"Shakespeare" By Another Name

Guest post: How Did A Man Who Didn't Go to Italy Go to Italy? A review of Richard Paul Roe's The Shakespeare Guide to Italy

2011-12-10T08:35:00.005-05:00

Book review of Richard Paul Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels (Harper Perennial, Nov. 2011)

by John Christian Plummer

Imagine that you lived in a time in which every educated person was absolutely certain that the planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moved both forward and backward. This is what the astronomer Tycho Brahe called “retrograde motion.” In Hamlet, when Claudius tells Prince Hamlet that a return to Wittenberg (the alma mater of Brahe) “is most retrograde to (the King’s) desire.”

From the standpoint of the 21^st century, it requires a powerful feat of imagination to reckon that a vast celestial body like Mars would stop in the middle of space and reverse its direction. And that it would do so consistently. But that is precisely what many well educated 16^th century Europeans thought happened, and they didn’t just make this up out of a desire for imaginative tales; they had a problem that needed explaining. The problem was Mars appeared at one point in the east of the sky, progressed westward, but then appeared back east of its westward position. If Mars were to move in that way as it orbited the earth…well…one logical explanation would suggest it wasn’t orbiting the earth. But that was impossible, of course, because Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and all the other planets, as well as the sun, absolutely did orbit the earth, because the earth, as everyone knew, was the center of the universe. So given that unassailable fact, Brahe proposed his theory of retrograde motion. Mars, like a crab, like Hamlet, moved backward.

From where we sit in the age of Einstein, it’s easy to chuckle at this absurd mental contortion which, we now know, flies in the face of not only the correct, heliocentric model of the solar system, but also basic Newtonian physics. But let us not forget that the educated Europeans of the 16^th century were operating from a working hypothesis – the geocentric model of the universe – that was powerful enough to put mortal fears into the minds of men like Copernicus and Galileo, whose more elegant, thoroughly researched and ultimately accurate explanations eventually won the day.

It is no hyperbole to call Richard Paul Roe a twenty-first century Galileo of literature. Roe isn’t examining the stars without, but rather the stars within: specifically a third of the canon of the man some call the greatest author who ever set pen to paper, the man we call William Shakespeare. The so-called Italy plays of Shakespeare are the subject of Roe’s tremendous inquiry, and his more than two decades of painstaking investigation and research have resulted in the landmark book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, Retracing the Bard’s Unknown Travels, just released, posthumously, under the Harper/Perennial imprint.

Roe, not coincidentally an attorney as well as an author, does something never before achieved: he proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the playwright of Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and the eight (yes, ten plays in total, to be clarified below) other Shakespeare plays set in Italy actually went to Italy. For over 400 years, Shakespeare scholars, many of them highly regarded and well paid, have, like Tycho Brahe, gotten it completely wrong. The playwright was in Italy. And his descriptions of the geography, topography, architecture, custom and regional dialects of that Mediterranean land, to which a relative few Elizabethans ever traveled, are absolutely accurate.

This is nothing short of a Galilean revolution in Shakespearean scholarship. Roe upends the centuries-old truism that would have us believe that the author invented a fanciful version of Italy filled with myriad factual errors. In fact, Roe demonstrates, it is the scholars who have erred. Their sin, dating from the early 18^th century “biographers” of Shakespeare to modern editors of the Arden, Riverside, Folger et al editions of the plays, is to never do what Roe does: go to the source, the land in question, Italy.

Again and again, in successive chapters, Roe travels to the purported settings of the plays and repeatedly makes the same intertwined discoveries: the playwright was there, and the scholars are wrong.

How is this possible? How can so many people be so wrong about something that one man could, with several trips to Italy and to the right libraries, get right? I would suggest that, like the well-intentioned, well-educated scholars of the 16^th century who operated from a geocentric model, these otherwise intelligent people have gone wrong because they’re working from a flawed hypothesis. But like Brahe, traditional Shakespeare scholars have been doggedly determined to fit their working hypothesis – the plays were written by a man who never left England – to the actual writing contained in these ten Italian plays. The traditional, Stratford-centric scholars are aided in their pursuit by a confluence of time and ignorance, which allow them, for instance, to quite easily scoff at the notion, as scripted in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, that a water-based journey from “landlocked” Verona can be made to “landlocked” Milan. But Roe’s painstaking analysis, not only of the text (he spends four pages on a handful of lines that concern water-based puns), but of the present-day and 16^th century cities in question, seeing sights, meeting with scholars and digging up historical tracts, proves that the scoffers are wrong. The writer didn’t fancifully invent boat travel from Verona to Milan. The writer accurately depicted a journey, taken by countless nobles of that era, via several canals and two rivers, which allowed travel from city to city without ever touching land. As the playwright points out in Two Gentlemen, water routes were the preferred mode of travel for nobles, who would not only have a more comfortable ride but one that avoids the outlaws who haunted the roads, both in real life and in the play. Roe’s thrilling journey of discovery, a shoe-leather investigator hot on the beat of a great mystery, is itself almost as exciting as the truth at the end of his pursuit.

Roe consistently proves how editors of the plays have over the centuries given readers – and actors, directors, and designers – information that is flat out wrong. One reads his factual refutations and shudders to think at how many productions have been misguided by their trusted textual interpreters. While Roe’s prose is nothing if not circumspect when pointing out the errors of others, it’s hard not to view Edward Cappell, the editor of the 1768 edition of the Shakespeare plays, as the villain in his book. As Roe repeatedly demonstrates, Cappell more than once adds settings and stage directions, changes proper nouns to nouns and vice versa, all the while obscuring the meaning of the playwright’s words. Perhaps a biography of Cappell is in order, so that we can learn what, other than laziness, compelled him to so often reject scholarship for invention.

Each chapter of The Shakespeare Guide is filled with groundbreaking discoveries, but none so shocking – to Roe as well, who writes in a refreshing, clear first-person hand – as the realizations that A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest are both clearly based on Italian locales and 16^th century Italian history. When Roe, on the advice of a tour guide, pays a visit to the small city of Sabionetta, near Mantua, he doesn’t draw any immediate conclusions from its nickname of La Picola Atena – Little Athens. But at the end of his tour, he’s thunderstruck when he learns another name for the arched main gate into the city is translated as “the Duke’s oak.” From that echo of Peter Quince’s line in Midsummer, Roe begins an explanation that demonstrates unequivocally that Little Athens, not Athens, Greece, is the setting of the Dream. His journey to Vulcana, an extraordinary island off the north coast of Sicily, reveals a panoply of flora, fauna and landmarks that show it is none other than Prospero’s island. Roe’s research into not only the history of Italian city-states but also of England’s perspective on them, illuminates the inspirations for the people and events who inspired the creation of Prospero, Antonio, Alonso, Ariel, Sycorax and Caliban. Reams have been written striving to tie The Tempest to Bermuda and the new world of America, via the now-debunked work of plagiarism known as the Strachey letter. In thirty concise pages, Roe consigns all those ill-informed Tempest musings to the recycling bin.

The Shakespeare Guide is simply required reading for any theatre company producing Midsummer, The Tempest or any of the other eight scripts The Shakespeare Guide illuminates. For it not to begin appearing on the syllabus of every university Shakespeare studies class would be a crime against the education any university claims to provide.

Throughout the book, Roe refers to the author simply as “the playwright.” This is reminiscent of the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” that is the key to Sherlock Holmes’ solving of a kidnapping in the classic detective story Silver Blaze. The dog who didn’t bark is “the playwright,” for up until now, every traditional, Shakespearean scholar was quite happy to accept the lie that Shakespeare’s descriptions of Italy proved he never went there.

Now that Roe has proved the writer was there, he has, in essence, thrown the Stratford-centric theory of authorship on the dust heap of faulty theories alongside Brahe’s retrograde motion, because there is absolutely no evidence that man who signed his name Shaksper, Shakspe, Shakspere and Shakespeare, and who hailed from Stratford, ever left the shores of his mother country. For centuries, as with Brahe, we had a problem that needed explaining – Shakespeare never went to Italy – and we had an explanation that worked – the Italy of the Shakespeare plays is an inaccurate fantasy. Now we have a new problem that needs explaining: how did a man who never went to Italy go to Italy? We know what happened to Galileo in the short run, but in the long run, verity was the victor.

John Christian Plummer is a screenwriter, director, producer and artistic director of the World's End Theatre Company in Garrison, N.Y.

photo of Richard Paul Roe (c) 2003, 2011 by Mark Anderson

"Anonymous" with a Byline - Screenwriter John Orloff interview (part 2)

2011-11-23T00:15:00.007-05:00

As of the writing of this blog post, the Oxfordian biopic Anonymous has earned $6.9 million in international box office revenue. The movie also continues to open in staggered release in countries all over the world through the end of February. Later in 2012, of course, its extended life will begin on home video, on television, on airplane flights, in classrooms, etc.

Despite the sometimes astonishingly vein-bulging tantrums of Oxfordian deniers, Anonymous will continue to introduce millions of people to the Shakespeare authorship mystery and to the most likely alternative "Shakespeare" candidate -- Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

We're grateful for Anonymous screenwriter John Orloff giving this blog an exclusive long-form interview with him about the alpha to omega of his script. (Orloff has also generously provided some of his own personal collection of photographs he took while on set with director Roland Emmerich -- during the movie's principal photography last year.)

In part one of the "Shakespeare" by Another Name Blog's interview with Orloff, we discussed the screenwriter's own discovery of the Shakespeare authorship question courtesy of the 1989 PBS Frontline documentary The Shakespeare Mystery. Orloff ultimately wrote a screenplay about Edward de Vere and "Shakespeare," a script he originally titled Soul of the Age.

Orloff had, he said, shopped it around Hollywood. And on the strength of Soul of the Age, Orloff had had meetings with Tom Hanks -- who ultimately hired Orloff to write two scripts for Hanks' co-production with Steven Spielberg, Band of Brothers.

(SPOILER ALERT: This part of the interview with Orloff (part 2 of 3) begins getting into the thick of the movie's plot.)

MARK ANDERSON: Does Tom Hanks have an opinion on the authorship question?

JOHN ORLOFF: We never discussed it. My guess is he's a Stratfordian. But we never got deep into it. But Soul of the Age led to me getting a writing career and doing other work. A lot for Tom.

MKA: Beyond Band of Brothers?

JO: Only that was produced. But I wrote about three more scripts for Tom over the years. And then meanwhile, I got a phone call from my agent saying Roland Emmerich is looking for writers for this disaster movie he's going to make about global warming. I said, "I don't know if I'm the right guy for that kind of stuff. I don't know the genre that well."

But [my agent] said, 'Yeah, but he's heard a lot about you. He really wants to meet you.'

MKA: So this was when?

JO: This was 2002 or '03. We sat down in his office, and we talked about "Day After Tomorrow." Which sounded totally cool. But it also sounded like a movie I didn't understand as a writer. It's very outside of my wheelhouse, as they say.

The other thing is, as a writer, I have to write things I love. And I don't know that genre as well as I should. And I said that to Roland. I said, "I'm so flattered that you think I can do this. I'm not sure I can. And I think quite frankly you can get a lot of writers who are way better than me for this kind of material."

He said, "Well, what else have you written?" And I do what I always do, which is, I say, "Funny you should ask. Do you know anything about the Shakespeare authorship issue." And as usual there's a blank face. And I start doing my spiel, my 20 minute spiel. And I could see he was really interested. He said he wanted to read it. And about a week or two later, my agent called me up and said, "Hold on to your seat. Roland Emmerich wants to buy your script."

Which was a surprise. As it would be to anybody. Now that I know Roland, it's not a surprise at all. But not knowing Roland it seems like a surprise.

MKA: Could you elaborate on that?

JO: Roland makes movies, Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, 2012, that are very big and action-y. And you don't quite sense the intellectual power behind them until you meet him. And Roland is this amazingly bright man. Very passionate. Very into art and politics. He has an amazing modern art collection, phenomenal taste. He's a very deep thinker.

I since have realized when you talk about Roland's other movies, you need to put them into context. There's a reason why Roland's disaster movies make $800 million over and over. And other directors' disaster movies make $80 million. The reason is he's really smart. And he really knows how to make a movie people want to watch. That doesn't mean they're art films. He's not trying to make them into art films. But that doesn't mean he can't make an art film. It just means he's chosen not to. But like anybody, why would you think he's this other person? But once you get to know him, you realize how incredibly smart he is.

As a rule of thumb, it's just been my experience in Hollywood, nobody succeeds unless they're very smart. Everybody. Actors, directors, it doesn't matter. You might get a one trick pony, they might just be lucky. But the people who make hit after hit after hit -- or manage to keep a career in Hollywood for longer than two years, they are very smart people. It is a really cut-throat and difficult business.

So of course he would make this movie, now that I know him. It's about the things that are most important to him. It's about art, about politics, about the artist's life. It's about the power of art, about censorship, about being a young person with artistic gifts that are being shot down. Which I think Roland could relate to. Most artists could relate to.

MKA: When I had a chance to speak with Roland*, he said he kept seeing Amadeus in your script. And though he said he loves Amadeus, we've already seen that movie.

JO: And he's totally right. I was a young screenwriter. That's what you do. You copy. You are influenced. He's right. There was too much Amadeus in it. He also started to do his own research. And there were new books that had been printed in the intervening 5 or 6 years. It was a big time for Oxfordian scholarship. Roland read these books that I hadn't read.

So he went off and made Day After Tomorrow. Then he came back to LA. And he wanted to meet with me. It was very sweet, because he'd read about this and thought about it deeply. And read all these books. And said, he wanted to talk about how to change the script.

He knew the script was my baby and that I'd been working on it at that point for about 10 years. And he very gingerly said, Had I ever heard about what's now called the Prince Tudor theory. That Oxford and Elizabeth had a child, namely Southampton.

I said I hadn't. I guess Ogburn mentions it very briefly. But not with any credence. And I was taken aback for an instant or two. And I thought about and said, I don't know if it's true or not. I haven't read anything about it. But then I said, it almost doesn't matter because it's really good drama.

Suddenly we started to talk about this movie in this whole other dimension. It became much more interesting. And this is all off of Roland and us talking about what Roland's basic idea was and then going deeper.

But this idea that if Oxford did have a child with Elizabeth, that bastard would be in the chain of succession. That suddenly became very interesting to me as a writer. Then talking about the plays as a political voice became really interesting.

Suddenly there was reason and motivation for why things happen in the movie that there wasn't necessarily before. What is Oxford's agenda? In the original script, it was just the need to get it out. It's a good one. And I buy it. And maybe it's more historically true. But this worked way better in dramatic terms. Plus, we realized the movie suddenly became a Greek tragedy. We then made a formalized Greek tragedy, which it wasn't before.

Then it became a Shakespearean drama. We were suddenly dealing with themes that are in so many of Shakespeare's plays: Succession, foundling chilidren, incest, all these things that find their way into Shakespeare plays, we started to dip into to.

MKA: Watching Anonymous, I kept thinking of Hamlet. There's a lot of that play infused into this story. Would you agree?

JO: Obviously Oxfordians feel a close affinity between Hamlet and Oxford. And we played with that a little bit. But thematically speaking, Hamlet uses the theater to get what he wants, because all other avenues are closed. And basically that's our plot too. It is his last ditch effort. There's a line that Cecil says -- although I'm not sure if it's in the [final cut] -- he says, "He has his tools; we have ours."

There's a moment when William Cecil realizes what Oxford is doing. It's late in the second act. Cecil realizes that what Oxford wants is for Southampton to be on the throne. I don't think the beat is in the movie anymore. But the line is Oxford uses the tools he has, meaning writing, while we use the tools we have, meaning assassination.

MKA: As I'm sure you're not unaware, the Prince Tudor theory is very controversial even among Oxfordians. So how do you see "Prince Tudor" fitting in to your film?

JO: I'm ashamed to say I've never read any literature on the Prince Tudor theory. I haven't read Charles Beauclerk's book yet. I hadn't read Paul Streitz's book. Roland just told me about it. This may rile people, but there's also a point when you're writing a movie where the movie is more important than anything else.

I adapt a lot. This is my job. To adapt material and make it into a three-act movie. Even if you're doing fiction, there's a point where you have to walk away from your source material. Whether it's history or fiction, you have to walk away from your source material and figure out what's best for the story you're telling. So when I went back into rewriting with Roland -- and ripping up Soul of the Age to turn it into what eventually became Anonymous -- I'm not sure I did any more reading. I might have gone back once and a while to check some source material or what have you. But it's not like I'd suddenly read all the books that had been published in the interim. Respectfully, I didn't even read your book until weeks before we started shooting, because a) Roland really loved it. And b) I knew I needed a primer before the shoot. That's when I read your book.

People might disagree with me. But as a professional screenwriter, you do have to walk away and ask, "What's with me? What's stayed with me since I did all this reading?" That's the important stuff.

You get into this idea Roland and I talk about a lot that we call emotional truth vs. literal truth. In drama, emotional truth trumps literal truth every time. If the bigger idea is that Oxford was using these plays for political ends, how do you show that in a two-hour movie the best possible way?

The bigger truth for Oxfordians is that these plays were used for political ends. That's one of the reasons why there is a lack of his name on it. The political issues. So if we're all in agreement that it's all about politics, how do you best dramatize it. We chose to use the Prince Tudor theory as our catalyst. To show the audience the political stakes in as simply as possible. And as emotionally as possible. If a father is doing this for his son, we have an emotional investment. The Prince Tudor theory gave us a lot of dramatic opportunities that the absence of it would made much more difficult to convey to an audience.

Let's get to this one right now: Richard III vs. Richard II. It is actually the single most controversial thing internally in terms of do we do it or not.

[Note: Anonymous portrays the Shakespeare play Richard III being staged just before the 1601 Essex Rebellion, when the Earls of Essex and Southampton staged an uprising against the crown. In historical fact, a Shakespeare play was performed before the Rebellion, but that play was Richard II.]

MKA: So there was a debate between whom?

JO: Roland, me, Mark Rylance, Vanessa Redgrave. It was the one thing that everybody was upset about. I'm only bringing it up, because I think it's a good illustration of what I'm talking about.

Namely, as a screenwriter, I'm perfectly capable of putting in Richard II in our movie and making the metaphors and references necessary to explain to a 21st century audience why the enacting of Richard II would be a threat to the "Tower" and the powers that be.

I could do that. Does everyone in the audience want an extra half-hour in the movie for me to do that?

The emotional truth is one of Shakespeare's plays was performed before the Essex Rebellion in order to incite the mob onto Essex's side. I could have done Richard II, but it would have required so much more exposition. Richard III, however, because of the hunchbacked king. Soon as you see him hunchbacked, and put him in a costume that looks anything like Robert Cecil's, the audience will make the visual connection between the two.

I freely admit it is not a literal truth, that Richard III was performed the day before. But it is the emotional truth.

MKA: So you also bring in Oxford as a possible son of Elizabeth. But as you've pointed out before, the only source for this claim in the movie is Robert Cecil -- who clearly has motive to lie to Oxford because he hates Oxford and would love to twist the knife by making him think he'd committed incest with the queen. The other thing, though, is the death-bed scene where Oxford recites to Ben Jonson the de Vere family's long and storied lineage. It's clear in that scene that Oxford thinks he's a de Vere. That he didn't buy the claim from Robert Cecil.

JO: That was the other great question -- between me and Roland. Do we include the [Robert Cecil] scene? About the other scene, when he's talking to Jonson. That scene is from Soul of the Age. And it's almost never been changed. That was one of Roland's favorite in the script, de Vere's death scene. That went under very few revisions.

We had people crying on the set when we were shooting that scene. Several of the German crew members came up to me and said that was the greatest scene they'd ever worked on.

But the scene in question is at the end of the movie when Robert Cecil has just thwarted the Essex Rebellion. And, in our movie, Oxford's waiting. Again, it's the third act. All these stories have to come together. So of course Oxford wasn't really waiting to really have a meeting at the moment of the Essex Rebellion. Yes, that is called dramatic license.

But in our film, we have him waiting to have this reuniting meeting with Elizabeth. And the Essex Rebellion fails literally as he's watching it in the courtyard. Which also is not true. And they're all arrested. And Robert Cecil comes in and informs Oxford that the rebellion has failed and that his life is a failure. Everything [Oxford] wanted, he didn't get.

In the course of that scene, Robert Cecil tells [Oxford] that he knew Southampton was Oxford's child -- but that what Oxford might not know is that there's a little bit more information. And that is that Oxford is also Elizabeth's child, which is now even more controversial in the Oxfordian world.

I actually begged Roland to take that scene out before we shot it. I said, "Please, let's just not shoot it. It's going one step too far." And Roland said, "You might be right. But we can always shoot it and not use it." The actor who plays Robert Cecil is this young guy nobody's yet heard of called Ed Hogg. And that was the piece he used for his audition. So we had seen him perform it before. So Roland said, "He's going to hit it out of the park. Trust me on this." And so then it came to the moment of shooting that scene, I'm not sure if that was the first Rhys Ifans shot as Edward de Vere. It may very well have been.

But Ed started to play the scene, and without us knowing he was going to do it, he started to cry as he's talking to Oxford in the scene. As he's telling Oxford what a shit he is. Because he's really talking about himself too in that scene. They're talking about what William Cecil thought of Oxford. He's saying, "My father thought you were going to be so great, but now you're a failure."

I think in some ways, he's talking about their childhood together, and how Oxford was the golden boy. The perfect kid. [Robert] was this pathetic, deformed little dark boy. And here's this shaft of golden light comes in to this household. He's 10 years older. Oxford is everything this boy [Robert] wants to be. He's sexy, he's brilliant, he's not deformed. Of course this little boy hates him.

So when we shot this scene of the older characters, I always internalized it. And maybe it's a justification. But it is Robert Cecil lying to [Oxford] that he is the bastard of Elizabeth. That's my interpretation.

I will say this. There is a core difference how we present the story of Southampton as child. We see that. We see them having sex. We see there's dialogue where Oxford is told he's Southampton's father. And then Southampton and Oxford meet as boy and young man.

You can make the argument that we as filmmakers, in our story, that is truth. But you cannot make the same argument for Oxford as bastard. Because you don't see any of that. There is nothing cinematically that says we in the movie think it's true. It's only Robert Cecil thinks it's true. Or Robert Cecil doesn't think it's true, and he's just digging the knife deeper, something he's been waiting to do his entire life. To destroy his great rival -- for his father's affections and sister's affections and anybody's affections.

So to me, it's a verbal destruction rather than a truth.

MKA: How much do you think Anonymous deals with that question of reliable vs. unreliable witnesses? Because the late Elizabethan court was a complete hall of mirrors. There were very few or maybe no reliable sources of knowledge. To me, the question of Prince Tudor is almost an imaginative question. The real question is Do you think the author could have thought there might have been illegitimate heirs to the throne -- regardless of the historical and genetic truth.

JO: Absolutely. That's a good point. Just because you might not believe [Prince Tudor] historically, that doesn't mean Oxford didn't have questions about it.

What I try to explain to people the first thing you have to remember is [Elizabethan England] is closer to North Korea right now than America right now. Elizabethan England was an incredibly totalitarian state. It was a feudal society, run by a dictator. Without free speech, without any of the things we might think they might have had, from a layman's conception. I would imagine that the Politburo of Kim Jong Il is a hall of mirrors there too. When truth is so dangerous, there is no truth.

So it does become really complex, as to who is the reliable witness. What are the agendas. A simple thing like [claiming] the Virgin Queen was a virgin [because] her doctor said so.

Well of course his doctor said so. That was his job. She needed to be a virgin in order to have the other courts of Europe think they had a chance with her. Which kept the kingdom safe. So her virginity was tied in to the kingdom's safety. The doctor is not an idiot.

He might have been telling the truth, by the way. I don't know. I happen to think that is the most unlikely of things. When people get upset about our portrayal of Queen Elizabeth, I've got to say, that is the most unusual that people get so upset that we show her having sex. I can't imagine power not going with sex. They are almost one and the same.

Roland and I were talking about this the other day, because the other big point that anti-Oxfordians say is, "Conspiracy! Conspiracy! They never work!"

All I always say is "Mark Felt."  If Mark Felt didn't do what he did, I don't think any of us would have known about Watergate. One man decided to talk to Woodward and Bernstein. If that one man, Deep Throat, didn't go into the bowels of that garage, I think G. Gordon Liddy would still not-be-talking about Watergate. That's my personal opinion. I don't think [John] Ehrlichman would be talking about it. I don't think [H.R.] Haldeman would be talking about it. I don't think [Charles] Colson would be talking about. It would still be an unknown thing, except for one man. Mark Felt.

And that's not in a totalitarian state. That's with a free press. And they almost got away with it.

You're almost asking me to disprove a negative. How do I prove to you successful conspiracies that have existed? There's no way I can do it, because if they're successful I don't know about them.

All realpolitik is conspiracy. That's what realpolitik is. It is conspiracy. Sometimes it's successful. And most of the time it's not.

