The Jane Austen Crisis has been averted. I know she is an exquisite stylist and much-loved but going back to the etiquette of Regency England after last weekend's encounter with Shostakovich would have seemed a bit lukewarm. With another weekend looming, I went into Cosham where there is a second hand bookshop and a number of charity shops in search of something that might bring itself to my attention. You can never tell with such speculative trips. Sometimes you will find an absolute bargain but otherwise the cupboard can be bare and the longer you look the less interesting the stock appears to be. But today was a lucky day and bang, bang, bang, I picked up three books in five minutes for less than six quid, the parsimoniousness always adding to the frisson of such success.First up was the Penguin Classics Five Plays by Thomas Middleton, widely acknowledged now as a collaborator on Timon of Athens. Already, just looking at the dramatis personae of A Trick to Catch the Old One, a lazy suspicion of mine has been amended.
I had assumed that the cipher characters, Poet and Painter, in Timon were the work of Middleton because Shakespeare never misses an opportunity to give even the most minor charcater a memorable name. And I'd even include Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet in that. Surely Shakespeare would have found names for the poet and painter. But Middleton here has Theodorus Witgood, Pecunious Lucre, Lamprey, Spitchcock, Gulf, Kix and Walkadine Hoard so he was clearly well ahead of the game in that department. And characters with some of those names, as well as Moneylove, provide an obvious link to the themes of Timon, too. So the Middleton plays will look lovely on the shelf until it's time to read some of them. I've probably read a couple already so I can start elsewhere among these new acquisitions.
And that will be with William D. Rubinstein's Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? (2013), bought mainly for how recent it is because it presumably contains further thoughts, or is merely a condensed version of Rubinstein's The Truth Will Out, the portentously titled, much bigger book he co-authored with Brenda James, which announced the arrival of a new candidate for the authorship in Sir Henry Neville, in 2005. And so I don't know how objective this assessment will be, especially since the order the candidates that are considered goes - Shakespeare, Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, Countess of Pembroke, Earl of Derby, Earl of Rutland, and finally, Sir Henry Neville. As if arriving at the right answer having dismissed the rest. We will see quite how even-handed this account is. It's not as if I haven't got any other books on the subject but I hope that, as a contribution to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death this year, I might present here the case for the defence- no, not the defence, the establishment of Shakespeare as author. I know it's been done before and I know it won't put an end to the ongoing controversy but I'd like to bring some modicum of sense to it as my input to at least suggest that once some people become addicted to a theory, no amount of reason can prevent them from getting lost in fantasy.
My third purchase was Anthony Trollope's The Warden, which easily sold itself to me by being advertised as being about 'an unworldly, cello-playing clergyman' engulfed by ecclesiastical and political skullduggery. If only all novels were about unworldly, cello-playing clergymen. But if Jane doesn't seem quite relevant at present, Trollope, in my experience, usually does. It has an introduction by Joanna Trollope, who I find is from the same family but not a direct descendant.
Look how much just buying these three books has generated already. Reading them can only provide more.