Isaac Butler’s review, All Is True Is a Shakespeare Biopic for the #MeToo Generation, is subtitled “Kenneth Branagh’s new movie is part fact, part fan fiction.” https://slate.com/culture/2018/12/all-is-true-shakespeare-movie-accuracy-kenneth-branagh-hamnet.html
Butler begins: “You could fill a First Folio with everything we don’t know about Shakespeare. Vanishingly few primary sources about Shakespeare exist, and by the time England’s poet laureate Nicholas Rowe got around to writing the first biography of him, Shakespeare’s mortal coil had been shuffled off for nearly a century. We have Shakespeare’s plays and poems, but only three pages written in his hand survive. What mostly remains from his life are business-related documents, like his will and his application for a coat of arms. Yet we still yearn to know him, to understand Shakespeare on a personal level, to see what kind of person could have written such brilliant works, again and again, for years. As All Is True, Kenneth Branagh’s new film about the retirement years of Williams Shakespeare demonstrates however, the way we arrange our scraps of evidence into a picture of the Bard ultimately says more about us than it does about him.”
Though I’ve not yet seen All is True, Butler’s title strikes me: “A biopic for the #MeToo Generation.” Others who depict Shakespeare in story or film today no doubt also reveal more about themselves than about him. That includes me: a character named William Shakespeare appears in my historical novels The Secret Player, Dark Venus, and Bedtrick. What do they reveal about my own slant on the man?
I drafted all three before #MeToo, but my themes too are gender, sex, power, and the female voice. I’ve tried to be scrupulous with details of Elizabethan times and Shakespeare’s plays, but these concerns structure my stories..
The protagonist is Alexander Cooke, an actor listed in Shakespeare’s First Folio, credited by the early Shakespearean critic Edmond Malone as having originated Shakespeare’s female roles. Details about Cooke and the theatre of his day fill the pages of Gurr, Bate, Shapiro, and others, including Cooke’s nickname Sander. I changed one major point: Cooke was born female.
Working with As You Like It over the years as teacher, actor, assistant director, and stage manager I was intrigued by the question: what if the boy actor who played Rosalind had been female? A woman disguised as male would be portraying onstage a woman who disguises herself as a boy.
In a Santa Barbara theater-in-the-park production, I played not Rosalind but Corin the shepherd—as a woman accompanied by girl shepherdesses, no masquerade involved. In Shakespeare’s England, female roles were played by boys and young men; in plays besides As You LIke It these female characters at some point play the boy, e.g. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Portia in Merchant of Venice, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Imogen in Cymbeline.
The Secret Player explores Sander Cooke’s reasons for transforming herself into a boy, the challenges she faces, and the complications for a boy actor, appealing to both women and men. How can a village girl become a player and master the skill to break into the London theatre? How will she maintain male identity in London and who dare she let into her secret? Has she given up any chance of love with a man?
All three novels explore Sander’s friendships with women: Moll Frith, the “Roaring Girl” in her flamboyant male garb; Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, patron of poets and poet herself; and even, in a fashion Queen Elizabeth. The first two know that under doublet and hose Sander is a woman; the Queen guesses.
Most significant, however, is Sander’s friendship with Amelia Bassano, the presumed Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets who becomes a poet in her own right: Amelia Bassano Lanyer, whose book of poems was published in 1611. The confidences Amelia and Sander share in their creative friendship provides the plot for my second novel, Dark Venus. Evidence may be scanty for identifying Amelia with the Dark Lady, but what a great fictional device! The first to name her as the beloved tormentor of Shakespeare’s sonnets, A.L. Rowse, quotes Dr. Simon Forman’s slanders of Amelia recorded in his diary. In #MeToo fashion, Forman denigrates Amelia after she refused to “halek” with him—his slang for copulate. Naughty laugh: halek is a cod! Amelia’s book of poetry seems a clever revenge on both Forman and Shakespeare. This feminist poet was once Shakespeare’s muse!
The historical Alexander Cooke fathered children. How can Sander be a parent, and what sort of relationship is possible if she marries a woman? That’s the arc of Bedtrick.
As Cooke is a member of Shakespeare’s theatre company, originally Lord Strange’s Men, later the Lord Chamberlain’s and, with the accession of King James, the King’s Men, William Shakespeare and his plays are important to these novels. I’ve read or skimmed many of his biographies, full of “perhaps” and “may have” and leapt-to conclusions. The so-called authorship question seems simple snobbery: see James Shapiro’s Contested Will. So far as I’m concerned, William Shakespeare was the man born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. Yes, he collaborated on some of his early and late plays. That isn’t germane either to our enjoyment of his plays or to my novels, though the idea that Elizabethan plays were somewhat collaborative excites scholars.
We’ll never really know the man Shakespeare. By the time John Aubrey got around to writing a sketch of him in Brief Lives,1680-93, no one alive had known him personally. According to Aubrey, Shakespeare “was a handsome, well-shap’d man: very good company and of a very readie, pleasant, smoothe Witt” (Oiiver Lawson- Dick edition, 1949, 275). As for the legends—his poaching deer, arriving in London as a stable hand, or living a flamboyant sex life there—I ignore them.
My novels focus on gender and sex in Shakespeare’s day through Cooke’s stage roles, primarily as strong-voiced women at odds with the strictures of the times, and her relationships offstage. Branagh’s film “All is True” focuses on the end of his life; “Shakespeare in Love” depicts the great man in the fictional love affair that supposedly inspired Romeo and Juliet; my story features Shakespeare as a theatre man and friend of Alexander Cooke, actor.