Looking for William
Professor Duncan Salkeld. ‘ Shakespeare’s World: playhouses, actors and rivals’.
It was a good idea for the first lecture in the Society’s Shakespeare day, Looking for William, to be about the context of his life; when he lived and where he worked. Professor Salkeld gave a most enthusiastic and entertaining presentation with a plethora of interesting slides to help make his points.
After a useful introduction defining Shakespeare as partly an Elizabethan, partly Jacobean, we were plunged into Elizabethan London with several maps showing where Shakespeare lived and worked. Though he is always associated with the Globe on the South Bank, his earlier plays would have been performed at Shoreditch. We know more about these theatres since the excavation of the Rose, a rival theatre to the Globe, of which venture interesting slides were shown.
But even more important than the buildings were the actors and their organisation which were compared to football teams. Rival companies each had their own (aristocratic) patron. Shakespeare was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men though he also had as a Patron the Earl of Southampton. He had to take care that he did not get sucked into the fighting between factions and the politics that surrounded them which are often hinted at in the plays.
We do know a little about, and even have pictures of, some of the leading actors, Richard Burbage, the creator of many of Shakespeare’s heroes, Will Kemp, the fool, and Edward Alleyn of the rival company, the Lord Admiral’s Men.
Finally, we looked at the Props and Staging which showed what a collaborative venture putting on a play was.
Professor Salkeld also managed to cram into a most informative hour a little about the publication history of the plays. In his view the 1st Folio might not be the 1st edition of many of the plays, but it is undoubtedly the soundest. And as to the fundamental question of who wrote the plays, he had no doubts that their author was William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. His evidence was a certificate of Shakespeare’s father showing as witnesses the names of characters Shakespeare introduced into Henry V.
Professor Duncan Salkeld. ‘ Murder He Wrote: Arden of Faversham – whodunnit?’
For his second talk Professor Salkeld had the brilliant idea of presenting a talk on the first murder mystery as a whodunit i.e. who wrote it. Arden of Faversham is an anonymous play published in 1592 based on a true story of a murder. The most likely writers are Thomas Kyd or Shakespeare, either as the sole author or in collaboration. So we were given a case study in how to attribute unattributed works of literature.
Firstly, you look for recurring phrases which would indicate a single writer. Examples occurring frequently here are ‘Come, let’s go’ ‘Zounds. I pray now’ ‘I pray thee’. Then you look for the suspected author’s fingerprints – words and phrases particularly associated with his works. There are some of Kyd’s, it is true, but more of Shakespeare’s. In particular the verb ‘to ear’ is found only in Shakespeare. There is also an account in the play of the deer myth. Shakespeare was accused in his youth of poaching deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate at Charlecote.. So Professor Salkeld takes the view that Shaspeare was the author of Arden of Faversham though there might have been some collaboration. An entertaining, indeed, riveting, investigation.
Our thanks to Richard Wilby for the above notes on Prof. Salkeld’s talks on June 15, 2024.