What if Shakespeare were discovered today?

Cafe Society
1

Suppose there were an alternate history Earth, very much like ours, but with one difference. In this world, Shakespeare decided to pursue a career as a merchant, instead of a poet. Many phrases that Shakespeare invented never entered the language. Nobody says “hoist by your own petard”, for example.

Most creative works that reference Shakespeare still were written, but reference other works instead. The Star Trek episode The Conscience of the King was instead named Badger By Owl-Light, and the actors perform The Duchess Of Malfi, instead of Hamlet.

Other than that, everything is the same. All the events that happened in our world happened in theirs, too. History books from both worlds are identical, except for a different phrase here and there. Lists of who won or lost various sporting events are identical.

Now, suppose a copy of Shakespeare were to fall through a space warp from our world to theirs, and should by chance arrive at the desk of a great professor of literature. He reads it.

What are the chances that he would be impressed?

If he were to publish it, would the public notice, or like it?

If he were to mount a production of Hamlet, with the world’s greatest actors, the world’s greatest director, the best set and costume designers, would anyone want to see it?

2

I think I’ve seen this movie.

3

More than that.

There are about 1,700 words that he is credited with inventing. (Or, at least, he is the first written record of these words.) Ones like assassination, bump, courtship, dwindle, exposure, frugal, gloomy, hurry, ….

4

Shakespeare is awesome, if that is what you are asking. Why do you think he is that popular, and everybody knows his words and phrases?

5

A professor of literature would probably think he’d won the lottery twice over. While Shakespeare tends to overshadow his contemporaries, there was a literary scene, but he was a big proportion of that. If his role in our universe was taken over by say, half a dozen other worthy hacks and playwrights, just the volume of new Shakespeare work that landed on the Professor’s desk would be impressive.

I think it would be possibly equivalent to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls - a massive injection of new literary content, alternate takes on play subjects and views on how contemporary politics and social life was reflected in literature, perhaps revision of the way that the entire Elizabethan literary scene was organised.

The Shakespeare corpus would also presumably introduce a great body of new words and phrases that would engage people - so hipster Youtubers would name their channels ‘The Petard’ and ‘The World is my Oyster’ etc.

Hopefully Professor ? would get his/her shit together and not gate-keep curation of the collection like the Dead Sea Scrolls have been, but would take advantage of modern technologies to make the texts open access.

6

The comparison with the Dead Sea Scrolls is probably accurate. That undoubtedly had a huge impact on scholarship about the Old Testament. It also gave rise to a sub-genre of silly pseudohistorical speculation. But one can hardly argue that its impact on popular understanding of the Bible has been anything other than negligible. Most people who read the Bible have no interest at all in such things.

As for Shakespeare, without him there would undoubtedly still be specialists who studied Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Much in the way that there are specialists who study English theatre in other periods. But it seems rather unlikely that without Shakespeare the study of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre would loom so large in the field of English literature. Unless one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Jonson, had instead been promoted as the national bard. But it is just as likely that a poet from another period, say Chaucer or Milton, would be viewed as the preeminent English poet. Don’t underestimate how far this would hamper the popular reception of the works of a newly-discovered Shakespeare.

First-rate artistic figures do sometimes get rediscovered from obscurity. The obvious examples from the visual arts would be Caravaggio, Vermeer and Artemisia Gentileschi. For literature specifically, plenty of female writers have also been rediscovered. But the general public aren’t exactly rushing to read the works of Margaret Cavendish or Aphra Behn.

7

There wouldn’t be a “today” without Shakespeare. It’s not just phrases: the whole modern concept of drama arising from the characters’ flaws and mistakes was derived from his works. Without them, the world would be a very different place.

8

Alessan Guest

2h

There wouldn’t be a “today” without Shakespeare. It’s not just phrases: the whole modern concept of drama arising from the characters’ flaws and mistakes was derived from his works. Without them, the world would be a very different place.

