Spit & Polish: 30 October 2011

Did Shakespeare write his plays? Or was he a front for somebody else? Or is it all much ado about nothing?

I feel obliged to warn you that this is a more-than-usually personal column, and no, it is not about my dogs. It is also not about the current political system that rules our lives, even though it is as lightweight and as full of holes as a sponge, and it also sucks up money as quickly and as messily as a sponge does water.

This week I want to talk about one of my favourite movies of the year. It is called Anonymous and it is a literary whodunit about William Shakespeare and the question of who really wrote his plays.

Surprisingly, the general public remains interested in Shakespeare's plays, be they on stage, film or TV screen. Scholars and academics, however, do not settle for the mere pleasure of happy audiences. They feel obliged to find proof that someone other than Shakespeare did the work.

The debate started in 1848, when Joseph Hart declared that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. And so the great Shakespeare Denial began, and it has rambled on since then, zig-zagging from loony invention to credible theory.

A Hollywood screenwriter, John Orloff, was fascinated by this lingering debate and he wrote a drama in which all the possible candidates to have laid claim to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays are in London at the same time, in the final years of the Elizabethan age.

In the production notes of the film, Orloff and director Roland Emmerich compiled a list of reasons indicating why Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays.

To start with, not a single manuscript or poem was ever found in Shakespeare's own handwriting - not even a letter. He divided his life between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and letters were the only way of communicating over a distance.

Surely a famous playwright, with a family that lived away from him, would have written to them? Shakespeare was famous. His family and friends would almost certainly have kept his letters - but none exist.

There is a supposition that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school, but there is no written record to prove it. Yet in the plays he writes with graceful eloquence about a wide range of subjects.

He also had an extensive vocabulary, but where did he acquire it?

According to the historians, his daughters Susanna and Judith were illiterate. Did he presume that girls do not deserve an education? In his plays he created witty, articulate women such as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, or the mercurial Queen of Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, or even the lovesick Juliet, talking to Romeo.

Is it likely that the man who created these fascinating women did not bother to teach his daughters to read and write? Surely he would want his children to read his plays and sonnets?

It is also noteworthy that in none of his plays does he focus on ordinary people. They are filled with aristocratic figures - Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra - and when he does write about servants and commoners, he parodies them, giving them silly names such as Bottom, Dull, or Mistress Overdone.

Another salient point on the list created by Orloff and Emmerich is that the only authenticated handwriting we have from Shakespeare are six shaky and inconsistent signatures, all on legal documents.

One of the most curious issues is that after the death of his only son, Hamnet, he wrote nothing about the boy's death. In his poems he wrote passionately about "a dark lady" and "a golden youth", both of whom bewitched him, but his own son's death produces not a single mention in either a sonnet or a play.

The most peculiar thing is that, at the height of his fame, when he was called "the Soul of the Age", he left London to return to Stratford-upon-Avon. He was in his early 40s, but he never wrote a play or poem after that. So why did the most fertile mind of his generation, equipped with an extraordinary vocabulary, suddenly stop in its tracks, and fall silent?

When Shakespeare's will was read after his death, he bequeathed to his wife - Anne Hathaway - the house and "the second-best bed". Of his 36 plays, 154 sonnets and two famous narrative poems - the works that were his most significant achievement - no mention was made.

Who inherited the plays? The theory offered in Anonymous is that they were written in secret by someone of high status, but his noble birth and status at court precluded him from the vulgarity of staging plays at the Globe.

The film suggests that he picked an ambitious but clueless man, named William Shakespeare, and gave him money and the manuscripts to have them staged. As a result, Shakespeare flourished while the true creator of the plays watched from the sidelines.

Does this film solve the mystery? Of course not! Shakespeare died in 1616, and here we are, 395 years later, watching major stars such as Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jacobi and Rhys Ifans puzzling about who wrote the plays - dramas that still retain enough power to inspire a movie hit in 2011.