Is Shakespeare Relevant, Part II

Whether or not the Reader accepts the premise that William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, was not what he seemed (i.e. a writer/poet and man of letters) or my own premise that he was in fact the inventor of Hollywood (i.e. the first celebrity producer) William Shakespeare was not a fool or a foil, as depicted in the film Anonymous: he was anything but. I see him not only as a forerunner to Cecil B. de Mille and Louis B. Mayer, but also a forerunner to the Vampire Capitalist and Wall Street corporate greedmeister as depicted in the movie Wall Street by Michael Douglas. Shakespeare had a lot of business savvy, was denounced for being greedy just like Gordon Gekko, was accused of piracy and plagiarism just like Dan Brown and Steven Spielberg, hoarded grain to drive up prices during a famine just like Monsanto, owned a theater company (i.e.studio) just like Goldwyn (well, a partner, anyway, with my own ancestor John Underwood among others), and fostered a bastard son who became England's first real estate developer, the forerunner of Samuel Levitt, as well as publisher of the first 'get rich quick' books: Sir William Davenant. And more important still was the ongoing conceit that even an uneducated commoner with illiterate parents, no books, no known education, and illiterate daughters could still be a genius entrepreneur who made good. In short, he embodied the future myth of the American Dream. So what could be more relevant than that?

That Shakespeare was a successful businessman (and also tax evader, as it happens--in other words an Elizabethan Romney)--is one of the few facts that actually exist about the man. Even Stratford-Upon-Avon is really just a theme park, all of which was built 150 years after his death, during which time nobody even remembered or heard of him in that town until P.T. Barnum showed up and tried to buy the "New Place" (already rebuilt at least once from scratch).

Thus was Shakespeare, followed by his son Davenant (also Poet Laureate of Maryland, later on) the original Brand Name: a true symbol and founder of all that America and our British Imperial ancestors valued most: money, property, and power over the works and labors of others. Small wonder his corporate sponsors and their Academic Ayatollahs protect him and his legacy with such ferocity.

All of which reminds me of the forthcoming U.S. election, and the continuing efforts of politicians to outdo themselves rewriting history, polishing their Newspeak, protecting their own best interests, altering facts to support their own ideology, and making Orwell the greatest prophet since Jesus.

Is Shakespeare Relevant?

Recently, the film Anonymous attempted to make a case that Shakespeare was a fraud--a premise I support in my own book Il Libro Segreto di Shakespeare --but with different conclusions as to who the true author really was. I'd say read the book, but unless you are fluent in Italian, Russian, Czech, or Polish you can't, until an English language publisher is finally willing to step forward and put this book out there. Thus far they won't, making this the first book in literary history to be a bestseller in foreign translation, and not published in the author's native language.

Apart from the fraud part, I take issue with Roland Emmerich's film primarily because it is irrelevant. Unfortunately, he and his producers spent $30 million trying to convince an uncaring filmgoing public that William Shakespeare was actually the 17th Earl of Oxford, the Elizabethan equivalent to Donald Trump. Or rather, it was like trying to convince American readers that Michael Moore is really Donald Trump. Or that Mark Twain (an important character in my book) was actually Cornelius Vanderbilt (no offense to Anderson Cooper, who apparently actually is Cornelius Vanderbilt). It's like telling the 99%ers that they are unimportant.

The point is this: in order for Shakespeare, the Godfather of the English language, to seem relevant today his actions, rather than his words, are what need to be addressed. We live now in a world in which, on the one hand 300 million Chinese can speak and read English reasonably well, whereas only about 5,000 Americans can actually do the same. Let's face it, when most people would just as soon Tweet, relevance becomes a dicey thing.

In my case, I make a claim for relevance as follows: William Shakespeare was the Elizabethan equivalent of P.T. Barnum, with a heavy dose of Donald Trump, and an even heavier dose of (in fact I make a case that he is the original) Cecil B. DeMille, and in fact his primary achievement was to have invented the producer as superstar and was therefore the forebear of Hollywood. And I dare anyone to question the relevance of Hollywood, because without Hollywood America has no culture at all. You will note that Cecil B. DeMille's name was atop every movie he produced, and I can guarantee that he never wrote (or read) a word of any of them. Nor did Joseph E. Levine, Samuel Goldwyn, or their successors. Shakespeare's name is known today for one reason and one reason only: his name, somehow, got stamped on all those plays. How a functional illiterate (he was), with illiterate parents, illiterate daughters (to me the clincher--come on, have you ever read or seen The Tempest?) and no books, no degrees, no correspondence, and no known friends or associates with any education whatsoever managed to 'write' all those plays is indeed the mystery of the ages. To me it couldn't be more simple: he didn't do it. And Mark Twain, by the way, agreed, in his long suppressed essay Is Shakespeare Dead. Read it! If you can find it. Then read my book. It might even be available in English by then.

