I Am Shakespeare

by Mark Rylance

  That guilty creatures sitting at a play…’

  MARY.

  ‘Have by the very cunning of the scene…’

  BACON.

  ‘Been struck so to the soul that presently…’

  MARY.

  ‘They have proclaimed their malefactions…’

  OXFORD.

  ‘I’ll have these players

  Play something like the murder of my father

  Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks…

  The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’

  FRANK. But your private drama is a world apart from the commercial playhouses of Bankside.

  MARY. Only in scale. As play-making was for us in our ruling families, so it was for the people: the first functional step towards freedom of speech behind the mask of harmless entertainment.

  BACON. The voice of the people.

  OXFORD. The birth of the commercial theatre and press was as radical a revolution in our age as the birth of the internet is in yours. No one could control it.

  BACON. For the first time in England’s history, the production of plays and books was not dependent on wealthy patrons.

  OXFORD. You see, Charlton, no one else in Europe spoke or wrote or read English. It was rare to hear it even in Wales, Ireland or Scotland. Most people had an extremely low opinion of our own language, so some of us began to write; to create a body of literature in the English language which would match the Greek and Latin classics we so admired.

  MARY. Our English Literary Renaissance…

  FRANK. Our?

  MARY. Mr Charlton, your search for a literary superhero of mind, heart and body, makes for compelling drama. We played out such fantasies in our age as well. The Virgin Queen being the most renowned.

  BACON. Cousin.

  MARY. Why? She can’t touch us now.

  OXFORD. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

  MARY. With respect, I will speak as I wish, gentlemen. Mr Charlton, has any revolution ever been created by one man or woman alone? Revolutionary movements may gather around an inspiring leader or two, but sustained revolutions require a group to accomplish any set of common goals in a way that lasts.

  FRANK. Are you suggesting…

  MARY. Great art is not created in a vacuum.

  FRANK. Who comprised this revolutionary literary group?

  MARY (laughs). Which one? Raleigh’s school of night? Francis’s good pens at Twickenham? My lord’s euphuistic school in Shoreditch? Montaigne and Ronsard’s French circle in Paris, the Pleiades? Or my Areopagus of English writers, the Wilton Circle, on the banks of the Avon?

  FRANK. You had a school of writers in Stratford-upon-Avon?

  MARY. There are several river Avon in England, Mr Charlton, the one in Wiltshire ran through my property at Wilton House, where I gathered the greatest writers of English I could find to fulfil my brother’s vision.

  BACON. ‘The beloved sweet swan of Avon.’

  MARY. Yes, my brother, Philip, and I were often referred to as swans, because our French friends enjoyed the connection between Sidney and Cygny. Le Cygne. Many poets referred to me as such.

  FRANK. Did you write the works of Shakespeare!

  MARY. Let me paint an alternative scenario for you. One that is not quite so anachronistic to our time as your modern concept of lone heroic authors in garrets, Shakespeare in Love, and all that schoolgirl romance.

  As she speaks, MARY takes down books by the authors she is naming from FRANK’s shelves and places them in a pile on the floor.

  If you look at the records, there exist a number of Elizabethan writers from modest backgrounds who lack anything resembling a writer’s biography. Their purported works, replete with courtly themes and expression, do not match what the records suggest about their life experiences. They are: Richard Edwards, Edmund Spenser, George Pettie, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Watson, Thomas Nashe, John Webster, and…

  FRANK. William Shakespeare.

  MARY. Correct. These writers are matched by a second group of courtly writers, who have little or nothing published under their own names and yet are reported to have written extensively or with particular poetic quality.

  FRANK. Or, if they do publish extensively, like Sir Francis, their extant works do not provide the kind of writing which they are reported to have done.

  MARY. Correct. They are: the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Derby…

  FRANK. And yourself.

  MARY.…and myself.

  FRANK (referring to the books on the floor). So, we have plays in the names of these men but little or no evidence that they were playwrights, while you five, reported to be brilliant poets and playwrights, leave us no plays.

