Abstract

The Droeshut and Chandos portraits, two familiar images, embody two contrasting representations of Shakespeare in Ben Elton’s  biofictions, Upstart Crow and  All is True.

The Droeshut engraving evokes the comic TV sitcom character played by David Mitchell.

The resemblance is short of literal, belied by the presence of a beard absent in the engraving, but richly suggested by the bulbous forehead and receding hairline, topic of a running gag throughout the series.  The actor’s typically bewildered expression conveys what some authorities have found to be a clownish cast in the image.  John Dover Wilson called it “a pudding faced effigy.” Northrop Frye said it makes Shakespeare “look like an idiot.”

The Chandos image renders the melancholy film character played by Kenneth Branagh. The resemblance of images here is unmistakable, confirmed by facial hair and costume, by inclusion of the portrait at the opening of the film, and by Branagh’s statements in interviews that this was his intent and inspiration. Nevertheless, the large prosthetic nose and angry eyes convey a much harder expression than the serene watchfulness of the oil painting. The discrepancy prompts the film viewer to collaborate with its producers in fleshing out a dark view of what Shakespeare’s late years in Stratford might have been like.

This essay explores these correspondences in light of encryption theory, an analytical framework derived from computer science, semantics and evolutionary psychology.

Encryption involves “an oblique method of communication” that entails a relationship between the surface content of an utterance and an unstated “implicature,” or key, which is known by both the sender and the receiver, and without which the intended meaning of the message cannot be understood.

In formal encryption, the key resides in a secret code that translates the surface message to the intended one. Formal encryption functions to restrict access to the meaning of messages requiring confidentiality and validate their truthfulness.

Rhetorical encryption encompasses injokes and allusions. The key resides in unstated information shared by members of an in-group and unknown by others. Rhetorical encryption functions to create intimacy and trust among sender and receivers and sensations of pleasure, self-esteem and bonding attendant upon privileged access to information.

In Upstart Crow, the encryption consists of injokes and allusions with distinct but overlapping keys for lowbrow and highbrow audiences of the show. Elton has appealed to both in a genre-crossing-career as standup comedian, actor, director, lyricist, and novelist, employing both crudeness and sophistication.

Upstart Crow often portrays Elton’s fictional writers and actors encrypting injokes and allusions and his fictional audiences enjoying or disdaining them. On this level, it references Shakespeare’s own habit of metatheatrical representation, including staging plays within a play, role-playing, and disguise.

In All is True, the encryption consists of allusions informed by literary and historical scholarship, sympathetic responsiveness to Shakespeare’s texts and subtexts, and an intention to elicit sympathy and tears rather than ridicule and laughter. Consistent with its focus on the poet’s later life, it employs the tragic-comic narrative arc of the last plays and the ironic demand for suspension of disbelief conveyed in its title.

On Oct 31, 2025, at 6:36?AM, Shormishtha Panja <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear Steven

How are you?  I hope this finds you well.  I heard from Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Publishing) yesterday about  the volume Shakespeare/Image for the Arden Shakespeare Intersections Series to which you so generously agreed to contribute an essay.  Unfortunately the editors regret that they cannot go forward with the project.  I quote from the excerpt of the reviewers’ comments sent by Arden: “It does not engage with recent and current debates… about how cognitive diversity, identity politics or digital technologies are changing how Shakespeare signifies, or is re-presented, as ‘image’ and across visual media….”

The reviewers do appreciate the fact that the volume brings together young scholars and senior ones from all across the globe but that is clearly not enough.  I thought that that was the volume’s greatest strength, bringing together academics not just from Spain, Germany, Italy, France, UK and USA but also from China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey and India.  I have not come across such a truly global range of academics and theatre practitioners in any other Arden volume.

I know that you share my disappointment at this outcome.  I do hope that you will go ahead and write that fine essay Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow and All is True of which you sent an abstract.  I am sure that it will find a home in a journal and an anthology of repute.  I learned so much about Shakespeare traditions across the world just by reading your abstract and those of other scholars. It has been a pleasure to interact with you as always, and I am sure that our paths will cross again in the future.

Thank you again for your patience, co-operation and friendship.

Warmly,

Shormi

Shormishtha Panja

Former Professor of English

Department of English

University of Delhi

India

An Address to the White Heron Sangha
February 5, 2023

Good evening fellow White Heron Sangha members and visitors. Thank you for once again inviting me to give a Sunday night Dharma Talk.In some previous ones I’ve explored ways that American literary writers I admire, specifically, Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac and Leonard Cohen, were influenced by Buddhist texts and incorporated them into their own unorthodox experiences and writings.

