The King’s Speech

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!

When did The Question first arise?

Watching Book-TV on CSPAN the other night I caught the end of a lecture by Elaine Showalter, author of the recently published The Vintage Book of American Women Writers and professor emerita of English at Princeton University, on the challenges to women writers through the centuries. She had some interesting things to say about how an audience’s perception of an author influences his or her success or failure. (Remember Deconstruction and the notion that the author is of no importance? LOL?)

Briefly she told the story of Alice B. Sheldon, who, raised in a family of intellectuals and writers, turned to writing in her fifties after a career that had included African safaries, two marriages, a stint in Army Intelligence during WWII, several years spying for the CIA in the Middle East, plus a PhD in Experimental Psychology (sounds like a typical writer’s CV). Alice’s genre of choice was science fiction, where she made a splash under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. In a tough, “masculine” voice, she made quite a name for herself, or rather, himself. After a decade of hiding her sex, she was finally outed in 1977, but continued to write as Tiptree until 1987 when she died at age 72 in a suicide pact with her 82-year-old husband.

There seems to be a divergence of opinion on the effect the change of perception of who she was had on her audience: Wikipedia says there was none, while Showalter says that once she was identified as a woman, she lost most of her audience. In any case, whatever the truth, the point I wish to make here is not about how an audience perceives an author or how that affects the success of his or her work, it’s about to what lengths some members of an audience will go to find out what they want to know about an author. “Deconstruction” to the contrary, it seems that knowing who is writing something is almost as important as the writing itself.

According to Wikipedia:

though it was widely known that “Tiptree” was a pseudonym, it was generally understood that its use was intended to protect the professional reputation of an intelligence community official. Readers, editors and correspondents were permitted to assume gender, and generally, but not invariably, they assumed “male.” . . . “Tiptree” never made any public appearances, but she did correspond regularly with fans and other science fiction authors through the mail. When asked for biographical details, Tiptree/Sheldon was forthcoming in everything but gender. . . .

Wikipedia continues:

After the death of [her mother] in 1976, “Tiptree” mentioned in a letter that his mother, also a writer, had died in Chicago––details that led inquiring fans to find the obituary, with its reference to Alice Sheldon; soon all was revealed.

So “all was revealed” to “inquiring fans.” Clearly the popularity of Tiptree’s stories had raised a fan base, aka audience, who wanted to know more about who was writing the stories that pleased them. Told only what she chose to reveal, evidently it wasn’t enough. Obviously there was a group of Tiptree fans who, having sniffed an evasion, were dedicated enough to track down the facts about him/her through the obits in a Chicago newspaper.

What, where, who, why and when?

One of the questions that dogs the authorship inquiry is: When did it first arise? Stratfordians invariably date it to the latter half of the 19th century when “cranks” like Mark Twain and Walt Whitman began to publicize it. Long study has left me with the opinion that, however sparse the evidence, the question of who was writing the plays is as old as the plays themselves, that is, it’s as old as the versions produced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when they began their rise to success in the late 1590s, the ones that, once they began getting published, bore the name Shakespeare.

I believe that once we begin to examine the emergence of the name Shakespeare while keeping in mind the likelihood that every step forward in its use was forced by the questioning of an audience who were at least as hungry to know whose voice they were hearing from the Stage as were the fans of James Tiptree Jr. to know the truth about him.

Back in the sixties there was a rather sorry weekly TV program based on the old comicbook superhero, The Green Hornet––not something I would normally have bothered to watch. But one day happening to tune it in while turning on the TV I was captivated by the young guy playing the part of the Green Hornet’s sidekick, Kato. Most unusually for that time, he was a genuine Asian, and Wow! was he ever compelling! I became a regular observer, cursing the directors when I had to sit through a half an hour of the dolt who played the Green Hornet, with no sign of Kato. Sadly the program lasted only one season, so it was some years before the actor who played Kato, one Bruce Lee, forever changed movie fights, and the after school lives of thousands of American schoolboys, in Enter the Dragon.

I venture to suggest that, in the 1590s, as the London Stage grew from infancy to power, a particular audience grew along with it, one that, even as Broadcasting has overwhelmed most of its original audience, has stuck with it ever since. Intelligent, thoughtful, appreciative of art, attuned to greatness, this core audience owed no allegiance, no vow of silence, to the Court or the Inns of Court communities. That there was such an audience, one that reacted to the brilliant swordplay in Hamlet––just as I and millions like me would react someday to Bruce Lee’s fight scenes––should go without saying. And that this audience, like James Tiptree Jr.’s fans, wanted to know who was doing the writing and was not afraid of asking, should also go without saying. It’s simple common sense.

