New idiot announces, "Shakespeare was a Jew!"

... And a girl one, at that.

It may have been 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare - but rumours circulating about the Bard's mysterious identity are as frequent as ever. 

Now one leading Shakespeare expert is claiming that the English playwright was actually a dark-haired Jewish woman, who lived in London. 

John Hudson's book, entitled Shakespeare's Dark Lady, explores the theory that Shakespeare's true identity is that of a woman named Amelia Bassano.

.oO Snip Oo.

She was therefore well-placed and had all the right knowledge skills, and contacts to have produced the canon we attribute to Shakespeare. 

Mr Hudson, who directs the innovative Shakespeare company the Dark Lady Players, based in New York, also believes that Amelia had an affair with the playwright Christopher Marlowe, writer of Doctor Faustus, and became pregnant before dying in poverty in 1645. 

One of the main reasons why he suspects Amelia wrote the plays is that many are based abroad - whereas Shakespeare was believed to have stayed in England for his entire life, The Sun reports.

Surely, the fact that many of "Shakespeare's" plays feature devils, witchies, denizens of Faerie land and suchlike supernatural entities must point to the conclusion "he" was actually a faerie warlock?

 Or (given he wrote several set in ancient Rome) they must have been written by Cicero, and just left lying about until some jobbing glover's son found them and decided to chance his luck?

And if this Bassano bird - with her alleged knowledge of foreign parts - had actually written the plays, she'd know that Bohemia has no coast line? Will manages to wreck a ship there in The Winter's Tale.

So, I'm not convinced.

It's silly to suggest someone who could make up stuff about Ancient Rome and the sexual shenanigans of the Danish royal family, and the goings on of the Faerie Court couldn't make stuff up about Italy, so he had to be a female Jew and NO-ONE realised until now.

But ... but ... the ghost of Hamlet's father says ... (wait for it) 'adieu' ... A Jew, geddit?

And Hamlet says he wishes his sullied flesh - his body - could resolve itself into ... a dew.  Or is a Jew?

The Terror, by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons has written a book about a horrible true story.  The Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, has been in the news, lately.  Climate change means the passage is now often navigable; and the wreck of Franklin's ship, Erebus, has been found, sitting on the bottom of the sea off King William Island, where she sank, over a hundred and fifty years ago.

The Franklin expedition was a tragedy.  Two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, blundered into the Arctic ice, became trapped; the crews succumbed to scurvy and (possibly) lead poisoning.  Despairing of breaking free of the pack, or of rescue, the surviving crew members set off on a Hellish trek across the sea ice and the frozen  North Canadian archipelago in a doomed effort to reach trading posts hundreds of barren miles away.  They didn't make it, and in their desperation they ate each other.  All 129 men died.

This we know, and it should be enough.  There isn't any need to add to what really happened.  A terrific novel could be written describing the disaster.  Simmons, to his credit, tells some of that story, and that portion of the novel is most successful.  He captures what must have been a horrific combination of drudgery and despair, and the horror of the attempt to cross the wilderness of frozen ice, dragging unwieldy sledges improvised from the ships' boats.  That is the best part of the book, awakening sympathy and horror in the reader.  But it is a horror of the pitilessness environment, and the hopelessness of the struggle.  Not of the hostile supernatural presence Simmons decides to add to the mix.  Simmons decides to garnish the already dreadful true events with a supernatural horror.  And it simply does not work.  The concept of a hulking, powerful, swift and remorseless THING hunting down the men of Erebus and Terror sounds chilling - but it isn't.  The scenes where the mysterious beast attacks the men are not frightening, and the beast is never convincing.

The plotting and story-telling is also unconvincing.  Early on, we learn the beast has breached Terror's hull - but nothing more is made of this calamity.  Having gained entry, the beast never bothers to take advantage of it.  There are possible explanations for this - but it is hard to escape the suspicion Simmon's just forgot about it.  After all, late in the book, Terror is able to sail happily enough, in spite of this breach.  Similarly, a crucial set piece relies on the officers ignoring what the crew are up to over the course of several days, in a situation where the least wavering of control and surveillance could lead to death.  Not convincing.

Captain Francis Crozier, the main character, is awkwardly portrayed.  Simmons wants him to to be the one who, if-only-they-had-listened, would have brought them home safely.  His crucial advice is ignored.  But Simmons can not reconcile this with the reality that Crozier loaded up the already-too-heavy boat-sleds with unnecessary junk - books, slippers, soap and silver spoons were all recovered from King William Island, pointing to an expedition planned not by level headed men but by a rabble, driven insane by scurvy and lead poisoning.  Equally, Franklin is presented as bumbling twit.  There is a lot the real Franklin can be criticised for - the failure to leave message cylinders detailing his plans in particular - but he was not a sap or a fool.  He had trekked across Canada twice.  The first time, disastrously, with members of his party succumbing to starvation and cannibalism; but he planned the second expedition, meticulously, drawing on his experiences and refusing to be browbeaten into compromise.  It was successful, covering thousands of miles of the bleakest terrain on the planet.  This man was not a buffoon, and Simmons's portrayal of him as a bit of an idiot is unjust.

Finally, there is a real problem towards the end of the novel.  For reasons entirely incomprehensible, Simmons decides to lard the final pages of his novel with Inuit theology, at a point where the story can least endure it.  Having slogged and shivered with Crozier and his shipmates over several hundred pages, it is hard to resist skipping the protracted mythic sections.  It just doesn't work, and one feels that someone must have mentioned this to Simmons.

There are some good parts to the novel.  It is a swift, page-turning read, for most of its considerable length.  As mentioned before, the simple day-to-day effort of staying alive in the icebound ships is gruelling enough with out supernatural additions.  There are a few shivery moments where suspense generates unease in the reader; and Simmons has certainly done his homework.  He includes a bibliography of sources that serves as a good guide to further reading for those interested in finding out more about this valiant, utterly misguided, attempt to do what was pretty much impossible - make a North West Passage, to the sea.

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