NEXT: FULL FATHOM FIVE

*Many thanks as well to John Orloff for coordinating an opportunity to meet with and interview Roland Emmerich.

Anonymous movie poster courtesy Sony/Columbia pictures. All other images courtesy John Orloff.

"Shakespeare" with an E - The new 2011 ebook edition of "Shakespeare" By Another Name

2011-11-13T11:37:00.007-05:00

As noted previously on this blog, on the ShakesVere Facebook boards and elsewhere, "Shakespeare" by Another Name has been updated and revised for an ebook edition.

Today, I'm pleased to announce, the ebook of SBAN is now online and available for sale at ebook retailers across the Internet and around the world. The new ebook copy is also now being converted into a print-on-demand paperback that will be available for sale later this year. More announcements on that front forthcoming.

Anyone with an ebook reader, smartphone, tablet or even just plain old PC or laptop can buy the ebook and read it on their device(s). The ebook is available in formats for all the major portable reader devices today (Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android tablets & smartphones, Google Books devices, etc.). Formats for reading the ebook on your PC/laptop reader (PDF) are also available or will soon be available, depending on the outlet. (Some sites take longer than others.)

The central clearinghouse for all of this is the publisher's page for SBAN. As of this writing, SBAN's ebook publisher, Untreed Reads, is offering a 30% off sale -- just $5.59 for "Shakespeare" by Another Name in its new e-formats.

Readers already familiar with SBAN know most of the new ebook well. SBAN's introduction, foreword (by Sir Derek Jacobi), chapters, epilogue and many of the appendices remain essentially the same -- with the addition of some minor copy-edits, corrections and clarifications.

New to the 2011 edition:

SBAN's cover featuring a new bust of Edward de Vere supervised by Ben August and sculpted by Paula Slater (as chronicled on this blog).
An introductory chapter called "The Argument" that succinctly encapsulates the case for Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" and addresses arguments against the Oxfordian camp put forward in James Shapiro's recent book Contested Will.
A new images section*
A new appendix addressing the recent media frenzy over the "Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare"
A new appendix concerning the movie Anonymous and the questions it raises over the "Prince Tudor" hypotheses -- i.e. concerning claims of one or more secret heirs to the throne born to Queen (or Princess) Elizabeth
A new appendix delving in to just a few of the many treasures published in Richard Paul Roe's new magnum opus Shakespeare's Guide to Italy

The editors and CEO at Untreed Reads, a publisher that specializes in ebooks, have done tremendous work converting a traditional binding-and-paper book into an ebook that we have tried at every turn to make sure serves its new medium well. (As an example, one of many decisions along the way: References to Shakespeare characters appear in the first edition of SBAN using small caps typeface. But many e-reader devices do not support small caps, so we opted to retain the style as best the format allowed -- via ALL CAPS.)

Below, our two-paragraph description of the book:

The debate over the true author of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that Will Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the author. Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man who apparently owned no books and never left England wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility. Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shakespeare" disguise.

"Shakespeare" by Another Name is the first popular literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the gripping story of de Vere's action-packed life—as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer, and, above all, prolific ghostwriter—finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works. Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere’s personal copy of the Bible (in which de Vere underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references). Anderson's page-turning portrait of de Vere makes a "convincing argument" (USA Today) that is "compelling" (Chicago Sun-Times) and "especially impressive" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and "deserves serious attention." (New York Times)

So... please share this link. Please enjoy the new book in its new electronic form. And, I would gratefully request, please consider writing a review and posting it on one or more of the many new venues where the SBAN ebook now lives. (The list of third-party ebook retailers can be found in a column on the right hand side of Untreed Reads home page. The most important sites include Amazon/Kindle (US), Amazon/Kindle (UK) and Nook. SBAN on Apple's iBooks is also live, but a URL link can't be made here, as it must be accessed through Apple's iBooks app. Other vendors, such as the Kobo Reader Store, Sony Reader Store, Waterstones (UK), WH Smiths (UK), Scribd, and Google Books, are still processing the submission and should be uploading the ebook soon.)

As someone once wrote, “My thanks and duty are yours…all the rest is mute.”

------------------

*The 2011 ebook SBAN contains some different images compared to the 2005/6 first edition. Significantly, because of the high level of detail found in the maps and timeline published with the first edition SBANs (and the fact that these images as displayed on many e-reader devices today would be practically unreadable) we opted not to publish the maps or timeline in the SBAN ebook.

"Anonymous" with a Byline - Screenwriter John Orloff interview (part 1)

2011-11-11T12:23:00.008-05:00

Note: A year ago, the screenwriter John Orloff sent an email over the transom and started what has become a yearlong correspondence about his Edward de Vere biopic Anonymous (with which "Shakespeare" by Another Name is unaffiliated -- although that said, I very much enjoyed the film and hope everyone reading these words takes the opportunity to see this tremendous movie on the big screen).

When the publicity push for Anonymous was kicking into high gear, in early October, Orloff sat down for an interview for the "Shakespeare" by Another Name Blog at Orloff's office in western Massachusetts.

Orloff had already, three weeks before the movie's release, heard and read so much misrepresentation of what his movie was about and where it was coming from. In this long-form interview, Orloff wanted to help set the record straight. He also, very kindly, provided a number of his own behind-the-scenes photographs from the set of Anonymous, some of which are below.

What follows is the first part of the transcript (part 1 of 3) of our two-hour interview.

MARK ANDERSON: So let's start at the beginning. You're coming out of UCLA film school and eager to get into the film and TV industry. What happens next?

JOHN ORLOFF: What happened was 20-some-odd years ago, it was a very different film business. And it was a lot harder to get in to. Especially as a screenwriter. I first realized that I didn't have anything to write. I hadn't lived. I had nothing to say. And I was 22 years old. I had a relatively sheltered life. I lived in LA all my life. I'm actually fourth-generation film business. My great-grandparents were Fibber McGee and Molly. Jim Jordan and Marian Jordan. Their son, Jim Jordan Jr. was a TV director, and my grandmother was a B-movie actress. My father was a commercial director. And my brother's an Academy Award winning sound mixer.

In my 20s, I ended up working in advertising, because I could get work there. Just struggling to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And then I met my now-wife, who at the time was working at HBO in the long-form movie division. She would bring home these long form scripts that tended to be non-fiction based. Movies about Dorothy Dandridge, the African American Baseball League. I've always been interested in non-fiction based movies. A lot of my favorite movies are David Lean movies. I love historical films.

One thing led to another, and I started talking to my wife about the Shakespeare authorship issue, which I'd already learned about through the "Frontline" [episode on the Shakespeare Debate]. This was probably 1995. But I'd learned about the issue around 1989. Which led me to then going, "This seems true. It seems crazy that I've never heard of this." That led me to reading Ogburn's book as my first book. I was really just blown away by it. As many people are.

At that point, I sort of put it away. It seemed a little too daunting to try to write a script about it. Even though I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker. Although at that point, I wanted to be a director. That's the sexy fun thing to do in the film business.

MKA: Do you still want to be a director?

JO: Not so much really, no. Not at all actually.

MKA: OK, so John Orloff the screenwriter or soon-to-be-screenwriter is interested in the Shakespeare question. But at this point hasn't written anything about it yet.

JO: So five years later, I'm still talking about it. "Amadeus" was one of my favorite movies ever. I just felt there was another "Amadeus" in the source material. Really thematically exciting. Examining characters we think we know in a way we've never seen. This was before "Shakespeare In Love" came out. And I very early on [envisioned] Shakespeare as a sexy, young movie star. At the time, that seemed like a total revolution. Before "Shakespeare In Love," the only image we had for Shakespeare was the frontispiece [to the First Folio]. The bald man, with the round head and haircut and lace thing. That dude's not sexy in anyone's imagination.

That alone seemed like a fun thing to do. To make Shakespeare sexy. The character. To me, if he was such a successful actor, then he must have been charismatic and all the things we think of as a movie star.

But it still felt too intimidating as an idea. So I just put it away. And when my wife started bringing home all these crazy scripts, based on non-fiction books. And all these people have agents. I was like, "These people have agents? They're being offered work at HBO? I can write a script that good."

My wife basically called my bluff. She said, fine, write it. If it sucks, you don't have to show it to anybody.

So that was a whole nother two or three year odyssey of writing what was called "Soul of the Age." It was a different script from "Anonymous." This is still 1994 or 1993 when I started this process. So there wasn't nearly as many books as there are now.

I read Whalen. I don't think even Sobran (Alias Shakespeare) was out. There wasn't a lot of Oxfordian source material. Plus, this is pre-Internet. Or baby Internet. Trust me, Compuserve didn't have any Oxfordian pages. So I did this curious thing of going to this place that people won't recognize soon called libraries. I went to the Beverly Hills Library. I just started to read everything I could on Elizabethan England. So I read a lot about Shakespearean stagecraft. I read a lot about the Cecils. I read a lot about Sir Walter Raleigh. At one point he was an interesting character in the script. He's not now.

Then I finally had a very hard time figuring out how to tell the story. There's a lot of "ins" into this story. De Vere's life is so rich. Even giving somebody that he didn't write the plays he's an incredibly fascinating man. He had an interesting biography. He is a prototypical Elizabethan gentleman. So that in itself is a rich story.

If you add the fact that he wrote the plays, it now becomes incredibly amazing. But just the culture of the time, it's all amazing.

So how do you write it? I didn't know. But I was just struck by Ben Jonson as a human being. And as a character. And I read more Jonson and everything Jonson had to say about Shakespeare. I kept thinking, "He's talking about two different people." OK, wait a minute. Is he the "Poet-Ape"? Is he the thief? Is he the Sogliardo in "Every Man Out of His Humour"? The stupid guy with the coat of arms who has no wit of his own?

But they've got his coat of arms as the boar without the head. When I read the boar without the head, I said, "Oh. He is talking about two different guys." The "soul of the age" is the poet. And the actor is the boar without a head.

So soon as I had that Eureka moment, I said, Oh, Ben Jonson is our Virgil -- in Dante. He's the guy who's going to hold our hand. He's going to be the audience. He's literally going to be me, John Orloff. Because I couldn't relate as a writer or as someone trying to imagine what the writer of the plays was like... I couldn't relate to that human being. I could relate with a young playwright who's come to the big city to make a big name. That's where Ben Jonson was in 1595. That character I could write.

So that became the "in" to the script called "Soul of the Age."

In the dramatic situation, you have to have Shakespeare as a character. I took it upon myself to think that Shakespeare of Stratford in my universe was recognized as the writer. So the question becomes How did that happen?

Ben Jonson seems as a young struggling playwright to be a very logical person for Edward de Vere to go to say, "Won't you be my beard?" It seems like a very logical extension. And it seems very logical of what we know of Ben Jonson and his ego for him to be terribly offended by the thought of him being someone else's beard. So it felt very natural.

That said, "Soul of the Age" is a very different movie than "Anonymous."

MKA: So to use the "Amadeus" analogy, Jonson was sort of the Salieri?

JO: He was sort of Salieri. In the very first draft, it actually takes place in prison. The book ends are in prison after the Roundheads took control of London. And they burned down the theaters. And they arrest Jonson. And Jonson is giving a lawyer his defense from jail.

And in that defense he tells the story of de Vere and Shakespeare. As an old man. Who may or may not be crazy.

MKA: So this is much more "Amadeus"...

JO: Much more. And it becomes much more about jealousy. But in a triangle rather than a one-on-one. So de Vere, Shakespeare and Jonson are in this triangle of tragedy in "Soul of the Age" where all three want something that they're never going to get. Jonson wants to become the most famous playwright in the world. He doesn't get to be that because of Shakespeare. Shakespeare wants to be the greatest actor in the world. He doesn't get to be that because he's going to become a playwright instead. And Oxford wants to become the greatest statesman in the world. That doesn't happen either.

So nobody gets what they want. And ... everybody else gets something that the other one has.

That's the script that Roland [Emmerich] read.

MKA: I understand "Soul of the Age" made the rounds in Hollywood. What's the story of the script?

JO: Right after I wrote it, I had heard rumblings that there was this little romantic comedy being made about William Shakespeare. But it didn't seem to be a big deal at first. It actually starred actors nobody had heard of; it was directed by a director nobody had heard of. And it didn't seem to be a big movie ahead of time. So I wasn't too worried about it. Although I knew it would steal my thunder about the idea of Shakespeare as a young and sexy man. But I thought, OK, no bigee. My movie's about more than just that.

Then the movie, "Shakespeare in Love," came out. As we all know it was a huge hit. Humungous shock to everybody. Best Picture. Best Actress. Best Screenplay. Swept the Oscars -- in the year that "Saving Private Ryan" was made, incidentally. My script was kind of dead on arrival. Nobody else is going to make a movie about William Shakespeare in 1998.

So prior to the movie being released, a friend of mine who is also a screenwriter who is represented at [Creative Artists Agency] -- the big agency in Hollywood. He sent my script in to his agent, who promptly passed. And said "I don't want to represent this script or the writer." It then went to another agent, a powerful agent, who not only passed, but called me at my house. I'd never gotten a phone call in my life from an agent. This big powerful agent calls me up and says that not only is he passing, but how dare I write this script?

MKA: This was 1998?

JO: Yeah. He wasn't just passing, he was passing with malice! "I'm not only passing; I'm going to humiliate you first." [Laughs] Eventually my script found its way into the hands of a young TV agent -- he only represented TV writers. His name was John Campisi. He's still my agent today, thankfully. He's the one that started to send the script out. It thankfully got me a lot of attention and meetings in Hollywood.

But nobody wanted to buy it. But luckily one of those meetings was with Tom Hanks. And that changed my life.

MKA: As I understand it you really pushed hard to get onto "Band of Brothers."

JO: I was very aggressive about "Band of Brothers." Because I'm a big history nut, a big World War II nut. Big Stephen Ambrose nut. Tom had read "Soul of the Age" and really liked it. He didn't want to produce it. But he really liked it and liked me. And we were talking about another movie that I was trying to figure out for him, another historical-based movie. And every time I would meet with him, at the end of the meeting, I would say, "I don't mean to push, but I'm a huge World War II nut, and if you ever need any writers on 'Band of Brothers,' please give me a call."

On the third meeting, he finally said, "You still interested in writing?" ... I ended up writing the D-Day episode, and he asked if I wanted to write another one. "Band of Brothers" was three years of my life. An amazing experience. And I owe it all to "Soul of the Age."

NEXT: Roland Emmerich takes on "Shakespeare"

Image of John Orloff by Mark Anderson; images of Anonymous set & models by John Orloff; Band of Brothers poster: HBO/DreamWorks

Comment-upon-comment: The scholars consider

2011-10-25T10:17:00.006-04:00

On the Facebook ShakesVere boards, Geoffrey Green points to a recent blog post by a Stratfordian scholar who sighs and says, OK, Anonymous now means we have to take on the Oxfordians.

My comment on this literary scholar's blog after the jump.

===QUOTE===

I personally find it fascinating the eminent creators in literature — Whitman, Emerson, Dickens, Twain, H. James, Du Maurier, Gallsworthy, etc. — who have all at least expressed interest in the Shakespeare authorship question if not (in Whitman and Twain’s cases) gone on at length about why they find the conventional attribution of William of Stratford so very wrong.

“It is my final belief that the Shakespearean plays were written by another hand than Shaksper’s [sic],” Whitman said. “I do not seem to have any patience with the Shaksper argument: It is all gone for me– up the spout. The Shaksper case is about closed.”

(Horace Traubel’s multivolume set _With Walt Whitman in Camden_ contains numerous examples of this kind of vehemence from America’s greatest poet about what he saw as the Stratford myth.)

James Shapiro’s _Contested Will_ does go into excruciating psychological detail seeking excuses as to why so many great minds were anti-Stratfordians or held sympathies for that point of view.

_Will_ is an entertaining read, no doubt. But I found myself at the far end of Shapiro’s extended exercise scratching my head. Is the authorship controversy really a kind of strange confluence of unconscious forces over the generations — a psychological conspiracy, as it were — that misled so many creative figures throughout history?

_Contested Will_’s examination of all the famous Shakespeare skeptics throughout the centuries struck this reader, instead, as a kind of deft exercise in projection. We’re left to wonder at how much avoiding of real issues **everyone else** is doing.

Here’s a simpler explanation than Shaprio’s: These skeptics were skeptical for good reason.

And here’s where the discussion must diverge beyond the bounds of a blog and its comments, enlightening and interesting though they are.

Because there is no direct evidence that would settle the authorship question either way. _Pace_ Stratford’s defenders, there is no Dante or Chaucer or Austen or Dickens etc. authorship controversies because the meager requirement of *some* sort of direct proof of their being an author is and has always been there.

Instead, we are left with circumstantial evidence. Nothing wrong with circumstantial evidence. It constitutes a centerpiece of court cases in courtrooms around the world every day. Circumstantial evidence wins cases every day.

But circumstantial evidence requires a patient accumulation of facts and hypotheses that together work toward the larger goal of proving or disproving a theory. Forest for the trees.

So this is why I think you may be guilty of a touch of melodrama when you claim that considering the Oxfordian hypothesis will be such a supposedly dreary exercise. In point of fact, there is a very strong **circumstantial** case that puts Edward de Vere’s life and epic story right at the heart of the Shakespeare works.

As Orson Welles said “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t there are an awful lot of funny coincidences to explain away.”

Say that the Oxfordians, as so many here so confidently claim, are wrong. Fine. But, beyond that, you’re equally certain that picking up the Shakespeare canon and viewing it from a completely different — Oxfordian — point of view is going to be so completely useless or ruinous to your outlook on the Bard and his immortal masterpieces? Really??

Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. You might surprise yourself.

Thank you.

Mark Anderson, author
“Shakespeare” By Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare

Roland shakes spears - "10 Reasons Why Shakespeare Was A Fraud"

2011-10-18T23:21:00.001-04:00

The Soul of the Age, The Amadeus of the Stage: A review of the movie ANONYMOUS

2011-10-09T17:26:00.020-04:00

In brief: See this movie. Anonymous is, first and foremost, a ripping good yarn. It also represents the biggest media event in the history of the Oxfordian story and perhaps the whole Shakespeare authorship question. Over the coming months and years, millions of people around the world who know nothing about Edward de Vere and his relationship to the "Shakespeare" canon will be witnessing the entire Elizabethan and Oxfordian world that Anonymous has fascinatingly and carefully created -- historical liberties and all. Some critics will undoubtedly knock Anonymous's departures from documented fact, even setting the Shakespeare authorship issue aside. But such criticism, in this reviewer's opinion, misses the point of the fictionalizing: The dramatic license the movie wields all arguably helps it tell a powerful and gripping story to as wide a global audience of moviegoers as possible. This is, on balance, a very good thing.

Review: Roland Emmerich's forthcoming Oxfordian biopic Anonymous (Columbia Pictures, US & UK release Oct. 28, elsewhere here) is a revolution in a 16:9 frame. Fittingly, the story prominently features its own uprising.

An enraged mob has just seen a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard III. Incited by the play's allegorical depiction of the crook-backed Elizabethan Machiavel Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), they're ready to smash and burn. The playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) sees a trap, though, and he tries to stop the masses from running headlong into it.

However, as the "Essex Rebellion" actually played out 410 years ago, it was preceded by a performance of the Shakespeare play Richard II -- a knottier drama whose relationship to the rebellion turns on less immediately accessible points, concerning a scene depicting the deposition of an English monarch. And while we're nitpicking, Jonson wasn't part of the marauding hordes either.

Yet the success of Anonymous is that even those who know the historical facts with which the movie takes its liberties aren't given much time to care. It's a wild and entertaining ride. The intrigue and literary double-dealing sweeps the viewer up into a shadowy world all its own. The actor Shakespeare, as the film portrays him, is an ale-hoisting codpiece who fronts as the author of plays written behind the scenes by an Elizabethan court playwright who is no stranger to readers of this blog, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

The depiction of de Vere blending into his Shakespearean milieu -- from authorship of plays and poems to courtly performances to outdoor public theaters -- is a revelatory and sometimes shocking experience. Even for an Oxfordian viewer.

Those who make a hobby or (part-time) profession professing the case for de Vere as "Shakespeare" nevertheless live in a hostile Stratfordian world, forever defending ourselves from critical brickbats. We rarely if ever get, even in our minds' eyes, to inhabit these worlds. But Anonymous exerts every effort to ensure that for two hours and ten minutes, we do. And, thanks to a painstaking work of filmmaking, we really do.

The immersion comes not just from the lavish production design and photorealistic and nearly ubiquitous CGI digital backdrops. (The computer generated imagery in fact fits so comfortably and seamlessly into the scenes and settings that it actually fooled Variety's reviewer into claiming Anonymous is "nearly CGI-free.")

A few performances -- in particular the mother-daughter team of Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson as the elder and younger Queen Elizabeth -- entice the viewer like a siren to join the film's Oxfordian universe.

And Rhys Ifans's quiet and measured turn as the mature Edward de Vere reverses nearly a century of academic slander against his character by flashing the fire and shaking the spears that Oxfordians have long said makes him such a compelling and convincing "Shakespeare." Ironically, Ifans' knowing glances, each themselves concealing volumes, will probably reach more eyes than the whole output of books and articles in the long history of the authorship question.

At a public Q&A with Emmerich recently, Columbia University professor James Shapiro (Contested Will) tried to smear Emmerich with insinuations of Nazism -- a vile slander that provided a case-in-point of the desperation and intellectual bankruptcy that marks most Stratfordian rearguard actions today.

Orthodox Shakespeare scholars -- those whose reputations and careers rely on Shakspere of Stratford claiming exclusive right to the "Shakespeare" canon -- have good reason to be worried. The comparable arrow in their quiver, Shakespeare in Love, is an empty vessel compared to the heady draught of thriller, romance and epic literary biography that Anonymous serves up.

That Anonymous surpasses Shakespeare in Love, incidentally, is actually no trivial statement from this reviewer. I am one Oxfordian who enjoyed Shakespeare in Love, especially for its own witty and carefully crafted depiction of the period. But Shakespeare in Love was -- like Stratfordian best-selling books Will in the World or 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare -- entertaining ultimately only for its backdrops and bit players. None of these stitch jobs had a living, approachable, comprehensible, and fallible human soul at its core.

Anonymous, on the other hand, delivers just that. It makes the kind of immediate and visceral human connection to its protagonist that good movie performances can forge.

So it is that unallied Shakespeare scholars and fans of all callings (i.e. who hold no vested interest in the authorship question) should be thrilled at the attention to the Bard that Anonymous will inevitably bring. Those outside the Oxfordian/Stratfordian trenches in the authorship wars -- which is to say 99% of film's audience -- will find in Anonymous a sexy thriller that also cleverly welcomes millions of new eyes to the Shakespeare canon.

The Bard really does win the day in Anonymous, although admittedly Shakspere of Stratford hardly comes out smelling like beauty's rose.

Rafe Spall as Shakspere is one of the film's two broad, comic performances. (The other is James Clyde, as a slightly queeny King James.) Spall's Shakspere is a sodden clown given to excesses that might befit an Elizabethan fraternity boy. One can sense from behind the lens the risk-taking Emmerich (whose own canon often joys in the extremes it can stage and provoke) helping to push the Shakspere character and performance to the hilt. And maybe that's just the sort of shock to the system the authorship debate needs. Bardolatrous admirers would certainly demand just the opposite, seeking an appropriate measure and respect befitting the Soul of the Age.

But that role -- and that die -- has already been cast.

In publicity events over the past month, Emmerich has appealed to the tradition of such classic fictionalized film biographies as Milos Forman's Amadeus. Emmerich has pointed out that in historical fact, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's relationship with the film's supporting character Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) involved less-to-none of the melodrama, back-biting and poisonous rivalry depicted in Forman's masterpiece.

Emmerich is wise to cite Amadeus as inspiration and precedent. Because like Amadeus heralds one of history's greatest geniuses as an often buffoonish clown, Anonymous's plot equally provocatively deflates the Stratfordian bubble.

Although wit is one realm where de Vere was reputedly the undisputed king -- not unlike Mozart, equally bawdy as precociously brilliant. And de Vere's wit feels most wanting in Anonymous's necessarily trimmed-to-feature-length depiction of the very serious Elizabethan succession question that forms the centerpiece of the film.

This, in turn, raises the movie's other great deflated myth -- Gloriana, the Virgin Queen.

"Prince Tudor" theories have either been, depending on whom one asks, the apotheosis or the bête noire of the Oxfordian movement -- postulating that Edward de Vere and/or Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton were secret royal offspring of Elizabeth herself.

For months, Oxfordian blogs including this one have wondered how Anonymous will treat "PT," as the Oxfordian heresy-within-the-heresy is often abbreviated.

In particular, a film that portrays the combination-platter PT theory, in which de Vere is both (ahem) Wriothesley's father and brother, would be horrific PR for Oxfordians. Stratfordians give us a hard enough time just for advocating the basic Oxfordian story. Picture a movie that portrays with equal levels of claimed realism that Queen Elizabeth had committed incest with her own son: This would be a nightmare.

