2,560: Contested Will by James Shapiro

Thanks to James Shapiro’s Contested Will, I am more than a little relieved to announce that normal service has now been resumed in my mind.  After reading John Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare?, I went through a phase of Marlovianism, believing (or, at least, finding it amusing to believe) that Christopher Marlowe, despite his murder in 1593, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays.  Now, fortunately, I’ve been pulled back from the distant shores of literary lunacy.

James Shapiro is a bona fide “Shakespeare Expert”, being a professor at Columbia University.  In Contested Will, he addresses the fascinating, if tendentious, subject of the Authorship Question.  The usual form for an author in  this field is, firstly, to dismiss the man from Stratford as the echt Shakespeare before trumpeting the qualifications of the author’s preferred candidate and creating some kind of conspiracy theory or circular argument to deal with any inconvenient problems with their pet theory.

The arguments against the man from Stratford tend to revolve around some or all of the following: there was little hagiography or commemoration of him in the immediate aftermath of his death; the author of the plays showed intimate knowledge of, inter alia, the law, Italy, France, falconry, sailing, military matters, which militates against the small-time business man and actor from Stratford; the “real” Shakespeare had an encyclopaedic knowledge of classics, whereas the man from Stratford was poorly educated; the absence of the man from Stratford’s own writing suggests that he may even have been illiterate; and, finally, the author Shakespeare was a man of lofty thoughts and morals, whereas the man from Stratford was a litigious and money-grabbing small time trader.

Having shown to their own satisfaction that the man from Stratford could not have written the works attributed to Shakespeare, the usual next step is to pick a candidate who seems to fit the bill better.  This is often done by imputing some autobiographical nature to the plays and then by twisting some facts to fit the case.  Finally, a more or less plausible story needs to be concocted to explain why the favoured candidate needed to publish under the name of Shakespeare rather than in his or her own name.  It’s even better if a secret code or some wordplay on the candidate’s name can be dredged up.  The poster boys for this technique are Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford.  Both these have been touted as lost sons of Queen Elizabeth and, in the latter case, variations of  de Vere, the Oxfordian family name, have been found in the text of the plays – hardly surprising given the number of uses of words such as “ever” and “never”!

Shapiro takes a different approach to the question.  Instead of jumping into the plays and sonnets, he looks at the question through the prism of the lives and times of several of the more prominent anti-Stratfordians to show how they have affected the viewpoints of those writers.

Having refuted the very early claims against Shakespeare’s authorship, Shapiro shows how the influence of the emergence in the early 19^th Century of the “Higher Criticism” theory, which used historical methods to examine authorship issues in texts, and its application to the Bible led inexorably to the questioning of the authorship of Shakespeare.  He then traces the history of the claims for Bacon and Oxford through the stories of their leading partisans before ably demonstrating why the criticisms of the man of Stratford as Shakespeare are misplaced.

Unlike many of Shapiro’s Shakespearean colleagues, he treats the authorship issue in a serious fashion, an approach which lends his conclusions even more force.  Shapiro’s views are largely centred around his knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean history and theatrecraft.  In particular, the arguments for the alternative Shakespeares depend upon the plays and sonnets being written from an autobiographical standpoint, a style of writing that Shapiro successfully argues was simply not common in Shakespeare’s time.  Shapiro does not deny that some of Shakespeare’s experiences and views would have come through but the extent of autobiography needed to support the alternatives goes way beyond this.

There is a huge amount of research and knowledge in this book and Shapiro writes in an entertainingly trenchant fashion, whilst dismissing the anti-Stratfordian arguments. His book is a great contribution to the debate and deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in the issue.  It has certainly changed my belief, not just by his examination of the evidence and his contextualisation of the times in which Shakespeare lived but also by his core belief, which he summarises thus:

“We can believe that Shakespeare himself thought that poets could give to ‘airy nothing’ a ‘local habitation and a name’. Or we can conclude that this ‘airy nothing’ turns out to be a disguised something that needs to be decoded, and that Shakespeare couldn’t imagine ‘the form of things unknown’ without having experienced them firsthand.  It is a stark and consequential choice.”

