NOT SO THRILLING: AN OLD DORIS DAY PROPAGANDA FILM

It’s best to be forewarned about the 1963 broad comedy The Thrill of it All, in case you come across it unsuspecting and are drawn in by the caliber of names associated with it: directed by Norman Jewison, written by Carl Reiner from a story by Reiner and Larry Gelbart, and starring Doris Day and James Garner. You might be tempted to check it out as a retro, Technicolor romp -- and not realize that its entire aim is brainwashing. 

During the course of the film, Doris Day’s character Beverly goes from contented “doctor’s wife” to a high-paid career of her own in commercials, much to her obstetrician husband Dr. Gerald Boyer’s displeasure, since he maintains they make enough money on his salary. For a good chunk of the movie, Gerald amd Beverly are in a kind of war over her career, to the extent that Gerald tries all kinds of farcical tricks and ruses to make her stop working. The couplr have a lot of animosity as they fight this out. However, in the end, Beverly realizes the folly of her ways and quits her job, and the couple reconciles. 

One of the main brainwashing techniques the film employs is to sentimentalize giving birth, which it does repeatedly from the very start of The Thrill of it All, in the opening credits of white, paper-constructed nursery figures. It also kicks into the propaganda with Mrs. Fraleigh’s ecstasy over the news she is pregnant. Yet it is in the movie’s climax that the act of giving birth is downright lionized. Mrs. Fraleigh (Arlene Francis) goes into labor in a traffic jam and ends up giving birth in the limo -- by the time the car pulls up at the hospital, the baby is out. A close-up of Mrs. Fraleigh leaning back against the seat smiling as she tells her husband the news is back-lit and shot in soft-focus. The flowered veil on her fancy hat is spread around her perfect curls like a halo, idealizing her. It is as if, after trying to bear a child for 20 years, she has now been inducted into a mystical sisterhood of womankind. At the same time, Beverly is also back-lit and shot in a soft-focus medium close-up as she gazes proudly at her skillful obstetrician husband. Here Beverly looks soft and delicate too -- unlike, for instance, an earlier scene when she is offered $80,000 for a spokes-model contract, and falls into a crate of tomatoes. Here, it is as if the magic of childbirth has touched her too. Indeed, it has; we will soon learn that it has made her decide to leave her lucrative career and re-invest herself as her husband’s helpmate.

Interestingly, at the same time as having babies is built up as a woman’s finest calling, the difficulty of it is minimized in this climactic scene. Gardiner Fraleigh is running around frantically as the birth becomes imminent, but his wife, who has not complained to our knowledge during her pregnancy, seems to get by without labor pains, bodily fluids messing up the inside of the car, or complications – despite the fact she is middle-aged and without benefit of maternity ward care during the pivotal car ride. She also seems to have retained every single item of clothing during labor, none of her make-up has run, there’s not a bead of sweat on her, she does not seem in the least bit tired, and somehow, there was room for her, Beverly, and Gerald, to all sit in the back of the car and push out a baby without anyone’s knees getting in the way. The ease of this birth is even more striking in light of the frequent slapstick mishaps that make fools of Gerald and Beverly in the movie, and which are always linked to Beverly working outside the home. The message to women seems to be that having babies is both noble and a piece of cake, whereas getting mixed up in the work world is humiliating and causes havoc in one’s personal life.

Ironically, although childbirth is elevated in The Thrill of it All, women are not given higher status because of it. Our introduction to Dr. Gerald Boyer at the beginning of the film is when he walks confidently out of the delivery room after a successful birth to congratulate the father; the mother is invisible. Though the climactic race to the hospital with Mrs. Fraleigh is a key set piece in terms of story structure and the complexity of staging it, most of the sequence is about the externals: the traffic jam, whether Gardiner can procure needed items from other drivers like a clean newspaper, and Dr. Boyer’s arrival on a police horse – riding up dramatically to charged music as if he were a knight coming to the rescue. (A take-charge knight; as soon as he catches up to the Fraleigh car he starts acting like an authority, issuing instructions to the police.) There is no direct narrative attention to what Mrs. Fraleigh is experiencing. This may have a lot to do with the puritanical prohibitions of the Production Code, which was still limiting what Hollywood could depict, but the ironic result is that though it is her labor that sets the sequence off, she is practically a passive spectator while it is everyone else who is active. 

