No one does Shakespeare on film better than Kenneth Branagh. His Hamlet is the pinnacle. All other Shakespeare movies are properly measured by how much they fall short of that 1996 masterpiece. His exceptional Much Ado About Nothing falls less short than almost all the rest.
His current film is not a play by Shakespeare but rather a purported bio-pic of the Stratford man’s last three years in his hometown. It is entitled All is True as was the play that was running at the Globe Theater when it burned to the ground on June 29th, 1613. The same play was printed in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays as Henry VIII but traditional scholars have long since agreed that far and away the lion’s share of the play was written by John Fletcher.
Branagh is presently doing a screening and public relations tour in the Hollywood / Los Angeles area in preparation for the various awards competitions for which he has entered the film. This has also entailed doing extended interviews for each of the organizations. Perhaps the longest was the interview for the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists awards. In it he greatly expands upon the lines he has memorized to present at each interview.
A number of assertions he makes in those prepared remarks are patently wrong. But it doesn’t really matter. The incorrect assertions are packaged together with correct assertions, albeit the correct assertions have nothing to do with writing plays. All of the assertions are heard from the mouth of Kenneth Branagh, for which reason they sound to the vast majority of his fans like a strong basis for a biography of the Stratford man as writer of the great plays.
Stratfordians, in the Authorship Debate, have faced the same feelings as Oxfordians are likely to feel listening to Branagh, when they have heard Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi speak in favor of alternative authors. They have reflected that even highly respected Shakespearean actors cannot be expected to know the historical details of the man who wrote the plays in which they act. It seemed perversely unfair.
And now the shoe is very much on the other foot. Now the public hears, from a man they utterly respect in matters Shakespearean that:
· “Shakespeare knew nothing more about Henry VIII than we know about Shakespeare now.” [But even traditional scholars have long agreed that he wrote only a very small portion of that play. And there was much more historical information on that king, even then, than there is about Shakespeare now.]
· “We know that the Globe Theater did burn down on that night. On June 29th, 1613.” [Of course that is indisputable but says nothing about Shakespeare.]
· “And it was traumatizing.” [We have no indication at all that Shakespeare was traumatized in any way. Nor do we have any indication that he remained a shareholder in the Globe Theater after 1608. The theater was rebuilt the year after it burned down.]
· “And he did leave.” [Even traditional scholars agree that he had already been away from London for years at that point except to tend to his real estate holdings.]
· “And he did never write another play.” [He’d written only a tiny part of All is True. There is no evidence that he ever put his hand toward any other play after the death of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.]
· “He did pay 20 l. – or about $5000 – for a coat of arms that allowed him to be called gentleman.” [True but it says nothing about Shakespeare as playwright.]
· “We know that the sonnets were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.” [We know no such thing. The first mention of that theory was put forward more than 200 years after Shakespeare’s death.]
Among these observations, Branagh recites a litany of genuine facts about the Stratford man’s business dealings as a grain merchant (purchase of grain tithes), the sexual peccadillos of his daughters and one of his sons-in-law, etc. All of it, he assures us with a flourish, irrefutable truth. All is True.
All about the Stratford family’s details is indeed true. The date the Globe Theater burned down is true. The rest is — as is the case in all Shakespeare biographies — total conjecture.
“In between what we did was what Shakespeare did regularly, was to try and imagine. And what we imagined was from the material of the plays themselves.” The movie, that is to say, uses exactly the same materials and approach of all of the traditional biographies. They compose the life of the Stratford man from the materials in the plays and then declare him obviously the playwright because the resulting life and the plays echo each other.
But Branagh has done something much more. He has given it his personal imprimatur. He offers his reputation as proof that the movie is a legitimate biography. After all, he has investors who are depending upon that reputation in order to clear a gratifying profit. Movie goers will not be reading a biography that leaves the more conscious among them free to question, they will be watching a film that will coopt their reasoning processes for the end of those profits.
Truth be told, Oxfordians have been doing their best to produce films to do precisely the same thing. And it was every bit as much an intentional conjuring trick as is this film. Rigorous evidence is no longer much in vogue. That being the case, the side with the best film-maker wins.
It would seem clearly to be time to consider spending more time on developing content than networking and promotion. There will be no more “convincing” film than this.
- Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598. November 20, 2018. ‘These he finds unconvincing. The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”’
- The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth. October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed? But differently from the text we have of Macbeth? To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
- The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
- Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written. The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
No comments:
Post a Comment