William S. Niederkorn – Discoveries in A Secular Tour of The Tempest скачать в хорошем качестве

William S. Niederkorn – Discoveries in A Secular Tour of The Tempest

In discussion of the Shakespeare authorship question, Oxfordians have heard the analogy between pulling a loose thread in a knitted garment, causing it to completely unravel, and ineluctably examining a loose brick of the inherited tradition, precipitating the collapse of a whole edifice of scholarly endeavor. Textual analysis of plays in the First Folio – the first Shakespeare catalogue -- repeatedly demonstrates this progression. William Niederkorn's talk begins at the beginning with the Comedies, with the first play in that 1623 tome, The Tempest, and several discoveries manifest themselves. A major one concerns the dating of the play. For over two centuries The Tempest has almost invariably been placed last in the chronology of the Shakespeare comedies. The evidence this paper details shows that it should be placed first. Textual analysis of The Tempest suggests that it was first produced for the wedding of Ferdinando Stanley and Alice Spencer in 1579 and that it was the first comedy created by Edward de Vere. The adjustment of its date from 1609-11 to 1579 leads to another equally astonishing conclusion, concerning the still vexed question of Bermoothes. Rectifying the date of The Tempest to 1579 rules out Bermudas as the meaning of Bermoothes because England had scant knowledge of the Bermudas until decades later. So the playwright could not possibly have meant to convey Bermudas with Bermoothes, and the play’s first audience would never have understood it as such. The absurdity of the traditional view is shown in recounting how the Bermuda theory progressed from a wild guess to an absolute certainty in the pronouncements of 18th century Shakespeare editors, perpetuating Jacobean playwright’s misunderstanding of the term. Research shows that the cognate of Bermoothes most likely intended is the German Wermut (plural Wermutes), French Vermouth (plural Vermouthe)s, Spanish Vermut (plural Vermutes), meaning wormwood, the herb associated with absinthe and vermouth. Bermoothes is mentioned by Ariel in The Tempest to convey to Prospero the location where he has hidden the ship of the king of Naples – in the deep Nooke to which Prospero once summoned him at midnight to gather dew, not from Bermuda, but from wormwood in the Nooke, from something present in the place to which he was summoned. Bio: William S. Niederkorn reported Shakespeare news in The New York Times from 2002 to 2009, critiqued Shakespeare scholarship in The Brooklyn Rail from 2009 to 2013, and has since been writing and researching independently. Like 18th-century editors, he focuses on interpreting the catalogue of plays of 1623 and the pamphlets of poems and plays printed earlier for his Shakespeare Discoveries: A Secular Tour of the Works. Besides volume 1 on Venus and Adonis, published in 2023, and volume 2 on The Tempest, he has substantially completed Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, and Comedy of Errors, and plans to continue through as much of the Shakespeare oeuvre as world and time allows. A lifetime member of the Dramatists Guild, he is also a playwright, performer, poet, artist and composer of jazz, underground rock and classical music.