Sanders – Woolf

1601: Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors

Mark Twain
Cincinnati: Imprinted by Ye Puritan Press at Ye Sign of Ye Jolly Virgin, 1601 [1880]
120 copies issued; none sold.

Twain, who doubted Shakespeare’s authorship elsewhere, portrays “Mr. Shaxpur” as an unsavory fellow engaged in bawdy conversation with Queen Elizabeth, Ben Jonson, and Sir Walter Raleigh, among others. Erica Jong, who called the work “deliberately lewd,” appreciated its pornographic spirit: “It delights in stinking up the air of propriety.” The work was not included in Twain’s collected writings until 1990. —VH

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1800's Breaking Bard 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

Coffee with Shakespeare

Stanley Wells
London: Duncan Baird, 2008

Part of a series of “Coffee with…” famous figures from Aristotle to Groucho Marx, this imaginary interview with Shakespeare would have been riveting if the interviewer, renowned Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, had asked Shakespeare what he really wants to know. Instead, he uses this fictional construct to allow us to listen as a charming and sympathetic William Shakespeare answers fairly traditional questions. In the course of the interview, Shakespeare reveals the biographical information and literary accomplishments that scholars have long known and surmised. The interview is divided into themes such as Shakespeare’s education, life at the playhouse, his family life, and his creative process. A nice evening’s read and a painless way to learn more about Shakespeare through a fictional chat with the very approachable Bard himself. –VH

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2000's Not of an Age Sanders - Woolf

The School of Night

Peter Whelan
London: Josef Weinberger Plays, 1992

Shakespeare appears in this play disguised as Tom Stone, an actor and admirer of Christopher Marlowe—but is he, like Marlowe, perhaps also a spy? The action, which takes place in 1592 and 1593, centers around Marlowe, his genius, and his untimely death. It also veers into Marlovian theories of Shakespearian authorship. The School of Night is presented as a secret society of sceptics to which Sir Walter Raleigh, Walsingham, and Marlowe belonged. Tom Stone/Shakespeare’s questions about the group both intrigue Marlowe and raise his suspicions about this actor with pretensions (and talent) to be a worthy rival or perhaps a mouthpiece for Marlowe’s “posthumous” plays. -VH

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1900's Greatness Thrust Upon Him Sanders - Woolf

The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

Oscar Wilde
First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1889

Erskine tells the unnamed first-person narrator about his friend Cyril Graham, who became obsessed with the theory that ‘Mr. W. H.’, the ‘onlie begetter’ of the Sonnets, was boy-actor ‘Willie Hughes’. In order to prove Hughes’s existence, Graham arranges for an impecunious artist to forge a painting of him. After Erskine discovers the deception, Graham kills himself; but refuses, in his suicide note, to abandon his idea, and urges Erskine to prove it. The narrator eagerly adopts the theory, and imagines Hughes travelling to Germany to perform Shakespeare’s work there before being killed in an uprising in Nuremberg. Erskine also becomes persuaded; years later, he too dies and bequeaths the forged painting to the narrator. Coming from Oscar Wilde, this piece is noteworthy for its anti-Shakespeare stance (Wilde was a sometime Shakespeare doubter) as well as its openness about homosexuality. —SJJ

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1800's Sanders - Woolf Shakespeare in Love

Familiar Verses from the Ghost of Willy Shakespeare to Sammy Ireland

George Moutard Woodward
London: Richard White, Piccadilly, 1796

The author, also known as “Mustard George,” was a well-known caricaturist in the late eighteenth century. Those skills are put to use in this brief satire in which the ghost of Shakespeare gives advice to Samuel Ireland, whose son, William Henry Ireland, had been discredited for forging Shakespeare documents earlier in this same year. In a humorous twist near the end, Shakespeare critiques contemporary editors and stage directors, saying he’ll wave judgment and not “pronounce them forg’d,” because so many hands have edited and altered his works over the years “that I make oath, and swear it on the spot, / I scarce know what is mine, and what is not.”—FCR

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1700's Sanders - Woolf Shakespeare's Spirit

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