Peter Ackroyd’s case for the Stratford man

We hardly ever buy books when they’re freshly published, which is why we’re only now getting around to Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography, which came out in 2005. It was a Father’s Day gift this year from our Goneril, the eldest of our three daughters.

Now, Emsworth has grave doubts as to whether the subject of this “biography” was actually the author of the “Shakespeare” plays and poems. (See this post, and this one too.) We think it far more likely that Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers.  But we still think Ackroyd’s book is a worthy read.

Peter Ackroyd is a Stratfordian, and like most of his kind he deals with the “authorship” question mainly by pretending to ignore it. His book barely mentions Oxford at all. But Shakespeare authorship was surely on his mind, because good portions of this “biography” amount to an advocacy brief on behalf of the traditional candidate. 

The Cobbe Shakespere portrait

Not that it’s a bad brief. We grant that Ackroyd cites a few circumstances that affirmatively tend to link the Stratford man to the writing of the plays. But they’re not nearly enough, in quality or quantity, to convince Emsworth. A lot of what Ackroyd gleans about the writer from the internal evidence of the plays and sonnets — which is his main technique — simply can’t be related to the man from Stratford. Indeed, Ackroyd sometimes admits as much.

For instance, Ackroyd says there is so much woodland imagery in As You Like It and other plays that the playwright had to have been a country boy (as the Stratford man was), not a city boy. There are so many references to gloves and how they’re made, he says, that the playwright must have known a glover (it’s known that William Shakespeare’s father was a glover).

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

That is the sort of thing Oxfordians do, too. They point out (to take two examples out of a great many) that whoever wrote Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew almost certainly had first-hand knowledge of the geography and customs of Italy (as de Vere did) and that the playwright had first-hand knowledge of the ways of royals and noblemen (as de Vere had).

Often as not, though, what Ackroyd takes from the plays doesn’t match up to anything we know about the life of the actor from Stratford, which of course isn’t much. Because the plays are riddled with references to falconry, Ackroyd says, the playwright must have known a lot about it — so he infers that, at some point, William Shakespeare must have worked as a tutor for a nobleman who kept falcons. And from the fact that there’s a lot of legal terminology in the plays, Ackroyd concludes that William Shakespeare must have spent time as apprentice to a solicitor in Stratford.

The world's best-known female lawyer was a fictional character in The Merchant of Venice. This "Portia" is by the Victorian artist Henry Woods.

This is just guesswork. There’s no other evidence that the Stratford man ever worked as a tutor or ever studied law. On the other hand, it is known that as a boy Edward de Vere was tutored by Sir Thomas Smith, who was devoted to falconry, at Smith’s estate at Ankerwycke. It is also known that de Vere was actually admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1566 to study law.

Some of Ackroyd’s other points are a bit of a stretch, too. For instance, stage directors are sparse in the Shakespeare plays, from which Ackroyd infers that the playwright himself was at the company’s rehearsals to tell the rest of the players what to do. But that’s something that might strike you only if you already assumed that William Shakespeare, the actor, wrote the plays.  Ackroyd correctly notes that strife between brothers is a theme in Shakespeare plays (for instance, Edgar and Edmund in King Lear, Prospero and Antonio in The Tempest, Orlando and Oliver in As You Like It) — from which he posits that William Shakespeare, the eldest boy in his family, had trouble with his younger brothers. It’s pure speculation; there’s no other evidence of it.

For all this, we don’t hesitate to recommend Shakespeare: The Biography. Peter Ackroyd is a gracious writer; we know him from of old as the author of our favorite biography of Charles Dickens. Like all Shakespeare “biographies,” only a fraction of his book deals directly with its ostensible subject; this book is essentially a history of the London theater from 1580 to 1620.

But it’s still full of interesting things we didn’t know. And many of the chapters of this book are excellent essays about the plays; Ackroyd’s pleasure in writing about something he loves is transparent.

Julius Caesar at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a review)

The historical Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is close to the top of the list of our favorite Shakespeare plays, but we’d never seen it performed until last weekend. The show at the Stratford Festival was tight, tense, and immensely satisfying, and we saw more in the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar than we ever knew was there.

We suppose there’s no danger of giving away the plot. The folks at Stratford evidently think people know the story, too; they left the usual plot summary out of the program. (We renew our complaint that the cost-cutters at Stratford are printing this year’s programs on cheap paper stock in an odd-sized (8 1/2 by 10 3/4) format that doesn’t fit our collection of programs.)

Julius Caesar is one of the plays reflected by relief sculptures along the outside of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C.

So to review, here’s the story. Around 40 B.C., Julius Caesar (Geraint Wyn Davies) has defeated his rival Pompey and has become virtual dictator of Rome. Jealous of Caesar, a number of Roman senators, led by Cassius (Tom Rooney), are plotting regime change. The conspirators realize, however, that without the support of the widely respected, high-minded Brutus (Ben Carlson), they are sure to be villified for taking Caesar down. Cassius persuades Brutus that, for the good of Rome, Caesar must die.

If Julius Caesar (Geraint Wyn Davis, center) had only read the letter being offered to him, he would have learned of the plot against his life.

