Category Archives: entertainment

The King’s Speech

Posted on February 28, 2011 | 1 Comment

What a terrific movie! One Oxfordians can enjoy on more levels than most viewers.  For one thing, it’s full of Shakespeare references.  The King’s speech therapist is an amateur actor who’s memorized a great deal of Shakespeare, as have his sons.  He has the King, “Bertie,” aka George VI (played by Colin Firth), struggle against his disabling stutter by reciting “to be or not to be.”  The whole film is a riff on how very “uneasy” lies the head that wears the crown, and how uneasily a nation is ruled by men who inherit the role, but who are not leaders by nature.  In king after king, from Edmund Ironside and Lear to Henry VI, Shakespeare shows that none are without weakness or flaw: Edmund too trusting, Richard II too self-indulgent, Richard III wicked, Henry VI weak-minded, Lear naive.  Even the greatest, Henry V, must struggle to overcome a mispent youth.

Of the older sons of George V, none are truly capable of leading the nation.  The eldest, Edward, Prince of Wales, is appallingly weak, his attachment to his unpleasant American mistress and her Nazi friends a threat to the nation.  So when destiny calls, it falls to his younger brother, who, unprepared for the role of national leader, must battle his particular disability, a terrible stutter that makes it not just difficult to speak in public, but impossible.

Is this just bad luck, a perfectly normal result of a throw of the genetic dice?  No!  It’s the inevitable result of the unnatural upbringing still perpetrated on the children of the English aristocracy.   As Lawrence Stone shows in his Marriage, Sex and Society in England: 1500-1800, for centuries the traditions governing the raising of children were harsh beyond belief.  Parents were constantly being warned that to show any leniency would end in disaster.  Raised by nannies and governesses, children saw their parents briefly on occasions more like a drill sergeant’s review of his troops than a family get-together.  By the age of seven or eight, girls were often sent to live and work as maid-servants with well-connected friends or family members, while boys were sent to boarding schools.

This kind of childhood was meant to prepare them for the hardships of adult life.  Yet even as adults, children were still often not allowed to speak to their parents until spoken to, and when they did, would address them formally, bowing or curtsying like servants as they asked for their blessing. They were told who they would marry and were expected to toe the family line on everything.   This would continue until the death of the father, at which point his heir would take on the same set of behaviors.  (For more on this, see Born in sin.)  The results of this kind of treatment were, to say the least, not always what one might wish.

That by the third decade of the 20th century, royal children were still being raised in much the same way is clear.  Born left-handed, George was forced to use his right hand instead.  Forced to wear a painful brace, he was not allowed to make the model airplanes that interested him, but must instead collect stamps, that being a more appropriate hobby for royalty.  His father, George V, boasts of how afraid he had been of his father and how right it was that his sons should be afraid of him.  The film also portrays the ways in which the supernumeraries that surround the younger royals subtly bully them into staying within the bounds of the age-old traditions they are determined to uphold.

The movie touches briefly on the sorrow attending George’s younger brother John.  A sweet but simple-minded child who suffered from epileptic fits, the family was probably concerned that John would be used by the press to humiliate the family, so at twelve he was sent to live apart in the country with a nanny.  No one was allowed to discuss him except among themselves.  (An award-winning 2-part TV docudrama from 2003, The Lost Prince, tells the story.)

Although changes have taken place over the centuries, and today most English children of the middle classes are raised in a more relaxed fashion, for the children of aristocrats it seems the pattern of harsh or absent parenting––being raised by nannies and sent to boarding school at an early age––persists to this day.  There is a poignant anecdote about Princess Diana.  One day while at Sandringham with the Queen and family, when her boys’ nanny was taken ill, she rearranged her schedule so she could spend the day with her sons.  When the Queen heard of it she told her that that wasn’t her job and instructed her to let the servants take care of the boys.

If drama consists largely of portraying contrasts, this movie is stuffed with them: We watch a man with the most desperate performance anxiety prepare himself to perform before the most appallingly vast public audience one can imagine on the grimmest of all subjects.  Desperate to conquer his weakness, we watch as the daunting protocols of rigid royal tradition are bent to allow him to participate in the wildly creative gambits necessary to overcome his disastrous fear of speaking.  We see the overprotected aristocrat, speechless with anxiety, forced into verbal contest with the most dangerously compelling guttersnipe ever born to shriek into a microphone.  And this while the most distressing possible private family situation is made public against the backdrop an oncoming world war.  All so beautifully and lightly presented; flawlessly sequenced; perfectly cast; creatively shot; each situation masterfully enhanced with appropriate music.

