Shakespeare In Love

Now that all of the Oscars have been given out and the celebrities have gone home, someone has to do the cleaning up. With the accolades ringing in our ears we can now set to work and find out just how it’s producers were able to do such a splendid job. Both for those who have remained faithful to the Stratfordian myth, and for all who look to a brave new (oops!) Oxfordian world, there are some surprises.

It will be a long time before any of us forget the clever cinematic handbill credits for the play-within-the-play. Then there were those clever “anons” to the good nurse being used in a world parallel to the play; an obligatory ghost scene; and heartbreaking lines from some of the sonnets.

Despite Bowdler, the Lambs, and all who think pure English also means pure thoughts, the Bard knew what the funnybones were connected to. This film is no exception. In addition to the porno-banter of Romeo’s pals within the lines of the play, Love has its own brand of joy. It may seem tame to an audience that has only recently drained the Oval Office of every possible double-jointed entendre. The “plucking” of Violet is a case in point. It speaks quite properly to Her Royal Highness’ well-known understanding of and concern for her Ladies; and what they were (probably) in-waiting for. But a “plantation” in “Virginia”: please! Perhaps the most Shakespearean is bedtime talk about there being “nothing better than a play”. This rich key word gets thirty lines in Eric Partridge’s pudendum compendium, Shakespeare’s Bawdy.

My admiration and wonder peak at the splendid way in which the play is interwoven with the action of the film. While I can not speak for someone who does not know Romeo and Juliet (and who does not?) it is easier to understand the plot in this format than in most stage productions and other films I have seen. The sense of love and love of love created by the film was stronger than ever I can recall being generated by the play itself. The smorgasbrod approach has been tried with other Shakespeare, but never so effectively. Had Tinker Belle or ET urged us to clap or cheer at critical points I would have shed some sixty-five years to be first. The only way to de-suspend my disbelief is to bring this remarkable production kicking and screaming back into the real world.

Before putting on my rubber gauntlets I would like to say that the cast was seamless; the spirit of the Bard was with them. Rarely does one see in the cinema, even in films about plays, the kind of centripetal spirit that one likes to think once infected the best of those sixteenth century revels. Had I the time and space and skill, I would (for the entire cast) write the beauty of their art. As for that other gang, those clever producers, writers, and directors, it is only the garters and whips of History that prevent me from falling as readily at their feet.

The story of Romeo and Juliet goes back before Shakespeare’s time; and there have been several versions, including operas and the immortal West Side Story. But the version worked over between 1581 and 1594 by someone who called himself William Shake-speare (note the hyphen) is the only one that has the facts right about the topography of Verona. This play was written by someone who had been there. 

Want another? Ms Paltrow reads and identifies with Sylvia, the object of a poem from Two Gentlemen of Verona. A choice, if the film’s advisors know their Shake-speare, of sheer genius. This same Sylvia, we’ll warrant, be Good Queen Bess hersen, and these two gentlemen (Valentine and Proteus) be in love with her. Usually the play is treated as a light piece because of the incomprehensible tolerance of these rivals for each other; but with the right playwright it becomes a hologram of Oxford’s love for his Queen. The two swains are not twain: how clever of Stoppard to have two women this time, Gwyneth and Judi, as embodiments of the love of one man. Long before Godot, Shake-speare thought of using two male actors “presenting” the playwright’s two sides. After all, both of them were of Vere-ona; get it?

Of course there was someone named “Shaxper” or ‘Shagsper” living in Stratford-on-Avon at the time R&J was begun. He was eleven years old. We now know that the dashing twenty-five year old Earl of Oxford had just returned from the Continent loaded down with enough of the Renaissance to last four hundred years. Having learned rather more about love (and women) he re-worked a boyhood play he called Romeus and Juliet into the vehicle now so appropriate to the skills of both Ms Paltrow and Judi Dench. While the film does capture some of the improv character of the Elizabethan playhouse, what we see here would have taken place several years before. Time, you see, has been “out of joint” since 1604, when Oxford died. 

Recently the national press has begun to resurrect the seventy-year-old discovery that, complete with its hyphen, “Shake-speare” was the pen name of Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The story, once Hollywood gets back from its vacation in the Stratfordian Theme Park, will make an even greater blockbuster than Love. The high priests who have defended the Stratford myth are either dying out, or have forgotten how to read. My theory is that in the Stratfordian seminaries (including Yale and Harvard) it is litany rather than literature that packs the intellectually nubile minds into the classroom. Their gurus are not capable of understanding how a great poet could weave all that history into the page: they are not, nor never will be poets. 

It is only a matter of time before modern scholars will “deliver to our age this tale for a truth”. Shakespeare In Love has come at a critical point in this new battle for the soul of both our theater and our mother tongue. Funny, Oxford was recognized at the time as the unchallenged leader of this cause.

I have tried to imagine the problems facing Love’s producers in reconciling the conflicting claims of authorship. Other than a “text consultant” the Credits seem not to have included anyone claiming to be an authority on either side of the issue. Perhaps in their wisdom they decided to kill all the experts. Like the Bard, the producers have systematically disregarded historic fact in order to entertain us. Here are some examples.

The film is set in 1595. At that time the Stratford man was thirty-one years old. There is no record of his presence or doings either in London or Stratford from 1592 until 1596, when he showed up at his son’s funeral. Elizabeth was 62 (nice job Judi) and still going strong. Oxford, her sometime paramour (and more) was 45 and had written some thirty plays already. He was in semi-retirement, married for the third time, and living in Hackney to be near the theater groups for which he was responsible.

