Bad Quartos

This bit of Bard-inspired pop passed along by reader A.N.. I kind of like the song "Every Day" -- about Twelfth Night based around a cooled-out version of the riff from Led Zeppelin's "The Song Remains The Same." (Originals of songs here.)

If music be the food of love, press "on"

Readers in the New York city area may want to tune their teevees and TiVos to Channel 13 (WNET) on Thursday night at 8 for a great little documentary on the acclaimed Hudson Valley Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night blogged about below.

As the show's director and one of its cast members told the SBAN blog, Edward de Vere's life story played no small role in inspiring the present production of Shakespeare's Illyrian comedy. Channel 13's cameras were on the scene recording the making-of this Twelfth Night -- a behind the scenes documentary that the New York Daily News said is "a lot of fun."

Here's a video clip.

Then, from 9 to 11, WNET airs the truly inspired production itself. While the director's proselytizing about de Vere (and "Shakespeare" By Another Name) didn't quite make the final cut in the "making-of" doc, the proof is ultimately in the show itself. The evening I was fortunate enough to be in the audience, last month, the end-result was as clear as could be: This director and these actors, quite simply, nailed it. I've not seen a funnier, more musical, more lyrical, more vivacious Twelfth Night.

Thankfully, the show, at least briefly, lives on.

The big debate and why it matters

The debate over Edward de Vere's contribution to (or authorship of) the Shake-speare canon has been smoldering for generations, since a British schoolmaster with a funny name first suggested de Vere might indeed be da Bard. And the fallback position one often hears is "Really, though, why does any of this matter?"

The following comment from a recent BBC article on the authorship controversy aptly summarizes the point:

What does is matter who wrote the books? They are great reads regardless of the class or caste of the author. It's a silly argument and we should just appreciate the work.

There are, of course, many earnest attempts to straightforwardly answer this objection that are already online. I won't add to that volume here.

Instead, I recently put the "What does it matter" question to two members of a New York Times and Wall Street Journal-acclaimed production of Twelfth Night, staged by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y.

The play's director, John Christian Plummer, had come across a copy of "Shakespeare" By Another Name two weeks into rehearsals. He says, from this first-hand experience, that knowing the historical context of de Vere's life and times helps both Shakespeare directors and actors tremendously.

The actor here, Eleanor Handley (pictured above, left), also drew from de Vere's life (and particularly that of de Vere's sister Mary) in her brilliant portrayal of Twelfth Night's trickster Maria.



In fact, the New York PBS affiliate WNET chronicled the rehearsals and behind-the-scenes perspectives on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare's production of Twelfth Night and will be airing a documentary about it on September 18 -- followed by an airing of this truly inspired adaptation of the Bard's Illyrian comedy.

Twenty-one score and ten years ago...

On this day in 1578, a Portuguese king did something really really stupid. And the aftershocks of said king's blunder reverberate throughout the play Twelfth Night.

Don Sebastian of Portugal was a 24-year-old warmonger who had taken it as his destiny to invade an Islamic nation -- a militaristic and foolhardy little crusade. (Thank god nothing like that ever happens anymore.) In the summer of 1578, Sebastian set sail for Morocco, confident that he would return with a new jewel in the Portuguese crown. On August 4, Sebastian led his outnumbered troops into, essentially, a Christian slaughterhouse, the Battle of Alcacer Quibir.

Sebastian disregarded the pleas of his commanders, who implored him to flee, once the Portuguese army's defeat was assured. But the bullheaded king soldiered on. He was last seen fighting furiously deep behind enemy lines.

King Sebastian was almost certainly killed 430 years ago today. But many in his country refused to give up hope. They insisted that their lost leader would one day wash ashore and spearhead the great Portuguese empire that never came to be. "Sebastianism" is, in fact, an undercurrent of Portuguese (and by extension, Brazilian) culture to this day. The polymorphous 20th century poet Fernando Pessoa -- a writer who assumed an astonishing number of pseudonyms -- chronicled Sebastianism in his poem "The Message." (An epic that was later translated into English and recorded by pioneering hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.)

