3,430 words
My first Jodi Picoult novel, Wish You Were Here, didn’t exactly whet my appetite for her, but her style is enjoyable, so I picked up By Any Other Name, curious and ready for another Picoult joyride.
“Picoult is the master of wading through the darkness to find the light,” exulted one back cover blurb. By Any Other Name is a dark novel, its light more dappled than effusive.
An historical biography of Emilia Bassano (1569-1645), nee Lanier, an Elizabethan era woman who is the first published woman writer in England. Picoult tells Emilia’s story as a saga of pain, domestic bitterness, concurrent societal war in asserting her intellect and desires in male-dominated Elizabethan society (male dominated? In 17th century Earth, what wasn’t?).
Picoult also strongly asserts Bassano was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays, not the Bard of Avon.
I suspect Picoult wanted to do a straight non-fiction biography, as she includes thirty-nine pages of author’s notes and references to champion Emilia’s authorship claim. She tells her story in a concurrent style contrasting the life and times of Emilia with the story of Melia Green, a New York descendent (another useless English major) who has written a play about Emilia, parts of which are section breaks throughout the novel.
Emilia’s struggles offer the reader a quiet, rising battle as she matures from her family of Italian musicians brought to England to perform for Queen Elizabeth. She is a musician, likes to read, and must conceal her intellect lest she, a woman, is seen as being too forward and independent. Also, since her family is Jewish, she has to keep that under wraps, as Jews are still banned in England.
Picoult captures this world in visual and poignant ways. Such terms as “She sank down in a sigh of skirts,” or “the anticipation of the performance was like a change in the air that lets you know lightning was coming” show a talent for language.
Picoult does very good word painting and molds the Elizabethan world through description and dialogue, Emilia always an engaging character whose ambition to be writer drives the action. She describes a masquerade ball where Emilia performs:
“Ah,” the Queen said, her lips curving faintly as she regarded Emilia. “Our little butterfly, emerging from the cocoon.”
The Queen sat on a heavy carved chair. She was dressed in golden armor, with jewels studding the fine metalwork. Her face was as pale as snow, as different from Emilia’s complexion as possible. Her hair wound around a helm with a spiked crown welded to its top. She looked like an avenging angel – fierce, imposing, unassailable. Emilia immediately sank into her deepest curtsey, eyes lowered. “I am a butterfly, Your Majesty, yet I shall never be a Monarch,” she quipped. Her pun delighted the Queen, who replied. “No, just a well-made maid who shall soon be made.” The two ladies attending her laughed behind their hands.
Picoult’s portrait of Elizabeth is more grump than Gloriana. The queen is decidedly status conscious and petty, and on certain days you walk carefully around her. Which would no doubt be Emilia’s view, someone in service at the court, a musician on demand.
Emilia, despite her wit and depth, becomes a shuttlecock tossed around by her family.
They eventually offer her as a concubine to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, a kind, elder man who oversees all theater productions in England (which is to say censoring plays that are too licentious or politically dangerous). This gives her a leg into the theatre world. With Hunsdon’s indulgence, she reads plays with him, getting a feel for stagecraft.
It also doesn’t hurt that she becomes friends with Christopher Marlowe, and begins an intense and clandestine romance with the Earl of Southampton, the patron of Shakespeare, lining up all her ducks in a row.
Emilia starts writing plays, but of course a woman could never get her works put on. Emilia needs a cover…a beard, if you will. Enter William Shakespeare.
I’m grateful Picoult’s Shakespeare isn’t the hatchet job making him an idiotic snake like in the 2011 film Anonymous, which plugged Edward De Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. As Picoult admits in her notes, she thinks Shakespeare is a jerk (her words), but at least depicts him as a reasonably good actor and businessman who pooled talent to be milked and write plays…under his name.
Emilia gets bounced from concubinage with Hunsdon because she is pregnant, possibly from Marlowe or Southampton, and her family steers her into a nasty marriage with Alphonso Lanier. She begins a clandestine life writing and keeping her work from her husband’s drunken and jealous eyes, meeting Shakespeare in dark meetings to get him new manuscripts, collecting her pay, then rinse and repeat…for several years.
It’s intriguing, always well-written, and at time dips into melodramatic and occasional snips on female empowerment. There are odd sentences like “actors began to bleed from the inn, clutching their parts.” It recalls men staggering from a fight, holding in their vitals, not actors leaving an inn, hiding their scripts. Odd wording.
