“I’ve got those… ‘but what do you know?’ blues.” The real Shakespeare and conspiracies (Part one)

“A bright and shining lie.”

Once again, a conspiracy theory, supposedly based on fact, is on the big screen. A nobleman passes off his plays under the name of an actor, who then becomes known as the greatest playwright of all time. This is of course the movie Anonymous, based on the theory that Edward de Vere, the Duke of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.  It starts off with distinguished actor Sir Derek Jacobi looking the audience in the eye and making some misleading statements, and goes rather downhill from there.

Anonymous commits one of the greatest sins known to cinema – it’s dull.  And actors who should know better do some pretty ordinary work. The villains do everything shy of twirling their moustaches, all the while looking at each other thinking, “I’m being evil. Are you being evil?”  Rhys Ifans as de Vere spends most the film trying to look noble and thoughtful, but mainly comes across as if someone is standing on his foot and he is far too polite to say anything. Each character seems to have been given not so much a one-dimensional character as a one word – ‘evil’, ‘jealous’ ‘drunk’, ‘shrew’ ‘slut’ etc. 

It’s one of those conspiracy theories that a lot of people know about but no-one says a word. His enemies the Cecils knew all about it, but never seemed to use his alleged transgression as a playwright against him. Queen Elizabeth I knew about it, and (I’d say spoiler alert but I don’t care) punishes de Vere at the end by proclaiming he will never be known as the author of his plays. As this was one of de Vere’s motivations throughout the movie, I failed to see the punitive aspect. It was a beautiful moment on de Vere’s deathbed when he handed over King Lear to be produced. I don’t know if he handed over a production schedule for all the plays produced after he was dead, including the ones with topical references to events also after his death, but I can only presume he did.

Obviously I was not convinced by the central premise, nor was I ever going to be, but I was at least hoping for a few entertaining hours in the dark. As it was I got bored, and the more bored I got, the more irritating the film got. As a piece of history, it made Shakespeare in Love look like an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As entertainment goes, it was the other way around.

I won’t go on and on with the argument that Shakespeare wrote the plays he wrote. Read about it here, or grab James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare?, an examination of the various conspiracy theories (there are at least 70 contenders for this already filled position). You can also read Jack Lynch’s Becoming Shakespeare: The unlikely afterlife that turned a provincial playwright into The Bard, which will answer your questions as to, yes, how did an obscure playwright get transfigured into the voice of the ages? Both Shapiro and Lynch take an unusual approach – they examine actual evidence and see where that leads them.

The arguments for de Vere or anyone else tend to be either snobby or ignorant. All conspiracy theories hold an element of snobbishness i.e. I know better than the rest of you blinkered fools, but this one depends on people with degrees and qualifications up the yinyang unable to believe that a country hick could write so well and with such insight. Why a nobleman should have particular insight into humanity denied a commoner is unanswered. And Shakespeare’s admittedly  limited education contained more Latin and Greek from Ovid to Homer to Caesar, and lessons in rhetoric than you and I have encountered. Languages, history, mythology and rhetoric – good bases for a career as a playwright.

‘Oh,’ you say, (I’m being very presumptuous about you, aren’t I?) ‘It’s only a film.” Roland Emmerich the director and his writer John Orloff have already congratulated themselves in several forums for having the courage to tell this story, warning us against those terrible Shakespearian scholars who have a vested interest.. Meanwhile education kits have been sent to schools with the message ‘teach the controversy – it’s only fair both sides get a say.’ It is not just a film, it is propaganda trying to teach a lie. And lie it is. There aren’t two sides to history. There are the facts, and interpretation of the facts. Interpretation of course can and does differ, but ignoring and creating facts to manufacture some sort of controversy is not history, it is marketing; marketing at best.

And as weasel writers such as Oliver Stone and Dan Brown have done before him, any time you point out obvious falsehoods and mistakes and misinformation in the work, Emmerich and Orloff respond with ‘It’s only a movie, entertainment.” Po-faced they tell us they are courageously giving us the truth, all the while carrying their get-out clause. Damn them all. Sod off.

