A.Kirsch: Is the elusiveness of Shakespeare’s life the key ingredient in his greatness?
NO, it is not! Elusiveness is the key ingredient to understanding the unknowability of his biography!
_________________
he brought up the matter of Shakespeare.
He wrote :
.".... the greatest English writer is a biographical blank. Scholars continue to write books about the life of William Shakespeare, but eventually, this boil down to studies of his work or histories of his times. The few scraps of evidence we possess about him are simply too scanty to make him come to life as an individual.
He wrote :
.".... the greatest English writer is a biographical blank. Scholars continue to write books about the life of William Shakespeare, but eventually, this boil down to studies of his work or histories of his times. The few scraps of evidence we possess about him are simply too scanty to make him come to life as an individual.
To some people, this absence is a scandal or irritant, and they try to fill the blank by insisting, irrationally, that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare but someone else [e.g.Edward de Vere] we can know more about.
But to most readers, I suspect,
But to most readers, I suspect,
the unknowability of Shakespeare is a key ingredient in his greatness.
“Others abide by our question. Thou art free,” wrote ->Matthew Arnold in his sonnet on the Bard, and this sense that Shakespeare stays one step ahead of us, always knowing more about life and human nature than we do, fits perfectly with his biographical elusiveness.
Shakespeare, who as a dramatist camouflaged even his literary personality.
The question is whether we learn anything important about this literary self when we get to know its real-life biography. I think we can, but only if we keep in mind that the goal of literary biography is .... to use the life to clarify the factors that shape the work — to show how life and work were both shaped by the same set of problems and drives. Otherwise, we simply reduce writers to celebrities or acquaintances; and don’t we already have more than enough of both?...."
________________________
________________________
Thus it's not the elusiveness [unkowability] of Shakespeare's life as a key ingredient of his greatness but the inability of human imagination [mutating to irrationality] to solve the problem of why the life of the greatest English writer with a substantially larger [unknown] literary oeuvre could not be detected up to now -
_____________________
The solution to the problem is the biography of Christopher Marlowe
.if you knew his complete literary output of other genres [even letters! it can never be reasonably assumed that the man with the most powerful language skills of all times left not a single handwritten source für posterity] it would not be difficult to predict that sooner or later the →final solution [this blog] will be accepted.....
Eventually, mankind will not escape their logic and plausibilities.
.if you knew his complete literary output of other genres [even letters! it can never be reasonably assumed that the man with the most powerful language skills of all times left not a single handwritten source für posterity] it would not be difficult to predict that sooner or later the →final solution [this blog] will be accepted.....
Eventually, mankind will not escape their logic and plausibilities.
