A Consideration Of The Literary Development of Writers And The Psychological Lives Of Artists In General.
I am a literary writer and creative artist by profession. This has been my lifelong pursuit and it is a field in which I have a substantial experience.
My particular area of interest lies in the expressed lives of artists and writers. In recent years I have written a unified fictional cycle of twelve literary novels on this subject as it relates to the development of Modernism throughout the 20th Century. Collectively this work constitutes an extensive new theory of a 20th Century Modernist Renaissance which has been more important to the development of mankind than the Italian Renaissance of circa 1500.
It is possible that my expertise and experience in the field of the expressed lives of creative artists is unsurpassed. Certainly my interest and research in the field has thus far lasted several decades and, in the course of my passing research, is what has led to my discovery of the Shakespeare-X Message.
It seems to me that this discovery alone reasonably supports my claim to some expertise in the field. The Shakespeare-X Message was not uncovered by accident. It was uncovered by literary and psychological analysis of the artist Christopher Marlowe.
This is not at all an insignificant accomplishment, nor a credential lacking in credibility, especially when one considers that many giants of literature, such as Charles Dickens, and even Goethe himself, failed to achieve it, Goethe while being an expert literary admirer of both Shakespeare and Marlowe, and a man of towering intellect.
Regarding The Literary Development Of Writers:
It is my view that the textual evidence of the attributed contemporaneous plays and poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare quite clearly indicates that Marlowe is Shakespeare as a developing young writer who has not yet reached a maturity of literary style or expression.
This is a process of development I have witnessed in my own literary work as it has matured, and it is visible in the work of virtually all other writers in the entire history of literature. All writers pass through this developmental process, but inside the maturation process the writer is quite visible as the same writer, to those with the literary sensibility to see it.
There are a great many arguments which can be made for this proposition in the case of Shakespeare-Marlowe, but let me here confine myself to a single fundamental one:
The comparison of the works of late Marlowe to those of early Shakespeare clearly reveal a writer in a gradual literary maturing process. Furthermore, comparison of Marlowe’s early thematic concerns and dramatic sensibility with those of Shakespeare’s later thematic concerns and dramatic sensibility show Shakespeare as the very same writer at a more mature stage of development. It is the same man with the same interests and the same natural talent, but with a more skillful literary technique.
For each writer literary style evolves over time, but fundamental thematic interests remain more or less constant and related over the course of a lifetime. This is because they are at the core of a writer’s very being and character. This is why it is often said that every serious writer only ever writes (variations of) the same book over and over throughout the course of a life.
This is true of every major writer, from Proust to Tolstoy, from Austen to Dickens. In literary criticism the matter of thematic obsession is often subsumed into literary style, but in fact it is something much deeper. In great writers the oeuvre is always coherent.
The writer Shakespeare-Marlowe is no different in this, as examination of the consistent developing and maturing themes of his works under both names clearly displays.
As both Marlowe and Shakespeare, he is writing upon the same handful of fundamental thematic obsessions. This reflects the unity of personality extant in every individual writer’s being, and also in his complete oeuvre The greater a writer is as an artist, the more this can generally be seen to be true. This is because great writers express themselves from the essential core of their being.
Thus we find many similarities in theme, subject and style are constantly manifest throughout the works of both Marlowe and Shakespeare. Just as we would expect from one individual writer.
In a number of cases in the plays of Shakespeare there is even an actual revisiting of the material and characters of earlier Marlowe plays and poems, as seen in the cases of Doctor Faustus and The Tempest; The Jew Of Malta and The Merchant of Venice; Edward II and Richard II; Dido Queen of Carthage and Antony and Cleopatra; Macbeth and Dr Faustus, Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis.
This is not something that is in any way unusual for an individual writer to do, in fact it is characteristic of almost all great writers as they journey through a long and prolific career. They reflect on their juvenile work and undertake it again, now using their mature and superior literary skills. They do this because they are aware they can now redo it better, that it was a good idea which went not fully realized in their past attempt.
Regarding The Psychological Drives Of The Creative Artist And Its Visible Manifestations
In my own literary writing, my particular subject, in which I possess a substantial expertise, is the character, personality, psychology and expressed lives of writers and artists. This has been a lifelong interest which has endured for decades, and my research into the subject of the artistic personality and the expressed lives of artists of accomplishment has spanned this entire period.
It is my opinion that from the known and accepted historical record, Marlowe evidences the imaginative artistic character and temperament at all times, and the biographical record shows that he lived a life in keeping with the vagaries of this, (an expansive, adventurous, searching life / existing in a bohemian-intellectual-theatrical milieu / spying missions for the crown / a street murder in a fight / imprisoned for the crime of counterfeiting coinage / political persecution for atheism-heresy / mortally threatening political intrigue / association with possible revolutionary seditionaries / enforced exile etc etc).
The known biographical facts of the life of the actor William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon never show any manifestation of the expressive drives and needs of the extraordinarily imaginative artistic psychology. Rather they show a cautious and petty man of little adventurous nature or expressiveness. The historical record indicates that the actor William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon lived a life unbearably banal for a wildly imaginative individual, as the person who wrote the Shakespeare plays most certainly was.
In fact many of the known biographical facts of the life of the actor William Shakespeare are so strategically cautious as to be diametrically opposed to the artistic personality and psychology, as it is evidenced in the lives of all artists throughout all time. And particularly of artists of stature.
There are a great many examples and complexities of this, far too many to examine here, and so let me simply confine myself to stating baldly that no great artist has ever retired from the creation of his art at age 49 in order to become a provincial businessman in common goods such as wool or malt. In this claim the actor William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is utterly singular in the entire history of art, literature and musical composition.
It is simply not in the artist’s nature, nor in the nature of the psychological necessities which drive the creation of greatness in any field of artistic expression. Not for Michelangelo nor DaVinci, not for Beethoven nor Mozart, not for Bach nor Goethe, not for Rembrandt nor Goya nor for any artist of extraordinary achievement.
People such as these do not create for any other reason than that they must. They do not retire from their art to concern themselves with routine daily commerce in order to make more money. To retire from their art is to retire from their life, so central is it to their being.
The simple reason for this is that this is how greatness is achieved in art, only by the direct expression of the essential core of an artist’s being. It is never an accidental thing, never a mere hobby which can be put aside at will. The idea that creation can be so easily divorced from the life of an artist is close to absurd, and indicates little understanding of the reality of an artist’s inner life.
In fact rather than retire, artists work harder as death approaches and time is seen to be running out while they are at the peak of their artistic expertise, which expertise has taken them a lifelong journey of practice, discipline and commitment to attain. They live and die as the great artists they are, and the historical record consistently shows this.
Certainly this is no less true for the man standing at the absolute pinnacle of human artistic achievement, the dramatist and poet Shakespeare-Marlowe.
