Reaching Lifelong Goals as a Nontraditional Student

I have two more research papers to post from my Shakespeare English Studies classes.   The play this paper was written about was The Tempest.   I have gotten A+ grades on all of these papers.   Being a History Major, I have taken my study of the works of Shakespeare and looked at them from a historical perspective.   As a Non Traditional Student, I put in that extra Non Trad effort on all of these papers.   Each paper I have posted was supposed to be a short 2 page paper, my papers are about 4-6 pages each.  I have one more to post, probably in the next couple of days.   This was my last term at Linn Benton Community College, and starting in a couple of weeks I’ll be full time at Oregon State University.   I will try to keep posting my college papers here on the Reaching Lifelong Goals.com blog so they can float around in cyberspace forever.   Hope you enjoy this paper.   I address the Shakespeare Authorship debate as it relates to sources used for the writing of The Tempest (1611).

Shakespeare’s Sources for The Tempest – Reflections of a “Born Again” Stratfordian

The evidence of William Strachey’s 1610 True Reportory being a major influence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is profound, or is it?   Again and again in my research of the works of William Shakespeare, anti-Stratfordian arguments seem to wash up like flotsam on a Bermuda beach.  The parallels of the experiences of William Strachey and the wreck of the Sea Venture with the plot and details of The Tempest seem overwhelmingly obvious to me.  To the Oxfordian author Nina Green, somehow there are none to be found.

In a 1996 article, David Kathman lays out a detailed comparison of the events of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture and the subsequent narration sent back to England by the expedition’s chronicler, William Strachey.  He lists over 50 connections to the play from the events from the voyage to the new world.  Kathman states, “William Shakespeare had multiple connections to both the Virginia Company and William Strachey, and it is not at all surprising that he would have had access to Strachey’s letter. As I will also show, this letter saturates The Tempest, providing the basic scenario, many themes and images, and many details of plot and language. The first recorded performance of The Tempest was at Court on November 1, 1611, allowing us to date the play’s composition with remarkable accuracy to the roughly one-year period between the fall of 1610 and the fall of 1611″ (Kathman 1).  With close examination of this comparison, Kathman gets into minute detail with phrases found in the Strachey letter and their use in The Tempest. I agree with most of his findings, but feel he may have been trying a little too hard to find some of the links.   Overall, his arguments are sound, historically factual, and logical.

The rebuttal from Nina Green tries to disprove each of the 50+ parallels, and to put forth the idea that Edward DeVere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, somehow wrote the play under the pen name of Shakespeare.   The fact that DeVere died on the 24^th of June, 1604, seven years before the documented first performance of The Tempest, is not mentioned in her attack on Kathman’s work.  The 94 page refutation paper begins with the tone, “When subjected to analysis, David Kathman’s false parallels all melt into thin air. They are insubstantial and baseless. They dissolve and fade, leaving ‘not a rack behind’ “(Green 1).  It goes downhill from there.   The attacks on Kathman’s parallels are, at best, nitpicking, taking each entry and coming up with an explanation that seems to be correct on the surface, but missing the main point that Shakespeare used the accounts as inspiration for a work of fiction, not a travelogue or a documentary.

One example that I found indicative of Nina Green’s overall arguments is about the actual geography known to the Elizabethans of the islands around Bermuda.  She questions, “Would Shakespeare have used a tract mentioning a group of five hundred islands as a source for a play about a single isolated island”(Green 2)?  The simple answer is, why not?   The Kathman paper proposes that Shakespeare used the accounts of William Strachey as a source, not as an actual template of the events that were somehow required to write the play.

Along the same vein of reasoning, Green further writes, “Similarly, the flora and fauna in Bermuda as described by Strachey and Jourdain are markedly different from the flora and fauna mentioned by Shakespeare in The Tempest” (Green 3).  The island described in the play is only loosely based on Bermuda, and perhaps Shakespeare felt no need to include “…stingrays, whales and sharks” (Green 3) as set pieces on the Globe Stage.

Only three pages into this diatribe that tries to disprove Shakespeare’s use of sources that were very definitely available to him, we begin to see the desperation of many of the Oxfordian arguments.   Carefully reading all 94 pages of this rebuttal only reinforces my status as a “born again” Stratfordian.   Seeking arguments that are considered to be peer-reviewed, I researched articles published in the Shakespeare Quarterly as an effort to make some sense out of Shakespeare’s sources for The Tempest.

Alden T. Vaughn published an article in the Fall 2008 issue of the quarterly, titled William Strachey’s “True Reportory” and Shakespeare: A Closer Look at the Evidence. In this work, the author explores some of the attacks on Strachey’s True Reportory, both as it was probably available to Shakespeare in 1610, and the published version of 1625.  The author gives a very detailed account of the challenges to Strachey’s letter as a source, and refutes each of them.

The main issue surrounding the debate on William Strachey’s chronicles seems to boil down to what access Shakespeare had to it as a source in 1610.   Strachey’s ties with the Elizabethan theaters before the voyage, and his probable connections to both Burbage and Shakespeare, are documented in Vaughn’s dissection of the previous work on the issue.   The author cites the works of Edmund Malone (1808) and Morton Luce (1901) as being important early articles linking Bermuda and William Strachey to the writing of the play (Vaughn 245).

Finding credible arguments about the sources for The Tempest in peer-reviewed articles further reinforces my conclusions about the historical events involved.   I feel that Alden Vaughn was correct in stating, “The virtual certainty that Strachey’s letter reached London in September 1610 and the overwhelming probability that at least two copies circulated widely among Company officials and their friends establish that ‘True Reportory’ was available for Shakespeare to use in The Tempest. The abundant thematic and verbal parallels between the play and ‘True Reportory’ have persuaded generations of readers that Shakespeare borrowed liberally from Strachey’s dramatic narrative in telling his island tale” (Vaughn 273).

Total immersion in all things Shakespeare over the past three terms has given this old history geek a new-found appreciation of the works of the Bard.  Looking at the plays from my historical perspective has been a journey into 16^th century Elizabethan England, and how Shakespeare dovetails into its history.  The authorship debate is often a side-trip that diverts my research path, but I remain steadfast, a “born again” Stratfordian.  And yes, the government faked the Apollo moon landings on a sound stage in Burbank!

Works Cited

Green, Nina. “False Parallels in David Kathman’s Dating The Tempest.”  Oxford-Shakespeare.com. 2005. 22 May 2010. Web.

Kathman, David. “Dating The Tempest.” Shakespeareauthorship.com. 1996. 22 May 2010.web.

Vaughn, Alden. “William Strachey’s ‘True Reporatory’ and Shakespeare: A Closer Look At the Evidence.” Shakespeare Quarterly . Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 245-273. 22 May 2010. Web.