Episode 1 of Anderson’s podcast is an excellent nutshell summary of the anti-Stratfordian argument. It also sets the stage for Anderson’s Oxfordian argument, which is developed in both his book and in subsequent editions of his podcast. (The entire podcast series is nine episodes long.)

Anderson also has a blog in which he presents the latest developments in the Shake-speare debate. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for the blog as well as to the podcast. In one blog entry he mentions a performance by my new podcast friends the Reduced Shakespeare Company.

This past year I came to a Shakespearean crisis point. Or perhaps I should say a Shake-spearean crisis point. That hyphen in Shake-speare is deliberate. I have come to believe with very strong conviction that Shake-speare was a penname, and that the actor guy from Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a word of those plays.

I’ve had serious doubts about the authorship of the plays by the Stratford guy for many years. Although Stratfordian scholars argue with amazing vehemence that William of Stratford was the author of all those plays, even they have to concede that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything more than his name in his own handwriting. I don’t think this observation is an anti-working-class judgment or snobbery or anything. There just isn’t any sample anywhere of his own writing–no notes, no letters, no diary entries, nothing. Just his signature on his will and a couple other legal documents.

Last spring I picked up a book in my local Barnes and Noble while waiting to be seated in a restaurant. It was “Shakespeare” by Another Name, written by Mark Anderson. This is a biography of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is considered by many anti-Stratfordians to be the true author of the works. In this remarkable book, Anderson shows a great number of parallels between de Vere’s life and the details of Shakespeare’s plays.

It is Anderson’s contention that these connections are so strong they cannot be ignored. He makes a very convincing case. As Orson Welles once said, “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away.” After reading Anderson’s book, I completely understand Welles’s point. The Italian cities mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are those known to have been visited by de Vere in 1575 and 1576.

I’m now in the middle of my second, deliberately more skeptical reading of “Shakespeare” by Another Name. This time I am being very careful to ignore, or at least devalue, any assertions made in the subjunctive mood. For example, in chapter 2, Anderson describes Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge University in 1564. He mentions the entertainment that might have been enjoyed by the queen:

A troupe of players from the university, however, followed the queen’s train. De Vere, who probably departed Cambridge with Elizabeth, would have watched as these presumptuous undergraduates overtook the massive convoy of horses and carts. The players begged Elizabeth to let them perform just one masque. After some pleading, she finally consented.

When Anderson uses constructions such as “de Vere…would have watched…”, it feels like pure speculation. But even skipping past all these “what if” passages, the concincidences are indeed very funny.

The debate about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare (or Shake-speare, which Anderson and other Oxfordians posit as a pseudonym for de Vere) has been going on for a couple centuries at least. I’m only just now getting into it. The thing I find most surprising is the heat and blind passion of the defenders of the Stratfordian position. Their strongest argument seems to be that William of Stratford must have written the plays because his name is on them. In other words, they don’t even admit that a publication could ever appear under a penname or the name of a frontman. (Anybody who knows about Hollywood in the 1950s knows that authors use frontmen quite often.)

The next most common critique of the Stratfordians against the Oxfordians is that they are stupid. Or at least lazy. For example, David Kathman, in a 1999 letter to Harper’s magazine, accuses Oxfordians of engagement in conspiracy theory, of pursuing pseudo-science and of observing a double standard with regard to Oxford and William Shakespeare. Sometimes, as on the Stromata blog, they seem to resort to simple name-calling. (Because Roger Strittmatter’s Ph.D. dissertation has a very long title, as dissertations usually do, Stromata calls it “ponderous.”)

What the Stratfordians are unable to convince me of, though, is that William of Stratford absolutely has to be the person who wrote the plays, and that no one else could have done it. The basic incongruence is just so strong. Where is anything else the man wrote, other than the core canon of English literature? Where are the letters? Where are the notes? What of William of Stratford’s own life is reflected in these works? Why does the First Folio seem to appear out of nowhere, with William Shakespeare’s name on it?

I think the reason this matters so much to me is that after reading Anderson’s book and other resources, and after thinking about the question for several months, I want to know that the plays and poems were written by a real human being. I want to know that they reflect the personal experience of a person with a life story. I don’t want to keep accepting that William of Stratford, human history’s epitome of accidental and natural genius, received these works from Heaven above just as the New Testament authors received the Word of God.

Come to think of it, the standard Stratfordian point of view does seem somewhat like a religion. Perhaps in this day and age when even religious Christians can begin to think about the real life of Jesus of Nazareth, students of English literature can start to think about the real life of the author of the Shake-speare plays.

