William Percy S The Aphrodisia

"A rare marinal about disguised identities and loves among the Greco-Roman deities under the Mediterranean Sea. Percy described Aphrodisia as an experiment in a new genre he was inventing, the marinal, designed to contrast the pastoral set on land in the countryside. Beyond this setting, this comedy focuses on taking to an extreme the popular European trope of disguises by having most of the main characters reveal themselves to have an identity other than the one they present themselves as. Arion relates a sad story that is an original translation of a segment out of Bartas' Weeks about him being a poor singer who was captured by pirates, but in the conclusion, Arion reveals himself to actually be Jupiter, the King of the gods in Roman mythology. And Talus pretends to be an engineer and Vulcan's (god of fire) son, when he is really Neptune (god of water). In standard published plots from the Renaissance, these revelations prove to have been necessary to further the goals of the characters, but in this censored story, the disguises cause lifetimes of misery and prevent all who are disguised from achieving their romantic and power goals. Percy has designed a plot that subversively shows how common pseudonyms and fraudulent identities are in British society, as it confesses the Workshop's role in selling ghostwriting services. On the surface, the story is dense with innovative love entanglements, and the mythological misadventures of complex and stumbling characters. The preparations for Empress Cytherea's arrival and the Aphrodisia feast in her honor also showcases realistic details about what a day might have been like when the aristocratic Percy family prepared for James I's visit to their Sion House on June 8, 1603, just before James was crowned"--

A rare marinal about disguised identities and loves among the Greco-Roman deities under the Mediterranean Sea. Percy described Aphrodisia as an experiment in a new genre he was inventing, the marinal, designed to contrast the pastoral set on land in the countryside. Beyond this setting, this comedy focuses on taking to an extreme the popular European trope of disguises by having most of the main characters reveal themselves to have an identity other than the one they present themselves as. Arion relates a sad story that is an original translation of a segment out of Bartas’ Weeks about him being a poor singer who was captured by pirates, but in the conclusion, Arion reveals himself to actually be Jupiter, the King of the gods in Roman mythology. And Talus pretends to be an engineer and Vulcan’s (god of fire) son, when he is really Neptune (god of water). In standard published plots from the Renaissance, these revelations prove to have been necessary to further the goals of the characters, but in this censored story, the disguises cause lifetimes of misery and prevent all who are disguised from achieving their romantic and power goals. Percy has designed a plot that subversively shows how common pseudonyms and fraudulent identities are in British society, as it confesses the Workshop’s role in selling ghostwriting services. On the surface, the story is dense with innovative love entanglements, and the mythological misadventures of complex and stumbling characters. The preparations for Empress Cytherea’s arrival and the Aphrodisia feast in her honor also showcases realistic details about what a day might have been like when the aristocratic Percy family prepared for James I’s visit to their Sion House on June 8, 1603, just before James was crowned. “Fascinating study of disguise, identity, self-fashioning, metamorphosis, and authorship. *****” —LibraryThing, Early Reviewers, Charles Alan Ralston Plot and Staging Text Terms, References, Questions, Exercises

A rare marinal about disguised identities and loves among the Greco-Roman deities under the Mediterranean Sea.Percy described Aphrodisia as an experiment in a new genre he was inventing, the marinal, designed to contrast the pastoral set on land in the countryside. Beyond this setting, this comedy focuses on taking to an extreme the popular European trope of disguises by having most of the main characters reveal themselves to have an identity other than the one they present themselves as. Arion relates a sad story that is an original translation of a segment out of Bartas' Weeks about him being a poor singer who was captured by pirates, but in the conclusion, Arion reveals himself to actually be Jupiter, the King of the gods in Roman mythology. And Talus pretends to be an engineer and Vulcan's (god of fire) son, when he is really Neptune (god of water). In standard published plots from the Renaissance, these revelations prove to have been necessary to further the goals of the characters, but in this censored story, the disguises cause lifetimes of misery and prevent all who are disguised from achieving their romantic and power goals. Percy has designed a plot that subversively shows how common pseudonyms and fraudulent identities are in British society, as it confesses the Workshop's role in selling ghostwriting services. On the surface, the story is dense with innovative love entanglements, and the mythological misadventures of complex and stumbling characters. The preparations for Empress Cytherea's arrival and the Aphrodisia feast in her honor also showcases realistic details about what a day might have been like when the aristocratic Percy family prepared for James I's visit to their Sion House on June 8, 1603, just before James was crowned.

