Word: bardelys
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Nowadays nothing succeeds like Shakespeare. I acknowledge borrowing from Dumas for that phrase, just to keep out of trouble. You see, the trouble with Shakespeare--and success--is that everyone wants a cut, kind and unkind. Not only is Hollywood ransacking the bard's works for the play that might be the next big thing, but the question has arisen of who really wrote Shakespeare in Love. The London press pointed out last week that the screenplay of that very palpable hit has remarkable similarities to the plot of No Bed for Bacon, a 1941 novel by Caryl Brahms...
...those plays aren't really Shakespeare's!" That is the rebel yell of a hardy band of amateur historians as they catch the wave of the bard's new vogue to resplash their thesis: Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; Edward de Vere did. What's more, an ivory-tower conspiracy is keeping their views from being taken seriously. "We're into something called bardgate," says Peter Dickson, a CIA official turned revisionist Elizabethan scholar. Shakespeare is not a crook, reply the defenders of the glover's son from Warwickshire. And each side casts the other as devils citing Hamlet...
...Oxford camp can go into admirable contortions explaining why Shakespeare's friendly rival Ben Jonson, in an encomium in the 1623 First Folio, calls the deceased Bard "the swan of Avon" (a conspiracy, they say). But their gravest problem is the existing poetry of De Vere himself. It is competent yet uninspired. The 20 or so poems may be juvenilia, but there is neither spark nor promise to the lines, too full of alliteration, all too devoid of depth. "Fram'd in the front of forlorn hope past all recovery,/I stayless stand, to abide the shock of shame...
Though he confesses he was initially reluctant to return to Shakespeare, Stoppard says he has been bowled over by the power of the Bard--and the theater--ever since his "first, deep" experience seeing Hamlet: "It alerted you. It jumped you into the central truth about theater, which is that it's an event and not a text." This, he is convinced, is why theater will endure and why he continues to produce a play every few years (of his next he will say only "19th century" and "Russia...
...hard-drugs crowd--Generation H--needed a bard, Clark would be the guy. His Kids was a glum screed about teens, drugs and unsafe sex. At least in Paradise, from a novel by ex-con Eddie Little, the lowlifes have some fun shooting up and stealing. Here two career criminals (James Woods and Melanie Griffith) adopt a young couple (Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner) into la dolce venom. There's a droll tough love in this inversion of Father Knows Best, where Dad is given to arias of rage, Mom kills people, Bud and Princess do junk. The tone...