Comment In search of the real Shakespeare
the life of William Shakespeare. There are only 11 written documents that make reference to his career and there’s no particular reason why any of his biographies should last more than a thousand words.
Desperate to fill in the blanks, many modern historians have turned to the era in which he lived and concluded that Chekhov simply had to have got it wrong.
It’s almost inconceivable that Shakespeare wasn’t aware of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, not to mention, the heroic adventures of Drake.
Given that his troupe performed at court, it’s hard to imagine that he lacked any kind of insight into the aristocracy, but again, it’s very difficult for us to be certain of anything.
In my early teens, I read a brief biography of the Bard that concluded with these words: “Barring some miraculous discovery, we’ll never know anything more about his life.”
In other words, there might just be a pile of documents in this world that have yet to be discovered and maybe, just maybe, these documents might explain the mystery of his life.
How the heck did he write all these plays? Did anybody help him? What was his source material and are there any other plays and sonnets that we have yet to find?
From the moment I read it, I found it exciting and I guess that one sentence remains the premise of my own novel, Shakespeare’s Diaries.”
Although I tried to shy away from real revelation, the book does speculate how the world might react if it were to be confronted with the facts.
Shakespeare might have been the sort of standard issue liberal that your average luvvie would approve of, but he might not.
What reason do we have to believe that Shakespeare was a committed Guardian reader?
Some scholars have read a degree of sexual ambiguity into his sonnets, but it’s at least as reasonable to suggest that he was a committed homophobe. And yet, if the inner machinations of the Shakespearean mind were suddenly put online, we might not like what we saw.
If Shylock really is the villain, then it’s not at all unreasonable to suggest that one or two Jewish film moguls in Hollywood would put an outright ban on further Shakespeare productions. But so what? If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us are imperfect and most creative people certainly are.
Quite a lot of celebrities seem to have an odd upbringing.
One of my friends is a theatre director with some pretty derogatory ideas about actors. As far as he is concerned, they’re all flawed.
“Something bad happens to them in early childhood. Maybe they are the youngest child in a big family and they always resented the lack of attention.”
The rest of their lives becomes a quest to find an audience and we should hardly sound surprised when we find them drunk, dead in the bath or wheeling through rehab.
It’s a competitive field out there, and they know it.
There’s nothing these people won’t do to get ahead in life and only the most naive among us felt any sense of surprise when the Weinstein story broke.
People have speculated that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of his own plays, but I don’t buy this.
What little evidence we do have all points in the same direction and, for the time being, we have to assume that Shakespeare wrote his own material.
Somewhat unusually for a dramatist, Shakespeare’s mind wandered between several different genres.
In modern times, we’ve become familiar with people who only ever write thrillers, erotica, mystery or romance. But Shakespeare flipped from comedy to tragedy without any real sense of concern.
At times he consciously seeks to cater for all levels of ability, switching from action to romance and so on to the sort of blunt sexual references that would be impossible to broadcast on modern television.
In the Elizabethan theatre, this sort of thing seems to have been normal.
Some of it smacks more of Carry On than the National Theatre.
In 1590, the high and mighty just sat there while a bunch of toothless halfwits burst into laughter.
They’d paid their money and they got their dirty jokes.
A bit of violence, a bit of snogging, sometimes even a sequel.
When we watch his plays today, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Falstaff keeps cropping up in the damned things, and this has got to say something about his popularity with the crowd. Shakespeare must have had an older male actor who knew how to carry that role. Steve Cutts is a Worcestershire
based doctor and writer
People have speculated that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of his own plays, but I don’t buy this