Anonymous, however, is no such movie.

Instead, screenwriter John Orloff (with whom this blog will feature a three-part interview during Anonymous's opening week) handles "PT" with the political moxie the subject demands. Without delving into spoilers, I can only say that in this reviewer's opinion, someone hostile to the "PT" theory could still see Anonymous and have a great time with the film.

For my own part, I enjoyed Anonymous tremendously, and I have at least some degree of sympathy for the "anti-PT" camp. (I hasten to add, though, that I also find "anti-PT" tactics to be questionable at times. Personally, concerning PT, I'm in a sort of halfway state that is neither and both. As a plug, I'll be sharing my own thoughts on the PT theories in the keynote address to the Shakespeare Oxford Society/Shakespeare Fellowship joint conference in Washington, D.C. next weekend, on Sat., Oct. 15.)

Anonymous, in other words, makes no effort to persuade you that Elizabeth had children. It's just part of the movie's courtly realpolitik. And the incest question instead becomes a question of the believability of an unreliable witness who has clear motives to lie about Oxford's parentage. (Oxford himself, in a moving deathbed scene, doesn't in the end believe he's Elizabeth's son either. He clearly prides himself in the long and storied de Vere bloodline to which he belongs.)

So, in all, Anonymous is about as welcome an introduction to the mainstream as Oxfordians could ask for.

Yes, it might be nice to have a fictional feature film that doesn't take liberties with historical fact and instead presents the basic Oxfordian theory as the only departure from orthodox history books. I suspect, though, such a movie would not be very successful. Or for that matter very entertaining.

Take it from someone who knows: Getting de Vere's epic story into 600 pages is challenging enough as it is. I can only imagine that condensing the whole thing into a self-contained and immediately-accessible two hour package would require some concatenation of seemingly unrelated storylines and a little unknotting of various tangled webs.

Kudos to Roland Emmerich, John Orloff and to the cast and crew that have opened the door wide for Oxfordians to tell our story. Here's to Anonymous enjoying every success at the box office and beyond.

Because the more it engages viewers across the planet, the more opportunities it will open up for Oxfordians in the years ahead. Anonymous ultimately poses questions. It is up to Oxfordians to provide, as best we can, our many volumes and many variations on the answers.

Dislcaimer: This author and "Shakespeare" By Another Name had nothing to do with the making of Anonymous.
Images (c) 2011 Columbia Pictures
Thanks to Gerit Quealy for securing the tickets that enabled this review!

Anonymous class 1: Why search? Why ask?

2011-09-17T21:28:00.002-04:00

This week, we're welcoming all to join in a discussion led by the teachers of an eight-week course called "Anonymous the Movie and William Shakespeare's Identity." (Description here [PDF], p. 21.)

The class is offered by the University of Minnesota's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and taught by OLLI science/liberal arts leader George Anderson* and retired Univ. of Minn. humanities professor James Norwood.

The instructors have one question this week which they'll be asking their students -- and ask anyone else to join in here and on the "ShakesVere" Facebook page. It's as follows:

For an ice-breaker, we are asking the class to tell us what got them started thinking about the Shakespeare authorship question?
What got me [G.A.] started was Oxford's Geneva Bible and the curious coincidences between the marginalia that Roger Stritmatter compiled compared to the Shakespeare canon. The rest of the arguments for Oxford were simply "downhill" from there.
So, in one sentence, What got you started? What turned your head?

I'll kick the discussion off here: For me it was hearing a radio program in the summer of 1993 that asked whether Edward de Vere might have written some or all of the "Shakespeare" canon. I'd never heard of the authorship question before that.

So, as a cub journalist, I started reading all I could find on the subject. (Including, throughout 1994 and into '95, an immersion in every word published under the Bard's byline.) And the more I read, the more I recognized how unusual and intriguing this particular mystery was -- and still is. I've been reading and writing on the subject ever since.

Please share your own stories in discovering the authorship debate either in the comments section below or in the related comments section on the Facebook ShakesVere page.

(* Yes there is a family relation here. cf. SBAN's dedication...)

Anonymous post-Toronto: The Good, The Better, The Oscars?

2011-09-12T12:32:00.012-04:00

It has been fascinating to monitor the press coverage of the Oxfordian Columbia/Sony Pictures film Anonymous as it had its official premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this past weekend. It opens in movie theaters across North America and the UK on Oct. 28 -- and throughout the rest of the world in the two months following.

The upshot has been very upbeat: Four reviews (that I've been able to find) have posted so far, and all four are anywhere from begrudgingly positive to wholly positive.

After the break, excerpts from the four. First, though, SBAN blog correspondent Ted Alexander was in attendance at last night's screening and had the following to report:

I loved the movie as did my wife and daughter. Crowd liked it too. No standing O but sustained applause.
I think the movie succeeded spectacularly as entertainment. The actors were superb in their roles; the story was interesting and I thought,well-told; the cinematography, costuming, CGI, etc were all great. I really enjoyed all the bits of the various Shakespeare plays that they staged in the film (really enjoyed the Henry V, Mark Rylance does a wonderful job with the opening chorus).
Now as to the historical accuracy of the movie, there are a lot of things wrong, especially chronologically and a lot of things that are highly speculative. I'm not a proponent of the PT theory but it does serve the plot well and makes the story more interesting. We don't know anything about what sort of relationship Ben Jonson had with the author but the way it is portrayed in the film feels like what I imagine it could have been or at least what I would have liked it to have been if that makes any sense. I really liked the Jonson character in the film. He has one of the best lines in the film to de Vere's wife when leaving their home near the end of the film.
All-in-all I think the writer and the director have done a masterful job of creating an entertaining film that is still enlightening in some significant ways while taking liberties with the facts. Bravo! Can't wait to see it again.

(Mr. Alexander also took a handheld video of the audience Q&A with director Roland Emmerich, five members of the cast and the screenwriter John Orloff.)

**EDITED on Sept. 13 to add correspondent Kathryn Sharpe's brief review after attending the other public screening to date of Anonymous -- this year's Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference in Portland, Ore.:

I loved it. Emmerich says it's his story of Shakespeare--a darker story. He changed the known history when necessary to convey an "emotional truth" just as Shakespeare did with his history plays. The changes will bother people who know what actually happened, but it's not unlike seeing your favorite book made into a film. Things will change for the sake of the art form. The most memorable scene for me? The interior of Oxford's study, with shelves piled high with leather-bound manuscripts, those precious manuscripts. And Hank Whittemore said that he does not mind that the movie will be picked apart and compared to the historical record, because it is not a pure fantasy (as was Shakespeare in Love), it is about real people, real literary works. Real politics and real power.

Below, then, are excerpts from the movie reviews of Anonymous posted online as of Sept. 12. (This will soon enough become woefully out of date. Check Rotten Tomatoes for the latest "score.")

The Guardian (UK)

But Roland Emmerich's meticulously crafted and often well-acted exposé of the "real" William Shakespeare is shocking only in that it is rather good. ... Edward Hogg as the Queen's adviser is a standout, and Vanessa Redgrave makes an eminently awards-worthy Elizabeth. Best of all, though, are the snippets of the Mark Rylance (former artistic director of the modern Globe) as a jobbing actor bringing Oxford/Shakespeare's work to life. Its a testament to Emmerich's cluttered but sincere film that, at the heart of all the flash and filigree, the play really is the thing.

The Hollywood Reporter

Surprisingly, this is easily director Roland Emmerich’s best film. Instead of blowing up the world or engaging in other sorts of mass destruction, he actually steers a coherent path through a complex bit of Tudor history while establishing a highly credible atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue. His British actors deliver their usual reliable performances while designers and digital environmentalist stunningly re-create Elizabethan London right down to the tiniest detail. ...
Nevertheless, the film grabs at historical facts, mangles them into a plot worthy of a John le Carré spy novel and takes the viewer on a breathtaking ride through ye olde London. Especially splendid are the aerial shots of that depict that era’s town with the accuracy of John Stow, the city’s first great surveyor. ...
The coming and goings of opportunistic courtiers in Elizabeth’s palaces, the movement of poets, peasants, whores and cut-purses in and about city streets, the city’s love for conflict and conspiracy — all this feels absolutely right.

Movieline.com

In contrast, Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is, at the very least, a curiosity, one with some clever casting and a very fine performance at its core.
First, there’s the inspired casting of Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter, Joely Richardson, as old and young versions of Queen Elizabeth I. Richardson, with her tumble of pale curls, looks like a living, breathing version of John Millais’ Ophelia, but tougher. Redgrave plays her version of the character as if she has become more emotionally vulnerable, not less, with age — the older Elizabeth just works harder to submerge it beneath her imperious veneer.
Both performances are great fun to watch, but it’s Rhys Ifans, as the Earl of Oxford, who keeps the movie spinning. He takes dorky, grandiose dialogue and turns it into something almost — well, Shakespearean. ... I giggled at parts of Anonymous, especially when our earl’s angry, disapproving wife catches him at his desk and bellows, like Gale Sondergaard with PMS, “My God! You’re writing again!” But I never laughed at Ifans. When you look into those eyes, you could almost believe that this was the guy who wrote all those sonnets.

Boise Weekly

Anonymous will no doubt create endless debates but also cause plenty of cheers when it is released on Friday, Oct. 28. You can literally count up the Oscar nominations as the movie progresses—it gets better with each passing minute.

It certainly appears that Stratfordians who had hoped this movie would appear and just as quickly disappear will be disappointed: Oscars season is still five months away.

"Shakespeare" the Venetian: Why Titian matters

2011-09-04T06:25:00.011-04:00

Following up on the previous post -- which finds Hamlet using dialect peculiar to East Anglia, where Edward de Vere grew up -- it's worth remembering that the Shakespeare canon is also brimming with evidence that the author knew and wrote about Italy from first-hand experience.

In a few cases, it's even possible to date when the author must have been there -- or, at least, communicated with someone who was in Italy at the time.

The Shakespeare epic poem Venus & Adonis provides one such clincher. It contains lines that suggest the author was in Venice -- and was capable of gaining entrée to a prestigious Venetian artist's studio -- sometime before August 1576, when the artist died.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, traveled in Italy using Venice as his home base from May 1575 through March 1576. When de Vere traveled to La Serenissima, the city of canals had one superstar celebrity who arguably eclipsed all other cultural figures in town: The painter Tiziano Vecellio, a.k.a. Titian (c. 1488/1490 - 26 Aug. 1576).

When the king of France, Henri III, had visited Venice in 1573, the king insisted on meeting Titian at the master's Venice studio. The octogenarian artist, former arch-rival of Michelangelo, had met and in many cases painted most of the leading intellectual, cultural, religious and political figures of the century.

An Italianate English lord -- an emissary from Queen Elizabeth's court -- visiting Venice would have almost been expected to pay homage to the city's greatest living cultural icon. To have neglected to do so could have verged on the impolitic.

If de Vere did indeed meet Titian, for starters, he could have heard a first-hand account of the life and the grisly death of one of Titian's patrons, the Duke of Urbino. The dearly departed Oxfordian scholar Andrew Hannas long advocated that Titian's portrait of Urbino, pictured here, was arguably the pictorial inspiration for King Hamlet's ghost, cap-a-pie, as Horatio says:

A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie [head-to-toe],
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them: ...

On the Elsinore battlements, we hear again about the ghost's armor, his pale complexion and his "countenance more in sorrow than in anger." Check, check and check. The apparition does, the soldiers say, have a grey beard. (Titian's Urbino doesn't.) Then again, aren't all ghosts supposed to look grizzled?

Anyway, Hamlet's play The Mousetrap stages Urbino's murder. Titian's patron was poisoned by a courtly rival named Gonzago. In the ear. (Hamlet says of the murderer, "His name's Gonzago: The story is extant, and writ in choice Italian.")

Titian could have told de Vere all about the gruesome deed his patron fell prey to and the insider politics behind Hamlet's play-within-a-play.

Titian also had in his studio at the time a masterpiece that would become a prime inspiration for the first work ever published under the name "Shakespeare," the 1593 epic poem Venus and Adonis.

As described in "Shakespeare" By Another Name, Titian's painting of Venus and Adonis (pictured here) is unique in its depiction of the classical myth.

The love between Venus and Adonis is almost universally described as a mutually-felt passion. A love story for the ages. But in Titian's portrayal, Venus claws at her reluctant young Adonis whose downcast expression at her makes him appear practically heedless to his lover's beckon.

This odd twist on the Ovidian legend (grasping and desperate goddess, disinterested overgrown boy) also matches the way "Shakespeare" portrays the central relationship in his poem Venus and Adonis.

As with many of his masterpieces, there are multiple copies of Titian's Venus and Adonis. But, as discovered by the late Oxfordian scholar Noemi Magri (another kindred soul departed from our company far too soon), only the copy sitting in Titian's studio at the time when de Vere visited Venice portrayed Adonis wearing a peculiar style of hat or "bonnet."

Here are a few excerpts from the "Shakespeare" poem Venus and Adonis:

He sees her coming and begins to glow,

Even as a dying coal revives with wind;

And with his bonnet [which] hides his angry brow,

Looks on the dull earth with disturbed mind,

Taking no notice that she is so nigh

For all askance he holds her in his eye.

...

[after, er, SPOILER ALERT, Adonis's death...]

Bonnet nor veil henceforth no creature wear:

Nor sun nor wind will ever strive to kiss you...

But when Adonis liv'd, sun and sharp air

Lurk'd like two thieves to rob him of his fair [beauty].

And therefore would he put his bonnet on

Under whose brim the gaudy sun would peep:

The wind would blow it off, and [the bonnet] being gone

Play with his locks.

So the hat on Adonis's head is significant to "Shakespeare" too. Both in his idiosyncratic sartorial and expressive characterizations of Venus and Adonis, then, Titian seems to nail exactly how "Shakespeare" sees the story of the mythical lovers.

But Titian would die of the plague just months after de Vere's departure. In 1576, Will Shakspere of Stratford was 12 years old.

Magri writes, in her classic study republished in the superlative essay collection Great Oxford (pictured, with close-up of Titian's painting on its cover):

Considering de Vere's desire for learning and his love for Italian culture, he must have felt the wish to meet him and admire his collection. He may have seen V&A in Titian's house, where the artist preserved originals and autograph copies.
In following Aristotle and the Greeks, who said that poetry and painting are two similar forms of art having the same nature and that painting is 'dumb poetry' and poetry is 'speaking painting,' Titian called his V&A and some ten paintings of mythological subject poesie, poems.
Being aware of the Renaissance concept of painting as a form of poetry, de Vere may have been given the inspiration to write a poem based on a painting.

(Postscript: As if two touchstones for Hamlet and a source for Venus & Adonis weren't enough, Titian also knew and had painted a celebrated portrait of Giulio Romano, the only artist mentioned by name in the "Shakespeare" canon -- in the Winter's Tale. The statue by Romano that's referenced in the play is arguably Romano's painted statuary monument in nearby Mantua to the author Baldassare Castiglione. (SBAN pp. 97-98) Castiglione, author of the essential book of Italian courtly etiquette The Courtier, was a central figure in de Vere's philosophical life. Among other things, de Vere had financed a translation of The Courtier into Latin. Crucially to the Winter's Tale, Castiglione's wife Ippolita had met an untimely death soon before her husband's, and Romano's monument (to both husband and wife) records the widower's heartrending sorrow at losing so dear a spouse.)

"Shakespeare" the East Anglian: Hawks, Handsaws & Hamlet

2011-08-22T14:48:00.010-04:00

In 2006 Greg Hancock, a reader from Coburg, Ontario, sent an email to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Bulletin sharing his revelation that Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually derives from hawking lingo popular in East Anglia -- where Edward de Vere was born and spent part of his childhood.

Today, Mr. Hancock sent an update on this fine little nugget. Thanks to Google Books, he uncovered a fuller explanation of what Hamlet is talking about.

"Harnsa" (phonetic spelling) was East Anglian slang for a heron. When a hawk chases a "harnsa," the heron often flies with the wind to escape its predator. When the wind is from the south, the sun is at the hunter's back, so he can easily differentiate between his bird and his bird's prey. (By contrast, when the wind is from the north, the hunter might have to squint into the sun -- and would have a harder time telling the difference between the two birds.)

What the commentator (from H.H. Furness's 1877 edition of Hamlet) doesn't say, however, is that the gloss only holds if the author of Hamlet's line knows East Anglian regional dialect -- and, presumably, has some experience hawking in that part of the country. De Vere, yes. Will of Stratford? Another misfit.

In Mr. Hancock's words:

Basically the important point is that a heron or hernsew is pronounced "harnsa" in Norfolk and Suffolk, which together constitute East Anglia. East Anglia is only about 150 miles from Stratford on Avon, but even in 2011 it is culturally and linguistically in a different country. ... It was presumably the same in the 16th century.

The Earl of Oxford was of course brought up in Suffolk, so he would have understood. It is very unlikely Stratford Shakespeare would have been familiar with Suffolk dialect, or would have [understood] written references to it.

It is pleasing to me that the reference to a handsaw had been correctly identified as being a "harnsa" or heron before 1877 by a Fellow of Trinity Hall Cambridge, and as such gives a little more academic credibility to the theory.

His original email to the SBAN Bulletin is below, after the jump.

"I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

I have just completed my first reading of "Shakespeare" By Another Name. I have long believed that the works of Shakespeare were not written by the actor from Stratford. Your book is so well researched that it is hard not to believe Edward de Vere to have been the author, and this enhances our understanding of Shakespeare's works.

My father was born in 1913 in Norfolk in East Anglia, and he spent his youth in boats on the Norfolk Broads. He then went to grammar school in Norwich where he studied Shakespeare.

Years later, in the 1970s, I was canoeing with my father in Canada when we passed a heron in the lake. He observed that it was quite clear how to tell a hawk from a heron. I was somewhat bemused until he explained that "hanser" is the East Anglian word for a heron and that the phrase from the mad scene in Hamlet erroneously transcribed "handsaw" for "hanser," thus leading to centuries of needless academic debate about the meaning of the phrase.

I have subsequently confirmed from a dictionary of Middle English that “hanser” was indeed an East Anglian word for a heron in earlier times.

When I read your book I was therefore very interested to lear that Edward de Vere also spent his youth in East Anglia. Taken together with de Vere's knowledge of hawking it is clear to see that de Vere would also have known a hawk from a hanser.

(Creative Commons image by ahisgett)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

**Sept. 12, 2011 EDIT to share some back-and-forth between correspondents Greg Hancock (who was the original source of the above material) and another SBAN reader, Michael Marcus, who is more skeptical of the Suffolk/East Anglia connection.

Here's Mr. Marcus first:

There's more (and less) to Mr Hancock's discovery than he thinks. According to Wright's ENGLISH DIALECT DICTIONARY the most common version is 'heronsew'. Wright's contributors then supply about two dozen other local versions/corruptions such as: heronsue, hahnser, hearingsew, hernsue, heronsyueff (!!), etc. As far as East Anglia goes (or went), there are heronsew, hanser, harnsey and hernsey. However, there is only one part of the British Isles where it was actually spelled in the form found in HAMLET, i.e. handsaw, and Wright identifies that as "N. Cy", which is the North Country, nowhere near East Anglia of course. But the broader point is that it can't be pinned down to Vere country. (FYI, in Warwicks it was either heronsew or hernshaw).
Here's a bit of speculation from the 19th century found (via google books) in "Hardwicke's science-gossip: an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature," (Volume 9):
Herneshaw.—Spenser himself, in his spirited description, furnishes the key to the mystery; the bird meant is the heron, which is often (I might say always) called by the country people in the Eastern counties a "hamsaw," or "harnsey." Shakspeare makes Hamlet speak of " knowing a hawk from a hernshaw," stupidly corrupted into " handsaw." [Presumably Mr Kilton was unaware of the N. Cy. rendering - MM] Chaucer in his "Squire's Tale " has "heronsewes":—

"I wol not tellen of hir strange sewes (dishes),
Ne of hir swannes, ne hir heronsewes."

In a Latin glossary, circa 1559, Ardeola (Ardea) is translated a hearnesew; in MS. Gloss. Line, we have hernsue; in Reliq. Antiq. it is spelt herunsew; in our modern lexicons hernshaw is explained as meaning a heronry; in Grieb's German Dictionary Keiherstand is translated hernshaw, heronry; Dansk Ordbog, heireiede is translated herons' nests, hernshaw. Tyrwhitt, in his glossary to Chaucer, explains heronsewes to mean young herons, no doubt deriving it from the French heronneau, a young heron. I am not quite sure that hernshaw and heronsew were not formerly distinct words; the former being compounded of hern (heron), and shaw a small wood or coppice, and heronsew,a corruption of heronneau; the two words were no doubt soon confounded, and heronsew, hernsew, harnsaw, and hornshato were applied to the bird itself, as, for instance, the word "eelfare" is a provincialism for a young eel (in some counties corrupted to Elver). The word eel-fare" was originally applied to the migration of the young eels, from the Anglo-Saxon verb faren, to go.—-F. Kilton.

"I wol not tellen of hir strange sewes (dishes),Ne of hir swannes, ne hir heronsewes."
In a Latin glossary, circa 1559, Ardeola (Ardea) is translated a hearnesew; in MS. Gloss. Line, we have hernsue; in Reliq. Antiq. it is spelt herunsew; in our modern lexicons hernshaw is explained as meaning a heronry; in Grieb's German Dictionary Keiherstand is translated hernshaw, heronry; Dansk Ordbog, heireiede is translated herons' nests, hernshaw. Tyrwhitt, in his glossary to Chaucer, explains heronsewes to mean young herons, no doubt deriving it from the French heronneau, a young heron. I am not quite sure that hernshaw and heronsew were not formerly distinct words; the former being compounded of hern (heron), and shaw a small wood or coppice, and heronsew,a corruption of heronneau; the two words were no doubt soon confounded, and heronsew, hernsew, harnsaw, and hornshato were applied to the bird itself, as, for instance, the word "eelfare" is a provincialism for a young eel (in some counties corrupted to Elver). The word eel-fare" was originally applied to the migration of the young eels, from the Anglo-Saxon verb faren, to go.—-F. Kilton.
I'm pretty sure that Tyrwhitt was wrong, and as another contributor wrote, "the bird and its abode got confounded into a single name". That seems as likely as anything, though it's peripheral to the source of the dialectal word. At any rate, there are enough local dialectal variants similar enough to handsaw that to tie it to East Anglia is rather precipitate. I suppose it's a point for the Derbyites, supposing any exist.

And Mr. Hancock's reply:

Michael  Marcus advances the opinion that herons were also called heronsew and hernsaw in Warwick, and suggests it is therefore unreasonable to ascribe  an East Anglian or Suffolk connection to the lines in Hamlet.

Ascribing a Suffolk  connection is basically what has been done by various commentators on this subject since the 18^th century .  I will detail some of these attributions:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The OED devotes approximately three columns to Heron, Heronsew and variations of these words. These can be found on pages 247 and 248 of volume V of the dictionary ( this section was completed in 1898) , and also on page 1296 of volume 1 of the micrographic version of this dictionary published in 1971.  According to the OED the first recorded use of heronsew was by Chaucer c.1385.

Quotes from the OED:
“ c. Phrase. To know hawk from a heronshaw. Conjectural emendation of the Shakespearian ‘ I know a Hawk  from a Handsaw’, proposed by  Hammer (1744), who being a Suffolk man, founded this on the East Anglian dialectal harnsey, harnsa harnser.”
and
“1835 Forby Voc E. Anglia, Harnsey, a heron 1885 Swainson Names Birds 144 Harnser (Suffolk)..Hernsew, Heronseugh (Yorkshire)”
There are no mentions of Warwickshire in the OED on this topic.

Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard Furness Vol III Hamlet Vol I, Philadelphia, Lippincott & Co 1877
“CLARENDON: In Suffolk and Norfolk ‘hernsew’ is pronounced ‘harnsa’, from which to ‘handsaw’ is but a single step”

A Middle English Dictionary, Words used by English Writers from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries, by Francis Henry Stratmann, revised by Henry Bradley, Oxford University Press
“Hairounsew, sb., O.Fr. herounceu, herouncel:  young heron: heironsew B.B.165: herunsew REL .I. 88; heronsewe ‘ardiola’ CATH 184 heronsewes (pl) CH.C.T.F 68

These show there is  significant  historical opinion ascribing  a  Suffolk connection to the use of “harnsa” in the Shakespearian phrase.  Respected texts and their quotations by a variety of commentators mention Suffolk.
None of the dictionaries or texts ascribe any Warwick connection to usage of  the word “harnsa”.

Although  Michael Marcus’s comments are interesting  I do not believe they provide significant reasons to alter acceptance of the historic Suffolk connection.

This. Looks. Big. (pt. 2)

2011-08-09T15:59:00.005-04:00

Sony Pictures released its second Anonymous trailer last week. US & UK release dates are still set for Oct. 28. (Other worldwide release dates are here.)