"A pastoral satire about homicidal women- and men-haters being forced into marriage. A standard "Shakespearean" comedy takes a group of youths who are attracted to those who are not interested in them, and regroups them by the conclusion into neat pairings of three or four marriages. In contrast, Fairy Pastoral appears to have been censored because the men in the pairings are wooing their intended partners from the beginning, while the women are homicidally opposed to marriage and prove to the men how much they hate them during the plot, only for them all to be forced into four marriages that all of them are miserable in by the resolution. The setting is the Forest of Elvida inhabited by a kingdom of fairies. Events open with a power-transfer from Princess Hypsiphyle to Prince Orion over accusations of mismanagement. Then, the Princess attempts to regain power across the competitive hunt the Court undertakes. Political and romantic tensions are repeatedly interrupted with slap-stick comedy of Schoolmaster Sir David trying to teach literature while his rear-end is showing, he is falling asleep, and in rare instances when he manages to relate a coherent lecture, the students fail to comprehend his meaning. This is a satire not only on the miseries that accompany forced-marriage, but also about the failures of pedagogic institutions, and irrational transfers of political power through subterfuge and sexism"--

A pastoral satire about homicidal women- and men-haters being forced into marriage. A standard “Shakespearean” comedy takes a group of youths who are attracted to those who are not interested in them, and regroups them by the conclusion into neat pairings of three or four marriages. In contrast, Fairy Pastoral appears to have been censored because the men in the pairings are wooing their intended partners from the beginning, while the women are homicidally opposed to marriage and prove to the men how much they hate them during the plot, only for them all to be forced into four marriages that all of them are miserable in by the resolution. The setting is the Forest of Elvida inhabited by a kingdom of fairies. Events open with a power-transfer from Princess Hypsiphyle to Prince Orion over accusations of mismanagement. Then, the Princess attempts to regain power across the competitive hunt the Court undertakes. Political and romantic tensions are repeatedly interrupted with slap-stick comedy of Schoolmaster Sir David trying to teach literature while his rear-end is showing, he is falling asleep, and in rare instances when he manages to relate a coherent lecture, the students fail to comprehend his meaning. This is a satire not only on the miseries that accompany forced-marriage, but also about the failures of pedagogic institutions, and irrational transfers of political power through subterfuge and sexism. “Ably presented by Professor Anna Faktorovich, Fairy Pastoral… will have a very special appeal to students and academicians with an interest in Elizabethan era pastoral plays and satiric dramas… Highly recommended for academic library literary fiction and drama collections… [and] for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject”. —Midwest Book Review, James Cox, July 2022 “The Fairy Pastoral and ‘Songs’ is an inherently fascinating study that will have special and particular appeal for readers with an interest in Shakespeare, Elizabethan Drama, and the Shakespeare/Percy controversy. Highly recommended for personal, professional, community, and academic library Literary Criticism collections.” —Midwest Book Review, Susan Bethany, August 2022 Plot and Staging Text Terms, References, Questions, Exercises “Songs” from MS 509 (1636)

"A farcical satire about the Laws of Tragedy and irrational morality that presents a Vacuum of death. The Forest Tragedy is the only text that Percy labeled as a "tragedy", but kept closeted in his family archives, without successfully selling it to a publisher. As the dominant tragedian under the "Shakespeare"-byline, Percy was the master of this genre. After decades of practicing perfecting strict obedience to the Laws of Tragedy, in this experiment, Percy rebels against them and satirizes the "imbecility" behind formulaic rules, and particularly in the types of rules that governs this "cruel" genre. The resulting farce especially satirizes Percy's "Shakespeare"-bylined Romeo and Juliet (1597), as well as other murder-suicide dramas described in "William Painter's" The Palace of Pleasure (1575). Translated segments from Palace about Rhomeo and Julietta are included to assist readers with finding echoes between these three texts. One blatant echo is the "...I die!" speeches uttered by Romeo and by Amadour in the Forest Tragedy. In the latter, events take place seemingly in the duchy of the Vacuum, or a void that brings together characters from ancient times together with historical and contemporary international European monarchs. In its conclusion, the Vacuum consumes all eight of the main characters, and leaves only dead bodies in its void. There is no clear main-character, so it might be Rhodaghond, the black-Egyptian slave-girl who ends up indirectly killing three of her masters because her mistress, Fulvia, shoves her once with her palm. Alternatively, it might be the Jewish boy-scholar and poison-brewer, Jeptes, who obliges his master by creating a poison that eventually kills four. The gore is brought to farcical lows, as three characters drink from a cup of wine with Lord Affranio's heart and the poison in it. Numerous laws of propriety, morality and generic-integrity are not only shattered across this Plot, but these shatterings are also philosophically explained as deliberate decisions of a Poet intent on sacrificing this Plot to prove the absurdity of genre-adhering murder-suicides. There is infidelity, hints of homosexuality, court-intrigue, fraudulent schemes, and a myriad of other dramatic events. And below the surface of the farce, there are beautiful and enticing metered and rhymed poetic passages hitting the heart and soul, as the audience is asked to consider these from the perspective of the omnipotent Poet who has to condemn characters to tragic deaths across decades of a professional writing career"--

