Contested Will is a Great, nay, TREMENDOUS Book!

I recently finished reading James Shaprio’s marvelous book, Contested Will. Michael Feingold writes in his terrific review of it at the Village Voice:

With sardonic aptness, James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, chooses Garrick's adoration as the starting point for his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a rueful history of Shakespeare worship's darker side. For it seems that even in a field as narrow as dramatic poetry, once you declare that a god has walked the earth, satanic forces must instantly spring up to deny him. From Garrick's veneration of Shakespeare's unearthly powers, a counter-assumption was born: A lowly actor from a small-town background, like "the man from Stratford," could not possibly have written these extraordinary plays.

With even-handed compassion, Shapiro chronicles the slow but steady growth of this dark belief, from its first scholarly murmurs, circa 1800, to its current Internet burgeoning. Wisely, he declines to ridicule its preachers, instead weighing their various claims fairly, in lucid, uncontentious prose, saving for the final chapter his reasoned rebuttal of their basic assumption. Secure in his knowledge of Shakespeare's world, Shapiro feels no compulsion to pick quarrels with these cipher-hunters and conspiracy theorists, not even when their extravagance invents, for their authorial candidates, incestuous affairs with Queen Elizabeth. He takes no cheap shots at such easy targets.

Instead, cunningly, he makes his opponents' lives, not Shakespeare's, his principal subject, replacing their nitpicky disputes over unprovable biographical what-ifs with a fascinating, well-documented parade of literary eccentrics, displaying the torments that drive frustrated souls into revisionist mythmaking. Shapiro doesn't flinch even when the frustrated souls carry beloved names: Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Sigmund Freud are among those whose disbelief in Shakespeare's authorship he confronts, squarely and honorably.

Feingold follows this with a short summary of Shapiro’s case, and his concluding paragraph is pure gold. Read the review, and then read the book – it is very rewarding.

Note to my commenting Oxfordian fans: Please take issue with Mr. Shapiro, et al., and not me. They’re the ones you have to convince, because it is they who will have to convince me.

Contested Will Looks at the Nuts Who Think Shakespeare Didn't Write Shakespeare (The Village Voice)

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20 things you never knew about Shakespeare

Simon Callow, actor extraordinaire, star of a new one-man show called Shakespeare: The Man from Stratford. Openly gay and quite outspoken on LGBT issues, BTW.

This piece about Shakespeare is sort of self-explanatory. Lots of interesting and fun tidbits about Shakespeare, such as:

Was he gay, straight or just sex-mad?

The sonnets are often cited as evidence of his bisexuality. He may have been in love with his patron the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Pembroke, or even the playwright John Fletcher. “The fact is he was married and had children,” Jonathan Bate says. “But he imagined in his work every type of romantic and sexual love. It is probable Shakespeare, once in London, would have tried anything.”

“If you’d asked him if he was gay he’d have been totally bewildered,” Simon Callow reckons. “But his work is drenched in sexuality to an extraordinary degree and his plays cover the entire waterfront of human sexual expression. As Leontes says [in The Winter’s Tale]: ‘I am a feather for each wind that blows.’ Whatever he was, at parties he would certainly have gone home with the best-looking person in the room.”

And this topic is, of course, much too fun to pass up!

What would be the ultimate Shakespeare find?
....

“I’d love to find a document linking the Shakespeare of Stratford irrefutably to the plays,” Wells says. “A letter from a Stratford friend, perhaps. ‘Dear Wm. Shakespeare: your wife Anne and the twins are in good health and wish you all the best for your new play Hamlet.’ It would save the world so much wasted paper on the subject of who wrote Shakespeare.”

"20 things you never knew about Shakespeare" (Times Online)

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The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood

Here's a terrific article about how that "newly discovered" play by Shakespeare is anything but. I don't think my dear Shakespeare authorship fans are going to like what Ron "Shakespeare Cop" Rosenbaum at Slate has to say about them.