Marlowe, a central character in the film, had been dead for two years. Fourteen years younger than Shake-speare (Oxford) he started out working with the Bard and may have finished off at least one of his plays (Edward II). The lines used in the auditions about “the topless towers of Illium” from his Dr. Faustus may have been produced as early as 1592, but not published until 1604. Shake-speare’s play All’s Well That Ends Well, first performed at Court in 1580, had the following lines spoken by a clown. who was often the playwright’s “voice”:

“Was this fair face the cause, quoth she, why the Grecian’s sacked Troy?” 

Sonnet Seventeen, “If I could write the beauty of your eyes”, was written by Oxford to his son, the Earl of Southampton, along with sixteen or so other sonnets, to get him to marry. For reasons which we do not have time to go into here, the right choice would have had a profound effect on the lad’s career options. Screenwriters take note: the Tudor Heir story will provide ample provender for the digital age and beyond. Oh yes, these particular Sonnets had been written by 1590.

That tobacco plantation in Virginia comes near the mark, but (pardon the expression) no cigar. It is off by fifteen or twenty years. Oxford did invest heavily in voyages looking for the northwest passage, and his son funded the Gosnold expedition that invented Martha’s Vineyard. But Gosnold, who was a kissing cousin of Oxford and Southampton’s college chum died in Virginia in 1607 (his second trip) well before there were any real plantations.

The film’s fetid urchin, who was to become John Webster, gets five points (out of a possible ten) for accuracy. Webster went on to write some scary plays, mostly in the sixteen hundreds. In 1595 he was all of seventeen years old. The film character is so good, it is possible to overlook the age discrepancy, but not the fact that he was actually the son of a wealthy coach maker in West Smithfield.

Finally, at the end of the film Her Royal Highness asks our hero for something lighter the next time, for Twelfth Night. It’s a good thing she did, for the play referred to had been (according to Charleton Ogburn) around since 1580. It was played at Court for (you guessed it) Twelfth Night.

Perhaps you can begin to see the miracle at work: that there was a film at all. The script’s great punch line was “It’s a mystery”. This can be seen as a send-up of the standard Stratfordian answer to the key question: how a person for whom there is no record of schooling, owning a book, writing a play, or even being able to read could have written the most important 

body of literature in the English language. The received truth is that “He was a genius”. The joke (about “mystery”) is that faced with continually growing evidence, the Stratfords have no place to hide. They cling to their credo that the Bard was (and is) “unknowable”.

I’ll lay even money that whoever was calling the shots for the film knew more about the Bard than they are letting on. Throw-away lines like “follow that boat” and “a rose by any other name” used for the theater (The Rose) rather than for Romeo’s genealogy, are a dead giveaway. Shake-speare also changed facts and dates and even names. Sometimes he did this to get the best story. But he also could draw a curtain around historic facts to protect the guilty, while chain-sawing the air with screaming clues as to his own identity. Towering over this production is a man who has stated on television that he does not believe in the Oxford stuff. Anyone irreverent enough to have written Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could not possibly swallow that Stratfordian pap. Tom Stoppard, come on out; we see you!

Appropriately the film’s two theaters were actually in use in 1595, one run by Burbage, the other Henslowe. Of the two impressari, Burbage (as well as his wife, mother, and father before him) was the more disagreeable. He was also acting at that time in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, which was run by Edward deVere (our friend Oxford). Between Tilney (Master of the Revels) and the plague these houses had a rough time of it. This part of the film becomes almost cinema vere-itay.

But back here in the Pit, snatching up orange peels and trampled handbills, we are still trying to figure out what really happened. Another throw-away line, “All men at court have no poetry”, hangs in the air but does not further the plot. It could be one of two things: a Stratfordian attempt to direct attention away from Oxford, who was a favorite at court; or more probably (since no one in Hollywood would stoop so low) a signal flare that all was not well in Culver City.

The pre-eminent skill of the Stratfordian “scholars” who have locked arms around their “dumb man” is in in-effing the ineffable, un-knowing the unknowable, and lubricating their shaky hegemony with gratuitous insults for anyone who prefers history to mythology. Did one of these Marlovian Merlins advise the producers to use the court-poetry line to buy time for their heresy? Or does Hollywood really know whodunit and is just teasing us?

Valentine (heart) and Proteus (look it up, I had to) along with Sylvia could be the film’s closet hedge to the future. There is little question that the next Elizabethan blockbuster will be the full Oxfordian monte. Was there a mole on the set already writing the trailers? Or an apostate Stratfordian desperately flashing comprehension to more intelligent forms of literary life on the outside, counting the hours to O-day?

And finally Shaxper-his-signatures; lots of them! If in the smokeless conference room among the styrofoam cups and stale bagels the production team worked over this tidbit, was the decision made to include it as a dig at Oxfordians? These unsung scholars have always used the six Rorsarchs as proof of what’s-his-name’s congenital illiteracy. Whatever the intent, a good film (like true art) can not lie even if it wanted to. 

Note to Hollywood: keep up the good work. You have made a start by de-mystifying the Bard with a handsome, young, occasionally articulate, and appropriately amorous young man who could pass for the Earl. Did the Puritan preacher stand for the professors terrified that the play/film would expose their own standard android? Only Hollywood can tell us whether (1) the film was conceived as a tribute to Shake-speare’s real genius; (2) an attempt to squeeze the last ducats out of Stratford before the fall; or (3) an unconscionable scheme to support the intellectual dishonesty of the keepers of the flame. If you run out of ideas, or want to make some real money, punch in at:

www.shakespearefellowship.org

Joe Eldredge