What's in a Name?

Recently I attended a rather remarkable catered event sponsored by Amazon.com's answer to the democratization of publishing--CreateSpace--whose motto seems to be 'Anyone can be an author.' Unlike, apparently, in the old un-democratic days when you had to be able to write, with a product that passes at least somebody's version of muster (usually one of those now-nearly extinct educated female editors with a no-nonsense approach and a degree or two from Barnard or Wellesley). Yet here in the now in Seattle, it all seemed fitting, because one of the key topics was having a so-called 'platform,' and as former publisher and editor Alan Rinzler (who has published and edited such dauntingly diverse clients as Toni Morrision, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Shirley MacLaine, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, and Robert Ludlum and thus has stood on lots of platforms prior to this one at the Asian Art Museum) put it, "who are you to write about this subject?" Indeed, having just seen published the sixth translation of my book about Shakespeare--worse, daring to challenge the orthodoxy on that subject--indeed, who am I, to dare to do so, when even such stalwarts as Mark Twain and Otto Von Bismarck were chastened for doing so?

I have been ready with an answer for some time, of course, which I provided to several Italian journalists who were properly curious enough to ask. Indeed, who am I--Gene Ayres, John Underwood, or whatever else I choose to call myself-- to write about Shakespeare, when I don't hold one single university chair on the subject, or even have a PhD in English, let alone hold a tenured post at Oxford, Harvard, or Yale or even a cubicle at the Folger Library? My answer is simple: who else but a 'commoner' should be better qualified to write about one of his own? I have done my 10,000 hours of work, study, and preparation for my chosen role as Outlier. Because as surely as the Oxford theory of Shakespeare (as set forth in the film Anonymous) is only half correct (it wasn't Shakespeare who dunnit--well, he dunnit, but not the writing part) so also is the notion that only a cloaked don in an ivory tower is qualifed to speak for a man who had, at best, a third grade education and spent most of his time avoiding taxes and hoarding grain.

Hello? I have always been amazed at the rigid orthodoxy surrounding the Shakespeare myth, which has become to all intents and purposes nothing less than a religion--so powerful that as with most religion the facts themselves are considered irrelevant--that he only had a third grade education at best, owned no books, attended no universities, corresponded with no one but a local Stratford merchant who became his son-in-law and a lawyer about a real estate deal in London, and had two illiterate daughters-- are pretty much the only known facts about the man. And yet it is nothing short of blasphemy to suggest that maybe this guy could not possibly have written anything more than a shopping list, if that. And yet the dons, or what my doomed fictional professor-character Desmond Lewis (author of the Book Within the Book, pictured below) dared to call the 'Ayatollahs of Academe,' have gotten away with this for centuries. So, yes, Shakespeare was an unqualified illiterate who somehow wrote all those great plays and poems while in a presumed trance in his Bankside office, and thus only a learned academic is qualified to write about it, by way of presumption? No wonder Sarah Palin has gotten away with claiming to be the only qualified expert on Susan B. Anthony, except in reverse (or was that Michelle Bachmann? I do get these mid-life cheerleaders confused). Mark Twain had a ball with all this nonsense, of course, noting in his essay 'Is Shakespeare Dead?' how every single word in those hundreds of scholarly volumes the academics have generated over the centuries consists of but a single element: what Twain called 'surmise.' Hence, the following so-called logic: Shakespeare had no formal education, so he must have had some books. And since he had no books, he must have borrowed some from his learned friends. And since he had no learned friends, he must have talked to some in a pub. And since there's no evidence of him doing that except in one tavern in Oxford begetting Sir William Davenant with a bar maid, he therefore "must have been" a genius who thought it all up all by himself. All of which somehow 'proves' that he wrote the plays, simply because he managed to post his name on them (my theory, of course, is that he was a producer, and the first of his kind).