And one last commendation: it shows the gifted amateur, the ad hoc speech therapist, succeeding where a phalanx of “highly accredited experts” have failed!

Now for a movie as good as this one that tells the truth about Shakespeare!

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Posted in Authorship Question, English history, English Literature, entertainment, the Reformation

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They all knew each other

Posted on May 15, 2010 | 4 Comments

It’s hard for us today to understand why a writer would wish to hide his identity.  We live in a society where, to get ahead in life, one must become known to as many people as possible.  We go to particular colleges where we can meet the right people, we “network,” we get on websites like Facebook and Myspace, we are fascinated by celebrities; magazines and television people make their livings reporting on their lives and showing pictures of their faces.

This is one reason why so many Americans, young ones in particular, are focused on achieving fame.  In a world where there are so many people, such quick turnovers, such constant movement, changes in personnel, entire companies relocating over vast distances, even to foreign countries, a trend that’s been spreading and expanding for generations, more and more there seems to be no other way to feel important or needed than to become world famous, or at least as famous as possible.  For this reason we have a hard time understanding why someone would actually not want to become famous.  In a world where fame seems necessary to establish identity, it seems unnatural that a writer would want to hide his identity to the point where it could get permanently lost.

We need to keep in mind how very small were the communities involved in this question.  If we don’t we’re in danger of being so blinded by today’s world-view that much of what this story is about won’t make sense.  Where today we have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of publishers and published writers, hundreds perhaps thousands of would-be playwrights, far more than any one person can know personally or even that they exist, Elizabethan readers could count the published writers of that time, those they could identify, on the fingers of one hand.

While today we see the world more as an ocean of vast if vague possibilities, dotted here and there by islands of what is known, all of it subject to change, most Elizabethans still saw themselves as members of a handful of small overlapping communities that saw only occasional changes.  Think in terms of a small town, where changes to the population occur only through childbirth, death, and the occasional newcomer out to find better work or escaping from trouble somewhere else. Think in terms of a high school where no one ever graduates, where the football captain and the homecoming queen take those roles with them into old age.

This stable universe was changing; economic pressures and other factors made it seem to many at that time that there was far less stability than their fathers had known, but seen from today’s perspective, it was stable to a degree that most of us no longer expect or even understand.  Unconsciously we always have the sense that there are many unknown people out there just beyond the perimeter of our consciousness.  If we are uncomfortable with the people around us, we can make changes, get divorced, move to a different neighborhood, get a different job.  Their options were far fewer.  Basically they were stuck with each other.

They were also stuck with themselves, that is, everyone they knew knew everything there was to know about them, about their family history, for good or ill, ugly rumors, misbehaviors, plus their own feelings of guilt and oppression.  Until we understand this we won’t understand what the Revels meant to them, those annual moments of emotional release, of social reversal when they could hide their burdensome identities and play at being the Hobby Horse or the Green Man.  Until we understand this we won’t understand what the birth of the London Stage meant to the Elizabethans.

So please try to keep in mind that this story calls for a cast of tens––not thousands, not even hundreds.  There may still be an unknown figure here and there that time will reveal, but for the most part, be assured that every role in this scenario was played by someone well known to the others, and probably well known to history as well.  This in itself should suggest at least one reason for their need for secrecy.  With this and with every other factor, think small town, think small town high school.

The other major factor to keep in mind is dates.  The series of events I propose is based primarily on a time structure of dates that unfold within the reality of the small size of the educated Elizabethan arts community and the necessary conclusion to be drawn from that fact, which is that they all knew each other very well.  Everything good, everything bad.  With this comes some understanding of the author’s power and consequently his need for secrecy.  He was the Hobby Horse of his community, their Martin Mar-Authority figure.  He was their Green Man.

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Posted in anonymity, Authorship Question, Elizabethan era, mumming and disguising, Oxfordian theory, pseudonyms, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Authorship, the London Stage

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What? No such thing as Santa Claus?