[Aug. 17 addendum: The movie's international trailer was also recently released: More dialogue snippets, less short-attention-span smashcutting between visual baubles. (Ahem, not the most flattering commentary about American audiences, no?) Clearly providing more hints about the movie's storyline. Facebook discussion about all the above here.]

Anonymous questions: Did Queen Elizabeth have children?

2011-08-04T12:03:00.014-04:00

[Aug. 9, 2011 EXCLUSIVE: See below for a crucial clarifying point from the screenwriter of Anonymous.]

In our sexually enlightened (obsessed?) times, discovering that a female monarch was once celebrated as "the Virgin Queen" immediately calls the pronouncement itself into question. Doth the lady protest too much?

The chaste public image campaign of the (ostensibly) childless spinster Queen Elizabeth I -- selling her to English Catholic revolutionaries as something like a royal, secular Virgin Mary -- was a piece of pure agitprop. And a brilliant one at that, engineered in no small part by her political genius of a chief counselor, William Cecil, Baron Burghley.

Queen Elizabeth was a woman with her own private sexual appetites. And no doubt like anyone else, some were fulfilled, some not. But, as ~~portrayed~~ considered in the movie Anonymous (and stated as fact by a host of Oxfordian and even Baconian books over the decades), the story of the Bard is allegedly one of almost unspeakable Elizabethan desires: Royal incest. Elizabeth, these claims state, was mother to "Shakespeare" and lover of "Shakespeare" who then produced a child by "Shakespeare."

The movie's director Roland Emmerich (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) has never been known to let the facts get in the way of a blockbuster storyline. The man has a track record for getting millions of butts into movie seats all over the planet. So let me not here be guilty of pettifogging a tub of popcorn.

On the other hand, the latest book that does unequivocally assert the royal incest theory of Oxford, Elizabeth and Southampton that, by all accounts I can find, inspired the royal incest storyline in Anonymous is Charles Beauclerk's Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom. That's a book purporting to present a lost history of the Elizabethan court. That's fair game for more serious debate.

Nowhere have I seen a more thorough consideration of SLK than in Christopher Paul's review [PDF] in the 2011 edition of the online journal Brief Chronicles. Anyone interested in the so-called "Prince Tudor" debate would be well advised to familiarize themselves with Paul's characteristically cogent analysis.

At this year's joint Shakespeare Oxford Society-Shakespeare Fellowship conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 13-16, I'm going to be presenting my own take on this crucial question that Anonymous will be raising.

"Prince Tudor: The Elephant in the Room" is now slated as the Saturday (Oct. 15) keynote address from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. If the conference committee can secure a special preview screening of Anonymous (which debuts in cinemas nationwide on Oct. 28) for earlier in the day, I will also be joining a panel of authors and researchers discussing the film.

If you think Elizabeth did have children -- whether her offspring was the 17th Earl of Oxford (aka "Shakespeare") or the 3rd Earl of Southampton (aka the "fair youth" of The Sonnets) or both -- the historical documents Christopher Paul presents in his review of Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom should at least give a fair-minded reader pause to reflect. If you think the answer to the title question to this post is "No," Paul puts more arrows in your quiver for the Prince Tudor debates that Anonymous will only be stirring up.

In either case, it's important too not to lose sight of the biggest Anonymous debate: Did Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford write the "Shakespeare" works? That this question is being raised for countless television and movie viewers around the world is certainly exciting. (Remember, people don't need to see the movie to see this riddle posed. That's something the trailer itself practically asks.)

What do you think? Was Queen Elizabeth the mother to one or both of the key players in the "Shakespeare" story? If not, is Anonymous a good thing or does it muddy the waters? No such thing as bad publicity?

"We'll debate," someone once wrote, "By what safe means the crown may be recover'd."

**Aug. 9 edit: **
I am thrilled to be able to provide readers here a sneak peek at how Anonymous handles the Prince Tudor question(s). This afternoon, I corresponded with John Orloff, Anonymous's screenwriter. He said, for the record,

Oxford's parentage is handled in the film in a manner that leaves it as a mere possibility that Oxford and Elizabeth committed incest. A character-- Oxford's rival and enemy, Robert Cecil-- informs Oxford that Oxford is the bastard son of Elizabeth. But Cecil might be lying in order to crush Oxford's spirit by making Oxford think not only was he a bastard, but that he had committed the sin of incest as well. Oxford immediately replies by saying "You lie!"

John also clarified a point I corrected above: Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom was not a source text or inspiration for Anonymous. (In fact, he said, Anonymous's screenplay predates Beauclerk's book.) I'd like to publicly apologize to John for misstating such a connection and hope this clarification can help to settle some of the speculation.

(Creative Commons image by Koshyk)

Memo to an Internet Critic - huff and puff and tweak the wording

2011-07-20T10:50:00.017-04:00

At the end of October when it debuts in cinemas worldwide, the movie Anonymous will undoubtedly bring many new eyes and ears to the Shakespeare authorship mystery.

In the meantime, movie fan sites like IMDB have been hosting ongoing online debates that are never short on definitive opinions stated definitively. (Film nerds are not known to be shrinking violets when it comes to expressing their point of view.)

In one recent conflagration, I was called out for being "completely wrong" and "completely clueless." Other adverb-laden barbs loudly and boisterously made their presence known too.

So what was the critique? It concerned a sentence I wrote in a 2006 online discussion forum about my book. (The same sentence also appeared in Appendix C of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- "The 1604 Question.")

As I'm now in the midst of making some minor edits to the next edition of SBAN that will be appearing in September -- more on that soon -- I wanted all the more to know exactly what I'd gotten wrong in Appendix C so I could make the correction.

The critic's contention and my examination of his contention follows after the jump.

First, though, a quick primer on why any of this matters: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford died in 1604. Ten or more of the "Shakespeare" plays are conventionally presumed (on very weak evidence) to have been written after 1604. Of course, if the post-1604 dates of composition are correct, the Oxfordian theory is either dead in the water or would require one or more collaborators who lived on after 1604.

The essential Oxfordian contention is that the orthodox scholars are wrong. The plays all date to 1604 or before.**

Below, then, is the claim posted on IMDB

[[BEGIN QUOTE]]

As I suspected, Mark Anderson is completely wrong. Howard Schumann gave the following link to an article by Mark Anderson. In the link, Anderson says, "Alfred Harbage's Pelican/Viking editions of Shake-speare (1969; 1977) provide a range of dates for the likely composition of each of the plays: Only The Tempest and Henry VIII fall beyond 1604."

That's simply NOT TRUE. It's demonstrably false.

I got a copy of the 1969 edition, edited by Alfred Harbage. On page 19 it gives a list of the works in the canon, along with dates. On page 20, it clearly states, "The date following the each title is, in all but a few cases, only tentative. It represents the view of the Pelican editor on the year in which the play is most likely to have been assumed in its present form."

TEN PLAYS ARE LISTED AS BEING WRITTEN AFTER 1604 - not the two that Mark Alexander [sic] claims.

The ten plays written after 1604 (according to this edition) are: Lear (1605), Macbeth (1605), Timon (1606), Pericles (1607), Antony & Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus (1608), Cymbeline (1609), Winter's Tale (1610), Tempest (1611), Henry VIII (1613).

Nothing says that the dates of likely composition for any of these plays is prior to 1604, although he does say Perlicles may have been a reworking of an earlier work. (Pericles is the ONLY one of these ten plays that the editor says might have had an earlier version.)

In short, Mark Anderson is completely clueless.

[[END QUOTE]]

It was seven years ago when I last laid eyes on the 1969 Harbage edition of the Complete Works -- and I don't own a copy myself -- so on my most recent research library trip, yesterday, I checked it out again. Here is the table that has caused such a kerfuffle. (Click on it to see it at full resolution)

So, first off, a quick examination of this image will reveal that my essential claim is, in fact, correct: The reason I mentioned the 1969 Alfred Harbage-edited edition of Shakespeare is because he is one of the rare modern Stratfordian editors who (with laudable candor and honesty) puts "error bars" on his estimate of each play's date of composition.

As Harbage writes in the accompanying introduction (quoted partially above), "The date following each [Shakespeare] title is, in all but a few cases, only tentative. It represents the view of the Pelican editor on the year in which the play is most likely to have assumed its present form. ... In parentheses beside each play is given the span of years in which we would place the play if we relied solely upon a strict interpretation of external evidence."

Only two plays' dates, by Harbage's reckoning, fall completely beyond 1604. Those are, as noted above, The Tempest and Henry VIII. And there is good cause to suspect Harbage is wrong on those points too. (This is discussed in SBAN's Appendix C.)

That said, I'd still like to thank the IMDB critic for -- in his own way -- flagging my statement about Harbage. Seven years after writing that sentence, I think it could indeed be worded a little more clearly and accurately. Perhaps something more like (with edits in italics):

Alfred Harbage's Pelican/Viking editions of Shake-speare (1969; 1977) assign a "tentative" date of composition for each of the plays (which would put ten works in the post-1604 category) but then also provide error bars for each suppositional date. Harbage's range of possible dates of composition for each of the plays puts just The Tempest and Henry VIII completely beyond 1604.

I'll be happy to consider any suggested tweaks to this edit. Even if you happen to be, like your correspondent, "completely clueless."

=================

**There are complications, of course. It's practically universally agreed that "later" plays like Pericles or Two Noble Kinsmen represent collaborations with other playwrights from the early 17th century. This is possible under an Oxfordian scenario too, though, with incomplete posthumous plays trickling out circa 1605-1613 and play companies assigning other playwrights to finish them off for public performance.

A belated thank you goes to Roger Stritmatter for originally tipping me off to the Harbage edition of Shakespeare. The Creative Commons Image above (of that other thing known as Anonymous) comes from Anonymous9000

Who Was "Shakespeare"? - The Essay Contest

2011-07-01T11:22:00.001-04:00

This year the two major American Oxfordian membership organizations -- The Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society -- are sponsoring an essay contest for high school students (or those who graduated from high school in 2011).

The four possible essay topics involve considering if the authorship debate is based on valid evidence and if it matters; analyzing the movie Anonymous; and (its one not-strictly-authorship-related question) discussing the role and significance of the Shakespearean heroines.

The Shakespeare Fellowship has posted a gallery of winners and honorable mentions from 2002. Contest rules and details for this year are here (PDF).

The prize values are $1000 for first, $800 for second, $600 for third and three $200 honorable mentions. If you're a high school English or history teacher or know one please consider/pass along this blog post. Previous years have seen upwards of 600 entrants, and with the attention Anonymous will bring to the topic, that number may well go up this year.

This is a great way to engage the next generation of Shakespeare fans and students about that "fine mystery" (as Charles Dickens put it) about the Bard's identity. "I tremble every day," Dickens continued, "Lest something should come out."

Creative Commons image by Keith Williamson

Sir Derek Jacobi and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford a.k.a. "Shakespeare"

2011-06-11T01:10:00.013-04:00

"...A piece many years in doing and now perfectly perform'd."

–The Winter's Tale

On Thursday night at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, I had the great pleasure and honor of helping present a noteworthy statute to Sir Derek Jacobi at a benefit fundraiser for the newly launched theatrical company The Ensemble Theatre Company of New York.

Jacobi is fresh off a widely acclaimed run as perhaps the greatest King Lear of our time -- one that brought him this spring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. (He also serves as the narrator of this fall's Oxfordian feature film Anonymous.)

Thanks to some stealthy planning and gracious goodwill (see acknowledgments below), my co-conspirator Gerit Quealy and I had set beneath a concealing veil the very first ready-for-primetime Edward de Vere bust from the entrepreneur Ben August and sculptor Paula Slater. (The story of the de Vere bust was blogged about here and here.)

At the completion of the evening's program celebrating the legendary Shakespearean actor -- and longtime Oxfordian advocate -- we were generously allowed to include a surprise presentation of the de Vere bust to Jacobi.

The five-minute presentation featured Quealy, who'd originally conceived of bestowing the statue on Jacobi, recalling the recipient's peerless Prospero and Lear. She said in her experience as an actor, the finest practitioners of the craft are forever searching for new windows on the truth. My contribution concerned great artists being unafraid to take big and sometimes controversial risks. (I wrote the remarks beforehand but tossed it out the window almost completely when the moment came. The one thing preserved word-for-word, though, was a poignant and funny Bertrand Russell quote -- someone else's quip, yes, but it still gave this admitted fanboy a thrill to say something witty enough to make one of his heroes laugh out loud.)

Jacobi was surprised, touched and most grateful for a bust of the Bard that he could claim as "Shakespeare."

And just to ensure Jacobi's new sculpture was well-grounded in its heretical bona fides, an Oxfordian author did also give it a quick refresher course beforehand. (Pictured)

Jacobi, as modest in person as he is kind and unassuming, might never presume to give anyone a sense of the greatness he's achieved in his six decades on stage and on the big and small screen. (His Wikipedia and IMDB entries certainly give a sense.) But it's well worth closing on here. His bio, as the Company's publicity materials spell it out, is below.

Throughout the evening, Sir Derek will relate the highlights of his award winning career, from the early days at school with Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Trevor Nunn, his talents being recognized by Sir Laurence Olivier and becoming one of the founding members of the new National Theatre. Appearing opposite Peter O’Toole in “Hamlet”, and appearing with Olivier in his film versions of “Othello” and “The Three Sisters”. His big breakthrough came in 1976 when he played the title role in the BBC production of “I, Claudius” a role that eventually won him the first of his two Emmy Awards. Through his international popularity he toured worldwide playing Hamlet -- even being invited to essay the role at Kronborg Castle better known as Elsinore Castle -- and bringing his interpretation to television in 1980 in a BBC production. Through the years he continued to blaze a trail of great roles and accolades on the stage in the US, England and around the world. Jacobi won a Tony award for "Much Ado About Nothing" and starred in, among many other shows, Hugh Whitemore’s "Breaking the Code." In film his career continues through Kenneth Branagh’s "Henry V," "Hamlet" (as King Claudius this time), “Dead Again,” “Gladiator," and more recently as the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang in "The King's Speech."

As an historian, he has been involved with the Shakespeare authorship question, supporting the Oxfordian Theory that the works of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. He has delivered public talks on the subject and with fellow actor Mark Rylance has signed a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" to encourage new research into the question. The online document has been signed by over 1900 people including over 330 academics. He has also narrated the forthcoming Oxfordian film "Anonymous."

(A heartfelt thank you to those without whom the sub rosa statue presentation would not have been possible: Ben August, Gerit Quealy, Anna Savant, Craig Dudley, Kevin Shinnick, Christopher Clawson, The Ensemble Theatre Company of New York and of course Sir Derek Jacobi!)

(Photos by Mark Anderson (Jacobi with bust) and Gerit Quealy (scribbler with bust))

Hamlet, Elsinore and an exploded world

2011-05-01T14:30:00.096-04:00

Yesterday, NASA posted as its Astronomy Picture of the Day an x-ray image of something called "Tycho's Supernova Remnant." (Pictured here) What the copy didn't mention is this astronomical object is also arguably known as "yond same star that's westward from the pole" in Hamlet.

Yet it's predictably opaque and inexplicable why Shakespeare of Stratford (if he were the author of the play) would make such a seemingly random association between an old exploded star and a Danish fable whose inspiration supposedly derived from some kind of nominal homage to his recently deceased son Hamnet. (The boy was named after a Stratford neighbor of Shakspere's, Hamnet Sadler.)

On the other hand, the allusion fits comfortably within a broader framework that supposes Edward de Vere behind the "Shakespeare" pen.

Here's the story.

It's hard to imagine today, but in 1572 when the light from this stellar explosion first became visible on Earth, it was a world-shaking event. Here was a new star -- not on any previous charts -- so brilliant that it was visible even in the full brightness of day.

There was, simply, no cosmic or scientific explanation for such an unprecedented heavenly phenomenon.

In England, the mathematician Thomas Digges studied the "new star" and wrote a book about it. Digges dedicated his book to Edward de Vere's new father-in-law Lord Burghley. In Denmark, the legendary astronomer Tycho Brahe made the most precise observations of the object in the world. Thus the object's modern-day name.

This new star, in effect, upended everything. It provided damning confirmation of an emerging scientific understanding of a dynamic universe. Under the prevailing Ptolemaic system -- which posited all heavenly bodies were unchanging and firmly fixed in place -- such nearly unimaginable notions were heresy.

Hamlet's reference to Tycho's Supernova (as it's known today) at the beginning of the Danish tragedy, in fact, constitutes a perfect setup to a cosmological debate that takes place throughout the drama.

Hamlet, in fact, enacts a specific astronomical dispute that Edward de Vere arguably witnessed first-hand in 1583. (Worst case scenario: De Vere did not witness the back-and-forth at Oxford University himself but was privy to courtly gossip about it at the time and enjoyed ample insider access to every detail after the fact.)

The debate was about old worldviews colliding with new — a familiar and comforting geocentric universe colliding with Copernicus's revolutionary heliocentric one. Hamlet, however, goes into more specific detail concerning both the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (a geocentrist) and the obscure 1583 court appearance of a bombastic Italian scholar (a Copernican) named Giordano Bruno.

There is no explanation for how a 19-year-old Shakspere of Stratford would have witnessed, read about or even cared about this esoteric, egghead dispute, one that was certainly antithetical to crowd-pleasing entertainments at the Globe Theatre. (And that's what we're told a Stratfordian Shakespeare canon is all about.)

After the jump, two excerpts from "Shakespeare" By Another Name that pick up the story where Tycho's Supernova Remnant leaves off.

Yet why write a play about Denmark, of all places — in 1583, of all times?

To begin with, it was the subject of current family table talk. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford never had the chance to see Denmark with his own eyes — although de Vere's German mentor Sturmius had once confided in Burghley his hopes that de Vere and his wife might visit Elsinore. Instead, de Vere would see the royal court of Denmark through the eyes of a trusted member of the family. The previous summer , de Vere's brother-in-law Peregrine Bertie, who in 1580 inherited the title of Lord Willoughby de Eresby, had paid an extended visit to the Danish court at Elsinore. On a mission from the queen, Bertie traversed the North Sea in June of 1582 to invest Denmark's King Frederick II as a Knight of the Garter.

Elizabeth needed the Danish king to stop harassing English ships as they passed through nearby seas. The English Muscovy Company was doing a brisk trade with Russia, and their business was greatly inconvenienced by levies exacted from them for using Danish sea lanes. So the queen sent PETRUCHIO to induct the King into the Order of the Garter and to win a more favorable shipping treaty.

Bertie proved a fine match for the blustery Danish King Frederick, and the two hit it off famously — although Bertie never did manage to change Frederick's mind on any of the seafaring matters he’d been sent to address. Between the 1582 voyage and a subsequent 1585 trip to Elsinore, Bertie spent five months in the castle that Hamlet immortalizes. Lord Willoughby’s two embassies included royal feasts, hunting expeditions, and fireworks. Bertie chronicled his trip in a handwritten memoir circulated at Elizabeth’s court. He no doubt also regaled friends and in-laws with his exploits. The Danish King, pleased to be honored with Elizabeth's knighthood, feted Bertie with multiple nights of revelry that included grand speeches about Her Majesty and the Order of the Garter. "All which [were] performed after a whole volley of all the great shot of the castle discharged," Bertie notes. Hamlet chronicles this peculiarly Danish drinking ritual: "There's no health the King shall drink today but the great cannon to the clouds shall tell," says KING CLAUDIUS.

In his capacity as ambassador, de Vere's brother-in-law met top Danish officials — including one courtier with the family name of Rosenkrantz and two surnamed Guldenstern. Bertie also visited the legendary astronomer Tycho Brahe at his observatory. Ten years before, Brahe had observed a supernova in the constellation Cassiopea — the same bright “star that’s westward from the pole” that Hamlet’s guards on the battlements of Elsinore notice. Brahe had also used his Danish observatory to make the most accurate observations ever of planetary conjunctions, oppositions, and retrograde motions. From this data, Brahe had concluded that the ancient geocentric theory of the universe was correct, that the Earth was indeed the celestial body around which everything else in the celestial spheres orbited. The Danish king touted his court astronomer’s achievements, a fact that escaped neither Lord Willoughby nor his brother-in-law. Hamlet's KING CLAUDIUS denies the PRINCE's request to return to school by noting that it would be "retrograde to our desire"; he says HAMLET’s excessive mourning is in "peevish opposition" to the facts of life and a "fault to heaven"; he says that his new wife GERTRUDE is "conjunctive" to his soul, and that he orbits her as a "star moves not but in his sphere."

For providing such local color, de Vere ultimately gave his brother-in-law a tip of the pen. "Enter ... English Ambassador" the stage directions read as Hamlet draws to a close. With six dour lines to recite — one of which is "ROSENKRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN are dead" — Hamlet's ENGLISH AMBASSADOR to Elsinore is hardly an ample stand-in for the colorful Lord Willoughby. Still, to those in on the joke at court, no further explanation was necessary. PETRUCHIO had made his cameo.

===============

Also in 1583, Edward de Vere had been re-introduced to Queen Elizabeth's court after more than a year in exile -- after having caused a scandal over impregnating one of Her Majesty's ladies in waiting Ann Vavasour.

Days after de Vere returned to court, the Earl of Leicester led a trip to Oxford University that much of Queen Elizabeth's court participated in -- a trip in which de Vere likely participated.

===============

De Vere's welcome back to court was bittersweet: On June 9, his mentor the Earl of Sussex finally gave up the ghost. The widowed countess of Sussex lamented in a letter circulated at court about the "sea of sorrows" that she now faced, and that "Were it not for the fear of God's revenge, I could with all heart redeem them with the sacrifice of my life." These morbid sentiments may well have funneled into HAMLET'S musing over suicide and taking “arms against a sea of troubles.”

Sussex had for decades been the leading voice of opposition against Leicester's pernicious influence at court. At one point, in 1566, the Sussex and Leicester factions had been so well demarcated that Sussex’s supporters wore yellow ribbons and Leicester’s wore purple ribbons. As he lay on his deathbed, Sussex issued a grave warning about Leicester, whom he derisively called "the gypsy": "I am now passing into another world and must leave you to your fortunes and to the queen's graces," Sussex said. "But beware of the gypsy, for he will be too hard for you all. You know not the beast so well as I do." Sussex had been an outspoken isolationist, feeling that England had no business meddling in the Netherlands. But now that he was no longer able to oppose Leicester, the scales began to tip further toward English military interventionism. The role of counterbalancing Leicester's influence now fell to Burghley — and to a lesser extent, to de Vere.

The Earl of Sussex — the loyal subject, brave warrior, cunning courtier, chivalrous nobleman and surrogate father to de Vere — presents the idealized paternal qualities that are projected onto the late KING HAMLET. "See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove itself," the PRINCE observes. Leicester had taken over many of de Vere’s lands upon Earl John’s death in 1562 — reminding a reader of CLAUDIUS’ usurpation of HAMLET’s inheritance upon KING HAMLET’s death. No one has ever adduced any evidence that Leicester poisoned Earl John, as CLAUDIUS did to HAMLET SENIOR. But in 1584, Charles Arundell would publish a new set of libels (Leicester's Commonwealth), alleging that Leicester poisoned Sussex.

Scholars today treat Leicester’s Commonwealth as a problematic and often unreliable source. Arundell claimed Leicester was a “rare artist in poison” — as reckless hyperbole as Arundell’s more outrageous charges against de Vere. One nineteenth-century chronicler wrote, "[Leicester] was said to have poisoned Alice Drayton, Lady Lennox, Lord Sussex, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, Lord Sheffield, whose widow he married and then poisoned, Lord Essex, whose widow he also married, and intended to poison, but who was said to have subsequently poisoned him — besides murders or schemes for murder of various other individuals, both French and English." Yet even if one disqualifies these accusations as so much vicious hearsay, the fact remains that rumors circulated during the 1580s that the death of Sussex originated in a vial borne by the “gypsy’s” hands. Leicester, whose cruelty excited “extreme fear” amongst those at court who dared oppose him, was certainly considered a suspect in Sussex’s demise. And for a lifelong opponent of Leicester, these suspicions may well have been good enough for the purpose of art. In making Leicester the contemptible poisoner CLAUDIUS of Hamlet, de Vere had given himself two poignant levels of contemporary metaphor — one (with the 16th Earl of Oxford representing KING HAMLET) in which de Vere would raise the old issue of Leicester's usurpation of his inheritance, and the other (with the Earl of Sussex representing the poisoned KING HAMLET) which anticipated Leicester's power grab after Sussex's demise.

Leicester was practically unavoidable during de Vere’s first few days back in the Elizabethan court. Just one day after Sussex's passing — Monday, June 10, 1583 — Leicester led the court on a trip to Oxford University. The Polish prince and military general Albert Laski was in town and, as Chancellor of Oxford University, Leicester had arranged for four days of revels honoring the distinguished guest.

The leading courtiers, scholars and authors of the day would be feasting, debating and attending new dramas directed and produced by de Vere's fellow Blackfriars playwright George Peele. For more than two years, de Vere had been persona non grata at every royal banquet, entertainment, progress, and hunt. Plays performed before the queen had become as remote from him as they were when de Vere had lived in Venice. And yet, less than a fortnight after returning to court, fate had handed de Vere the prospect of a four-day-long party full of fine food, learned discussions, and courtly drama. No record exists of de Vere’s presence at Oxford during this celebration. But circumstantial evidence suggests that the thirsty would turn down water and the frostbitten warmth sooner than the man who was Shake-speare would have let this opportunity pass.

The party centered around one distinctive figure. The warlike Prince Laski was a tall and loquacious man who had fought in dozens of battles throughout his military career, was fluent in numerous languages, and wore a long white beard nearly to his navel. Laski and his entourage stayed at Christ Church College and, after two nights of fireworks and other entertainments, he and the court took in a new Latin play titled Dido. As the chronicler Raphael Holinshed noted, Dido was a "very stately tragedy... with Aeneas's narration of the destruction of Troy." The play, extant today in manuscript , was a bombastic spectacle, complete with a kennel of hounds and a simulated tempest with thunder, hail, fake snow, and rain — just the sort of theatrical hue and cry that a lifelong military man like Laski would have enjoyed. The general savored the play like it was a fine delicacy.

Watching this play by torchlight at the college hall, de Vere must have marveled to himself at the unexpected overlaps between the classical melodrama being staged before his eyes and the Danish tragedy he was then beginning to sketch out in his mind. For in Dido one also finds the hero, Aeneas, haunted by his father's ghost. "How often is the sad shade of my father borne before my eyes, when quiet relaxes my limbs and a sweet sleep has overwhelmed my tired body?" muses the play’s Aeneas. "How often does the sad shade of my father enter my bedchamber advising a hasty flight?"

Dido, an otherwise undistinguished university play that was never published or acted again, proved to be yet another creative spark. None of Dido's words are quoted in Hamlet; but the Danish tragedy suggests the author had seen this production. For when the troupe of players arrive at Elsinore, HAMLET instructs one of his actors to perform "Aeneas's tale to Dido." (The real-life CLAUDIUS, Leicester, had originally commanded its performance at Oxford.) Before loosing the PLAYER KING on Aeneas’s speech, HAMLET explains that the Dido play he’s thinking of "was never acted, or if it was, not above once. "For the play, I remember, pleased not the million. 'Twas caviar to the general." (This final line is a pun on the fact that general Laski did indeed enjoy the play like caviar and that the university drama was too refined for the general multitudes.)

Also on hand during this four-day festival was the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. At the time, Bruno was staying with his mentor, patron, and host, the French ambassador Mauvissière — the diplomat with whom de Vere shared a chequered past. Bruno was a native of Nola, a township in the kingdom of Naples, and was one of the most free-thinking intellects of his generation. Bruno also enjoyed one of the largest egos of his day, no minor accomplishment considering the competition in the Elizabethan court. The Nolan, as he referred to himself in his writings, never passed up the opportunity to inform his readers just how important and magnanimous he was.

At Oxford, Bruno lectured the assembled crowds on "the immortality of the soul" and "the five-fold sphere." According to one eye-witness, the stocky Bruno rolled up his sleeves "like some juggler" and laid out his argument in Latin infused with a thick Italian accent. The university professor who then debated Bruno rebuked and embarrassed the guest. "Have them tell you with what uncouthness and discourtesy that pig acted, and about the extraordinary patience and humanity of the Nolan, who showed himself to be a Neapolitan indeed, born and raised under a more benign sky," Bruno wrote in a pamphlet that recounts the Oxford fiasco.

Oxford University and Giordano Bruno were celestial bodies in opposition. The University preached the ancient geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Every object in the heavens, it was said, orbited the earth, and the earth occupied the center of the universe. All matter was composed of five elements: earth, water, air, fire and the heavenly fifth element “quintessence.” Each element seeks out its rightful place in a hierarchy of five concentric spheres. Oxford students were forbidden to defy these teachings under the penalty of a hefty five-shilling fine ($75 in today’s currency). The Nolan, on the other hand, would have nothing to do with the university's retrograde approach to scholarship. Instead, he touted the novel theory of Nicolas Copernicus, wherein the earth orbited the sun. Overturning the medieval order of a fixed universe with a tidy five-fold sphere, Bruno advocated three further heresies: That the stars, contrary to fixed church doctrine, are free-floating objects in a fluid celestial firmament; that the universe is infinite, leaving no room for a physical heaven or hell; and that elements in the universe, called "monads," contain a divine spark at the root of life itself. Even the dust from which we are made contains this spark.

These notions prefigure a vast Newtonian cosmos, as well as an emerging field in present-day physics in which monads (renamed by the 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead as "occasions of experience") are being reconsidered as a key concept in understanding the conscious mind. Bruno, in other words, was the genius he considered himself. After departing England, seeking an intellectual climate hospitable to his bold ideas, Bruno settled at the University of Wittenberg, a major center for the study of Copernican theory, where he taught for two years. Wandering further across Europe, Bruno was captured by the Inquisition. He was thrown into prison for seven years and then burned at the stake for his heresies in 1600.

As Hamlet reveals, de Vere was moved by Bruno's remarkable show at Oxford : Each of Bruno's tenets finds expression in the play. HAMLET, not coincidentally a student at Wittenberg, is Bruno's mouthpiece. To his fellow Wittenberg students ROSENKRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN, HAMLET recites the Nolan's theory of an infinite universe, although he admits he still finds the notion disturbing. ("I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." ) In a poem he gives to OPHELIA, HAMLET wonders what the stars are made of and whether they are indeed fluid or fixed in place. ("Doubt thou the stars are fire/ Doubt that the sun doth move/ Doubt truth to be a liar/ But never doubt I love.") HAMLET waxes existential over losing a comforting and familiar framework of five elements. ("This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." Emphasis added) HAMLET wonders about the essence underlying human life — the question that prompted Bruno to postulate the existence of monads — and whether this divine spark can indeed be found in inanimate matter. ("What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" )

===================

In so many words, with Shakspere as author, one must imagine his digging deeply into an entire world of courtly culture and academic disputes for which there is no evidence he had the slightest access to or interest in. With Edward de Vere, the philosophical disputes in Hamlet become seamlessly integrated into the biographical details of his life and organically integrated into a larger drama about similar themes: Old ways of thinking against new, ancient orders versus an encroaching modern world, the bloody consequences of a royal cosmic order that has been overturned and a time that, in the Danish prince's words, is out of joint.

The dumbshow Hamlet - pay no attention to that author behind the curtain

2011-04-17T08:10:00.018-04:00

How has it come to this? Hamlet, perhaps the single most celebrated literary work in the English language, is still today widely read as so much dumbshows and noise when it comes to its biographical layers of meaning.

The editor of the new definitive edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray inadvertently highlights this strange point in a recent interview.

In the Harvard University Press promotional podcast on its new Gray, editor Nicholas Frankel says

"[Wilde] did say ... that the book 'contains much of me in it.' I think those were his words. '[The characters] Basil Hallward is who I think I am; Lord Henry [Wotton], who the world thinks me; and Dorian Gray, who I would be in other ages perhaps.' I think that's pretty clear evidence that Wilde saw himself all over this novel in all three of those central characters. Although to give him credit, he also said that art generally conceals the artist more completely than it reveals the artist.... So I think he would have been displeased with us wholly reading the novel in terms of himself and his biography. And of course we wouldn't do that with many works of art. We wouldn't do that with Hamlet, for instance. We wouldn't read Hamlet as an expression of Shakespeare necessarily."

Hear the lady protesting too much for yourself below, starting at the 12:20 mark.

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(On a side note, the podcast is also an interesting interview about Wilde's life and times -- especially the final decade of his life -- and the controversies that erupted surrounding the anti-homosexuality ("gross indecency") trials that had the author sentenced to two years' hard labor.)

The straw-man argument within Frankel's quote is remarkable in itself. Who would ever suggest that one must read Dorian Gray -- or Hamlet for that matter -- exclusively as a work of autobiographical fiction? (In the editor's words, "Wholly reading the novel in terms of himself and his biography.")

No one -- really in all my years in this debate and through all the assorted characters I've met, no one -- argues that Hamlet exists solely and exclusively as a work of autobiography. The reflective quality of the author inserting his own life story is just one new vantage point on this immortal play that withstands all manner of non-biographical critical perspectives -- new-historical, post-colonial, deconstructionist, new historical-post-colonial-deconstructionist, etc.

I don't want to pick too much on this one remark or this one editor. It's just the latest expression of a kind of age of decadence that orthodox Shakespeare studies seems to be caught up in these days. They refuse to substantively address the heretics at the gate and, in turn, refuse to substantively address any of even the most fundamental and self-evident points the heretics make.

For instance, every author draws from his or her own life to create his or her own work. Really, what alternative does an author have? For some authors this simple truth is more apparent and plainly represented than it is with others. It just so happens that "Shakespeare" was particularly -- and sometimes quite conspicuously -- guilty of this crime.

Some day in the far distant future, perhaps, we might see Hamlet entered within the register of expressly acknowledged "autobiographical works" that even the strictest defenders of the orthodoxy recognize.

As a friend of mine likes to say, though, just don't wait underwater.

Creative commons image of "chimp Hamlet" by Riley and Amos.

News from Germany (Drei)

2011-04-11T08:04:00.003-04:00

From our own Mr. H.W. in Germany today comes this news: Kurt Kreiller's book (Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) will be published in paperback on April 18. This hard-hitting Oxfordian tome, our correspondent notes, has proved since its 2009 release to be "quite a success." Kudos to gentle master Kreiller!

Moreover, the peerless Oxfordian researcher Robert Detobel (a helpful and careful early proof-reader of "Shakespeare" By Another Name) has a new book coming out in response to James Shaprio's recent anti-Oxfordian diatribe Contested Will. The book cover is pictured here.

Detobel's Will - Wunsch und Wirklichkeit - James Shapiros Contested Will ("Will -- Wishes and Reality -- James Shapiro's Contested Will") is slated for publication in October.

According to its press release, the new Will will be challenging Shapiro's "almost unbelievable range of errors... and deliberate distortions."Hear hear!

Both books are in German only as of this writing.

"Shakespeare" in Venice - film under construction, carnivale underway soon!

2011-04-10T20:54:00.013-04:00

On Wednesday night (April 13), Club Oberon in Cambridge, Mass. will host a fundraising preview party for the film Nothing is Truer Than Truth, a work-in-progress documentary centering around Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and his Shakespearean adventures in Italy in 1575-'76.

Readers of this blog have been introduced to the filmmaker, Boston-based Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, and to her recent successful Kickstarter.com campaign to underwrite her forthcoming trip to Venice to film on location at many of the sites that de Vere traveled to and immortalized in the "Shakespeare" canon.

Eagan-Donovan has also recently signed Deborah Cesana, location assistant for recent Hollywood films The Tourist and The Merchant of Venice, to be the production coordinator for her film's Venice-based shoot.

According to Eagan-Donovan, she will be traveling in May to Italy for on-location photography and also this spring and summer will be filming interviews in the U.S. with Oxfordian scholars Roger Stritmatter and Richard Waugaman, authors Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) and Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought), as well as Tina Packer (founder of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.) and Academy Award winning actor F. Murray Abraham.

The theme for Wednesday night at Club Oberon is "Carnevale in Venice," and in addition to screenings of selections from Nothing is Truer Than Truth (and a short talk about "Shakespeare's Grand Tour" by yours truly), there will be music and dancing -- including sets by DJ Jesse Kaminsky and Boston's Hanoverian "rocque" band The Upper Crust (pictured).

The event starts at 8 p.m. Directions and parking/public transit details for Club Oberon are here.

Tickets for the evening are available here. (Contributors to the Kickstarter.com fund drive -- who contributed $150 or more -- will receive complimentary admission: See the film's Kickstarter page for details.)

Full disclosure: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan has optioned the documentary film rights to "Shakespeare" By Another Name and has my consultation and full participation in making her film.

Creative Commons image of Venice at night by David Sifry

This. Looks. Big.

2011-04-07T20:09:00.003-04:00

Anonymous teaser trailer out today. Wow. (Postscript: The movie's worldwide release dates are logged here. As of June 29, Anonymous will debut in cinemas in the US & UK on Oct. 28.)

"Shakespeare" = salty dog

2011-04-04T08:41:00.007-04:00

Thanks to reader R.H. for passing along this great little excerpt from the book A Gipsy of the Horn: The Narrative of a Voyage Round the World in a Winjammer (Rex Clements, 1925).

Upshot: The Bard knew sailing and nautical terminology first-hand. Almost as if, say, he had crossed the English channel at least four times (SBAN pp. 70-71, 75 & 113), had circumnavigated much of Italy in a Venetian galley (pp. 85-92) and likely plied stormy seas on the open Atlantic, in advance of the Spanish Armada attack (pp. 222-29):

The books that had survived the West Coast had succumbed to the rigours of the Horn and had been dumped, a sodden pulp, overboard. My battered old Shakespeare was the only book left in the half-deck and I hung on to that with grim solicitude. ...

On one occasion, when the bosun came in I fired off the first scene of the The Tempest to him. He was immensely taken with it, but would hardly believe it was Shakespeare at all. However, he knew what "bring a ship to try" was, which was more than I did at the time or, I dare say, a good many others who have read the play. Shapespeare’s knowledge of the sea always struck me as remarkable. For an inland-born poet he was very fond of similes, and astonishingly accurate in his use of nautical technicalities. How did he acquire his knowledge? One ignorant of sea-life would hardly use the phrase "remainder biscuit after a voyage" as a synonym for dryness, or talk of a man as "clean-timbered." I like to think that in the obscure early years of the poet’s life in London he made a trip to sea, perhaps as an adventurer in one of the ships that smashed up the Armada. ['cuz why not? –Ed.] At least, no one can prove he didn’t; [!] and to my mind what more likely than that a high-spirited youth doing odd jobs about the old Shoreditch theatre, in the scampling and unquiet times when Medina Sidonia was fitting out should join some salt scarred vessel. ...

His use of marine technicalities was far wider than that of any of his contemporaries. He mentions nearly all the parts of a ship, and he mentions them with evident knowledge of their various functions. "The giddy footing of the hatches" as the open gratings of the main deck of an Elizabethan ship were called; the admiral bearing "The lantern in the poop"; the shrouds that "stay" the mast; "the high top-gallant" -- they had no royals in those days; "the small spare mast such as seafaring men provide for storms"; these and many others he alludes to casually but with absolute correctness. Might he have learnt so much from ships lying in the London river, and not so far from Bankside?

The poet might even have learnt therefrom what the "remainder biscuit after a voyage" is like; found the inspritation of that simile "Pun thee into shivers with his fist, as a sailor breaks a biscuit" and seen "the new map of the world with the augmentation of the Indies," that was so popular among seafaring men. Mixing with the mariners of those ships he might have gone so far as to hear of "great sea marks, standing every flaw," of the depth of "the bay of Portugal." Of the "guards of the pole," of taking the altitude or "height" of a star, of "keeping the weather gauge" of the need to "slack the boline" in heavy weather; and learnt to speak of the wind "fetching about," the anchor "coming home," of being "unclewed" by misfortune or "be-lee’d" by lack of favour, though no other writer without sea experience that I know of ever got the hang of sailor-talk so naturally.

But admitting all this, there is still more that can hardly be explained in these ways. How came he to know what "noise the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest"? That dolphins "showed their backs above the element they lived in"? That a shifted wind unto a sail makes a vessel’s course to "fetch about," mark you – or that, in a chase, if the pursuing vessel "yaws," a quarry of quick sail will escape her? Yet know it all he did and much more, and on occasion makes Ancient Pistol talk like Drake himself going into action.

Paula Slater - Sculptor, Iconoplast

2011-03-22T14:00:00.020-04:00

Last week, the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Blog featured an interview with Ben August, the Houston entrepreneur who a week ago unveiled one of the most ambitious art projects in the history of the Shakespeare authorship controversy -- a life-sized bronze bust of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Below we'll be featuring an extended interview with the bust's sculptor, Paula Slater.

The de Vere bronze August says, will soon be for sale in a limited edition casting as well as in marble resin and Hydro-Stone. More information on this, as well as August's painted duplicates of the "Wellbeck portrait" of Edward de Vere (on which the bust is based) can be found on his website: VerilyShakespeare.com.

August said in his interview that once he had the idea in 2008 of replacing his old Shakespeare bust with that of the true Bard, he began looking online and at art exhibitions for the right sculptor to take the project on. Last year, after interviewing and rejecting several other artists, August said he'd finally found his ideal. He commissioned Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.-based artist Paula Slater.

Slater, pictured here with a rough of the de Vere bust before its layers of patinas had been applied, had sculpted many monuments but in 2009 earned international acclaim as the sculptor of a memorial bust of Iranian revolutionary martyr Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old protestor whose shooting death by Iranian government forces was captured on a widely distributed video on the Internet. Within days she'd become memorialized around the world as the "Angel of Iran."

I spoke with Slater by phone in early March, as she was putting the finishing touches on her de Vere bust.

SBAN BLOG: When did Ben August first approach you with his possible commission for the Edward de Vere bust, and what was your first response?

PAULA SLATER: Ben came to me in July [2010]. He sent me an email saying he was interested in commissioning a portrait. We talked about how I do portrait bronzes. Then he emailed that picture [i.e. the Wellbeck portrait of de Vere], and I about flipped over the moon!

SBAN: Why?

SLATER: I sculpt congressmen and senators and leaders of industry. And this was so different. I love doing anything that has period clothing. Anytime there's period clothing, it's a challenge and a stretch.

Then when he emailed me more about the Oxfordian theory and who this actually was, I was totally captivated. I started reading more.

SBAN: How would you describe your own style -- and how would you be applying that for this commission?

SLATER: I like to sculpt in high detail and with museum-quality finishing -- in the style of [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini and Jean-Antoine Houdon.

The Wellbeck is a very flat painting. I really felt that I was going to need to bring it to life. I wanted that knowing look -- yet also knowing there's something hidden behind those eyes. That's what I wanted to capture.

First I became enthralled with sculpting this portrait, and then I became enthralled with this story. And then I purchased those ["Shakespeare" By Another Name] CDs. You just can't listen to those CDs and believe that anyone else was the author of the works.

I think in hearing about Edward de Vere, I felt there was an intensity and a lust for knowledge, certainly. And a bravado. At that age too, there is an invincibility. I think he displayed all of that. Some of that came across in the Wellbeck, and some of that was my feeling.

He was an aristocrat, and he had that flair with the clothing. He was an extravagant personality. But there's this mystery. He was really a deep thinker. I felt I needed to have this mystery behind the eyes and have this depth of thought.

SBAN: Could you describe the process of making the de Vere bust?

SLATER: To make a bronze bust, you start with a clay original. It's life-sized.

Because there was so much detail, this was a lot to sculpt. There was the frilly lace collar and the buttons. And once Ben and I were both happy with that, a mold was made.

I took it to a mold-maker, who coats [the clay bust] with many layers of polyurethane. And a plaster mold is put on top of that. That's called the "mother mold."

So you've got a nice hard mold. Then wax is poured inside the mold. And the mold is rotated around so the wax goes around to the inside of the mold. [The wax] is about 1/4 of an inch thick.

Then you take off the mother mold, the hard plaster. And you peel off the urethane. So now you've got a wax that looks like the bust. And it's hollow.

I then work my own waxes in case any details have been lost or air bubbles have come in. Usually everything is there. But maybe it requires a little refinement.

Then "sprues" are added. That's a long square piece of wax that's attached. Then it gets dipped into a "slurry" -- coating with this sandy liquid batter. That's allowed to dry. And then it gets coated again. They do this 10 or so different times. What you're left with is a hard shell. This becomes the new mold.

So you melt the wax out of this hard shell. And where you put the sprues are the pour holes. The hot bronze coats all the insides of the hard shell.

This is called a "lost-wax bronze." It's a 4000-year-old system.

SBAN: How many drafts of the clay original did you go through?

SLATER: I showed Ben maybe four or five drafts. I'm really tenacious about my sculpting. Even when people say that it looks fine now, I know it needs something more. I need to keep going until I say, 'Ahh. That's it!'

With the de Vere bust, the question was how do I think he might want to be remembered? The answer comes through my hands kinesthetically when I'm sculpting. It's beyond words.

SBAN: The bronze bust has an extra layer of patinas, right?

SLATER: They polish it to being like a bright brass. I work with a patina artist who heats the metal with a propane blow torch and applies different chemicals to get different colors.

SBAN: What about the marble resin and Hydro-Stone versions?

SLATER: That's a different kind of mold. I worked on a wax that I made sure was beautifully finished. It was poured extra thick too. I took it to a resin and marble casting company, and they made their own mold of it. They cast it.

SBAN: But for you, bronze is the ultimate medium, right?

SLATER: There's something very substantial about bronze. It lasts for centuries. To me, it really cements his name with Shakespeare.

It's similar in that same way to when Neda was shot in the heart in Iran. I just felt so compelled to sculpt her. I sculpted a portrait bust of her -- she was wearing the hijab, the veil. And then I sculpted a second portrait of her.

For the Iranian people it was not only that someone in the US cared, it also helped to cement her life and her [importance]. It became historic. Evidently 50 million people in Iran know this bust!

I thought I was going to sculpt her and donate the bust to an Iranian-American organization. But one organization leader told me to hold on to it until Iran is free because this bust should go in the art museum in Tehran.

The Neda sculpture just became so much bigger than I ever anticipated. It meant so much to have this image of her in 3 dimensions that the Iranian government couldn't destory. It helped keep her alive.

SBAN: The author of The Sonnets of course says that even bronze doesn't last forever. But there is still something a little more permanent about the recognition that this bust conveys.

SLATER: Because bronze lasts for centuries, it becomes part of the fabric of humanity. When we do that with an iconic image, it becomes historic.

I feel very blessed to do what I love for a living. This will, in the end, outlive us all.

--------------------
IMAGE CREDITS: Ben August, Paula Slater
EDITED for technical accuracy

What Hitch Said - An Important Counterpoint

2011-03-16T17:06:00.014-04:00

It is a basic premise of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- and this blog -- that a very often unappreciated (or under-appreciated) autobiographical layer of the "Shakespeare" canon exists. For actors, directors, scholars and just plain fans of the Bard, tapping into this new level of meaning only enhances the experience of the greatest works of literature in the English language

But of course all those other layers of meaning -- poetic, linguistic, philosophical, dramatic, tragical, historical, tragical-historical-pastoral, etc. -- still remain in an Oxfordian reading of the canon, too. And they're just as rich as if we knew nothing about the author's life story and its relationship to the works. (The latter is, essentially, the Stratfordian position. Pace the valiant effort of books like Will in the World, there is no substantive connection between Will Shakspere of Stratford and the canon.)

Here, with that setup in mind, is a wonderfully concise exposition of the universal qualities of Shakespeare -- whoever wrote the works -- within the context of an appeal to skepticism about religious certainty. It's from recent remarks made by the author Christopher Hitchens:

The key quote from Hitchens here concerns the question of heaven. "Why don't you accept this wonderful offer?" he asks

"Why wouldn't you want to meet Shakespeare, for example? ... The only reason I'd want to meet Shakespeare or might even want to is because I can meet him any time. Because he is immortal in the works he's left behind. If you've read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment."

I'd only add that Hitchens is right that getting to know Edward de Vere is a disappointment if you're expecting the Christ-like "Divine William" fantasy of 19th century romantic visions of the Bard. If you're more of a realist, though, and want to know the warts-and-all story behind the phenomenal plays, poems and sonnets, then Edward de Vere is anything but a disappointment. He's as mortal and fascinating and fallible and sometimes frustratingly human as Dickens, Mozart or Caravaggio.

Leave it to Hitchens, then, to deliver in his final words a fitting end to this thread too.

"Take the risk of thinking for yourself," he said. "Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come your way."

The Bard Gains A Dimension: The New Bust of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

2011-03-14T08:45:00.017-04:00

In November, I received an over-the-transom email from a businessman based in Texas who had a vision: He was a lifelong Shakespeare fan who had kept his bust of the Bard in a prominent place in his home. But he'd lately come to realize that "Shakespeare" was the mask that concealed another author -- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

So, in so many words, Ben August set out to fill a void. The stunning and lifelike bust that August ultimately commissioned last year and is pictured here was unveiled yesterday at his new website Verily Shakespeare (www.VerilyShakespeare.com). (August also regularly updates his gallery's Facebook page.)

Verily Shakespeare today sells a "giclée" print of the 1575 "Wellbeck portrait" when de Vere, then visiting Paris, was 25. It also shows photographs of the bronze bust he's commissioned from Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.-based sculptor Paula Slater

August says the life-size bronze bust of de Vere (with colored patinas) will soon be available for sale at VerilyShakespeare.com. He says he will also ultimately offer for sale a marble resin casting of the same bust as well as a "Hydro-Stone" plastic with a bronze finish. Moreover, August plans to offer a half-sized bust in all three media.

