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

+