Generally, though, debunking "authorship" obsessives isn't even worth the Shakespeare cop's time. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel. The question is also almost entirely irrelevant. The point is not who wrote Shakespeare (though I'm entirely convinced Shakespeare did) but what Shakespeare wrote, and what is falsely passed off as Shakespearean. The "someone else wrote Shakespeare" types (and those who waste time arguing with them) are sad and pathetic because, frankly, life is short and if one has to choose between rereading King Lear or Othello and arguing about who wrote them, then one's priorities are profoundly misaligned. Any amount of time spent on the latter is subtracted from the former, alas.

What is Shakespeare really about? This is what Shakespeare is really all about:

Of course this is not to say Shakespeare can't write boring or even bad lines. I recently moderated a panel at the Brooklyn Academy of Music featuring the cast of Sam Mendes' production of The Tempest. Because I was hosting the panel, I saw it twice, and it was interesting to see how even good actors couldn't make some of the leaden comedy and words work. It left me thinking again about what made Shakespeare Shakespeare. But then we'd come to one of those great passages in The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies/ and of his bones are coral made" and "like the baseless fabric of this vision/ the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,/ the solemn temples, the great globe itself./ Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve/ and like this insubstantial pageant faded/ leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff/ as dreams are made of/ and our little life rounded with a sleep."

Lines like this send jolts of lightning through you.

No effing scheiss.

It's a great article with an air detective story to it as Rosenbaum pulls apart the horrible writing that is being passed off as genuine Shakespeare. Enjoy!

The Double Falsehood of Double Falsehood

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"Keep it gay! Keep it gay! Keep it gay!"

The story of how outspoken sex columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller adopted a kid has been turned into a musical!

Perhaps reality TV isn’t the right venue for teachable moments that could be easily misconstrued by Savage haters. Like the time 9-year-old DJ, who thought girls were icky, jumped to the conclusion that he must be gay, until Miller showed him a photo of himself, surrounded by girls, on his 10th birthday. “If you liked girls right now,” he said, “that would probably mean you’re gay.”

I love that quote. One of the first things that made me realize that I was different, when I was about seven or eight, was that I actually liked playing with girls.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

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"Cruddy JD's" Sentenced to Perform Shakespeare!

Interesting article about a program in the Boston area where juvenile offenders are sentenced to put on a Shakespeare play.

Tonight, 13 actors will take the stage at Shakespeare & Company in “Henry V.’’ Nothing so unusual in that — except that these are teenagers, none older than 17, and they have been sentenced to perform this play.

The show is the culmination of a five-week intensive program called Shakespeare in the Courts, a nationally recognized initiative now celebrating its 10th year. Berkshire Juvenile Court Judge Judith Locke has sent these adjudicated offenders — found guilty of such adolescent crimes as fighting, drinking, stealing, and destroying property — not to lockup or conventional community service, but to four afternoons a week of acting exercises, rehearsal, and Shakespearean study.

Fascinating. Of course, I'm all for bringing young people and fine art together. This program has to have a some good effect on these kids, even if only a small one. The newfound sense of responsibility alone may make a huge difference in their lives. Plus, they may wind up loving Shakespeare!

Caught in the act: Juveniles sentenced to Shakespeare

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Tenor Brownlee Shows Race No Hurdle To His Career

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee is rising fast in the opera world. He has a terrific voice and amazing technique. Here is a fascinating article about him, not least because of the gobstopping racism Brownlee has encountered during his career. Mind you, this didn't happen fifty years ago -- this nonsense is still going on today.

But [Brownlee] also recalls the racism that dogged him as he tried to build his career.

An agent told him that he'd never succeed "because you're short and you're black,'" the 5-foot-6 singer says with a wry smile. Then, when he hoped to be hired by a second-rate American opera company he won't name, "they said, 'We can't, because you're black.'" (The company changed its mind after La Scala offered him the same part.)

