Shakespeare as Inspired Plagiarist

Riffs on Shakespeare: The Beard of Avon
The Bluma Appel Theatre
The National Post

Amy Freed, an American playwright, offers a fantasia on that reddest of herrings: the Shakespeare authorship controversy. The theory -- the plays could only have been written by a university graduate, preferably aristocratic -- is, of course, snobbish rubbish. I'd like to say Don't Get Me Started, but since I obviously have started, here are my own, mostly unoriginal, thoughts:

1. It's true the plays could not have been written by an "illiterate bumpkin" but there's no evidence that that's what Shakespeare was. He had a good grammar-school education whose curriculum has been painstakingly documented by modern scholars. Ben Jonson's famous comment about "small Latin and less Greek" merely means that Will was less good at these subjects than Ben himself was; it also carries the clear message that these were deficiencies Shakespeare easily overcame.

2. The supposedly arcane information contained in the plays was easily available in their printed sources, most of which we know.

3. Theatre people were in constant contact with courtiers and politicians; companies were obliged by law to have noble patrons. If there was anything Shakespeare couldn't work out for himself about top people's behaviour, all he had to do was ask.

4. Shakespeare's contemporaries all tackled the same kind of historical and political subjects that he did, and most of them give the impression that they know what they're talking about. Were all their plays ghosted by earls?

5. Shakespeare's immediate predecessors were known collectively as the University Wits. Their plays, for the most part, have not worn well. In other words, the graduate class had its chance and failed.

6. Some of the most erudite playwrights since, from Jonson to Stoppard, have lacked a college education.

7. One thing we do know about Shakespeare is that he was an actor. This seems a better preparation for writing effective plays than any amount of Privy Councilling and trolling around Italy.

8. If you're looking for first-hand experience in the plays, try the scenes set in fields, villages or taverns. You may wonder at a Warwickshire tradesman's son having created Hamlet; you should wonder more at the idea of the Earl of Oxford, currently most favoured of the pretenders, having dreamed up Bottom the weaver. Or any of the other immortal low lifes. The Beard of Avon, in fact, has Oxford, on his deathbed, admitting to Shakespeare "I could never have come up with Falstaff."

Freed's comedy presents the lord and the player as collaborators, and her piece is actually a lot less subversive than she would like it to look. What she provides is a new riff on the theme of Shakespeare as inspired plagiarist, as the man who, according to Shaw, could tell a story so long as somebody else told it to him first, or who, in the words of Walter Kerr, was not only the playwright's playwright but the kleptomaniac's kleptomaniac. Only here, instead of getting his plots from Plutarch, Holinshed or assorted Italian romancers, he gets them from Oxford. Or from Francis Bacon, or Lady Lettice Knollys or from Elizabeth I herself. Freed has had the bright idea of assembling all the authorial candidates who have ever been proposed, and making them bid for Shakespeare's services. Bacon, apparently, is the most hopeless hack of the bunch. The Queen, weary of ruling, fantasizes about being ruled, and comes up with the first draft of The Taming of the Shrew. We see it rehearsed, and Kate's submission speech has never sounded less embarrassing. Shakespeare improves the piece, of course, just as he does Lady Lettice's attempt at King Lear. (As she wrote it, it's all about the reading of a will.) As far as I could tell, the only play in the canon for which Freed denies Shakespeare any credit at all is Titus Andronicus. Hers is really a very orthodox argument.

Oxford remains the prime mover: a brilliantly gifted piece of sleaze who never saw a neighbour's wife he didn't covet, at least on his heterosexual days. He has a mind and a wit but he lacks concentration and the common touch. Both of these are supplied by Shakespeare, an untutored rustic who has a mild turn for rhyme but who, when we first meet him down on the farm, is unable to say anything about the rain except that it raineth, which he repeats three times. He escapes from Stratford and from his wife, joins the players and is taken on by Oxford as a literary front man. Before long he is supplying all the best bits in the plays. The two men are also, uneasily, friends. Their scenes together, as they both begin to realize which of them has the talent, are freshly conceived and excellently executed.

They take a long time to set up, though; and the play's first half is mostly awful. There is much cod-Elizabethan dialogue; we all know that our ancestors were readier with words than we are, but I doubt if their facility extended to speaking extempore in blank verse or rhyming couplets. (And, of course, pretending that they did makes impossible any serious examination of the link between how these people talked and how they wrote. So there goes the authorship question.)

We get ghastly parodies of early Renaissance drama, which Freed seems to think was composed of phallic gags and very little else; some terrible pre-Shakespearean plays have indeed come down to us, but none as ghastly as these.

David Storch's production is as uneven as the play: shameful in the bad parts, truthful in the good. The scenes at court are as clumsy as those in the barn, with Brenda Robins' Elizabeth a mere echo of all the player-queens who have preceded her (though, oddly, she sounds less than usual like Glenda Jackson). Stephen Ouimette's Oxford is uneasy at first but develops a fine wit-flicking style with a dark undercoating of self-hatred. Michael Spencer-Davis' Shakespeare is a complete success, buffeted but resilient. As an actor this Will seems ahead of his time; he asks about motivation, and complains "call you this direction?" when he doesn't get it.

There is a virtual sub-plot concerning Shakespeare's marriage. Anne Hathaway follows her husband to London, disguises herself as a whore and -- like one of Will's own comic heroines -- gains entrance to his bed without him recognizing her. This is a nice in-joke in a play that's full of them, but it barely connects with the rest of the action.

It does, though, enable Gina Wilkinson to display an equal talent for self-transformation; her Anne, a coarse harridan at home, becomes very warm and crushable when on the loose. Peter C. Wylde presents John Heminge, Shakespeare's colleague and eventual editor, as North Country actor-manager of what must already have been the old school; a weathered senior when he subjects Will to his first audition, he must have been a centenarian by the time he brought out the First Folio. Peter Hartwell contributes a burnished set that's a dead witty ringer for the platform stage at the Stratford Festival.