There will be a limited edition of both full-sized and half-sized bronze busts made, August says. On the other hand, he says, he will not be limiting the production run of busts made in marble resin or Hydro-Stone.

Over the past four months, I've corresponded and consulted with August as he quietly developed this ambitious art project. And today the "Shakespeare" By Another Name Blog features an interview with August -- an impresario who has carved out a unique role in creating a powerful new representation of Edward de Vere, a.k.a. "Shakespeare."

Later in the week, the "Shakespeare" By Another Name blog will feature an interview with the bust's creator, the renowned sculptor Paula Slater -- who in 2009 launched to international acclaim with her memorial bust of Iranian revolutionary martyr Neda Agha-Soltan ("The Angel of Iran").

(Full disclosure: I have provided feedback on the de Vere bust as it was being developed but am not financially affiliated with the project. August has, however, bought copies of "Shakespeare" By Another Name for his web store.)

SBAN BLOG: How did you discover the Shakespeare authorship question and the story of Edward de Vere?

BEN AUGUST: When I was in college [in the late 1970s], I started reading Shakespeare and fell in love with it. I was so taken by the power and the conciseness of The Sonnets that I started memorizing them. I've probably got up to 40 sonnets memorized. I just immersed myself in Shakespeare.

It wasn't until 1995 that I came across the authorship issue in Michael Hart's book [The 100: A ranking of the most influential persons in history]. I read that and was shocked. So I started digging around. And I'd run across an article here and there. And then I read your book in 2005. That created an avalanche of interest. After that I started picking up everything I could.

SBAN: How does the bust come in?

AUGUST: It was after reading your book that I took my bust of Shakespeare down. I always had one in my house. I had it for, gosh, 25 years. It had been on my mantle. I said, 'There's no sense in looking at this guy!'

I also love Goethe. Johann Goethe and Shakespeare are my two heroes. I've got several images of Goethe around my house. And a pretty good library of his works as well. So [in 2008] I was missing my Shakespeare, when one day it occurred me, 'Why don't I just create my own?'

SBAN: What did you do to put this plan in motion?

AUGUST: Every now and then, I'd look at sculptures. I'd start searching for sculptors. And I'd talk to them and get a feel for them. Four or five months later, I'd talk to another one.

I was not in any rush. I wanted to wait until I was absolutely taken by the work of a sculptor -- and also their personality. I had to feel like I could work with this person and feel like they could pick up on my passion and inspiration for this project. It needed to be somebody I felt I could have a good rapport with.

SBAN: Without mentioning names, could you give an example of one of the artists you decided not to choose -- and why you made that choice?

AUGUST: To me the key was capturing the character of the individual in the face. Really, that's what it came down to.

I've loved fine art for years. My mother was a collector of fine art. I'd go to art museums. I'm very familiar with the old masters. I would just look at everything I could find from these sculptors and what they'd send me. And what [the others sent] just didn't move me to act on this.

SBAN: So when did you come across Paula Slater's work?

AUGUST: I came across Paula in 2010. We talked back and forth for a couple months. I looked at her work closely. And I decided to share with her what the project was. I commissioned her in June 2010.

I believe Paula has a remarkable ability to capture the essence of a person in her work. I've seen several of her pieces -- pictures of them as well as in person. She does it remarkably well. Her attention to detail is exceptional, too. But you can be a technician and get that. It's a much greater art to capture the character of somebody's persona.

[n.b. Ben August and Paula Slater are pictured here in a recent photo with a rough of the bronze Edward de Vere bust.]

SBAN: How many drafts or revisions of the original bust [in clay] did you go through before settling on something you could both agree on?

AUGUST: I bet Paula went through 50 drafts. We had one major meeting with some significant refinements and adjustments. Then we probably had two or three other followups, where she'd send photos, and some tweaks were made after those conversations as well.

I know that she worked and re-worked and re-worked many many times. As she got more and more into this project -- and into the authorship issue and even just the content of Shakespeare's work -- she got it into her blood. She really got a sense of what she was trying to create.

SBAN: So what versions of this bust will be for sale?

AUGUST: My plan is to do a limited edition of the bust. The idea is there will be 100 of these Shakespeare busts in the world -- of the original bronze. Then we're going to do a half-sized bust. That's in the works right now. Paula is sculpting that. We'll do a limited edition [of that] as well. That'll be in the fine art section of the [online] gallery.

We'll also have replicas of the bust in a marble-resin -- so that the final product looks like hand-carved marble. We'll have them in Hydro-Stone with a bronze finish. Both half-sized and full-size.

SBAN: Whom do you hope to reach with this bust? What are your goals?

AUGUST: We're not looking to 'convert' Stratfordians -- those who have something to lose if de Vere is recognized as Shakespeare. We're looking for the millions of people who don't have a preference one way or the other. They love Shakespeare, and they'd prefer the truth.

[Images courtesy Ben August & Paula Slater]

Edward de Vere & "Shakespeare's Company" - What We Know

2011-03-05T20:36:00.016-05:00

One frequent question I find when giving talks on the Shakespeare authorship mystery is "What was Edward de Vere's relationship with Will Shakspere?" It's a good question for which "I don't know" is not a very satisfactory reply.

One way at this question is to point, for instance, to the revealing scene between the clown Touchstone, Audrey and the country lad Will in As You Like It (5.1). As Alex McNeil has argued in an article for Shakespeare Matters, it suggests an antagonistic relationship between author and front-man.

To me, though, the best answer would incorporate evidence and perspectives from outside the "Shakespeare" canon. And to this end the best alternative I've come up with -- I'm open to other suggestions -- is an answer to a slightly larger question on which we do have some guidance.

My standard response to the question above is: There's some very suggestive evidence that de Vere was working with at least one member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (a.k.a. "Shakespeare's Company") around the time of the first public performance of As You Like It.

The story begins with a book written by Lord Chamberlain's Men player Robert Armin. It's called Quips Upon Questions (1600) and is, essentially, a book of jokes. Alas, they're not terribly funny ones. But the introductory dedication is where the action's at.

Armin's book dedication talks about the comic actor's heading out to serve "the right Honorable good Lord my Master ... [in] Hackney." And in 1599, when these words were written, there was only one person who fit this description (i.e. both a resident of Hackney and a nobleman befitting the "Right Honorable good Lord" honorific) -- Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Also in 1599, the final draft of As You Like It was being prepared for a public performance by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. (The date derives from contemporary references in the play to current events, such as the 1599 "Bishop's Ban" on satires.) Robert Armin is believed, for good reason I think, to have been the first actor who played the role of Touchstone on the public stage.

Summarizing, then, The actor who, it appears, first played the character Touchstone during the year he was preparing the role was spending time in Hackney working in the service of Edward de Vere. This, I think, is phenomenal evidence for at least one actor in As You Like It workshopping his role with de Vere.

It suggests a model of adapting these courtly entertainments that, according to Oxfordians, de Vere wrote for private audiences in the 1570s and '80s. And in the 1590s and early 1600s, de Vere then transformed these texts for the public theaters. It stands to reason de Vere was consulting with the players who were bringing these works to the world at large. And the Armin example is, so far at least, the closest we have to a gold standard for de Vere's relationship to the public staging of plays we today know as "Shakespeare."

Below are some excerpts from the dedication to Quips Upon Questions. Or, thanks to Google Books, you can read the whole book for yourself right here. (The Google Books edition dates to 1875, and at that time its authorship had mistakenly been attributed to another actor named John Singer. Scholars such as T.W. Baldwin and E.K. Chambers have since argued more persuasively that Robert Armin wrote Quips.)

TO THE RIGHT WORTHY
SIR TIMOTHIE TRVNCHION:
Alias BASTINADO, euer my part-taking
friende:

According to the OED, a truncheon is a "fragment of a spear" (OED 1b). And "bastinado" is a Italinate verb meaning "cudgel." Crucially bastinado is one of the verbs Touchstone uses to threaten the character Will with in As You Like It. Note that "Sir Timothie" here is Armin's "part-taking friend" -- a competitive fellow actor? Could Armin's dedicatee be none other than Will Shakspere of Stratford?

Maybe. I do confess in an earlier draft of this post I started wandering astray right about here. But stick tight.

Clunnico de Curtanio sendeth
greeting; wishing his welfare, but
not his meeting.

Right worthy (but not Right Worshipfull, whose birth or grouth being in the open feldes) I salute thy Crab-tree countenance with a low congeey, being stroke downe with thy fauour:

A-ha! Born in the fields. Crab-tree countenance. Hold on to those thoughts.

whereas (kind sir) I sometime slept with thee in the fieldes ... [and] you assured me to take my part in all dangers: I am now to make vse of your valloure, to protect me from incision, or in deede from dirrision, in which I am now to wade deepely:

So the friend will cudgel anyone who maligns Armin. I'll cut to the chase before we get to the good stuff: Armin is dedicating these verses to his fool's staff -- a kind of cudgel that often had a carving of a human head atop it. (In "Shakespeare" By Another Name's endnotes, I'd left open a possibility that Armin was dedicating this book to Shakspere. But I'm no longer convinced of that for reasons that, if they haven't been persuasive already, will appear a few paragraphs below.)

Anyway. Below is the good part.

but if I scape Monday, which is omminus to me, I shall thinke my self happie: and though Fryday be for this yeere Childermas day, yet it is no such day of danger to me; then on Tuesday I rake [sic] my Iorney (to waite on the right Honorable good Lord my Master whom I serue) to Hackney.

The money quote. To be clear, I would render it in modern spelling and punctuation as: Then on Tuesday, I take my journey -- to wait on the Right Honorable good lord my master, whom I serve -- to Hackney

In 1599, Christmas and New Year's Day fell on a Tuesday. "Childermas day" or Holy Innocents Day (Dec. 28) did indeed fall on a Friday in 1599. So whether on Christmas Day or on New Year's Day of 1600, Armin went to Hackney to work in some capacity in de Vere's household, King's Place. As noted above, it's a reasonable inference that Armin was workshopping the role of Touchstone at King's Place.

Please note that the Wikipedia entry for Armin puts forward the comical notion that Armin's "Right Honorable good Lord" in Hackney was Armin's former patron Baron Chandos "who may have been visiting ... Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford over the holidays." (There were indeed two noblemen who kept households in Hackney in 1599. The other was Baron Zouche. But please see my endnote above: Zouche was out of the country in 1599-1600.)

While we're at it, why not say that Armin was spending time with Good My Lord Santa Claus who was visiting de Vere's household over the Christmas holidays?

Guard me through the Spittle fieldes, I beseech yee, least some one in ambush endanger my braynes with a Brickbat vnsight or vnseene.

The Spitalfields were a landmark (today a placename) on the way out of London, on the road to Hackney.

Sweete Sir Timothie, kind sir Timothie, tough Sir Timothie, vse me with kindnesfe, as you shall in the like commaunde me hereafter; whose Barke I will grate like Ginger, and carrouse it in Ale, and drinke a full cuppe to thy curtesie, when I am returnd to the Cittie againe...

That's where, on reflection, I got off the "Sir Timothie" = Shakspere wagon. The mystery dedicatee had a crab-tree head and bark that Armin could grate like ginger. It's a piece of wood.

To be clear, we still lack concrete and unequivocal evidence of de Vere's relationship with Shakspere. But de Vere's relationship with the company that performed many of the mature "Shakespeare" plays -- that's a solid start.

I'd like to hear people's response to the above. Please join the discussion on the SBAN Facebook page. Or, as ever, the comment thread, below, is open too.

(This post was partly inspired by a discussion on the "True Shakespeare" page on Facebook.)

[EDITED TO ADD: As pointed out in the comments, the crucial background to all the above is cited in SBAN's endnotes, which I excerpt here. Takeaway: Some orthodox scholars (Baldwin & Chambers) discovered/reaffirmed that Armin wrote Quips and one pioneering Oxfordian researcher, Abraham Bronson Feldman (whose brilliant work I consulted & cited in some 22 separate passages(!) in SBAN), made the connection between Armin and de Vere. Here are the full endnotes from SBAN that give the background to the Armin/de Vere story.

"Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe," Quips Upon Questions. W. Ferbrand, London (1600). Frederic Ouvry (private edition, London (1875)) attributed Quips, upon John Payne Collier’s suggestion to John Singer. However, since T.W. Baldwin (“Shakespeare’s Jester” MLN 39 (Dec. 1924)), scholars have generally accepted the attribution to Armin, e.g. E.K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 2:300.

"To the Right Worthy Sir Timothie Trunchion, alias Bastinado" in Robert Armin, Quips Upon Questions, ed. Frederic Ouvry. London (1875) A2r-v; Abraham Feldman, "Shakespeare’s Jester—Oxford’s Servant" The Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly 8:3 (Autumn 1947) 39-43

Re Oxford, Lord Zouche and Hackney, cf. Alan Nelson, Monstrous Adversary p. 414. Re Zouche's whereabouts in 1599-1600, cf. DNB entry for Zouche.]

Zeitgeist watch: The casting call for "Ed Devery"

2011-01-22T15:44:00.005-05:00

An old Broadway play opening in April is now, according to backstage.com casting for a lead character who once worked for a Supreme Court justice and was "destined for greatness" but now "they speak of his past brilliance."

This sorry old fella who's been battered around by fate is named Ed Devery.

It'd be easy to read too much into this. (The play, Born Yesterday by Garson Kanin, was written in 1946 -- six years after researcher Charles Wisner Barrell created a stir in the pages of Scientific American identifying the sitter of the "Ashbourne Portrait of Shakespeare" as Edward de Vere.)

Still, in a year that will see the first Edward de Vere biopic, this revival reminds how we may be seeing more names or characters or situations from de Vere's life story emerging in sometimes unexpected places.

After the jump, the relevant excerpts from the casting call listing.

'BORN YESTERDAY,' B'WAY

Philip Morgaman, Frankie J. Grande, Anne & Vincent Caruso & James P. MacGilvray (prods.) are casting the Broadway production of Born Yesterday. Garson Kanin, writer; Doug Hughes, dir.; Binder Casting, casting dir. Rehearsals begin approx. March 1; opens in mid-April in NYC.

Seeking — Ed Devery: early 50s, thirty years ago, when he was secretary to a great Supreme Court Justice, he was known as a young man destined for greatness, fifteen years later, they speak of his past brilliance in law, and charitably forget that he now has but one client, Harry Brock, who might have difficulty in finding a reputable lawyer to serve him, but Ed is past caring, Brock represents over $100,000 a year, which buys plenty of the best available scotch, attractive, but the years and the booze have taken their toll, but he still retains a glimmer of his earlier appealing looks, protects himself with an ironic, jaundiced sense of humor; Eddie Brock: late 40s-early 50s, Harry's cousin and servant, wiry little streetwise mug, knows he is dependent on Harry, and genuinely fears him, as he has seen him at his most dangerous and violent, smart enough to know how to stay in Harry's good graces, while at the same time having a dry sense of irony and humor about the position he is in...

~~Probably better just to end this post before venturing too much into the storyline here. Interesting, though, about Devery's "wiry little streetwise" colleague Eddie Brock. Will Shakspere redux?~~

EDITED to add links and references to the original version of Born Yesterday. The first draft of this post suggested the play was new. It ain't.

(Hat tip to G.Q.; creative commons photo by matt.h.wade)

Found video: Ed de Vere and Will Shax speak!

2011-01-18T21:13:00.002-05:00

Look Here, upon This Picture, and on This

2011-01-05T14:26:00.006-05:00

Two items crossed the transom today. First comes the new publicity still of Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere and its accompanying blurb from Columbia Pictures.

Cue generic, string section-saturated thriller soundtrack music. And, as you read these words, think of that one guy with the deep voice behind every movie trailer ever made:

Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England, Anonymous speculates on an issue that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds ranging from Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to Henry James and Sigmund Freud, namely: who was the author of the plays credited to William Shakespeare? Experts have debated, books have been written, and scholars have devoted their lives to protecting or debunking theories surrounding the authorship of the most renowned works in English literature. Anonymous poses one possible answer, focusing on a time when cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage.

And so it goes.

Second is the forthcoming release (unspecified date in "spring/summer 2011") of the next big Oxfordian book, Richard Malim's The Earl of Oxford and the Making of "Shakespeare". Its publisher's blurb reveals this tome will be taking a broader scope than just a literary biography of de Vere.

The Making of "Shakespeare" will also provide "a historical overview of English literature from 1530 through 1575" and a speculative appendix on the role of Will Shakspere of Stratford in the unfolding "Shakespeare" drama.

Unless it packs a lot more new evidence into it than the blurb suggests, it won't be bringing as much original material to the table as will Richard Roe's forthcoming Shakespeare's Guide to Italy. But I have high hopes that Malim -- longtime contributor to the De Vere Society's newsletter and related publications -- will assemble a solid and compelling precis for the Oxfordian case.

Given the slough of misinformation about Edward de Vere that'll be flying when Anonymous hits movie theaters in the fall, Mr. Malim's work in the New Releases section of bookstores will, no doubt, provide a great assist.

Links & tangled webs

2010-12-29T22:01:00.006-05:00

Two new and noteworthy web resources came to my attention this past week worth passing along.

First, a new (brief) documentary biography of Edward de Vere has been posted -- for free download, no less. Canadian researcher Nina Green, familiar to many Oxfordians as the moderator of the "Phaeton" email list, recently posted her 44-page Oxford's Biography (PDF) on her Oxford-Shakespeare website.

It's not an Oxfordian biography. (We, ahem, already have a pretty decent one of those.) Rather, it's a strict recitation of all the known facts and documents relating to Edward de Vere's life, from the christening cup granted to baby Edward on April 17, 1550 to the June 18, 1604 custody transfer of the Forest of Essex (six days before de Vere's death).

The PDF biography refrains from theorizing about the Shakespeare authorship issue. The previous documentary biography of de Vere (Alan Nelson's Monstrous Adversary, 2003) wore its hostility toward de Vere on its sleeve -- indeed in its very title. Its errors skewed toward making de Vere look bad and his case for any claim to the "Shakespeare" canon worse.

Kudos to Ms. Green for assembling this fresh and welcome new look into Edward de Vere's life.

Second link is a great new website hosted by the Georgetown University clinical psychiatry professor Richard Waugaman, "The Oxfreudian". It's a fine turn of phrase, with a good (and we hope ever-growing) collection of papers Waugaman has written on Edward de Vere and the authorship issue.

Like the late Bronson Feldman before him (one of the great underappreciated Oxfordian writers and critics), Waugaman brings a career of clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to the authorship issue, with often incisive results. For instance, in one essay for the Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review (co-written with Roger Stritmatter), Waugaman notes

It may come as a surprise to psychoanalysts to learn just how much current literary theory minimizes the significance of an understanding of the psychology and life experiences of the author. For several years, the predominant view has instead been that studies of the text itself should be paramount, and it is often not considered legitimate or relevant to introduce data, much less psychological speculations, about the influence of the author’s psychology on their literary creations.

Freud touched on this problem when he accepted the Goethe Prize. He interwove his comments on de Vere with his defense of a psychoanalytic study of Goethe. He acknowledged that some would object that such psychoanalytic studies would "degrade" a great man. He met this objection with the claim that only a psychoanalytic study of great writers can "throw any light on the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist" or "help us comprehend any better the value ... of his works" (Freud, 1930, p. 211). We strongly agree with Freud that advances in our understanding of literary genius, and creativity in general, will be promoted by once more legitimizing the study of connections between the artist’s life and work.

Creative Commons photo by Jenny Downing

The pen, the spear... and the temptation - part 2

2010-12-24T17:41:00.008-05:00

Earlier this month, I blogged about a tantalizing piece of Oxfordian evidence that was divulged this year in an endnote (!) to a paper on a different subject.

The evidence consisted of a book published in 1604 written by someone who knew Edward de Vere. In his 1604 book, the author made an elegiacal reference to an unnamed individual who "with one hand [holds] a speare... and with the other [holds] a pen."

The year of de Vere's death, in other words, the book might seem to record a contemporary remembering the recent passing of "Shake-speare."

My initial response to this find was -- like discovering an incredible new album or book or movie -- excitement... to the point of growing a bit starry-eyed about the material itself.

It was, in the words of the old journalist's saw, "too good to check."

And here is where a wiser version of me would have sat on it for a time. And spent some time researching it and thinking about it before making any public statement about it one way or the other.

Because once I was able to investigate it, the whole thing rapidly crumbled into nothing.

And so I record the following notes on one that got away as a reminder to myself -- and anyone else who cares to join along -- how important it is for Oxfordians to be their own harshest critics. Certainly, go ahead: Entertain that wild-eyed notion about what so-and-so said about this or that. But then go back and play devil's advocate. Far better to catch yourself in an error -- or, at least, be called on the carpet by one's peers -- than to be dragged through the mud after an opponent discovers the mistake.

Barnaby Riche was a professional soldier, eight years older than Edward de Vere. Riche had fought in Irish military campaigns in 1573 and 1599 and in France and the Low Countries at various times in Queen Mary and Elizabeth's reigns.

In 1581, he wrote a book of stories and satire in which he bid, as the title suggests, Farewell to the Militarie Profession. Shakespeare scholars know it as the book containing a possible source for Twelfth Night: Riche's story "Apolonius and Silla." Trace back the source of Riche's story, though, and one finds the commedia dell'arte performed on Twelfth Night in the Italian town of Siena (Gl'Ingannati). It's a longer and more twisted tale than is worth getting into here. For more detail, The Atlantic magazine from 1902 has an extended discussion of Twelfth Night's possible intermediate sources. (In the final analysis, one really only need know this: De Vere traveled to Siena, and in fact wrote a letter to his father-in-law from Siena just two days before Twelfth Night of 1576. It's a fair bet de Vere saw enacted onstage the original Italian version of Twelfth Night.)

Some Oxfordians might also know Farewell as another source: In his book, Riche goes on at length about an effeminate and Frenchified dandy that he sees on the streets of London. Some Oxfordians have presumed Riche was talking about de Vere here.

In my first draft of "Shakespeare" By Another Name, I presumed that too. However, I cut it out in the final draft. I owe a more careful and sober look at Riche's book to the (now sadly departed) Oxfordian researcher Peter Moore. There is, Moore patiently pointed out, practically nothing in Riche's description of the fop that would specifically identify him as Edward de Vere.

So it also is with Riche's 1604 book A Souldier's Wishe to Britons Welfare. The book is dedicated to King James's son Prince Henry. The original endnote that set this jolly train in motion earlier this month might seem to suggest that the "pen" and "speare" reference was found in the dedication. But it is not.

After an unremarkable dedication to Prince Henry, Riche launches into a long dialogue between two soldiers, Captain Pill and Captain Skill. The former is a greenhorn and the latter a leathery old vet. As military historian Paul Jorgensen summarizes Riche's fictionalized dialogue, "Throughout the book the pattern of discourse scarcely varies. Pill offers his respectful opinion on a military subject; Skill counters it with his more learned judgment."

On page 61, then, we get to Pill and Skill's exchange in question. (I've modernized the spelling and punctuation here.)

Pill wonders, "When shall arts prevail and flourish then?" To which Captain Skill replies, "When kings become philosophers again."

Pill says, "That time is come, and God be thanked... But now if the goodness of a prince may promise a gracious consideration to the well deserving, England is made happy in him whose name is already consecrated to immortality, whose magnificence equalled with virtue, is able with Caesar, with one hand to hold the spear in the rest and with the other to hold the pen, whose imperial seat is no less renowned by Mars than beautified by the Muses." (My emphasis)

Just for starters: Riche's Captain Pill is clearly talking about someone who holds the scepter of power, who sits on an "imperial seat."

In other words, Riche is probably talking about Prince Henry. Perhaps King James himself. (There was by the time of Henry's untimely death in 1612 a full-blown cult that recognized in the Stuart heir to the throne a platonic ideal philosopher-king -- one who if he had lived to inherit the kingdom would have carved out an entirely different trajectory for the English speaking world than that of his foolish brother Charles I, whose controversy-plagued reign played no small role in sparking the English Civil War in 1649.)

In any event, that Riche is not talking about de Vere comes clear in just the phrase preceding the "spear/pen" fragment: De Vere was many things, but a Casear he was not.

So we return good Captains Pill and Skill to the obscurity whence they came. As with Riche's other possible Oxfordian reference, from 1581, a closer examination of the full text reveals a simple and straightforward fact. There's no de Vere here.

(Thanks here also goes to the careful and diligent researcher C.P., who also emailed his own analysis of the 1604 Riche "evidence," drawing the same conclusion that nothing in it pertains to Edward de Vere.)

Creative Commons photo by striatic

Video: Why Was I Never Told This?

2010-12-20T10:29:00.002-05:00

This new YouTube video was recently posted by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition.

