I took the two most important plays—Hamlet and Macbeth—and translated them. Took three years to complete, where I left as much as possible unaltered, so the audience will feel like they’re experiencing Elizabethan speech but comprehend the sense of what the character is saying. Of the two plays:
Hamlet is a character who’s life gets upended when his father is murdered, and he’s next if he doesn’t put on a disguise—an antic disposition—to baffle the murderer to keep from getting killed himself. He’s a character whose world gets corrupted, and because the world is still corrupt, means we are all Prince Hamlet—we are all figuring how to survive upon the stage of corruption.
Macbeth is about what happens when you lose the Stoic precept of the two things in life: those that you can control, and those that you can’t, while all you can, is what you say and do. Go looking for portents, or have them set upon you through synchronicity, keep your head about the sanctity of your eternal spirit. When young king Malcom—while vetting his supporters—declares that he cares for the truth as much as life itself, means if push comes to shove—you’d die for the truth—you wouldn’t run and hide.
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But I didn’t want to discuss the plays or their ideas, I want to discuss how I’d never been aware there was, and still is, a controversy amongst scholars over the authenticity of authorship. Who really wrote the poems and plays under that name? Most are taught and believe the Strats—that Shakespeare was a bright young man who grew up in a riverside town some 20 miles north-west of London; which he then walked to, fell in with the theatre crowd, and wrote poems and plays while becoming owner of a stage or two. The anti-Strats believe someone else wrote the works and the person “Shaxpur”—was a stand-in.
Back then you could suddenly be in hot water if the royal court had a change in monarch; playwriting was frowned on by those actually hanging out at court at that time. So if it wasn’t the bright young man from Stratford upon Avon, it was someone who concealed themselves because they were part of the court. Strat or anti-Strat: the author is either a bright young man who moved to the big city and found theater to declare his genius, or he was someone learned from the court of Queen Elizabeth. To slightly complicate the choice between the two, amongst anti-Strats are factions believing it to be one person or another at or near the court, some even believing it a woman writer.
The bare facts are, the British Museum has a notebook from 1594, which contains over a thousand entries of words, phrases, salutations, turns of speech, proverbs, metaphors, aphorisms, moral/philosophical observations, drawn from Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and English, and it belonged to Sir Francis Bacon. It comes to us from Dr. William Rawley, who resided with Bacon the last ten years of his life. 1679 Dr. Rawley’s son gave the notebook to Dr Tenison. The Promus—or storehouse—is the notebook Bacon used during youthful journey to the French and Italian courts—where Queen Elizabeth—who rarely went to the docks—saw him off herself.
By 1808 the notebook had made its way to the British Museum where it was first catalogued, and then discovered by a biographer who published The Life and Works of Francis Bacon in multiple volumes during the late 1850s. He selected portions, but curiously none that he and others would have immediately recognized as Shakespeare, and does not mention him even though both were alive in the same town at the same time.
Then, 1867, another bundle of writings belonging to Bacon are found—The Northumberland Manuscript—where the names Bacon and Shakespeare appear together on a contemporary document. Variations of Bacon, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, and William Shakespeare are hand-written across its cover—two years before Shakespeare was publicly known as a playwright.
Then, 1883, a scholarly work reproduced a full transcript of the notebook—noting hundreds of passages and sentiments which later appear in the plays of Shakespeare. To an impartial mind it was and still is to this day confirmation beyond doubt that Bacon used his Promus for later works.
Then, 1938, is discovery of Shakespeare’s 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vast history of Britain and source material for the plays, and what Strats claim as proof, that a bright young man from Stratford read it and conjured the plays. That particular copy came to us from a descendent of the printer who first printed Shakespeare’s plays, and seeing notes in the margins, surmised it had been Shakespeare’s own personal copy. A scholar of that day then put the copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles alongside The Northumberland Manuscript and said a glance by anyone shows the book and the document belonged to the same person.
Then there is the earliest manuscript of a Shakespeare play, discovered in the library of an antiquarian who was patronized by Lady Anne—Francis Bacon’s mother. A five act play representing it as originally composed, before showing up as two separate plays in the publication of the first folio—which was published with sixteen plays which hadn’t previously been published, along with another twenty which already had, for a total of thirty-six—divided into Comedies/Histories/Tragedies, and published five years after the death of someone who didn’t own a book and never sent a letter, even though living twenty miles from a source of income in an age where letter-writing was voluminous. All Shakespeare’s contemporaries, zillions of letters—him? Not one.
Many would say, OK, Bacon is Shakespeare—big deal—he couldn’t put his name to them—at least we got some memorable works.
