Authorship

In the LA Times today there was an editorial about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The guy who brought you the movies of 2012 and Godzilla is filming a movie right now titled, "Anonymous". It is about the assertion that Shakespeare did not write his plays and it was a guy named Edward de Vere.

If you are an actor in theatre and have studied Shakespeare, you have run across conspiracy theories about who wrote the Bard's plays since it wasn't the Bard himself. After looking at the different sides to all this, I have come to a conclusion.

An actor/playwright named William Shakespeare wrote his fucking plays. Not Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe or any of the dozen people asserted to have written the plays of Shakespeare.

There is the argument that Shakespeare didn't know the royal court well enough to write about kings and queens. That he wouldn't have had the education or understanding to write the plays about foreign countries he had never traveled to.

Shakespeare was the son of a wealthy man in Stratford upon Avon. He was educated better than most people at the time. In other words, he went to school. He learned Latin and from there the other romance languages of French and Italian are easily learned. He learned histories. When he left Stratford to go to London he got hooked up with the Chancellor's Men and later the King's Men. Acting troupes that were sponsored by, wait for it, the royals of the time. They had wealthy patrons supporting the arts and the actors mingled with the aristocracy of the times. Kind of like pretty and amusing pets.

So would Shakespeare have had the opportunity to learn of royalty? Absolutely. Would he have watched and listened. Absolutely. That's what actors do. We watch and listen and when we get the chance, use what we saw on stage. Sorry, you are not just people we talk to, you are research.

So how did he write 37 plays and maybe a few that were lost to us? Well, they weren't all original. He took plays from other sources, either stories he heard and re-worked them, or he took other plays and rewrote them only better. Romeo and Juliet is based on an Italian story from years before. The history plays he worked on from the history of England! Wow, who would have thunk?

Are all his plays brilliant? No. Some are bad. Timon of Athens? A play about a guy in a cave? Cymbeline? It's a rework of other plays, but not very well done. His plays are long, over written and are made workable for todays audience by editing them down, cutting out the references that we don't understand anymore. Cutting the third plot lines that don't further the story. In Hamlet, how often will you see Fortinbras or any of the impending war. Rarely.

The reason I think there is skeptcism that he wrote his plays is for a few reasons.

1. People have a hard time with genius. How can anyone be that good? There has got to be a trick. Someone else wrote it. Really? Does anyone question the authorship of Christopher Marlowe or Ben Johnson? Or how about Sophocles or Euripides? There's even less proof they wrote the plays attributed to them. Why do people believe they wrote those plays?

2. Conspiracy theories are sexy. It's pretty boring to think that a single actor with an imagination wrote Shakespeare's plays. It's more sexy to think that it was Edward de Vere who wrote the plays, and they were autobiographical because he had be abducted by pirates, just like Hamlet! Problem is, de Vere died in 1604. Shakespeare died in 1616. 12 years is a long time to be hanging onto scripts for plays just to be perpetuating a fraud that Shakespeare was writing plays and not de Vere.

3. There are character types that are in several plays; Hotspur, Laertes, Tybalt, MacDuff, Don John. Characters that are so similar in temperment, they seem to be written for the same actor. Which a resident playwright would have done. He did it with the clown parts too; Dogberry, Aguecheek, and others. A nobleman writing under an assumed name would not know actors well enough to tailor make parts for them.

So what do we end up with? The hack who brought us Godzilla in 1998 selling fiction that the uneducated and school kids will think is fact. Well, let me tell you, there isn't an island off of Costa Rica with living dinosaurs regardless of what Michael Crichton wrote.

Though I do think dinosaurs would be very cool...