Shakespeare’s Will, a talk by David Kastan

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A lecture by renowned Shakespearean and Yale Professor Kastan reflecting on the materials in the 'By Me William Shakespeare' exhibition.
Sunday 14 February 2016
Part of the King’s Shakespeare Festival: What You Will

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Skip to 8:30 -- that is when the lecture begins.

michaelmiller

Good to hear someone stating the truth “there is no proof of anything from the man from Stratford, everyone is just guessing”. But the Stratfordians would love for you to believe them.

dcpsolutions

Kastan's response to the first questioner's question (regarding why we have nothing written about the personal life of the Stratford "Shakspere" during his lifetime and in the years following his death) is entirely unsatisfactory and, in fact, disingenuous. Kastan's excuse for this glaring lack is that playwrights in the Early Modern period were akin to the screenwriters of today's movies—the implicaiton being that they were for all practical purposes anonymous. (Incidentally, equating Elizabethan playwrights with today's screenwriters is a classic example of the Historical Fallacy.) There are two problems with Kastan's explanation. *First, * "Shake-speare" (the literary figure) was not just a playwright. In fact, the earliest literary output of his that was published during the lifetime of the Stratford "Shakspere" were the two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lucrece" (1594), and later, the Sonnets (1609). So, the literary "Shake-speare" was initially a poet, and would have been known as such by his contemporaries from these three published works, if not by anything else of a literary nature (such as the plays). If the Stratford "Shakspere" was the author of these literary works, he would have received at least some attention during his lifetime, and would have been mentioned in some document as a literary figure. *Second, * other poet-playwrights who were contemporaries of the Stratford "Shakspere", such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, have well-documented lives. The Scottish poet William Drummond wrote extensively in his diary about Ben Jonson when the latter spent Christmas with him in 1618 at Hawthornden Castle, and the two men kept up an ongoing correspondence thereafter. Similarly, there is a extant manuscript of a document by one of Elizabeth I's spies, Richard Baines, accusing Marlowe of endorsing atheism and homosexuality. These are just some of the many documented references to Elizabethan playwrights by their contemporaries. So, it is patently false that playwrights in Elizabethan and Jacobean England were behind-the-scenes figures, largely anonymous and unknown to the public, about whom nothing was written during their lifetimes. The plain fact is that the Stratford "Shakspere" was not a literary figure of any sort and was in fact of no public interest whatsoever, and that is the reason why so little is known about his personal life.

MichaelMendis