Posted on December 11, 2009 | 1 Comment

When we discover  at age six or seven that it isn’t really Santa who provides the toys under the tree, but our parents, questions that were becoming ever sharper to our developing sense of reality––How can he get in when we keep all the doors locked?  Why do they say he comes down the chimney when we’ve got no chimney?  How can he possibly take care of all the children in the world in a single night?  How come his reindeer can fly?––are suddenly resolved.  A world that was becoming ever more mysterious in problematic ways returns to making sense.  And so it is with one myth after another throughout life.  And so it must be, eventually,  with the Stratford biography.

Just as no fat man in a red suit could get himself down a million chimneys in a single night, no son of an impoverished, illiterate yeoman from a beer swilling market town two days ride from London could possibly have revolutionized English letters at a time when 90 percent of the population was illiterate.  And just as Santa’s miracle is created by parents sneaking downstairs when the kids are asleep, so the English Literary Renaissance was (mostly) created by educated courtiers and their patrons working silently behind the scenes to provide a depressed nation with a replacement for the mummings and disguisings, the Church Ales and parades so harshly condemned by the Reformation.

The Renaissance, the rebirth of interest in Art and Science that began in Italy in the 14th century with the rediscovery of ancient texts and artifacts from the ancient  civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, was delayed in reaching the northern and western areas of Europe by physical and cultural barriers.  When it finally reached  England in the late 16th century, it only did so because a politically weak monarch who desperately needed some inexpensive glamour to hide the fact that she had no wealth to speak of, was persuaded by some of her councillors to allow it to burst into life, first at Court, then in the public arena.

The English Literary Renaissance was not, uniquely, created by clever members of the working class any more than Christmas mornings are created by Santa’s elves.  It was created by the same social group that created it in most of the southern nations of Europe, members of the Courts of kings, queens, and princes.  In Spain, where a long connection with Islamic culture separated it from the rest of Europe, the “Golden Age” was largely created by men of a class much closer to that of William of Stratford, but this is an exception that can only prove the rule, for, unlike William (or Greene, or Nashe, or Watson, or, or, or), the two greatest Spanish writers of the period, the novelist Cervantes (born two years before Oxford) and the incredibly prolific genius Lope de Vega (born two years after Bacon) both show trustworthy and substantial paper trails that fit well with the dates and themes of their works and de Vega at least was assisted and supported by courtiers.

It’s been a year now since I began outlining this scenario, and although I’m still nowhere near getting even short versions of all the information that needs sorting out, a start has been made.   Now that we are embarked on the great holiday season of the year, the one that started “Shakespeare” on his career, may you all find peace and relaxation in whatever form of “merry-making” brings you pleasure.

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Posted in Earl of Oxford, Early Modern literature, Edward de Vere, Elizabethan era, entertainment, mumming and disguising, Shakespeare Authorship, theater history

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The Rule of Law: Jude Law IS Hamlet

Posted on October 27, 2009 | 5 Comments

During a three month London adventure in 1999, I got (thanks to Dan Wright) the opportunity to see Jude Law in John Ford’s T’is Pity She’s a Whore at the Young Vic.  Impressed by Law’s ability to express the most intense anguish, I’ve been hoping ever since, first, that he’d do Hamlet (instead of one lame movie role after another) and second, that I’d be able to see him do it.  Both wishes just came true: not only has Jude Law done Hamlet, but (once again, due to the kindness of friends) I got to see him do it on Broadway!  And I was right.  What a Hamlet!

Hamlet is tricky, even for the best actors.  It’s become such a museum piece, there are so many famous sililoquies, every avid Shakespeare fan has a favorite performance to which they match each new approach, so that watching the play runs the risk of turning into a sort of Olympics of the Stage, where the actor playing Hamlet is not so much enjoyed as he is rated, in the same way that Olympic figure skaters get rated during their performance, feat by feat, by TV commentators.

Law sweeps this away with the utter naturalness of his style.  Sililoquies flow from him as easily as he greets his old school friends or rants at Ophelia.  Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language runs as trippingly off his tongue as if it were his own most natural form of expression, yet there’s none of that jack-hammer rat-a-tat-tat that some use when reciting Shakespeare, apparently in an effort to spew out the bloody awkward stuff the way they do their own native slang.

I think this is largely because Jude Law is as much a dancer as he is an actor.  He expresses the beautiful but strange language as much with his body as he does with his voice.  Together the two, the voice and the body, create a satisfyingly complete whole in a way that I can’t remember ever seeing before.  Anger possesses him utterly.  Anguish torments every fibre.  How perfectly Shakespeare has captured these emotions in words and how perfectly Law renders them, his gestures flowing, not from the words themselves, but from the emotions they are meant to express.  Today, thanks to television, we have all seen, over and over, how real people respond to disasters or the deaths of people they love, and so we can’t help but know how at such moments, words failing, it’s the body that reacts.  With his dancer’s sense of timing, Law also knows how to pause before reacting, something many actors either never learn or tend to forget in production.  It’s such an energetic performance, I can’t imagine how he can do it, not only night after night, but twice on matinee days.

Unfortunately there’s little good to be said for the rest of the production.  Law’s gutsy approach was not echoed by a single other member of the cast.  Apart from the King, who did prove a strong and convincing match to Hamlet’s energy, the rest simply entered, exited, stood or walked about as though waiting for something exciting to happen.  Horatio was particularly disappointing, less an antique Roman than a pool hall shark.  The set and lighting are good, providing some interesting accents to the action, but the costumes, modern suits in shades of gray, not only disappear into the gray walls and black floor of the castle set, but seem totally out of place. With no chairs or benches to relieve the need to stand, what group of twenty-first century people would choose to spend more than a minute or two in this cold, empty, castle foyer?

Now that my wishes have been fulfilled I have a new one, that Jude Law will repeat his performance on film, with costumes and sets that match, a Horatio whose body language speaks of his strength and dependability , a sober Gertrude who knows deep down right from the beginning that she’s damned, so that her son has only to remind her of it, and . . . and . . . oh, Michael Palin and Terry Jones as the gravediggers!   Hey, let’s shoot for the moon!

Unfortunately when it comes to Ophelia, it seems the role is unplayable.  Since it’s very likely that the Countess of Montgomery had a say in the publication of the First Folio, she could well have had something to say about the final version of her own mother’s unhappy fate and death.  For whatever reason it seems impossible for any young actress (or director) to actually bring her to life, at least, I’ve never seen it done. With Jude Law directing, maybe we could see an Ophelia who really cuts loose.  Wishes do sometimes come true.

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Posted in Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, entertainment, Hamlet, Oxfordian theory, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Authorship, the London Stage, theater history

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Shakespeare’s patrons-who were they?

Posted on October 14, 2009 | Leave a comment

Born as the crest of two waves, the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, crashed into each other, the great poet and playwright blended these two often incompatible energies into the culture that has been England’s ever since.  Under the constraints of the Reformation, the passions that went into painting, sculpture, and architecture in the Southern European Renaissance, in England went into language: a bare stage, good costumes, superb actors, and the great human stories we know as Shakespeare, stories whose sources are to be found in the libraries where the Earl of Oxford spent his childhood.

Oxford’s development and survival as an artist was largely due to his patrons, surely among the best a writer ever had.  He sank low at times, but not so low that he ever had to quit writing, at least, not for long.  One of the most important research projects remaining to be done is on these patrons.  Burghley, Sussex, Walsingham, Hunsdon, Charles Howard, Southampton, the Pembroke brothers, are the leading figures, but there were others as well who contributed to his survival in various ways.  Even when they were disgusted with him, as Hunsdon must have been when the bum took up with his mistress, they kept him afloat because they knew his value.  For the great ministers of that time who had the dreams and aspirations of both Italian and Reformation humanism alive within, he was the great instrument of their policy, though this would be fully realized only when he was gone, as so well expressed by Ben Jonson in his dedicatory Ode in the First Folio.

Historically Oxford’s role in Early Modern theater is as a patron, a role that tends to get lost in the argument over his role as a writer, but his involvement as patron of the arts and sciences went a good deal deeper than what shows on the historical surface.  He patronized musicians and composers as well as other writers, and was praised by them as one of themselves.  When looking for a model for Oxford within our own times, the composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein comes to mind, an entertainment genius of the same all-encompassing nature, only, shall we say, considerably less fearful of recognition.

