Much
Ado About Something began with a chance meeting. I was
in the far north of Queensland with my wife, Katerina, visiting
the Australian actress Diane Cilento. She was married
to Tony Schaffer, (Sleuth, screenplays for Frenzy,
The Wicker Man, Evil under the Sun) the English writer of
plays and novels. During dinner, Shakespeare came up and Tony
said very emphatically. “You know, Will did not write those
plays!” I expressed astonishment.
“Come with me,” he said, and taking me out into the
tropic night, he led me to his study, high in the rainforest.
There, in the dim light, I was handed a battered book. “Read
this and you will know the truth.” It was Calvin Hoffman's;
The Man who was Shakespeare. A rare book, Tony said,
I would have to find it for myself. He was not parting with
his precious copy.
Eventually I found it, and while I was not sure it was the
whole truth, I did agree that Calvin put forward a fascinating
thesis. A thesis good enough, as it turned out, to spend five
years of my life exploring.
For two hundred years there have been doubts about Shakespeare,
about his ability to write the works that bear his name. The
doubts center mainly round his education, or lack thereof. The
plays and poems are very learned, the vocabulary gigantic, and
yet there is no evidence he went to school, and he certainly
did not go to University, the training ground for many of the
best playwrights of the day.
But if not him, who? 
Christopher Marlowe the great rival of his youth, is
a possible choice. There are many similarities between the plays
of these two Elizabethan writers. But Marlowe was dead in a
knife fight at the age of 29, dying just as Shakespeare burst
on the scene. Or did he?
Calvin proposed that Marlowe did not die, that his death was
a ruse to escape the “English Inquisition,” and that
he fled to live in Italy where he continued to write his plays,
to be released at home under the name of a front man in the
London theatre world, William Shakespeare.
As Peter Farey (see The People we talked to)
says in the film, it’s a great story. Perhaps it is also,
as Peter at first suspected, a load of rubbish. He and I are
still finding out. He’s been at it for well over 30 years,
I, just five.
England was the place to work. There I’d find the top
Shakespeare scholars. There too, the disciples of Marlowe, members
of the
Marlowe Society.
Not all members of the Society believe Calvin’s thesis,
I found.
I
began to shoot my documentary, working solo with a small digital
camera, making a vow that I would stop at any point. Yet I was
quite ready to cut my losses if anyone could convince me that
Calvin’s thesis was silly.
The Shakespeare scholars I met would probably report that I
arrived with my mind made up. Not so. True, I came loaded with
Calvin’s ideas, but I was ready, half expecting the knockout
punch.
It never came.
The shooting lasted several years, on and off, sleeping at
a friend’s house in south London, and making frequent visits
to Italy where it is thought Marlowe might have gone in exile.
Then, a very long period editing, coupled with approaches to
broadcasters who were hostile at first but gradually came round.
As the editing progressed, I circulated many copies, asking
for feedback from scholars and lay viewers alike. It became
clear what worked and what didn’t. I was obsessed with
eliminating all errors. Now with the film locked off, with five
different versions at five different lengths for five different
TV networks, I await my first broadcast, and the unknown.
I continue to read on the subject and wake in the middle of
the night with a new angle on the mystery, or a new reason to
doubt the bard.
Just as some people become obsessed with this authorship question,
others find it profoundly upsetting. As Sue Hunt (see
People we talked to) says in the film, the English, and
not just the English, take in Shakespeare with their mother's
milk.
All over the world, he is loved beyond all questioning, beyond
all doubts. And yet once you know a bit of the story, the doubts
may begin. Also, the more one is told that one must blindly
believe in Shakespeare, the more the doubts multiply. It is
human nature I suppose for the forbidden to fascinate, and to
doubt Shakespeare is forbidden, certainly in academic circles.
It is true that in unguarded moments some fierce defenders
of Shakespeare do show some puzzlement. Harold Bloom,
the author of the magnificent book Shakespeare, the Invention
of the Human, wonders why the man is so colorless. It does
not seem to fit with the huge power and personality of the works.