Please take a gander -- and if you like it, please tweet, facebook & email it to others!

The Jacobian Lear - mark your calendars

2010-12-12T23:48:00.008-05:00

Sir Derek Jacobi, The Wall Street Journal said in a review Friday, is now treading the boards in London in "the finest performance of Lear we are likely to see for some time."

And it's not just the WSJ who are waxing rhapsodic. Jacobi's King Lear (directed by Michael Grandage) has been widely hailed as one of the great (legendary?) Shakespearean performances of the present day.

The Daily Express calls it, "An evening of greatness" and "one of the most remarkable performances of the past decade," while The Daily Telegraph called this production "A Lear to rank with the greatest."

In a separate article The Telegraph also reminds its readers where Jacobi stands on a related matter: "Sir Derek Jacobi doesn't believe Shakespeare wrote 'King Lear' - but he's still given one of the greatest performances in the role."

That Jacobi is an Oxfordian and patron of the De Vere Society (UK) doesn't appear to merit mention. But the legendary actor's apostasy may indeed not be irrelevant to his clearly penetrating insights into Lear's psyche.

The Evening Standard's critic extols Jacobi's "exaggerated pomp, wounded majesty, paternal indignation and, as his tyranny turns to self-knowledge, a blighted, ordinary humanity." While the Independent says, simply, Jacobi's Lear comes off like a "coward and a poet."

The downward spiral of Edward de Vere's life tracks Lear like a phantom horseman -- from de Vere's disbursement of his ancestral castle amongst his three daughters (from his first marriage) to his bastard and legitimate sons (the latter from his second marriage) that clearly inform the portrayal of the play's Earl of Gloucester.

And if I didn't know any better, the "pomp, indignation, tyranny" and "coward" quotes above might seem to be a slanderous summary of de Vere's life, as portrayed by contemporary libelers (such as Charles Arundel) or current-day ones (such as Alan Nelson).

If you can get thee to London's Donmar Warehouse before Feb. 5 (or to the locations of its UK tour through April 9), then please let readers know what you thought in the comments section here.

For the rest of us, though, there's good news: In February, select cinemas around the world will be screening Jacobi's Lear as part of the National Theatre Live project. (See the link for details on venues and screening dates near you.)

Last month Jacobi, 72, told The Guardian:

"The pressures are much bigger now," Jacobi said. "There was a lovely actress called Dorothy Tutin and she always said that there were three categories of actor. The first one was 'young and talented,' which is a great category to be in. You've got youth on your side, and you're the rank outsider in the race. You've got everything to play for, nothing to lose. Then you become, if you're lucky, 'experienced and successful.' You've got work, you're making a living, and you're also getting wonderful experience. And then there's the last one, which is 'distinguished and acclaimed.' And that's where the pressure is. Now you're the favourite in the race, you have to win or come a good second. Now people are putting money on you to win."

As the Guardian's critic concluded, "I think this Lear may turn out to have been worth the wait."

The pen, the spear... and the temptation! - part 1

2010-12-12T00:24:00.010-05:00

Recently, a reader emailed to draw attention to a most curious new piece of literary evidence. If the discoverer was right, it would constitute powerful and fascinating new further proof of Elizabethan writers associating Edward de Vere with "Shakespeare".

For several days, I was persuaded. After doing more digging, however, I made an about-face. I no longer think it relates to Edward de Vere or "Shakespeare."

All the same, I want to share the process of getting from there to here.

It may be useful, in other words, to share a story of a fish that got thrown back in the pond. Not every catch is a keeper. And a lot more get away than are worthy of keeping.

The evidence in this case comes from a book written in 1604 by the courtly soldier and poet Barnabe Riche (c.1540-1617). As pointed out in "Shakespeare" By Another Name, Riche arguably knew about (maybe participated in) the Falstaffian good times at de Vere's pleasure palace Fisher's Folly in the 1580s.

Then sometime during the year de Vere died, 1604, Riche wrote a book dedicated to King James's son Prince Henry. And in that book, Riche appealed to England's king -- or at least to an earthly representative of the ideal philosopher-king -- to pay homage to an unnamed individual who "with one hand [holds] the speare... and the other hand [holds] the pen."

Heady stuff, right?

This seemingly explosive discovery actually appears in a footnote in the latest edition of the online Shakespeare authorship journal Brief Chronicles. Footnote 96 (!) of Robert Prechter's paper "Hundreth Sundrie Flowers Revisited" says the following:

"[I]n A Souldiers Wishe from 1604 Rich wrote a heartfelt commentary requesting
King James to honor a certain unnamed person who was able 'with one
hand to holde the Speare... and with the other to hold the pen.' Barnabe
Rich. A Souldiers Wishe to Britons welfare, (London: T. Creed for Jeffrey
Chorlton, 1604), 61."

Here, then, is temptation by another name.

The year 1604, of course, is the year Edward de Vere shuffled off this mortal coil. And it'd be a curio worth crowing about if a soldier-poet from rival Philip Sidney's circle urged King James to commemorate de Vere's passing using punning references to the "Shakespeare" name.

Not only would another suggestive allusion to de Vere as the Bard be added to the hopper -- but also this one would further solidify the point that "Shakespeare" died in 1604.

What's that line about being especially careful when something seems too good to be true?

Yep. Pretty much.

In the next post, the above lovely edifice of Oxfordian handiwork will be taken apart.

(My one regret here lies not with the investigation of the evidence itself. Research is the steady accumulation of such disappointments -- and, with any luck and lots of hard work, an occasional breakthrough. Instead, I regret stating off-handedly in the latest "Shakespeare" By Another Name email bulletin that I would be blogging about a great new discovery connecting de Vere to "Shakespeare." For that bit of premature celebration I do apologize. Please pass the crow!)

Creative Commons images by sean_hickin and neil conway.

Remembering Richard Paul Roe

2010-12-03T15:10:00.007-05:00

This morning I learned of the passing of Richard Paul Roe, a key expert on an important and underappreciated topic in Shakespeare scholarship: Shakespeare's Italy. Roe is pictured here in an interview I did with him in 2002 at (as it was then titled) the Edward de Vere Studies Conference at Concordia University in Portland, Ore.

Practically for as long as I've known about the authorship issue (dating back to 1993) I've heard reports about Roe's treasure chest of new evidence on the Bard's Italian knowledge. Roe, one soon learned, had been gathering this wealth of new research over many years of travel to and research in Italy.

Roe's fundamental point was that, contrary to the ignorant-old-Will Stratfordian dogma, the author of the "Shakespeare" canon knew the Italian and French settings in his works exceptionally well. The "Shakespeare" Italy plays in particular, Roe argues, display a kind of organic and intimate knowledge that only comes from first hand experience.

I've seen Richard give talks, and I've had the great privilege to interview and correspond with him. He was very kind to provide a few important and unpublished findings for "Shakespeare" By Another Name.

I'm very sorry to have to report the news of his death today.

One small solace is that Roe lived to collect, write and supervise the preparation of a tremendous book containing all of his findings. This magnum opus, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Then and Now, will be published next year by HarperCollins.

The Oberon Blog today reports a conversation they had with a publicist at HarperCollins, who announced a Nov. 1, 2011 publication date for Roe's book. I have an advance copy of the book and will only reiterate what I said earlier this year: It's a superb piece of work.

As the publication date approaches, I'll be posting a full review.

Meantime, I extend my condolences and sympathy to the loved ones he leaves behind.

Roe's work will be long admired and appreciated. There has been, I think, no greater collection of Shakespearean scholarship in recent years. And that, in the words of the Sonnets' dedication, is surely a fine and fitting kind of "eternity promised by our ever-living poet."

"Shakespeare" shut down in 1604, ctd.

2010-11-25T09:59:00.005-05:00

It has long been a contention of this blogger that one of the stronger pieces of evidence for Edward de Vere's authorship of the "Shakespeare" canon is the fact that he died in 1604.

(The strongest remain the phenomenal connections between his life and the works, the contemporary rumors (cited in "Shakespeare" By Another Name) of his involvement with the Shakespeare enterprise, the manifold ways the annotations in de Vere's Geneva Bible appear as biblical references in the canon, and the astonishing overlap between the settings of Shakespeare's Italian plays and de Vere's documented ports of call during his grand tour of Italy in 1575-'76.)

The reason the "1604" argument is so powerful, I think, is that traditional Shakespeare scholarship stipulates that the plays were written from the period c. 1592-c. 1613. But critical examination of the actual evidence, in fact, provides an independent check that the author of these works stopped authoring in 1604.

Stratfordians still seem to think "1604" is a game-over argument for their case. Their flogging of this horse should only be encouraged.

Case in point: A new book by the UK publisher Parapress, Dating Shakespeare's Plays compiles a play-by-play examination of sources, references and allusions for all of the Bard's works (plus four apocryphal plays often attributed to Shakespeare).

The upshot is that these researchers find the "Shakespeare" canon as a whole has been dated too late -- sometimes by a decade or more. That the author shuffled off this mortal coil in 1604 and not 1616 (when Will of Stratford died) is, at the least, consistent with Dating's findings.

In the interest of fairness, it should be added that the De Vere Society in the UK coordinated the research and put together the book. Of course, anyone objecting to Dating's findings on this ground should then equally demand that authorship-agnostic researchers, not Stratfordians, be the ones who write the papers and books advancing the conventional 1592-1613 chronology.

The notion suggested in the previous sentence is not a joke. But anyone who knows Shakespeare scholarship today also knows it is laughable.

In any event, the book's analysis is in line with recent scholarship on The Tempest (added to the paperback edition of SBAN) that finds 1604 as the latest likely date for the play's composition.

And The Tempest is the strongest case they've got that the author must have lived beyond the year of de Vere's death.

So, now, with "A Critical Review of the Evidence" -- in the words of Dating's subtitle -- we come closer to the day when it can be said definitively: "Shakespeare" stopped writing in 1604. Oxfordians can explain this. What's the Stratforidans' excuse?

SBAN documentary fund drive update

2010-11-24T13:00:00.003-05:00

Seven days away from the Dec. 1 deadline for the Nothing Is Truer Than Truth documentary fund drive, and I'm pleased to say that as of lunchtime today, 62 contributors have pledged a generous $7675. This puts the project close to its $12,000 goal.

It's important to stress that this kickstarter.com campaign is all-or-nothing.

If just over $4000 can be raised in the next week, then filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan will have secured what she needs to film on location in France and Italy, to edit and mix her film and have it ready for submission to film festivals starting in the fall -- where she'll then be courting distributors both in the U.S. and around the world.

On the other hand, if the $12,000 goal is not reached by the end of the day on Dec. 1, then no money changes hands. And it's back to the drawing board.

I greatly appreciate the generosity and support the project's many supporters have shown. Please keep tweeting, emailing and otherwise notifying those who might be interested in this project. (Another suggested tweet: The #Shakespeare Italy plays precisely trace the Italian travels of this Elizabethan playwright. Follow the Bard: http://kck.st/9DJB46 )

And for those considering a contribution, please remember -- especially as close now as it is to the wire -- every bit helps.

Thank you.

Podcast Agonistes

2010-11-01T14:24:00.002-04:00

If you've ever listened to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name podcasts, your correspondent would greatly appreciate the favor of a review to add to the iTunes page. The "Shakespeare-upon-iPod" series has a few defenders. But it has quite a large assortment of one-star nay-sayers these days, too.

If even 10 per cent of what the critics on the iTunes page say about the podcast were true, I wouldn't want to download it either. Utter rubbish! Completely deceptive! He makes it all up!

Here's Apple's webpage for "Shakespeare-upon-iPod" a.k.a. the SBAN Podcasts. Click on the blue button that says "View in iTunes" to go to the iTunes page where reviews can be posted. (Requires free registration.)

Thank you!

The Bard of Venice (VIDEO)

2010-10-23T15:58:00.009-04:00

On September 23, 2011, Sony Pictures will be releasing a big-budget popcorn movie called Anonymous. As blogged on this page, the movie tells the tale of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" -- parts of which will be highly fictionalized, of course.

And so for the first time in history, a broad cross-section of the moviegoing public will be open to hearing out the factual story of Edward de Vere's epic life. And already primed for the many connections between his life and the Shakespeare plays and poems.

This is the (brief) opportunity that Nothing Is Truer Than Truth is poised to seize.

Filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan needs to raise $12,000 by December 1 to fund the final phase of her film -- shooting at the many Italian locations immortalized in the Shakespeare canon.

Please post this to your blog or facebook page. Please email your friends and English professors. Please tweet. (One possible suggested tweet is below.) And for those so inclined and enabled, please donate.

Thank you.

TWITTER-READY BLURB:
#Shakespeare lived in Venice and toured Italy. His Italian plays trace his travels precisely. http://kck.st/9DJB46 #PleaseRT

Celluloid Update - London-to-Venice edition

2010-10-01T14:32:00.002-04:00

Big and small, Oxfordian-themed movie projects move ahead with an eye toward 2011.

We recently learned (h/t reader DE) that Sony Pictures' Roland Emmerich-directed Oxfordian movie Anonymous will now be on screens nationwide in September 2011. Screenwriter John Orloff tells fan-site Collider.com that they didn't want to rush to meet their previously announced March release date.

Tantalizingly, Orloff also tells about CGI shots of Elizabethan London that sound pretty amazing.

"When you see a movie like Elizabeth, which is a lovely film, it’s all inside and it’s all interiors because you couldn’t build London," Orloff says. "But, we don’t do that. We literally have helicopter shots, in 1600 London. We have crane shots. You just can’t believe it. Nobody has made a period movie like this, ever before."

And speaking of exteriors, Boston documentary filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan tells the SBAN blog that her Oxfordian documentary Nothing Is Truer Than Truth -- now aiming for completion in time for submission to the film festival circuit next fall -- has begun fundraising to do springtime on-location photography in Venice, northern Italy and southern France.

"Oxford was an A-list party boy who took this grand tour of Europe," Eagan-Donovan said in a press interview last month. "He was all about collecting experience, art and music and all of that. And he came back with the experiences that were the material for the canon."

Edward de Vere's Italian adventure in 1575-'76 -- whose ports of call happen to coincide almost exactly with the settings for the Shake-speare Italian plays -- is an incredible story unto itself.

It was my favorite part of "Shakespeare" By Another Name to write. And its byways and grand canals have all the potential to be quite a yarn onscreen too.

(Full disclosure: Eagan-Donovan has optioned "Shakespeare" By Another Name and retained your correspondent as an advisor for Nothing Is Truer Than Truth.)

Creative Commons image by Kent Mercurio

All de Vere's A Stage

2010-08-22T21:33:00.008-04:00

During this hectic summer of 2010 -- when your correspondent has been busy moving the SBAN bunker to a new location -- the world of All Things De Vere has been quiet. But it hasn't exactly been totally silent either.

Last week, word leaked that Sony Pictures has set a release date of March 25, 2011 for the Edward de Vere biopic Anonymous. Film & fan blogs have been either slightly aghast or slightly quizzical about the prospect. Looking forward to seeing what Sony's publicity push is going to look like. Watch this space for more as the movie's release date approacheth.

Meanwhile, stages in Edinburgh, Scotland and Santa Monica, California have been spreading the de Vere heresy too.

This is the last week of British thesp George Dillon's one-man show The Man Who Was Hamlet (pictured) at the Edinburgh Festival -- through Aug. 30. After the jump, a review excerpt.

From the Scotsman:

Rising from the grave after Hamlet's death scene, George Dillon draws the audience into an absorbing and thought-provoking one-man show. He takes one of the world's oldest literary mysteries and turns it into an Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare scholars may shake their heads, but the evening's a romp, and a clever one.

The Man Who Was Hamlet will, according to Dillon's website be touring the UK through next spring.

And on shorter timescales, a new de Vere whodunnit will debut at The Santa Monica Playhouse this week.

Abraham Alan Ross's Elizabeth Shakespeare and the Astute Detective stages the authorship controversy as a modern-day romantic comedy, which features an astute gumshoe who, according to the production's website, "[using] his computer conjures up The Bard and The Earl from their four centuries’ demise. His sleuthing brings him into conflict with Elizabeth Shakespeare, sexy Stratfordian who is positive that William Shakespeare was the true author of his plays and sonnets. As Tad tries to coax Elizabeth to his point of view, she fights her physical (and mental) attraction to this romantic iconoclast."

So there you have it. Clever romps and sexy Stratfordians.

And the build-up for next-year's movie that will, at least temporarily, tilt the game board a little more toward those of us who think the Bard is looking more like de Vere all the time.

(Photo credit: George Dillon in 'The Man Who Was Hamlet', Photo by Charlie Baker)

Smelling Psalts - another de Vere treasure trove

2010-06-27T23:30:00.010-04:00

"Shakespeare" By Another Name reader Richard Waugaman of Georgetown University sent a note this week about his new publication in the journal Notes & Queries.

He told the SBAN Blog he's been peeking at Shakespeare's answer key lately and discovering a "jackpot" of new discoveries about the Bard's sources.

N&Q has now published two articles by Waugaman on a newly rediscovered source for the Shakespeare plays and poems: The Whole Booke of Psalme (WBP) from 1565. This popular edition of the biblical book of The Psalms set the sacred text to a steady rhythm, enabling the psalter to be sung more easily during church services. (It's also clunky and dated poetry and so has made an easy target for critics like C.S. Lewis, who said the WBP had practically no value as a literary influence for "cultivated writers.")

But the Folger Shakespeare Library has Edward de Vere's personal copy of the WBP -- one that's hand-annotated and bound with de Vere's copy of the Geneva translation of the Bible. (The latter is the subject of SBAN's Appendix A.)

De Vere's personal copy of the WBP is a treasure trove of material for Shakespeare.

De Vere marked 21 of the 150 psalms in the WBP. Waugaman has examined eight of those marked Psalms (8, 12, 25, 51, 77, 103, 137, 139) to discover dozens of new references to these psalms (sometimes to this edition of the Psalms) throughout Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as Rape of Lucrece; Macbeth; Richard II; Henry VI, Part 1 and the apocryphal Shakespearean history play Edward III.

"Using the psalms de Vere marked has led to what is probably the largest literary source for Shakespeare discovered in many years," Waugaman said in an email.

As with de Vere's biography, his travels in Italy (about which I'll be blogging more soon) and his personal copy of the Bible, de Vere's edition of the WBP once again proves that detailed examination of the particulars of de Vere's life recovers vast new vistas on the "Shakespeare" canon.

And once again it appears that if de Vere wasn't in fact the one who wrote behind the "Shakespeare" mask, then it sure looks like "Shakespeare" spent a lot of time looking through de Vere's eyes.

Richard Waugaman's first (Dec. 2009) article on WBP & Shakespeare
Waugaman's second (June 2010) article

(Creative Commons image by Orin Zebest)

Shakespeare's Italy - the teaser

2010-06-12T14:22:00.016-04:00

As noted in the comment thread to the previous entry, I discovered after posting about Richard Roe's forthcoming book The Shakespeare Guide To Italy ... Then and Now that the commercial edition is still forthcoming -- but not as in a few weeks or months from now. More like later this year or sometime next year. (Hopefully on the sooner end of that scale.)

Still, I don't want to whet appetites without also providing an appetizer until the main course becomes available.

So I'm pleased to report my recent discovery that a one of the classic studies on Shakespeare's Italy is now available for free download. It was among a handful of excellent sources that I used to write the two Italy chapters of "Shakespeare" By Another Name.

The 17-page work, "Shakespeare and the Waterways of North Italy," obliterates two of the most frequently-cited claims of the Bard's "ignorance" about Italy -- and continental Europe.

Case in point, says the scold: Shakespeare set part of The Winter's Tale on the seacoast of Bohemia. That'd be like trying to find some nice oceanfront property in Nebraska.

In fact, says Bart Edward Sullivan, the study's author, Bohemia during its most prosperous years had two seacoasts. (And as SBAN readers may recall, the first patch of foreign coastline Edward de Vere encountered on his 1575 trip down the Adriatic Sea out of Venice was land ruled by the then-King of Bohemia.)

OK, then... another case in point: Shakespeare didn't even know which Italian cities were on the Mediterranean and which were landlocked. Multiple plays feature voyages by ship from inland towns.

Sullivan demolishes that objection, too. Every one of the references to travel by boat via inland Italian towns (in The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, and Two Gentlemen of Verona) is in fact spot-on for 16th century Italy, when travel across Northern Italy was often more convenient by water than by land routes. The Po and Adige rivers as well as via a network of canals and tributaries that look today like a Renaissance Italian bus map provided the routes for the region's network of ferries and boats.

Sullivan adds, however, that for Two Gentlemen of Verona (which prominently features water travel between Verona and Milan), he couldn't determine whether the entire journey between the two Italian cities could be made by boat.

And that's one hurdle Richard Roe's book clears. He records some pretty impressive gumshoe detective work to determine that an uninterrupted river/canal trip between Verona and Milan was not only possible -- it was also recorded in accurate detail in Two Gentlemen. The Bard's critics are, again, the ones with egg on their face.

The dispiriting thing about Sullivan's work is that it was published in 1908. And Sullivan was a Stratfordian. His work is still widely ignored to this day.

Evidently, a Shakespeare who knew Italy like the back of his hand is a Shakespeare that academic Shakespeareans want nothing to do with. They know that if the Bard can be kept safely holed up in London, leaving no traces of a well-traveled Renaissance life, there's no threat to the happy myth of a commercial writer who spent his career churning out potboilers for the stage.

The fun begins soon, friends. Sullivan is just the starter dish.

Shakespeare in Italy: Game, Set, Match?

2010-06-07T13:25:00.005-04:00

When Mark Twain wrote his witty and still-unsurpassed anti-Stratfordian opus Is Shakespeare Dead?, he ultimately boiled the Shakespearean authorship problem down to one question: Was the Bard a lawyer?

His question is still an interesting one -- and certainly highlights just one of many problems the conventional Stratford theory has to overcome.

But as of 2010 -- with the forthcoming publication of a long-awaited book that represents practically a life's worth of research -- I think there's a new BIG question in town: Did "Shakespeare" personally visit the Italian locations of his plays?

Today I received in the mail an advance copy of Richard Paul Roe's beautiful, forthcoming book The Shakespeare Guide to Italy - Then and Now.

A longer review is forthcoming. But let me just say that I've interviewed Mr. Roe before, and over the years I've seen presentations and read papers by him and have had a longstanding respect and admiration for his work. He in fact kindly shared a small but significant number of his research findings for the Italy chapters of "Shakespeare" By Another Name.

And now just a brief perusal of his own opus confirms what I've long suspected: Mr. Roe's lifetime of research in Italian archives, visiting often-obscure Italian locales (nevertheless locales clearly referenced in Shakespeare), building up the case brick-by-brick... has certainly paid off.

The Shakespeare Guide to Italy could be a game-changer, in other words.

Of course, how orthodox scholars react -- no doubt in their time-honored "ignore all serious opposition" strategy -- is another subject altogether.

More on that and the big book itself to come.

More Contested Cant

2010-05-17T00:03:00.008-04:00

In recent days, you've probably seen a few reviews of James Shapiro's Contested Will. The man's a best-selling author and clearly doesn't need our help generating clicks.

But thanks go to reader SJW who pointed out the LA Times blog's recent post offering up some new old trout by reviewer Ward Elliott -- the author of a series of computer studies involving Edward de Vere's letters and the youthful poetry (mostly song lyrics) published under de Vere's name.

This may come as a surprise to those not familiar with academia, but Elliott published well-funded studies in the 1980s and '90s using computers to prove, among other things, that letters and song lyrics are very different from Shakespeare plays.

It never ceases to amaze this blogger (and part-time tech journalist) how often computers are enlisted to re-tell us things that are in fact already quite obvious. But Elliott points toward his CT scan of an apple and his CT scan of a glorious orange and says with the assurance of a good professor of number-crunching that never mind those trifling quibbles over the input data: The point is the computer says the apple couldn't ever no never have been an orange! So de Vere weren't Shakespeare, see?

I'm not a professor of number-crunching. But I think I have a fair nose for picking out hornswoggle just from the whiff of it.

I'm also a writer working on a second book and haven't the patience or time right now to deal with taking on Elliott's nonsense point-by-point. Fortunately, that's already been done.

Here [PDF] is a fine study of Elliott -- which it should be fairly noted Elliott replied to which was in turn replied to as well.

So, to those seeking deeper truths than "an apple ain't an orange," please seek above and you shall find!

Meantime, it's also worth noting one Canadian critic who's had enough of Shapiro's "anemic" scholarship.

That plus the skeptical review of Shapiro blogged about earlier has been picked up by the National Book Critics Circle.

Seems cant doesn't go down easily everywhere.

LA Times: Tit for Tat, Bard for Bard

2010-04-20T09:11:00.003-04:00

Contested Will author James Shapiro recently wrote an editorial for the Los Angeles Times bemoaning the filming of the Edward de Vere biopic Anonymous.