There is a disturbing double-repressiveness when a movie extols pregnancy as female fulfillment but dares not talk about it from a woman’s perspective. The woman’s part in the process is kept in the dark – in a black Rolls Royce, out of view of the camera – and the visuals focus on men, as if male management of childbirth mattered more than what the woman does. For example, when mother and baby are moved from the limo to the hospital, Mrs. Fraleigh is moved out of the car almost invisibly at the back of the frame, and only one female nurse is in the background -- the other four medical figures taking control from Dr. Boyer are all male doctors and orderlies. Moreover, the name of the institution is the “Doctors’ Hospital”, we’ve heard that and now we see it on the front of the building. It is the (presumably all-male) doctors who make the institution.
 

In the same vein, Gardiner calls his wife a “genius” in the first scene for getting pregnant! At the film’s climax, he calls her “brilliant”, for giving birth! What he doesn’t call her, ever, is her first name, and neither does anyone else in the movie, so it is hard to buy the idea that she’s truly revered. (At best she gets referred to as “Mrs. Gardiner Fraleigh.”) Gardiner also compliments everyone in the limo except for Beverly for their brilliance over the childbirth, and yet Beverly has been there all along at his wife’s request and has overseen the process until her husband arrived. Also, she has first-hand knowledge from having given birth twice herself. 

But even Beverly seems to forget her own first-hand knowledge. She is brought to tears by watching her husband deliver the Fraleigh infant, and afterward tells him: “Darling, you know when I helped you back there in the car? And I held that new life in my arms? I felt what you must feel every single day.” She has already held new life in her arms, twice, has actually created that life and felt an even greater feeling than what Dr. Boyer can as an obstetrician, and yet the movie seems so intent on the dangers of women competing with men in the workforce that even Beverly’s experience as a mother takes a back seat to her husband’s professional skill in helping mothers give birth.

Visually, in fact, Beverly’s journey from career woman to re-dedicated housewife in the final moments of The Thrill of it All is almost presented as if she herself were being born. She has engaged in a lot of foolery with Happy Soap earlier in the film when she was not yet fully developed – they in fact hired her because she was unpolished, awkward and hesitant – and now, having seen what a proper career is by watching Dr. Boyer pull a baby out, Beverly emerges from the dark, cramped, womb-like car into the open space -- and a brand new perspective. When the car has arrived, we see those inside it through a window that is masked around the edges in a horizontal oval shape, like an iris from early films – the inside of the car is lit, but outside the oval is dark. If you were so inclined, this could also be seen as reminiscent of a vaginal opening. Beverly walks out of the car through this opening, emerging into the pool of light in front of the hospital, and, crying, she joins her husband. We see him in profile, head and chest, holding her, as she sniffles on his chest. The position makes Beverly look weak and childish in contrast to Gerald’s strong, parental figure. 

In the last shot of the scene, she pledges to leave her job to be a “doctor’s wife” and they kiss, both in profile in a close-up two-shot. We then segue to the performers in the same pose and shot, kissing at home. The two young kids tell their parents how much they want a sibling. Gerald hugs Beverly from behind during this exchange – the woman who had been so elusive earlier is now completely enclosed by his arms, the stair railing and the walls – for it appears she has been tamed, domesticated. The children on the landing appear as wise little cherubs; after hinting that they plan to make a baby together that night, Beverly and Gerald ascend the staircase together lovingly –  their unseen bedroom is their heavenly destination. Their constant tribulations have been solved now and their future will be like a paradise, for Beverly has given up her career.

It is clear that Gerald has won. He has recaptured his runaway wife. Her lucid arguments earlier in the film about why she needs outside interests or why she’d like to contribute earnings to the household have been forgotten. This is depicted as a happy ending, complete with fireworks popping as we go to closing credits. The message of the movie really could not be any plainer. It is no wonder that Betty Friedan felt the need to write her book The Feminine Mystique, which came out the same year. The Thrill of it All epitomizes the kind of concerted societal campaign that was being waged to persuade post-war American women to stay home.

