Seventy-seven Shakespeares

At present, there are no plans to run a review of Roland Emmerich's new film Anonymous in the TLS. Careful analysis of its constituent parts – chiefly, the premiss that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays, but farmed them out to a conveniently ingenious yet secretive aristocrat (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, played in the film by Rhys Ifans) – suggests that there might be better things to do with the paper's arts pages than reviewing Anonymous.

Sorry about that. But . . .

if the idea underlying the film really interests you, and you're a TLS subscriber, you could do worse than searching the online archives for, say, Alan H. Nelson's entertaining review of a book by trained astronomer about Oxford ("a poet of no more than modest talent") being the real Shakespeare. Published a few years ago, the book happens to being with a foreword by one of the actors in Anonymous, Sir Derek Jacobi:

"Jacobi, biting the hand that feeds him, recommends [this book] on the grounds that the Shakespeare plays were written by an actor, and that Oxford was an actor. Perhaps he had in mind a different book, for Anderson makes neither claim. . . ."

Or you could try Charles Nicholl's more recent piece on Contested Will by James Shapiro, a scholar who is interested not so much in "what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why they think it”. This would seem to be the interesting part of the anti-Shakespearean delusion, if indeed there is one: it's a direct consequence of the deification of Shakespeare.

Anti-Shakespeareans tend to believe, in Nelson's words, that "an author’s life is reflected in his works" absolutely. Shakespeare wrote a play about a prince; he must therefore have been a prince. He wrote a play about a Scottish murderer. He must therefore have been a Scottish murderer. He knew a bit about life at the Elizabethan court and history and – stuff. Well, he must therefore . . . etc.

They are not alone in taking things literally, of course, as Shapiro argues; but they have proved to be curiously imaginative over the years in attempting to deny that the author of A Midsummer Night's Dream had, of all things, an imagination. And as Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells point out in Shakespeare Bites Back, a polemical essay published online for free (you can also hear more about the subject over here) to coincide with the general relase of Anonymous, literalism leads its adherents into a predicament: they can't all be right.

There is the Earl of Oxford (who died in 1604, most inconveniently for the plays he then continued to write, well into the following decade). But then there are therefore a further seventy-six individuals who, over the past century-and-a-half, have suffered nomination as the "real" author of Shakespeare's plays. Are they all Shakespeares now? 

Seldom did these candidates have anything to do with the theatre (except for Christopher Marlowe, but then he went to university, which makes him fair game). But they do tend to be awfully well connected. It's the literary-biographical equivalent of the syndrome whereby a child becomes convinced that her real parents are royalty or millionaires.

Understandably, many Shakespeare scholars seem to prefer to stay as far away from this non-debate as possible. Edmondson and Wells argue, however, that because Anonymous "humourlessly" presents itself as history, as a dramatization of the truth, something needs to be said against it. Others will see in it "an amusing and mischieveous Blackadder-style romp". But Rhys Ifans can be awfully convincing, you know. Stephen Marche, writing in the New York Times, predicts that, after Anonymous, "undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious". Let's hope that he underestimates undergraduates' capacity for scepticism.

Not coincidentally, Shakespeare Bites Back names and shames the world's most notorious piece of anti-Shakespearean punctuation: the question mark after "1593" in the window that commemorates Marlowe in Westminster Abbey: this is as much to suggest that he didn't die in that year, as the coroner seemed to think, but survived being stabbed in the eye in order to write, well, such un-Marlovian works as The Merry Wives of Windsor and All's Well That Ends Well. Edmondson and Wells call on the Dean to get rid of the question mark (somehow).

Roland Emmerich, meanwhile, ought to be thinking of a sequel. Anyone for Anonymous 2: The mighty line? One "Shakespeare" film down, seventy-six more to go . . . .

Comments

[Murray Martin]

If this logic continues, then 400 years from now, people will insist that Buzz Aldrin wrote Star Wars, because how could George Lucas have possibly known so much about space, if he'd never been there?

[Clayton Burns]

Michael,

[And as Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells point out in Shakespeare Bites Back... literalism leads its adherents into a predicament: they can't all be right.]

Edmondson and Wells are right, but all too literally right. They are suffering from the same literalism they refute. Who would bother?

There are profound issues with Shakespeare afoot. One of the most marvelous texts for teaching the sound system(s) of English is "Macbeth," yet critical editions go right past that. We should have a genuine ESL /regular "Macbeth" in which experts in phonetics and phonology would detail their perceptions.

We need a limited database of literature, to include "Macbeth," a dozen of the sonnets, 12 lyrics by Dickinson, and a half dozen by Keats and Blake, so as to be the foundation of sound system teaching in Linguistics classes and in international English. So as to obliterate IELTS and all these silly snapshot English tests.

The Arden "Hamlet," Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" would be excellent advanced targets in a graduated curriculum for high school students. We can't see where Shakespeare fits in because we have no such global curriculum.

One of the notable failures in Shakespeare teaching is the incomprehension about recursive Shakespeare. Each year, students should take up a major Shakespeare play, but also engage in intensive review of the previous ones. "Macbeth" in grade 7, "Othello" in grade 8, with meticulous revision of "Macbeth."

Wells and Edmondson are wasting our time. We do not need to be told the obvious.

[David Hazell]

People are often error prone at a literary level. If prizes were to be awarded, the Ilkley Illiterature Festival's resounding clanger, has competetive resonance.
http://www.voiceofthevalleys.net/pennine-watershed.html

[Andrew McCulloch]

Yes, of course attempts to attach someone else's biography to the plays of - let us agree to call him - Shakespeare are completely beside the point. But before we are all trampled in the stampede for the high ground we might do well to consider the equally persistent and often prejudiced attempts to establish an authentic likeness of Shakespeare, and the unsettling fact that even if he is who we thought he might not look like we imagined. Attempts to fashion Shakespeare's life into something with which we are comfortable are not very different from attempts to fashion his appearance into something we can square with his work, attempts which, as the 2006 National Portrait Gallery exhibition 'Searching for Shakespeare' showed, have been going on for 400 years.

The 'Chandos' portrait, for example, appears to have been regarded as authentic within living memory of the playwright but this did not prevent the nineteenth century critic J. Hain Friswell objecting that 'one cannot readily imagine our essentially English Shakespeare to have been a dark, heavy man with a foreign expression'; the 'Grafton' portrait (1588), on the other hand, had many twentieth century champions precisely because of the angelic looks of the sitter which 'fuelled interest in romantic notions of Shakespeare's youth prior to his life as an established playwright'; the 'Janssen' portrait (c.1610), which emerged in the late eighteenth century, turned out to be an attempt to make someone else (Sir Thomas Overbury?) look like the Shakespeare of the Droeshout engraving by painting out his hair to create an impression of 'the refined poet rather than the player or the provincial burgher' while the 'Soest' portrait (1667), another adaptation, this time of the 'Chandos' portrait (minus the bohemian earrings), was part of the Restoration reconstruction of Shakespeare into something the age of Dryden could find more palatable - 'an introspective man of fine manners and sensitive disposition'. Plus ca change...