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Episode 126:
A conversation with Dr. Darren Freebury-Jones, author of 'Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers' about the influence of early modern playwrights on Shakespeare where we talk about Marlowe, Kyd, Greene and others and the role of data analytics in modern author attribution studies.
Dr Darren Freebury-Jones is author of several works on early modern theatre including:
Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival
Shakespeare’s Tutor: The Influence of Thomas Kyd
and his latest work Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers, will be published in October 2024.
Darren is Associate Editor for the first critical edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd since 1901. He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston’s dramatic corpus as part of the Oxford Marston project and is General Editor for The Collected Plays of Robert Greene published by Edinburgh University Press. His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed in national newspapers in the UK and on BBC Radio. His debut poetry collection, Rambling published by Broken Sleep Books, was published in 2024. In 2023 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship.
Links to 'Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers'
manchesteruniv...
www.amazon.com...
Link to Darren's on-line talk on Robert Greene 22nd July 2024 in aid of the Rose Playhouse
www.trybooking...
Support the podcast at:
www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com
www.ko-fi.com/thoetp
www.patreon.com/thoetp
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Chartable - chartable.com/...
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (acast.com/privacy) for more information.

[@Northcountry1926]

My word, this is brilliant 🎉

[@Jeffhowardmeade]

My thanks to Dr. Freebury-Jones for lowering the price on this book. At $100+, Shakespeare’s Tutor was out of my price range.

[@paulcarmichael2368]

Lovely stuff. Thank you.

[@ethelburga]

I really like this approach to digitally understanding texts. Have you noticed, by the way, that Donald Trump has gone all "pinky-eyed" just recently.

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

All discredited. In some places, it seems, the planet is still flat.

[@thehistoryofeuropeantheatr3204]

Any specifics there or do you find that everything suggested in the discussion is 'discredited'?

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

@@thehistoryofeuropeantheatr3204 E.G. the so-called "Ur-Hamlet". The existence of a "Hamlet before Hamlet" is pure speculation, introduced because the accepted Shakespeare timeline is violated by Nashe's mention of "whole Hamlets" well before Shakespeare of Stratford could have written anything (if he ever actually did write anything). In order to maintain their timeline, Nashe's Hamlet cannot be the Hamlet that we know, because that would mean that someone other than William of Straford wrote it, so they assert that there must have been an UR- Hamlet despite the fact that no such work has ever been unearthed, or even mentioned by anyone but Nashe. The "Ur-Hamlet" is now accepted by the so-called academic community, who as a whole are discredited for propagating such speculative nonsense and obvious circular logic.

[@thehistoryofeuropeantheatr3204]

@@vetstadiumastroturf5756 The various theories about the ur-Hamlet would fill a podcast episode (and more probably). Perhaps I should tackle that one day. Given we don't know the content of the play, and that Nashe's comment is subject to interpretation (How I wish that these Elizabethans had been a little less cryptic) I'm not going to extrapolate too much from it. If pressed I would say Kyd seems a far more likely candidate than Shakespeare, but then why would Shakespeare revisit the play, unless the ur-Hamlet was quite different from his version (perhaps it was)? I don't know the answer, but much of the fun of studying the period is the speculation.

[@vetstadiumastroturf5756]

@@thehistoryofeuropeantheatr3204 Kyd, Nashe, Greene and Shakespeare were all the same person.

[@thehistoryofeuropeantheatr3204]

Well, that’s a new theory to me