Tonight, I want to examine ways that the works of William Shakespeare connect with my understanding of Buddhist principles. There’s no evidence that this sixteenth and seventeenth century British writer had any exposure to Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, I find in his works many ideas in common with what’s called “the Dharma,” identifiable with what Joseph Campbell called The Perennial Philosophy.

In the immense body of Shakespeare literary criticism since 1948, I’ve found only two items, both quite recent, that treat this subject: The Buddha and the Bard by Lauren Shufran (May 2022) and Shakespeare Meets the Buddha by Edward Dickey (October 2021).

My own interest in the subject arises from an academic career that included teaching, directing and writing about Shakespeare—including a book which argued that Shakespeare read the Bible as literature and construed its varied depictions of God as personifications of the theatrical roles of author, director and actor.

In this talk I will align six Buddhist doctrines with recurrent Shakespearean themes

1 Emptiness and Form, Prajnaparamita –The World as Stage
2 The First Noble Truth, Dukkha–Tragic Suffering
3 Dependent Co-arising, Ptratityasamutpada–Motivation and Causality
4 Impermanence, Anicca–Time
5 Delusion, Avidya–Error
6 No-self, Anatta–The Person as Actor

Separating, labelling and numbering these ideas is somewhat misleading, since they often overlap or blend. However, this kind of schematic analysis is typical both in Buddhist texts and in literary criticism because it opens new ways of understanding. (more…)

Hi Alexander

I came across your film as accidentally as you came across my Shakespeare at Swanton website.

As part of general downsizing efforts, a couple of weeks ago my wife, Jan, sent a beautiful Afghan dress she acquired in 1972, when we homesteaded in the woods of British Columbia, to a friend born and still living there, who took a photo of it, worn by her daughter riding a ropeswing on the property their family leases from us.

Seeing it reminded me of another woodland use of the dress in 1999 at Swanton Ranch. So I googled the old website to download a picture of it worn by  a student playing Hermia in scenes from A Midsummernight’s Dream that the class filmed there.

I was amazed to find the link to your “Shakespeare at Swanton” video and astounded to watch it.

I’m still pulsing with the world wide web of connections it activated. Parallel surprises of happening upon a relic in the course of searching for lost treasure—lost through fire and aging and through the digital loss of “bitrot” and software updates.

And parallel grief for the losses of Time: 1960’s back-to-the-land hippies turning 80, ’90’s English majors now in their ’40’s, a 2021 forestry student graduated and out in the world.

And the transformation of it all, through memory and art, via the alchemy of Shakespeare.
___________________

March 2024 Postscript: A further variation on the theme of Alex’ video and this post.  Shortly after this entry was written, Cal Poly University erased the whole website which included “Shakespeare at Swanton” from its server. Almost two years later, the site was resurrected from its 404 grave on a different server with a new URL–smarxpoly.net–which allowed for the link here to be reactivated. Thank you, Ty Griffin, for all the work you did to make this happen.

29 March [to Kathleen Balgley]

After the lockdown started I began a journal to record thoughts of what seemed like unusual urgency in the face of unprecedented transformations. But within a couple of days I lost motivation, thinking that even if some new insight emerged, who cares, since both audience and author are likely to be eradicated in the approaching tsunami. Better to just keep working in the garden, prepare good dinners and drink hard while watching movies.

That sentiment was captured in this quote by an Oxford Shakespeare scholar in today’s NY Times:

René Girard, the French critic, wrote in a famous essay that “the distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.” Mass burial pits for plague victims were one visible symbol of the way the disease erased social, gender and personal difference.

But then she goes on:

Elaborate plots, motives, interactions and obscurities focus our attention on human beings. No one in Shakespeare’s plays dies quickly and obscurely, thrown into a communal grave. Rather, last words are given full hearing, epitaphs are soberly delivered, bodies taken offstage respectfully.

Lots to learn from writers and artists these days after all.

A couple of days before the conference in Jerusalem for which this paper was written, I woke up before dawn to avoid the crowds and went down to the Old City to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Under a dark and cavernous rotunda, before the shrine covering the tomb from which Jesus is said to have been resurrected, priests in splendid vestments swung censers, sang prayers and placed communion wafers in the mouths of the few worshippers in attendance. During the performance of that ceremony I sensed the tangible power of their faith. Though I didn’t share it, I was alerted to the gravity of the subject of my upcoming talk. (more…)

[published in Renaisssance Quarterly, Fall 2014]

This book begins with the assertion that “no one has yet published a full-length critical study of Shakespeare’s practice of biblical allusion and the implications of biblical allusion for our understanding of the plays.” Its author is eminently qualified to remedy what he calls this “deficiency,” having published several books on aspects of biblical culture in Early Modern England and co-curated an exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Impressive in its learning and packed with original discoveries of biblical and extra-biblical Shakespearean references, the book is written in concise, lucid and lively prose. Its “argument” is incontrovertible: the Bible is a pervasive source and object of reference in Shakespeare’s plays. The recognition and contextual reframing of hundreds of biblical allusions was part of the experience of earlier audiences, whose familiarity with the Bible was guaranteed by their cultural environment. The book’s task is to restore such experience to the modern reader lacking this familiarity.

