It appears that Stratfordian Prof. Jonathan Bate (see letter to the Guardian below) has been caught in a display of ignorance. Chances are my letter will never see print in the Guardian, but we need to answer the obvious gaffes of the traditional camp to get the discussion out into the open -- sooner or later it will happen. Tom Hunter
To the Editor of the Guardian:
In his review of Mark Rylance’s new play, The BIG Secret Live - I Am Shakespeare - Webcam Daytime Chat-room Show at the Chichester Festival Theatre, Michael Billington (Guardian, Sept. 3, 2007 ) quotes scholar Jonathan Bate: "It is a striking fact that no major actor has ever been attracted to anti-Stratfordianism," the notion, Billington explains, that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. Says Billington, “Now Mark Rylance proves Bate wrong.”
The problem is that Bate is as accurate in this statement as he is about the authorship question in general, about which he displays only a woeful ignorance.
Mark Rylance is only one of many major actors to prove Bate wrong. How about Sir John Gielgud, Leslie Howard, and Orson Welles for starters? How about we add Jeremy Irons, Michael York and Sir Derek Jacoby? All have stated reasonable doubt, some outright disbelief, about the authorship of poems and plays attributed to William Shake-speare, later spelled Shakespeare.
Add to that list the author Mark Twain, who recorded his reasons for opposing Shakespeare as the author of the works in a long essay, Is Shakespeare Dead?
Twain himself is a good example of the issue. Professor Bate would insist that Mark Twain wrote Mark Twain's works, wouldn't he? Nothing could be more obvious. Twain's name is all over them, isn't it? It would be looney to think Twain's works might have been written by somebody named Samuel L. Clemens.
R. Thomas Hunter, Ph.D.
Independent Shakespeare Scholar
Additional reviews of Rylance play
James Wheaton reported yesterday in the Jackson Citizen Patriot that the Michigan Shakespeare Festival high school tour of Romeo and Juliet was criticized for inappropriate content -- " So me take issue with sexual innuendoes in Michigan Shakespeare Festival’s High School Tour performances of ‘Romeo & Juliet’" : Western [High School] parent Rosie Crowley said she was upset when she heard students laughing about sexual content in the play afterwards. Her son didn’t attend the performance Tuesday because of another commitment, she said. “I think the theater company should have left out any references that were rated R,” Crowley said. “I would say that I’ve read Shakespeare, and what I was told from the students, I’ve never read anything that bad.” She said she objected to scenes that involved pelvic thrusting and breast touching and to a line in which Mercutio makes suggestive comments to Romeo after looking up the skirt of a female. The problem with cutting out...
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