What Does This Change in Authorship Identity Mean To The Works Of Shakespeare?
Christopher Marlowe, wounded child of the angels, you are made immortal with a kiss.
Does It Matter Who Wrote The Plays If They Are The Same Plays?
Yes it does.
More than you might think.
It enriches the plays and opens them to a deeper understanding. Now that we know who the authentic author is, we can resolve the literary intention more fully. I find them even better plays now, when read from a correct and accurate perspective.
The literary work of Shakespeare-Marlowe is a good deal more autobiographical than we have previously understood. The authorial misattribution has made the personal seem impersonal because it could never be related to anything known in the life of the actor William Shakespeare. Nowhere is this more true than in the sonnets, which have long been considered by many to be an autobiographical statement which has somehow become confused.
Now that we know Shakespeare-Marlowe was the authentic writer, and understand his traumatized personal circumstances, the writings of Shakespeare have a new clarity. What has often seemed abstract or confused in the imagined life of the actor William Shakespeare, is now seen in the authentic Shakespeare-Marlowe to be a deeply personal statement.
Now we know the man who wrote them and we understand his life situation as he wrote them, we can understand what he is saying much more clearly.
Before Shakespeare was thought to be a dull provincial businessman and minor actor of small theater parts. A faceless, cautious man who was apparently so forgettable that he was virtually ignored in the contemporary literary commentary of his peers.
But now instead we see that he was known and admired and loved and protected by all with their silence, even by Queen Elizabeth I herself. His famous peers called him the 'Muses darling', clearly a term of affection.
And we now know he was a wild expressive artist going off on spying foreign missions for the Crown, getting himself into a sword fighting duel in which a man was killed, in jail for counterfeiting money, almost expelled from Cambridge University, in serious political trouble as a dissident and seditionary, at home in the world of bohemians and artists and enlightened revolutionaries, faking his own murder and then being thrown completely out of his own country for being too brilliant and wild to handle. He was a man dangerous enough to threaten a government merely by his existence.
Now Shakespeare-Marlowe can be understood as an artist and a bohemian and a fascinating individual who was a great literary genius. A truly remarkable man. Now we see him as he really was. And he really is something. It’s no accident that his plays are this brilliant.
And So When We Read The Plays:
Our new knowledge of the actual man allows us a deeper understanding of the texts. It gives us a new and more accurate context in which to see them. And so we see more clearly. And therefore they are slightly different plays.
This new context sometimes gives the very same text an entirely different and clarified meaning. We understand the turns of the mind of Shakespeare better. And we then become less dependent on interpreters to explain the text for understanding.
I am the first to have read the plays and sonnets from the correct perspective and I find them deepened by it.
With the correct context the person Shakespeare-Marlowe now shines through the text. A more human but no less brilliant Shakespeare. And with this new insight into the person Shakespeare, the writer's intention is greatly illuminated.
Does this matter?
Well I certainly find it extremely valuable to more clearly understand Shakespeare-Marlowe, who was the greatest genius mankind has ever produced, and the person with the deepest insight into the human condition.
By seeing more deeply into Shakespeare, we see more deeply into our own lives and humanity. Into the world.
There is simply more there in Shakespeare, when we know the real life of the writer.
More expression, more humanity, more depth.
Now there is even more magic.