Last week, when I attended The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre, I found myself squirming in my seat, feeling like a heretic or a traitor for even entertaining these Oxfordian thoughts. Weird.

I’m a German teacher outside of Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia–a county that still offers German at all its high schools and just about all its middle schools. This is a good place to be. The famously wealthy Fairfax County, where I live and where my children graduated high school, is letting German die off slowly and quietly in its schools. That’s really shameful, if you think about it. Fairfax considers itself in many respects to be the “home of the Internet.” Network Solutions, which was the sole registrar for all .com, .net, and .org domains through the 1990s, has its headquarters in Herndon, on the northwestern edge of Fairfax County.

German is the second-most frequently used language on the Internet, after English. Fortunately, Loudoun County, home to AOL and Dulles International Airport, is not as parochial as Fairfax, and still offers German widely. This means I am sure to have a job here for a long time.

The downside of this, however, is that I have five, count ‘em, five course preparations this year. Because I am the sole German teacher at a new school, I teach every level of German that is offered by the county: levels one through five (fifth-year being an Advanced Placement course). I know very few other teachers who have this pleasure. Whenever a school has more than one teacher, invariably somebody is doing two or more sections of the same course–two sections of second-year Spanish, for example. That means any given teacher’s five-class teaching load is divided up between, or among, only two or three different courses. But I get one class of each and every level. That’s the situation for most German and Latin teachers around here.

If you’ve taught school before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have to do five completely different shows every two days. Teaching is like the most demanding performance anyone ever gave. A teacher on the block schedule has to hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes. That’s the standard length of a Las Vegas show. The difference between me and a Las Vegas show, however, is that there’s only one of me, while even a “one-man” show in Vegas has a whole crew of people behind it.

Oh–one other difference between me and a Las Vegas show: I get paid a teacher’s salary. And I get three personal leave (i.e., vacation) days during each school year. True, I get the summers “off”–but that means I have free time to take courses, lead student tours to Europe, and write and plan the county curriculum.

I am exhausted right now. That’s why this post is so long. I don’t have the energy to stop typing.

Think I’m going to go home and drink wine and watch the baseball playoffs now. The whole thing starts up again Monday morning, bright and early.

I put “interviewing” in quotation marks because we really just shot the breeze for awhile. Neither they nor I really had any particular question points or theme in mind.

This was quite a rush for me; I’ve been fans of the RSC for several years now. I first saw them at the Kennedy Center sometime before the turn of the millenium (not sure whether it was 1995 or 1999). Their witty abridgements of not only Shakespeare, but also the history of America, the Great Books, and many other areas of intellectual endeavor, are a hoot. If you haven’t seen them yet, you should.

They’ve been doing a podcast for about the past six months or so, produced once a week by Austin. Matt Croke, an associate of theirs, contacted me by email through The Word Nerds and suggested that we might get together and talk.

So this evening, before their performance in Reston, Virginia, we talked for about a half hour about podcasting, my podcast, their show, and what it’s like to do funny in different countries.

I think neither Austin nor I know exactly what we’ll do with our recordings, but we will certainly get them into our respective podcasts sometime this summer.

The reaction of Tom Shales of the WaPo was to put down the whole event as a “bore and a horror” (a proper response for the TV maven of a major East-Coast paper, I guess). Tom didn’t particularly like Ellen DeGeneres as the host. The Boston Globe was even more curmudgeonly, suggesting that Ellen put everybody to sleep. I don’t know what Matthew Gilbert at the Globe is thinking. It wasn’t Ellen who put us to sleep. It was the whole pompous affair.Ellen was a fantastic host, in my opinion. The reason she was so good is because she playfully yet ruthlessly punctured the gassy, self-important Hollywood elite and their quasi-royal airs. When she brought out the vacuum cleaner sometime after 11:00 PM, I thought it was a stroke of genius.

Shales says Ellen lacked the “stature” of previous Oscar hosts. So presumably Tom wanted an even more royal air to the whole proceeding. I preferred having a showbiz insider who is really also a bemused fan. I don’t think overly inflated stars need more inflating.

Ellen was the best host since Johnny Carson. Hope she does it again next year.

Particularly when I was trying to get started as an actor in New York, I used to expend a lot of energy and stress trying to figure out “who I was,” by which I mean what kind of performing persona was most likely to get me hired. Was I a young leading man? A character actor? A comedian? A musical actor? Something else? I never exactly zeroed in on any of those, which might have something to do with my not “making it” big as an actor. (That and my desire to stay married.)