Death on the Nile (2022)

The prologue of the movie is ingenious, and surprises the viewers by plunging them immediately into the trenches of World War I and a glimpse of Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot’s past, before he was an investigator – but when he already had the kind of mind that would develop into one. That sequence, in fact, is quintessential Branagh. It epitomizes Kenneth Branagh’s assets as a filmmaker: flamboyant, theatrical, boldly expanding out from the anticipated milieu and imagining a back-story for Poirot that isn’t strictly necessitated by the mystery Agatha Christie wrote but that grounds the story to come by adding depth to Poirot, and in a way that the audience can readily understand and enjoy. Branagh’s greatest strength, perhaps, is his willingness “to go there” – wherever ‘there’ might be – without pulling his punches in fear of whether it is proper, de rigueur, intellectually sanctioned, etc. When he directed Shakespeare films, this was known as ‘popularizing’ Shakespeare, although that was always a very odd way to put it, considering that no writer since Biblical days has written for the mass audience more overtly or successfully over the long-term than Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Branagh was intent on bringing out what was already there in Shakespeare, unlike the stuffy dramatizations which seemed to want to hide it, and now with Death on the Nile, as with Murder on the Orient Express, he seems again on a mission to make us appreciate the author he’s adapting to the screen, not as a distant curiosity, but up close and visceral.

Death on the Nile is a grandiose kind of movie, the kind where Gal Gadot goes for a walk on the ship’s deck to go speak to Poirot and the shot itself is a tour de force that shows off the boat and how big it is, and has fun being able to move the camera in a crane shot that follows her in one move. When a spurned love interest makes a reappearance, the scale of her entrance is operatic, with an enormous red train on her dress in a high camera angle. When the holiday-makers pass by ancient Egypt’s pyramids and sphinxes, these ancient wonders are giant-sized – something akin to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, although this time they are probably CGI – and the grandeur of them dwarfs the human sight-seers and their petty squabbles. It’s obvious that this is a big-budget movie, and that it fully exploits how expansive it can be. But it does so in a classic-Hollywood vein, not in a typical modern action-movie vein (the kind that sacrifices visual beauty and originality for special effects wizardry and rapid cutting). It’s a movie that wants to spin you a tale, of another place and time, and let you participate in the story-making. Mystery aficionados like trying to guess who the killer is, and a game is played between the reader and the author, leaving clues but trying to surprise as well. Branagh lays down clues with the right amount of aplomb (in a story with sufficient complication) so that you can enjoy the ride and the process simultaneously. For instance, you might notice how shifty-eyed one of the characters looks when the camera pans past the group of passengers, or you might register “huh, that character mentioned she has lost an item, I bet that item’ll turn up as part of the plot,” but this just makes it more fun when the strings are untangled later.

This time, the film is not as visually frenetic as Murder on the Orient Express was. Branagh was so busy in that first Agatha Christie film, it almost looked like Baz Luhrmann. Poirot could not even lie down in his bunk on that train without the camera angle slanting bizarrely, and there were a lot of attention-getting compositions, movement, and sudden cuts. Though lively and energetic, the many distractions made it difficult to follow the plot. By contrast, this time around, the plot flows smoothly and the cinematic style is entertaining and inviting, less hyperbolic. 

Death on the Nile is also quite witty. There were a number of laugh-out loud moments. For example, in one scene Poirot accuses two people of murder and they are deeply offended, and his friend, from the other side of the room, helpfully offers comfort: “He accuses everyone of murder.” Poirot admits: “it’s a problem.” There’s also the casting of ‘Saunders and French’, the longtime comedy duo from England, as a couple traveling together -- a clever little reference. Jennifer Saunders’ character is also amusing because she’s a socialist, and keeps expressing her critical attitude about the rich and their morays. There is also, of course, Poirot’s own anal-retentive qualities, and how his ability to notice when tiny little details are out of order is both a bonus, as a detective, and an annoyance, as a person. And there’s his mustache, which has only grown more stylish and more relevant.

The cast is consistently excellent, and features Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, as a hostess to this huge ship-bound party; Annette Bening, a a grande dame who carries her artist’s easel around Egypt with her and is a controlling matriarch to Poirot’s pal Bouc (Tom Bateman); Sophie Okonedo as a lounge singer and Letitia Wright as her daughter; Russell Brand in a surprising appearance as a stoic, clean-cut, bespectacled doctor – clearly not type-casting; and Arnie Hammer and the French-British actress Emma Mackey as one-time lovers. Though Christie’s novel is from 1937 and the film retains that period setting, Branagh and the screenplay by Michael Green (who also adapted Murder on the Orient Express) have made the sensibility more modern, so there are inter-racial and same-sex romances, and some fluidity and openness between classes.

Though Branagh and Green manage to extract an overall theme about love and passion from Poirot’s own personal arc as well as from the murder plot, Death on the Nile is a movie that embraces unabashedly how frothy and frivolous it is – as John Gielgud said, “Style is knowing what kind of play you’re in”, and Branagh as a director follows that dictum and embraces the style of the material itself. He is not embarrassed to show us rich people leading pampered lives and then murdering each other and acting shocked, because that’s the material, and it has its own value, even if that value is no cure for cancer or climate change. In order to underline what world or style we’re in, Branagh stages several musical numbers, set in night-clubs or on the dance floor of the cruise ship, which enliven the whole enterprise (especially with some risqué moves that I’m pretty sure were not period artifacts) and which also provide Poirot with a love interest of his own. The movie makes no bones about showing us just how decadent the wealthy characters on this pleasure cruise really are, knowing that the audience is later going to enjoy seeing them get their comeuppance.

As far as class politics, Poirot himself also helps to provide balance. Though he is invited into the highest echelons, we have already seen from the prologue that he came from humble farmer stock. Moreover, he doesn’t get down with their debauchery; he is an observer, an outsider. He counters their excesses and histrionics with his own reasonableness and calmness. While he is quirky enough to be a memorable and interesting character, it is also clear that he remains sane even in the midst of this insular, self-centered social circle, so the audience can watch these vain and corrupt people through his eyes – detached and bemused. Though the idle rich would love to win him over, his loyalty is, always, to uncovering the facts. In short, he is actually a timely role model for our own society.

Speak the Speech

The fact that William Shakespeare of Stratford began as an actor seems entirely compatible with his writing when we look at his obsessive references to theatrical performance and illusion in several of his works: the As You Like It  “All the world’s a stage” speech, the Prologue’s “wooden O” invocation in Henry V, and Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.” It makes perfect sense for Shakespeare -- an actor with years of stage experience, a feeling of solidarity with other players, and a financial commitment to theater through joint stock in his own company -- to insert plays-within-plays into Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet. Yet it seems less likely that a poet like the Earl of Oxford, sequestered (per the film Anonymous) on an aristocrat’s estate far removed from the London theater world, would express himself in those terms.  A detached, reclusive writer seems unlikely to spend so much time on the Melancholy Dane’s relationship with the Players, or Hamlet’s master class in the craft of acting, but an actor-writer might -- and might get away with preaching to fellow actors. 

Even more germane to the way acting shaped Shakespeare the writer, however, is that Shakespeare’s writing, far from being constantly flowery poesy, is down-to-earth and psychologically astute. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona rips up her admirer’s letter to show she has no interest in him, then once alone, she falls to her knees and tearfully scoops up the pieces. Googoo-eyed Juliet calls Romeo back to her balcony, then forgets what she was going to say. The heartbroken Falstaff denies that King Henry V really meant to reject him, and waits vainly for a reprieve. Beatrice gets a cold on her cousin’s wedding day because subconsciously she wishes she were getting married, despite what she says about romance.

Such insights extend to deeper psychological through-lines and major characters as well. Macbeth makes a big splash as a warrior-captain and is promoted by a grateful monarch, but the moment he tastes that career success, this hitherto rule-playing and loyal subject is consumed by an insane ambition. Othello wants to trust that his beloved Desdemona is faithful, but being an exception as a general in a fundamentally racist society, he is easily tricked into suspecting that a white woman could not really love a black man; despite all his accomplishments and recognition, he can’t believe that the power structure, to which Desdemona is related, truly accepts him. Getting ready for retirement, King Lear falls for flattery and obsequiousness just when he is trying to set up his legacy, and like a narcissist who needs to hear constant compliments or he’ll get offended, he cannot see which of his children or aides are actually the loyal ones. All of these portraits are immensely gratifying for any actor to mine, and a strong argument could be made that these profoundly human roles still fascinate artists and audiences precisely because Shakespeare as an actor knew how to give other actors emotionally-sophisticated parts.

Shakespeare’s writing is even more precisely actor-oriented, however, in the rich variety of ways he uses pace and rhythm to express character and emotion. As actors who study the texts know, the speech patterns of Shakespeare’s characters can be profoundly psychologically revealing. Cleopatra misses Antony like a lovesick teenager would, asking her entourage a torrent of questions about what he might be doing at that moment. In Much Ado About Nothing, after her cousin’s wedding descends into chaos, an outraged Beatrice gets emotional around Benedick, interrupting and contradicting herself, blurting out her love for him before she realizes. When the treacherous Iago lays the seeds to taint Othello’s mind, he speaks in a simple and straight-forward way, so that he won’t appear too smart to Othello and arouse his suspicion. By contrast, when Iago speaks to the foolish Roderigo, he uses more complex language in order to impress and intimidate him into helping Iago carry out his scheme.

