Dolly Walker-Wraight

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Dolly Walker-Wraight (b. 24 April 1920, Java - d. 15 February 2002) was a British historian, Marlovian scholar and teacher.

She married Robert Wraight in 1940 (they divorced in 1963). She earned the Froebel Teachers Diploma in 1958 and worked as a teacher at Dulwich College Preparatory School (1961 – 1967; 1975-1983) and at the William Tyndale School (1969 – 1974). Her interest in Marlowe began in 1956 when the American writer Calvin Hoffman, who popularized the Marlowe-Theory, published his book The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare. Dolly Walker-Wraight's research centred around the Marlovian theory and an interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets. She also joined the Marlowe Society, serving variously as secretary, editor of their newsletter, Chair and Vice-Chair. She began a drama branch to revive Marlowe and his contemporaries rarely performed plays. In 1965, she published an illustrated biography: In Search of Christopher Marlowe (in collaboration with the American photographer, Virginia Stern).[1] She died on 15 February 2002, aged 81.

Contents

[edit] The Shakespeare Sonnets

The methodology in her book "The Story that the Sonnets Tell" was to divide the sonnets of Shakespeare under different meanings to come closer to the solution of their mystery[2],[3]. She approached the problem by assuming that what the poet himself has written is as close to the truth as one can get. According to her belief the basic mistake committed by many interpreters of the Sonnets was that they have assumed that there was only one man depicted in them. She seems to have identified that they are at least three. For the first edition of the sonetts 1609 the order probably was arranged by the poet himself, as an art form almost like a five act play. There are reasons to suppose that the poet himself never dreamed of that his sonnets would be sorted up like this in different columns. The first one is Henry Wriothesley, to whose seventeenth birthday the first seventeen sonnets were commissioned by Lord Burghley to inspire him to marry his granddaughter. The second young man of the Sonnets is a certain "William Hatcliffe", one of two possible 'Mr. W.H.'. The third man is "Thomas Walsingham", Marlowe's friend, who stood him by as he unjustly dishonoured was forced into exile, for which constancy the poet was indebted to him for the rest of his life, which the sonnets might illustrate. Wraight found her arguments on a basis of solidity, her research is laborious and exact, during almost an entire liftetime, and her work to solve the riddle of the Sonnets seems unparalleled, although her hypotheses are not completely new and some ideas have been expressed before.


[edit] Publications

  • In Search of Christopher Marlowe (1965)
  • Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn (1993)
  • The Story that the Sonnets Tell (1994)
  • New Evidence (1996)
  • The Legend of Hiram

[edit] References

  1. ^ A. D. Wraight (text) and Virginia Stern (photography). The book was published in 1965 by Vanguard Press, New York City.
  2. ^ http://hem.fyristorg.com/aurelio/shakespeare.html In: Comments on A.D.Wraight
  3. ^ Marlowe in Exile? 2. The Story That The Sonnets Tell

[edit] External links

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