  MARY. Not only these five. This second group includes two more, whose works of poetry and drama are attributed to them, but only after their untimely deaths. The sixth author was the kind of man that Stratfordians wish William Shakspar was, a true natural genius, the brilliant shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, my dear Christopher Marlowe.

  BACON. His terrible departure was part of the inspiration to dedicate our works to a common man. We were honouring his genius.

  FRANK. You knew Christopher Marlowe?

  MARY. Yes. Very well. Christopher’s assassination or exile made our secrecy a necessity.

  FRANK. He was exiled?

  MARY. Walsingham would never have had him killed. But murdered or exiled – either way, silence… we knew…

  OXFORD. The game was up. Have you never wondered why the Shakespeare name is first used a few weeks after Marlowe’s disappearance? If Mr Shakspar wrote the plays, why publish under his own name for the first time then, when it was so dangerous?

  FRANK. Who was the seventh author in this literary group?

  BACON. Her brilliant brother, Sir Philip Sidney. And my beloved brother, Anthony.

  MARY. Yes, your brilliant brother, though even more hidden.

  OXFORD. Marlowe and Sydney could only be published under their own names because they had been killed.

  FRANK. You’re saying these men were the stand-ins whose names were employed to protect the identity of the real writers?

  OXFORD. Why would the author of the Shakespeare plays be the only one who had to hide? In the new world, during that Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunts, was Dalton Trumbo the only Hollywood screenwriter forced to use a front?

  FRANK. Who?

  OXFORD. Dalton Trumbo, the man who wrote Spartacus.

  FRANK. That’s who wrote Spartacus! Who in this group did what? I mean, who wrote the works of Shakespeare?

  MARY. We all contributed in a number of ways. We influenced each other. Supported each other. Criticised each other. But always in secret.

  FRANK. Surely one of you was the prime author of the works of Shakespeare.

  BACON. They say that Love was the most ancient of all the gods, without parent, the prime author of all things whatever, except Chaos, divine Chaos, out of which Love begot all things, there being nothing before it. It is the cause.

  FRANK. Did you write together?

  MARY. If you take note of the literary approach in writing: the habits of expression, and the unchanging personal concerns that transcend all efforts to alter style and genre; pay close attention to dates; and consider the reflection of events and issues of the authors’ personal lives, you will discover the truth. Nothing truer than the truth.

  There is a power cut and the lights go out.

  FRANK. Don’t panic. It’s just a power cut.

  FRANK fetches a torch and lights candles. Stars are visible in the sky above the garage – a moon too, Diana.

  Beautiful and mysterious music arises during the scene. The actors become increasingly still as the subject reaches its most personal manifestation.

  MARY. What a relief. Really, how do you bear all this light everywhere?

  FRANK. But what did you write?

  MARY.
Have you ever compared The Duchess of Malfi or The White Devil with my work?

  FRANK. John Webster. Of course. John Webster’s life shows even less connection to any literary or theatrical activity than Shakspar’s. Those two masterpieces have remarkably strong women in the lead roles, like the Shakespeare plays and depend primarily, for their source, on the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

  MARY. Which I and my lover wrote together.

  BACON. Look. One can finally see the stars again. See Cassiopeia. The double-A in the constellation of the virgin. Did you know there was a supernova right in the middle of Cassiopeia in 1572, Frank? We all took it to be the sign of a virgin birth of the arts and poetry under our virgin queen Elizabeth.

  FRANK. Wait a minute. I thought the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was your completed version of Sir Philip Sidney’s work?

  MARY. It was.

  FRANK. But you just said that you wrote it with your lover.

  MARY. The father of my two sons, the incomparable brethren of the First Folio.

  FRANK. You wrote it with William Herbert, their father?

  MARY. I wrote it with my lover, Philip Sidney.

  FRANK. You had an incestuous relationship with your brother Philip Sidney?

  MARY. No, I did not. Though I could never deny it in my life. He wasn’t my brother, because I wasn’t a Sidney. I was the daughter of someone else, someone who sent him to die on the battlefields of the Netherlands, fighting for her kingdom because of what he did.