Yesterday, Anonymous's screenwriter retorted in the Times that Shapiro wrongly portrayed positions of U.S. Supreme Court justices who held a famous 1987 authorship moot court.

Screenwriter John Orloff said:

[Retiring justice John Paul] Stevens went even further, saying: "I have lingering concerns. . . . You can't help but have these gnawing doubts that this great author may perhaps have been someone else. . . . I would tend to draw the inference that the author of these plays was a nobleman. . . . There is a high probability that it was Edward de Vere [the Earl of Oxford]."

I would hardly characterize these as opinions "unanimously for Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford."

This is only the first salvo of the fights that Anonymous will undoubtedly inspire.

Pop some popcorn, please. The previews have apparently already begun.

(Creative Commons photo by Pascal Vuylsteker)

Contested Wont

2010-04-03T17:56:00.000-04:00

James Shapiro (1599) has a new book out. Called Contested Will, it's about the Shakespeare authorship question. Reviews have appeared in a number of (predominantly British) publications you've heard about.

However, the best newspaper or magazine review yet published on this book comes from The Brooklyn Rail, penned by William Niederkorn (a former editor at the New York Times, who in the interest of full disclosure I've known for five or so years). Niederkorn's an independent thinker who remains agnostic on the authorship issue -- a fact that, since Niederkorn wrote a number of Shakespeare authorship-related articles for the Times, Shapiro takes pains to single Niederkorn out for attack in his book.

Well, the riposte is in.

A few excerpts after the jump.

Everything went wrong, Shapiro writes, when scholars started trying to read topical allusions into Shakespeare’s works, and he blames Edmond Malone (1741-1812), the lawyer whose work is generally acknowledged as the cornerstone of modern Shakespeare scholarship. The only way out for Shapiro, it seems, is to ban all topical interpretation: Shakespeare never alluded to anything, or if he did we don’t know enough to be able to say what he was alluding to.

...

If Shapiro has a bible on the Earl of Oxford it is Alan Nelson’s Monstrous Adversary, a life of de Vere that is one of the most bilious biographies ever written. Riddled with errors, which Oxfordians have pointed out since its publication in 2003, Nelson’s book is an embarrassment to scholarship. Contested Will, whose title is cast in the same syntactical form as Nelson’s and which revels in the same spirit, is almost as bad.

Though both books assemble a great deal of interesting information, they are patently biased and need to be read skeptically. While it is hard to find one page of Nelson’s book that is free of unfair statement, though, Shapiro can occasionally sound seductively considerate. He characterizes Nelson’s book as “harsh,” but also “authoritative,” and recycles Nelson’s opinions.

...

Perhaps he even contributed to the hatchet job that appeared on the front page of the New York Observer a month later, aimed at silencing my coverage of the authorship issue in the Times. In his bibliographical essay, he recommends it “for a helpful analysis of Niederkorn on Shakespeare.” And he repeats the same derisive remark used in the Observer article, another trademark Stratfordian analogy, saying that my “rhetoric smacked of that employed by Creationists eager to see intelligent design taught in the schools alongside evolution.”

That was for my suggesting that authorship studies be made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum. If another reason for open-minded discussion of the authorship issue in Shakespeare studies were needed, Contested Will provides it, because it shows just what students are now having to swallow.

Rumblings on the Internets, the Glorious Spanner edition

2010-03-05T10:06:00.008-05:00

MTV News today posted an interview with actor Rhys Ifans, cast as Edward de Vere in Roland Emmerich's Oxfordian film Anonymous, which begins shooting soon. The movie, Ifans says, will put a "glorious spanner in the English speaking world of academia."

"I'm going to get those teachers sweating," Ifans said. It's been elsewhere reported that Vanessa Redgrave has been cast as Queen Elizabeth and David Thewlis as William Cecil, Lord Burghley -- de Vere's guardian and later father-in-law. The role of Will Shakespeare/Shakspere/whatever of Stratford has yet to be cast, Ifans said.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

To head any queries off at the pass: I am not in any way affiliated with Anonymous. Neither an advisor nor a consultant do I be.

In other news, a tip o' the SBAN chapeau goes to blogger Liam Scheff who gives SBAN some nice props in a recent article on his blog.

Last and certainly not least are two new Oxfordian blogs out there asking good questions and positing good answers: The Shake-speare's Bible and Shakespeare's Tempest blogs. Both come from Shakespeare Fellowship co-founder Roger Stritmatter, author of a superb monograph on Edward de Vere's bible (the one in which de Vere's markings just so happen to match many of the Bard's favorite biblical references) and one of the top experts in the world on the impressive array of evidence that The Tempest (long thought to be the silver bullet that could stop the Oxfordian theory cold) was in fact written before 1604, the year de Vere died.

In all, class, today's lesson is a simple one: Keep on tossing out those glorious spanners!

[EDITED TO ADD: Come to think of it, Glorious Spanner is kind of a cool name for a band. Although perhaps not as good a name as Edward de Vere. (The link's for real; that band name is now officially taken.)]

Hogg calls and New Year's news

2010-01-15T10:53:00.011-05:00

2010 looks like it's going to be a big year for Shakespeare authorship news. Kurt Kreiler's new book continues to make waves in Germany (one of the largest newspapers in Germany, the Suddeutsche Zeitung, earlier this month wrote up a big, favorable review of Kreiler's work); James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? appears in April; Charles Beauclerk's Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom also appears in April.

And, good or bad or otherwise, it appears that the first big movie about Edward de Vere as Shakespeare is going to be helmed by Hollywood blockbuster director Roland Emmerich.

News arrives today of the first bit of casting for Emmerich's Anonymous -- which is now reportedly working with a $30 million budget and begins shooting in Berlin in March. According to the movie website Collider.com, Emmerich has cast the young British actor Edward Hogg as one of his marquee talents.

Looking over Hogg's resume he certainly doesn't lack for film/television or stage experience. Hogg is best known on screen for his lead role in last year's White Lightnin'. Hogg has also been in productions of Measure for Measure and The Tempest at Shakespeare's Globe as well as a turn as the fool in King Lear at the RSC.

Expect a raft of Hogg puns (as in this post's title), especially if Hogg is cast as Edward de Vere -- the blue boar himself.

Brief Chronicles' not-so-brief editorial team

2009-12-15T22:32:00.004-05:00

If you haven't yet taken a look at the new Shakespeare authorship studies journal, Brief Chronicles it's well worth the time. (Its peer-reviewed contents are also free and open to anyone on the web, with monetary donations encouraged but not required.)

As the authorship heresy continues to wind its way into academia, it gains new (credentialed) experts who can bring their own brand of multi-disciplinary studies into the investigation.

Today, for instance, the journal's editorial board welcomed six new members, among them published experts in textual dating and the history of anonymous publication as well as a legal consultant in forensic linguistics -- who has helped to established authorship of disputed documents in courtrooms in the United States, Canada and the Hague.

Looking good, folks. It's great to see the standard -- and standards -- being raised.

Stratfordian quote, offered without comment

2009-12-08T15:54:00.003-05:00

"If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes -- if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it -- it wouldn’t be Rowe’s [1709 biography of Will Shakspere], it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s."

--Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire, editor Critical Survey

(Holderness reportedly made this statement at the Nov. 28 symposium "Shakespeare: From Rowe to Shapiro" at Shakespeare's Globe in London. Originally reported here and here.)

Contested Will's first review

2009-12-05T21:47:00.004-05:00

Columbia University English professor and best-selling author James Shapiro (1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare) will be drawing much attention to the Shakespeare authorship controversy in the coming months -- with the publication of his new book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? in January in the UK and in April in North America.

Reviewer Linda Theil of the Shakespeare Oxford Society has gotten her hands on an advance copy of Contested Will and today published her review of the book on the Society's blog.

Much to this Oxfordian's surprise, she says that it's an enjoyable (if at times frustrating) book and an entertaining read that could make a "stride toward armistice in the 'trench warfare' of authorship inquiry."

According to Theil, Shapiro makes two basic arguments:

First, Shapiro claims, it would have been impossible in the Elizabethan age for anyone to conceal any hidden identity of a prominent author such as Shakespeare.

And second, Shapiro claims, it's an anachronism to suppose there are any autobiographical qualities to the Shakespeare canon at all.

Much can be said about both points, of course. But before I do, I'd like to read Shapiro's words first. Give the man a chance to say his piece.

In the meantime, as Theil says in her review,

I fail to see how a lack of interest in a personal story translates to not having one. Call it what you will, an English writer will not produce Sufi poetry unless he has been taught Arabic, trained in the methods of Sufi literature and imbued with the life and understanding of a Muslim. An artist can only express what his life has given him, and as Shapiro admits throughout this book, the work of Shakespeare was not the life expression of the Stratfordian.

That's plenty for now.

BBC: Stratford partisans "arguing by adjective"

2009-11-30T07:37:00.010-05:00

Over the past (U.S.) holiday weekend, the BBC ran a superb long-form article on their website about Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare."

It gave Oxfordians (such as your correspondent) ample opportunity to make our case and allowed orthodox scholars such as de Vere biographer Alan Nelson (Monstrous Adversary) and Oxford University English professor Emma Smith ample opportunity to say we're completely nuts.

This is, unfortunately, a microcosm of the state of the authorship debate today. We want to talk evidence, and they want to fling mud. And with the April publication of best-selling author James Shapiro's hatchet-job book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, it's probably only going to get worse.

Thankfully, the BBC correspondent also allowed the heretics ample opportunity to point this very fact out.

Michael Egan, editor of the journal The Oxfordian told the BBC's Dave Gilyeat "One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole debate is the way the anti-Stratfordians are silenced. There isn't any real attempt to confront the arguments. There's just a general mocking and ridiculing strategy -- what I call arguing by adjective... "ridiculous, absurd" and so on."

Smith made one of the most curious anti-Oxfordian arguments in the article, stating, "There seems to be absolutely no evidence that the Earl of Oxford was a literary genius and had the ability to write and that seems a much more important criterion for writing Shakespeare's works."

Wow, the hurdles have changed! Time used to be we were just kooks and booby-heads. Now we must adduce evidence that Edward de Vere was a literary genius.

No matter.

John Shahan, head of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition responded to Smith with an email which Shahan has kindly given permission to excerpt here.

[Begin Shahan letter]

Four of [de Vere's] contemporaries -- Gabriel Harvey, William Webbe, the anonymous author of The Art of English Poesie (George Puttenham?) and Francis Meres -- all had high praise for Oxford's writing. Long after he died, in The Complete Gentleman (1622), Henry Peacham included Oxford on a list of six poets who had made Elizabeth's reign a "golden age" for poetry, while omitting "Shakespeare" from the list. You may dispute the evidence, but the evidence certainly exists.

Furthermore, modern behavioral science research on the nature of creativity and genius reveals that it is Oxford who has the characteristics typical of a great literary genius, not Stratford's Mr. Shakspere.

I [recently] wrote [a book review] (Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Fall 2001) of Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity by Dean Keith Simonton (Oxford University Press, 1999). The review outlines the developmental and character traits that Simonton and others found to be associated with genius, including literary genius. The Earl of Oxford matches the expected profile of a literary genius perfectly, while the Stratford man fits hardly at all. Mr. Shakspere's father did experience some "family reversal of fortune;" but nothing like what Oxford experienced, including being orphaned, which Shakspere was not. It is remarkable how clearly the research on genius points to Oxford, and away from Shakspere. Again, you may dispute the evidence, but the evidence certainly exists.

Simonton is one of the world's leading experts on creativity and genius, and a signer of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare (www.doubtaboutwill.org/declaration). Perhaps you could tell me, him, and the others above, why you say there is "absolutely no evidence" Oxford was a literary genius.

[End letter]

Last I heard, Smith hasn't replied.

UPDATE (Dec. 1): Dr. Smith did reply to her correspondent with a two sentence email. "Thanks for this. I think we will have to agree to disagree."

A brief tale's best for (almost) winter

2009-11-16T23:51:00.001-05:00

It's been a busy couple weeks in the Shakespeare heresy world. I'm still playing catch up after the birth (Oct. 30) of a wonderful little boy in our household. So, free time being at a premium, best to just cut to the chase:

* German media has been awash with coverage of Kurt Kreiler's new book about Edward de Vere as the man behind the "Shakespeare" mask. Both national German radio and print media (Der Spiegel) have weighed in and presented Kreiler's Oxfordian arguments seriously and authoritatively. Keep up the pressure!

* The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition announced earlier today that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor (ret.) have signed the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare." Keep up the pressure!

* A new Internet-based Shakespeare authorship studies scholarly journal has also just launched: Brief Chronicles. I haven't yet had a chance to go through the debut issue in detail, but the list of authors, topics and editors is impressive. Check it out -- and if you like, please leave a tip in their tip jar. (Scroll down)

News from Germany (Zwei) -- by way of Hollywood

2009-10-10T21:12:00.005-04:00

The other cup of news today comes via the pop culture website Collider.com, which features an interview with (German native, now Hollywood based) director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Patriot, 2012).

There have been murmurs in Oxfordian circles for years about Emmerich's desire to make a biopic of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." Now, according to this new interview, principal photography on Emmerich's de Vere pic Anonymous begins, Emmerich says, March 22. Interview excerpt after the jump

Quoth Mr. Emmerich:
It’s been eight years I’ve been trying to do this project. It was always supposed to be my next movie but this time I’m really doing it because I’m already set to shoot on March 22nd and I’m the casting process right now which for me is the most kind of nerve-racking because you have to make decisions. And I start shooting in four or five days the first plates in England...

It’s about how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays. It’s not [Christopher] Marlowe, it’s [Edward] de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. It’s kind of like a political thriller. It’s about who will succeed Elizabeth and the cause of that thriller, the Essex Rebellion, we take on, and we learn how the plays were written by somebody else. ...

Well it’s very well researched. The writer is John Orloff (”A Mighty Heart”) and he’s been working on the script for two years before I got involved and he did a really, really good job and I just discussed it with several actors who are very knowledgeable about that time and I’m really pleased how accurate it is. Naturally, for dramatic reasons you sometimes alter facts but it’s pretty well-researched.

[End interview excerpt]

I unfortunately don't have anything more to report other than the above. Full disclosure: I am unaffiliated with Anonymous -- and indeed will be posting something on this site soon about another project which does use "Shakespeare" By Another Name as its foundation.

Meantime... onward and upward to Mr. Emmerich as well.

News from Germany (Eins)

2009-10-10T20:52:00.011-04:00

[UPDATED OCT. 23, AFTER JUMP]
Two posts today about news from Germany (or Germans working in the U.S.) -- First, German author Kurt Kreiler has just published a new Oxfordian book (Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford).

According to German correspondent Robert Detobel, writing for the Shakespeare-Oxford blog, Kreiler's tome has met with at least one favorable review, a translated excerpt (by Detobel) after the jump

This from the Rhineland Mercury:

In 1920 Looney found the needle in the haystack . . .

In Germany it was possible to be informed on de Vere’s war adventures, his politic quarrels, his engagement in the theatre … since 1995 when Walter Klier for the first time summarized Looney’s findings. Ten years later the US author Mark Anderson presented old and new “evidence“ and came to the conclusion that Shakespeare was “one of the most autobiographical authors that ever were“.

Now a new, comprehensive book has appeared from the pen of the long-standing German Shakespeare researcher Kurt Kreiler, a historical-biographical-stylistical analysis provided with new findings and concentrating on de Vere’s cultural tradition, his individuality and his poetic art. A homage, also suitable as initial reading, to the “master of poetical self-reflection“, the artist of love rhetorics, a soul-knowing tragedian and an illusionsless illusionist. Reasonable doubts that de Vere is Shakespeare are no longer possible. But no really good myth will ever proceed from thence: the man is too complicated, his life already too well investigated, not appropriate as projection surface. Good myths ought to be simple, incredible and homely.

[End of review]

To be clear, I haven't yet seen the book, nor would I be able to do much with it if I did. (My French is rusty, my German non-existent.) But with great notices like this, in such prominent German media, I'd certainly be curious to know what any German-speaking readers of this blog think about the book.

Onward and upward, Herr Kreiler!

UPDATE (Oct. 23): We now hear word of a second strong review in favor of Kreiler's book in the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche. "A fascinating novel (?) of circumstantial evidence" is what the reviewer is calling this tome. ("mitreißender Indizienroman") The headline of the article, most of which unfortunately is behind a subscription wall, reads "Cover Name Shakespeare." ("Deckname Shakespeare")
[hat-tip to German correspondent H.W.]

A Mystery Writer Ponders: Whodunnit?

2009-09-19T15:15:00.008-04:00

Mystery novelist Ellis Goodman wrote a brief blog posting yesterday that summarizes his reasons for suspecting that Edward de Vere was the Bard.

Goodman homes in on Will Shakspere's last will and testament as reason aplenty to suspect something is very wrong with our traditional picture of "Shakespeare":

In addition, it is recognized his Will was poorly drawn, badly written and ungrammatical. Could this really be William Shakespeare? I decided there was a much better case to prove that De Vere was the true author of much of Shakespeare’s work; but, because of the fact that he was an aristocrat at the Court of Queen Elizabeth and a homosexual, he used Shakespeare as his “front man” at a time when anything to do with the theatre was considered low-class, rough, and tough. The theatre was banned from operating within the city limits, and no person of “class” would be seen at these entertainments.

So my conclusion is that William Shakespeare probably did not write these plays. What do you think?

I, for one, think the Stratford will tells a lot more than even many Oxfordians recognize. Bonner Miller Cutting, host of this year's North American Oxfordian conference in Houston (Nov. 5-8), has done some of the best work on this subject that I've seen -- revealing, for one, that Will Shakspere used a Protestant boilerplate template. (So much for the "secret Catholic" theory.) So much more, I suspect, remains to be uncovered as skeptical eyes re-examine that legal document that for centuries has been thought to be the Bard's.

[Creative Commons image by rpongsaj]

Nothing Truer Than A Good Cause

2009-09-18T16:35:00.003-04:00

Today's Shakespeare Oxford Society blog features a post by Boston filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan on her feature-length documentary film project Nothing Truer Than Truth.

Eagan-Donovan, who has optioned the documentary rights to "Shakespeare" By Another Name for her film, writes:

An A-list party boy on the continental circuit, a true alpha male, Edward de Vere was a man quite unlike any other. My documentary film project, Nothing is Truer than Truth, looks at the process of writing, where life experience, imitation of the masters, and relentless revision come together to create genius, as the key to discovering Edward de Vere as the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. The film will reveal de Vere’s epic life story and introduce a brilliant, troubled, charming man.

...

"With over 60 hours of footage, I have produced two fundraising trailers, and have had the great privilege of meeting some truly extraordinary and exceedingly generous people. On screen, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance regale us with their unique portraits of the earl, and British historian Charles Bird takes the viewer on a walking tour of Castle Hedingham, home of the De Vere family since the days of William the Conqueror." ...

As a writer, I am determined to tell this story. With your support, Nothing is Truer than Truth will prove that the universal appeal of Shakespeare’s work is due to the fact that the true author was a perfectionist, a world traveler, a temperamental, tempestuous trouble-maker, and most of all, a writer.

The Annals of Stratfordian Snark

2009-09-08T17:39:00.013-04:00

For those who enjoy ringside view on a good row from time to time, yesterday Oliver Kamm, a financial columnist for the London Times, got into a rather snarky flame-war with some Oxfordians on his blog.

Starting off simply enough with the assertion that the Shakespeare authorship issue is "benign, if batty," Kamm gets drawn into the maelstrom and really, in so many words, loses his shit.

Oxfordian commenters call Kamm out on his factually dubious claims, and he just keeps coming back.

He writes:

"I do 'assume that Oxfordians are unscholarly cranks'. That's part of their job description. Their ... arguments bear as much relation to literary scholarship as do creationism to science and Holocaust denial to history. It's a sociological and pathological phenomenon rather than a literary one."

Credit to the Oxfordians who posted on his blog, who generally maintained a respectful and civil tone.

And credit to the unintentionally comical Mr. Kamm, who after posting nine increasingly shrill comments to his own original post, clearly enjoys having plenty more to say when he has nothing more to say.

Here's hoping we might see the defender of the Stratford faith make it toward 15 or 20 attempts at the last word. Here hear, Mr. Kamm. We suspect there's yet more nasty ad hominems and prickly appeals to authority to come.

Just, please, commenters all: Keep it polite. Let the good man dig his own hole.

POSTSCRIPT: All the fooferaw has now occasioned a bona fide Oxfordian-themed post from the Times's conspiracy lover.

POST-POSTSCRIPT (and comment bump): Author Michael Prescott ponders the larger meaning of Mr. Kamm's vituperations. Tally-ho!

Overbury Overdrive Part 749: Shakespeare in Canard-land

2009-08-30T13:03:00.012-04:00

Today's Washington Post Sunday Magazine features a head-scratcher of a cover story (not unlike the cover fodder in the color supplement pictured here) that serves up, in this case, a fine selection of canards about Shakespeare and the "new Shakespeare portrait."

The author of the piece, sports columnist Sally Jenkins, has clearly done her research. Or at least research of the un-fact-checked, single-sourced, if-you-believe-that-I've-got-a-bridge-to-sell-you-too variety that big media outlets such as hers perfected in the run up to the Iraq invasion.

She writes:

Both [the First Folio Shakespeare engraving and Stratford funerary monument] are so unintelligent-looking that scholars blame them for instigating the Author Controversy, which is not really a controversy so much as a campaign by conspiracy-minded amateurs to prove that someone more visually appealing wrote the plays. The thinking goes that the "peculiar dough-faced man" in the Droeshout, as Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University calls him, is too stolid to have written such soaring words. Someone else must have, preferably someone good-looking. As scholar Marjorie Garber writes, "We'd rather he not look like an egghead."

The Author Controversy persists despite considerable documentary evidence. We have the man from Stratford's pay stubs for performing at court, his certificate of occupancy for the Globe Theatre, and his will, in which he left memorial rings to some London actors. Funny he would do that if he was just a country burgher who didn't write the plays.

Oh, dear.

Proponents of "the Author Controversy," as Jenkins terms it, are often accused of a number of sins. (Are we not snobs anymore? Where are the familiar red herrings we ordered??) But disowning the Stratford myth simply because Stratford Will is not pretty enough is a new one to me.

And the fact that the basic anti-Stratfordian argument (cf. here, here or here) presumes William of Stratford to have been an actor but not an author has evidently escaped Jenkins' notice. (The documents she cites, indeed the whole of Stratford Will's documentary record, are consistent with him working in the theater, probably as an actor -- something that few Shakespeare heretics dispute.)

From there, the howlers just keep coming:

* "One thing scholars agree on is that Shakespeare probably sat for a portrait in his early to mid-40s" - I think I recognize this old deadline-plagued journalist's trick: Find something in a book (in this case, pure supposition); claim that all authorities agree with it; then hedge your bets with that handy weasel word "probably." Nice.

* "he was exposed to great theater as a boy" & "Shakespeare avoided duels, so he must have been sweet-tempered" - these as examples of things that don't represent ways that scholars "fill in the gaps with overeager supposition."

* "He arrived in London in 1586 or 1587" ... or 1588 or 1589 or 1590 or 1591 or 1592.

* "The first time the Earl of Southampton laid eyes on Shakespeare he was probably stalking around a stage, wearing sham jewels and a robe hung with tiny mirrors to make it glitter, shouting hoarse rhymes in the air..." No room for doubt there. Jenkins is clearly catching on to the just-make-stuff-up school of Stratfordian biography.

And with such solid credentials built up in telling Stratford Will's life, Jenkins goes on recite the case that the sitter in the new Cobbe portrait ~~of Sir Thomas Overbury~~ is indeed Will Shakspere of Stratford. Namely, the c. 1610 painting came from a family descended from the Earl of Southampton ("Shakespeare's patron") and it resembles another painting once thought to be of Shakespeare.

To her credit, Jenkins also quotes authorities that, in the grand tradition of strange bedfellows, I'd just like to end this post with. Because they're right. (And in Jonathan Bate's case, he's more right than he probably knows.)

The [Folger Shakespeare] library is in a funny position: For years, it viewed the Janssen portrait as discredited and displayed it in a far corner of the ornate, gothic reading room in a row with other impostors and curios, under a small brass plaque that read "Sir Thomas Overbury?" In 1964, an art historian had tentatively identified the portrait as Overbury, a minor poet poisoned in the Tower of London under James I.

While Folger curator Erin Blake has met with Cobbe and directed him to useful historical sources, she stands by the provisional Overbury identification until she sees more evidence.

...

"To me, a lot of the interesting discoveries about Shakespeare are discoveries of his absence," [Shakespeare scholar Jonathan] Bate says. "It comes back to this sense that what he was good at was withholding himself and leaving things open to the audience. ... It's that kind of disappearing act that he was so good at, that's what keeps him alive."

[POSTSCRIPT: Although I'll be in deadline-land tomorrow, please note that as the Post article points out, Sally Jenkins will be taking questions about this story Monday at 12 noon ET.]