Shakespeare Did Not Write Cymbeline
Whenever I learn something about playwriting, I find it in Shakespeare’s plays, like a marker to tell me I’m going the right way.
It is fashionable these days to say that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, and then nominate some Elizabethan, usually high-born, usually at Queen Elizabeth’s court, as the “real” author.
There are three problems with this. Playwriting is a craft. Where do you look for a craftsman? In the shop. Shakespeare was an actor all his professional life. When he wrote a play, the box office tripled, and as he was a shareholder in his company, that gave him motivation.
Writing a full-length play is a lot of work. It usually takes me two years, between the research, the headwork, and the writing, to produce a working first draft. Shakespeare wrote 35 of them. It doesn’t make sense that some court dilettante would undertake that kind of labor, over and over, year after year for 25 years, just for fun.
Second, serving at Queen Elizabeth’s court was a full-time job, from the time the queen rose in the morning, until she went to bed at night, seven days a week, and she didn’t sleep much. When is Oxford, or Bacon, or Walsingham going to have had time to write these plays? (And why?) Why would Marlowe – aside from the fact that he was dead half the time – write plays under someone else’s name? And why did Marlowe suddenly know things about playwriting when he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, that he didn’t know when he wrote his own?
Third, no one brought up the idea that Shakespeare wasn’t the author in his lifetime. Not for 150 years did anyone question it, and when they did, it was with the assertion that no one of his low class could be such genius, and therefore the true author of Shakespeare’s plays must have been more highly-born. This is as ridiculous as it is offensive.
So I went and saw a production of Cymbeline, at Foothill College. Within ten minutes I was skeptical that Shakespeare wrote that one. It doesn’t seem possible that, at the height of his powers, after writing Lear, Othello, and Anthony and Cleopatra, he would suddenly forget how to begin a play, how to motivate characters, how to pace his plot points, how to organize a story! Why is Cymbeline almost never produced? It’s a big fat mess! (Tom Gough, who directed Cymbeline, told me he cut 1 ½ hours from it, it still ran over two hours, and he had to hang a giant poster in the lobby to explain to the audience what happened in the play).
I spent a year doing the research to prove to myself that Shakespeare did not write this one. You’ll find the paper, Shakespeare Did Not Write Cymbeline: You Cannot Unlearn Craft, below. I wrote the play, Cymbeline Simplified!, or The Queen’s Cookies, to show that any journeyman playwright can fix the massive and ridiculous playwriting errors in Cymbeline. And dance about on it in the process.
You will find Cymbeline Simplified!, or The Queen’s Cookies on the Playwriting page.
Shakespeare Did Not Write Cymbeline: You Cannot Unlearn Craft
When a play begins, and the actor steps onto the stage, he is met by the attention and expectation of the audience. The actor surfs this energy all the time he is onstage. He needs this energy to be sustained, so that his every word, his every gesture, is received and understood. He wants this energy strengthened over the course of the story, so that the audience is held spellbound and breathes as one. What the actor does not want is for the audience’s attention to falter. He does not want them looking away, shuffling their feet, rattling their program, or thinking of something else.
To read further, download the pdf below.