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.

*

On Citizen Kane (SPOILERS)

Peter Bradshaw has an excellent essay on the oft debated meaning of Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

Yes, we all know it is the sled he was playing with the day he was plucked from the bosom of his family and set on the path to material riches and spiritual poverty; and the more salaciously minded know where Kane got the idea of putting Rosebud on the lips of his thinly disguised WR Heart clone ... and we can all work out that the deeper meaning of Rosebud is something about losing innocence, the way that dreams destroy the dreamer, how success and wealth are empty without love and so on.

Bradshaw posits a new idea that is very interesting; that, on his deathbed, is that Kane is thinking not of himself, but of his son, who we are told dies very young in an car crash:

It is in fact the moment that isn’t there, a shocking, ghostly absence that Welles allows you to grasp only after the movie is over: the death of his first wife and his son in an automobile accident. We only hear of it in the newsreel about Kane that begins the film – the brief roundup that we are invited to believe does not get to the heart of the man. But that is the last we hear of it. It happens two years into his second marriage. When does Kane hear this terrible news himself? How does he react to the death of his first wife and his adored little boy? We never know.

Kane's reflecting, on his death bed, of how he seems to have visited his own fate upon his child - denied his family; trapped in a pampered but bleak, loveless life; and in the case of his son, his childhood literally destroyed.

Kane realises he's become Thatcher, ripping a child away from his parents and setting him on the road to perdition. All because of his vanity and self-deceiving, selfish self-indulgence. His pain at the end is that he has done this to everyone - his first wife, his second wife, his friends and colleagues at the Inquirer ... But most of all his son.

This (possible) interpretation is highlighted in the 'News on the March' clip that immediately follows the 'Rosebud' opening. It's Poe's idea of concealing in plain sight.  We miss it because we assume the answer to the riddle will be revealed at the end; but, brilliantly, the answer is right there, before the question is even asked. It is one of the few avenues not investigated by Thompson. And we all miss it, too.

We can live with our own failings and disappointments, but the way we fail and disappoint others is what truly haunts.

The Forest of Doom!!

For those of you who don't know, The Forest of Doom was the third installment of the brilliant Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks.

This post is a response specifically to comments made by the brilliant Auckland based blogger, Murray, who has been playing his way through the series and posting accounts of his misadventures and opinions on the books.

So be warned; if you have haven't encountered the Fighting Fantasy books, or read Murray's blog (which I hugely recommend) this will probably make no sense to you. And not in an intentional, post modern literature sort of way.

Forest of Doom was always one of my favourites (and one of the few that I finished, though it took me years and I probably stopped playing by the rules to do it) but the opinion of those commenting on it is generally negative. So what I offer here is a defence of Forest of Doom. The criticism of the book by Murray - and on other blogs - shows fatal misunderstanding of what Livingstone was trying to do.

I think FoD was the second game book I bought, after Death Trap Dungeon. Keep in mind that, if flicking through those pages and being perverted gently by all those barely concealed genitalia, was a novelty for me, it was also kinda new for Steve and Iain.

Warlock of Firetop Mountain came out in 1982, and Citadel of Chaos and Forest in 1983. Like musicians, who get to plunder their whole miserable angsty adolescence for their their first album, and six months of cocaine, constant touring and meaningless sex for the second, Steve and Iain were in a hurry.

Also bear in mind books 3, 5, 6 and 7 were solo efforts by Livingstone. After Citadel, and the co-authored Starship Traveller, Steve Jackson took a holiday from writing the 'core' Fighting Fantasy. So it was pretty much a one man show, with cameo appearances by various people all called Steve Jackson. And Iain managed to knock out five solo books in two years. So maybe we should cut these him some slack, huh?

So, exculpatory pleading aside, what of FoD? Well, as Murray notes, it is set OUTDOORS. Ponder that novelty for a while. The default settling for most adventures is still a fancifully network of tunnels and rooms, populated by random monsters, with no real ecology (What does the DRAGON in Warlock eat?) or purpose.

A good friend of mine, a role-player of considerable vintage, says that it was Forest of Doom that made him realise You Could Take This Shit Outside. Okay, FoD is just a dungeon with trees for walls, but that is still a transition many have to make. What Freud would have made about our reluctance to move from the warm comforting 10x10 tunnels and wombs, sorry, rooms?

Taking the action out of tunnels makes the setting more convincing. Tunnels have to be dug by someone, whereas trees just grow, yeah? And the forest setting immediately creates a viable eco-system. Even if we can't go off the paths, the nasties we encounter can. So the WEREWOLVES, CAT WOMEN, CENTAURS and such like seem more plausible.

Another thing Livingstone did that was really cool was create a detailed story setting. FoD has a decent introduction, outlining how you get involved in the quest. It also gave you a pay off if you managed to complete the quest - a remarkably long 'paragraph' 400, meaning you get some sort of a reward for all the page flicking and dice rolling. I think it was Masks of Mayhem that ended the story with a single sentence 'paragraph' - a pretty crappy ending.  FoD really felt like a story in which you got to be the hero.

The structure of the game book is also innovative and some seem to have misunderestimated Livingstone's purpose. Yeah, sure, you can play it as a psychopath and attack everyone ... Livingstone is giving you that choice. You get to choose how you interact with the population of Darkwood.

Obviously, if you attack them all, they'll all try to kill you right back. If you don't, some of them probably won't; but (clever bit) some will, because the outcome has to be unpredictable. Some times being nice will get you out of a fight, but not always.

If Steve Jackson was a GM, you get the impression he'd be the sort of GM you'd hate - the type that are always out to kill the PCs and who revel in the cunning ways they manage to Seal Their Doom. Whereas Iain would be the sort of GM who would provide a good night's entertainment for all with plenty of beer and chips.  Steve would probably put slow acting poison in the chips, and then giggle evilly as he watched you expire.

The other big innovation was structural. Remember the frustration of bursting into tears on the Warlock's treasure chest because you didn't have the right damn keys? Instead of, you know, doing what a self-respecting Dragon slaying, Warlock disembowelling sword waggler would do, going back into the maze to find the damn things? FoD doesn't do that.

If you get to Stonebridge without the two parts of the hammer, you don't get called a dumbass loser, you get to carry on. You may have found a significant location but not had the magical item needed, like the GHOUL's crypt. So you get to re-visit Yastromo and buy the magic items you now realise you need. Or you can explore new paths - in fact you have to do this, as the two parts of the hammer are located on different routes through the forest, justifying the classic/infamous "You come to a T junction, L/R" opening to EVERY game book in the series.

Obviously, this means you might go through some encounters twice, and it would have been nice if Livingstone had included an "If you have been here before and killed the werewolf, turn straight to ..." option, players with a modicum of intelligence can just skip repeat encounters, unless you really like killing CAT WOMEN. This highlights a profound difference in attitude between Steve Jackson and Iain Livingstone. Iain isn't out to kill you for any wrong choice.

Steve Jackson, on the other hand, certainly is, as Murray discovered in House of Hell. Pretty much any wrong choice in a Steve Jackson book leads to certain death ... and, frustratingly, it may not occur immediately; you may still seem to have options, as in the Kitchen of Death in the House of Hell; but there is no going back once you blunder into one of his 'Kill Zones.' FoD, on the other hand, forgives mistakes, some of the time at least, and doesn't kill you too vindictively too often.

So in terms of innovation, it is something of a high water mark in the series. I don't know if any of the later books had such a complex structure or allowed as much freedom of interaction. Which isn't to say it is perfect, because it isn't. But it is different and, I think, undervalued.