Riffs on Shakespeare: Anonymous
Columbian pictures corporation
The National Post

So what I want to know is: Who wrote the tavern scenes?

Controversies about the authorship of the works published under the name of William Shakespeare always start from the sceptic's conviction that no unlettered actor could possibly have acquired such an intimate knowledge of political affairs, and high life generally, as appears in the plays, or have possessed the classical education needed to read up on the source material. It seems to underpin the new movie Anonymous, which takes up the theory that the real author was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

I say "seems" because the authorship question gets shunted to the side in the film, which is far more concerned with defacing another cherished historical image, that of England's Virgin Queen. The Elizabeth I of Anonymous enjoys a promiscuous private life and has apparently given secret birth to about half the young noblemen in the queendom.

It's a fun frolic, and Vanessa Redgrave is quite wonderful as Elizabeth, maybe even better than Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love. Though the earlier film is even more fun and, since it cheerfully acknowledges its own anachronisms, far more worth taking seriously. It's especially moving and persuasive when it shows the first audience of Romeo and Juliet stunned for a moment and then cheering and applauding as if they'd never seen anything like it. Which, if you look at the plays written before it, they wouldn't have.

There's nothing that convincing in Anonymous, which is partly "Oxford in Love," since the earl is presented as one of the queen's old flames. In the real world, he's proven to be the most durable pretender to the Shakespearean throne, though there have been plenty of others. The late Samuel Schoenbaum, redoubtable Shakespearean scholar and biographer, once wrote that he couldn't take a holiday without fellow travellers approaching him and asking him what he thought about the real author being Francis Bacon. It was the one thing about the plays of which everybody seemed to have heard.

In the 1950s, an American named Calvin Hoffman mounted a vigorous campaign to prove that Shakespeare's fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe had survived his supposed death in a tavern brawl and had ghosted the plays from a European hide-out. Hoffman even got permission to open the tomb of one of Marlowe's patrons, hoping to find the Shakespearean manuscripts in there. Richard Burton, guesting on a radio comedy show at the time, quipped that the host comic's ambition to be a classical actor was enough to make Shakespeare turn in Marlowe's grave. And people knew what he meant. Those were the days.

Anonymous begins with another distinguished actor, Derek Jacobi, conceivably playing himself, intoning on how suspicious it is that nobody has ever discovered the manuscript of a Shakespeare play bearing Shakespeare's signature. He's right about that. Nobody has ever found a Shakespearean manuscript, in a tomb or out of it. But that doesn't mean anything, because we don't have the manuscripts of other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists either. They can't all have been frauds or frontmen. The Jacobi prologue goes on to say that Shakespeare's father was illiterate, and so were his daughters. That hardly proves that he himself was, and in fact Anonymous goes on to cover its flank by admitting that, as an actor, Shakespeare could hardly have learned his lines if he couldn't read. In fact, if he went to the Stratford-on-Avon grammar school, as we have no reason to believe he didn't, he would have received a rigorous if narrow education, especially in Latin.

He didn't go to university; we do know that. And his immediate predecessors, the mostly self-destructive group of writers known as the University Wits, knew it too, and resented it; one of them, Robert Greene, wrote a deathbed denunciation of the "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers" who fancied himself "the only Shake- scene in a country." But then Ben Jonson (who plays an especially implausible role in Anonymous) didn't go to university either, had in fact less formal education than Shakespeare, but he still wrote the most aggressively erudite plays of the age. It would be easy to point to other formidable theatrical auto-didacts, from Bernard Shaw to Tom Stoppard and Edward Bond. How did they find out what they needed to find out? They read, they listened, they imagined, they invented. And so, obviously, did Shakespeare. Anti-Stratfordians love to say, for example, that only a well-heeled traveller could have known all the details about Italy that appear in the comedies. But he only had to ask.

And he would have known the right people. Anonymous, presumably on the principle that if you're going to deface a literary monument you may as well do a thorough job of it, presents him as a graceless oaf who murders Marlowe to stop him from blabbing and cutting off the supply of Oxford's hush-money. In fact he was a highly successful actor-manager, at a time when all theatres were obliged by law to have aristocratic patronage. His company was the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men. He would have seen at first hand how noblemen talked and behaved. So, by the way, would all his colleagues. John Webster's two great tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, are every bit as courtly and "political" and learned and Italianate as any of Shakespeare's, and we know far less about his life than we do about Shakespeare's, but nobody goes about claiming his plays for Oxford or any other contemporary toff. But then of course he isn't as prime a piece of cultural real-estate as Shakespeare.

It's not as if Shakespeare's English and Roman histories are full of arcane information, accessible only to scholars or diplomats. Rather, they suggest an author who had read the chronicles, been fired by their stories, and set about asking himself how real men and women would talk and behave in such situations, putting himself inside his characters' heads as if he were - I don't know, some kind of actor. For performers of the calibre of Jacobi or Mark Rylance to join the deniers, both in and out of the movie, is a particularly galling kind of trahison des clercs.

Of course, you don't have to be an actor to write great plays, but it certainly helps to have knocked about the theatre a bit. (How could Oxford or any of the other courtly contenders have attended rehearsals? It would have blown their cover.) The author of the Shakespeare plays must have knocked about other low places as well, which brings me back to my opening question. Not every Shakespeare scene takes place in a palace. The ones that bear the plainest marks of personal experience and, being in prose rather than verse, the plainest marks of reported speech, happen on the streets, in pubs, in brothels (OK, the nobility probably knew something about those), in police courts, among thieves and whores and bar staff and cashiered soldiers. When they're set out of town they deal, realistically, with artisans and rural labourers and country constables: exactly the kind of people among whom the Warwickshire Shakespeare would have grown up. The orchard scenes in Henry IV, set in the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire, are extraordinary pieces of naturalistic writing. I don't think a sheltered earl could have written them. I don't think he'd have known where to start. (I can't resist mentioning here the one sceptic who came at the authorship question from the opposite direction, Charlie Chaplin. He thought the plays could only have been written by someone of humbler origin than Shakespeare, someone like himself.)

Even given the talent, which there's no evidence he possessed, it's hard to conceive of some noble amateur writing all those plays in secret: A couple perhaps, as an exercise, but 37? And why wouldn't he at least have put his name to the narrative poems, to which no social stigma would have been attached? He must also, since he died before several of the greatest were produced, have stockpiled them, which would necessitate a rate of composition even more staggering than Shakespeare's own.

I'll give the doubters one thing. Shakespeare spent his last years in retirement at Stratford, not writing anything. It's hard to think of any comparable artist who simply stopped producing. But maybe he just thought he'd done his job, and saw no need to go on doing it. It's almost impossible to imagine the man who could have written those plays. But one thing about him seems clear, though it's the one that seems to infuriate a lot of people. He was a professional.