News from Germany (Zwei) -- by way of Hollywood

The other cup of news today comes via the pop culture website Collider.com, which features an interview with (German native, now Hollywood based) director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Patriot, 2012).

There have been murmurs in Oxfordian circles for years about Emmerich's desire to make a biopic of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." Now, according to this new interview, principal photography on Emmerich's de Vere pic Anonymous begins, Emmerich says, March 22. Interview excerpt after the jump

Quoth Mr. Emmerich:
It’s been eight years I’ve been trying to do this project. It was always supposed to be my next movie but this time I’m really doing it because I’m already set to shoot on March 22nd and I’m the casting process right now which for me is the most kind of nerve-racking because you have to make decisions. And I start shooting in four or five days the first plates in England...

It’s about how it came to be that William Shakespeare was not the author of his plays. It’s not [Christopher] Marlowe, it’s [Edward] de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. It’s kind of like a political thriller. It’s about who will succeed Elizabeth and the cause of that thriller, the Essex Rebellion, we take on, and we learn how the plays were written by somebody else. ...

Well it’s very well researched. The writer is John Orloff (”A Mighty Heart”) and he’s been working on the script for two years before I got involved and he did a really, really good job and I just discussed it with several actors who are very knowledgeable about that time and I’m really pleased how accurate it is. Naturally, for dramatic reasons you sometimes alter facts but it’s pretty well-researched.

[End interview excerpt]

I unfortunately don't have anything more to report other than the above. Full disclosure: I am unaffiliated with Anonymous -- and indeed will be posting something on this site soon about another project which does use "Shakespeare" By Another Name as its foundation.

Meantime... onward and upward to Mr. Emmerich as well.

Continues...

News from Germany (Eins)

[UPDATED OCT. 23, AFTER JUMP]
Two posts today about news from Germany (or Germans working in the U.S.) -- First, German author Kurt Kreiler has just published a new Oxfordian book (Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford).

According to German correspondent Robert Detobel, writing for the Shakespeare-Oxford blog, Kreiler's tome has met with at least one favorable review, a translated excerpt (by Detobel) after the jump

This from the Rhineland Mercury:

In 1920 Looney found the needle in the haystack . . .

In Germany it was possible to be informed on de Vere’s war adventures, his politic quarrels, his engagement in the theatre … since 1995 when Walter Klier for the first time summarized Looney’s findings. Ten years later the US author Mark Anderson presented old and new “evidence“ and came to the conclusion that Shakespeare was “one of the most autobiographical authors that ever were“.

Now a new, comprehensive book has appeared from the pen of the long-standing German Shakespeare researcher Kurt Kreiler, a historical-biographical-stylistical analysis provided with new findings and concentrating on de Vere’s cultural tradition, his individuality and his poetic art. A homage, also suitable as initial reading, to the “master of poetical self-reflection“, the artist of love rhetorics, a soul-knowing tragedian and an illusionsless illusionist. Reasonable doubts that de Vere is Shakespeare are no longer possible. But no really good myth will ever proceed from thence: the man is too complicated, his life already too well investigated, not appropriate as projection surface. Good myths ought to be simple, incredible and homely.

[End of review]

To be clear, I haven't yet seen the book, nor would I be able to do much with it if I did. (My French is rusty, my German non-existent.) But with great notices like this, in such prominent German media, I'd certainly be curious to know what any German-speaking readers of this blog think about the book.

Onward and upward, Herr Kreiler!

UPDATE (Oct. 23): We now hear word of a second strong review in favor of Kreiler's book in the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche. "A fascinating novel (?) of circumstantial evidence" is what the reviewer is calling this tome. ("mitreißender Indizienroman") The headline of the article, most of which unfortunately is behind a subscription wall, reads "Cover Name Shakespeare." ("Deckname Shakespeare")
[hat-tip to German correspondent H.W.]

Continues...

A Mystery Writer Ponders: Whodunnit?

Mystery novelist Ellis Goodman wrote a brief blog posting yesterday that summarizes his reasons for suspecting that Edward de Vere was the Bard.

