Who was Shakespeare really?

Seven years after the death of Shakespeare, and upon the publication of the first folio of the famous plays, Ben Johnson wrote, "He was not for an age but for all time." The debate as to who was the "he" referred to by Johnson is the subject of a new movie called Anonymous. Mark Twain, Dickens, and Freud all believed the Stratford man did not really write the plays. There are many scholars today who also have a hard time with the conventional history. One school of skeptics is the Oxfordians, who believe that Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays but was forced to conceal his identity as a playwright for powerful political and social reasons during the reign of Elizabeth I. Oxford, according to the Oxfordians, conspired to have an actor from Stratford on Avon, William Shakespeare, take credit for the plays. Has the world really been scammed for all these centuries, and if so why?

I came to an appreciation of Shakespeare late in life. I was a college Shakespeare dropout back in 1971, the year I married and quit school. I spent three weeks in a Shakespeare class at the U of M, and though I loved the class, I never again took a Shakespeare course; nor did I read another Shakespeare play. The odds were good that I would have spent my whole life in a state of Shakespearean ignorance were it not for the fact I saddled myself with a new husband who lives and breathes Shakespeare. In order to stay married, I had to design my own course: Cliffs Notes and Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare became my textbooks.

I struggle greatly with the language in the plays. I know it is beautiful but I have trouble following what is being said. Sometimes I think my Spanish is better than my Elizabethan iambic pentameter, and that is not saying much. When Harry had the leading role in Measure for Measure, he had to learn one of the longest roles in Shakespeare, but I had no idea what he was saying most of the time he was on stage. Of course I have a problem with what he is saying at other times, too.

I found myself, the Shakespeare novice, crying my way through a wad of Kleenex during the "Quality of Mercy" speech from Merchant of Venice a few years back. This happened twice, once at the Guthrie and the second time watching the film with Al Pacino. I never saw Hamlet until this past year, and then I saw it twice within six months. Both times I was riveted to my seat for three hours. I subbed in a high school English class for three days straight recently and on my third time through Midsummer Night's Dream I was actually laughing at the jokes. Harry's last play, All's Well That Ends Well, is what they call a problem play. After seeing All's Well twice, I was actually able to carry on a dinner conversation about why it was neither a comedy or a tragedy. My next challenge is to appreciate thoroughly my spouse's rendition of one of the most famous speeches in all of Shakespeare, just before he pops off stage to die. Richard II, in case you missed my earlier announcement, opens this Friday.

My introduction to the Stratfordian/Oxfordian debate began in 2003. Harry was in England visiting his mother for a few weeks, but I had stayed home to clean out the attic and basement of my 100-year-old house, hoping to put it up for sale when he returned. I stumbled across a New York Times book review of the book Shakespeare by Another Name, by Mark Anderson and bought it for Harry as a little welcome-home present. The evening before he came home, I began reading the preface to the book and suddenly found myself reading until three in the morning. Harry arrived home to find his Shakespeare-illiterate wife unwilling to let him touch his book until she had finished reading it.

Many books about Shakespeare and De Vere have been written within the last decade. I have read only two, so I am not an expert on the topic. Such books, and now the movie, Anonymous, seem to have moved the debate from the strictly scholarly realm into present-day popular culture. Even Cliffs Notes, my favorite synopsis source, is currently making web-accessible cartoons of the Shakespearean plays that include jokes about those who still think Shakespeare wrote the plays. They are funny and a bit crass. So much for popular culture.

I was very excited to see the film Anonymous even though the reviews have been terrible. Those in the New Yorker and The New York Times were particularly scathing. The reviewers panned the movie in ways that to me demonstrated the writers had little knowledge of the powerful arguments from the Oxfordian camp. They trash the movie, preferring Shakespeare in Love's version of history. There are many hard questions and mysteries surrounding the authorship of the plays, and I don't think that being someone who questions the version of history we have all been fed makes one a traitor or, worse, a class snob, as one reviewer put it. As a schoolteacher, I do find it hard to believe someone with the kind of education the Stratford man undoubtedly received could have written Hamlet. The sort of scholarship the plays contain with regard to languages, geography, literature, etc. etc. was not easily attained in the 16th century without a royal pedigree. And a slow start in education makes it impossible to attain a vocabulary of 20,000 words: modern research makes that abundantly clear.

Anonymous is a dark and shocking movie. The movie-makers take the reasons for the truth being hidden a few daring steps further than even the Oxfordian camp would want to go. The topic of the authorship is an emotional topic for many people, but I do not think it would be a tragedy if history is someday rewritten giving credit to the Earl and not the Bard. It would be nice to know what really happened, but it is unlikely we ever will. Just another one of life's big mysteries!

www.cliffsnotes.com/CliffsNotes-Films.html

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Are bookstores a thing of the past?

This past week Harry had the entire cast for Richard II over to rehearse in our living room, all 18 of them, so I decided to make myself scarce because space was going to be at a premium that night.

