensive, for the Shakespearean set. What’s more, he delivers all of his information with felicity and wit; the book is a wonderful read as well as an intellectual triumph. I highly recommend it to anyone with a dog in this fight, as it were, but also to anyone who is simply interested in writing and in how ideas about it have evolved over time. Shapiro provides us not only with a rousing defense of Shakespeare, but also a valuable peek through the veils of time, rolling back our assumptions and laying bare the reality, insofar as it is knowable.

And I already got trolled by my first Oxfordian! I call that a win, really.

renkris:

Heironimo needes a hobbie.

(Source: poorshadowsofelysium, via renkris-deactivated20130506)