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CHASING SHAKESPEARES by Sarah Smith
Joe Roper is a graduate student who has come from a modest background to become a Shakespeare scholar through a love of the bard's work. While sifting through Shakespeare memorablia one day, most of it forgeries, he comes across a letter signed by Shakespeare stating that he didn't write his famous plays. Joe does the obvious tests to prove it's a fake, but it appears authentic. He shows it to Posy Gould, a PhD student at Harvard and daughter of a wealthy and priveleged family. She convinces him to fly off to London with her, at her daddy's expense, to find out the truth about the letter. While Joe urgently wants to believe that Shakespeare, from common origins like himself, really wrote the plays, Posy believes that they were written by an Oxford aristocrat. It's a mystery and an adventure to find out the truth, and where even making a claim it is true could cost Joe his standing in the academic community.
It was published in 2003 and the hardback has 352 pages.
From a review by Jeff Turrentine: "At the heart of their conflict is the ''authorship question,'' the perilous third rail of Shakespearean studies. Over the years an irregular scholarly cult has emerged whose adherents maintain that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon couldn't have written the poems and plays attributed to him; he simply wasn't, they maintain, educated, worldly or sophisticated enough to have created the most complex and enduring works in the English language. Leading their list of alternate candidates is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, whose noble upbringing, superior education and European travels equipped him far better to recount the lives of Julius Caesar and Richard II, or to recreate so vividly the settings of Verona and Venice."
I for one am in the camp of Shakespeare writing Shakespeare's plays. I do like reading about the debate though. This book is a fictional way to be introduced to debate.
Here is a an excerpt:
I had been working with the Kellogg Collection seven months, and at four in the afternoon on the Ides of March I cataloged my three hundred and fifty-seventh forgery; do the math, that's about a fake and a half a day. Opening one of Frank Kellogg's archival envelopes had started to be like putting your hand into the potato barrel and feeling something furry. You might not know what it was, but you knew it wasn't good.
The Kellogg Collection had its own room in the basement of Northeastern. The computer I was using to catalog it was brand new. The room was new; the whole Northeastern library was new. The big library exhibit so far was an elephant tusk carved into a hundred Buddhas. The Kellogg Collection had been going to be the second big thing, Northeastern's exhibit for the new millennium.
The Kellogg wasn't all bad; no collection is. Kellogg's aunt had bought Elizabethan costume books, and we were going to be pretty well set on Elizabethan history and politics. But that wasn't what we'd expected from the Kellogg. We'd wanted the manuscripts.
And we had 'em, all right. Faded brown ink, ragged paper, letters sealed with ribbon and with fragments of wax. Boxes of them. Letters from Mary Queen of Scots, from Queen Elizabeth. Six Shakespeare letters, one with a sonnet attached. I was scanning them all, for the catalog, and I'd started to amuse myself by printing them out and posting them on the bulletin board in the room. The Wall of Sin.
I tacked the printout of the latest forgery to the board and stared at the rest.
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We had a gorgeous thunderboomer of a rainstorm this morning. It is supposed to be a high of 60-something today and tomorrow and more storms. Wee ha! Perfect reading weather. However, I must put in time on the newsletter today. I'll be getting going on that as soon as I'm done here. Hopefully after that I will make time for a nap and some reading.
Steve really wanted to watch a movie last night -- being a Saturday night he just felt it shouldn't be wasted -- so we watched the DVD of Legion. Strange, tilting toward a horror flick.
It is perfect weather for chili and I've been wanting to try making white chili (made with chicken and white beans) for some time to see if Steve would like but I've had the makings for taco salad for nearly a week now and we must use it or lose it. :) Oh, and Steve did like the books I got him yesterday: off the bargain table was a book of handguns with pictures and descriptions of about 500 of them, and two Batman graphic novels. He's not a reader but he will read graphic novels, spending more time with them that I would give them. So that was a success. Yes!!
Have a lovely, comfy Sunday.
Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
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