And Sam Schoenbaum, the great American scholar, author
of Shakespeare's Lives wonders why Shakespeare cut such
a low profile in his time. One would think that such a towering
talent would have attracted much interest from his contemporaries,
and yet he did not.
And Katherine Duncan-Jones in a recent book called Ungentle
Shakespeare admits that Shakespeare was not the divine William
of legend, but a rather unlikable man, a money-minded fellow
who dealt eagerly and profitably in real-estate, who lent money
to people at high rates of interest. One might add that he was
so disinterested in culture that he appears to have owned no
books, to have not educated his own daughters, and made no cultural
contribution to the town in which he lived and died.
With his friends holding opinions like these, can we be criticized
for taking the next logical step, to ask if indeed we have the
right man? If he does not look like a literary genius, act like
a literary genius, maybe he wasn’t one. Maybe he was some
sort of front man for the real author who had, for some reason,
to remain hidden.
Most
of the authorship theories explore this territory, and while
they don't agree as to who the real author was, they do agree
that it was not Will alone.
If you have seen my film, you will know that it ends with Mark
Rylance, (see The People we talked to) no lesser
person than the director of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre,
saying exactly this, that William could not have done it alone.
He joins a long line of intellectuals and theatre people, Henry
James, Mark Twain, Charles Chaplin, Sigmund Freud, Derek Jacobi
to name a few who have doubts, and the list grows by the
day.
As I went around the world meeting Shakespeare scholars and
Marlowe supporters, I discovered two things. The Stratfordians,
as they are called, are reluctant to debate the question. They
have found from past experience that it’s a losing proposition.
They cannot deliver a knockout blow to the heretics, and any
talk on the authorship question, just fans the flames of what
they perceive is a sort of madness. One can't blame them for
saying; “No comment.”
But they did talk to me, and it’s a bit of a mystery as
to why they did. Perhaps is was simply that I had done my homework.
By the time I was on the road, I knew so much, arguing with
me was fun. There was stress too. It was quite a juggling act
moving across enemy lines to ultimately come out with a film
which both sides would admit was fair. But that was ahead, and
not quite everyone was happy. 
The Marlovians tended to be more ready to talk once they were
assured that I would take them seriously. They may seem obsessive,
overly passionate. Certainly John Baker , along with
Peter Farey my favorite marlovian, (see The People
we talked to) comes on with all guns blazing, and yet ends
up making the probably the most telling points in the case.
Check out their fascinating sites. John
Baker's site and Peter
Farey's site.
I
am happy that Dolly Walker-Wraight (see The People
we talked to) author of The Story That The Sonnets Tell,
thought the film did her justice, and though she did not live
to see it go to air, it gave her great comfort in her dying
days to know that at last she would get her points across to
a large audience.
Jonathan Bate, (see The People we talked to)
my main Shakespeare scholar, author of The Genius of Shakespeare
had had his run-ins with Dolly and confesses there was some
bad blood there. Yet he too has praised the film in which Dolly
plays such a major part, and has recently been instrumental
in the film winning an important prize.
It
is important for me that, while the film does show a growing
enthusiasm for the Hoffman thesis, I always bring on other voices,
and am always trying to speak to the skeptical viewer.
In fact, I imagined, as I was doing the editing, that I was
making the film for Sue Hunt, (see The People we talked
to) she of mother's milk. It is a good rule, when making
a documentary, to imagine one person as the one you are talking
to. Sue was that person.
Diana Price has written one of the best books making
the case against Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography.
It was an inspiration in the final stages of making the film.
None of this could have been done without my wonderful researchers
June Everett, Louisa Merlin and Roberta Garini.
Nor without the passionate and practical help of my co-producer,
Penny McDonald, from whose office I sallied forth. Forth
to come back always to the editing room of the ever cheerful,
ever nimble, Mary Jane St. Vincent Welsh.
I do wake at nights wondering what to say in the next debate,
what I would add, if I could do the film again.