  BACON. Mary.

  MARY.

  ‘For his honour, it stuck upon him as the sun

  In the grey vault of heaven, and by his light

  Did all the chivalry of England move

  To do brave acts. He was indeed the glass

  Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.

  In speech, in gait, in diet, in affections of delight,

  In military rules, humours of blood,

  He was the mark and glass, copy and book,

  That fashioned others. And him – O wondrous him!

  O miracle of men – him did she leave,

  Second to none, unseconded by her,

  To look upon the hideous god of war

  In disadvantage…’

  You see, I sometimes write of men. I wasn’t allowed to attend his funeral. I was twenty-five years old. He had been my life.

  BACON comforts MARY SIDNEY.

  BACON. She lost her father and her brother in twelve months. You fell so ill you very nearly died yourself. She mourned for two years, Frank.

  FRANK. The Countess Olivia in Twelfth Night… also loses both her father and brother within a year.

  BACON. Yes, Frank. But Philip’s death only fired your determination to continue what you both had started, didn’t it, cousin?

  OXFORD. It’s true, the Sidneys were to the English Renaissance what the Medici were to the Florentine.

  FRANK. So you were a part of this secret literary renaissance, Lord Oxford?

  OXFORD. I had my own group. Philip and I quarrelled.

  BACON. An unfortunate encounter on a tennis court.

  OXFORD. We made it up later, as families do.

  FRANK. Families?

  BACON. My Lord Oxford.

  OXFORD. I am I, however I was begot. How elaborately guarded you taught us all to be, my careful little cousin. How well you hid your humiliation…

  BACON. My lord.

  OXFORD. Hid from yourself… constructing histories and tables of anger, fear, ambition; reasoned essays on emotion. Hiding from your true nature behind theories of man’s dominance over nature through art and science.

  BACON. I have never in my life advocated man’s dominance over nature. Quite the contrary, my humble proposal is that we must serve nature if we are to master nature, our own nature as well as the nature of the universe. The Shakespeare works deserve a much wider canvas than the one provided for a self-portrait, no matter how true to nature that may be.

  OXFORD. It’s time that people understood the cause of Shakespeare, Charlton. This empty Stratford biography is breeding an art empty of humanity, empty of nature itself. Unless an artist puts himself into his creation, puts the very chaotic centre of his being into the work, there’s no point, nothing. A true biographical approach will liberate the work from all this nullifying modern scholarship. Up its ass in intellectual theory with no relevance to life, no blood, no soul, no royal note…

  BACON. Edward.

  OXFORD. The note of royalty, the unavoidable unique note of Shakespeare. The question of what constitutes true kingship is not so much a theme in Shakespeare, as an obsession. And the crown he seeks time and again, is not the gilded crown of power and money, but the simple band of truth.

  MARY. And what is that truth, my lord, that you must speak so loudly?

  BACON. Ah, what is truth said…

  OXFORD. That Shakespeare’s a bastard for all ages. An eternal exile searching for his kingdom in the imagined worlds of theatre. He was compelled to write. He is the monstrous adversary, the strange majestic chaos at the heart of our lives, the sweet, sweet, poison for the age’s tooth, in everything illegitimate…

  FRANK. Illegitimate? Are you all illegitimate children?

  OXFORD. Each of us, in our own way, trying to legitimise our time, our true nature, in words. Words in the mouths of vagabonds dressed as kings.

  Pause.

  Very still.

  FRANK. Bastardy. The royal note of Shakespeare. Exile, disinheritance, one’s origin concealed – an island, a dark forest, a cave… bastards.

  BACON. Only those things that are light and puffed-up float in the river of time. Those which are weighty and solid, sink.

  OXFORD. The dark secrets of Fortuna. Being the child of a virgin means you don’t exist.

  MARY. Other than in the imagination.

  OXFORD. Where do people exist who don’t exist?

  FRANK. In the theatre.

  Scene Three

  Barry and Shakspar Return for the Truth

  We hear rocks and clods of earth hitting the galvanised-steel roof of the garage.

