COMMENT: Here is a New York Times review of Simon Callow’s one-man show in support of Will Shaksper of Stratford as the author “Shake-speare.” Not surprisingly the review is a big, wet kiss for Callow’s shallow rendition of how much Stratford biography can be found throughout all the works, blended in with such artful New York Times-isms as, “The near miss when a commissioned performance of “Richard II” drew the attention of a bloody-minded Queen Elizabeth.” It is amazing how one little sentence can mis-represent so much, but then again, that’s why the Times exists. Note also that the review manages to mention Marlowe by name, but only alludes to other “hign-born types” when they could have mentioned Edward de Vere by name, the 2011 movie Anonymous, and all the uproar of the past year. But gee, why do that and steal the limelight from Mr. Callow?

  • ‘Being Shakespeare’ With Simon Callow at BAM – NYTimes.com

    • In the invigorating “Being Shakespeare,” now playing at the BAM Harvey Theater, Mr. Callow testifies in support of the playwright. His collaborator, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, has supplied all sorts of contextualizing facts, figures, segues and suppositions, allowing Mr. Callow to point his finger unwaveringly at the title character: He did it.
    • Shakespeare’s authorship has come under increasing fire in recent decades, with challengers disputing that a man of his relatively humble background could have amassed the knowledge — the book smarts, street smarts and existential smarts — to write the way he did. Various high-born types have been suggested instead, as well as the comparably middle-class but Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe.
    • Other writers may have presented the ties between Shakespeare’s life and work more thoroughly and insightfully (Garry Wills on the rhetorical flourishes of “Julius Caesar,” Stephen Greenblatt on the transformation of Shakespeare’s deceased son Hamnet into Hamlet). Still, “Being Shakespeare” has the propulsive energy of a particularly juicy membership-drive PBS special.

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