(OK, that last parenthetical remark isn't quite true.)

The reason the Bard cared about any of this was that with Sebastian's death -- or alleged death -- came a succession struggle that was ultimately settled, in 1580, by King Philip II of Spain incorporating Portugual, along with its massive navy, into his dominions. This meant Spain was now a naval power to rival any in Europe and could thus confidently embark on her own (Catholic) crusade to destroy the heretic Queen of England. Cue the Spanish Armada.

Circa 1580, however, there was a dwindling but still distant hope that a different successor to the Portuguese throne could be found. Inserting this alternative king onto the Portuguese throne would have cut off Spain's anti-Protestant invasion plans at the knees.

One of the leading pretenders to the Portuguese crown, one supported by both Queen Elizabeth and a number of her prominent courtiers at the time, was a distant relative of Sebastian named Don Antonio.


The story of Shake-speare's Twelfth Night is in part the story of two friends, ANTONIO and SEBASTIAN, who are reunited when the latter washes ashore and into the action of the drama. SEBASTIAN is widely believed to have perished at sea, and he and his chum ANTONIO spend much of the play attempting to disentangle themselves from a series of misapprehensions that are the stock-in-trade of Shake-spearean comedy.

Twelfth Night, in other words, paints a satirical portrait of European geopolitics from 1580 -- two decades before the play is thought to have been written.

As I discussed at the Concord Shakespeare Conference in May, this is just one of a series of topical references in Twelfth Night that would seem to date it to circa 1580, not circa 1600.

As blogged below, there is a chronology problem in the Shake-speare canon. But the problem is that a vast majority of the evidence points to initial composition dates for these plays years -- decades, in some cases -- earlier than is now accepted. And it all comes to a halt in 1604, the year Edward de Vere died.

That is a harangue for another time. (How about, say, October 10 in White Plains, N.Y.?)

For now, though, it's enough, I think, just to marvel at that vast Rube Goldberg device also known as history.


If a crazy Portuguese king hadn't launched an even crazier invasion of Morocco on this date 430 years ago, the king of Spain wouldn't have had the military might to launch the Spanish Armada, which would have left Protestantism in England unchallenged, which may have set other rivalries in motion (e.g. Holy Roman Empire and/or Italy v. England? Spain v. Portugal? France and Holland sit this dance out?), which would have left the history of New World exploration in a complete tizzy. Who knows what country or countries would have divvied up the American spoils? (And who's to suppose Amerigo Vespucci's name would have still been memorialized as the new continent's namesake?)

Bienvenue auf Nuovo Deutschland, señor!

"Shakespeare's Meaning, Motivation and Message" in Concord, Mass.

Next weekend, May 30-June 1, a group of Boston-area Shakespeareans (and your correspondent, a western Mass. holdout) will host three days of Shakespearean presentations, conversations and performance in Concord, Mass., some of which will examine the plays and poems from Edward de Vere's perspective and some of which will hold to the orthodox William Shakspere/Shakespeare of Stratford school.

The Concord Shakespeare Conference and Festival is one of those rare gatherings that will bring both Montagues and Capulets--Oxforidans and Stratfordians-- to the same venue to discuss one thing both sides hold in common: a profound love of The Bard.

I will be giving a talk on Friday night at the Concord Free Library on how Twelfth Night reads like an Elizabethan courtly gossip sheet, circa 1580.

The Friday evening program (also featuring a performance by acclaimed pianist Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell and a discussion on the similarities between Mozart's and Shakespeare's genius) will be free of charge. The remainder of the weekend's full schedule will be held at the Concord Masonic Hall in Monument Square in downtown Concord. A weekend pass for Saturday and Sunday's events is $40.

As local press coverage of the event points out, Concord famous son Ralph Waldo Emerson said that tracing the identity of the Bard is "the first of all literary problems."

And as Orsino counsels his attendant Curio, "Play on."