Subject
Otto Rank, disputed authorship, and "Laura"
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On 12/10/06 19:49, "Stephen Blackwell" <sblackwe@UTK.EDU> wrote:
I was just looking back over some sections of Otto Rank's Art and Artist (in English; Knopf, 1932), a book filled with fascinating consonances and dissonances vis-a-vis Nabokov, and stumbled upon a passage that I think gives a potent context for the present discussion:
". . .it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's [sic] plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author" (382).
It is probably also worth bearing in mind that Timon of Athens is, or at least at one time was, one of the plays considered even by non-Baconians (i.e. Stratfordians)
to be of disputed, or perhaps mixed, authorship. I don't have time to chase references on that one, sorry. Any annotated edition should have the details. And maybe Sam Schuman can chime in with more details?
Stephen Blackwell
SB:
Your [sic] (assuming it is yours?) tut-tagging Shakespe[a]re’s spelling is rather odd in the context of verifying ‘authorship!’ Contemporary documents show dozens of variations with Bill the Quill himself (herself?!) signing his/her name differently on diverse legal documents.
Otto Rank’s three examples are slightly bizarre in being spread across quite different ages/cultures during which the whole notion of ‘authorship’ has radically changed.
(i) “Homer’s” ballads (only TWO survive) were orally transmitted for at least three centuries before writing was available.
(ii) The 27 books of the NT have never seriously been ascribed to a single physical author (e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul are distinct persons &/or pseudonyms) — even the oft-presumed unity via holy inspiration must face the Synoptic and other ‘discrepancy’ Problems. Otto may be thinking of the Pauline Epistles, over which much ink-blood has been shed debating which letters were truly dictated by Paul.
(iii) Discounting the mad Baconian/Oxfordian/et al delusions, there do remain several real problems over which plays are 100% by Shaksper [sic] and which have signs of collaboration. The latter was commonplace in the hurly-burly of Elizabethan drama and we should not impose more modern concepts of ‘jealously-guarded authorship.’ Indeed, many of the texts we now read ‘canonically’ were cobbled together from scribbled actors’ prompts. “To be or not to be — aye there’s the point!” That happens to be a genuine extant version of the famous soliloquy — which d’you prefer?
Re-reading VN the American Years (belated-by-15-years homage to Brian Boyd) prompts me to ask whether the unfinished Original Laura was or could (should?) be meaningfully ‘cobbled’ from any surviving notes?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
[EDNOTE. Check the archives for previous discussions of "The Original of Laura" on NABOKV-L -- SES]
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I was just looking back over some sections of Otto Rank's Art and Artist (in English; Knopf, 1932), a book filled with fascinating consonances and dissonances vis-a-vis Nabokov, and stumbled upon a passage that I think gives a potent context for the present discussion:
". . .it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's [sic] plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole centuries in favour of one author" (382).
It is probably also worth bearing in mind that Timon of Athens is, or at least at one time was, one of the plays considered even by non-Baconians (i.e. Stratfordians)
to be of disputed, or perhaps mixed, authorship. I don't have time to chase references on that one, sorry. Any annotated edition should have the details. And maybe Sam Schuman can chime in with more details?
Stephen Blackwell
SB:
Your [sic] (assuming it is yours?) tut-tagging Shakespe[a]re’s spelling is rather odd in the context of verifying ‘authorship!’ Contemporary documents show dozens of variations with Bill the Quill himself (herself?!) signing his/her name differently on diverse legal documents.
Otto Rank’s three examples are slightly bizarre in being spread across quite different ages/cultures during which the whole notion of ‘authorship’ has radically changed.
(i) “Homer’s” ballads (only TWO survive) were orally transmitted for at least three centuries before writing was available.
(ii) The 27 books of the NT have never seriously been ascribed to a single physical author (e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul are distinct persons &/or pseudonyms) — even the oft-presumed unity via holy inspiration must face the Synoptic and other ‘discrepancy’ Problems. Otto may be thinking of the Pauline Epistles, over which much ink-blood has been shed debating which letters were truly dictated by Paul.
(iii) Discounting the mad Baconian/Oxfordian/et al delusions, there do remain several real problems over which plays are 100% by Shaksper [sic] and which have signs of collaboration. The latter was commonplace in the hurly-burly of Elizabethan drama and we should not impose more modern concepts of ‘jealously-guarded authorship.’ Indeed, many of the texts we now read ‘canonically’ were cobbled together from scribbled actors’ prompts. “To be or not to be — aye there’s the point!” That happens to be a genuine extant version of the famous soliloquy — which d’you prefer?
Re-reading VN the American Years (belated-by-15-years homage to Brian Boyd) prompts me to ask whether the unfinished Original Laura was or could (should?) be meaningfully ‘cobbled’ from any surviving notes?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
[EDNOTE. Check the archives for previous discussions of "The Original of Laura" on NABOKV-L -- SES]
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm