Word: elizabethan
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...wave of the bard's new vogue to resplash their thesis: Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare; Edward de Vere did. What's more, an ivory-tower conspiracy is keeping their views from being taken seriously. "We're into something called bardgate," says Peter Dickson, a CIA official turned revisionist Elizabethan scholar. Shakespeare is not a crook, reply the defenders of the glover's son from Warwickshire. And each side casts the other as devils citing Hamlet to their own purposes...
...idea that you have to go to Oxford to be a great writer is snobbish," says Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate points out that Shakespeare, as the son of a local merchant and town official, would almost certainly have attended the Stratford Free School. And Elizabethan grammar schools offered a formidable education in Latin, including oratory and letter writing in the style of characters from classical myth and history. Students also had to be able to expand and embellish on existing literary works, much as Shakespeare did with Henry V and Julius Caesar. People shouldn...
...California professor who is writing books about Shakespeare and De Vere: "The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self-serving person of his day in England. It would have been out of character for him to write the plays and then keep authorship a secret. Many Elizabethan noblemen wrote and published...
Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal...
...Elizabeth, but Kapur doesn't help much, filming the young royal in pastel gowns with a bevy of handmaidens and a robust beau, prancing giddily in some absurdly verdant corner of the English countryside. This is the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin (to quote the preeminent Elizabethan scholar Groucho Marx)--and if this preposterous rapture is the best the film can do, one can't help but long for more chiaroscuro conspiracies and bloody assassinations...