Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Otto Rank on disputed authorship
From: "Stan Kelly-Bootle" <[email-masked]>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 13:06:38 -0400

On 12/10/06 19:49, "Stephen Blackwell" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I was just looking back over some sections of Otto Rank's Art and Artist (in
> English; Knopf, 1932), a book filled with fascinating consonances and
> dissonances vis-a-vis Nabokov, and stumbled upon a passage that I think gives
> a potent context for the present discussion:
> 
>     ". . .it can hardly be chance that the greatest creations of the human
> spirit, such as the New Testament, the Homeric poems, and Shakspere's [sic]
> plays, should, on the one hand, have been centres of academic disputes as to
> authorship and, on the other, should have inspired the imagination of whole
> centuries in favour of one author" (382).
> 
> 
> It is probably also worth bearing in mind that Timon of Athens is, or at least
> at one time was, one of the plays considered even by non-Baconians (i.e.
> Stratfordians)
> to be of disputed, or perhaps mixed, authorship.  I don't have time to chase
> references on that one, sorry.  Any annotated edition should have the details.
> And maybe Sam Schuman can chime in with more details?
> 
> Stephen Blackwell
> 
> 
> SB:
> 
> Your [sic] (assuming it is yours?) tut-tagging Shakespe[a]re¹s spelling is
> rather odd in the context of verifying Œauthorship!¹ Contemporary documents
> show dozens of variations with Bill the Quill himself (herself?!) signing
> his/her name differently on diverse legal documents.
> 
      Otto Rank¹s three examples are slightly bizarre in being spread across
quite different ages/cultures during which the whole notion of Œauthorship¹
has radically changed.

(i) ³Homer¹s² ballads (only TWO survive) were orally transmitted for at
least three centuries before writing was available.

(ii) The 27 books of the NT have never seriously been ascribed to a single
physical author (e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul are distinct
persons &/or pseudonyms) ‹ even the oft-presumed unity via holy inspiration
must face the Synoptic and other Œdiscrepancy¹ Problems. Otto may be
thinking of the Pauline Epistles, over which much ink-blood has been shed
debating which letters were truly dictated by Paul.

(iii) Discounting the mad Baconian/Oxfordian/et al delusions, there do
remain several real problems over which plays are 100% by Shaksper [sic] and
which have signs of collaboration. The latter was commonplace in the
hurly-burly of Elizabethan drama and we should not impose more modern
concepts of Œjealously-guarded authorship.¹ Indeed, many of the texts we now
read Œcanonically¹ were cobbled together from scribbled actors¹ prompts. ³To
be or not to be ‹ aye there¹s the point!² That happens to be a genuine
extant version of the famous soliloquy ‹ which d¹you prefer?

Re-reading VN the American Years (belated-by-15-years homage to Brian Boyd)
prompts me to ask whether the unfinished Original Laura was or could
(should?) be meaningfully Œcobbled¹ from any surviving notes?

Stan Kelly-Bootle 

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