However, whilst I agree with the positive elements in your formulation – ‘This character trait of fearful, reluctant ambition seems to have eluded commentators on the play.’ – though its well worth reading FR Leavis on the ‘If it were done…’ speech in The Living Principle’ (pp 93ff, Leavis sums it up, p. 94, saying ‘This is superb dramatic poetry; it creates for us the complex state of hesitant recoil, the tragic weakness of self-knowledge, that Lady Macbeth, arriving at the close of the speech, precipitates into murderous resolution.’) – yet, as Leavis implies there also IS ambition, oscillating to be sure with the amazing yet helpless power of conscience evoked in the ‘pity like a naked new born babe’, etc. What Shakespeare has marvellously done is to evoke that state of irresolution when a powerful drive WHICH WE KNOW TO BE HARMFUL is one we yet, almost self-hypnotised, collude with. A classic expression of it is to be found in a much more minor form, yet still harmful, in Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’, where Emma seduces herself into corrupting Harriet Smith’s self-judgement, overriding all her own self-observations, even though Emma still instinctively knows the Knightleys are right about Harriet and Mr Elton – as she realises much later in her great moment of self-knowledge when she realises she loves Mr Knightley:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/158/158-h/158-h.htm#link2HCH0047
‘Emma’s eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched—she admitted—she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet’s having some hope of a return? It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world. Some portion of respect for herself, however, in spite of all these demerits—some concern for her own appearance, and a strong sense of justice by Harriet—(there would be no need of compassion to the girl who believed herself loved by Mr. Knightley—but justice required that she should not be made unhappy by any coldness now,) gave Emma the resolution to sit and endure farther with calmness, with even apparent kindness.’
Macbeth lacks ‘a mind like hers’. Again and again Shakespeare portrays characters incapable of that kind of self-knowledge, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, – query, is Hamlet one of them also!!?? That is the great and profound elucidation Shakespeare supremely achieves! Austen, George Eliot, and Dickens follow in his footsteps, again and again, in this, as does my profession and psychoanalysis in particular, and JP Sartre on ‘bad faith’, going back to Aristotle
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q19TF2j1SIoC&pg=PA355&lpg=PA355&dq=Self-deception+and+Akrasia:+A+Comparative+Conceptual+Analysis&source=bl&ots=LIIKB25q9D&sig=jXNBvUBzvFs-GQxdLEakaLx9oJs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q3oLUe_ZGNOR0QWO84CABQ&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Self-deception%20and%20Akrasia%3A%20A%20Comparative%20Conceptual%20Analysis&f=false
- but Shakespeare has taken this further than anyone else! This author has to have done this in his own life to an inordinate extent – and then woken up to it!!

Wonderful stuff! Congratulations Richard!

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0162 Tuesday, 19 July 2011

From: Holger Schott Syme
Date: July 18, 2011 10:15:33 PM EDT
Subject: Stephen Marche, _How Shakespeare Changed Everything_

I don’t believe this recently published piece of “popular history” has been discussed on SHAKSPER. I just posted a rather lengthy review/critique of Marche’s claims on my blog, which I think would be of interest to fellow SHAKSPERians. Here’s the opening paragraph (the rest can be found at http://www.dispositio.net/archives/368):

It would be nice to start this post with a semi-snappy line like “Stephen Marche has written a monumentally stupid book about Shakespeare” or “_How Shakespeare Changed Everything_ may be the most ignorant book about Shakespeare published this century.” Neither statement would be inaccurate, exactly. But Marche’s book is so preposterous in its claims, so poorly researched, so ludicrously over the top, and so slight that it’s hard to see it as anything other than a bad joke, a deliberate (if potentially lucrative) send-up of the excesses of Bardolatry. I don’t think I’d find the joke especially funny, but at least its author could lay some claim to the intelligence one might expect from someone who was, until recently, a professor at a major US university. Taking this book at face value seems almost impossible to me.

