Shakespearean Intrigue, and a Place Where Some Very Bad Ideas Can Come From

I am not a Shakespeare scholar. Heck, I'm not even much of a Shakespeare fan. I usually come back from a Shakespeare performance (I've seen a few) knowing that I was supposed to enjoy it, but didn't. I spend the majority of the play wishing it would be over soon. Sorry. The best, most entertaining production I ever saw was A Midsummer Night's Dream performed by teenagers. I hated the movie.

I'm not incapable of enjoying Shakespeare, but I prefer the bard in small doses. On the other hand, I did spend many hours last summer watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC's) Playing Shakespeare, facilitated by John Barton. I enjoyed Stage Beauty and the Shakespearean parts of My Own Private Idaho. I think Much Ado About Nothing, and the musical, Love's Labour's Lost, were delightful movies. I like the Zeffirelli Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, the Baz Luhrman Romeo + Juliet. I watched the David Tennant Hamlet over the summer, but didn't enjoy it in spite of the awesomely charismatic and compelling (not to mention very good-looking) David Tennant. I like the Shakespeare episode of Doctor Who (ep. 3.2, “The Shakespeare Code”). I did think it was cool when Brick started quoting him in a recent episode of “The Middle.”

Anyway, all that is to say that I have had exposure to the bard, but I don't love him. I was, on the other hand, intrigued when I started seeing advertisements for the upcoming movie, Anonymous, on goodreads.com. The byline is “Was Shakespeare A Fraud?” When I watched the trailer online I thought the idea was hardly revolutionary, but when I read this article, published in The New York Times, I realized that all I know about the controversy surrounding Shakespeare's identity was gleaned from the pages of another work of fiction, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next Series. I learned from Thursday herself that some scholar's argue Shakespeare's oeuvre was written by Christopher Marlowe. This just goes to show how influential even fictional media can be, which is part of Stephen Marche's point. The general public does in fact believe a lot of what it sees. Sometimes the things it sees are a matter of responsible scholarship. Sometimes they are not.

I like this line from Marche's article: “Along with a right-wing antielitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism have also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in.” I am not smart enough to draw any conclusions from that statement, but I am storing it away for consideration at a later date.