This. Shakespeare wasn’t enduringly famous for his neat plots; nearly every play he wrote was traceable to something well-known in his era. His transformative language influenced his contemporaries to such a degree that he is considered the line between Middle English and Modern English. Take him out of the equation and England would, well, be famous for whiskey and soccer and its really aggressive foreign policy and not much else. Put four hundred years between him writing it and anyone else reading it, the impact would be kinda blunted.

9

Shakespeare professor here. If I (or anyone) found a copy of 38 unpublished and previously unknown Elizabethan / Jacobean plays, especially ones that are, for the most part, better than anything else we have from the period, it would be a huge discovery and everyone in the academic world would be massively impressed. There would, however, be some pretty serious questions about provenance! “Fell through a space warp,” obviously, would not be a satisfactory explanation. There are plenty of lost plays from this era, and it’s not crazy that we could have lost Shakespeare’s (all it would really take for us to have lost about half of Shakespeare would have been his acting buddies John Heminges and Henry Condell dying a few years earlier, and never seeing the First Folio into print). But it would beggar belief if the complete works of a major dramatist that we’d never heard of, works that were obviously written for the commercial stage but had left no trace in the written record, suddenly turned up. So I think the likely reaction from scholars would be “this has to be a forgery, but it’s a really bizarre and impressive one that is worth studying on its own terms.”

I have no idea whether the general public would be interested in a production of Hamlet! An awful lot about theater history and the literary canon would be different; people’s tastes would have been shaped differently; they might or might not have the same comfort level with early modern English (although the King James Bible would presumably still exist and have still made some features of that language familiar).

I have lots of more specific thoughts about what would and wouldn’t be different (starting with why we wouldn’t have The Duchess of Malfi, but would have the general concept of “drama arising from the characters’ flaws and mistakes), but they will have to wait until after class…

10

It would be interesting if something major, like Hamlet, had not been discovered until now.

If we knew all about Shakespeare, but had never heard of Hamlet, it would be a massive discovery. I think it would soar to the top of his works, much as it pretty much is now.

It would have been pretty incredible to find something so important. Reminds me of the guy who found the Terracotta Warriors in China.

11

From a handout I got from The Shakespeare Society Of America :

accused, addiction, advertising, amazement, assassination, backing, bandit, bedroom, blanket, birthplace, bloodstained, bet, bump, buzzer, blushing, champion, cold-blooded, countless, critic, dauntless, dawn, deafening, discontent, dishearten, drugged, dwindle, elbow, excitement, eyeball, fashionable, flawed, generous, gloomy, gossip, green-eyed, hint, hobnob, hot-blooded, hurried, impartial, jaded, label, laughable, lonely, lower, luggage, majestic, marketable, mimic, moonbeam, mountaineer, noiseless, ode, Olympian, outbreak, puking, radiance, rant, scuffle, secure, skim milk, submerge, torture, summit, swagger, tranquil, undress, unreal, varied, vaulting, worthless, zany…

A laughing stock (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

A sorry sight (Macbeth)

As dead as a doornail (Henry VI)

Eaten out of house and home (Henry V, Part 2)

Fair play (The Tempest)

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve (Othello)

In a pickle (The Tempest)

In stitches (Twelfth Night)

In the twinkling of an eye (The Merchant Of Venice)

Mum’s the word (Henry VI, Part 2)

Neither here nor there (Othello)

Send him packing (Henry IV)

Set your teeth on edge (Henry IV)

There’s method in my madness (Hamlet)

Too much of a good thing (As You Like It)

Vanish into thin air (Othello)

A laughing stock (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

A sorry sight (Macbeth)

As dead as a doornail (Henry VI)

Eaten out of house and home (Henry V, Part 2)

Fair play (The Tempest)

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve (Othello)

In a pickle (The Tempest)

In stitches (Twelfth Night)

In the twinkling of an eye (The Merchant Of Venice)

Mum’s the word (Henry VI, Part 2)

Neither here nor there (Othello)

Send him packing (Henry IV)

Set your teeth on edge (Henry IV)

There’s method in my madness (Hamlet)

Too much of a good thing (As You Like It)

Vanish into thin air (Othello)

12

Wow. I had no idea that there were so many.

