REVIEW: Will Shakespeare – An Invention

Broadcast: Sunday, 24^th May, 1953

Character: William Shakespeare

The Story

The action takes place in Stratford-Upon-Avon and London in the 17th Century

• Scene 1: The cottage in Stratford, 1584
• Scene 2: The Palace of Whitehall – 10 years later
• Scene 3: Backstage at the Globe Theatre – the first performance of ‘Romeo and Juliet’
• Scene 4: Shakespeare’s lodgings in London, the same year
• Scene 5: An inn at Deptford – the same night
• Scene 6 The Palace of Whitehall – the next afternoon

Rudolph Cartier’s production of Miss Clement Dane’s ‘invention’ was a spirited and dramatic explanation of a problem which has troubled critics and commentators for centuries. How did Will, a seemingly raw and ordinary lad from Stratford, become William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of all time; what were the forces that shaped him?

The story begins, funnily enough, in Stratford with Will, though only 20, already married to an ill-tempered Anne Hathaway. Fame, in the shape of Henslowe, a strolling minstrel, beckons the young man to London and encouraged, too, by the coursing demand of his genius, the cries of his characters as yet unborn.

Will (Peter Wyngarde) chooses to seek his fortune and finds it. He also discovers the exacting price of fame. We are to see some of the stormy seas which beset him, and also some of the experiences which contained the very stuff of tragedy.

Here is Kit Marlowe, Murray, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and, overshadowing all of them, the splendid figure of Queen Elizabeth I. She is the heroine of this play – concerned for her drama as she was for her navy, and ringing greatness from herself and from Will.

Many of Will’s yet-to-be characters made an appearance in the play, including Ophelia, Desdemona, Hamlet, Rosalind, Shylock, Falstaff and MacDuff – the latter played by the future film and stage director, John Schlessinger.

Ms. Dane certainly presents Shakespeare as a wordy, windy and morbidly introspective man; certainlythe long speeches, most of them in blank verse, may well have bored many viewers.  

Her Elizabeth I was evidently influenced by subsequent twentieth-century representations, and her portrayal of Shakespeare’s relationship with Christopher Marlowe (and others, seldom read or performed today) were equally shaped by myths current in 1921, which was when the play was written.