He Who Loveth Not Tobacco And A Good Mystery...

ONE should not leap to conclusions, but James Ley’s dismissal of the new flick Anonymous, which opens in Melbourne tonight, prompts the suspicion that he is firmly of the left. That is the way it tends to go with speculations about unsolvable mysteries, in this case the film’s contention that William Shakespeare did not write the plays bearing his name. Those on the left tend to think he did, a glover’s son making such a mark on history and literature being seen as confirmation the proletariat is brimming with such talent that it needs only a fair and just social order to see it uncorked.

Conservative minds, more interested in substance than chimera, often take the opposite view, surmising the plays can only have been the product of extensive and formal learning, travel throughout Europe and, above all, of the absolute, unquestionable confidence often thought to be the birthright of the aristocracy. The late Marxist historian Gordon Kiernan is a good example of the first school of thought, and former National Review editor Joseph Sobran of the latter. Sobran's book on the subject also appears to be a large part of the film’s inspiration, as each posits Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the man who wielded the magic quill.

It is all a lot of harmless fun, much like the many efforts to identify Jack the Ripper, a fascination which also sees political leanings colour the many and various theories. If you happen to be a champion of the working class, the idea that a member of the royal family or household did all that midnight disemboweling can be one of many splendid cues for lots of windy words about class, gender, empowerment and assorted other concepts without which the modern academy would be left thoroughly and absolutely mute. Where Shakespeare is concerned, ideology has made a very poor editor.

To do serious damage to the leftard case for Shakespeare as his own author, consider just one word, “tranect” – clearly a printer’s error -- which appears in the First Folio’s Merchant of Venice (see note 53 and this even more interesting note on page 65). In Italian, “ferry” is traghetto, which the French rendered as traject before dropping it entirely and adopting the English "ferry". So how did the kid from Stratford know first the  Italian word and, beyond that, its even more obscure French variant? The most likely answer is knowledge gleaned on the road -- and Shakespeare is not known to have ever left his native England.

De Vere’s candidacy is refuted more easily. As Ley notes, the nobleman died in 1604, well before Tempest, Macbeth and Winter’s Tale were staged. The fact that Macbeth makes sly reference to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 would appear to put the icing on the cake served at the wake for de Vere’s authorship.

But what of another candidate, one with the education, turn of phrase and exposure to Europe to solve all the shortcomings that undermine each of the main camps’ arguments?  That man would be Christopher Marlowe, the Cambridge graduate, operative in the shadowland of Elizabethan espionage and intrigue -- and, as naysayers will by now be screaming, a fellow who went to his grave in 1593, even before they screwed down the lid on de Vere.

Fair enough, that is the accepted version of Marlowe’s life and demise, but before dismissing out of hand a Bunyip’s pet theory it might be worth taking up Charles Nicholl’s fascinating book, The Reckoning. A wonderful detective story based largely on original records and documents, it painstakingly casts Marlowe’s life, and the lives of those accused of killing him in a tavern brawl, in an entirely new light. As Nicholl demonstrates, Marlowe was up to his neck in cloak-and-dagger doings, even going undercover in a Jesuit seminary to collect intelligence for Elizabeth’s spymasters. The trio accused of his murder, all very quickly exonerated and set free, were also agents, and the playwright’s death just happened to come at a moment when he was in quite a bit of trouble with court powerbrokers.

Just suppose Marlowe was not killed at all, that his death was faked and he was spirited out of the country for his own protection. (Nicholl rejects this, by the way.) Picture him in his Italian exile, enjoying tobacco and boys to his heart’s content, soaking up the language and scribbling away at plays and sonnets. Why wouldn’t he send those efforts back to England for production, where a theatre owner called William Shakespeare would have been only too happy to slap his name on them?

None of this theorising amounts to a hill of beans. The plays were written, and that is the important thing.

All the same, it is fun to speculate. 

UPDATE: If there is a worthwhile film to be made about Shakespeare and the authorship question it seems this one isn't it. On the other hand, this scathing review of Anonymous is a classic. Sample:


Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the first of many bastard children of Elizabeth I (who was 16 when she gave birth to him); he was also the father of Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, another bastard son, in this case incestuously, of the Queen’s (and given that she was 40 years old at the time, probably also her last one). In between those two Earls, a 32-year-old Elizabeth also appears to have given birth to Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, who in the film is being promoted by Oxford as Elizabeth’s successor.

Looks like Contagion will be tomorrow night's entertainment.