At a late stage in the book, Emilia visits Cooke-Ham, the estate of Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, where women are free to write, study, practice experiments in alchemy “A garden of knowledge that, this time, was unrestricted to women.”
Emilia’s efforts to find a female patroness for her great work, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorem, fail. She ages, sees friends like Southampton die off, and the story ends in a bit of solemn spiritual uplift where the next world offers compensations.
The coherency and storyline of Emilia’s life is not transferred to Melina Green’s story. Melina is Emilia’s descendant, and she comes out as whiny, annoying, always bothered by male domination that keeps her writing success down. This in twenty-first century New York City, a feminist Valhalla compared to Emilia’s world.
She is not a terribly interesting character and is caught up in herself; where Emilia is dynamic and, at times heroic, Melina is just neurotic. She belongs in a Woody Allen movie, likely the second sub-plot.
Her best friend and major positive male is Andre, a black homosexual who is at turns cute, bitchy, wisecracking and bleeds with irony, working at a talent agency because (of course!)
There are so few opportunities for black playwrights in the “real world.” White male domination comes through these sections like that beating drum on the slave galley in the film Ben-Hur.
The plot point in these sections propelling the story is Melina’s play of Emilia.
The play wins some kind of prize in a contest, but wires get crossed and the committee thinks Andre is the author, not Melina. There are several chances for her to correct this misapprehension, but she becomes tongue-tied, afraid of male domination, being accused of racism for denying a playwright of color his fame…you know the drill, etc., and is frankly too chicken to come out and ‘fess up. This plot point reads as weak on the page as it does here.
This is not written in comedic or farcical style. It’s dead serious, and just doesn’t connect.
The plot needs Woody. Melina seems an example that Emilia’s genes haven’t been passed on.
Andre reminds me of Gregory, a similar character in Picoult’s Wish You Were Here. Both characters are carbon copies of each other: sassy, black homosexual sidekicks who seem to be an obligatory part of contemporary New York fiction. A bitchy, wisecracking character who seems to be a person of what Hollywood called the Morgan Freeman role. It’s odd Picoult would, almost word for word, create such a similar character.
What I find more curious is Jasper Tolle, a critic who savages an early performance of Melina’s play and crushes her spirit. Jasper reappears over and over as her nemesis.
He causes her to freak out, but in the end Jasper becomes her guide and comfort, an obvious echo to the Shakespeare subplot in the other part of this novel. In the end, he converts to the genius of her play, and creates a theater that will happily produce plays “written only by women and nonbinary writers.”
I’m not convinced Melina overwhelms Jasper as Emilia does Shakespeare. It just doesn’t work on the page.
A treacly dose of PC becomes regnant in the latter part of Melina’s story. The word “patriarchy” is mentioned three times on two pages, and white domination reads over and over like dutiful agitprop. In a 449 page novel, I started to lose interest by page 350, where, as Miles Mathis notes on his website, one becomes drenched with men-as-pigs observations, as well as, on page 314, terms like George Floyd’s murder and body-shaming. Nor are these satirized.
It is noteworthy that the historical novel of Emilia is more real than the contemporary chapters of Melina, or perhaps Picoult’s verities depicting current NYC arts/academia is a dreary account of a cultural revolution that has seized power.
Picoult’s writing here recalls her Wish YouWere Here, with its equal dichotomy of the Galapagos islands and New York dealing with Covid. Her account of the Galapagos was warmer and more human than the exploits of her New York yuppie couple. The NYC world in both books is a place I’m not fond of, although it has better plumbing than Elizabethan England, so I’ll give it that.
There have been some who speculate Shakespeare couldn’t have written his plays. Critics from Mark Twain to George Bernard Shaw argue Shakespeare, with only a grammar school education, could not possibly have written the wide scope of experience, poetry, and character study depicted in his plays. Sir Francis Bacon was a favorite candidate. I first heard of this theory, not in the classroom, but from cartoons. In The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle there is an episode where Mr. Peabody, an erudite dog with a Clifton Webb voice, goes back in time to find Shakespeare at the premiere of his new play, Romeo and Zelda. Mr. Peabody suggests naming the second character Juliet might be an improvement, and before the show starts, Bacon whacks Shakespeare. “Bacon, you’ll fry for this,” threatens Shakespeare. Bacon claims Shakespeare’s plays are written by him. No. Shakespeare! Bacon! Shakespeare! Bacon!…so, I knew about this as a kid. An example how popular culture in 1959 was pretty high-brow by today’s standards.
