‘Will’ imagines punk Shakespeare — the latest of our fantasies of the Bard
We hear the sound of a crowd clapping in unison, chanting an indecipherable name, faster and faster, and then exploding in applause. When the applause fades, we see a lone hand holding a quill to parchment. The quill forms a few letters, then pauses and scratches them out. The camera moves to show us a handsome face, eyebrows furrowed in thought.
“Who will want a play by William Shakespeare?” a female voice calls out, breaking the mood. We see a woman standing, arms crossed, in the corner of a candlelit room.
It’s the first of many winkwink moments in “Will,” a new TNT show about the writer’s life. The series, which debuts Monday evening, was created he even write his own plays?)
Perhaps it’s because there’s something titillating about unmasking the man whose name has become synonymous with genius, and whose plays embody universal ideas.
Alexa Alice Joubin, a professor of English and Shakespeare scholar at George Washington University, says that representations of the writer’s life fall into three categories. There are parodies, such as the BBC Two sitcom “Upstart Crow,” which imagines Shakespeare as a hapless Stratford dad with a daughter who rolls her eyes at his puns. Then there are dramas, such as Roland Emmerich’s film “Anonymous” (tagline: “Was Shakespeare a fraud?”), which draw on fringe academic theories about Shakespeare’s authorship.
And finally, there are fantasies, such as the Academy Award-winning movie “Shakespeare in Love,” which imagine a Shakespearean life as full of romance and tragedy as a Shakespearean play.
Though these categories employ different means — mockery, conspiracy, romanticization — all aim to show that “Shakespeare’s not the person he appears to be,” Joubin says. Or rather that he, the source of those lines so familiar as to seem originless, is a person at all.
“Shakespeare in Love” shows the Bard lying prone in an apothecary’s shop, like a patient in his psychoanalyst’s office. “Words, words, words,” he sighs to the apothecary, bemoaning his writer’s block and sexual frustration (“It’s as if my quill is broken”). The scene’s cleverness comes from its merging of two incongruous registers: the poetry of “Hamlet” and the complaints of a modern neurotic. The pleasure in making Shakespeare corporeal is the pleasure of imagining timeless wisdom emanating from a body as
clumsy as our own.
It helps, though, if that body has deep blue-green eyes and dark wavy locks of hair, as does “Will’s” Laurie Davidson. Because while we want a human Shakespeare, we also want a special Shakespeare. Show us the man behind the plays, we say, but don’t ruin the romance entirely.
That’s the real wink-wink of “Will”: the curtain drops to show us the man, then goes back up again to present another spectacle. There’s a scene in the first episode, where the Bard and his players go to a pub to celebrate their first success. A well-known author begins to tease the young playwright, mocking his
humble origins. The camera zooms in on Davidson as he swallows nervously and sputters, “Why?” For a moment, we’re in Shakespeare’s head, struggling with him to come up with a witty retort.
But then Davidson stands up and delivers insults, in rhyme. The spat becomes a rap battle.
Will a soap like “Will” help us probe the depths of genius? Or make sense of scholarly debates? No, but that has never been the goal of those who have fictionalized Shakespeare’s life, and it’s not necessarily Pearce’s.
“No one really knows if Shakespeare had a rap battle,” Pearce says. “But, hey, wouldn’t it be great if he did?”