William Shakespeare
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 394
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"Between 1586 and 1592 we lose all traces of Shakespeare. We know only that the must have been an active member of a company of players, that of the Earl of Leicester's, which owned the Blackfriars and afterward the Globe theatre. it has also been proved by several passages in contemporary writings that partly as actor and partly as adaptor of older plays, he had, at the age of twenty-eight, made a certain name for himself and had therefore become the object of envy and hatred. While in his youth Shakespeare had to adapt or retouch the plays of other dramatists, in later life he sometimes collaborated with younger men; and the company to which Shakespeare had attached himself and in which he had already attracted notice as a promising poet would most likely have employed him to revise and refurbish the older pieces of the reportory. In presenting this collection of disputed plays by Shakespeare, we are brought face to face with the problem of whether work has been correctly or falsely attributed to this poet. In dealing with these so-called doubtful plays, we are 'wandering about in the worlds not realized," tantalized by suspicious tradition. It seems likely that before Shakespeare began writing his mature works he spent some years of strenuous activity as an apprentice playwright for the company of players he had joined. In this inchoate period, he was probably employed in revising earlier compositions or writing new ones for the stage, and at the same time he also collaborated with other dramatists-- among them John Fletcher and William Rowley-- in the preparation of old and new plays for his acting company. Furthermore, the development of Shakespeare's art took place first within dramatic conventions established by lest gifted authors. The first plays from his hand show him mainly concerned with perfecting his craft-- so much so that the earliest works connected with his name have sometimes been regarded as the reshaping of performance by his own company of plays originally written by other hands. The significant question we have to ask ourselves, therefore, is, Is the play under consideration, even though a little or obscure work, a work of merit that is written by or retouched by Shakespeare's hand? Is it a play on which he engrafted fresh scenes of incontestable mastery and poetic beauty. Internal evidence has been adduced for the Shakespearean authorship of some of these apocryphal plays. According to careful investigation by Kenneth Muir and other critics, the evidence includes resemblances in versification, in vocabulary, in treatment of similar themes, in imagery, and especially in the use of the same image clusters. The presence if the same image clusters in the disputed plays and their absence in the work of rival dramatists would seem to go far toward establishing if not Shakespeare's sole authorship of a doubtful play or scene at least his hand in writing it." -Publisher.