Denying the man of Stratford as Shakespeare is essentially to deny the power of imagination and creativity and to accept that one can only write about what one has experienced.  I don’t buy into that.

2,562: Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal

I very nearly didn’t read this book.  Having unwrapped it from its Amazon packaging, I casually gave the back cover a glance, just to see what the blurbs said and saw this quote from BBC Radio 5:

“the Jamie Oliver of Shakespeare.”

It was fortunate that there wasn’t a wastepaper bin within easy throwing range or you may very well have been reading something else on this page today.  It’s not that I have anything in particular against the aforesaid Saint Jamie of Oliver.  I appreciate that he is very well-meaning and has been prepared to put his money where his mouth is when it comes to his causes.  I’m even happy to say that he has done a great deal to improve the diets of British schoolchildren (often against their will!) and to encourage proper home cooking, something that can only be applauded in our age of ready meals and fast food.  It’s just that the cheeky chappy manner and the toe-curling catchphrases make me want to kick a hole in the TV screen.  I swear to God that if I hear the words, “pukka” or “delish” one more time, I may swallow my own tongue in disgust.

You see, Jamie Oliver is actually a very smart guy.  He runs successful restaurants, is a brand in himself and has been a mainstay of UK television for over a decade.  He’s nobody’s fool.  Yet, he insists on acting like a teenager.  A pretty decent teenager, I will admit, and not one of your feral hoodied yobbo teenagers but, nevertheless, a teenager.  I also feel uncomfortable when I see him being all matey and concerned on TV with people who will never even have a tiny fraction of his estimated £106 million fortune.  I don’t begrudge him a single penny of it – I just find the mateyness a bit false.

Anyway, as I said, there wasn’t a wastepaper bin to hand and so I decided to read Shakespeare on Toast rather than consigning it to the recycling.  And I’m so glad I did.

Ben Crystal is an actor and also the son of David Crystal, a renowned British linguist, who has also written about Shakespeare’s language.  As well as acting, Crystal has carved out a career in running workshops and broadcasting about Shakespeare, with the intention of demystifying him and making him more accessible to modern audiences and in Shakespeare on Toast, he attempts to do so in print.

Crystal believes that the key to understanding Shakespeare’s plays lies in an understanding of their context.  He sees the plays as, essentially, manuals, telling Elizabethan actors how to perform their parts.  If we have a small amount of background knowledge of the Elizabethan theatre and how plays were published and performed and we keep this in the back of our minds, all should become clear.

Shakespeare on Toast, therefore, gives us a quick tour of life for an Elizabethan dramatist, actor and theatre-goer to set the backdrop to Shakespeare’s plays.  It then proceeds to discuss Shakespeare’s language in an attempt to dispel the common notion that it is “difficult” for a 21^st Century reader to understand.  Crystal does this very successfully, pointing out, for example, that 95% of the words used in Shakespeare’s plays are exactly the same as they are today.  He also reveals how an understanding of the use of “thou” and “you” can increase one’s appreciation of the plays.

Having dealt with Shakespeare’s language, Crystal then explains Shakespeare’s use of verse, setting out Shakespeare’s hierarchy, wherein prose sits at the bottom, tending to be used for prosaic and unemotional speech, topped by blank verse, then rhyming verse, sonnet and, finally, song.  Having explained with this, there is an extensive consideration of Shakespeare’s use of the iambic pentameter, why it is so wonderful, how Shakespeare riffs on the form like Miles Davis and, finally, how Shakespeare, known for the lack of stage directions in his plays, gives his instructions to his actors through the structure of the verse itself.