As I wrote earlier, Edward De Vere is a more recent candidate. Emilia has joined the list. Picoult makes a case for Emilia, and it makes a good story. Emilia was a musician,
played at court and was certainly the right fly on the wall. She knew cultured people, and the connection with Hunsdon has been noted. She also visited Denmark, so was well-acquainted with the Danish court, a good framework for Hamlet.
In the book, Emilia takes over writing the play, and suggests the name Hamlet be substituted for Hamnet to conceal the grief Shakespeare feels for his lost son. Possible, but when Shakespeare was a boy, there was a girl in his native Stratford who killed herself by drowning in the Avon. Her name was Kate Hamnet.
Shakespeare, while not an educated university man, knew a lot about life to help him in the stage. His father had been an assemblyman. Shakespeare would have been familiar with courts and lawsuits, his father involved with both, and Shakespeare was no slouch at taking people to court. Distant revolts against the kingdom saw militia organized and drilled, in which his father was an officer. So, there was a lot of life Shakespeare saw. How could he have written 35 plays? Well, playwrights pumped out the demand for new material, and we only have a handful of extant plays by any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Lope De Vega, Spain’s great dramatist of this era, wrote five hundred plays.
The Globe theatre burned down in 1613, taking with it costumes, properties, and no doubt dozens of manuscripts. As a playwright, I delve into a lot of material, and have only stopped at a Bachelor’s degree. But to be a good writer, you have to observe, absorb, and mould reality. I’m sure Shakespeare did this, and Picoult, herself a playwright, understands the theatrical process and depicts it well, but again, stacks it all in Emilia’s favor.
In Picoult’s book, an entire stack of clues is offered to a cover-up. The portrait from the first folio has two left eyes, and two left shoulders. This symbolically implies Shakespeare is a false author, that Ben Jonson’s dedication, while praising Shakespeare is, in clandestine code, shouting he isn’t really the writer, because he has coded the phrases…well, this is Da Vinci Code territory, the realm of gnostics.
Picoult oversells her argument. In the novel Shakespeare is admitted to be a terrible writer. Emilia has to polish up all plays, and yes, she also wrote the sonnets. Of course! Odd, since some theories maintain Emilia was actually the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, beating out Mary Fitton, the usual suspect. Venus and Adonis? It offers a woman’s view of courtship, doesn’t it? I admire the story, research, and Picoult’s style, but as she stacks the deck, I start smiling. It recalls Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, where Salieri murders Mozart.
Miles Mathis speculated on Shakespeare not being the author of his works. In Shakespeare: Intel Project (October 3, 2017), Mathis believed the plays were not written by a single person, but a writing committee formed to collect, revise, and make the plays ready. Shakespeare was one of its chief overseers, but, lacking a university education, how could he…? Again the old argument, and Mathis also shoots down Christopher Marlowe as being part of the committee, claiming Marlowe was actually a fiction. De Veres certainly could have contributed, and as for Emilia? Mathis admits she was in the right place at the right time for certain plays, and certainly may have been consulted when a script needed a woman’s touch.
There is a possibility of this. Aside from the playwriting process, dealing with revisions and feedback, there was the historical precedent of translating what became the King James translation of the Bible, starting in 1604, done by a committee of fifty-four translators, passing on their work to other committees for scrutinization. It was done by university scholars, not all churchmen, for the Bible was, as Anthony Burgess noted, a work of literature as much as one of piety. Burgess posed that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson might have been on one of these committees, and Kipling, in Proofs of Holy Writ, depicted Shakespeare and Jonson revising a part of scripture passed on to them by a translator.
Yet I find Shakespeare’s plays have a definite voice and pattern. They progress from youthful exuberance to maturity, then comes a dark period of bitter, sour stories and dark, bleak tragedies, and, with the last four plays, the “romances,” there is a mellowing and reconciliation of characters. The last period recalls the fashion when the masque, with its emphasis on spectacle, music, and allegory, was a hit with the aristocracy and public. By the way, Mathis is less than pleased with Shakespeare being a great moral guide. He thinks the moral guidance of the aristocratic west has hardly been a great example.
As for any message Shakespeare has in his plays, I’m reminded of my old Shakespeare prof in college, who advised us there were only two real “messages” in Shakespeare: don’t kill the king and be nice to actors.