On the Ides of March, Cassius, Brutus, and other Roman senators stab Caesar to death. Against the advice of Cassius, Brutus unwisely permits Caesar’s protege, Mark Antony (Jonathan Goad) to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Antony’s oration inflames the Romans against the conspirators. Mobs riot in the streets, and a civil war breaks out, in which Brutus and Cassius are uneasy allies. It all ends with a final battle at Phillippi.

Tom Rooney as Cassius, lean and hungry

As well as we know the play, we still felt the suspense keenly. Would Brutus yield to Cassius’s flattery and join the conspirators? Would Caesar be warned in time? Would the conspirators take Cassius’s advice and assassinate Mark Antony as well?

Domestic tension, as well: would Brutus ever tell his distraught wife Portia (Cara Ricketts) what’s going on?  Would Caesar heed the soothsayer and stay home on the Ides of March, as his wife Calpurnia pleads? Our own wife, who is not politically minded, thought the moral of the play was that husbands should listen to their wives.

We couldn’t have asked for a better cast for our first Julius Caesar on stage.   Geraint Wyn Davies has only a few scenes, but he is positively masterful as a ruler who has begun to believe that he is, indeed, god-like; no wonder Brutus could be persuaded that such a Caesar needed to be stopped. Best of all was Tom Rooney, with his bright-eyed intensity, steely sense of purpose, and ramrod stature. We knew without Caesar’s telling us that Cassius had “a lean and hungry look.”

Ben Carlson (Brutus) and Tom Rooney (Cassius)

Ben Carlson speaks the language of Shakespeare naturally, conversationally, and with effortless diction.  He and Rooney are well paired; the best parts of this Julius Caesar were Brutus’s scenes with Cassius.  The famous “quarrel” scene was just short of perfection (we dissected the quarrel in this recent post); it fell short only in that we felt that Brutus would, for maximum impact, have told Cassius to his face that he had “an itching palm.”  Instead, Carlson delivered the accusation in an offhanded manner as he poured a drink across the stage from Cassius.

Until last weekend, we never fully appreciated the emotional power of the “I am sick of many griefs” scene later in Act IV, Scene 3, in which we (and Cassius) learn of Portia’s suicide. Carlson, Rooney, and Kevin Blanchard (as Messala) play this scene with delicacy and humanity.

We were a little disappointed, however, in Jonathan Goad’s Mark Antony. We have seen Goad described as Stratford’s Johnny Depp, and indeed Goad’s what-me-worry? approach to the part reminded us of the hero of Pirates of the Caribbean. But it didn’t suit here, with the Roman empire at stake. Surely no confrontation in Julius Caesar should bristle more than the scene immediately after the death of Caesar, when Mark Antony comes face to face with the conspirators. But this Antony seemed more annoyed than angry with the conspirators; he hardly seemed to fear for his life. The scene slowed the play’s momentum.

And Antony’s “This was the noblest Roman of them all” monologue, after the death of Brutus, also fell flat.  It ends, of course, with Antony’s pronouncement on Brutus: “This was a man!”  The line needs to be delivered portentously, with equal emphasis on “this” and “man”.  But Goad accented only the first word: “THIS was a man.” It sounded more like a throwaway line.

Still, Goad delivered one of the play’s most thrilling moments with his “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. For this scene, director James MacDonald resourcefully embedded members of the cast in the audience, they made us feel part of the dangerous mob ourselves. The effect was electric. We had always assumed that Antony began his speech when the noise of the crowd died down. But Goad made us understand that “lend me your ears” (which he was obliged to shout over the din) was uttered in order to get the mob to shut up and listen.

From the supporting cast, we especially enjoyed the performances of Michael Spencer-Davis (as Casca), Cara Ricketts (as Portia), John Innes (as Cicero), and Dion Johnstone (as Octavius Caesar). Skye Brandon was superb as the unfortunate Cinna the poet, whose appearance and rapid demise (the finest cameo role of any play we can think of) seemed even more shocking than the assassination of Caesar himself.

The costumes and the props did not, frankly, make sense. The most that can be said for them is that we didn’t find them terribly distracting. In the first act, the Romans all wore snazzy suits and colorful ensembles (including some very short skirts) that vaguely reminded us of the Berlin street scenes, circa 1914, of Ernest Kirchner. In the second act, the officers in Mark Antony’s camp wore twentieth-century military uniforms; those in Cassius’s and Brutus’s camp wore baseball caps. And the soldiers all carried semi-automatic rifles. We missed the point of these “modern” touches.  We know exactly the time period in which this particular play takes place; it wasn’t the early 20th century.

Ben Carlson deserves credit for remaining unflustered under trying circumstances. During one of his early scenes, quite close to the stage, an extremely loud cellphone went off and played a long passage from Mozart’s C major piano sonata, K. 545. The owner had trouble getting it under control. Carlson never batted an eye as we all finally heard the belltones of a cellphone being turned off.

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

Anton Chekhov’s wonderful The Three Sisters (see this post)

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

The marvelous quarrels in Julius Caesar and The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)