Or did these words and phrases exist but his writing is just the first written evidence?

13

OK, so that list of words needs to be taken with a grain of salt – Shakespeare may be the first one recorded as using the word, or, more often, using it in a particular form or a particular sense. For example, “gossip” as a noun dates back to the Middle Ages – first meaning a godparent of either sex, then one of the close female friends taking care of the mother at a baby’s birth, then a talkative woman, then the talk itself. Shakespeare is just the first person on record to use it as a verb. Same story for many of the other words – :”accuse,” “amaze,” “assassin” and “addict” certainly predate Shakespeare, and from there it’s an easy leap to “accused,” “amazement,” “assassination” and “addiction.” He’s not randomly making up words, just tossing a suffix onto an existing one. Some of this is bona fide linguistic inventiveness. (Shakespeare, like Calvin, liked to verb nouns and weird language.) Some of it is just being the first person to use a word that was already current in spoken English in an extant written text, and there’s a certain amount of “Shakespeare bias,” in that the compilers of the OED were way more likely to notice Shakespeare using a word in 1605 than some random dude using it in an unpublished letter to his friend in 1602.

The multi-word turns of phrase are more likely to be Shakespeare originals, although even here, there are some that were definitely current prior to Shakespeare (he would have found “the fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” in the Geneva Bible, for example).

14

I suspect that it would take quite a long time, if ever, for Shakespeare to become the cultural icon he is today.
The language is dense, and there has been a lot of drift in English in the nearly 400 years. The plays are not instantly comprehensible to a modern speaker.

I rather doubt the plays would be widely commercial in an environment accustomed to Internet soundbites?

On a related topic: suppose Shakespeare the man had been born in 1995? I wonder what he would be doing today? [Note to mods: if you think this is too much of a hijack, we can move it to a new thread].

15

Easy - he’d be a Hollywood director-screenwriter. The man loved language, but he also loved show business, and he was a populist at heart. He’d be making blockbusters, or at least trying to.

16

I was thinking probably more like an originator of several TV series, though of course the two are not incompatible.

It’s interesting that he apparently laid down tools and stopped writing before the end of his life.

Rather like Artie Shaw putting down his clarinet…

17

Nothing would happen. How often are the plays by Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe performed today? Where is the mass audience for them?

Imagine announcing to the world that “We just found an Elizabethan writer who was better than Christopher Marlowe!” A small cadre would notice, and no doubt present the plays, and in time maybe a cult would grow up around them. A mass audience? No.

Shakespeare works partly because of his celebrity status and partly because people have spent centuries adapting his plays to contemporary society. “Modern dress” versions of Shakespeare take his work out of the 16th century. Hamlet regularly gets shortened of its four-hour length. Romeo and Juliet is shorthand for doomed lovers and the core theme can plopped down in any circumstance, but if it were to discovered tomorrow some other ur source would get the credit and this one dismissed as yet another copy.

Though certainly noted in his time, his pre-eminent status took 200 years to be asserted. Not until the 19th century was he popular with the masses, but that was an era before movies and television, when plays were a dominant art form. Today a 1200-page dump of plays in which half the language contains allusions and puns barely accessible to moderns would be a non-event.

That “time warp,” though. That would get attention. Maybe someday something good would come through it!

18

He was popular with the masses in his own lifetime. Do you mean that he wasn’t popular with the masses in post-Elizabethan England until the 19th century?

19

I remember a radio commercial from many moons ago. I don’t remember what it was advertising, but the scene entailed a record producer attending the audition of a new musician: Mozart. The producer spoke with a British accent and frequently complained to his assistant about the lack of talent nowadays.

Mozart starts playing, and the producer cuts him off. He then says “First of all, love your hair, love your shoes. But it’s not commercial enough. Next!”

Despite all the Shakespeare fans saying it would be a glorious find, I’m more cynical. Today’s appraisers would say tl;dr and drag to Trash.

20

Aha. Now about that Library of Alexandria… :slight_smile: