The Sweet Autumn of the Documentarian

Along with the various other positions The New York Times has taken over the years, they may now be anti-Stratfordian. That is, they do not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

The authorship question (the authorship question) has been a kind of Kennedy assassination for literary types for 200 years. In the past two weeks an editor of the culture section of the Times argued the Oxfordian case, in an item holding that the plays were written by the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere; The Beard of Avon, a new, quasi-Oxfordian (but professedly ahistorical) play running in San Francisco, got a favorable notice in the arts pages; and a brief review encouraged lay audiences to see Michael Rubbo's new documentary that opened Wednesday at Film Forum, Much Ado About Something. It "may seem superficial to experts," writes William S. Niederkorn, the same Oxfordian culture page editor, but it's informative.

Educational value is not a very good reason to see Much Ado About Something. After encountering American Calvin Hoffman's 1956 study The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, filmmaker Rubbo commits himself to the Marlovian camp. Hoffman, indeed, has left behind perhaps the biggest outstanding literary prize today: half his estate, an ambiguously high number pushing the seven figures, to anyone who can prove that playwright Christopher Marlowe, "the Muse's darling," did not die in a Deptford knife fight in 1593 but instead escaped to Italy and penned in exile the works of Shakespeare.

The film gets off to a good start. We find out about Calvin Hoffman's expedition to an English church to look for evidence in the still-liquid remains of Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe's patron, encased in a leaden coffin. (Hoffman hoped, vainly, to find manuscripts of the plays entombed--and in Marlowe's hand.) A remarkable cast of characters show up, from Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, to John Baker, an outspoken, fun-loving hayseed who operates a cemetery in Centralia, Wash. Famous men, including Freud and Henry James, doubted Shakespeare's authorship.

Rubbo builds about an hour's momentum, laying out efficiently the problems with Shakespeare's authorship. Simply put, the Bard seems to have been a bumpkin. The son of an illiterate glovemaker, Shakespeare's own daughters may have been illiterate, and for writing samples he left behind only six shaky signatures. At his death, he owned 107 acres but not a single book. And yet the author of the plays commanded a 25,000 word vocabulary, three times that of Milton.

Oxford and Marlowe had the languages, the intimate knowledge of English history, and the experience of the world to write the plays. There is, however, a reason that the vast preponderance of academics are Stratfordians. There is a case against Shakespeare, but his competitors have little but gossamer theories and gauzy circumstances to wear. As for Marlowe in particular, bestselling author Charles Nicholl tells Rubbo, "There's no evidence that Marlowe wasn't murdered--killed--and lots of evidence that Marlowe was killed."

Rubbo, piqued by the uncertainty of "killed" or "murdered," responds with conspiracy theory voiceovers, such as "Perhaps that was convenient for the plan--if there was a plan." It's consistent with the film's tiresome second hour. Rubbo hectors Dolly Walker Wraight, a leading Marlowe expert, with his own spur-of-the-moment theories. He shoots everything hand-held, even the interviews in which he could have set up a tripod. He likes cheap zoom tricks. It becomes clear that Jonathan Bate, the media-savvy Shakespeare professor, will only talk to Rubbo sitting in the cafeteria at work and digging with a shovel in his backyard. Rubbo is reduced to picking up interviews off the street and padding with excerpts from Shakespeare movies. (It is, to be sure, hard to begrudge his use of Franco Zefferelli's footage of Olivia Hussey's cleavage, the "really bojangly breasts" praised by this author's high school buddies.) Rubbo's 1974 documentary, Waiting For Fidel, is about going to Cuba and not getting to see the eponymous leader. In Much Ado, he has trouble getting time from an attention-hungry University of Liverpool Shakespearean.

But Rubbo did not seem to have trouble getting money from the Australian Film Finance Corporation and other public arts institutions to tour England, Washington state, and Italy. A Columbia film student once explained that he chose his major after he saw 1995's Powder, a movie about an albino boy with special powers. He knew then that he could get dozens of millions of dollars to make something better. Much Ado offers pleasure in the silver lining to anyone who dreams about making movies: documentary filmmakers can annoy the mediocre and be shut out by the marginally famous, shoot sloppy work on digital video, spell commedia dell'arte "comedia del arte" in the credits, and still get paid to fly around the world and open at Film Forum. There's hope for us all.