Nothing Is Truer Than Truth

...the experience of reading and watching Shakespeare, is richer for the work that these researchers are doing. Having waited years for the release of this doc, I am pleased and very grateful. The filmmakers have made good use of footage from film versions of many plays, and of locales, particularly in Italy, that inspired settings for his dramas. This alone, is good reason to watch. My rationale to taking time to explore this alternative author theory, is that it has inspired in me a greater pleasure in and understanding of the works. Try it out, and see if it doesn't make you more likely to read more, attend more plays, and seek the truth .

The film’s title, “Nothing Truer Than Truth,” translates the Earl of Oxford’s family’s Latin motto, “Vero Nihil Verius.” Director Eagan-Donovan first encountered the Shakespeare authorship debate when she took a course at Harvard on historical controversies, taught by Donald Ostrowski. She optioned the movie rights to Mark Anderson’s pivotal 2005 book, Shakespeare by Another Name, the book which underpins the narrative of this film. The film’s haunting, original score for violin and cello was composed by Katy Jarzebowski. It is fitting that music should play such an important role in a film about Shakespeare, since every one of his plays includes music or allusions to musical terms. And John Farmer, an Elizabethan composer, said Oxford’s musical skills were on a professional level. Shakespeare scholars have tried to discredit the Oxfordian authorship theory, partly by “proving” that the author did not actually visit Italy, where many of his plays take place. But, as John Shahan says in the film, Shakespeare the author seems to have had a strong emotional connection with Italy. That author, the Earl of Oxford, himself spent a year touring Italy, and the film offers convincing visual and verbal evidence that the author of the canon had to be in Italy to see the wealth of detailed local knowledge described with precise accuracy in the plays and poems. An important inspiration for the Italian themes in the film was Richard Paul Roe’s 2012 book, Shakespeare’s Guide to Italy. It shows that Shakespeare did not in fact make errors in his depiction of Italy. Oxford’s year in Italy provides a colorful organizing narrative for the film, with many scenes shot on location. For example, we see the rich frescos in a palace Oxford probably visited in Mantua, which are later described in detail in Shakespeare’s long 1594 poem, The Rape of Lucrece. This one story alone should be enough to make supporters of the traditional authorship theory rethink the matter. A mural depicting the Trojan War was painted in the 1530s by Giulio Romano, the very artist that is mentioned in The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare devotes some 200 lines of his long poem to a detailed description of the painting (scholars who haven’t seen the mural in question can’t agree whether the lines are based on a painting; a tapestry; or are purely imaginary). Lucrece looks for solace after Tarquin rapes her by mentally reviewing this mural. Most of the painting is on the ceiling, so Lucrece is in a figurative sense “floating up to the ceiling,” as many women dissociatively imagine they are doing while being raped. One stanza says that Achilles-- like the anonymous author of Shakespeare’s works-- “was left unseen, save to the eye of mind,” while standing in for “Achilles’ image stood his spear.” These lines are in the second work signed with the pen name Shakespeare, while the real author “was left unseen,” as Oxfordian scholar Michael Delahoyde has observed. A secondary theme in the film is the highly contentious thesis that Oxford’s bisexuality is consistent with the bisexuality of the Sonnets and of some of the Shakespeare plays. Sir Derek Jacobi, who appears frequently in the film, states that Shakespeare’s first 126 Sonnets are love poems from an older man to a younger man. Jacobi describes Oxford himself as “camp.” Sir Mark Rylance comments on Oxford’s ambivalence toward women. Sigmund Freud was the first prominent intellectual to support the Oxfordian authorship theory. Stritmatter, described accurately in the film as having contributed the most significant scholarly research to the authorship debate, observes that the traditional authorship theory insists we must not look for connections between the works and the life of their author. But Rylance gets to the heart of the matter when he says “Unwrapping the plays from a …protective cover the Stratford [theory] has put around them to make them this cuddly little, harmless, provincial fantasy [allows us to see] that they are really painful plays, attacking, confused at times, raging.” Rylance adds that “People in the theater are forced …to express themselves behind a mask of being someone else, whether you’re an actor or a writer…that obviously applies to de Vere.” What are the film’s weaknesses? It does not include nearly enough information to persuade skeptical viewers that Oxford wrote Shakespeare. No single film can do so. Oxford’s authorship has previously been explored more broadly in Laura and Lisa Wilson’s 2012 documentary, Last Will. and Testament.

I have seen several versions of this film as director Eagan-Donovan has crafted, developed, and refined it. It is a brilliant and fascinating exploration of the Shakespeare authorship question and the compelling evidence supporting Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) as the true Shakespeare. But one need not adhere to any alternative authorship theory to enjoy this rich excursion into European cultural and literary history.

This is an eye opener documentary which reveals that there is a Shakespeare Authorship Controversy and presents the truth about the long standing myths and corrects them with facts. A must see!