Students acting Shakespeare are taught to ‘scan’ the meter of the lines, because diagramming the rhythm shows what the characters feel, beat by beat. Cracking the code reveals mood, energy, intended pauses, racing thoughts, tortured logic, and so much more. If a line runs shorter than the usual iambic pentameter, that’s a clue as to the character’s thought process. If it runs longer, that’s another clue. If it begins with an “O,” extending that vowel sound can be wonderfully expressive. If the line has a lot of monosyllabic words, those can be drawn out. If one character stops half way through a line and another character comes in for the second half of the line, the second actor benefits from picking up the cue (following quickly on the heels of the previous line) because it reveals the appropriate energy and therefore the character’s emotion.  

Noticing whether characters speak in verse or prose, what makes them switch between those forms, where or whether they rhyme, and where they use alliteration, antithesis, or simile — these are all clues. Well-trained actors also pay close attention to the word on which the line ends, since they have discovered that Shakespeare has it there for a reason that is particular to that character at that moment in time. Shakespeare’s verse does not just get to the end of the line and allow the actor to take a breath; it ends the character’s thought there, or uses it as a jumping pad for an altered or more highly charged thought, or continues a complicated thought onto the next line in a new way. The end of the line is thus a clue to subtle inner changes within the character. 

The technical nature of Shakespeare’s writing becomes ever more astonishing the more one delves into it. Though of course we cannot expect Shakespeare to have been methodically and deliberately going about his writing with a conscious effort to plant clues for the actor, there is such richness to every piece of text it shows a profound inner actor’s instinct. He even seems to have been aware, probably subconsciously, of the emotional flickers that could be mined in the split-second pause of a ‘separation’: the slight breath necessary when a word ends on one letter or sound and the next word begins with the same letter/sound. An actor cannot rush through “Say I am merry” or “’Tis Caesar that you mean” without making the words unintelligible – and if he pauses between the two similar sounds and puts an emphasis on the second word, emotional subtext (sarcasm, anger, suspicion, and so on) can be conveyed. Separations can also help with stage business. “This is thy sheath: there rust and let me die” has two separations, the ‘th’ sound and the ‘r’ sound, and this allows the actor time to, first, stab himself and second, take a pained breath in reaction.

Such sensitivity to the actor’s needs seems so absolutely informed by an insider’s knowledge of acting, it is almost incomprehensible that the authorship debate has not acknowledged this fact as the predominant one. Shakespeare wrote like an actor would write.

Finally, Shakespeare was never likely going to attain wealth just as a performer – acting was a precarious business, and besides, he was certainly not the star performer in the company, but more like a character actor. It makes sense for him to have kept writing while acting; it probably paid better. Indeed, Shakespeare had earned a pretty good fortune by the end of his life – and it was not by being a grain merchant. If, all the while that Shakespeare was raking in dough it was merely for pretending to write these sought-after plays, it is hard to believe that the supposedly rightful author would continue to pass up all that money as well as the acclaim. At the very least, one might expect the ‘real’ playwright to throw down his quill and refuse to do any more plays under that unfair arrangement.

But the Oxfordians have an even greater problem with regards to the money that Shakespeare earned: their candidate the Earl of Oxford had money troubles. Anonymous rationalizes from this fact to defend their own position: de Vere went broke, so the reason must have been because he was too busy writing the Shakespearean canon to manage his finances. But why wouldn’t he get paid for his work like Shakespeare did? And also, De Vere did put his name on numerous poems -- he was not too proud or private for that. It seems to strain credibility that when he ran into money troubles he would not also lay claim to the greatest plays in the English language if they were his and the result of many years of constant effort. These plays were widely celebrated by then, and commercial hits – it seems coming forward might have offered a solution to his financial woes.

All the World’s A Stage

Some of the most outspoken Oxfordians, or Shakespearean authorship challengers, claim that the Stratford-born thespian William Shakespeare was essentially illiterate. The lack of written documents in Shakespeare’s hand and the collection of vastly varied signatures attributed to Shakespeare fuels this view, and his alleged illiteracy is treated as an indication that he could not have penned the plays attributed to him. 

Yet how on earth would middle-class Shakespeare have found work as an actor if he could not read? Perhaps an illiterate aristocrat, who would not need to depend on income from a career, could have hired a helper to read the lines over and over to help him learn his part, but to come to London as a penniless unknown, as Shakespeare did, and try to survive as a jobbing actor, when the theater companies were performing so many new plays so frequently there was barely time for rehearsal, would have required the ability to read. Moreover, as anyone who has tried to memorize Shakespearean speeches knows, it is not like memorizing modern colloquial dialogue. A line of dialogue is not a short sentence or two. This is not text you can just paraphrase or improvise.