This discussion of the iambic pentameter was the real eye-opener for me.  When I was doing my Latin O-level, many, many years ago, one part of the exam paper always asked you to scan a few lines of Latin verse, to mark in the stresses and caesuras and to identify whether it was iambic pentameter or hexameter.  It is actually possible to do this with no understanding of verse or verse structure at all, provided you followed a few simple rules.  As such, the question became an exercise in deduction rather than language or literature.  Crystal’s discussion of Shakespeare’s verse has transformed my understanding of this and I can now see exactly what I should have been seeing all those years ago.

The final part of Shakespeare on Toast has Crystal putting everything together in a fascinating analysis of one of the key speeches in Macbeth.  It’s a real tour de force.

Crystal has the knack of explaining seemingly difficult concepts in a simple and entertaining manner.  He is also clever enough to slip in plenty of Shakespeare trivia among the analysis and explanation to keep things nice and light.

I think this book is wonderful.  I have learned plenty from it and I suspect anyone other than an English literature academic would do the same.  If, in the years to come, mini-Falaise is struggling with Shakespeare, I will simply reach for the shelves and hand her this book.  I reckon it should be compulsory reading for all teenagers studying Shakespeare and so, for that, Saint Jamie of the Bard gets my vote.

The Books of my Life III

This particular instalment of my irregular series of posts on books that bear special memories for me is a bit of a cheat.  A stretching of definitions to breaking point, if you will.  I’m not actually writing about a book, you see.  I’m writing about a play and not even the script or a stage performance.  I’m writing about a film of a play.

To really get a sense of the time and the place of this one, you have to imagine yourself back in the early 1980s.  It was the time of Duran Duran, the Eurythmics and Culture Club, the era of Magnum, Dallas and the A-Team.  If you were around then, you were probably wearing ripped sweatshirts, shoulder pads or even the dreaded stretch pinstripe jeans.  I say “you” were probably wearing these as I was stuck in a small, country boarding school wearing a tweed jacket and a shirt and tie six days of the week.

And in the midst of the light and frothy pop culture that had emerged from the gloom and doom of the recessionary ‘70s, our English teacher, let’s call him Mr Chicken (as he had a twitch reminiscent of a chicken pecking at the ground as well as a faint whiff of fried chicken about him), had just about recovered from introducing our class of 14-year olds to Shakespeare through a reading of Twelfth Night.

To be honest, it hadn’t gone all that well, although even now, having never read it again since that time, I can still recite the first few lines. In any case, it had proved not to be the kind of fare that was going to get our class of teenage boys hooked on Shakespeare.

Mr Chicken was a pretty good teacher and a supportive and kindly man.  He loved literature and obviously wanted us to appreciate Shakespeare at least a little and preferably enough to get us decent grades in our English Literature O-level.

So, one morning we trooped in to our English classroom to see that a TV and video had been set up.  It was not unheard of to get to watch a TV programme of film in class, although it was pretty rare and usually seen as a chance to have a snooze.  As such, it was a happy form of boys that settled into their chairs.

The classroom lights were turned off and the TV turned on.  We saw a beach and witches digging a hole in the sand and burying a man’s arm.  Soon after, we got a scene in which a naked young witch beckons a man into a hovel in which there are a whole host of naked witches.

It was, of course, Polanski’s version of Macbeth.  From this provocative start, we got huges slabs of the macabre, of gore and, yes, THAT scene.  Lady Macbeth’s naked sleepwalking scene.  From the first few minutes, we were hooked.  Let’s face it, nudity, violence and mayhem – exactly what you want to put in a film to grab the attention of the average teenage boy.

It was Mr Chicken’s master-stroke.  Over the next few weeks, we finished watching the film and then read the play in class.  We didn’t just read it, discuss it and enjoy it, we got it.  Shakespeare would never be the same again.

I’ve not come across a performance or film of a Shakespeare play that has had the same lasting impact as Macbeth, although seeing Ian McKellen in Richard III at the National Theatre came close and, after all this time and having read many more of the plays, Macbeth is still my favourite.  I have absolutely no idea whether I would have got into Shakespeare after the failed Twelfth Night experiment if the next attempt had been Othello, Romeo and Juliet or one of the histories.  Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about that, thanks to Mr Chicken’s brainwave.