While I see points to Mathis’s theory, I’m reminded of Obama’s speech some years ago when he denounced factory owners by shouting “you didn’t build that,” implying a communal, not individual approach to creating goods and technology.
Picoult’s novel offers a sample of the communal and continual war against western culture and traditions. On page 226, Jasper’s defense of criticizing plays is attacked. Instead of making theater, he picks holes in the way other people make theater. How dare he? As, yes, a white man!
“Things that appeal to you might be different from subjects that appeal to someone Black [sic] or nonbinary or female, because you haven’t lived their lives. There aren’t many Black or nonbinary or female theater critics. They’re mostly white men.”
“Being a white man doesn’t mean I can’t recognize good work when I see it,” Jasper argued.
“No, but it does mean that if you don’t like something, you might not realize it wasn’t meant for you to like.”
This is Jasper’s Road to Damascus moment, when he becomes the champion of all of the above. It reads like more agitprop, and has an unhealthy whiff of being ideologically correct, where certain works are forbidden examination. At best, you are racist, guilty of being unaware of all these precious excluded groups, at worst…you’ll find an Antifa mob breaking down your door.
One review of the book noted how Jasper comes out as the most three-dimensional character in Melina’s parts of the novel.
This excerpt disturbed me, more so that it is from a novel published by the mainstream press, one, yes, on the New York Times bestseller list. Having spent a life in the theater writing, being criticized, criticizing…this is antithetical to everything I’ve done and been taught as a writer. Its pretensions of equality, racial justice and fighting colonialism in effect closes four centuries of critical inquiry dating from the Renaissance. Also note how Picoult capitalizes “Black,” but doesn’t “white.” All very P.C.
It reaffirms why columnist Fred Reed said he self-published: in New York publishing houses, the only author who stood an immediate chance of being published was Hillary Clinton. Well, we can include Jodi.
The idea of the book recalls how, in my youth, Shakespeare’s authorship was unquestioned, as was all of the canon of Western literature. To seriously say Shakespeare was not the author of his works was relegated to…cartoons.
I also find the overwhelming repetition of Emilia unable to write because she is a woman curious because there actually was a woman writer, the Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Phillip Sydney. She and he worked on Sydney’s Arcadia. To counter Emilia’s supposed repression, she actually did write a play, Marc Antoine, her translation of Garnier’s play about Mark Anthony. It was published as well. She entertained poets and playwrights. The family claimed they had an old letter where she writes her son of a party, adding “We have the man Shakespeare with us.” Yet Picoult is silent on this.
Certainly wealth and a title helped. In an essay on the difficulties of a woman Shakespeare coming forth, Virginia Woolf said a major barrier to such development was guineas and locks…that is, the need for money and privacy to write, but this is always the artist’s lot.
It’s no surprise that another claimant has come to sink Shakespeare, as it matches the general cultural and political decline of the west. To have our cultural icons watered down or dismissed is a current that’s been flowing over the dike for decades.
Genius has been attacked for a long time. In Picoult’s and other’s imaginings, Shakespeare is now seen as being no genius or heroic literary figure but more like a manager of the writer’s table; not unlike Monroe Stahr, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a Hollywood producer who admitted he hadn’t the talent of the actors, directors, et. al., but knew how best to use them. In essence, our cultural establishment has favored communalism for quite a while.
Nor is it a surprise that the major impetus for Shakespeare’s demise is in America and by our own people, no doubt many of them molded by people like Picoult, generously funded and well-accepted by the literary establishment as she continues to free the arts of…patriarchy. We’ve had barbarians and culture-sackers before, but never so well-funded and backed by the literary establishment…they do not lack for locks and guineas.
As I finished writing this, I went back to watch the 1996 masterpiece of Hamlet directed by Kevin Branaugh. It’s the complete play (four hours), a literary and cinematic delight, and the story, with its balance of suspense and human meditation between a corrupt kingdom in decline, and a foreign force ready to flow in and fill its death, made Picoult’s book and the sensations it brought while I wrote of it become very immediate. Emilia and Melina’s concerns of women’s repression and “male domination” seem very minor compared to the slow coming dark of the West. Along with the survival rations, firearms and gold, pack a volume of Shakespeare. You’ll need it.
24 comments
I’m gonna go with “no”. I eagerly await the coming attempts to tear down historical non-white figures. One of these centuries…
“No, but it does mean that if you don’t like something, you might not realize it wasn’t meant for you to like.”
