Matt's Pentameter: Number 1

Welcome to the premiere episode of Matt's Pentameter. It's a little "get to know you, get to know me, get to know Wonder Woman." Very important to this blog is YOU!! What would you like to know? What would you like to SEE and HEAR about or by Shakespeare? Email me and let me know! matt@mutinyuniverse.com. Bring on the Bard!

So sad...............

Actors question Bard's authorship

Actors including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have launched a debate over who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare.
Almost 300 people have signed a "declaration of reasonable doubt", which they hope will prompt further research into the issue.
"I subscribe to the group theory. I don't think anybody could do it on their own," Sir Derek said.
The group says there are no records of Shakespeare being paid for his work.
While documents do exist for Shakespeare, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, all are non-literary.
In particular, his will, in which he left his wife "my second best bed with the furniture" contains none of his famous turns of phrase and it does not mention any books, plays or poems.
Illiterate household
The 287-strong Shakespeare Authorship Coalition says it is not possible that the bard's plays - with their emphasis on law - could have been penned by a 16th Century commoner raised in an illiterate household.

The group asks if one man alone could have come up with his works. It asks why most of his plays are set among the upper classes, and why Stratford-upon-Avon is never referred to in any of his plays.
"How did he become so familiar with all things Italian so that even obscure details in these plays are accurate?" the group adds.
Conspiracy theories have circulated since the 18th Century about a number of figures who could have used Shakespeare as a pen-name, including playwright Christopher Marlowe, nobleman Edward de Vere and Francis Bacon.
"I think the leading light was probably de Vere as I agree that an author writes about his own experience, his own life and personalities," Sir Derek said.
The declaration, unveiled at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, West Sussex, also names 20 prominent doubters of the past, including Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud and Charlie Chaplin.
'Legitimate question'
A copy was presented to Dr William Leahy, head of English at London's Brunel University and convenor of the first MA in Shakespeare authorship studies, to be launched later this month.
"It has been a battle of mine for the last couple of years to get this into academia," Dr Leahy said.
"It's a legitimate question, it has a mystery at its centre and intellectual discussion will bring us closer to that centre.
"That's not to say we will answer anything, that's not the point. It is, of course, to question."


I will respond to this with the post I wrote on Myspace:

Re: the raging debate in the world, and with Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance about trying to disprove William Shakespeare as the writer of the Works of William Shakespeare:

Here's some new information!!!!!!!

According to my sources, the works of Plato were actually NOT WRITTEN BY PLATO, but were, in fact, written by Socrates and simply ASCRIBED to Plato!

Somebody help me raise some money and start a huge debate to bring this truth to light! If Plato actually took some of Socrates's unfinished manuscripts and published them under his name, the world could be going under the terrible assumption that brilliant work written by someone hundreds of years ago was actually WRITTEN BY SOME DIFFERENT BRILLIANT PERSON HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO!!!! Please immediately stop reading anything ascribed to these two literary giants, stop learning from thier insight and genius, and just try to figure out who wrote what! History is counting on us!!!!!


(please tell me that anyone reading this blog can understand written sarcasm and will not respond to me as a 35 year old in Maryland did by saying "I have heard this as well, but find it incredible.")

Shakespearean anagram

"In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten" is a relevant anagram of the first three lines, discovered in 1996 by Cory Calhoun.

To be or not to be, that is the question;Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,