Shakespeare

Oh, Canada: Love Letter From a Neighbor

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Canada was just a short plane ride away when I grew up in New York City, and its bilingualism fascinated me as soon as I started learning French in elementary school.  I eventually became my high school’s star French student, thanks to tutoring from my mother whose French was excellent. I received a certificate of achievement from the Alliance Française in New York, so a trip to Montréal seemed ideal after I graduated high school and was feeling almost bilingual.

My brother, who didn’t speak French, put me in charge of hotels and I picked one on Place Jacques Cartier which was then somewhat ramshackle and noisy, but exciting for a student like me. Just being able to use French outside of a classroom–and be understood–was thrilling. I’d been studying it for eight years but now it was alive, transactional.


Getting into the country was unexpectedly dicey, though. It was 1971 and both of us looked like hippies. Clean hippies, but hippies nonetheless. And I didn’t realize that joking with Passport Control was not a good idea. When I was asked if I had any money with me, I emptied my wallet onto the table and made some smart-ass remark like “Ai-je assez?” (Do I have enough?)

My brother claims that we were taken aside for an hour and interrogated. I have no memory of that. What I do remember was the superb food everywhere we went in Vieux Montréal and elsewhere that week and the wonderful feeling of being a different person when I was speaking and thinking in another language.

But my next trips to Canada involved a different language: Shakespeare’s English. Living in Michigan, I visited the Stratford Festival in Ontario twice as a graduate student, and later, my spouse and I became Festival members.

Though I’d seen some wonderful shows in New York, nothing beat watching Christopher Plummer as Lear in front row center seats or Martha Henry in Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play I’d seen and studied extensively in college. Her silence was more evocative and devastating than many actors’ monologues. The play left us so stunned we couldn’t vacate our seats for a good ten minutes afterwards–and we went back to see it again that summer, just as we saw other plays twice when they were terrific.

Stratford was a revelation: not just a charming, scenic town, but a place where you could run into the cast members anywhere and they were happy to chat.

And then there were several trips to Montréal and Toronto each, a week in Vancouver, a handful of celebrations we had at the Langdon Hall Country House and Spa, trips to Québec City by ourselves and with one son and his wife, and my own professional visits as an author to Windsor. I know I have a lot more to explore in Canada and luckily there’s plenty of time for more great food, wonderful people, and memorable sites.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in genres from mystery to memoir including Writer’s Block is Bunk.

Was Shakespeare Shady?

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Recent studies show that conspiracy theories are highly democratic. These loony beliefs “cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.” So despite all the evidence, there are people who maintain that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and just as tendentiously, there are people of all kinds who fervently believe that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays.
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They’ll present a blizzard of proofs that melt  under close inspection and have suggested dozens of candidates as the “true author” over the last 150 years including Ben Jonson, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Philip Sydney, The Freemasons, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, The Rosicrucians, a whole assortment of nobles, poets and playwrights—and even Queen Elizabeth.There are many ferocious arguments and they start with a bogus negative. The Refuseniks simply cannot believe that someone who wasn’t upper class and a world traveler could have been a brilliant writer. This shows a gross misunderstanding of the creative mind and contemptuous snobbery. What about Jane Austen, the Brontës, James Joyce, and Dickens?

The  Shakespeare Deniers make lots of flimsy claims, as well as assertions that are anachronistic. These might look solid at first glance, convincing people who don’t know the period Shakespeare wrote in. Deep-fried Doubters want you to believe that there have always been suspicions about “authorship,” but that’s completely false.  Nobody in Shakespeare’s time and for years afterwards every doubted that he wrote the plays. The “controversy” started in the middle of the 19th century.

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And one of the main “proofs” that he didn’t write the plays is this: we don’t have any of his manuscripts or his handwriting. Well, guess what? That doesn’t mean anything at all. University of Chicago’s David Bevington, a Professor of English, notes that “the lack of manuscripts, of handwriting samples . . . are what one would expect of a playwright of the period, even the most famous. We don’t read and preserve movie scripts today, and often do not even know who wrote a movie we particularly like. Play scripts were like that in the Renaissance. They existed to enable an acting company to put on a play. The wonder is that so many of Shakespeare’s plays were published at all. We have no manuscripts of plays by Marlowe or Jonson or Webster, even though some of their plays rival Shakespeare’s in their literary and dramatic qualities.”
The Nonbelievers also argue that Shakespeare was barely mentioned in his own time. But that’s simply not true if you bother to read that great Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s book Contested Will. There was solid contemporary commentary about Shakespeare. People who claim otherwise are discounting inconvenient evidence that shakes and topples their conspiratorial Tower of Babel.
Shapiro dives deeply and amusingly into the slumgullion of falsehoods and half-truths cooked up with rabid intensity by a thriving industry that can easily convince the gullible and the uninformed.  But let’s face it: going against the settled truth of a few centuries is a good way to gain notoriety and generate headlines. A few years ago, the widely distributed magazine Reform Judaism devoted a badly edited cover story to proving Shakespeare was actually an obscure Jewish woman poet. It ignored the highly inconvenient fact that she wasn’t really Jewish because Jewish descent has traditionally been matrilineal and her mother was not a Jew. It also side-stepped her authorship of a viciously anti-Semitic poem that’s a stone dud and shows nothing like the artistry of his plays whatsoever. But hey, why let any of that that get in the way of a good, sexy theory? I’m surprised the story didn’t throw in Queen Elizabeth and the whole Tudor court as secret Jews for extra points. That could have been the real reason Spain sent the Armada….
It’s probably exciting to uncover a “secret,” to feel like a hero, to connect disparate dots as if the fate of the world depended on your dazzling acumen. It likely gives people a sense of power and control, and can make any life seem like a Dan Brown thriller. And as in The X Files, these people see, to desperately want to believe—for reasons of their own—that the truth is out there. So Shakespeare Skeptics and the legion of cranks who think our moon landing was faked might have more in common than you’d think.
Lev Raphael is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders and many other books in genres from memoir to writer’s guide.
This blog was adapted from an article in Bibliobuffet.