Part I, titled ” Shakespeare’s Allusive Practice and its Cultural and Historical Background” opens with a vast array of evidence for the saturation of Shakespeare’s culture with Biblical narratives, characters and language. Chapter 2 traces discourse about the Bible and Shakespeare from early editorial glosses through 19th century elevation as paired pillars of British Civilization to recent debates about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. (more…)

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures, edited by Travis de Cook and Alan Galey, Routledge, New York and London 2012.

Published in Religion and Literature 44:2, Fall 2012

This is a collection of essays about relationships between the production, dissemination and reception of books and the pairing of two books: Shakespeare and the Bible.

Many recent scholars have studied the either the Bible or Shakespeare in terms of the history of the book”ways that material media have determined their form and message.  Intertextual relationships between Shakespeare and the Bible is also a familiar, if sparse, field of critical inquiry.  But investigating the coupling of Shakespeare and the Bible itself with the methods of textual materialism is a novel and narrowly focused undertaking.

The editors’ discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s whimsical 1934 fantasy about Shakespeare’s drafting language of the King James Bible introduces the book’s overall polemical argument that the consideration of historical and physical conditions of texts should counter the tendency to canonize them and “naturalize” their assumed unity and completeness.

The book’s first group of essays examine ways in which Shakespeare’s use of the specific editions of the Bible he’s presumed to have read affected plot, characterization, theme and language in individual plays. (more…)

Slideshow

It’s been five years since Jan and I traveled abroad, my retirement began, and I started writing this blog.  Japan was the next destination on our list because we were attracted by what we knew of its culture–haiku, sashimi, kabuki, Toyota–and because we hoped to spend some time there with our nieces, Emma and Marie, whose mother is Japanese-Korean.  The nieces had gotten married and engaged within the last year and wanted to introduce their partners to the family, so the time had arrived to coordinate plans.  Jan and I would go on a ten-day guided tour of “Japan’s Cultural Treasures” and meet them afterward for a few days together in Osaka, where it happened a friend of ours from San Luis Obispo had been living for three years.  Once we decided our schedule, I contacted Kazumi Yamagata, an eminent scholar of English Literature who’d translated my book on Shakespeare and the Bible into Japanese, and he invited us to visit him and his family at home outside of Tokyo the day before the tour  started.

After 24 hours of travel and a good night’s sleep we were met at our hotel by a disciple of Dr. Yamagata who conducted us through the maze of downtown Tokyo to Central station where we met one of his disciples and boarded the bullet train for an hour’s trip north to the Professor’s home.

These men all teach English literature and were relatively easy for us to communicate with.  Kazumi’s wife, Satchiko, met us at the station in their daughter’s Jaguar and drove us to their  country home, where were we received warmly by the mentor, who’d turned 76 the day before.  We spent time gossiping about English literary critics, I signed their copies of his translation, and Kazumi brought out fourteen volumes of his collected works recently published–a minor portion of the 50 books that he’s written.

He was pleased when Jan mentioned that she’d written her M.A. thesis on Dante, who he’s now translating into Japanese.

After a couple of hours, they took us to a traditional restaurant in their neighborhood where we ate large quantities of melt-in-your-mouth and melt-you-away sashimi and tempura.

Then back to their house for tea and a tour of his study, and a visit with their daughter, Yumi, who’d just arrived from a concert she’d performed at in southern Japan.  Jan got to know her better than I did, but as her flute played quietly on the stereo in the background, they brought out gifts for us including a new CD of her work.

We toured their garden, where the same plants that we’d eaten in the tempura were springing up, plum blossoms in the background.

We returned to Tokyo in time to meet up with our tour group led by Maya, our striking and gracious guide. We marched together to a little dive for yakitori dinner and then home to this “modest” hotel, one of the best I’ve ever stayed in, that has a toilet with two different kinds of sprays for one’s undercarriage, along with a really deep bathtub.

Dear Professor S Marx

RQ has received a review copy of English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare by Adam McKeown (Vanderbilt University Press). Would you agree to write a 700 word review due no later than February 10th?

