Who is this guy?

Even though I'm certain the movie "Anonymous" is going to irritate the hell out of me, I will see it. Mostly because I will watch just about any Elizabethan costume drama. And because some weird voyeuristic part of me gets a kick out of seeing people get all worked up over the Oxford vs. Stratford argument. This is the century-old debate over whether William Shakespeare as we know him -- the author of all those comedies, tragedies, histories and sonnets -- was a glovemaker's son-turned-actor from Stratford or the aristocratic Earl of Oxford, who merely used the actor's name to shield himself from potential social and political reprisals. The movie tells the Oxford version of the story and will doubtless create endless new arenas for debate, a bunch of new Oxfordians and irritate the hell out of Stratfordians (which includes the vast majority of the scholarly establishment). I only hope longtime Oxfordians get equally riled up because now most of the public is going to believe Roland Emmerich -- a guy best known for disaster pics like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 -- came up with this theory. My position is: I don't really care. I'm a sentimental Stratfordian merely because I like the idea that a schmoe of ordinary birth could turn out to be the greatest literary genius of the English language. I'm also cynical about conspiracy theories, especially those that would require conspiring on behalf of a whole lot of people. (This piece in the New York Times has a great line about the ability of Shakespeare scholars to pull off conspiracies.) But I think the plays are the things -- what matters is that we have this treasure trove of literary genius, not which guy's hand held the pen.

At least the whole tantalizing question of Shakespeare's identity and his legacy, and all the unanswered questions around him, has left us with so much material for so many interesting books, fiction and non. If you'd like to read a Shakespeare biography without signing over a couple weeks of your life, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's. It's part of the Eminent Lives series of briefish biographies by popular writers (as in nonacademic specialists, not potbiolers). The Key West Library has a large print copy which is 240 pages and it concludes with a chapter dealing with the various "claimants," ie. people who are not Shakespeare that people have proposed as the writers of Shakespeare's work. Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and Peter Ackroyd's biography also come highly recommended, though they're both quite a bit longer than Bryson's. And after reading this ringing Stratfordian defense by Simon Schama I've put in an Interlibrary Loan request for James Shapiro's Contested Will. Shapiro himself has also weighed in on the movie, in a New York Times op-ed.

But what I really like are modern crime novels where a long-lost Shakespeare talisman serves as the MacGuffin.  My favorite is The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber. In that one, the Shakespeare artifact that has mysteriously surfaced after the centuries is a lost play about Mary Queen of Scots. Another that goes directly to the Stratford-Oxford question is Chasing Shakespeares by Sarah Smith. So does The School of Night by Alan Wall though it's less effortlessly entertaining (though highly intelligent) than the previous two. I'm told good things, too, about The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips -- not so much a crime novel as a literary puzzlebox, from the descriptions, but it's got its own lost Shakespeare play, this one about King Arthur.

One thing I have not yet done, the stuff I have not read -- though I really should, if only justify lugging the giant Riverside Shakespeare around with me for the last 25 years -- are the works of Shakespeare. (I have read most of the works of Shakespeare -- I was an English major -- but not in adulthood, which I find makes a big difference in how you understand a lot of stuff they made you read in high school and college. Wasted on the young, as they say.)

Teaser Tuesdays: Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

I've been on an (extremely minor) Shakespeare jag -- without actually reading Shakespeare -- in preparation for arguing with people about the upcoming movie Anonymous. More on that later. In the meantime, here's my Teaser, in accordance with the book meme hosted by Should Be Reading (to play along, go to that blog and post your own link or teaser). I'm just finishing Bill Bryson's Shakespeare biography, which is part of the Eminent Lives series and thus not a giant tome:

"We would know even less about the business and structure of Elizabethan theatrical life were it not for the diary and related papers of Philip Henslowe, proprietor of the Rose and Fortune theaters. Henslowe was a man of many parts, not all of them entirely commendable."

Near and far

Today's Miami Herald has my review of Bill Bryson's new book, At Home. It's an extremely entertaining read and informative, too. It's not a history as scholars would see it, but a review of various areas of private life in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America. The book is organized as a tour of Bryson's home in Norfolk, England (thus, the title), and each room serves as a reason to muse about the history of the room and the functions it serves. Though Bryson does venture pretty far afield, it never seems boring or irrelevant.

There were tons of fun facts I couldn't fit into the review. Here, for your cocktail party fodder needs, are a few (but you should still read the book -- this doesn't begin to capture the depth and variety of good stuff within):

* George III ordered a palace at Kew -- that was half built -- made entirely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards "a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot," Bryson writes. It was pulled down by the king's successor. But I would have liked to have seen it.

* "The Quechuan language in Peru still has a thousand words for different types or conditions of potatoes."

* The Europeans introduced many diseases that came close to wiping out Native American populations -- but they received one in return: syphilis.

* "For a century or so, no table of distinction was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one remotely knows. The word doesn't exist in French. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere."

* The name Boston Tea Party wasn't applied to the pre-Revolutionary rebellion until 1834.

* Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather made the family fortune in the opium trade.

* Thomas Edison dreamed of filling the world with homes made of concrete.

* At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition most visitors were "far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison" than Alexander Graham Bell's new invention: the telephone.

* In 1726 gynecological medicine was so ridiculous that Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder from Surrey, "managed to convince medical authorities, including two physicians to the royal household, that she was giving birth to a series of rabbits."

* In the late 19th century people were so afraid of being buried alive that an Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was formed in Britain in 1899, and a corresponding group in America the next year.

* Buttons were so popular when introduced that they were applied all over clothes, even where they don't keep anything closed -- which is why suit jackets, to this day, have a row of buttons down near the cuff. "They have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet three hundred and fifty years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity."