by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Last Will. and Testament — the period in the title is in the opening credits,
though not surprisingly it isn’t used on the imdb.com page for the film — which
promised an interesting, if typically tendentious, exploration of the ongoing
controversy surrounding the (presumed) works of William Shakespeare, the
allegation that someone else wrote them, and the debate among
Shakespeare-rejectionists of just who that someone might have been — including
at least two candidates, Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and
Christopher Marlowe, who were dead when new “Shakespeare” plays were still
being produced and premiered at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres in London.
The show, which I’d recorded from KPBS, turned out to be a cut-down one-hour
version of a 90-minute documentary produced in conjunction with the 2011 film Anonymous, a dramatization of the Oxford theory featuring some
of the same actors, including Mark Rylance (a first-rate performer who also has
a quite large and uncut cock — I know that because I first saw him in the film Intimacy, in which he went full-frontal; that movie was
basically a knock-off of Last Tango in Paris but one I liked better than the original) and Derek
Jacobi.
What was most amusing about it was that after picking apart the
traditional Shakespeare-accepting biographies for their attempts to build
extensive structures out of a flimsy foundation of actual contemporary
information — the show demonstrated how often the orthodox Shakespeare
biographies use phrases like “may have,” “might have,” “must have,” “could
have” — the authors of this film, Laura and Lisa Wilson, make even more bizarre
leaps of logic, saying that because the name “Shakespeare” was spelled with a
hyphen the few times works from the canon were published in his lifetime —
“SHAKE-SPEARE” — it really meant “shaking a spear” and referred to Pallas
Athena, the Greek goddess who had a magic helmet that could turn her invisible
so she could affect battles without being seen either by the side she was
helping or the side she was hurting. (The narration even argued that the first
name “William,” a variant on the German “Wilhelm,” meant “wish-helmet” and was
another reference to Pallas Athena.) The bizarreries get worse as the show
argues that the Shakespeare plays couldn’t have been written without an
intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Queen Elizabeth’s court (which, as
I pointed out to Charles, would be like saying that nobody could write a play
about the John F. Kennedy administration without having been part of it — true,
there were far more readily accessible communications media in Kennedy’s time
than in Elizabeth I’s, but there were town criers and other word-of-mouth methods as well as large posters
in coffeehouses and other public places by which people got their news in the
pre-newspaper age) and that Polonius in Hamlet was a parody of William Cecil, Lord Burleigh,
Elizabeth’s key advisor (some said he was really running the country and she
was just a figurehead) and the man who raised DeVere after he was orphaned in
his teens (or was it William Cecil’s son Robert, who took over as Elizabeth’s
principal advisor when his dad died?). The show didn’t offer any explanation for how “new” Shakespeare plays
continued to come out for a decade after Edward DeVere’s death in 1604, though
other “Oxonians” (the narration rather annoyingly referred to supporters of
DeVere as the real “Shakespeare” as “Oxonians” and supporters of the
Shakespeare-wrote-Shakespeare view as “Stratfordians,” as if they were rooters
for rival football teams) have argued that the Earl of Oxford left behind
enough manuscripts, albeit some in uncompleted or fragmentary form, to continue
to produce “Shakespeare” plays for a decade more, with John Fletcher (who
actually existed; though for centuries The Tempest had been regarded as Shakespeare’s last play, the
current edition of The Oxford Shakespeare includes a later one, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and co-credits it to Shakespeare and Fletcher) as
the person who whipped up the earl’s surviving manuscripts into performable
plays and offered them up as “Shakespeare.”
There are certainly problems with
the case for the historically known William Shakespeare as the author of
Shakespeare’s plays — including the fact that there’s no evidence that he could
read or write at all beyond being able to sign his name. Indeed, as far as we
know neither of Shakespeare’s parents could read or write, nor could any of his
children; and this show pointed out that the inventory of Shakespeare’s
possessions taken on his death did not include any books. This led me, the last
time I saw one of these tendentious Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare
programs, on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle basis that when you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, to
consider the possibility that Shakespeare couldn’t read or write but did create the content of the plays by dictating them. (This might in part reflect my own bias, which
is that reading a Shakespeare
play is pretty dull; for me these works only come alive when I see them
performed, either live or on film or TV.) There’s also no known evidence from
Shakespeare’s actual lifetime that he was involved in the London theatre as
anything more than an investor — the attribution of the plays to him and also
the claim that he acted in them rest on the First Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death
(and the only source for about half the plays in the Shakespeare canon). And
there’s no known manuscript for any of Shakespeare’s work in Shakespeare’s hand
— though that doesn’t bother me as much as it does some other people; after
all, Christopher Marlowe was everything Shakespeare wasn’t as far as the
anti-Shakespeareans claim the author of “Shakespeare” would have had to have
been — university-educated, erudite, directly involved in the controversies of
the day, employed by the Elizabethan court as a spy (the significance of the
odd letter Marlowe wrote to the government requesting permission to go to
France — “So he wanted to go to France? So what?” one might say today, but in
Elizabeth’s time France was in a state of cold-war with England and was a hotbed
of Roman Catholic sympathizers with the power that posed an existential threat
to England, Spain) — and yet only one page of a Marlowe playscript in his own
hand is claimed to exist, and even that is disputed.