Goodman homes in on Will Shakspere's last will and testament as reason aplenty to suspect something is very wrong with our traditional picture of "Shakespeare":

In addition, it is recognized his Will was poorly drawn, badly written and ungrammatical. Could this really be William Shakespeare? I decided there was a much better case to prove that De Vere was the true author of much of Shakespeare’s work; but, because of the fact that he was an aristocrat at the Court of Queen Elizabeth and a homosexual, he used Shakespeare as his “front man” at a time when anything to do with the theatre was considered low-class, rough, and tough. The theatre was banned from operating within the city limits, and no person of “class” would be seen at these entertainments.

So my conclusion is that William Shakespeare probably did not write these plays. What do you think?

I, for one, think the Stratford will tells a lot more than even many Oxfordians recognize. Bonner Miller Cutting, host of this year's North American Oxfordian conference in Houston (Nov. 5-8), has done some of the best work on this subject that I've seen -- revealing, for one, that Will Shakspere used a Protestant boilerplate template. (So much for the "secret Catholic" theory.) So much more, I suspect, remains to be uncovered as skeptical eyes re-examine that legal document that for centuries has been thought to be the Bard's.

[Creative Commons image by rpongsaj]

Continues...

Nothing Truer Than A Good Cause

Today's Shakespeare Oxford Society blog features a post by Boston filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan on her feature-length documentary film project Nothing Truer Than Truth.

Eagan-Donovan, who has optioned the documentary rights to "Shakespeare" By Another Name for her film, writes:

An A-list party boy on the continental circuit, a true alpha male, Edward de Vere was a man quite unlike any other. My documentary film project, Nothing is Truer than Truth, looks at the process of writing, where life experience, imitation of the masters, and relentless revision come together to create genius, as the key to discovering Edward de Vere as the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. The film will reveal de Vere’s epic life story and introduce a brilliant, troubled, charming man.

...

"With over 60 hours of footage, I have produced two fundraising trailers, and have had the great privilege of meeting some truly extraordinary and exceedingly generous people. On screen, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance regale us with their unique portraits of the earl, and British historian Charles Bird takes the viewer on a walking tour of Castle Hedingham, home of the De Vere family since the days of William the Conqueror." ...

As a writer, I am determined to tell this story. With your support, Nothing is Truer than Truth will prove that the universal appeal of Shakespeare’s work is due to the fact that the true author was a perfectionist, a world traveler, a temperamental, tempestuous trouble-maker, and most of all, a writer.

Continues...

The Annals of Stratfordian Snark

For those who enjoy ringside view on a good row from time to time, yesterday Oliver Kamm, a financial columnist for the London Times, got into a rather snarky flame-war with some Oxfordians on his blog.

Starting off simply enough with the assertion that the Shakespeare authorship issue is "benign, if batty," Kamm gets drawn into the maelstrom and really, in so many words, loses his shit.

Oxfordian commenters call Kamm out on his factually dubious claims, and he just keeps coming back.

He writes:

"I do 'assume that Oxfordians are unscholarly cranks'. That's part of their job description. Their ... arguments bear as much relation to literary scholarship as do creationism to science and Holocaust denial to history. It's a sociological and pathological phenomenon rather than a literary one."

Credit to the Oxfordians who posted on his blog, who generally maintained a respectful and civil tone.

And credit to the unintentionally comical Mr. Kamm, who after posting nine increasingly shrill comments to his own original post, clearly enjoys having plenty more to say when he has nothing more to say.

Here's hoping we might see the defender of the Stratford faith make it toward 15 or 20 attempts at the last word. Here hear, Mr. Kamm. We suspect there's yet more nasty ad hominems and prickly appeals to authority to come.

Just, please, commenters all: Keep it polite. Let the good man dig his own hole.

POSTSCRIPT: All the fooferaw has now occasioned a bona fide Oxfordian-themed post from the Times's conspiracy lover.

POST-POSTSCRIPT (and comment bump): Author Michael Prescott ponders the larger meaning of Mr. Kamm's vituperations. Tally-ho!

Continues...

Overbury Overdrive Part 749: Shakespeare in Canard-land

Today's Washington Post Sunday Magazine features a head-scratcher of a cover story (not unlike the cover fodder in the color supplement pictured here) that serves up, in this case, a fine selection of canards about Shakespeare and the "new Shakespeare portrait."

The author of the piece, sports columnist Sally Jenkins, has clearly done her research. Or at least research of the un-fact-checked, single-sourced, if-you-believe-that-I've-got-a-bridge-to-sell-you-too variety that big media outlets such as hers perfected in the run up to the Iraq invasion.