One critic wrote of a Boston production of Rossini's "Barber of Seville" that "the worst embarrassment was the tenor, Lawrence Brownlee. Now I don't demand that the tenor look like Brad Pitt, but he shouldn't look like Al Roker, the Today Show's weatherman, or even worse, Oprah Winfrey in drag!"

Seriously, WTF?!? Are these people still living in the nineteenth century? Oy vay.

This reminds me of something that happened here in Kansas City about twenty-five years ago. The New York City Opera came to town with Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. In this production, Figaro was performed by a bass-baritone who happened to be black. This bothered neither me nor my friend Claudia nor, as far as I could tell, anyone else in the audience. But the critic at the time for The Kansas City Star just couldn't get past having a black man playing a traditionally "white" role, and spent a couple of paragraphs of his review complaining about it. The Star received quite a few letters from opera patrons criticizing the reviewer's idiotic comments, but the best letter came from a representative of the managing agency in New York that was handling the New York City Opera's national tour. This gentleman succinctly discussed the suspension of disbelief required by many, many aspects of live theatre and particularly in opera, starting with age differences in the cast (he mentioned having often seen Le Nozze di Figaro done with a Figaro who was much older than the singer performing Marcellina, Figaro's mother) and moving on to travesti roles, which are male roles played by women. And then this gentleman totally pwned the reviewer by reminding him of one of opera's most famous travesti roles, Cherubino, in the very same opera where the reviewer couldn't quite get his head around a black Figaro.

The Kansas City Star, to its credit, let that reviewer go when his contract expired.

Anyway, check out the article about the talented Lawrence Brownlee and listen for him on the Sirius radio Met Opera broadcasts -- I have Armida on the radio right now!

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Of Sondheim and A-flat: In the Wings with Elaine Stritch

The irrepressible Elaine Stritch has a few words to say about nearly everything, but mostly about Sondheim and singing.

"No Sondheim song comes easy to me. You depend on Rodgers and Hart for that. Those songs have easy brilliance. Stephen Sondheim gives you complicated brilliance. But once you get him, you got him. He makes you think a little bit. But those hours in a rehearsal room learning a song—those hours are rough. After that, it's a joy. It's like having a baby, it's like with anything that's worthwhile."

I hope I'm still that sharp when I'm her age.

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Denying Shakespeare

I've always thought that the Shakespeare authorship question was a load of hooey. For one thing, the advocates of another author having written the plays strike me as something not unlike the sort of folks who think they saw Elvis in a Burger King in Ypsilanti. What difference does it make, anyway? "The play's the thing," as the man said, and those plays are all we need to explore fascinating worlds and characters and confrontations. Sometimes it's nice to look at an author's works in light of his or her biography, but really, isn't it nicer to just savor what's on the page and treasure it (and analyze it) for that alone, and not for any armchair psychological analysis?

Terry Teachout reviews a new book about the Shakespeare authorship question, and with him I hope that just maybe we can finally lay this silly "controversy" to rest:

It doesn't surprise me that such lunacy has grown so popular in recent years. To deny that Shakespeare's plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself—a sentiment increasingly attractive in a democratic culture where few harsh realities are so unpalatable as that of human inequality. The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else. But just as some people are prettier than others, so are some people smarter than others, and no matter who you are or how hard you try, I can absolutely guarantee that you're not as smart as Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That is all.

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Sondheim = Shakespeare?

I buy it. The intelligent writing, the surprising rhythms, the music inherent in both writers, the astounding characters and challenging stories and often despairing outcomes. The actor Michael Ball takes a look at Stephen Sondheim and ponders his greatness.

Sondheim has never written typical musicals – the kind made famous in the US in the 1940s and 1950s – he writes about the human condition, with layer upon layer of depth. His is musical theatre – like plays with music – not musical comedy, and there's a big difference. It's also why his legacy is so important: Stephen Sondheim changed the face of the medium.

Will we be performing Sondheim in 500 years? Like Shakespeare, like Mozart, like Bach, I hate to think of a world where we weren't doing so.

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