It may come as a bit of a surprise, being that I'm a kid from a rural Iowa background who now lives out in the boonies in Alaska, but I've always been a Shakespeare buff. I've seen several of his works done on stage, and a whole bunch on film; if such things are your bag, my favorites are Kenneth Branagh's takes on Henry V and As You Like It, Ian McKellen's Richard III, and the wonderful Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor film version of Taming of the Shrew.
Don't talk to me about Romeo and Juliet, though. Never saw the appeal in two teenagers forming a suicide pact. Old Will sort of missed the mark with that one.
Still, William Shakespeare remains, after all the centuries, perhaps the greatest playwright to ever work in the English language, and he was no stranger to the boards, either, often acting in his own roles. But now, in his old home island, a nut is trying to claim that the Bard didn't write his work. Now that's not a new claim; such have been made through the years. But this one's different, because this claim is that the real author of Shakespeare's work was a black woman.
The Telegraph's Philip Womack has the story. A black woman. Yes, really.
Like a zombie that won’t die, the notion that William Shakespeare was a front for someone else has popped up again. A blog on the website of the London School of Economics (no less), claims that old Shakey was a “black woman”, the poet Emilia Bassano (who, in any case, wasn’t black).
Well, you could have fooled me. A grand old institution like the LSE should not be anywhere near this stuff. It is not even a new theory. The essay, by “feminist historian” Irene Coslet, argues it is “critical to reclaim Subaltern identities from history” if we want to build an equal society.
There is just one problem. We know, with certainty, that William Shakespeare wasn’t even slightly a woman, or black. He was a white bloke from Warwickshire, of yeoman stock. You might as well try to argue that the sun was, in fact, cold. Why does this madness continue?
The LSE seems to be thinking that it's better to be thought a witty fool than a foolish wit, but regardless, this is foolish stuff. Few non-royals of the day had their lives as well-documented as William Shakespeare, and besides, Emilia Bassano wasn't black. We know who she was. She was English. As in, a typically white English woman of Elizabethan England. We shouldn't downplay her work, mind you. She was a prominent English poet of the time; as a matter of fact, she was England's first woman to make her living writing poetry. But her works survive, and while her achievement in these regards is considerable, well, she's no Will Shakespeare. Those who claim she penned his work, well, that is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This isn't the first time someone has tried to give someone else credit for Shakespeare's work. It's just the first time someone got it this hilariously wrong.
It was only in the 19th century that a certain Delia Bacon decided that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the works, and that Francis Bacon (no relation) must have done it instead. Though Francis Bacon barely had enough time to be himself, let alone produce Shakespeare’s works, this soon sparked a trend for other spurious “candidates.”
And boy, are there dozens, with anyone from Elizabeth I to Christopher Marlowe to the translator Thomas North mooted. These “candidates” proliferate, a sure sign that they fall at the first hurdle. Was Shakespeare “actually” the Earl of Oxford, for example? Nope. Oxford was a lazy aristocrat who spaffed away his fortune, and, inconveniently, was pushing up daisies long before Shakespeare composed his greatest plays (though this doesn’t stop some, who claim Oxford’s ghost was involved).
So, why do these chuckleheads insist on putting out this stupidity? What a terrible era, in which idiots govern the blind.
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I think a great deal of it comes from the woke left's need to crap all over anything that involves white dudes, and that's what Will Shakespeare was, a white dude from England. Most dudes from England were white back then, you know. We can't just look back on Renaissance England, at the work of the Anglosphere's foremost playwright, whose work is still popular today, whether people recognize it or not. (Remember Disney's The Lion King? Hamlet.) No, the woke can't just accept history. They have to bend it, to twist it out of recognition, to claim that Shakespeare was a fraud, that the most famous of all playwrights took the credit of the work of, not only another person, but a woman - a black woman who wasn't black.
To the people who put forth this nitwittery, old Will himself may have said:
I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!
Now, if you want to know my very favorite film version of anything Shakespeare, I have to go with Branagh's Henry V, which starred Branagh himself in the title role - but my main reason is because of the wondrous Brian Blessed's performance as the Duke Thomas Beaufort of Exeter. Here's a bit that will send chills down one's spine.