Why can’t these people take their own advice?
Women, you see, when not held down have the genius of men or even more. And before we stole their genius, blacks were building pyramids. Why women and blacks cannot perform at these levels today is simply evidence of how far down they were pushed by those greedy white men…
The envy of the talentless knows no bounds. I expect in short order some enterprising and cosseted woman will be writing a novel about some mistress of Herman Melville’s who is overly capable of bringing to life on the page the harpooner. And how Melville greedily steals her manuscripts and claims credit. This is shlock, and it’s all so predictable and tiresome.
Virginia Woolf wrote a famous essay called Shakespeare’s Sister. In it she postulates that if said sister had gone to London from Stratford she would have been attacked and raped and so never hit the Big Time. The truth is if she had made the trip safely, she would have ended up a Scullery Maid. Which makes Woolf little more than a sob sister.
Likewise feminist Germaine Greer wrote a biography of Anne Hathaway in which she lacerates the Bard as an avatar of the White Patriarchy. It is all so very tiresome and typical.
A few months back Jason Kessler wrote an essay here at CC about how in the official Stratford Trust they are busily rooting out all rumors of Shakespeare as a great man, it all started with that Dead White Males movement in the 1980s, though I think that will soon be on its last legs.
Re: “The envy of the talentless”
I’ve thought about this on & off, over the years. I believe that nonwhites are envious of how seemingly easily Whites can succeed (due to natural talent + grit.) But for the White women who are un-partnered, & untalented, I think fear, not envy, is what shapes their attitudes & unprincipled behavior. They have a deep, gut level knowledge that they don’t have the talent or know-how to make it on their own, and their absolute only hope for survival requires them to lie, cheat, & steal to simply keep themselves alive.
Excellent essay Steven, you have a very witty and engaging style of writing.
You know that when a feminist takes up Shakespeare the Bard better watch his back.
The idea that Shakespeare did not write the plays is preposterous. But how did the commoner know all about the Court, etc? Well London was a small town (maybe a quarter million people) with an elite of, say, 5000. Shakespeare worked for the Queen and King and most certainly hobnobbed with the Aristocracy, they easily could have told him all he needed to know. What about the seemingly supernatural and encyclopedic knowledge? He was a voracious reader, we know this because scholars have shown that 90 percent of his quotes from books come from the beginning ten percent of those books. The picture it gives us is that the Bard would start a book, soon know that he had mastered it, then moved onto the next one. And whatever he may have lacked, nature supplied the rest.
The notion that Shakespeare had something to do with the KJV Bible is not so far-fetched, in Psalm 46 the 46th word from the top is shake and the 46th word from the bottom is spear, and the Bard was 46 years old when the project was completed. Perhaps he wrote some of it or maybe it was a tip of the hat from the Divines. Coincidence seems unlikely.
Great article! Joseph Atwill in his Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah, posits that Shakespeare is Emilia Bassano. 🙃
No criticism of the author here, who’s exploring this and reflecting on a book he’s read.
But when this topic comes up I shudder in a way I do a bit about QAnon, or Bridgette Macron, or holograms or mini-nukes or missiles and pods attached the planes on 9/11.
In those cases you have people in their basements reading into noise, reading into pixels and seeing what they want.
With the Shakespeare authorship topic you have people reading – not so much into noise, but into a void as they see it, into a lack on information, taking advantage of the gaps, and then inserting what they want into that void hundreds of years later.
There’s so many problems with this topic, any honest appraisal of this would instantly relegate this to the status of Q-Anon for the semi-literate. It’s not a legitimate intellectual endeavor and it’s a bewildering why it’s been somewhat tolerated academically. It’s the indignant march of the midwits. The midwits want to assert themselves on the world, show us their midwitism and this is what it looks like.
Now I guess it’s a human right to speculate about stuff. Privately you can speculate on anything you like. You can speculate on whether some pope was a false pope, whether Caesar really existed, whether some man in history was really a woman if you like, whether there’s missing time in history, or the pyramids were built by aliens, but it doesn’t make it a serious legitimate academic topic. It just means there’s 1) a human tendency to speculate and fantasize, 2) to rewrite history and people into a form that’s digestible for that person, or advances their political preferences.
To be a legitimate academic topic it has take everything into account, including why you’re looking at this at all and the all the circumstances these ideas are hinged on. This topic doesn’t do that. This is the search for the ‘secret code’, the secret message that 400 years later only the midwits can work out.
