Re: Shakespeare tossup example for Joon

• From: thefool75 <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 22:16:10 -0000
• Message-ID: <b873ba+eh1f_at_...>

1.  I was only answering Joon's point about being able to write such 
a tossup pyramidally but; there is no real debate over Cardenio--one 
journalist--not a scholar--did indeed claim to find Cardenio--it's 
not anymore accepted than the Marlovian position.

2.  I have read Nothing Like the Sun---and no, it's not about anyone 
else's love life--it's most clearly about Shakespeare.

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, walter_shandy <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> 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