  We hear BARRY and SHAKSPAR enter up the driveway in a drunken fashion carrying things to throw.

  BARRY and SHAKSPAR. Howl, howl, howl, howl!

  BARRY. O you are men of stones.

  SHAKSPAR. You do me wrong to take me out of the grave. Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

  BARRY. It was quiz night at The Coach and Horses, Frank. No education! Look at this, Frank.

  BARRY points out the large, yellow, first-prize badge SHAKSPAR wears.

  First prize! First prize in the pub quiz! The man’s a genius. They’ve all come round.

  BARRY speaks with the audience as if they are people from the local pub surrounding the garage. Real names of people in the audience each night would be good.

  Here we are, everyone. Hello, [Mrs Dysart]. This is his garage. Hello, [Mr Jones]. Just like I told you. They’re all in there. We’re all here, Frank. All your neighbours. Come up from the pub. Why? Because we love the man. We love Shakespeare.

  O Shakespeare, wilt thou come no more?

  BARRY and SHAKSPAR. Never, never, never, never, never. You’ll never walk alone!

  FRANK. Barry, come in here. The Countess of Pembroke is here.

  BARRY. Don’t tell me a countess wrote the plays. How many more Shakespeares are we expecting, Frank?

  SHAKSPAR. Oh, there are hundreds and that’s not counting all the committees. What did a committee ever create?

  BARRY. Yeah, everybody! A starter for ten. What’s a group of people ever made that hasn’t been total crap? The Life of Brian. ‘Hey Jude.’ Friends. The Simpsons. The Bible. But apart from that!

  SHAKSPAR. You’ll end up insane, Frank. How much more of this madness can you take? Come out of there! It’s the plays that matter. They’re just good entertainment. I’m just an ordinary man like you with a big imagination. Just enjoy the plays. Wha
t does it matter who wrote them?

  The lights come back on inside the garage.

  OXFORD. It’s time you made up your mind, Charlton. At least kick one of us out. Narrow the field. Surely it’s time you sent Shakspar packing.

  BARRY. Send Shakspar packing! Friends, Romans, people from the pub, put down your beers!

  Look at him. Look at my friend Will. He’s waited three hundred and ninety-something fuckin’ years to return to England, the least he could have expected was ‘Well done, mate’ – ‘I don’t understand a fucking word of what you wrote, I had a crap teacher, I hated Shakespeare in school, you wouldn’t catch me dead at a play of yours, but, you know, well done.’ ‘You did it.’ ‘You’re a classic.’ What’s he get instead? ‘Fuck off, you impostor, fake, poser, fucking Midlands idiot!’ You come to bury Shakespeare, Frank, not to praise him!

  What about all the poor people of Stratford-upon-Avon? What’s Stratford got if it doesn’t have Shakespeare? The butterfly house. If you prove Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, Frank, there will be refugees for miles around, unemployed, shocked Stratfordians clogging up the roads to Birmingham. And, it will be your fault. Why don’t you come out and ask your neighbours who wrote Shakespeare? I bet they know. Let’s sort this whole thing out once and for all.

  OXFORD. I want to speak with the neighbours. I would like to answer their questions directly.

  MARY. It would certainly be refreshing to hear the opinions of some other women.

  BACON. Ah, that the increase of natural light and the way of the senses had not thrown the divine mysteries into darkness and incredulity. I fear, my lord, that every man still takes the limit of his vision to be the limit of the world – but let us hear the voice of the people.

  OXFORD opens the garage doors at the front of the garage and turns on an outdoor light. BARRY nips in and picks up a microphone he has attached to his sound system. He emcee’s the conversation through his sound system as the actors move amongst the audience as if they were people from the pub sitting in FRANK’s garden. They ask them what they think, and pass some comments back to BARRY and FRANK. The company improvises. Sometimes, in performance, against FRANK’s better judgement, BARRY insisted on a vote. These votes usually elected SHAKSPAR as the author. FRANK’s refusal to accept this result provoked the next scene. But I leave this improvised section to the artistry of the company.