Oxford and the Media

It’s always enlightening to examine the conditions that made possible great and lasting enterprises like democracy, the Olympic games, or the internet. Today the so-called Fourth Estate of government, aka the Media, a vast enterprise encompassing many areas in both print and broadcast, takes as its standard the vox populi, “the voice of the people,” and as its sacred duty informing the millions about the world they live in and what goes on in the higher echelons of power. Without the Media there would be no democracy, for it takes an informed people to properly govern themselves.

But back when it all began, neither of these, print nor broadcast, had any such purpose in mind. Both began as little more than spinoffs from the first burst of Renaissance enthusiasm that was taking place at the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1560s to 80s) that was manifesting as entertainment: privately as translations of classical poetry and tales from Latin, French, and Italian, along with some original works masquerading as translations, passed from hand to hand in fair-copied manuscripts, and for the entire Court community, plays for holidays and events like important weddings and visits from foreign dignitaries.

In the late 1570s, several things occured that instigated a leap from the intimacy of the Court to the greatly expanded public arena, first among them the year spent in Italy by the Renaissance-minded Earl of Oxford. By observing the bold and exciting public theater known as comedia dell’arte and in Venice, the Aldine Press that was driving the high end of the Italian Renaissance through elegant translations of the ancient classics, Oxford learned things that he brought back with him to England.

By 1575 he may have grown bored with the limitations imposed on anyone who entertained the Court. Having grown up within the confines of what his Reformation tutor thought appropriate, then within what a Court run by an irritable and oversentitive female thought appropriate, the rowdy no-holds-barred enthusiasm of the Italian public audience, the freedom of their exchanges with the actors, offered new vistas for his developing talents. Besides their tools, pen and paper for writers, brushes and canvas for painters, etc., all artists need an audience to write for, or create for, and all professional artists need one that goes beyond their friends and family members. By twenty-five, our earl had reached the limits of what he could do to entertain his Court audience. Bored, he was ready for new fields to conquer.

Within months of his return there were two commercial theaters going in London, and within two years was published the book that would revolutionize print, the novelistic Euphues, the story of a young nobleman’s romantic adventures in Italy published as by his secretary, John Lyly, and written in what the Italians called an alto stilo, a high style. These were not the first of their kind, but they were the first to remain commercially viable, the theaters suffering if anything from being too popular while the novel would go into 20 editions before the turn of the century. Obviously there was more to the business of creating a successful theater and publishing a successful book than just the building or the printing––methods that Oxford was privy to during his year in Italy.

As the records show, as the 80s approached the ’90s more theaters got built and more books written and published, to a level that meant that two self-sustaining industries were born, what we call the Stage and the Press, both up to then having been little more than the playthings of amateurs. For this to happen a number of other situations had to be factored in, a public hungry for entertainment, politically powerful patrons who saw the advantage of a public forum, and a crew of writers who could create the kind of entertainment that drew them in. The first was ready and waiting for Oxford’s plan; the second miraculously appeared when needed; while the third describes the crew he assembled at Fisher’s Folly, the one historians refer to as the University Wits.

Nor was it long before this newborn Fourth Estate moved from simple entertainment to the function for which it was destined, public discourse of important issues, with the not surprising result that the authorities quickly launched what would be a never ending battle to control it. This is a matter of history. What has escaped history is the extent to which the plays and books that masqueraded as nothing but entertainment during the 1580s and ’90s and beyond were meant to influence public discourse. Every play, every tale, was chosen with an eye to how it related to some current event or personality. The writers knew that’s what the audience wanted and what they expected, so they gave it to them, partly because they wanted to, and partly because it’s what sold.

The writers, actors, patrons, and printers during these years walked a fine line between simple story-telling and too openly revealing the editorials they wished to convey to audiences eager to hear and discuss them. (It they didn’t, if they were too obvious, they suffered the fate of Christopher Marlowe, Ld Strange, and the producers of The Isle of Dogs.) Book censors, distracted by the Italian names, beast fables, and unknown or unimportant authors, were also distracted by title pages and front material purposely framed to keep them from looking too closely at the text itself. Plays were easier since speeches and scenes that were inappropriate at Court or other venues could simply be changed or dropped. When the author and actors ran into trouble in 1580 from the newly appointed censor, Edmund Tilney, with regard to The Play of Sir Thomas More, they may have lost a good play, but they learned how to avoid such trouble from then on.

This is the story that has yet to be told, how the first steps towards functional democracy were taken by one of the most brilliant artists who ever lived, how those steps led to the birth of the modern Media, and how they were then erased by his enemies, along with his reputation. As Hamlet prophesied, the rest has been “silence.”