mcgill.caShakespeare has joined the ranks of Godzilla, alien invaders, and apocalyptic Mayan predictions, with the release of Roland Emmerich’s latest film, Anonymous, in which we, the English-speaking world, are the unknowing victims of a political and literary conspiracy of titanic proportions. A conspiracy involving Queen Elizabeth herself and the most highly regarded dramatic works in the Western world, one which Antoni Cimolino, general director of the Stratford Festival, took less than 15 minutes of his talk at McGill to discredit, far shorter than the running time of Anonymous. The Hollywood take on the question of Shakespearean authorship has sent Cimolino running for the hills.
“The idea that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays is about to be disseminated to a mass audience, many of whom will no doubt assume that it is based on some kind of historical fact,” he lamented to an audience of students, professors, alumni, and literary buffs at Moyse Hall on Monday, Oct. 24.
The Oxfordian school of thought, which claims that Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the true author of Shakespeare’s works, began when J. Thomas Looney’s book Shakespeare Identified was published in 1920. But questions of Shakespeare’s status as an author date back to the mid-nineteenth century, and coincide with the rise in popularity of the autobiographical form, and, as a result, an increased awareness towards the notion of authorship. Unfortunately for Oxfordians, the evidence supporting their case is fragile. Both The Tempest and Henry VIII are recognized as having been written after 1604, and “Edward De Vere would have had therefore difficulty writing, being as he was, well, dead,” at that time said Cimolino. The Tempest, in particular, contains references to events that occurred after 1604, but according to Cimolino, those allusions are not enough to disprove the conspiracy theories.
“Oxfordians counter that dating plays is tricky and that De Vere could have stockpiled works to be released after his death,” Cimolino said.
The complete absence of any letters and journals written by Shakespeare has led scholars to try and discern facts about his life from his works, a tricky and highly speculative task. Looney wrote in his 1920 book, based on his understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, that the true author must have been anti-materialistic and empathetic towards the lower classes, clashing with what little is known about Shakespeare’s life: neither of these would be accurate descriptions of him, as he was a savvy investor and businessman, despite being a glover’s son with a grammar school education. Oxfordians also claim that there are references to De Vere and his family and friends in many of the plays: that, for example, there is a line in Hamlet referring to a quarrel between De Vere and another member of Elizabeth’s court in 1579, from which they extrapolate that Hamlet must be De Vere, Ophelia his wife, and Polonius as his father-in-law.
Cimolino, no stranger to knowing “what every word means, every nuance, all the ambiguity that might be there in every line” in Shakespeare’s works, disagrees with these interpretations. Trying to recognize subtle references to Elizabethan nobility takes away from our enjoyment of the works, and for Cimolino, it is Shakespeare’s vast emotional terrain that makes these plays resonate even today. As a teenager, he was drawn to theatre and acting after he saw Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Stratford Festival.
“The story of four young men, enthralled in their hormones, they make a rash vow of abstinence from women—and then they find out they can’t live up to it,” Cimolino said. “As a catholic teenager, that spoke to me.”
Adolescent humour aside, Cimolino’s aptitude for directing Shakespearean dramas comes from his emotional connection to the plays, his ability to form insights into the plays based on his own experiences with his children, his wife, and his work at the Stratford Festival. For the 2012 season, he will be directing Cymbeline and he is particularly interested in how dream scenes function in the play: in Shakespeare, dreams often represent moments of lucidity and clarity in a world otherwise filled with lies and deceptions. To that end, he is considering an opening scene that suggests the entire play is one lengthy somnambulant journey, an ambition inspired by Cimolino’s understanding of Shakespeare the author, which leaves no room for questions of other authors.
“But in case, if I do end up staging it, I won’t be guided, I can assure you, by the spirit of an aristocratic dramatic amateur, who allegedly, in addition to writing the world’s greatest body of dramatic literature, also managed to pull off the world’s greatest literary hoax.”
Cimolino will be “putting [his] faith in the man from Stratford.”
Audience members left the talk inspired by Cimolino’s intimate understanding of, and faith in, Shakespeare’s plays.
“I’m not sure why it matters, firstly. I don’t know what will come of figuring out if it’s him or not,” Kaitlyn Findley, U2 History, said. “[Cimolino] described how you’d have to be willing to believe in a miracle if you’re going to say that a middle class man can write all these amazing things, but I find if you don’t believe that, you’re not very optimistic or you don’t have a lot of faith in society to do good things.”
Shakespeare fans at Cimolino’s talk, who nearly filled Moyse Hall, are more likely to be spotted lining up for tickets to the latest rendition of one of Shakespeare’s resonant political dramas like Macbeth than at the box office for Ano
nymous, which deals with a topic controversial enough to garner notoriety but whose premise ultimately rings hollow.
