www.popularmechanics.com: In the annals of William Shakespeare’s legacy, a twist has emerged that’s practically as dramatic as any of the Bard’s plays: the real “Shakespeare” behind a centuries-old family document has been revealed ... and it’s not the man we expected.
3 comments:
The title of this article is definitely misleading. Every time I see an article about Shakespeare, I know there is a high likelihood it will be speculating about his identity. Despite this, it was pretty interesting to learn about Joan Shakespeare, as I had never heard of her. I wish there were more surviving documents written by her. With the smallest bit of her writing revealing that she held a religious view that was deemed dangerous in this time, I wonder what other ideas she could contribute. In the event more of her written work comes out, I think she could provide a lot of valuable information about people that went against the grain. When studying these untold historical stories, it is admirable the amount of information historians are able to glean from such little information. In a way, this can inspire how we read plays: ensuring that we know why each word was chosen.
The title of this article is really dramatic in the sense that it only wants to attract more audience, rather than actually conveying the context. After reading the whole article, I still feel confused about J.Shakespeare since we don’t have many records of her in history. I discovered that I haven’t really looked into Shakespeare’s life after spending most of my high school literature time reading his plays. It really is a mystery to people when looking into his whole life, as if Shakespeare were not a single person. We also have a writer in Chinese literature who created some of the best contemporary literature, and he constantly changed his name for his work to avoid being accused politically or getting himself into trouble. I feel like many writers would think in the same way and use different methods to hide their true identity. Without a high social expectation from their loyal readers and audience, the creation process can be freer. With the mystery about Joan Shakespeare, I feel the need to find out more about her after reading Virginia Woolf’s words. She must be the hidden figure behind a lot of what happened to the Shakespeare family.
The title of this article is provocative and intriguing to say the least, however I found that the actual “discovery” mentioned may be historically fascinating, but doesn’t seem to impact a lot of what we know about Shakespeare and our modern interpretations of his works. First of all, the “discovery” surrounds the mystery of William Shakespeare’s family history with their religious beliefs in Catholicism versus the enforced Protestant institutions of the time. The debates surround whether or not the letter confirming the “secrecy” of the family’s relationship or practice to Catholicism were written by his sister or father. However, given this source “discovery” is an archival contingency and not an archeological find, not much of the “mystery” surrounding this has actually been confirmed objectively. Overall, I think the fact that we don’t know much about the man William Shakespeare is intriguing with the lack of personal documents or manuscripts he left behind, but I think it also serves to show the importance of his work itself standing alone. It’s already commonly accepted in academia that Shakespeare didn’t work alone, and even debates on how much of the credit should be given to this singular man, and I think it may be best we know less as to acknowledge that fact for art is collaborative and idealizing one figure when we already know about the collaborative nature of Shakespeare can be harmful in disregarding that notion.
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