Other Oxfordians seize on Shakespeare’s acting career as a direct part of their claim, arguing that acting as frequently as Will did would have precluded the Bard’s having the time or ability to also write 39 wordy, enduring plays. The Oxfordian feature film Anonymous makes this argument explicitly and repeatedly, presenting Will Shakespeare the performer as a crass and moronic egotist, and contrasting him with the refined and sensitive Earl of Oxford, who is shown as the real author. However, the film undermines its own argument by showing Shakespeare having plenty of free time (which he uses for debauchery) while Oxford seems constantly busy handling his estate, his nagging wife, and affairs at court. Thus even the movie about the Earl being the true prolific playwright does not show how he would have had the time.

Besides, the news that acting and playwriting do not mix might have come as a shock to Molière, who was writing, acting, and directing for his French theater company all throughout his life, less than a century after Shakespeare. The impracticability of combining the two professions would also come as a great surprise to the numerous actor-writer hybrid talents out there: the pioneering, critically-acclaimed wordsmiths Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Spalding Gray, and Wallace Shawn; actor-writer-directors Kenneth Branagh, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John Cassavetes, George Clooney, Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy, Taika Waititi, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck, Tim Robbins, Brad Bird, Christopher Guest, Woody Allen, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar, Miranda July, Lake Bell, Desiree Akhavan, Ben Stiller, Billy Bob Thornton, and Edward Burns; famous icons of early cinema Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Orson Welles, and Laurence Olivier; and writers like David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin, who both began by studying acting.  It seems, therefore, that contrary to the snark against Shakespeare being an actor (especially evident in the movie Anonymous) actors can find the time and concentration to write, as have done numerous comedic talents like Seth Rogen, Tina Fey, Jennifer Saunders, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Kristen Wiig, Mike Myers, Owen Wilson, Rashida Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Albert Brooks, Rob Reiner, and a range of other thespians including Emma Thompson, Ethan Hawke, Anna Deveare Smith, Matt Damon, Mark Duplass, Tom McCarthy, Danny Strong, Regina Taylor, Brit Marling, Charlayne Woodard, Sylvester Stallone, Lauren Graham, and more. Phew! Quite a long list to just prove the point that actors can also be writers.

 

More importantly, having been an actor turns out to be a major asset of Shakespeare’s work. People who stage the plays marvel repeatedly over how stageable the scripts are, how attuned to the needs of production. In a tragedy with a single performer bearing the main weight of the script, like Hamlet or Macbeth, Shakespeare gives the tragedian a break, keeping him off-stage for several scenes so he can have a good rest. Great comedic roles like Falstaff coincide with the presence in the company of a superb clown,  and even in the tragedies, the comedian is given the chance to strut his stuff: witness the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the Gravedigger in Hamlet, or the Porter’s monologue in Macbeth. These and other features suggest the author as a true man of the theater, no looky-loo but someone who understood its challenges and opportunities – someone who was intimately involved with it on a practical and immediate level.

The fiction film Anonymous makes this issue (albeit unintentionally) all the more tangible and all the stronger a counter-argument by portraying its proffered author of Shakespeare’s plays, the Earl of Oxford a.k.a. Edward de Vere, as deeply mortified that an actor is going to be his front. It is a bit of a joke in the film, but he really does find actors vain and shallow. He is shown watching the plays from his isolated box seat, uninvolved in rehearsals and never interacting with the cast members. He just retires to his estate and churns out these brilliant plays as from a vacuum. How such an aloof figure could have understood the needs of theatrical production seems hard to fathom.

Then there are the four romance plays which Shakespeare wrote late in his career: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. These are so different in tone, genre, and style from his previous work that they have long struck scholars as a radical change of direction for the Bard, bespeaking a psychic change as he aged and sought to retire to Stratford. Consequently, these romances make a strong argument against the top two alternative candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s works: de Vere and Christopher Marlowe. Also, it is relevant that both those men were dead at the time. 

Yes, it would seem that their deaths alone should immediately remove them from the short-list, bar them from penning new plays that appeared after their demise. But those who debate Shakespeare’s authorship do not feel death should stand in the way of a pet theory. They rationalize that either Oxford or Marlowe could have written a backlog of plays in advance of their deaths, and that these were simply produced posthumously while carrying on the ruse of attributing them to Shakespeare. Alternatively, the theorists posit that either one could have faked their own deaths (this is quite a popular theory in the case of Marlowe) and simply continued to write secretly.