Last night at my church, we had our once-a-year “Open Mike Night,” which is just what it sounds like. Anybody who wants to sing or play something can get on the program. A few dozen people from the congregation come to listen. A handful of folks, some of whom really don’t otherwise get up in front of an audience too much, present their musical tidbits. It’s a lot of fun, and yet we would never dream of putting out a CD of the result. We just do it for fun.

Or, actually, why do we do it?

I was thinking about this this morning. Why does a performing artist perform? For some people it was pretty scary getting up in front of friends and casual acquaintances to sing. You expose a lot about yourself when you do that. It’s not only about one’s singing voice; it’s also about one’s taste in music, one’s confidence in one’s presentation of self to others, even one’s ideology and point of view.

People who perform are famously driven by ego, but this Latin word for “I” can be applied to anyone. Everybody has an ego, and everybody wants his/her ego fed by approval. One of our first urges is for approval from Mom. When our friends approve of our song (recitation, magic trick, etc.), it’s even better. Mom pretty much has to approve, but friends don’t, necessarily. And when strangers approve, well, then you are somebody.

I guess I’ve been looking for approval from strangers all my life. When casting directors and talent agents gave me approval in my New York years, it put me on top of the world. And when I got nothing from them but indifference, it put me into a deep, funky depression.

It’s taken a long time to get a good perspective on this. And I’m still working on it.

Categories: performing, acting, music

From about the age of 16 or so up until–well, up until the present, really–I wanted to be an actor of some kind. I didn’t just major in Dramatic Art at UNC Chapel Hill, I went for a B.F.A. in acting. After that I got an M.F.A. at the same school, then went with my new wife to New York City to be an actor.

The classic “between shows” job for New York actor is to wait tables in a restaurant. In the summer of 1977 I fulfilled this stereotype for about two and a half weeks by taking a waiting job at a place called La Pomme. This was a chi-chi little place in the east 60s that had an upscale clientele and served quasi-”natural” cuisine.

I only got assigned to lunch shifts, so I made little money. The real tip money was made by the dinner waiters. In my two weeks at La Pomme, I did wait on John Lennon once, and later on Bill Murray (just starting on Saturday Night Live). But I didn’t make enough in tips to make it worth staying.

Once I did get assigned to a dinner shift. Another young struggling actor was working that dinner shift as well, a guy from New Jersey named John Spencer.

We didn’t hang out or become buddies, really, but I do recall that John had a lot of confidence and a smiling demeanor. He smiled a lot, in fact. I recall that he was always nice and friendly to me at a time when I felt that other New York actors were out to beat me out of the next role. John had spent the previous summer as a bit player at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Virginia (my wife’s hometown), and was now “between gigs,” so he was in the same position as I.

One evening I was supposed to meet my wife in the west 40s for some reason I can’t recall, and John lived in Manhattan Plaza, the high-rise apartment buildings for performers on West 43rd Street. So we shared a cab to the West Side after work. Later on I ran into John at a party thrown by some UNC buddies at Manhattan Plaza who had known him at Barter Theater, I think.

One of the treats of watching The West Wing for me the past few years has been to see the very good work by this actor with whom I was once acquainted. I knew John in the 1970s just enough to get a superficial impression. I never had any clue about his demons or secrets–I didn’t know until I read in Parade magazine, for example, that he was a recovering alcoholic (although in his early 30s I guess he did seem like a guy who liked to party). I knew he worked on L.A. Law in the 1980s, and I always perceived that as his “big break,” but I learn today from his obituary that he had been on The Patty Duke Show, a fluffy sitcom from 1963 in which Patty Duke played two roles.

The news of John’s death from a heart attack yesterday is making me feel very old. I guess it doesn’t surprise me. That character Leo McGarry on The West Wing had been looking pretty rundown for quite some time. The plot development which had Leo suffering a heart attack at Camp David was no surprise at all. Still, it is unsettling to see life imitate art–except John isn’t recovering from his heart attack like Leo did from his.

The news of John’s death comes two days after my father attended the funeral of one of his closest friends, Carl Kreps. Carl, who was a pastor in North Carolina, like my father, also had been in bad health for some time. My dad took it pretty hard. The year 2005 was a year of funerals for my dad. He lost an old friend back in the spring; his neighbor and friend, Conrad Williams, died in July; and his brother Paul died much too young and unexpectedly in August. And now Carl Kreps is gone, reminding my dad and me that we are all, basically, terminal patients.

I don’t know, really, what message or lesson to take from these two deaths this week. I guess I should make sure I keep myself in better shape. I live a much too sedentary life sitting at this computer and driving my car to the schools where I teach.

And I should always try to appreciate friends and acquaintances–even passing acquaintances like John Spencer.

Categories: midlife, performing, acting