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What do you know about W. Shakespeare? How well are you aware of the things linked to him? Match the pieces of Shakespearean memorabilia (A) with the information under B.
| A | B |
| Francis Bacon | died |
| The Globe | his play |
| Laurence Olivier | largest theatre company in the world |
| The Royal Shakespeare Company | member of the RSC |
| place of birth | |
| plays he wrote | |
| Stratford-upon-Avon | ruling dynasty |
| Henry IV | Shakespeare’s Theatre |
| Tudor | to whom the authorship is sometimes attributed |
BL. 2. Study this list of proper names before you listen to the story:
| The Midlands; The Bahamas; Swahili; Serbo-Croat; Warwickshire; Chris Tower; The Stratford Herald; Mary Arden; Anne Hathaway; Hall’s Croft; Susanna; Thomas Nash; Mary Baker; The Cotswolds; | Richard Burton; Peter O’Toole; Laurence Olivier; The Swan Theatre; The Other Place; David Bradley; The Avon; Volpone; The Alchemist; John Webster; The Duchess of Malfi; The White Devil; Christopher Marlowe; Dr. Faustus; | The Juw of Malta; John Aubrey; Brief Lives; Ben Johnson; The Dirty Duck pub; Pam Harris; David Atkinson; Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Shakespeare Theme Park; Romeo and Juliet |
L. 1. If you were unlucky with SHAKESPEARE QUIZ in BL. 1., listen to the story “Selling Shakespeare” and complete the task.
L. 2. Listen and say what they mean by saying:
- the best of the bestselling authors;
- major and not so major languages;
- a physical link with the past;
- continuing debate;
- tourists’ silly questions;
- a cosmopolitan atmosphere;
- “All the world’s a stage”;
- RSC;
- unique Stratfordian institution;
- impatient members of the cast.
L. 3. Points 1 – 8 can serve as the subtitles to “Selling Shakespeare”. Listen to the story again. Using the key words, give short summaries to cover each of the points:
1. THE BEST OF THE BESTSELLING AUTHORS: hometown; a tax exile; exotic location; royalties; multimillionaire; major language; Swahili and Serbo-Croat.
2. MAKE THE PAST COME ALIVE: impact; tourism industry; to pull the tourists; 2.5 million tourists; overseas; physical link; to trace back historically; physical contact; to give a link.
3. DID HE, OR DIDN’T HE? Continuing debate; Francis Bacon; attributed to; to assign; original author; to cut ice; to doubt Shakespeare’s authenticity.
4. STRATFORD ALARMED: apart from; to be congested with; coachloads; day-trippers; local residents; to make concessions to; plethora of gift-shops; cosmopolitan atmosphere; inactive; to blow horns; pedestrians; holiday atmosphere.
5. “ALL THE WORLD’S STAGE”: RSC; theatre-company; illustrious names; an integral part; absolutely vital.
6. TALENTED COMPETITION: to enjoy superstar status; contemporaries; cynical explanation; shortage, professional jealousy; to handle mores hominum (the ways of mankind); to reach the heights; access to emotions; the beauty and ugliness of life.
7. STRATFORDIAN THEATRICAL TRADITIONS: unique institution; conveniently located; equidistant from; to flock; curtain call;
8. to make a quick getaway; to line with; ghosts and memories; people long gone.
9. A WELL-OILED MARKETING MACHINE: to promote; a famous resident; the latest trend; to be herded; wildly attractive; to regard oneself; education business; authentic; to build upon the experience; to trade on the basis of Shakespeare.
R. 1. State your point of view:
Do you agree upon that selling Shakespeare is a serious business? What kind of business is it? What is actually sold: Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare’s properties, Shakespeare’s fame?
R. 2. Prepare for a guided walking tour around Stratford. Tell what you know about Shakespearean memorabilia.
IT’S INTERESTING TO KNOW
SHAKESPEARE WINS?
Many people have always thought that the world knowledge evidenced in the Shakespeare opus¹ is incompatible with the provincial background of the actor called William Shakespeare. There has also been a strong body of opinion in favour of the philosopher and protoscientist Francis Bacon² as the actual playwright. The Bacon/ Shakespeare controversy has remained an unsettled debate until today.
Though, T.C. Mendenhall, the American geophysicist, attempted to end this dispute once and for all. He laboriously counted the lengths of about 40.000 words in Shakespeare’s plays and then calculated their relative frequency. He also compared the proportions with the results of his analysis of some of bacon’s writings. T.C. Mendenhall’s findings are represented in the table below:
| word length | word frequency (% of the total) | ||
| in Shakespeare’s plays | in Bacon’s writings | ||
| three-letter words | about 45 % | very similar | |
| words of four letters | about 48 % | 35 % | |
| five letters | 35 % | 20 % | |
| six letters | 25 % | very similar | |
| words containing more than six letters | Conversely, compared with Shakespeare, Bacon consistently used more.* |
*the statistical data is not presented in the source.
What can be concluded is that Bacon did not write Shakespeare.
Or did he?! Plays are written to be spoken, in which case one might expect fewer long words than in philosophical writing. But can anyone for that matter really be put through a word test? The debate continues.
How then do we ascertain the true authorship? Nowadays, with the aid of computers, we can perform sophisticated linguistic analysis by taking into consideration word length, vocabulary and even grammatical structure – in other terms, we use stylometrics or stylostatistics³.
Whatever words and syntax are in a writer’s repertoire they tend to be used in the same frequencies in all that writer’s work and the proportions will be unique to that writer. In this way it was proved that a newly-discovered Elizabethan sonnet was in fact the work of Shakespeare (or at least came from the same hand as all the other sonnets attributed to Shakespeare).
¹ An outstanding piece of literature, an opus magnum.
² First Baron Verulam and Viscount Saint Albans. 1561 – 1626. English philosopher and essayist who proposed a theory of scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment that came to be known as the inductive method.
³ The quantification of stylistic patterns.
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