This month, UConn\u2019s Benton Museum welcomes the exhibition \u201cFirst Folio! The Book that Gave us Shakespeare\u201d as part of the Folger Shakespeare Library\u2019s project to send one copy of the book to each of the 50 states.<\/p>\n
On September 9, students and faculty gathered to discuss the man and his historical moment, with presentations by three Ph.D. candidates in the Department of English. The event titled \u201cShakespeare: Player, Author, Imposter,\u201d painted a picture of who Shakespeare really was, and why we are still talking about and reading his work 400 years after his death.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Performance as Literature<\/strong><\/p>\n In R\u00e9me Bohlin\u2019s presentation, \u201cBefore the Folio: Shakespeare\u2019s Plays as Performance,\u201d she said that today, most people encounter Shakespeare as literature, in a classroom, and not on stage.\u00a0Further, many people miss out on how different of an experience it was seeing a play in Shakespeare\u2019s time. For instance, the increase of indoor theaters during this time period attracted a more genteel audience, and shifted the content of Shakespeare\u2019s plays to suit more sophisticated tastes. Since gentlemen were allowed to sit on the stage itself, Shakespeare, unfortunately, had to change his writing over time to limit things like the sword-fighting scenes.<\/p>\n Bohlin reminded the audience that commercial theaters only employed male actors, so actors often cross-dressed and had to take multiple speaking parts, which impacted how Shakespeare wrote and cast his plays over time. For instance, certain actors were more suited to comedies than tragedies.<\/p>\n Keeping Shakespeare\u2019s historical moment in mind, Bohlin concluded, will help readers of Shakespeare as literature understand the many factors that shaped Shakespeare\u2019s vast body of work, which were originally dynamic performances.<\/p>\n The Technology That Gave us Shakespeare<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cAuthorship and the Early Modern Book Trade,\u201d George Moore\u2019s presentation, explored the role of print culture, after the advent of the printing press, and changing ideas about authorship in the early modern period.<\/p>\n Thanks the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th<\/sup> century, the book trade emerged as a thriving enterprise in Elizabethan England.<\/p>\n Within Shakespeare\u2019s lifetime, printed books being reproduced more quickly \u2013 and often without the author\u2019s consent \u2013 became commonplace. The rapid expansion of print culture led to many authors feeling anxiety about their work going out into the world, being altered, and removed from their parentage and influence.<\/p>\n This anxiety ran so deep that authors often expressed this apprehension in their work through metaphors of \u201cmonstrosity,\u201d said Moore. Famously, in Edmund Spenser\u2019s Faerie Queene<\/em>, the villainous monster Error vomits books and papers, signifying Spenser\u2019s distaste for the unruly spread of written works.<\/p>\n The idea that some texts might become monsters stemmed from the notion that one of a kind works of art have what Moore called \u201can aura,\u201d which is the sense that the art bears the trace of it\u2019s creator. Once the printing press technology was used to replicate texts, that sense of the author in a work disappeared, to the chagrin of the authors themselves. Even today, Moore said, books feature au author biography and headshot, to help readers feel more connected to the work\u2019s author.<\/p>\n In Shakespeare\u2019s The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, the Bard playfully participated in this conversation about authorship and how it was changing. Shakespeare\u2019s character Autolycus recites ballads that satirically use the \u201cmonster\u201d metaphor.<\/p>\n But without this technological advancement of the printing press, it\u2019s possible we might not have access to Shakespeare\u2019s work at all. No originals of any of his works have survived; save for the reproduced folios currently traveling the U.S., without which Shakespeare\u2019s plays and poems may have been lost to history.<\/p>\n The Authorship Question<\/strong><\/p>\n Melissa Rohrer opened her talk with the exclamation: \u201cFor those of us who study William Shakespeare, there is one thing we are guaranteed to be asked at least once: is it true that Shakespeare didn\u2019t really write those plays?\u201d<\/p>\n In her presentation, \u201cShakespeare, Authorship, and Modern Conspiracy Theory,\u201d Rohrer examined why some scholars, called anti-Stratfordians, are all convinced Shakespeare did not write the plays we attribute to him, even though Shakespearian scholars almost universally discredit this belief.<\/p>\n She explained that anti-Stratfordians believe Shakespeare could not have written may of his works because his education level was not high enough. How could a man with no knowledge of court and no extensive education write such complex, pith, and intellectual plays, they ask?<\/p>\n These people guess Shakespeare must have really been Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Bacon, or Sir Walter Raleigh. Rohrer discredits this notion because Shakespeare not only wrote collaboratively with other writers \u2013 a major difference between today\u2019s definition of authorship and that of this time \u2013 but he had the necessary knowledge about the details of the theater that an elite member of court would not.<\/p>\n Anti-Stratfordians also discredit Shakespeare because his biographical information is absent in his plays, said Rohrer, whereas the gentleman Edward De Vere\u2019s, another candidate for Shakespeare\u2019s identity, lived a life that paralleled the character Hamlet\u2019s almost too well. Rohrer pointed out that this theory relies on the misinformed belief that authors in Shakespeare\u2019s time wrote biographically, like modern authors typically do.<\/p>\n Finally, many anti-Stratfordians say that Shakespeare couldn\u2019t have had the extensive knowledge of cities and countries outside of England. They even speculate that the playwright Christopher Marlowe faked his own death, fled the country, and wrote from abroad. Shakespearean scholars, however, say that any playwright writing from abroad could never have achieved Shakespeare\u2019s success without an intimate, day-by-day knowledge of the Elizabethan theater, actors, and audience reactions.<\/p>\n William Shakespeare makes the most sense as the author, concluded Rohrer \u2013 particularly when people accept that playhouses were first and foremost businesses. Anti-Stratfordians refuse to believe that a money-obsessed social climber like Shakespeare could write such amazing art, but this relies heavily on a modern, romanticized view of authorship, said Rohrer.<\/p>\n \u201cTo deny Shakespeare the playwright is to deny an important aspect of our reality,\u201d Rohrer concluded. \u201cIf we believe that only an aristocrat or the highly educated could write such works of artistic greatness, than we are putting limits on human potential.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On September 9, three English Ph.D. candidates gave presentations at the event “Shakespeare: Player, Author, Imposter,” which painted a picture of who Shakespeare really was and why we are still reading his work 400 years after his death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":117010,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1858],"class_list":["post-117018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 12:10:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/117010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117018"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=117018"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=117018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}