She writes:

Both [the First Folio Shakespeare engraving and Stratford funerary monument] are so unintelligent-looking that scholars blame them for instigating the Author Controversy, which is not really a controversy so much as a campaign by conspiracy-minded amateurs to prove that someone more visually appealing wrote the plays. The thinking goes that the "peculiar dough-faced man" in the Droeshout, as Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University calls him, is too stolid to have written such soaring words. Someone else must have, preferably someone good-looking. As scholar Marjorie Garber writes, "We'd rather he not look like an egghead."

The Author Controversy persists despite considerable documentary evidence. We have the man from Stratford's pay stubs for performing at court, his certificate of occupancy for the Globe Theatre, and his will, in which he left memorial rings to some London actors. Funny he would do that if he was just a country burgher who didn't write the plays.

Oh, dear.

Proponents of "the Author Controversy," as Jenkins terms it, are often accused of a number of sins. (Are we not snobs anymore? Where are the familiar red herrings we ordered??) But disowning the Stratford myth simply because Stratford Will is not pretty enough is a new one to me.

And the fact that the basic anti-Stratfordian argument (cf. here, here or here) presumes William of Stratford to have been an actor but not an author has evidently escaped Jenkins' notice. (The documents she cites, indeed the whole of Stratford Will's documentary record, are consistent with him working in the theater, probably as an actor -- something that few Shakespeare heretics dispute.)

From there, the howlers just keep coming:

* "One thing scholars agree on is that Shakespeare probably sat for a portrait in his early to mid-40s" - I think I recognize this old deadline-plagued journalist's trick: Find something in a book (in this case, pure supposition); claim that all authorities agree with it; then hedge your bets with that handy weasel word "probably." Nice.

* "he was exposed to great theater as a boy" & "Shakespeare avoided duels, so he must have been sweet-tempered" - these as examples of things that don't represent ways that scholars "fill in the gaps with overeager supposition."

* "He arrived in London in 1586 or 1587" ... or 1588 or 1589 or 1590 or 1591 or 1592.

* "The first time the Earl of Southampton laid eyes on Shakespeare he was probably stalking around a stage, wearing sham jewels and a robe hung with tiny mirrors to make it glitter, shouting hoarse rhymes in the air..." No room for doubt there. Jenkins is clearly catching on to the just-make-shit-up school of Stratfordian biography.

And with such solid credentials built up in telling Stratford Will's life, Jenkins goes on recite the case that the sitter in the new Cobbe portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury is indeed Will Shakspere of Stratford. Namely, the c. 1610 painting came from a family descended from the Earl of Southampton ("Shakespeare's patron") and it resembles another painting once thought to be of Shakespeare.

To her credit, Jenkins also quotes authorities that, in the grand tradition of strange bedfellows, I'd just like to end this post with. Because they're right. (And in Jonathan Bate's case, he's more right than he probably knows.)

The [Folger Shakespeare] library is in a funny position: For years, it viewed the Janssen portrait as discredited and displayed it in a far corner of the ornate, gothic reading room in a row with other impostors and curios, under a small brass plaque that read "Sir Thomas Overbury?" In 1964, an art historian had tentatively identified the portrait as Overbury, a minor poet poisoned in the Tower of London under James I.

While Folger curator Erin Blake has met with Cobbe and directed him to useful historical sources, she stands by the provisional Overbury identification until she sees more evidence.

...

"To me, a lot of the interesting discoveries about Shakespeare are discoveries of his absence," [Shakespeare scholar Jonathan] Bate says. "It comes back to this sense that what he was good at was withholding himself and leaving things open to the audience. ... It's that kind of disappearing act that he was so good at, that's what keeps him alive."



[POSTSCRIPT: Although I'll be in deadline-land tomorrow, please note that as the Post article points out, Sally Jenkins will be taking questions about this story Monday at 12 noon ET.]

Continues...

William Golding's biographer on the unfortunate nature of many eminent creators

This past week on the BBC Radio 4 arts and entertainment program(me) "Front Row," host Mark Lawson interviewed biographer John Carey who has just completed the first ever biography of Nobel Prize winning novelist William Golding, using hundreds of pages of personal journals, letters and unpublished works -- that haven't before seen the light of day.