The censored satirical or "bad" version of the "Shakespeare" classic that features a homosexual affair between Hamlet and Horatio, and Ofelia's deflowering to feign heterosexual normalcy. The standard summary of Hamlet describes it as a "tragedy" about a "mad" or "tormented" Prince of Denmark, who follows the solicitation of the Ghost of his assassinated father to revenge-murder his incestuous and homicidal uncle Claudius. The commentary that accompanies this never-before fully-modernized First Quarto of Hamlet explains how it was initially designed to be a satire that diverged from Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History where Amleth pretends to be mad not only to execute revenge but also to successfully win the crown from his uncle. The First Quarto subtracts any desire for the crown from Hamlet, and instead subversively explains that Hamlet is motivated to feign madness and to deflower Ofelia to disguise his outlawed homosexual love for Horatio. Hamlet makes no direct expressions of attraction towards Ofelia's beauty. And in the resolution, Horatio offers to poison himself to death when he learns Hamlet is dying. The satirical perspective of this history is especially apparent in the cemetery scene where the Clown 1 gravedigger sifts through a mass-grave to help Hamlet find a dried skull among those that are still decomposing. The heavy re-write between the 1603 and 1604 editions of Hamlet also help to show Percy's re-writing habit that confirms the attribution to him of diverging versions of anonymous and then "Shakespeare"-bylined versions of Leir/ Lear, and Tragedy of.../ Richard III. William Percy (1567?-1648) is the dominant tragedian behind the "William Shakespeare" pseudonym according to the computational-linguistic study in The Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus. Percy was a younger son of the assassinated 8th Earl of Northumberland and the brother of the imprisoned in the Tower 9th Earl. This series solves most of the previously critically discussed mysteries concerning the authorship of British Renaissance texts (including the "William Shakespeare" and 103 other bylines) by applying to 284 of them a newly invented for this study computational-linguistics method that uses a combination of 27 different tests to derive that six ghostwriters were their authors: Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, Benjamin Jonson, William Byrd and William Percy. This computational method as well as structural, biographical and various other attribution approaches that led to the attribution conclusions are discussed in Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus. A larger portion of this series is Modernization of the Inaccessible British Renaissance, which tests the quantitative attribution-conclusions by closely analyzing and explaining the contents of re-attributed texts that are uniquely significant for the revised history of this period, and yet have never been translated into Modern English before. Some of these texts were initially anonymous, others were self-attributed by the ghostwriters, and yet others were credited in bylines to pseudonyms or ghostwriting-contractors. The annotations to each of their translations provide thousands of new confirming clues of shared authorship within a given authorial-signature. These texts are polished for the first time to allow their superiority to shine so that readers can see how they rival the standard "Shakespeare" canon.

"A comedy that juxtaposes fame with anonymity, and tyrannical abuse with fair governance. The rapid succession of monarchs across Nobody and Somebody satirizes the standard plots of "Shakespearean" histories that end with the overthrow or death of the preceding tyrannical monarch, and suggest hope that the next monarch will be better, before this hope is dispelled in the next tragic history, as is the case with the chronological series of Edward III, Richard II, and 1 Henry IV. Nobody is set in 85-60 BC, or just before the Roman invasion of the British Isles. The plot opens with two Court advisors, Cornwall and Marcian, scheming to overthrow their corrupt King Archigallo who unfairly confiscates land to grant it to Lord Sycophant and names a common Wench as his Queen. The coup d'état succeeds, and Elidure accepts the crown when the advisors explain he is the only rational choice. A while into his reign, Elidure finds Archigallo in exile in a forest, and insists that Archigallo retakes the throne from him. While Archigallo's second term is less tyrannical it ends shortly thereafter due to his natural death, upon which the throne passes back to Elidure. Without a reprise in the events, Elidure's two younger brothers then wage war against Elidure and overthrow him. And then these brothers cannot agree on who between them should have power over the other, and so they wage war against each other and both die, leaving Elidure to again reclaim the throne. The radical moral story against tyranny in this central plot is dampened by the constant interruptions of a rival plotline about Nobody and Somebody. Nobody is a fair, charitable and unassuming land owner, against whom the corrupt and fraudulent landowner called Somebody wages a slander-campaign. Every word in this play is dense not only with this extremely violent, sexually-charged and outrageous plotlines, but also with subtexts of implied meanings and historical backstory"--