I never let the truth get in the way of a good story

The noise and fury over the question of who wrote Shakespeare is unabated. On the contrary. This, if not the most significant, certainly the most attractive theatrical topic of the last fifteen years does not cease to arouse the widest interest not only in the theater world but also in the general public and the media.

Since the last time we wrote about this topic ("Time" No. 1512-1513), many candidates have fallen out of the race for the right to carry the famous name of the greatest playwright of all time, such as Francis Bacon, Edward Dyer, Henry Neville, Queen Elizabeth or Walter Raleigh, and on the scene we were left with members of a conspiratorial group of aristocrats and their friends who published plays under the pseudonym Shakespeare and two, a sports dictionary, super heavyweight – Lord Oxford and William of Stratford. The favorite to win was long the mainstream contender from Stratford, followed by Oxford and in third place, a group of aristocrats and artists from the so-called Group Theory. However, judging by the number and attendance of forums, symposiums and lectures, as well as the frequency of publication of new publications, one gets the impression that in this race Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Viscount of Bulbec, has taken a slight lead for the time being.

The Stratfordians, with their candidate William Shakespeare, are somewhat behind, and the advocates of the aforementioned Group Theory are gaining strength, further encouraged by new discoveries. Based on the results of recent, very extensive interdisciplinary research, the editors New Oxford Shakespeare from 2016, the most authoritative edition of Shakespeare's collected works, caused a real storm on the otherwise calm sea of ​​contemporary theater. Namely, not only did they attribute as many as seventeen of Shakespeare's plays to his collaboration with other authors, but also three works Henry VI signed as co-authorship by Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, his biggest rival on the London stage at the time.

William Shakespeare, whoever he was, did not write his plays, or at least some of them, by himself. In addition to Marlowe, George Peel, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Thomas Nash and others helped him in this. It has been shown that Shakespeare's close collaboration with other authors, until recently denied in theatrology, is not only possible but also certain. These discoveries do not directly support the thesis that William of Stratford is not the author of plays at all, but they show that unexpected collaborations that we were not aware of until now occurred more often than thought, and therefore the idea that several people are responsible for the creation of Shakespeare's oeuvre is gaining ground. strength. If several writers, even direct rivals such as Shakespeare and Marlowe, could collaborate on the same play, then it is easier to imagine that different authors wrote individual plays and then published them under the common name William Shakespeare.

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THREE SHAKESPEARES

And since even after tens of thousands of papers dealing with the topic of authorship, countless forums, TV and radio broadcasts, we are not, it seems, any closer to a consensus in the scientific community, it has become clear that those who have more evidence will not prevail, but those who more successfully present their case to the public, and to the widest one. From the field of evidence, we moved on to the question of the narrative - which story seems more believable and acceptable as a whole.

The one about a fantastically educated young aristocrat who spoke Latin, ancient Greek, Italian, French, studied in Italy, traveled almost all of Europe, a lover and connoisseur of art who must not reveal his incredible talent to the public because it is his title and rigid social rules they do not allow, who is forced to observe how all the glory, so important to the Elizabethan aristocracy, is appropriated by an ordinary actor and theater broker, the son of a glove maker and a smuggler wheat from a provincial town in middle England.

Or the one about a man of humble origins and an even humbler education, who leaves his family and goes to the big city to conquer it in just a few years with the power of his talent, whose plays are performed at the royal court, whose verses are swallowed by the audience in the crowded theaters of London, for whom contemporaries said "that he did not belong to one age, but to all times", a unique genius of incredible imagination, who managed to accurately and convincingly evokes many countries and cities and their customs.

Or the one about a group of the most prominent artists and aristocrats of the age, which included, among others, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland and his wife Elizabeth Sidney, who met regularly at estate of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke within an informal group known as Wilton House Circle, where they exchanged artistic ideas, read poetry, played music, performed alchemical experiments and secretly wrote plays which they placed on the London stage through a skilled theater entrepreneur and episodic actor, lover of easy money, a certain William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

MOVIE VERSIONS

The first two of the mentioned narratives in recent years have, as expected, also received their film productions in the form of two artistically ambitious and production-expensive films. After the serious blow that Ronald Emmerich gave to the Stratfordian idea in the wider population with his very successful Anonymous from 2011, the Stratfordians led, as expected, by Kenneth Branagh responded with a film with a suggestive name, which leaves no room for doubting the author's ambitions - All is True from 2018. Both films were made in serious productions, visually rich, with top acting divisions, no expense was spared in this War of the Roses of contemporary theater.

Although both sides in this conflict sometimes, and more often lately, have a freer attitude towards historical truth, especially in the creation of the character of the main character from Stratford, the fact remains that, in the absence of historical documents, much can be said about the personality, character and sensibility of the author. infer from what he wrote. Of course, such interpretations are not exact in every detail, but there is no doubt that in our case we are dealing with a person of very high moral principles, fantastically broad education, polyglot and erudite, but at the same time a sophisticated personality and romance. Which, with all of the above, was most likely bisexual or gay. This kind of characterization was very rarely questioned, so both Branagh and Emmerich had to use all their skill and technique to make their Shakespeare - Oxford and William as similar as possible to this kind of portrait.