I agree with you whole heartedly, there is not a scintilla of doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays. I think the reason for the speculation is that the genius of these plays is so uncanny, almost unearthly, and the playwright seems to know everything, he has detailed information about every field extant at the time, and the poetry and prose is unassailable, the characters majestic. And for some reason they think no “uneducated” man could have done it. But they neglect that human nature at its maximum is an extraordinary thing and certainly was in the case of William Shakespeare.
“,.. there is not a scintilla of doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays”: The authorship question is not whether Shakespeare wrote the plays but who the man behind the published name “Shakespeare” was. And there are tons of doubts about the traditional story. Looking at it closer, is extremely unlikely that it was William Shaksper from Stratford who wrote the plays. Both the case against him and pro Edward de Vere is very strong. Give it a chance and start with the great book “Alias Shakespeare” by Joe Sobran, or this BBC documentary feat. Enoch Powell (who was Oxfordian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJi4t_m4OR0
Sobran I knew, but I did not know Powell was Oxfordian, that is very interesting. I will take a look, thank you for the link.
Well one thing I notice immediately with advocates of this kind of claim (kind of claim:hint) is they feel a need to persuade. They want to point you to some book or a purely fictional film. It’s a bad sign. It’s not a question of persuasion, it’s a question of plain facts.
So here’s much a better plan. Just drop your evidence instead.
The evidence should obviously speak for itself about de Vere it’s so compelling. Sorry my mistake, Bacon. Sorry Marlowe. Sorry I meant North. Sorry I meant the plucky lesbian slave of Queen Elizabeth who had to hide her power level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship
Anyone honest will instantly tell you what’s actually there, and it’s exactly zero. Even the zero is full of mistakes and misunderstandings and religious thinking and secret code unraveling so it’s actually a negative number. For some reason, people are too nice to tell them straight. They are too nice to tell them they are looking at the tea leaves and manufacturing the shapes they want in their mind. Too nice to tell them Mr Spock isn’t really sending them secret messages through the TV.
What probably started as bit of jealousy and class snobbery, as dusty crusty educated people become exposed to Shakespeare again, and Shakespeare now being celebrated, today reads as a religious or identity movement or private club locked onto the subject’s prestige and mystique, that in large part uses that to fantasize, to generate internal self-esteem off the back of it. But there was no way of predicting what Shakespeare would become 230 or 400 years afterwards. There’s a profoundly ahistorical component to this.
And if someone says something is ‘impossible’ treat it as another bad sign. Apply to any subject you want.
Another thing they do is point to others who expressed this view as if it’s supposed to make the underlying claim more impressive.
They didn’t like it on Unz because I would not accept a comment Joan Rivers made as evidence that Michelle Obama is a man or that it added some weight to the case.
They had already glued themselves to this idea that latter noise = claim true. Makes no difference what Powell thought. What Sobran said. It has as much bearing on the truth as Joan Rivers did on Obama. Perhaps less, because some of those people are indeed reaching into fantasy and codes, again we are getting into negative numbers.
Another comment on a similar line I remember here. I think (from memory) a commenter said ‘Lemnitzer said nuclear weapons couldn’t exist, therefore…’. That’s nothing to do with whether nuclear weapons exist. Has no bearing on the matter.
All you can say is people, including people who should know better, sometimes public figures, occasionally otherwise smart people, are far from immune in acquiring an incorrect idea about something, or express a thought on it or become infected with a fictitious line of inquiry and kid themselves they have it right.
It mostly starts today through this persuasion contagion. You can collect the names of those people and recite them later, but it doesn’t tell you anything.
And when people use words like ‘scholarship’ or ‘research’ …online this invariably means worthless crank stuff, no facts, lurid claims. These have become code words for basement conspiracy theories or intellectually bankrupt advocacy. Crackpots living in their own headspace broadcasting strictly on the idiot frequency.
Still, no one can 10000000000000000% tell you Shakespeare wasn’t someone else, just as they can’t 10000000000000000% tell you da Vinci never met aliens and there’s messages about it hidden in the Mona Lisa, but I can you tell you with 10000000000000000% certainty how they are getting there and why is not a serious or honest intellectual or academic pursuit and should be identified as that first and foremost. If some people want to have a private club where they believe Mr Spock is ‘transmitting secret messages’ to them through the TV, fine, we can’t stop them, but it’s nothing to do with facts.
