The Tudor stage

Ron Unz, in Joseph Sobran's school, is talking Shakespeare. Unz has the motive to call Sobran a prophet; which we can take or leave, but the service Unz presents in so-doing is a good one.

Back in the early 1990s, Sobran (erstwhile English-lit major) thought "Shakespeare" was actually Edward de Vere Lord Oxford, paederast, based on the sonnets. More lately, McCarthy has found that Shakespeare's plundering of Sir Thomas North went beyond the Plutarchisms everyone knows about (which we remember from HBO's Rome if nowhence else).

I would note here that I don't think we have the same evidence for North's... proclivities... as we have for de Vere. Such hasn't stuck out to me in these plays, as it has for contemporary Christopher Marlowe's (more on him later). If anything gender-bending is played for outright laughs. The Shakespearean poems, however... maybe. A Sobran-McCarthy synthesis would account for this discrepancy: de Vere had no reason to insert this stuff in North's work, which he wanted to adapt for the stage, in mixed company (if not with female actors in said company). Itinerant players touring, oh, the old Celtic avons might have the female actors but assuredly would not want to allude to what the Tudors' Church was calling "sodomy".

We can see the difference when we look at fellow Tudor Marlowe. Marlowe wrote a whole play about that very topic: Edward II. That play's audiences would know what they were getting. The topic interested Marlowe, as de Vere; it did not interest North.

I have not explored a Marlovian dynamic in Julius Caesar where is handled the character of Brutus. We might also consider the forbidden love of, say: Romeo and Juliet. De Vere's hand might be in there. I am not a Shakespeare scholar. Perhaps one of those might explore that dynamic.

SCHOLAR 3/22: Dennis McCarthy says the satirists pinned Caesar and Romeo both upon North.