Anonymous

Brana thus begins his film with a long close-up of the famous Shandos portrait, which shows a striking, black-faced man with a penetrating and intelligent gaze, with a gold earring in one ear. He is pensive and slightly melancholic, insightful and curious. He looks just like the Shakespeare we expect. The only thing is that there is not a single, nor the truest proof that William from Stratford was painted in this portrait. The director, experienced, concluded that it would be a suggestive way to hint to his viewers in the very first frame what his cinematic Shakespeare will be like.

The big, probably the biggest problem in portraying William as a bard, a dignified creator with firm principles and great empathy, as we can glimpse through his plays and poetry, is Shakespeare's testament that has been preserved. Apart from the fact that there is not a single word in it about the written works, which clearly supports the thesis that he did not even write them, there is also no mention of William's wife Anne Hathaway, except on the other side of the will, where it is subsequently written between the lines that his wife leaving only the famous "second best bed in the house". He left a small sum of money to his younger daughter, Judith, and left all the other considerable property to his second daughter, Susan. In this way, Anne Hathaway was left without any property and it is not known what happened to her. A possible assumption is that she stayed to live with her daughter and son-in-law, but there is no evidence for this.

The defenders of the character and the work found a wide variety of justifications for this behavior, none of them particularly convincing, so Kenneth Branagh and the screenwriters decided not to look for some dramatic solutions to the problem, but simply asserted that according to the law at that time, a woman was entitled to a third of her husband's property, so therefore there was no need to mention her in the will. Of course, no such law existed in England at that time.

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ALL IS TRUE

On the other hand, Emmerich has the problem of connecting the character of his hero with the author King Lear, Bure i Macbeth solved elegantly. He simply attributed all his erudition, sophistication and sensibility to aristocratic Oxford, portraying him as just that, a melancholic, unfulfilled poet, constrained by the demands of his title and a sharp-eyed wife, without any understanding of art and the life of poverty that doing art and not any serious business usually brings. During one visit to the theater, he realizes how much power it can have on the audience and decides to show his many written plays, which are gathering dust on the shelf in his study, to the audience, just under someone else's name.

Other problems in portraying the protagonist convincingly for the Stratfordians and Kenneth Branagh were William's humble upbringing, his relationship with his own family, and the clear indications of his homosexual affinities, as we find them in the sonnets. Which, it seems, is quite a controversy to clear up in just one movie. There is no solid evidence that William of Stratford attended school at all, although it is almost certain that he did, but it is not known for how many years, and in Bran's film, the extraordinary erudition and deep knowledge of the vast number of professions and skills that we find in Shakespeare is explained by the genius and talent of the great writer , who compensated for his lack of education simply by imagination and thinking. On the other hand, the data from his life give the image of a cold personality, egocentric and materialistic; it is known that he left his wife and children and moved to London by himself, that he did not attend the funeral of his early deceased son, and we also have a very interesting fact that all members of his family - father, mother, wife and two daughters - were illiterate. Also, the conservative, patriarchal attitudes that are recognized in his testament by no means correspond to the gentleness and understanding of many female characters in his plays and their subordinate position in society and family.

DIRECTOR'S SOLUTIONS

Faced with such difficulties, the authors of the film looked for simple and effective solutions - William was not at his son's funeral because he was not notified in time, he did leave the family, but he believed that it was enough for them that he provided for them materially and that he tried to he balances his obligations to them and his talent, and that the fact that no one in his family could read was common at the time, which is not entirely true. Namely, very often daughters, especially from somewhat wealthier families, received primary education and were literate. Certain controversies about Shakespeare's sexuality were resolved by Bran in a superbly acted scene in which the now aged writer and his patron and protector the Earl of Southampton hint at the existence of a strong but platonic mutual attraction from their youth. After all, we got a cinematic portrait of a sensitive and delicate self-taught genius, torn between artistic ambitions and attachment to his family, who harbored forbidden feelings for his patron, but persistently hid them.

Ronald Emmerich, again, made an effort not only to give his Oxford candidate the expected characteristics of a Shakespearean writer, but also, at the same cost, to denigrate the competition, may we be forgiven for a small colloquialism. Thus William of Anonymous a shameless, talentless, skillful and shameless manipulator, a cruel man who abandoned his family and pursues only personal interests. We see a merchant and a moneylender, not at all an artist, which was not enough for the authors of the film, so they decided to place a motive from one of the fringe theories according to which William from Stratford was not only uneducated but also functionally illiterate, all based on a really somewhat uncertain handwriting such as we see it in the six preserved signatures, which are also the only thing that Shakespeare wrote in his own hand that has been preserved to this day. The entire campaign against the unfortunate Will ended with the accusation that he had personally killed Christopher Marlowe, which until then had not occurred to even the most staunch anti-Stratfordians. There are indeed a number of unknowns and controversies surrounding Marlowe's death, but probably the only thing that is certain in all of this is that he was not killed by his colleague from Stratford-upon-Avon.

In the end, without wanting to engage in film criticism at this point, we can state that both mentioned films presented their case quite skilfully and convincingly, albeit with a more or less relaxed attitude towards historical truth. So much so that it seems as if the jury in some imaginary trial would have a really hard job deciding which side was more persuasive. And we are left to re-read Shakespeare, expect new discoveries by theater scholars and researchers and hope that the third story, the one about the group of authors on Lady Pembroke's estate, will see its film adaptation.