1900’s

The Shakespeariad: A Dramatic Epos

Souvenir of the Tercentary of Shakespeare’s Death Day, April 23rd, 1916
Denton J. Snider
St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1916

This sprawling, surreal verse novel (400+ pp.) seems to be modeled in part on Spenser’s allegorical Faerie Queene, as well as the symbolic geography of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Characters from a myriad of Shakespeare’s plays mix and mingle with each other, as well as Shakespeare himself, Pandora, and more mysterious figures such as the Psychagogue and the Scholarch, in places such as “the ghost-haunted Palace of Hamlet” and “the spirit-thronged Temple of Prospero.” Shakespeare himself first appears in propria persona about half-way through the epic, when he turns up as a tourist in Venice, lovesick for “the Dark Lady.” Visiting Venice repeatedly, Shakespeare sets in motion a translatio imperii of “poesy’s world-empire” from Venice to England to America. His “peopled creation” will give way to a “higher efflorescence,” a “limitless future,” in the “coming Seculum” of America, which he compares to Atlantis. The “Magic City” of “Shakespearopolis,” marred by racial bigotry and the subjugation of women, will give way to “Prosperopolis,” the city founded by Prospero, the first American.–PG

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1900's Not of an Age Sanders - Woolf

The Gloss of Youth

An Imaginary Episode in the Lives of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher
Horace Howard Furness Jr.
Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1920

Furness’s short play is a window into Shakespeare’s lodgings in London around 1613, with scenes that feel both intimate and authentic. First, Shakespeare despairs that the public only likes comedy, not the histories and tragedies he values, and his real-life collaborator John Fletcher cajoles him into continuing work. Next the landlord’s daughter and grand-daughter visit, bringing marchpane and asking for help from their long-time friend in settling a (historical) family dispute. Finally, two neighborhood youths Jack and Noll pay a call, and their admiration for the tragedies and histories restore Shakespeare’s hope. He encourages them in turn in their ambitions to be poet and king respectively. The authentic tone gives way and we learn the youths’ last names: Milton and Cromwell. However, this delightful Shakespeare is the kind of man who many would like for a collaborator, neighbor or mentor. -CP

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1900's Clarke - Furness Gentle Shakespeare

Orlando

Virginia Woolf
London: Hogarth Press, 1928

Shakespeare lurks in the background of Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” as the twin brother of the imagined Judith Shakespeare, of course, but there we view him only as the privileged male, whose genius is allowed to develop in a patriarchal society. In Orlando, we catch glimpses of a more sympathetic Shakespeare during the period when Orlando, now male, inhabits Elizabethan England. Woolf has Robert Greene guffaw to think that Shakespeare might have any staying power, but Woolf sees him as one who, like Orlando, can understand male and female emotion equally well. -VH

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1900's Rare Talent Sanders - Woolf

Shakespeare in Wall Street

Edward Henry Warren
Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1929

Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare, and various characters from his plays get involved in the stock market in 1929 New York. That volatile date may make this piece interesting to students of economic history, but Warren, a Harvard lawyer, creates a Shakespeare who is nothing more than a foil in a comedy of human errors.

1900's Not of an Age Sanders - Woolf

Clipt Wings

William R. Leigh
New York: Thornton W. Allen, 1930

Leigh is an author with an ax to grind. In the preface, he inveighs against Shakespeare as “a boor with the mind of a scullion, who could not, by the most fantastic attribution, have written anything of literary or dramatic stature, anything worth performance or publication in his own or any other age.” Described by one reviewer as “loony,” the play introduces William Shaxper of Stratford as an illiterate bumpkin, willing to let Francis Bacon hide behind his name. Bacon, it turns out, is Queen Elizabeth’s son, as is William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The sibling rivalry turns murderous and Queen Elizabeth is killed. The simpleton Shakespeare is paid off and Bacon goes on writing plays. But when Shakespeare later becomes troublesome, Ben Jonson and other playwrights feel no remorse at poisoning him. –VH

1900's Greatness Thrust Upon Him Leigh - Rowlands

The Coiner

Rudyard Kipling
First published in Limits and Renewals
London: Macmillan, 1932

After a visit to Bermuda in 1894, Kipling developed a theory that Shakespeare may have gotten the idea for The Tempest from stories of castaways told by sailors in London pubs. In this poem, Shakespeare, the playwright on the lookout for a good yarn, gives food and drink to a band of seamen in return for their wild stories, which become the inspiration for his play (The Tempest, we presume). He bids them farewell, telling them he is a “coiner” who will “turn your lead pieces to metal as rare / As shall fill him this globe, and leave something to spare.” —VH

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1900's Gaiman - Kipling Upon the Boards

Proofs of Holy Writ

Rudyard Kipling
First published in Strand Magazine, April 1934

A fanciful scene in which Kipling imagines Shakespeare consulted by the translators of the magisterial King James Bible. Set in 1610 or 1611, it opens with Shakespeare sitting with his old friend Ben Jonson in his garden at Stratford-upon-Avon. When a messenger delivers proof pages of chapter 60 of Isaiah for Shakespeare’s review, the two argue about the best way to express the sense of the text, line by line, with Jonson exhibiting his learning and Shakespeare showing his humanity. Jonson ultimately admits defeat—but only when he is sure Shakespeare has dozed off. The title comes from Othello, III.3. —VH

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1900's Gaiman - Kipling Gentle Shakespeare

No Bed for Bacon

Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon
London: Michael Joseph, 1941

In an anticipation of the plot of the film Shakespeare in Love, Lady Viola Compton disguises herself as a boy, becomes a player, and falls in love with Shakespeare. In this version of history, the fire at the Globe theatre is started deliberately by the jealous Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, and the book ends with the Essex rebellion and the first night of Twelfth Night at Court; Francises Drake and Bacon also appear, the latter scheming to acquire a bed that the Queen has slept in (hence the title). The relentlessly hearty prose and the running joke about Shakespeare’s inability to spell his own name may not be to the taste of every reader. —SJJ

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1900's Akenside - Burgess Shakespeare in Love

Nightfall

Arthur C. Clarke
First published in King’s College Review, 1947
Collected in Reach for Tomorrow (1956) as “The Curse”

Clarke wrote this story while stationed near Stratford-upon-Avon, training RAF radio mechanics after the war. Shakespeare himself does not appear, though the warning on his gravestone and mankind’s destruction are strangely connected in this short, grim story of the end of the world.

1900's Breaking Bard Clarke - Furness

Shakes vs. Shav

A puppet show
George Bernard Shaw
London: Constable & Co., 1950

George Bernard Shaw, the man who coined the word “bardolatry” to describe—and criticize–our excessive fascination with Shakespeare, was not above bringing Shakespeare into his fiction. Here, in his last dramatic work, Shaw pits himself against the Bard in a brief puppet show written for the Lanchester Marionettes in Malvern in 1949. In ludicrous verbal sparring, the two playwrights debate the purpose of drama and their own relative literary worth until Shakespeare finally takes it upon himself to “put out the light.”

Shaw on Shakespeare: “I am convinced that he was very like myself. In fact, if I had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse & given Shakespear [sic] a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans put together.” —VH

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1900's Rare Talent Sanders - Woolf