Okay, I'll try my hand here. --- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > This man's love life was depicted fictionally in the novel Nothing > Like the Sun, by Anthony Burgess. Three problems here: 1) The line "nothing like the sun", from Sonnet 130, is too well- known to appear in a lead-in. 2) I haven't read Burgess' novel, but I'm fairly sure it concerns the love lives of a number of Elizabethan authors and such; while Shakespeare may be the protagonist, the clue isn't uniquely identifying. 3) I don't appreciate the fact that the first clue in the Shakespeare TU is actually a clue on Anthony Burgess. > His first publications, The > Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover's Complaint, were issued without his > consent. 1) "The Passionate Pilgrim" was indeed published (in 1599) in an unauthorized edition under Shakespeare's name, but to describe it as a Shakespearean work is inaccurate. It was, in fact, an assortment of poems, about half of which were by Shakespeare. 2) "A Lover's Complaint"'s first publication was in 1609, with the Sonnets. 3) The first Shakespearean works to be published were in fact his poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece", in 1593-94. Several of his plays had been published by 1599. 4) The phrase "issued without his consent" suggests that there was something unusual about this fact. Unauthorized publication, especially of plays but also of poems, was rampant in Renaissance England. This makes that clause basically useless as a clue. 5) Furthermore, "first published works" is a largely unimportant distinction, due to the prevalence of privately-copied manuscripts at the time. For example, the Sonnets were first published in 1609, but comments by Francis Meres and others indicate that they were in circulation more than a decade before that. He apparently wrote three pages for a collaborative play, > Sir Thomas More, but a Don Quixote based collaboration, Cardenio, is > completely lost. A minor quibble: A minority opinion (first voiced by Charles Hamilton) suggests that the anonymous "Second Maiden's Tragedy" is actually Shakespeare and Fletcher's "Cardenio". Hamilton's belief is not widely accepted -- the play is more widely credited to Thomas Middleton -- but "completely lost" may be somewhat too strong a phrase. > FTP, name this author who also worked with John > Fletcher on the Two Noble Kinsmen. ...so why aren't there more questions on Thomas Middleton, anyway? --ECN
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