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Hoax Shakespeare play turned out to be real after all

Started by Cain, March 16, 2010, 03:28:09 PM

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Cain

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7063213.ece

QuoteIn 1727 an enterprising lawyer and writer of pantomimes with ambitions to become a leading figure in the theatre staged his greatest coup: a lost original play by William Shakespeare.

The London Journal greeted Lewis Theobald's production ecstatically, exclaiming: "The good old Master of the English Drama is by a kind of Miracle recall'd from his Grave, and given to us once again."

However, for most of the three centuries since its debut, Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers has been ridiculed as a hoax or just disregarded.

Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare, one of the best regarded scholarly editions of Shakespeare's plays, published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.

Double the fun: the story ends with a rape victim marrying her attacker, so the potential for values dissonance and fandumb related stupidity is at an all time high.

Elder Iptuous

from the article, it sounds like they are claiming it to be a play that Shakespeare kinda helped with rather than one that was entirely his own endeavor.
it also makes it seem that they are accepting this into the cannon because it 'really sounds like something he would write'....
article doesn't really give compelling evidence for the claim.

but, never the less,  'rape victim falling in love with aggressor' as an Authorized™ cultural romantic meme joining the likes of 'star crossed lovers' is awesome...
:lulz:

MMIX

"An interrupted marriage, a series of mad scenes and a near-rape add spice. " Sounds like just another run of the mill Mills & Boon / Harlequin women's novel . . . If you think that 'juxtarape' isn't already one of the most powerful romantic memes you obviously don't read a lot of traditional chick-lit


I'm not sure how I feel about them padding out Shakespeare canon with stuff he might have had a hand in writing bits of, but my first thought is that it feels very contemporary, its sooo 21stC
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

Cain

I don't read any chick-lit.  Mary Wollenscraft doesn't count as a chick-lit author, right?  Actually, that does make a lot of sense, since Twilight is about the inappropriate stalking of a teenage girl by a murderous, hundred year old corpse and is THE GREATEST ROMANTIC STORY OF OUR TIME, so that rape would be a common theme is not entirely unexpected.

However, the curiously prudish literary critics in the press will lilkely put their reading glasses on and strongly condemn Shakespeare for his retrograde attitude, because living in the 16th century is no excuse, ever.  And then more historically aware critics will mock them.  And then flamewars will begin in the comments.

And yeah, the whole thing seems a little suspect, but without actually seeing the evidence that Arden Shakespeare have, its really hard to say what's going on with this.