2,563: The Shakespeare Curse by JL Carrell

As you will know, if you read my post on JL Carrell’s first Shakespearean novel, I wasn’t overly impressed.  Nevertheless, I’ve recently been in the mood for easy, throwaway reads and so I downloaded the sequel, The Shakespeare Curse, onto my Kindle.  And you know what?  It wasn’t bad at all.

The novel centres around Macbeth, which gave it added appeal to me because Macbeth is my favourite Shakespeare play.  Carrell’s heroine from her previous book, the Shakespearean director, Kate Stanley, makes a return appearance when she is asked by Athenaide Preston, another returning character, to pay a visit to Lady Nairn, a glamorous Scottish aristocrat.

Lady Nairn, it transpires, was a famous actress before her marriage and her family home is, in fact, the very same Dunsinane Castle that housed the Macbeths.  She and her late husband, Sir Angus, had amassed a collection of artefacts relating to Macbeth and, following his recent death, Lady Nairn wants Kate to direct a memorial performance of Macbeth.

Soon, the cast and crew of the play are gathered at Dunsinane, where a series of strange events occur, which Lady Nairn believes are somehow linked to her belief that Shakespeare wrote an earlier version of Macbeth than the one in the First Folio, a version that included a genuine black magic ritual.

Murder and mayhem ensues and, as in Carrell’s previous novel, the bodies start piling up and Stanley is once again propelled into a search for a lost Shakespeare manuscript.  Carrell stirs in liberal quantities of Wicca, Dr John Dee, Shakespearean trivia, occult themes and, makes good use of the alleged curse of Macbeth and Shakespeare’s lost years.

As with The Shakespeare Secret, the reader is expected to undertake a huge suspension of belief, helped only by the pacing of the book and Carrell’s characterisation is still as wooden as the Birnam oak itself.  Carrell also makes use of a number of the plot devices of her earlier novel, including the “good” character who turns out to be “evil”.  This particular device may explain some of the poor characterisation as Carrell needs to avoid making the twist either too obvious or too implausible.  There is also an unnecessary sub-plot involving her companion and sometime lover from The Shakespeare Secret, Ben Pearl, which crosses the line from pointless to annoying when his new lover is found murdered and he seems to recover from it in five minutes flat, showing virtually no grief or sadness at her death.  This was jarring in and threatened to break my ability to cope with the general implausibility of the plot.

Nevertheless, contrary to a number of other reviewers, I found The Shakespeare Curse to be a improvement on The Shakespeare Secret.  Firstly, Carrell has resisted the temptation to overegg her pudding with too much Shakespeariana, which means the plot is less cluttered.  She has also managed to suppress her pedagogical instinct and there is less exposition than in the earlier book.  I suspect that some readers may find the occult theme and, especially, the suggestion that Shakespeare had undergone a black magic ritual that gave him his talent, just a little too much too swallow.  If you come to it with the presumption that it is a fun novel and not to be taken seriously, however, you hopefully won’t have this problem.

I believe that JL Carrell is currently working on a new novel, historical this time and not featuring Kate Stanley, Ben Pearl or William Shakespeare.  While I wish her luck with that, I do hope that she returns to the Shakespearean theme before too long as, despite their flaws, her novels have been good fun to read.

2,564: The Shakespeare Secret by J.L. Carrell

You would have thought that some great novels could be written with Shakespearean themes.  The mysteries surrounding his identity, the rumours and suggestions of missing plays, the dark lady of the sonnets, there’s so much potential source material out there.  Almost any half-decent author should be able to hit a home run with this kind of stuff.  And yet, somehow, JL Carrell swung and missed with The Shakespeare Secret (also known as Interred with their Bones in the USA).

