In responding to the Oxford challenge, recent books and films have tried to connect the biography of the man we know as William Shakespeare to his plays and poems. The popularity of films such as Shakespeare in Love indicates a hunger to find the true Shakespeare, the man behind the myth. In this same vein, PBS, in collaboration with the BBC and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, has produced a four-part documentary In Search of Shakespeare, written and presented by Michael Wood and directed by David Wallace. Accompanied by a 332-page book, it is a big budget, beautifully photographed, and highly entertaining pro-Stratford exposition that purports to show how an unschooled Glover's son from Stratford became the greatest writer in the English language. After four hours, I'm still scratching my head.
Wood (In Search of the Trojan War) narrates the documentary with a gee-whiz enthusiasm, yet offers, in addition to the usual embellishments, nothing new about Shakespeare except for some interesting items relating to his family and their Catholic inclinations. The documentary is worth watching, however, for its colorful dramatization of English history, excellent excerpts from Shakespeare's plays, and amazing Victorian photographs of old Tudor Inns and homes in London that are no longer standing. The host is often seen in an archive, office, or estate library thumbing through yellowing parchments and springing to life with a pixie-ish grin when he discovers the name Shaksper or Shakeshafte or some variety thereof. Through sleight of hand, William Shakspere, whose life is known only through marriage, birth, and death records, court cases, and a will emerges, in Wood's phrase, as "bold, streetwise, and sexy", vitally in tune to events taking place in the world around him.
Although the dating of the plays is guesswork at best, Mr. Wood boldly asserts the chronology of Shakespeare's work as if it was agreed by all, confusing dates of publication with dates of composition, desperately trying to fit the plays into contemporary events. One must forgive Mr. Wood for his over zealous attachment to the Stratfordian agenda when he makes statements for which there is scant evidence.
One assertion without evidence is that Shakespeare collaborated on a play about Sir Thomas More because the handwriting "matches his". This is interesting in that the only specimens of William Shakspere's handwriting to come down to us are six almost illegible signatures. Wood also states categorically that Shakespeare's Sonnets about the fair youth refer to his mourning the loss of his son Hamnet at age 11. He does not mention the dedication to a W.H, widely interpreted as referring to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton to whom he dedicated his love poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Also carefully avoided is the fact that Sonnets 1 to 17 give advice to the young man to get married, hardly the kind of advice you would be giving to an eleven year old.
Wood's main thesis, however, is that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic whose life was shrouded in mystery because he went to great lengths to dodge the authoritarian network that was chasing Catholics during Elizabeth's reign. He discovers documents indicating that William's father John along with other Warwickshire cousins and acquaintances were active members of the Catholic underground. Wood discovers a posthumous document in which Will's father John asserts his allegiance to Catholicism and points out that Will was baptized by a Catholic sympathizer. Another strong bit of evidence is William's purchase of the Blackfriars' Gatehouse in London after his retirement to Stratford, a notorious refuge for Catholic dissidents and priests on the run from civil authority.
If Wood's thesis is correct that William of Stratford was indeed a Catholic, it only serves as a further indication that the author of the plays and sonnets was a different man. While the purchase of Blackfriars was going on, five Elizabethan dramas were being presented at events celebrating the marriage of King James' daughter Elizabeth to Frederick a leader of the German Protestants. There is no greater incongruity. In fact, Mr. Wood seems not to have looked to the plays to find evidence of whether or not the author was a Catholic. Transcending any specific religious agenda, the plays advance the model of a humanistic Reformation society, showing a skeptical attitude toward Catholic orthodoxy and laying down a challenge to the political authority.
Can one imagine a Catholic writer meditating, as in Hamlet, on the nobility of suicide or could Hamlet have said, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"? Contrary to his intentions, what Wood reveals is that the free-thinking humanist with a passion for romance, history, fantasy, and high comedy could not have been the narrowly parochial, Catholic entrepreneur from Stratford. The true Shakespeare was a literary revolutionary, our first modern writer, who supported and brought to fruition the Protestant revolution, creating works that transcended the medieval morality of the mystery plays and opened a new chapter of unrivaled literary richness.
Old myths die hard. In Search of Shakespeare may be looked upon by future generations as one of the last attempts to cling to the myth of the unlettered common man as literary genius. In spite of ferocious opposition by the academic establishment and British Tourism to even consider the question, I think the average person has serious doubts about the attribution of the Stratford man as the author of the Shakespeare canon. Many of course, simply don't want to know. They prefer their Shakespeare to be a kind of a disembodied intelligence looking into our lives like some literary Jehovah, a man who understands and knows everything. Yet as Shakespeare said, "Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning" so let us have the truth one way or the other. Then we can all have a safe sleep, perchance a dream, for it is only the truth that can set us free.
