Shakespeare has been a problem for centuries. The film begins at Poet's Corner, at Westminster Abbey, scanning the memorial stones and reciting misgivings that the interred poets expressed about whether the man from Stratford really wrote all those works. "It is a great comfort," Charles Dickens said, "that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up." Thomas Hardy, also buried there, was similarly nonplussed. Coleridge wasn't too bullish on it all either.

Nor for that matter were Mark Twain, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud and a host of other prominent doubters. Much of this was due to the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare vogue that began as early as 1785, but something seems to have been ado even during Shakespeare's lifetime. "There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers," the poet Robert Greene wrote in a broadside published in 1592, "That with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde [a steal from two plays, one by Marlowe, and one later published as Shakespeare's], supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum [read: errand boy, Stepin Fetchit], is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." Hmm.

"Much Ado About Something" covers the obvious holes in the pro-Shakespeare thesis: We have no paper trail of Shakespeare as a playwright or poet, no correspondence, manuscripts, personal library or ephemera. We have numerous notices of him as an actor and as a bourgeois landowner, but only a few mentions in lists of contemporary poets (Greene's is by far the most lavish). Most except Greene's are merely title-page evidence, where it's mentioned that such-and-such a play was published under such a name.

There are six extant Shakespeare signatures from banal documents, all crabbed and variant, as though he had difficulty writing his name. There's no record of his having attended the village school, or of his having donated a penny to it in his wealthy middle age, although, as the film shows, he lived literally across the street. His daughters were, it seems, illiterate, in sharp contrast to the practice among educated Elizabethans (and in the ethics on display in the Shakespearean plays). We do know that William Shakespeare composed the oft-quoted inscription on his tombstone:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

It really kind of stinks.

Of course there's more: Many of the plots of the dramas were borrowed from sources in French or Italian, where there was no English translation and William S. couldn't read the original. Q: Why do so many of the plays display knowledge of locations in Marlowe's home district of Kent, and never of Warwickshire, where Stratford is (Marlowe's sister's tavern even turns up in "Henry IV")? Why are many set in Italy, and why do so many feature exiles as characters? Where are all the early works? Why do the sonnets refer to disgrace and a stain on one's name, when William S. was apparently jollying it up in Stratford and, later, London the whole time?

The Marlovians believe the fatal brawl was a setup, all right, but in a different way. They believe that Marlowe was not really killed. Research has shown that the fateful rooming house was a kind of safe house, owned by a woman with connections to the queen's personal escort. It was also right next to the river -- the contemporary equivalent of having a meeting at the airport. After the incident, the case was taken over by the crown, whereupon the queen rapidly pardoned everyone involved and directed that all further inquiries be set under her own jurisdiction.

The avowed killer, Frizer, who was employed by Marlowe's own spymaster and patron, kept his job. Another man in that same circle of Royal Secret Service men who was stationed at Dover, on the south coast of England, transported a group of agents to France the next day. He subsequently returned to London via Cambridge, Marlowe's hometown. To the Marlovians, all this suggests that their man was sent off in exile, first to France, then to Spain and finally to Italy, where he lived out the bulk of his years before (possibly) returning home. They think Marlowe used the actor Shakespeare as a front man, so he could keep publishing in England. They believe this was more or less an open secret at the time.

It might seem too Elvis-lives to be true. But an epic poem in the Marlovian style, first registered to "anonymous" in the Stationer's Register, was re-registered 13 days after this hypothetical flight would have taken place, in the name of William Shakespeare -- the first time that name had ever appeared there. The title page carried a two-line quotation from Ovid, whom Marlowe himself had translated into English. The verse in question concludes:

The living, not the dead can envy bite,
For after death all men receive their right.
Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire,
I'll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher.

Hmm.

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