Renaissance Society of America
365 Fifth Avenue, 5400
New York, NY 10016

*******

This book’s scholarly subject is literary works about war produced between 1551 and 1632 by English writers who fashioned themselves both soldiers and poets. Three introductory chapters frame that subject: an account of the author’s experience as an English professor and Marine Lieutenant Colonel deployed in Djibouti during 2006, where questions raised in a class he taught on Shakespeare’s Henry V generated the project, a discussion of an 18th-century pamphlet pretending to collect eyewitness accounts of 16th century warfare, and a description of similarities between the conditions of expeditionary forces under the command of Elizabeth 1 and George Bush 2. The whole book addresses what the author calls a “glaring omission”(11) by voicing perspectives of veterans then and now about war and militarism.

McKeown analyzes texts dealing with military activity during  Elizabeth’s regime. “Age of Shakespeare” in the subtitle alludes to a sentimental characterization of Early Modern England he challenges and to responses to Henry V that begin and end the book.  His readings undermine the hawkish propaganda usually associated with military writings and critique policies leading to the “calamity” of expeditionary war.  Instead, they emphasize the paradoxical, nuanced and invariably tormented experience of soldiers in battle, on deployment or returning home.

In Thomas Churchyard’s 1575 account of  The Siege of Leith, McKeown finds both a critique of the military strategy that fruitlessly sacrificed many lives and disdain for the diplomacy that eventually brought peace yet discredited the sacrifices of those who fought.

Contrasting George Gascoigne’s 1576 The Spoil of Antwerp with Alarum for London,  an anonymous 1602 play based upon it,  McKeown finds the earlier soldier’s account of the English mission in the Netherlands better informed and more judicious than the later adaptation, which converts it into anti-Spanish propaganda.

John Donne’s utterances on the subject “ask their readers to see war as both a testing ground for personal and national valor and a destructive force that ravages human pride and renders whole countries bare, peace both an Eden on earth and a state of gnawing restlessness and internal anxiety.”(19) McKeown states that the purpose of these emblematic paradoxes is to stimulate spiritual awakening, but he finds their source in Donne’s harrowing military experiences in the Cadiz and Azores expeditions.

McKeown juxtaposes John Harington’s popular translation of Ariosto’s war-glorifying Orlando Furioso with his reports on the disastrous Irish campaign for which he volunteered and with his complaints of ingratitude by “the country that scorned him when he came home.”(20)

The book concludes with an affirmation of martial virtue in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady, where the playwright presents exemplary veteran soldiers who, during the revival of English militarism after the death of King James, warn “Caroline England of its moral and physical unfitness to get involved in foreign war.”(20)

McKeown’s third chapter, “English Mercuries,” begins by presenting a document about heroic soldiers that lionizes Elizabethan military achievements. At the end of a long paragraph he reveals that it is an 18th century hoax often quoted to support 19th century English militarist propaganda.  “Mercury” signifies reporter, as in the names of newspapers, and “English Mercuries” is used by the chorus in HenryV (2.0.7) to describe the king’s recruits. The term appears in emblems and a familiar motto signifying the Renaissance ideal of soldier-scholar: Tam Marti quam Mercurio. But Mercury also represents a liar and thief, alluding to the unreliability of both Chorus and King, as witnessed by the play’s cynical other voices. McKeown restores the term’s honorific meaning in reference to his real soldier-poets.

McKeown’s paradoxical method is prominent in the introductory chapter, entitled “Ecole Lemonier” after the “forward antiterrorism base” in Djibouti U.S. forces shared with the French Foreign Legion.  Here, McKeown tells us, he taught Henry V to fellow marines who wanted to know if Shakespeare ever served. He describes this class to reporters and to NPR listeners he addressed in a commentary as neither “the story of one sensitive intellectual’s attempt to create a meaningful experience in a war otherwise without meaning” nor that of “a patriot who risked the censure of an elitist and hypocritical academy to serve his country and give Shakespeare back to the regulars guys fighting the war.”(12) Rather he claims, “it was a real war story by real soldier about other real soldiers fighting in a real war.”

The book concludes by repudiating the perennial use of Henry V to promote military adventurism. In the self-portrait on the back cover, the author wears no uniform, but his black t-shirt, shaved head and fierce smile convey the message, “Semper Fi.” Speaking both for and as one of the English Mercuries, he characterizes soldiers as “morally strong people¦who are not stooges of the state or servants of its whims¦They are above all products of political violence and witnesses to how people come to terms with political violence not as an idea but as an action they must commit or endure.” McKeown provides valuable insight to outsiders about what military people for five hundred years have thought about their profession.  But in this age of a volunteer army, I still fail to understand his meaning of  “must.”