How Not To Write Historical Fiction

I remember how piqued I was when a Publishers Weekly reviewer criticized my first novel, My Father Had a Daughter. She didn't like the book -- a fiction based on the life of Shakespeare's youngest child, Judith -- because it didn't end with the girl's death, like the sad fantasy about Shakespeare's sister spun by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. Woolf's protagonist was also named Judith, and Woolf's Judith killed herself. The critic thought mine should have, too. Yet it wasn't this puzzling critique that sparked my ire. What got to me was this critic's disparagement of my novel's

Saint Shakespeare

On All Saints Day, not only may you buy a secular "Saint Shakespeare" candle (http://gonereading.com/product/william-shakespeares-secular-saint-candle), you may also ask: what saints did Shakespeare like? He wrote plays in a militantly Protestant England that had severely demoted saints during its Reformation some sixty years before. The famous shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury had been dismantled (and looted). No one was going on merry pilgrimage there, or to St. Mary at Walsingham, and it was forbidden to pray to St. Cuthbert of Durham, which is one of the reasons you've never heard of him. English saints were not marching in, but roving, sad, invisible and homeless, across the land. Yet they weren't forgotten. They were still enshrined in the calendar (St. Swithin's Day, St. Lucy's Day -- who are these people?). Even though the church nearest Shakespeare's Globe had its name changed from "St. Mary's" to "St. Savior's" during the Elizabethan period, many churches, not to mention towns, retained their traditional saints' names. And saints still throve in the popular imagination. So it shouldn't surprise us that references to this saint or that pop up all over the place in Shakespeare. Here, in honor of the day, are five notable Shakespeare saints.

Elizabethan Paint Jobs

 I've long been fascinated by the horrible things late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Englishwomen of means did to their faces, in order to conform to a standard of beauty that was largely prescribed by literature. What standard? Eyes like suns or stars, skin like snow (except for the cheeks, wherein red and white roses were to be mingled), lips like cherries, teeth like polished alabaster. (Somehow that reminds me of George Washington.) Many people know Shakespeare's famous poetic critique of this (when you think about it) bizarre visual ideal, Sonnet 130, which begins, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and includes the line "coral is far more red than her lips' red." Not so many folks are familiar with the kind of poetry Will was reacting to, so here's a sample, from his contemporary Thomas Campion: "There is a garden in her face / Where roses and white lilies grow; / A heav'nly paradise is that place / Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow." Now, let's stop right there.  The woman may have a fungal skin disease, and on top of that, the fruits in her face are flowing, like, maybe, applesauce. Yet there's more. "Those cherries [the lips] fairly do enclose / Of orient pearl a double row [her choppers] / Which when her lovely laughter shows, / They look like rose-buds fill'd with snow."
     This is hardly grammatical. Campion clearly stuck the word "They" in the last line

Lights Under Bushels: Renaissance Folk in Hiding

I recently talked with a friend of mine, Chuck Bentley, at the Starbucks in our local Barnes & Noble where he and his wife Donna hang out. Chuck is hands down the finest Michigan Shakespearean actor I have ever seen perform, and his skill is worthy of the major theaters of New York and Chicago, which I have visited more times than I can count. He might have gone to the big city, but he chooses to write and perform here, in Kalamazoo, participating in or organizing local productions, all the while happily championing

The Ten Best Shakespeare Performances on Film

For this August post I'm sharing my choices for the Ten Greatest Shakespeare Performances Ever Committed To Film Based on an Incomplete Sample of What's Out There Because Shakespeare's Been on Film for Over a Century and I've Seen Less than Half of It. So perhaps I should call what follows The Ten Best Shakespeare Performances in Films I Have Seen and Happen To Remember. Another possibility: Random Choices of Great Shakespeare Performances I'm Thinking about Today. All are good titles, so please choose the one you like best. Now, like David Letterman, I'm going to start with my tenth-ranked winner.

Did Shakespeare Write Everyone Else's Plays?

EVERYONE AND NO ONE:  A Story

 

 At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody . . . .  

                         -- Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

The town was an ocean of faces and noise. He stood in the Strand, a pack on his back, confounded, and thought, I am a drop in the surrounding sea. Anonymity was new to him, but this mental habit was old, inescapable, and often unconscious: the instinctive apprehension of real things by means, and only by means, of metaphor. The sun was never the sun, but a hot wench in scarlet taffeta. The moon? A loon’s mournful wail. Thus his mind was made, or mismade. Yet what in Stratford had made him conspicuous, peculiar, and strangely wanting could profit him in London. He’d come to the place where the word-merchants were, to make a virtue of necessity.
    He translated himself, at first to a player named Shakspere. Yet soon

Shakespeare Profiteers Make Out Like Bandits!

Have you checked out these suits who are making a killing marketing "corporate" Shakespeare? To be accurate, some business types are only trying to cash in, while some actually are profiting, big time. Google "Shakespeare in business" and you'll find a slew of "Get rich the Shakespeare way" books, including Paul Corrigan's Shakespeare on Management and Jay Shafritz's no less (or more) originally titled Shakespeare on Management. (Book description: "William Shakespeare's vast and important contributions to literature have long been acknowledged, but his shrewd insights into business and management have been all but ignored -- until now.") Even some folks with an actual interest in theater are sucking up to the corporations, a trend which, hilariously spoofed in one episode of the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, turns out to be perversely real. The Nashville Shakespeare Festival now offers "Business Workshops for Professional Development" ("Making your world a stage, all year round!"). If you want to spend the rest of your day in a state of shock and depression, watch their promotional video:  http://www.nashvilleshakes.org/BusinessWorkshops.htm.

No one can deny that Shakespeare himself was a shrewd businessman. He knew enough to buy stock in his own theater company, the most successful in England,