 

Let us put aside the fact that it does not quite make sense that, if the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays were forced to hide his identity to protect himself from political or social backlash, this charade should still have to continue once he was safely dead, whether really dead or even just faked dead. Also, let us not puzzle here over what exactly could possibly have been so controversial in Shakespeare’s works in the first place – plays that were frequently performed in front of England’s monarchs and with their full sanction. Let us not ponder why some people believe that the writer’s real name would need to be so permanently concealed, even after the theater companies switched around, laws changed, and Queen Elizabeth I died and was succeeded by King James. Let us ignore how incredible it seems that Marlowe, so close to literary immortality already in his lifetime, would be willing to forego credit if he was the one who wrote Shakespeare’s plays – considering how well-received they already were at the time.

We won’t dwell on those points, because the clearest and most obvious problem with both of the authorship doubters’ explanations of their candidates’ deaths lies in the four romance plays themselves. If an underground ‘Shakespeare’ figure had written this quartet along with many other plays from the canon years earlier, while still in the prime of life, while his life circumstances were still unaltered, why would the plays differ so markedly in tone and spirit from Shakespeare’s other late works? On the other hand, if the author of those romances wrote them later, after he had faked his death and was hiding his very existence, why would he experiment so noticeably in the plays, drawing attention to himself and risking the arousal of suspicion which might lead back to him?

Those romances illuminate the authorship question even more simply, though, when we consider that these plays were deliberately written for a smaller, indoor theater -- a dramatic shift for Shakespeare – according to James Shapiro in his book Contested Will. The theater used artificial lights, accommodated a much smaller audience, and encouraged new staging techniques, and Shakespeare was conscious of all that in his writing. Shakespeare knew that he could experiment and write a storm at sea, as he did in The Tempest, because of the new technology that allowed for greater scenic realism. Besides the design possibilities, and the opportunity to embrace genres and forms that interested him, there was also, once again as a practical matter, the changed needs of a smaller and more intimate venue -- an impetus to rethink the type of dialogue and plots that would play well. In summary, the new place required that the writer be actively involved with the company, that he understand the physical effects of the space itself, and that he respond to the changing stagecraft – all of which align once again with an active man of the theater like Shakespeare, who became a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre.

More specifically, this consideration establishes the timeline. The concordance between the late romance plays and an indoor theatre are proof that the romances were, just as historians have said, composed later in Shakespeare’s life. The way they were suited to their performance venue would have been impossible for a writer to predict years before the altered theatrical possibilities became a reality.

And This Cushion My Crown

One class-based argument against Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays is sometimes presented (and, interestingly, is often from those who are not from upper-class backgrounds themselves). It offers that Shakespeare wrote like a patrician, elevating the importance of court life, and that he ignored or demeaned the proletariat. Certainly he often wrote about royal rulers, but that seems no stranger than Hollywood making movies and miniseries about legendary heroes, famous politicians, or movie stars – it sells tickets because of the name recognition and public interest in the topic. Shakespeare did write about political intrigue at court in ways that made the characters three-dimensional, but it is odd to deduce from this the necessity of first-hand observation in an actual royal court, especially since so many of the plays about royals were set in the past, when Elizabethan palace customs mattered less. It seems like what was most needed to write about the rulers and the intrigues in the halls of power would simply be historical research, imagination, and an understanding of human nature. 

Julius Caesar and Coriolanus do seem to indicate a profound distaste for ‘mob rule,’ and his history plays frequently have rebels mounting attacks on lawful rulers and causing chaos, and eventually being punished. However, this general slant hardly makes Shakespeare’s provenance from a middle class background disqualify him as a writer who might express such themes. Elizabethan England was not a democracy, and letting the people decide on a course of action would have seemed like anathema – but particularly to the theater’s underwriters, who were either royalty or nobility. In fact, universal human equality would actually have been an alien idea to everyone, no matter what their class. Their whole belief system during the Renaissance rested on an overarching concept of hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being -- with God at the top and the various races and animals arranged at specific, assigned levels on a kind of permanent staircase below.

But at the same time, it is not even universally true of his plays that rebellion was naughty: in Hamlet, though Leontes foolishly tries to overthrow Claudius, when Fortinbras marches on Elsinore at the end of the play, he is returning a troubled castle to peace and stability. Moreover, this comes after the protagonist has murdered a king -- something that in the world of this particular play comes across as a noble act. In Macbeth, the rebels are technically the good guys, recruited by the stalwart Macduff into overthrowing the bloodthirsty eponymous tyrant. When they march on the usurper on the throne (Macbeth) they do so to end his murder spree, so clearly this rebellion is positive.

Personal rebellion and disobedience are also seen in positive lights in other plays of Shakespeare’s. Imogen and Hermia disobey their stern fathers’ matrimonial commands in Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we are on their side. Juliet does the same; the play certainly does not rebuke her willfulness, but instead, ends with the bereaved Capulets and Montagues both learning lessons about parenting. In Measure for Measure, it is the sanctimonious and regimental deputy overseeing the city with an iron fist who is the villain -- the libertines and lawbreakers are shown as very likeable, with understandable flaws. Antony and Cleopatra are the objects of gossip throughout the ancient world over their licentious affair, but at the end of the tragedy, the play sides with them, the independent-minded risk-takers, not with the upright bore Octavius who wages war against them. Moreover, the comedies Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest all devote considerable stage time to mischief and pranks perpetrated by characters who encapsulate the idea of high-spirited anarchy. 

Then we should consider Henry IV, Parts I and II. Though these plays are ostensibly about an English king, he barely appears in it. The riotous, hedonistic, unrepentant anti-hero Falstaff actually seems like the centre of both plays. Prince Hal is the character who changes most over the course of the two plays -- he is the protagonist, strictly speaking, and ultimately he has to disavow the values of the rascal knight Falstaff after his coronation. The play itself does not disavow them, however. When Hal rejects Falstaff, it is Hal who disappears from the stage; Falstaff stays on so we can feel his pain. Moreover, in Henry V, we learn that Falstaff has died of a broken heart because of Hal’s rejection; Shakespeare’s humane ethic has a lot of warmth toward Falstaff, over three plays.

The strongest argument against the theory that Shakespeare must have been a nobleman is Act 2, Scene IV in Henry IV, Part 1. This very long scene takes place at The Boar's-Head Tavern in Eastcheap and shows the deep friendship that Prince Hal and Falstaff have with each other – it also, through their constant playful banter and competition, proves how well-matched they are, though one of them will inherit the kingdom and the other is already disgraced. The teasing and back-and-forth culminates in a role-playing game in which Falstaff turns an ordinary tavern chair into a throne, a dagger into a scepter, a pillow into a crown, and himself into the king, Henry IV. 

Disrespectful? Disloyal? It certainly could have been perceived that way by the gossips and spies from the court. Falstaff apes a monarch, rather like the Lord of Misrule tradition in the Feast of Fools though Queen Elizabeth had banned such festivities. Falstaff presumes, during his play-acting, to put words in the king’s mouth – and to benefit himself. He treats the ceremonial trappings of royalty as a joke, all while playing around with a prince who is next in line for the throne. Falstaff is a commoner, and this mockery is being done in public, before a crowd of both men and women, at a disreputable, low-class tavern. Does Shakespeare show the prince being offended by it, though? No, instead Hal is tickled, and he does exactly the same thing himself – he switches roles with Falstaff and likewise dishonors the king, his own father, by mocking the monarch’s serious commands. When the king’s officers arrive and disrupt the proceedings, the harshness of their interruption is a subtle reminder of the dangers this irreverent display might actually bring in an autocratic state. Yet we are not on their side.

It seems impossible to imagine a nobleman writing this scene. Aristocrats in the Renaissance may have received better education than middle-class Englishmen, but they also were educated to think a certain way: it is much more likely that an aristocrat would have been shocked by that scene, viewed it as undignified and scandalous. That’s not all, though. The play as a whole, both parts of Henry IV in fact, place much greater value on the Eastcheap gang’s irreverent and mischievous scenes than on the formal, serious dialogues at court. The scenes which come alive and seem the most naturalistic -- the most closely observed, if anything in Shakespeare should legitimately be said to feel observed -- are not the courtly pontifications, but the scenes surrounding Falstaff and his milieu. The Oxfordians would have us believe that their Shakespeare was a nobleman who kept himself hidden away on a remote estate, writing in secret – while the actor Shakespeare frequented taverns and apparently had an active London social life. Yet the plays themselves do not sound like they were written by someone in a garret or in an approved, important, careful position at court – they sound precisely like they’re written by someone who enjoyed goofing around with other actors and hanging out at taverns. They sound as if they are written by someone who did not view the pedigreed as the only legitimate subjects of drama, but by someone who admired the full variety of human types and frailties.