It’s a real shame.  Carrell is a genuine Shakespeare expert, having taught History and Literature at Harvard and being the owner of English degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford.  Her area of research was the influence of Shakespeare in the American West which, unsurprisingly features strongly in The Shakespeare Secret.  It’s quite apparent from the book that she knows her Shakespearean onions.  Unfortunately, she wants to share all of them with us.  Consequently, the story becomes a bit of a mess, trying to knit together elements of the authorship question, a search for the manuscript of Cardenio, a missing Shakespeare play, the identity of the protagonists of the sonnets and Shakespeare in the West.  I can’t help feeling that Carrell is trying a little too hard and that she could probably have got a couple more novels out of the material if she had been more judicious with it.

Carrell’s heroine is one Kate Stanley, a former academic turned theatre director.  A few days before her Globe production of Hamlet is due to open, rehearsals are interrupted by a surprise visit from her erstwhile mentor, Roz Howard.  Soon, Professor Howard is dead, the Globe is torched and Kate is on the run from the police, accompanied by an enigmatic former SAS officer and in possession of a mysterious gift from Roz.  From there, we are taken on a breathless hunt from London to Cambridge, Massachussetts, where there is another arson attack, this time on Harvard’s Widener Library.  The trail then skips backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, climaxing in the Arizona hills.

If you have read any of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon novels, you will be familiar with Carrell’s style.  There are lots of clues to be solved, plenty of chases and her main novelistic technique appears to be to use plenty of pace and attack to distract the reader’s attention from the holes in the plot, the totally implausible coincidences that litter the book and the cardboard characterisation.  Every character in the story appears to speak in the same kind of voice and, just like Dan Brown’s characters, they can’t seem to be able to resist giving potted lectures to help the story along in a way that no real person would ever do.

I have one other minor quibble.  Carrell, despite having studied in England, makes some fundamental mistakes in her treatment of scenes set in England or with English characters, including an incorrect English street name and a comment on the likelihood of being a victim of crime in London that would have been anachronistic in 1950s London, let alone the London of the 2000s.  I appreciate these are minor criticisms but they did have a negative impact on my enjoyment of the book.  It wouldn’t have taken much research to get this right.

It’s not all bad, though.  The story moves quickly and there are some interesting Shakespearean titbits.  It’s a harmless, sub-Dan Brown page turner which whiled away a few hours and would be moderately amusing for any Shakespeare fan with a taste for detective stories.  Literature this ain’t, let alone the Great Shakespeare Novel but I’ve bought the sequel anyway. 

2,565: Who Wrote Shakespeare by John Michell

Well, it’s obvious really, isn’t it?  Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, didn’t he?  Only, it may not be quite that simple.  You see, possibly, maybe even probably, the man we know as Shakespeare isn’t the man we know as Shakespeare.  Confused?  Concerned about my sanity?  Well, read on MacDuff!

The Authorship Question is the “deranged relative bricked up in the tower” of Shakespeare studies.  It is the issue that the vast majority of Shakespearian academics would like quietly to vanish, never to be heard of again.  Certainly, the town of Stratford upon Avon, currently the sixth most popular place to visit in the UK, would like it to go away as, if the William Shakespeare of Stratford is not the William Shakespeare of Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, then Stratford is just another Midlands town.

But, for those of us who have neither a professional, economic or personal tie to the man of Stratford, the Authorship Question is a hell of a lot of fun.  It has everything a good mystery could hope for – conspiracies, spies, murder, aristocratic intrigue and, best of all, there appears to be no way of proving anyone’s theory to be true or false.

John Michell’s book, unlike most others in the field, does not seek to promote any of the rival candidates or to defend orthodoxy but acts as an overview of the claims for most of the leading candidates.  It’s an excellent introduction to the question and, written in a sardonic manner is, with one caveat that I will deal with later, a lively read.

