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Literature: Shakespeare and his plays

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In his recent biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson quotes an anti-Stratfordian comment that contemporary documents never describe Shakespeare as an author. Bryson responds: “That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605 – that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be – Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages of the sonnets and the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Mere in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groat’s-Worth of Wit. John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil.”

Bryson’s conclusion: “The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 9, 2008 at 9:21 am

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Literature: Shakespeare and his plays

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