I must say that in my
youth I was briefly attracted to the idea that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the
same person — the theory here is that Marlowe, who was ostensibly killed in a
tavern brawl in 1593 (but, as Hugh Williamson persuasively — at least to me —
argued in his historical novel Kind Kit, was really the victim of a hit squad organized by Walsingham, the
head of Queen Elizabeth’s equivalent of the CIA and uncle of a noble boy
Marlowe had had the bad luck to fall in love with), actually faked his own death and made his way to Italy (or,
according to some versions, Spain), where he hid out and continued to work as a
playwright, sending his scripts to England where they were produced with
Shakespeare as a “front.” (One supposed piece of evidence for this was the
number of Shakespeare plays that take place in Italy. This got mentioned in Last
Will. and Testament too, as evidence that
the author of the plays must have been someone who had actually lived in Italy,
which DeVere had and Shakespeare hadn’t.) Then I actually read Marlowe’s plays,
and decided he was a genius author at Shakespeare’s level but the two were so
different it was hard to believe they were anything more than two literary
giants working in the same medium in the same language at the same place and
time. And one of the big things that sets them apart is Marlowe’s erudition;
his plays simply read like those
of a man who had obviously had much more “book-learning” than Shakespeare.
Another is that Marlowe was more a dramatist of ideas than Shakespeare, whereas
Shakespeare was more interested in creating multidimensional human characters
than using his people as mouthpieces for his own political and social ideas
(indeed I’d regard Marlowe as a forerunner of Wagner, Shaw and Brecht in that
department). This isn’t to say that there isn’t any crossover — Edward
II is my favorite Marlowe play not only
because it’s the most open and out-front about the author’s Queerness (when
Marlowe died he was under indictment for both homosexuality and atheism,
capital crimes in Elizabethan England — and his principal accuser was Thomas
Kyd, the mediocre playwright, author of The Spanish Tragedy and probable author of the first 1580 version of Hamlet, who was more popular at the time than either Marlowe
or Shakespeare) but it’s the most “Shakespearean” of them, the one in which he
created the deepest, richest, most rounded characters of any of his works.
But
I continue to see no reason to believe that anyone other than the historical
William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s works; Shakespeare is known to have been involved in the theatres where
the plays were premiered, and he was hailed as their author just seven years
after his death — when a lot of people who would have had knowledge of a
literary fraud, had there been one, would have still been alive and able to
blow the whistle on it. I’ve long thought the “Shakespeare didn’t write
Shakespeare” myth began in the early 19th century, during the
Romantic era, when Shakespeare, largely forgotten in his own country (thanks at
least in part to the Commonwealth period when England was ruled by Puritan
Oliver Cromwell, who had all the theatres closed down on moral grounds and
thereby broke the performance tradition of Shakespeare’s and others’ plays),
was rediscovered by playwrights, novelists and composers on the Continent and
reinvented to fit the Romantic stereotype of what an artist should be.
Shakespeare, by all accounts, led a supremely dull bourgeois life; he didn’t
get in trouble with the authorities, he didn’t get a picturesque illness, he
didn’t participate in a revolutionary movement, he didn’t lead a licentious
sexual life, and he didn’t die young (whereas Marlowe qualified on all those
counts except the picturesque illness) — so it’s not surprising that some of
the Romantic Shakespeare fans responded to the contrast between the dazzling
quality of the work and the dullness of the known author’s life by suspecting
that someone else actually wrote the plays. Indeed, the first published claim
that Edward DeVere was the author of “Shakespeare” came out in the early 19th
century and was a book written by the author with the name Thomas Looney — and
though the people in this documentary conscientiously pronounced it “Loney,” I
still think that the more common pronunciation of its actual spelling says all
you need to know about the Oxford legend’s credibility!
