Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare

By Bertram Fields

Book Overview

For centuries scholars have debated the true identity of the author of the magnificent body of poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare, the actor and co-owner of a successful theater company who hailed from Stratford-upon-Avon. And yet many credible voices -- Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and Walt Whitman, to name a few -- have challenged conventional wisdom, proposing alternative candidates from rival playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe to Queen Elizabeth herself, in what has become a centuries-old parlor game. In this provocative and convincing new book, historian and attorney Bertram Fields presents a stunning, and highly plausible, new theory of the case. Mastering four centuries of evidence and argument, Fields revisits all the critical facts and unanswered questions. Could there have been a single man in the English theater with such breadth and range of knowledge, a man who knew Latin and Greek, the etiquette and practices of nobility, the workings of the law, and the tactics of the military and navy? Or -- as Fields asks in his tantalizing conclusion -- was this not one man at all, but a magnificent collaboration between two very different men, a partnership born in the roiling culture of Elizabethan England, and protected for centuries by the greatest conspiracy in literary history? Blending biography and historical investigation with vibrant scholarship and storytelling, Players revolutionizes our understanding of the greatest writer -- or writers -- in our history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006083417X
• ISBN13: 9780060834173
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Better than some of the reviews would suggest.

I almost did not read the book because of the negative reviews on this site. However, I read it and enjoyed it. Definately not for the serious scholar and the lack of any bibliography or notes is puzzling. However, it's a good, high-level review of the question regarding who wrote the works of Shakespeare.

Merely Players

PLAYERS is a book by Bertram Fields which plunges us like a swift dive into the maelstrom, where only the brave and the foolish dare go, deep into the so-called "authorship question" of Shakespearean scholarship. Fields, a lawyer by trade, examines the possibility that the man we know as Shadespeare (the "Stratford man" as he is called here) did not write the works with which he has generally been credited. Since the 18th century, the skeptics have kept close pace with the believers, and for understandable reason. There is a paucity of known facts on the man from Stratford's CV. Surely if he was the greatest English playwright we'd have more knowledge about his life and death. And what about those signatures? He can't even spell his name the same way twice, how did that country bumpkin write HAMLET or THE WINTER'S TALE? No way! What would that hillbilly have possibly known about courtship politics in Italy and Bohemia, he never left England, and there were no books that could have filled him in. Could he have learned the Latin and Greek he needed at Stratford Junior High, I don't think so, but thousands of allusions of classical literature pepper his corpus. Besides, there were literally dozens of brilliant, upper class and good looking men all over Elizabethan England who might have written those works with more probability than the Stratford schlub. These include Francis Bacon, the eccentric philosopher; the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere; the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was known to have written for the theater and whose murder might have been faked to allow him the psychic space to go on and improve his craft as "Shakespeare." Even Elizabeth herself might, everything else being equal have been the playwright, for she was well known as a stylist and could wield a pen with the best of them; perhaps only sexism has kept her towards the bottom of the bookies' chart of suspects. Fields picks up each piece of evidence and examines it, both pro and con. The First Folio gets most of his respect, and he comes down hard on the point that, if someone else was Shakespeare, why did the First Folio, published shortly after the death of the man from Stratford, credit him with having written all the plays and poems? Were its editors in on some hoax? Wouldn't that be a little weird, indeed Masonically extravagant? If they were just patsies, innocent dupes, why prolong the charade past the point of the death of the real author? (Oxford, for example, died in 1604 for sure.) Nobody really knows what happened, and you'll have fun with Fields as he tries to make sense out of a confusing mass of facts, fictions, fallacies and far-fetched Tomfoolery. Along the way you might learn something you never knew before. I know I did.

Merely Players

PLAYERS is a book by Bertram Fields which plunges us like a swift dive into the maelstrom, where only the brave and the foolish dare go, deep into the so-called "authorship question" of Shakespearean scholarship. Fields, a laywer by trade, examines the possibility that the man we know as Shadespeare (the "Stratford man" as he is called here) did not write the works with which he has generally been credited. Since the 18th century, the skeptics have kept close pace with the believers, and for understandable reason. There is a paucity of known facts on the man from Stratford's CV. Surely if he was the greatest English playwright we'd have more knowledge about his life and death. And what about those signatures? He can't even spell his name the same way twice, how did that country bumpkin write HAMLET or THE WINTER'S TALE? No way! What would that hillbilly have possibly known about courtship politics in Italy and Bohemia, he never left England, and there were no books that could have filled him in. Could he have learned the Latin and Greek he needed at Stratford Junior High, I don't think so, but thousands of allusions of classical literature pepper his corpus. Besides, there were literally dozens of brilliant, upper class and good looking men all over Elizabethan England who might have written those works with more probability than the Stratford schlub. These include Francis Bacon, the eccentric philosopher; the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere; the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was known to have written for the theater and whose murder might have been faked to allow him the psychic space to go on and improve his craft as "Shakespeare." Even Elizabeth herself might, everything else being equal have been the playwright, for she was well known as a stylist and could wield a pen with the best of them; perhaps only sexism has kept her towards the bottom of the bookies' chart of suspects. Fields picks up each piece of evidence and examines it, both pro and con. The First Folio gets most of his respect, and he comes down hard on the point that, if someone else was Shakespeare, why did the First Folio, published shortly after the death of the man from Stratford, credit him with having written all the plays and poems? Were its editors in on some hoax? Wouldn't that be a little weird, indeed Masonically extravagant? If they were just patsies, innocent dupes, why prolong the charade past the point of the death of the real author? (Oxford, for example, died in 1604 for sure.) Nobody really knows what happened, and you'll have fun with Fields as he tries to make sense out of a confusing mass of facts, fictions, fallacies and far-fetched Tomfoolery. Along the way you might learn something you never knew before. I know I did.

Most insightful work on the Shakespeare Mystery

Born to illiterate parents, unable to write himself, somehow William Shakespeare, a butcher's apprentice produces works only a well educated, well traveled and well born could be credited with. The key to the author's conclusions is that the writer had to be Cambridge educated. The prime suspect(s) are then presented in excellant detail. A must read for anyone who is intrigued by this mystery.

The mystery playwright and the players

The question of the real Shakespeare is one that won't go away. Every time the issue is declared solved/dissolved, it resurrects, and this amusing summary of the evidence concerning the identity of the playwright of the plays versus the man from Stratford is provocative and hard to rebut. As proof of this I tried to avoid the book, and to leave the matter to rest in my mind, but curiousity got the better of me, with skeptical consequences. Perhaps it will pass, but... The problem starts with the attempts to go further and speculate about someone other than the Shakespeare we know, so-called. The question is dismissed at insane, puerile or crackpot, but the standard history faces some serious anomalies, of dates, composition, ability, education, knowledge exhibited in the plays, especially of overseas places such as Italy. Once this evidence is collated in reasonable fashion sans the standard crank-headedness of many such works, the total is unsettling. Many things don't add up, starting with the facts of the known Shakespeare's early circumstances and education, the speed of composition, and ending with his wills and the complete absence of commentary on his death. This peculiar situation of authorship bathed in semi-anonymity, where most contemporaries left biographical detail and records of passage, doesn't make any sense on its own terms, but doesn't prove anything certain either. But the suggestion remains of a mystery person unaccounted for, to resolve the contradictions staring out from the facts. But it seems, then, the mission was accomplished, that we may never know. Unlike many treatments of this subject, this one tends toward presenting the difficult facts, and letting them rest, and the result tweaks the enigma the more.