feanix

Just got back from seeing Anonymous with my mother. If you’ve not seen it (and I’ll try to avoid spoilers), it’s the new movie based on the myriad conspiracies as to who the “real” author of William Shakespeare’s was. Like most other people, I love a great story well told, and like quite a few people, I like a good conspiracy theory. But, most importantly, like they majority of half-literate people, I fervently believe that nobody else but William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare. 

The movie contained every possible suspect (excepting Bacon); Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, the Earl of Essex and onward, and Shakespeare appeared to be a bawdy, hapless, though reasonably talented actor who initially put his name on a successful play but on whom the rest of the plays and poems were pinned (alliteration, what?). It was star-studded, as one would hope a Shakespeare movie ought to be. Queen Elizabeth I was played by the brilliant Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans played the Earl of Oxford, David Thewlis as William Cecil (who was supposed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare's Polonius in Hamlet), Sebastian Armesto played Ben Jonson (England's first Poet Laureate and editor of the First Folio), and Rafe Spall played Shakespeare himself (turns out Spall was in both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead). The inimitable Sir Derek Jacobi, renowned Shakespearean actor, spoke the prologue and epilogue. I thought that the celebrity-heavy cast might detract from the merit of the film itself, but it really didn’t -- I was only stupidly distracted by David Thewlis (kept expecting Gary Oldman to pop up) and the extraordinarily beautiful Xavier Samuel, who played the not unattractive Earl of Southampton. Redgrave was, as I say, especially brilliant. The authorship story line managed to exist, not compete, alongside the largely real (though not insignificantly fictionalised) story of the battle for the Tudor throne and how a Scottish king -- King James -- took the throne and the British Empire. 

The movie as a narrative was a lot of fun and thought provoking. It didn’t seem, at least overtly, to try to force the audience’s beliefs regarding the conspiracy in one way or another. I don’t think it needed to and I don’t think that was the whole aim of the game, rather than to just shed light on this intricate set of myths regarding the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. These ideas seem to have endured based on the (apparently) commonly held belief that an ordinary, not hugely educated, not wealthy man could have ever been responsible for speaking and/or writing the words that have endured and then flourished over the last four hundred odd years. Apparently some people, past and present, don’t believe that regular Joes like you and I could ever have the strength, the literary authority or the general thingness that produced the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Personally, I don’t think that anyone but a commoner could have written the plays (and poems). Only a commoner could have entertained the upper classes but spoken to his people. He knew what the people wanted, he knew how to reach them, to speak to them, to make fun of and with them. He knew how to be anti-religious in a way that people would agree with but wouldn’t get him in (too much) trouble, how to be seditious but vague. He knew how to keep the Crown and Court onside and how to free the ordinary people from their day-to-day drudgery. Shakespeare could speak to common people and it is for this reason that he is still not just popular but important to common people today. No matter how grudgingly students read his works, they still read them and, somehow, the plays and poems and sonnets still stick. They still resonate. Now, members of the Court and upper classes can be valuable (and often are), and they can often be striking and valid and interesting and, yes, important, but not often in a way that demands italics because they largely speak to and for themselves. They speak for themselves, not for us. Shakespeare spoke for us regular John and Jane Does in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, and he still speaks for us today. To this very day. He speaks for us in schools and in art and in popular culture and in the privacy of wherever it is that we read or talk. He speaks for us in our hearts and in a place, I fervently believe, is a little higher up, because -- as they say in Latin -- vox populi, vox dei.

The voice of the people is the voice of God.

William Shakespeare, then and now, gives a voice to the people.