At least I, who dare to tackle this subject on grounds of an ancestral link to Shakespeare's own company among others, plus having dealt with many producers myself in my time, at least have a Bachelors Degree. Plus I have also read a book or two, and unlike Shakespeare even own a couple (and of course, also unlike Shakespeare have written several including the Italian book currently in print).

On a related subject, the issue was raised at this seminar about using a pseudonym. Apparently this is frowned upon. "What are you trying to hide?" The panelists wanted to know. Hmm. Good question. Maybe they should ask Mark Twain. In my case John Underwood was 2/3 of my father's name and also of his mother's father's name, in addition to being one of Shakespeare's partners in crime, so it seemed to fit. At least as well as Samuel Clemens nom de plume Mark Twain. Or Ed McBain's alter ego Evan Hunter (neither of which, incidentally, is his real name). Mine, for the record, is Gene (short for Eugene) Ayres. Sometimes I go by E.C. Cheers!

What Makes a Bestseller?

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor."
Matthew 13:57

I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time, and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country.

So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so has been this author banned for daring to question the world's most lofty and cherished literary deity as, well, a fake? And yet have we not heard this story before? The movie Anonymous, borrowing on my premise of Shakespeare as a fraud is the first film to dare to challenge the orthodoxy, and got pretty well hammered for doing so. And while I agree with Roland Emmerich's plot line only to the extent that it wasn't Shakespeare, it has become readily apparent that it's a lot easier to question Jesus (or at least Mary Magdalen) in the English-speaking world, than to question Shakespeare. Even though, as Derek Jacobi so eloquently puts it in the prologue to John Orloff's screenplay (as borrowed from Mark Twain and as Ben Jonson wrote:) "The man lacked art." Or an education, or even a book, for that matter.

Not that that matters. We live in an age now in which the loudest voice, or the most heavily armored authority, or the most well-heeled hypemeisters rule not only the air waves, but pretty much the whole damn whole roost. Including the publishing world. Not that they haven't done so for millennia, but still... So it is that whenever anyone presents a book on the subject of the Bard to an American or U.K. publisher, the first thing their editors seem to do is run the manuscript past the biblical authorities for signs of heresy, and these 'experts,' whom my soon-to-be dead character Desmond Lewis calls 'the Ayatollahs of Academe,' render judgement, always negative, just like the Bishops and Torquemadas of old. And this, mind you, in the land of 'freedom and opportunity' and our much-oppressed 'First Amendment.'

Even Rushdie found a home in Great Britain. I am still waiting for my invitation. Or publisher with the courage of an Emmerich (who lives safely in Germany), to question authority.

As to my own book, without giving away the plot, let me make one thing clear: it wasn't Oxford!

Confessional from Hacker Hell

Well, it's finally over: a long nightmarish week of life in a cloud-computing thunderhead, Cloud 8 1/2 as opposed to Cloud Nine, a dark cloud which, if there is a silver lining, it's strictly of the organizational variety. The Chinese have a term for making a mistake like I did: Loss of Face. In my case for falling flat on my shoulda-known-better ass for the oldest phishing scam there is: the "Lost in the Wilderness Send Money" scam. No, I didn't send money. I just asked everybody I know, ever met, ever emailed, or did business with to send money. Lots of it.

Luckily, nobody else fell for it, although one friend nearly did. Looking back, the Hacker-spammer-phisherman knew exactly which buttons to get me to push. Most disturbingly, I have long known better than to fall for internet scams, other than a car purchase/theft which I easily averted. Yet there is a weakness millions of us vulnerable humans seem to be afflicted with: a willingness, even a need, to trust. To believe. To Be a Believer: whether it's the latest get rich scam, penny stock, lottery ticket, religious con or Republican claim that being broke, busted, disgusted and unemployed is somehow guaranteed to make you rich like them if you simply trust them with what remains of your money and be happy being broke and so on.

But I digress (although, no, wait, this is about money, in the end. As William Goldman wrote, "Follow the money."). My own need to trust came from a different direction: My Quaker upbringing. Trust in God, I was told. So I trusted in Google, which is almost the same thing. I trusted G-mail. After all, they live up in the clouds too, don't they? So I Believed that if I got an email with the Google header and logo, purporting to need an update of my name and password based on random selection, or my account would be closed down in 48 hours, for some reason I believed it. That was the kicker, the one that worked. Lose my Gmail account in 48 hours? No way! This cannot be allowed to happen! My whole life is attached to that account, to all the saved emails, including the query letters and submissions, some with manuscripts and other writings attached, and certainly opinions on all and sundry matters deemed to be private.

