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CHASING SHAKESPEARES
by Sarah Smith
Atria, June 2003
352 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0743464826


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

A word of caution. In this review I am imputing into the mind of the author, Sarah Smith, some motivations that other critics, as well as the author herself, might not agree with. What I write, of course, are my own ideas and not necessarily anyone else's.

Sarah Smith is not just a good writer, but a clever one, and in CHASING SHAKESPEARES she has written an unusually interesting book. Its settings in England are top-notch, and her characterizations are most realistic.

There is no hero or heroine in this story. The lead characters, except for being Shakespeare wallahs, are rather immature, although Joe is a graduate research assistant and Posy a Harvard undergraduate. Their vocabulary is shown to be severely limited by the extremely frequent use of the f-word and the s-word (I know students like to use them, but here they are used excessively to the point of caricature, a fact that I think may be essential to their characterizations), and they seemed to think that a hundred or so uses of "maybe" metamorphose into something close to 100 percent certainty. They also f-ing like to, like, use "like" like it adds punctuation to their, like, f-ing speech. I think I'd prefer the f's and s's to the likes. At one point Joe says to Posy's father, "Let them alone." At another point, Joe says, "We can't give people ... maybe," yet they do throughout.

Elsewhere when Joe is trying to get acceptance for one of his theories, he adds, "But I think there's a problem with the date." And in trying to explain further, he still has to say, "But there's a problem with that date, too." Posy complains about Anne Hathaway's cottage, saying, "I just can't stand it. It's [just] a random cottage ... That's so lame." Joe and Posy do not like what they find in Stratford on Avon, and we read, "Totally," Posy whispers. "Are they dumb or totally lying or what?" And as I'm reading some of how Posy and Joe are thinking, I want not to whisper, but to shout about them, "Are they dumb or totally lying or what?" Posy especially, as soon as facts or indications are mentioned, wants to place them in the bed of Procrustes.

In a collection of material donated to Joe's university consisting of many obviously forged documents relating to Shakespeare, Joe discovers a letter signed by William Shakespeare in which he seems to deny having written the plays et al attributed to him. Posy knows an expert in London who can determine if the letter is real or forged, so off they go to London. Joe's aware that taking the letter, which belongs to the university, without permission is essentially stealing. The London expert, Nicky, says it will take several days, so Joe and Posy go to see locations associated with Shakespearean research.

All along, they engage in a dialogue, with Posy being the Strong Argument and Joe the Weak Argument. Joe protests (too frequently?) that he believes Shakespeare (1564-1616) is Shakespeare, so the letter is obviously a forgery. Posy vehemently denies Shakespeare's authorship and says that the real author of the plays and sonnets was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), so the letter is authentic. Joe states that no one believes that de Vere wrote Shakespeare, although this is not true because the de Vere theory has had much life and many adherents. The 1972 Enc. Brit., for example, has "Along with Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the 5th Earl of Rutland, the 6th Earl of Derby, and others, Oxford has been seen as the putative author of Shakespeare's works." The Complete Peerage, 2nd ed., X:251), 1945 -- the hands-down authority for British nobility -- also mentions the claim in favor of Oxford. Oxford advocates, both earlier and now, have a job in explaining away the fact that Oxford died in 1604 and plays by Shakespeare continued to be written for many years after.

Joe finds a lot of books and other material in the British Library that Posy construes to support her argument. Joe keeps protesting that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, but he doesn't resist very much. At times they express a wish that there was more more available than the rather limited contemporary information on Shakespeare (which Posy considers a very telling fact) and they likewise wish that more people of the time had preserved the truth for posterity. As a matter of fact independent of this book, Giles Dawson, one-time curator of the Folger Shakespearean Library, wrote in the 1972 Encyc. Brit., that at least 50 of Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, mentioned him as the author of many Shakespearean plays, and for 150 years after Shakespeare's death no one questioned his authorship. Elizabethan records regarding dramatists were not especially considered desirable to preserve. Dawson writes, "With the exception of Ben Jonson, we know more about Shakespeare than about any other dramatist of the time." Although Joe is an advanced Shakespeare scholar, he neglects to mention facts such as these.

The casual reader can enjoy this book for its own sake; it gives much food for thought. The reader more knowledgeable of the Elizabethan period could have a problem of just how much time one should put into the book. There are a lot of references that could be checked. I personally would like at least to read it a second time, knowing that I would get more out of it; however, I have so many other books to read.

The book may be compared, but only superficially in my opinion, with Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME. But whereas Tey is forcing unwarranted conclusions by careful manipulation and selective suppression of facts, I think Smith is actually laughing up her sleeve at the Tey type of argument. In some respects CHASING SHAKESPEARES might be more akin to THE CAINE MUTINY. If there's a theme, I think that Smith is telling the reader, "Don't be gullible. Use your mind to think." And I hope all readers will keep that in mind as they read this much recommended novel.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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