In order for their even to be an Authorship Question, there first has to be doubt as to the provenance of William Shakespeare as the author of the plays and sonnets.  Unfortunately, for the Stratfordians (as the supporters of orthodoxy are known), this is rather easy to show.  Indeed, there is remarkably little positive evidence of him as the author beyond Ben Jonson’s introduction to the First Folio in 1623, a few faked-up buildings in and around Stratford and the fact that his name is on the front of the plays.  William Shakspeare (the man is referred to as Shakspeare and the author as Shakespeare in Authorship Studies).  There are huge gaps in Shakspeare’s personal history and what there is of it suggests a country boy with limited education who grows up to be a small time businessman and property dealer who becomes an actor, gets involved in some rather dodgy enterprises, makes his money and retires to the life of a rural gentleman.

And this is the starting point for the anti-Stratfordians.  They point out that there is virtually no connection between the type of man Shakspeare was and the kind of author Shakespeare was.  According to various experts, Shakespeare must have been, amongst other things, of noble birth, a trained lawyer, familiar with France, Italy and Denmark, a soldier, a botanist, a highly-educated individual with a detailed knowledge of Greek and Roman classics and, in short, someone very different to Shakspeare.

The anti-Stratfordians also point out another uncomfortable fact.  There are very few references to Shakspeare by his theatrical and literary contemporaries.  How can this be the case for someone of his renown which was great even in his own time?  Indeed, other than the Jonson encomium, those references that do exist suggest that Shakspeare was more of a copyist, plagiarist or manuscript thief than the greatest playwright of his age.

There is much more to the argument, as Michell relates, but this is enough to give a flavour of the doubt that may be cast on the authorship of Shakspeare.  The next step for the anti-Stratfordians is to come up with an alternative candidate and here the fun really starts.  In no particular order and without being exhaustive, claimants for Shakespeare’s crown include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earls of Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Essex and Southampton, the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Walter Ralegh, Cardinal Wolseley and Queen Elizabeth I herself.  While you get your breath back from the laughing fit this will have caused you, I would say that, in addition to more serious writers, contributors to this field have included a man called Looney and a woman who actually did go mad.

I am not going to rehearse the arguments for any of these candidates in particular – you should go and read the book but, suffice it to say, there is plenty to be said for many of them.  This is, of course, where the problem lies.  It is possible to read almost anything into the text of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.  The champions of various candidates make opposing claims about the nature of Shakespearian characters such as hamlet, who is claimed to resemble at least three of the major candidates.  Writers on the topic, especially the Baconians, tend to be fascinated by cryptography and word play and create all sorts of fantastical claims for the text of the First Folio and other contemporary texts which, they say, show that Shakspeare wasn’t the author and that their candidate was the real mastermind.  To give but one example, the existence of a thick black line around the edge of Shakespeare's face in the engraving in the First Folio is claimed to show that the dface is a mask behind which the real author hides.  Having said this, there is plenty of much more serious and persuasive evidence to be considered.

The huge quantity of evidence of differing persuasiveness leads to the one criticism of Michell’s book.  In order to cover each candidate properly, he sometimes gets bogged down in detail.  This isn’t really his fault and, in his defence, he has tried to distil thousands of pages of Authorship Studies material into a readable summary.

The truth of the matter is that, in the absence of new evidence, it will never be possible to settle the Authorship Question.  Given the repressive nature of Elizabethan England, the intrigue that surrounded the Queen and her counsellors and the lack of respectability of the theatre, it is eminently reasonable that the real author, if he or she were noble, would want to keep their identity a secret.  Given that backdrop and the real doubts about Shakspeare as author and endless speculation is possible.

So where does Michell stand?  Michell can’t quite bring himself to say it but he is clearly an anti-Stratfordian and posits a hypothesis of a group of writers, masterminded by Bacon, publishing plays that were intended to educate the play-going public in Bacon’s ideas and beliefs.  Where do I stand?  Well, it is safe to say that I am no longer a Stratfordian.  I did flip-flop between candidates as I read the chapters devoted to each of them but, if push comes to shove, I am probably a Marlovian now although who knows where I will stand if I read more on the subject.

And read more I will because this is fascinating and fun stuff.  I've only been able to give a flavour of the subject here and I would highly recommend Michell’s book is an excellent primer on the question.