So, of course, I made exactly that very disaster happen. And of course knew immediately I should never have clicked 'send,' I shoulda taken a moment longer and gone to Snopes.com first. What was the rush? I had 48 hours. But I was frustrated by an effort to ask Google if this was necessary, and of course there is no 'Ask Google.' Also, admittedly, I'm an impulsive sort, and sometimes, it seems, a careless one too. And some impulses can be fatal--like "Let's pass this fucking slow truck NOW, dammit!" And just luckily, this one was not.

Live and learn. That's what they say, whoever 'they' are. And some lessons are more costly than others. Luckily this one worked out, in the end--after five days of suspense, misery, agony without the ecstasy, and fielding angry or worried phone calls from around the world, mostly to the effect of: "This can't be true, right? You're not really in Spain and flat broke and for some reason desperately in need of $3,500, right?" "Uh, hello? Say what?" was my first response, followed by "Omigod, I am so sorry, this can't be happening!" Being safely in Seattle at the time, at least I thought I was, and yet these calls kept coming (emails no, because the clever SOB that stole my password promptly changed it, along with my security data, answering my emails posing as moi, demanding even more money (or maybe a little less?) and a five-hundred-million client Google.com forced to give the Occupier the benefit of the doubt as to ownership until convinced otherwise without actually having a readily apparent way to tell them.

Fortunately, I also have Friends in High Places, if not actually God, who helped facilitate my contact with Google's Recovery Team and convince them that the marginally literate, spelling/grammar/syntax and ethically-challenged person claiming to be the Author Gene Ayres (currently apparently broke and busted in Spain) was not who he said he was, and that person was, um, actually, ME! Moi. After all, I knew who I was and could prove it. And ultimately, as it turned out, my usurping impostor could not, and thus was vanquished and banquished(if not to jail in South Africa where he actually lurks). And my property and Good Name returned, if slightly tarnished from the experience, my profession, friendships and personal business are only slightly the worse for wear.

So, yes. Live and learn. It's a good motto. So is "Be careful out there!" Even for a Writer who thought he was immortal and knew everything.

Ciao for Now (CFN).

Civilization as We Know It

There were three extremely disturbing stories in the news this morning, and none had anything to do with Libya, or Obama, or deficits (at least fiscal ones) or our disfunctional Congress. What they had a lot more to do with was the End of Civilization as we know it. To wit: the Philadelphia Orchestra is bankrupt. That is huge, and utterly inexcusable to be allowed to happen in any society that still imagines itself to be advanced. On a lesser scale, but equally significant, here in Seattle two similar cultural decisions have been reached: to close down the Intiman Theater, arguably the finest repertory company on the West Coast; and on a smaller, but perhaps even more significant scale, Nordstroms is firing all its piano players. No, not because they are too costly, or not gifted enough, or destract shoppers from their mission. No, it's because today's shoppers, it turns out, pefer canned pop music to live piano. So I think it wouldn't be too much of a reach to say that today's shoppers at Nordstroms are the same majority that seem to prefer Fox News to PBS, and Rush Limbaugh to rational discourse, and if they read at all, its probably either "How to Get Rich Quick" books or the comics.

And it's not like we can no longer afford the luxury of culture. We have now become a nation of hoarders: of money, of guns, of property (see how all those foreclosures are being gobbled up by 'investors') and most of all righteousness. None of which supports, or even gives a crap about the key elements that make a nation, and a society, into a civilization. Otherwise people would gladly pay taxes to support these essential institutions, and maybe write a check or two themselves, instead of buying, say, another Ford F-150 and the latest assault rifle to guard their own personal domain against all and sundry: especially if they don't look like you or go to your church.

If all it took (which is what today's American Republicans and Tea Partiers are now demanding) for a nation to be functional is to have a large army and police force, then Ghengis Khan was the most civilized man in the history of the world. Which brings me to China, a country I know something about, because China has already been through all this. Less than thirty years ago China's leaders, in their wisdom, decided their country had no need or use for such unimportant things as, say, education, health care, art, science, or music. Just as we seem to be concluding here and now. All of those cultural 'nonessentials' were disposed of, at huge cost in terms of lives and the kind of institutions and infrastructure that makes (or breaks) a great nation.