History, despite what some will tell you, is not something you make up as it suits you.  Reputable historians and scholars confronted with facts and evidence that go against their theories, change their theories. In the words of Professor Richard Evans, a professor of History at Cambridge, the past “really happened, and we really can, if we are scrupulous and careful and self-critical… reach some tenable conclusions about what it all meant.” There is not a conspiracy theorist that I have come across who is scrupulous. All evidence against a conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The lack of evidence for a conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The evidence that points anywhere else is part of the conspiracy. There is nothing that can injure a conspiracy theory so it is safe and easy and brain-dead to espouse.

Sorry if this is insulting to anyone but this idea makes my blood boil. The theory denies imagination has any part in creative writing. It takes that clichéd advice to young writers ‘write what you know’ as the only approach to writing that exists. As to Shakespearian scholars and their vested interests, I doubt highly that their conferences begin with a toast ‘To Evil’ followed by a money fight. These sorts of things insult centuries of scholarship and the personal morality of generations of scholars just so people like Roland Emmerich can make a buck. Who really has a vested interest in this “controversy”? A scholar in a university or a director with a film to sell?

“Oh,” you say again (you do enjoy poking the bear, don’t you?) “The play’s the thing. It doesn’t matter who wrote them.” This sounds reasonable and on one level is. However who said or wrote something is important. It colours our perceptions and our interpretations. Martin Luther King Jr talking about his people’s destiny has a different effect to say Joseph Stalin making a similar statement. Several fauxtations have floated around the Internet of late, misattributed to the likes of King and Thomas Jefferson. If they were attributed to Anonymous, or the geek in front of his computer who wrote it, people would have seen them for the meaningless, tendentious self-serving pieces of crap they were. Emmerich has de Vere writing plays that have as their ultimate effect a political one, reducing the plays to propaganda, as if politics is the highest calling of humanity. No, politics is the shit politicians go through so they can get to a position so they can do the good they entered politics to do. Shakespeare’s plays (apart from the ordinary and crap ones (let’s not forget they exist)) are so extraordinary as to defy categorisation.

The real Shakespeare wrote to keep an audience happy and coming through the doors to make a buck. He made up words because he didn’t have sufficient education not to. The plays are badly structured with characters that change names or disappear and plotlines that don’t get played out. This was a man writing for a playhouse giving out the pages almost as fast as he could write them, without little chance to rewrite or revisit. The phrase “the word ‘genius’ is bandied about all too easily these days” is in itself bandied about all too easily these days. But Shakespeare was a genius. As we so benighted, so lacking in imagination, that we cannot accept that?

Oh I have gone on long enough. But I called this Part One. Like any good conspiracy theory, there is more to this than meets the eye.

"Not since Lincoln." Lincoln's struggle with slavery.

We live in a shallow age. Not only are Tony Abbot’s swimwear and Julia Gillard’s accent considered two to the top political issues of the day, we are content to find one statement, one epithet, one action from a politician we don’t like and base our judgment on a person or a career on that. We think ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’ or whatever the appropriate word and reject that person and all their works. (Mind you, if you can apply all three to one person, you may be on to something.)

But take this statement:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.

Surely this appalling man was condemned to the political fringe, or at least ended his career in ignominy. However, the formal language and the vocabulary is a bit of a giveaway that this is a politician from some time ago. The speaker is Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and the man who did more for the advancement of black Americans in one stroke than anyone else.

But the man is a racist! Surely we should condemn him, say that history is telling us a great lie, and insist anything he did was motivated by a grasp for power and nothing else.

We could do that. Look up that quotation on the internet and commentators indeed are way ahead of me. But they are wrong. You could say they are wrong in part, but that part is such an enormous part let’s just call them wrong.

I have just read The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner, which traces Lincoln’s attitudes and actions with regard to American Slavery from his youth through to his assassination in 1865. And what he finds is a man whose attitudes towards slavery and Black Americans evolved as he went through his life, both personally and politically. Imagine that! A politician whose ideas evolve! Who responds to what he hears and sees and experiences. No! We have caught Lincoln uttering racist remarks in a political debate, we must condemn him forever!

Lincoln was a product of his time. But even as a young man he found slavery abhorrent. But being opposed to slavery did not mean feeling the Negro (to use his language) was his equal. You don’t need me to tell you that Emancipation didn’t lead to social equality. That struggle is still going on. Those calling for immediate abolition of slavery weren’t necessarily calling for full citizenship for the slaves. There were many gradations of beliefs between the radical abolitionist and those slave owners who refused to see there was even a problem.

Despite what people will tell you, the Union broke on the issue of slavery. Lincoln, along with many other politicians, was satisfied to limit the spread of slavery while allowing it to remain in the states where it existed, believing, probably rightly, that the ‘peculiar institution’ would die a natural death. The laws governing slavery, including runaway slave laws and rights of transit for slave owner in non-slave states were complex and often changing. But that solution was not good enough for many slave state who insisted the Federal Government had no rights to place limits on slaveholding anywhere. (It didn’t impress Abolitionists or black Americans much either.) The Southern States insist they broke away over state rights. But the state rights they were worried about were all to do with slavery.

Lincoln then moved to gradual, compensated abolition, with the children of slaves made bondsmen instead, which meant eventual freedom, and owners compensated for any loss of their “property”. This too was rejected not only by the Confederate States, but by the border states, slave-owning states that had remained in the Union.

All the while, Lincoln was a big believer in emigration for freed slaves, either to Africa or South America. He believed both whites and blacks would be happier separate. He was to hold to this belief for a long time, but it too was one he would eventually alter, convinced by arguments from anti-slavery activists, both black and white.

During the early years of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted the war was about preserving the Union, treating the Confederate States with the rights of any other state under the Constitution. This was his way of trying to reassure the more conservative elemens of both sides that they had nothing to fear from being part of the United States. It was only when the war was going badly and the North’s fighting spirit need reinvigorating that Lincoln finally talked about the enormous elephant in the room: the war was about slavery.  As Lincoln had said many times before, the country could not exist half-slave and half-free. Here is another Lincoln quote:

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "All men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, "All men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Lincoln knew that if you allow discrimination to one group, you prepare the way for discrimination against more.  He also knew that “all men” included those brought over in slave ships and their descendents. In a later speech, he referred to “Americans of African descent,” thus including them with all other American descended from other lands. How Lincoln would have handled the Negro question in post-war American, of course we shall never know. Doubtless he would have struggled and changed and moved between ideal and practical, the way he dealt with the slavery question.

The Emancipation Proclamation, though limited in its scope, gave the Civil War a moral and clear purpose. The war wasn’t about a poltical principle it was about a humane one. Without slavery the war may well have never come about. Without its abolition, there was no point to carrying on the struggle. The Proclamation was not a military turning point, but a moral one, for the country as a whole. Once again, the United States was reminded of the principles on which it was founded, and its people, led by their President, insisted they be upheld.

Lincoln may have been by our standards racist, but he was intelligent and open to new ideas. He was also courageous and stood up for his beliefs. If Lincoln did not genuinely believe in the intrinsic wrongness of slavery, he had many opportunities to allow it to continue and let later generations deal with it, but he did not. He played a tough political role in keeping his party with radicals and conservatives united and fought a war rather than let slavery continue. In the end, he was killed for it, the victim of a group led by a Southern white supremacist. Lincoln’s greatness, while marked by speeches and actions, may be due to his ability to evolve as a human being. He was not held by his time, or his upbringing or any other constraint. He admitted when he was wrong, saw what was right, and strove to bring it about.

The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

Foner’s book is a good read, if a bit dry and academic, dealing as it often does with legislation and political manouvres. But it shows a great man struggling towards greatness. Or if you like, a great soul struggling towards its ultimate expression. There are very few Abraham Lincoln’s around, then as now. But part of our political responsibility it to listen to arguments and to engage with them. Many people such as Frederick Douglass were appalled by some of the things Lincoln said and did.  He could have dismissed him as racist, insulted him in the press and made fun of his beard. In 2011, this is the sort of thing that often passes for political debate. But he met with him, talked with him, argued with him and helped to change his mind. Listening, talking and thinking– still powerful tools.

Lincoln was one of what we all are – a flawed human being. But he rose above his time, his upbringing, his own prejudices and the pressures of his political career to end one of the greatest injustices of all time.  His methods and solutions are not perfect, but I still don’t understand those that now want to denigrate his memory. Thank goodness for historians like Eric Foner.

You may not know – I did not - that 27 million people are in slavery today, more than in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Evil goes on, demanding our best efforts. I hope we are equal to the task.

PS: And while we’re on the subject of changing people’s minds through talk, last night my home state of Queensland passed legislation recognizing civil unions for homosexual couples. Congratulations to everyone for that one.