Shakespeare & A Writer’s Revenge

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I’ve been publishing for a long time and I’ve dealt with all kinds of editors.  Some are laid back.  Some are very hands-on.  Some are hard to pin down.  Some are extremely helpful and supportive.  And a few–very few–are difficult or even opaque.  They tell you one thing but mean something completely different that you couldn’t have guessed at.

Here’s what happened a few years ago with one of those.

I pitched an idea to a magazine about the farkakteh theory that Shakespeare was a Jewish woman (yes!), which is just another bit of nutty Shakespeare Denialism that’s been a flourishing industry for way too long.  James Shapiro wrote an entertaining book about it: Contested Will.

The editor really liked my approach–at least I thought so.

Then he sent back my blog and basically told me that it had to be completely rewritten.  But that wasn’t all: he thought it should be re-shaped to say what he wanted, which was bizarre, since in our previous emails, he’d never told me any of his opinions.  If he had, I would have gone elsewhere.

Was I annoyed?  Of course.  I’d been publishing dozens of articles, essays, short stories, and books for years and dealing with editors who were much more professional than that.  Except for one, “and thereby hangs a tale….”

I sent the piece to The Huffington Post.  They took it right away, beginning my long relationship with that site.  I waited till the blog was posted and wrote back to the first editor that I was sorry he didn’t like my approach, but someone else did.

I included the link.

Sometimes revenge isn’t just sweet, it’s swift.  This time it was so swift that it wasn’t even worth saving the editor for a character to put into my Nick Hoffman mystery series–appropriately disguised, of course.  I just brushed it off.

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in many genres which you can find on Amazon.  Follow him on Twitter at

Don’t “Translate” Shakespeare!

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Oregon Shakespeare Company is getting translations of all of Shakespeare’s plays to make them more comprehensible. Why? According to a Columbia University professor:

Most educated people are uncomfortable admitting that Shakespeare’s language often feels more medicinal than enlightening. We have been told since childhood that Shakespeare’s words are “elevated” and that our job is to reach up to them, or that his language is “poetic,” or that it takes British actors to get his meaning across.

Most? Medicinal? I’m not sure where these people grew up or went to school, but I never heard any of this in New York where I saw lots of Shakespeare with American actors. I read him from an early age and learned that whatever was difficult on the page melted away in performance thanks in part to the production: lighting, sets, costumes, music.  And it didn’t matter if that was live or on film.

When I took acting classes in college, I saw Shakespeare from the inside and understood how important a job it was for the director and the actors to make the play clear to the audience. The WSJ writer seems to think that a line like this from Polonius’s speech to Laertes in Hamlet needs translating: “These few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character.” Why? Because Shakespeare used “character” as a verb for “write.”  If an actor old enough to play Polonius can’t make it obvious through his voice and gestures that he’s telling his son to mark his words, then he shouldn’t be acting.

Attending the Stratford Festival in Ontario for years and meeting their directors and many actors, I learned how much plays are cut to make that more possible. And how setting plays in different periods can give an audience visual cues to comprehend the action and text more readily.  A play is never just the spoken words, as the WSJ author seems to think.  Everything on stage carries meaning.

The author of the WSJ article says plays will only be 10% translated (will there be a Translation Meter?). But I don’t just go to a Shakespeare play to see it, I also want to hear it, enjoy Shakespeare’s word play, the rhyme, the rhythm, the assonance. Yes, I like the poetry, even though I don’t remotely think it elevates me. It’s entertaining, it’s beautiful music, its Shakespeare.

Why should some tin-eared scholar be making decisions about what people do or don’t understand, rewriting great poetry and spoon-feeding them Shakespeare Lite?

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in genres from memoir to mystery, available on Amazon.