Now, it seems, albeit at a slower pace, we can't wait to follow China's example. Ironically China is starting from scratch to rebuild a new, viable nation and society even as we can't wait to destroy our own. So far they've got the economics part down, and everyone is busy being a good consumer or producer. What they don't have, by and large, are those very things we are now discarding: orchestras, museums, galleries, libraries, theater, public welfare or even charities. Big houses? Sure. Stretch limos? No problem. Giant department stores with canned pop music selling expensive goods nobody actually needs? Absolutely. More and more it seems, they are becoming us, and we are becoming them.

Hollywood Vision (Not!)

Pet Peeve:

Hollywood producers have long had the habit of shooting location footage in their back yard and calling it Rome. Or Alaska. Or Seattle. Or New Jersey, where I happened to grow up. What these people seem obliviously, vaingloriously, utterly incapable of grasping, or even imagining, is that the rest of the world, or for that matter the rest of the country, does not in the slightest resemble those brown, burned out hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, and resemble nothing so much as, well, Los Angeles.

This past week I was watching two of my favorite shows, and they are favorites no more, because I have become so weary of having burnt brown stains smeared across my screen and being asked to believe it is Seattle, or Princeton, or Niagara Falls. Do these people in Hollywood actually imagine that nobody outside of Los Angeles County (or for that matter, inside of Los Angeles County) ever goes outside, opens their eyes, and looks around? That we won't notice the Hollywood sign hanging over, say, Brooklyn?

The first offender this past week was the series that specializes in graphic gruesome detail, apparently more titillating by a long shot then, say, sex, to these people, these days. It's called 'Bones,' appropriately enough I suppose, although it's rarely about anything that basic or natural. This week's episode of Bones featured, or we were being asked to believe it featured, a bone yard on an upstate New York campus, on the Canadian border. Now, I happen to have spent several years getting my bachelors degree on a university campus in upstate New York (Syracuse) and while it often had more than I cared for in the way of snow, or ice, or leaves blowin' in the wind, or arboreal forests, not to mention numerous frigid lakes and rivers, what it did not ever look like, even once, was a flowerless, grassless, treeless brown dirt yard out back behind, say, Burbank, where this dismal footage was so obviously filmed.

The other offending episode was from my favorite 'Jersey' show, 'HOUSE' about a person of that name, not a building, for those of you who might be unaware. 'House' is supposed to take place in the very elegant and stylish (and historic) town of Princeton, New Jersey, at a medical center adjacient to the university by that name. Blessedly, these producers sent out a B unit to take some stock footage of the area, which they use in the main titles. ('Bones' is supposedly based in Washington, D.C., and stock footage of that area is also used in the main title, and nowhere else). Now, if you haven't been to Princeton, you should go, it's a beautiful town. Unlike, say, the brown hills above Woodlawn Cemetery, where they apparently film 'House' as well as 'Bones.' This week's 'House' episode also involved a road trip. And this gets into yet another of my least favorite Hollywood conventions: long boring car scenes in which two actors pretend to be riding in a car while spewing hours of verbal exposition (in Bones, they will ride in a car without stopping for so much as a traffic light for ten minutes at a time in the middle of D.C.--try that some time!). The oldest convention in Hollywood is to run stock footage in the background of scenery rolling past. Unfortunately, said scenery is always of the highways and byways of Los Angeles, looking exactly like Los Angeles, and nowhere else, with brown treeless hills and boring neighborhoods and mini-malls everywhere.

Even my current favorite show, 'Grey's Anatomy,' supposedly set in Seattle, where I now live, features brown treeless hills for a background, whenever they show the grand foyer of the supposed Seattle Grace Hospital, and the 'landscape' beyond. Here's a clue, Hollywood location managers and producers: Mt. Rainier does not in the least bit resemble the Hollywood Sign. And Puget Sound does not consist of a brown blotch of Van Nuys Airport runway. And Princeton, N.J. does not look in the least like a burnt out soccer field in Canoga Park, where this road trip apparently took place. And the day it does, is the day I finally return to L.A., where my own career was once long-sidelined.