One question that hasn’t been dealt with yet, so far as I know, has to do with the company maintained by Oxford’s father.  Were they, perchance, the one we know as Leicester’s Men in the 1560s?  When Earl John died in 1562, Elizabeth gave Leicester control of the Oxford estates.   Though there’s no sign of it (so far) in the record, that could mean that he inherited what had been the sixteenth Earl’s acting company?  Unlike our world today, the arts community was very small.  Leicester’s Men were a handful of Court actors, some the same men who later became the core of the company that called themselves Hunsdon’s Men and operated out of Burbage’s Theater, just up the street from Fisher’s Folly.  Were some of these the same men who, decades earlier, had performed John Bale’s King Johan in Ipswich in 1561, just prior to the Queen’s entertainment at Hedingham Castle?  It’s worth considering.

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Posted in Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, Elizabethan era, entertainment, music, Oxfordian theory, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Authorship, the Court Stage, the London Stage, theater history

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Michael Jackson: “He was just too good.”

Posted on June 26, 2009 | 4 Comments

Many years ago I got to see Michael Jackson perform in person.  We, myself and daughters, got to go to my husband’s gig, playing for Michael who was soloing at a local music auditorium in the New York suburb where we lived.  It wasn’t the kind of big concert tour that would come later; the room was full, but not overflowing.  He must have been about twelve or thirteen, just a skinny kid with a big Afro.  But could that skinny kid sing!  And could he dance!

 Michael was a genius, perhaps we should say, IS a genius, for his music and his videos will last as long as we have instruments to play them.  Fred Astaire called him “the greatest dancer of the century,” although we hardly need anyone, even the world’s second greatest dancer, to tell us when we have the evidence of our own eyes and ears.  Those long skinny legs, that perfect balance, that total embodiment of human exuberance and grace, leaping from one amazing move to another, like a great soprano reaching the final high note, a great skater doing a triple axel and landing perfectly, silently, easily, steadily, on point. 

 Michael wasn’t just the greatest dancer of the century, he may actually be the greatest artist of the century.  With so many of the arts in the doldrums, struggling to retain a foothold in a world that no longer needs painters or sculptors to record images or poetry to memorize truths, great dance performances, which until the recording devices of today used to survive only as long as stars like Nijinsky lived, will now remain long after Jackson, Barishnikov, and Astaire are gone.  

 The great ones of the world, the ones we term genius, Ellen Winner defines as “creators,” men and women who not only give us great works, but bring permanent change to their domains.  Michael Jackson was such a one, taking Rhythm and Blues out of the niche of Black Soul into the mainstream of American Pop, and from there to the far reaches of the globe.  Despite the sad obeisance to white beauty standards that caused him to do such harm to his face, it was with his body that he helped a generation of all nationalities and races accept that Black is Beautiful, for nothing on earth could be more beautiful than Michael Jackson in motion. 

With his almost violent dancing he turned rage and pain, much of it about sex, much about being born black, into great art, a feat similar to that of another genius whose instrument was his body, Bruce Lee, whose monument, like Jackson’s, is the present worldwide acceptance in the media, film and television,  not only of his art, but of his race. 

And what does all this have to do with the Shakespeare Authorship Question? For one thing, it’s interesting that he died the day after Midsummer’s Day in the ancient folk calendar, the end of the entertainment half of the Festival Year, and the day after Oxford’s official death date.  Also, there’s the fact that entertainment geniuses have certain things in common, among them a tendency to eccentric behavior, to die in massive debt, a painful relationship to their born identities, and a very great need for privacy, which, as I keep saying, was the primary reason that Oxford hid his right from the start. 

As one of the commentators said of Michael this morning, regarding how he opened the door to black entertainers on MTV, “He was just too good.”  The same could be said of Oxford, who opened the publishing door to the great Court writers who followed him, Sidney, Mary Sidney, Francis Bacon, and John Donne.  When Oxford first began writing back in the “drab era,” his stuff was different from everyone else’s, but once it got out into the mainstream, by getting published, it clicked.  Why?  Because it was “just too good.”

In saying goodbye to Michael on television, Germaine Jackson wished that his brother might rest in peace.  Myself, I think he’d rather be dancing.

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Posted in entertainment, music

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