All The World's A Stage

I saw quite a bit of the BBC's output marking the four hundredth anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare this weekend.

I enjoyed watching the poet Ian McMillan brew a hopless Tudor ale and laughed at the programme guidance note for Arena's compilation of Shakespeare film clips which warned viewers that it contained adult themes. Well, yes, I thought, murder, adultery, the odd suicide or two.

I didn't do any Shakespeare at school, a 1980's comprehensive, but did get taken to see some of his plays as a teenager by my English teacher Dad. Like many people, I struggled with some of the language and plots, but watching the live Shakespeare show from the RSC in Stratford on Saturday night I was surprised by how accessible and witty his work is. I suppose that's an appreciation which only comes with maturity.

And of course, we all use Shakesperian expressions - "in my mind's eye", "melted into thin air", "wild goose chase", "pitched battle" - without even realising it.

Shakespeare and the conspiracy theorists

I'm reading Shakespeare's Lives by Samuel Schoenbaum at the moment. The most entertaining parts are where he discusses, dismisses and pokes fun at those who believe someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays.

A lot of the people who believe a grammar school boy from Warwickshire couldn't have written the plays are clearly motivated by snobbery.  For example, the barrister Christmas Humphreys wrote in 1955: "It is offensive to scholarship, to our national dignity, and to our sense of fair play to worship the memory of a petty-minded tradesman while leaving the actual author of the Shakespeare plays and poems unhonoured and ignored. Moreover, I have found the plays of far more interest when seen as the work of a great nobleman and one very close to the fountainhead of Elizabethan England."  (Humphreys was an unusual member of the Bar, a convert to Buddhism whose North London home is now a temple). They are invariably never - unlike Schoenbaum - academic experts on Shakespeare's plays but rather eccentric amateurs: the pioneer of the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays was a schoolteacher called, rather appropriately, Looney.

There is now though another element to the anti-Stratfordian movement apart from the snobbery.  They increasingly resemble other conspiracy theorists and "truthers" who believe the moon landings were a hoax, 9/11 was carried out by the CIA and/or Mossad etc.  in believing that they have secret, "inside" information that "they" (the Government/Jews/academic establishment) don't what us to know.

Shakespeare, snobbery and conspiracy theories

The upcoming film Anonymous starring Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth I is based on the hoary theory that someone else, in this case the Earl of Oxford, wrote William Shakespeare's plays.

I'm no expert on Shakespeare but it strikes me that the idea is essentially based on snobbery,  that a grammar school boy from Stratford couldn't possibly have the knowledge of the world the plays demonstrate. This ignores the fact that he had access to books - indeed many of the plays are based on classical sources like Plutarch - and that even those set in Ancient Italy or Greece have settings and characters straight out of the English countryside. Talking of which, there's a story that a Shakesperean actor was walking down a Warwickshire lane one day when he saw two men cutting a hedge. He asked them what they were doing and one of them said, "I rough-hew them and he shapes the ends", an echo of Hamlet's, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will".

It's commonplace to say that while Vanessa Redgrave has nutty politics, she's a great actress. While I agree with the first assertion, I'm not convinced about the second - she always seems to me to belong to the Imelda Staunton "look at me" school of overacting.

Challenged about the lack of evidence for the Earl of Oxford theory on BBC breakfast TV this morning, Redgrave countered rather lamely that there wasn't much evidence for Shakespeare either. At one level, the argument about who wrote Shakespeare's plays is a harmless literary game. It's certainly a less poisonous conspiracy theory than others Redgrave was associated with when she was a leading member of Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party in the 70's and 80's.