There was a book I had read about and wanted to buy, so I thought it would be the perfect evening to spend a little time in a nice bookstore. Barnes and Noble at Galleria in Edina is not exactly the quintessential old-world-type London bookstore such as Flourish and Blotts from the Harry Potter series, but it is nice. I do not frequent bookstores much anymore, being the Kindle gal that I have become over the last few years.

Upon entering the bookstore, I was shocked and rather saddened to find that my old haunt had taken out what were once large areas of bookcases filled with books and replaced them with shelves of games, puzzles, greeting cards, stationery and gifts of all sorts. I looked around and thought, what happened to all the books? Did their market research tell them to get rid of the books? Are people today really sitting around playing board games and putting puzzles together? I thought most people today are playing Angry Birds alone not Monopoly with a group of their friends and family. Don't most of us spend a lot of time looking at screens of some sort or another? Our hands are on a keyboard or a touch screen when we want to relax, they are not picking up puzzle pieces. We communicate with our friends and family via Facebook in cyberspace, not in real space. We now use our phones to text our friends or family, we don't call and talk to them. Maybe the market researchers have learned that when people do spend time together they will have to be playing games and putting together puzzles because the art of conversation is a lost art.

I did find the book I was looking for: Cleopatra: A Life, by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Stacy Schiff. The book has photographs and maps that would not be fully appreciated on my black-and-white Kindle screen. Lately, and rather strangely, I have found myself in the mood to read a "real book." I have spent many an hour wandering around in this Barnes and Noble bookstore over the years, looking at books, drinking cups of coffee with friends at the on-site Starbucks, listening to author talks and buying books. Barnes and Noble always had the book I was looking for, or they would order it for me. I found new books I didn't know existed just by wandering around, and they had a great selection of teacher materials. They gave a nice teacher discount too.

I know, I know: you can't have your great bookstore and a Kindle too; but walking about the newly configured bookstore the other evening, I missed my bookstore of old. I love downloading a book in 30 seconds on my Kindle while sitting in my comfy chair at home, or having the day's New York Times to read instantly during a sub's slow work day (lots of teacher prep time and nothing to prepare for). There's also the fact that I can carry my Kindle with me anywhere and read from a wide selection of books, magazines and newspapers. I can even read without my reading glasses because I can just pump up the print size on the screen, and love to surf the virtual bookstore, Amazon.com, when- and where-ever; but I still want the world to have bookstores you have to walk into on two feet.

I was one of the first in line to buy a Kindle years ago, and have actually had two Kindles. My first one drowned, victim of a rogue wave that hit me as I sat reading on a beach in Los Cabos. My only complaint with the Kindle has been the size of the screen. I have long thought that the keyboard at the bottom of the device should be eliminated and that it should have touch screen color technology. The Nook, made by Barnes and Noble, debuted after the Kindle with a color touch screen. The Nook was more expensive and heavier than the Kindle so I stuck with the Kindle.

Well, now it looks like perfection, from my point of view at least, has landed -- or I should say ignited? The Kindle Fire. The keyboard has been eliminated on this soon-to-be-released Kindle model, and the screen is a touch screen and in color. I like the relatively small size of the Kindle Fire: 7.5 " x 4.7 " 14.6 ounces, and the price: $199 (with free shipping, of course, from Amazon), You can also surf the web on the Kindle Fire and download movies and television shows as well. The Fire and other new but less fancy Kindle models will be released in November, just in time for Christmas.

I guess one should not find all that surprising the changes with regard to books, given the history of the written word. From scratching in the dirt with sticks to writing on cave walls, to parchment scroll writing, to monks hand copying bound books, to the invention of the printing press, communication with writing is what people have always done and will continue to do: only the technology changes. The lightening fast development of e-book technology has been astonishing. Books as we have known them for hundreds of years have suddenly changed form. I am glad to have lived long enough to experience this amazing change, but the reality is that these changes may mean the demise of bookstores as we have known them. Broders Books, the other large national chain of bookstores, recently went into bankruptcy. Barnes and Noble is struggling mightily to survive by reinventing itself with a wider range of merchandise.

Today my daughter and I went to Wild Rumpus, the wonderful little bookstore in Linden Hills which opened nearly two decades ago. It is sort of the Flourish and Blotts of children's books, situated in an old building on a charming city street in my old Minneapolis neighborhood of Linden Hills. Wild Rumbus is stuffed -- no crammed -- full of books, and it seems to be flourishing while selling only books. Alexis bought books for a friend with two young children, and I found a wonderful picture book for my granddaughters called Sisters. This bookstore may be strictly books, but it does have two chickens, three cats and a rabbit running about, and reptiles in cages. There are cozy chairs for old folks to sit, floor space with pillows for kids to lie down and curl up with a book, and kind people to help you find books. So, I guess for a time anyway, I can have my Kindle and ... an old fashioned bookstore too. As Jerry Seinfield said, "A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence that people are still thinking."

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