All the best,
Holgerhttp://shaksper.net/current-postings/305-july/28026-stephen-marche-how-shakespeare-changed-everything

Methinks Stephen Marche doth protest too much. Because Oxford was a lord and not a commoner, Marche accuses Oxfordians of “snobbery,” which is the “surest sign of their ignorance,” while accusing them of “anti-elitism” in the same breath. I’m not sure how one can be an anti-elitist snob, but there it is. Indeed, Marche’s effort to debunk Oxfordians by invective backfires, in large part because he assumes that he, as a duly-anointed “legitimate” scholar, knows the truth, and all else is apostasy (“Not everyone does deserve a say,” is a point often made by religious extremists and those who would love to see Occupy Wall Street go way as well. Talk about snobbery).

I, for one, am interested in the De Vere theory (among other possibilities) because people like Marche have never closed their case for authorship. (Obviously smart people like Dickens, Freud, and Mark Twain, who also had trouble with the notion that the glover’s son from Stratford could have written the plays, were anti-elitist snobs too.) Faced with scant physical proof of the Stratford man’s genius (a line in a will about a “secondbest bed” doesn’t really cut it), they simply shut their ears and sing “la-la-la” at the top of their lungs (in Marche’s case, apoplectically) when anyone questions their saint’s legitimacy. I suspect that Marche’s fears of undergraduates coming to him for the next ten years to “waste…time explaining the obvious” will come true, and good for them. Anything that gets undergraduates — or anyone else, for that matter– to read the plays and ask questions is something profoundly to be wished.

Cheers,
Bronwyn Fryer

They’re damned out of their own mouths.

I would add Emerson, Goddard and Bloom to your Keats, Leavis and Knight, as worthy Shakespearean companions.

Holderness wryly wonders how he might keep his Oxfordian standing as a “foremost” Shakespearean scholar. Have you seen his merry romp:

“Ofelia: Lawrence Nowel: Excerpta Quaedam Danica (1565)” Translated by Graham Holderness?

He’s written a whole book promisingly titled “The Shakespeare Myth”, produced an edition of the 1594 “Taming of A Shrew” and is “one of the most prolific critics of Shakespeare’s history plays.” To my great shame, I’ve read none of these works, but will soon make amends, next visit to the library.

In this recent letter, he writes:

“Insofar as Shakespeare Authorship inquiry is interested in pursuing these profound questions about life and writing, the self and identity, personal expression and impersonal artistry (and I know that some authorship doubters are interested in such matters), then there is common ground for debate.”

A welcome invitation, I should think.

From G. Wilson Knight:

“or, better still, set himself to compose explosive dramas calculated to terrify all the kings of Europe…”

!!! Would Wm. of Stratford dare?

That’s quite a quotation from Knight.

I think, however, that there is in fact a very robust tradition among Oxfordians of honoring traditional scholars, on whom we naturally depend for much insight about the bard. So, although I agree with your analysis, I don’t think I agree with your apparent premise that such an honoring has not taken place. Perhaps we need to do it more often, but most of the major Oxfordians of whom I’m aware have carefully read reams of traditionalist scholarship and often made very astute use of it in constructing an Oxfordian alternative to traditional readings of the evidence. What has not happened, historically, is any acknowledgment of this by mainstream Shakespeareans, most of whom are still fighting a rearguard against the genteel tolerance of folks like Holderness.

And, if we were to take more seriously a somewhat deconstructionist position about the ‘identity of the author’, as Graham Holderness is arguing, then we would both be freer to explore the implications of the Oxfordian pseudonymity, and we might also be more skilful in using and invoking those deconstructive moments when Stratfordians make inadvertant recognitions, as when Wilson Knight in Hamlet Reconsidered (The Wheel of Fire) appeals to Castiglioni’s Il Cortegiano as Hamlet’s Book, and imagines:
If he returned with a sense of artistic superiority, washed his hands of the whole nasty business and confined himself to writing a Ph.D thesis at Wittenberg on satiric literature; or, better still, set himself to compose explosive dramas calculated to terrify all the kings of Europe, we, today, should be very pleased with him indeed. (Knight, 1949/1960, pp 320-1)
http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk

http://shake-speares-bible.com/2010/03/06/bubbles-for-ever/#more-1135