“As I finished writing this, I went back to watch the 1996 masterpiece of Hamlet directed by Kevin Branaugh.”
Another excellent movie version of Shakespeare is the 1989 Henry V. Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in that one as well. I recommend it highly. His delivery of the St. Crispin’s Day speech brought a lump to my throat.
A recent theory posits that the author of Shakespeare’s play is Sir Thomas North, the translator of Plutarch into English, inter alia. Ron Unz suggests a variant where North wrote the plays, De Vere wrote the sonnets, and Shakespeare produced the plays.
The film Anonymous (2011) did not plug so much as dramatise Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as the true author of the Shake-speare canon. This script, a real departure and likely a labour of love for the director, relied on a century of revisionist scholarship (called Oxfordian), some of whose modern proponents took part in the production. All in all it was a fair condensation of the theory; the provincial Shaksper is played as an ‘idiotic snake’ for dramatic purposes, and to remind us that this revisioning is indeed a suggestion that the magic name (which to this day has some of your commenters firmly in its spell) was simply a nom de plume — pseudonyms being as least as common then as now. The film is no hatchet job. It does however unfortunately present the most deep dark form of the theory (known as Prince Tudor II) and this may serve to repel the curious as well as the spellbound, convincing them that after all ‘there is nothing to see here — move on.’
Ernest: thank you for the insightful comment. I thought Anonymous was a tremendous film, they got the premise wrong, but they put so much of the time period into the movie, all the plots and subplots, it was delightful to watch.
As for Shakespeare being a “magic name” and casting spells, poet Ted Hughes thought that his works constituted a kind of self-replicating cybernetic field which was at the vortex of all World Literature. He posited this theory in Shakespeare And The Goddess Of Complete Being.
The Ted Hughes quote is nice — the Shake-speare Canon is certainly ‘at the vortex’ of all English, though perhaps not World literature (having had no perceptible effect upon, say, the Chinese despite the excellent translations of 朱 Zhu Shenghao 生豪 (1912-44)).
However in saying it is a ‘magic name’ I mean the nom de plume itself, not the oeuvre. Its utterance makes people, even those who have only seen a silver screen version of a few of the plays, feel cultured. It is the personality cult of Genius. When they hear you say that the obscure middle class fellow from the West Midlands cannot reasonably have known the workings of Nobility, the Law and Finance, shipping and sailing, astronomy and falconry, Greek and Latin, and have taken the Grand Tour and come to know Italy intimately, they are perplexed; they even get angry. They need him to be the Author though they will not look at him as we must and normally do look at any real historical author. How dare you say, you fiend, that Mark Twain did not write the books which we call Mark Twain?
Twain was another one who thought Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, writing a piece called Is Shakespeare Dead?—showing that the delusion dies hard.
Is that what his piece (1909) shows ?
In any case, the point is that Twain was not Twain.
If I remember correctly it was even the “extended” Prince-Tudor-theory, claiming that de Vere himself was a son of Elisabeth. That’s quite a bit of a stretch, and it was very unnecessary to put this in the movie. But I do think the Tudor throne succession story would have made an exciting plot if it hadn’t been just attached at the end. For my part, Hank Whittemore convinced me that Wriothesley is the key to the sonnets.
Yes, Whittemore is excellent. But it is the rather the relationship of Wriothesley to DeVere, i.e. of the last of Cecil’s Royal Wards to the first of them, which is the key to the Sonnets.
Whittemore terms the “extended” Prince Tudor theory Prince Tudor II — see my first comment above. As you say it was an unnecessary element of the film Anonymous; but it may be worse than that — it may be that writer Orloff and/or director Emmerich wanted to scotch, if not kill, the Oxfordian snake, in the way Alex Jones harms the Truth movement with his “Turning the Freaking Frogs Gay” sensationalism.
According to *St Trinian’s 2 : The Legend of Fritton’s Gold*, which is a historical document as meant in *Galaxy Quest*, the Bard was a woman indeed.
French humorist Alphonse Allais is supposed to have stated that “Shakespeare n’a jamais existé. Toutes ses pièces ont été écrites par un inconnu qui portait le même nom que lui.” (There was absolutely no Shakespeare. All the plays attributed to him have been written by some other unknown man whose name was also Shakespeare.)
Nice material for literary fiction, but obviously Edward de Vere was the man behind the Shake-Speare pen name. Start with Joe Sobran’s great book.
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