Lawson's interview is a fascinating listen for anyone who enjoys literary biography. But it's also relevant to the Shakespeare issue because Carey is a critic who has reviewed many literary biographies himself. As Lawson points out, Carey once famously observed that Anton Chekhov seems to be "perhaps the only great writer who had also been a wholly commendable human being."

Carey's portrait of Golding reveals an author who -- if Stratfordian standards of moralistic judgment about Edward de Vere's character applied here -- should clearly be deemed unfit to have written great literature.

Carey's biography of Golding reveals the Nobel laureate to have been, in his own words, a "monster" who admitted in his own journals that "I understand the Nazis because that's basically what I am." In those same journals, Golding owns up, for instance, to an attempted sexual assault on an underaged girl.

Golding's journals, Carey says, contain a kind of self-loathing and deep-seated shame -- the full origins of which are not entirely clear. Carey qualifies Golding's sensational "Nazi" remark to note that, unlike the poet Ezra Pound, Golding was never a supporter of the Third Reich. Rather, Golding's strange confession might seem to stem from a more generalized understanding he felt, in some primal way, for organized acts of depravity or inhumanity.

These horrific qualities of one of the great British novelists of the 20th century of course provide only one small insight into a man who also gave the world one of the most stunning and poignant portraits of the savagery inherent in all human societies.

But it would also appear that, in this case at least, Golding knew all too well the monstrous extremes to which human behavior can sometimes descend. Clearly a redeeming grace was his extraordinary talent for rendering it into words.

My general response to those who try to pull the moral argument against Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" is to ask if they've ever actually read, say, Titus Andronicus. Or Pericles. Or how about Macbeth?

To that list I might now add Lord of the Flies -- and then point them toward Carey's new bio.

[Creative Commons image by Sun_Dazed]

Continues...

Order in the Courthouse: The Wrath of Kahn

The legal newswire syndicate Courthouse News Service today ran a column taking on the Oxfordians and "Shakespeare" By Another Name in particular. And while I try to resist the temptation of answering critics at every turn, this particular columnist -- Robert Kahn -- cranked out some factually dubious and just-plain-untrue statements that deserved some kind of recognition.

Kahn leads off his opening argument with the remark that "[Oxfordian] U.S. Supreme Court Justice... John Paul Stevens doesn't know Shakespeare from a goose."

Attempting to correct the record, Kahn goes on to goose up some of his own Shakespearean claims. "We know that Shakespeare acted in Macbeth before King James II [sic]," Kahn says. (There actually are no records of any performance of Macbeth for the first King James. A restoration version of the Scots play may have been performed for James II, but unless Kahn's Bard was also a vampire, it's unlikely that the 123-year-old Stratford actor would have been doing much when the restoration Macbeth treaded the boards c. 1687.)

We also know, Kahn says, "that someone knocked out 'the Scottish play' in a few weeks especially for the new king, who liked ghost stories."

Um... nice try. James I may have liked ghost stories, but the other bit about the Scots play isn't true either.

A few potshots ensue about SBAN and the "dreck" of de Vere's early song lyrics. (I'd be curious to know if the columnist has read any great authors' juvenilia, such as the Bronte sisters' none-too-soaring early works.)

But then come Kahn's two real howlers. First that Mark Twain only believed that "someone else wrote Shakespeare -- who also happened to be named William Shakespeare." (Yours truly, Kahn says, "cheats" by supposedly falsely stating that Twain was an anti-Stratfordian.)

Again: Wow. Kahn is just plain wrong. He seems to be a witty guy who might enjoy a good read. Mark Twain's 1909 anti-Stratfordian opus Is Shakespeare Dead? comes highly recommended.

Last but not least, Kahn states that SBAN is itself fundamentally flawed, because, "The notion that the man who may have been the greatest creative genius the world has ever known would spend his old age rewriting his old plays over and over, after they already had been acted, is psychologically ridiculous."

"A creative genius," he says, "does not spend his old age polishing up stuff he wrote as a pup."

By way of counter-example, one might point the wayward jurist in the direction of a man who in fact did just that. Many consider the man to be a "creative genius." Some, in fact, consider the man to be the closest America has ever come to our own Shakespeare.

Whatever the case, this "creative genius" did spend his latter years, into old age, revising and re-revising his own masterwork.

His name was Walt Whitman.

And bonus round, Mr. Kahn: Whitman was an anti-Stratfordian too.

[Creative Commons image by Thomas Roche]

Continues...