We know very little about William Shakespeare, so we make stuff up. Thus we have Shakespeare in Love (John Madden–Tom Stoppard), which imagines the Bard falling for an aristocrat’s wife who wants to break the gender barrier by appearing as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. And we have Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will, which imagines Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, slowly putting the First Folio together after the Bard’s death.
And we have the Kenneth Branagh-directed All is True, in which almost nothing is true except the frame. Branagh, and screenwriter Ben Elton, here create a Shakespeare who, drunk with mourning for a son who died seventeen years previous, returns home to his family in Stratford-on-Avon after being absent in London for most of his adult life. It is true that Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, when she was pregnant with their daughter Susannah. It is true that Susannah married John Hall, a physician and a Puritan. It is true that she was once accused of adultery; the family sued her accuser for slander. When the accuser didn’t show up at trial, the family won. It is true that Anne bore twins, Judith and Hamnet. It is true that Hamnet died at eleven, upon cause not known to us. It is also true that Judith married the vintner Thomas Quiney, and that he was later hauled before the Bawdy Court for having impregnated another woman, who died in childbirth. The rest, as they say, is silence.
Into it, Branagh and Elton step, boldly giving Shakespeare the dilemma of our times rather than his own. They imagine Shakespeare (Branagh) coming home to Stratford-on-Avon, and the beautiful New Place, after the Globe burned down. He is obsessed with thoughts of the long-dead Hamnet (Sam Ellis), who once wrote poems which reminded the Bard of himself. His family receives him coolly; his wife (Judi Dench) bids him to sleep in the guest bedroom (“with the best bed”) as he has been home so infrequently she considers him a guest.
Susannah (Lydia Wilson) receives him cordially, and Hart (Hadley Fraser) politely, but Shakespeare knows that as Puritans they are constitutionally opposed to the theater, which is to say his life. On the other hand, Judith (Kathryn Wilder) is a barely-contained engine of fury, bitter and depressed. She is illiterate, but her secret is that she has the makings of a great poet inside of her. She is jealous of the love her father shows for her dead twin, and she hates herself for it. Although she is a beautiful woman with a great capacity for love and joy, she is 28 and unmarried — a doomed spinster, in those days — and she spurns the attention of men. She knows that as a woman she is valued principally because she might produce a male heir, and she hates it.
It is Judith’s fictional dilemma (there is no evidence that she had any literary gifts; for that matter, there is no evidence that Hamnet did, or that Shakespeare mourned his death excessively) which is the motor of the story. When she reveals the astonishing secrets behind her anger and self-loathing, it hits with tsunami force, and thereafter leaves the landscape peaceful and benign. (The scene is helped immeasurably by Dench’s constant, stoical denial of Judith’s truth.) Her bitterness evaporates; she agrees to marry Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst) despite his rakish ways, and is soon thereafter with child, to her father’s delight, and hers. Wilder handles this change — barely believable on paper — with great grace and verisimilitude; you can see the tension leave her face when she makes her confession, and thereafter she seems surrounded by a nimbus of joy, and nimble and light, the way that saints are sometimes depicted in the paintings of the time.
Does that seem a little melodramatic to you? Perhaps, and you might also wonder about scenes with the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) and Ben Jonson (Gerard Horan), which appear principally designed to give us Facts About Shakespeare in dialogue form. And yet…and yet. The scene between Southampton and Shakespeare is one of the most tender and beautiful in the film. Some scholars believe that the two were lovers, based on the Bard’s effusive sonnets to him; the film, instead, suggests that Shakespeare’s feelings were unrequited. And yet McKellen’s brief scene shows Southampton alive with sympathy, admiration, wonder, compassion, encouragement — the elements of love, if not love itself. It is a bravado performance by the two actors, and a bravado bit of writing by Elton.
And if the idea that women had a raised consciousness about their treatment in early seventeenth-century England has no basis in recorded fact, so what? First off, how do we know? There was no sociology or sociological study, as we know those terms, at the time. Branagh and Elton have as much right to speculate about Shakespeare’s daughter as Virginia Woolf had to speculate about Shakespeare’s sister a hundred years ago. Secondly, we have always fashioned a Shakespeare for our time, as we create God in our own image. In so doing we only do what Shakespeare himself did. The Bard altered the text of history at will to create his monarch dramas; when he says, in the film, “I never let truth get in the way of a good story”, he pretty much sums up his history plays. Even some of his dramas — particularly Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth — are based on history, or historical legend, and freely translated by the Bard. The real Macbeth, for example, was a good king, who reigned long and died of natural causes. The real tyrant in history was Duncan, who he overthrew.
So if we afford Shakespeare the privilege of rewriting history to satisfy his audiences, why not afford the same privilege to Branagh and Elton? After all, in painting on the tabula rasa that is Shakespeare’s life, they are not distorting history, just making it up. Who’s to say that the Bard was not a mopey misogynist who learned, late in life, the true value of his wife and daughters? Who’s to say he did not make that absolutely smashing riposte to the execrable Thomas Lucy (Alex Macqueen) we see him make in the film? (Or, for that matter, the fabulous verbal flaying Southampton gave Lucy in front of his wife a bit earlier).
And the cinematography! Zac Nicholson shoots the film in gorgeous lush greens and blues, and oranges, giving an autumnal feel to the ubiquitous English gardens and fat grasses. (The Bard is frequently depicted sweating over his forlorn garden, which he attempted to construct in order to honor the memory of his son.) Indoor scenes are shot in darkness, replicating the dim lighting of Shakespeare’s time, but the illumination is always sufficient to accomplish the scene’s intent. When we are outside again, the effect is somewhat gauzy, as if to remind us that we are viewing through a glass which observes events four hundred years in the past.
The production team (the design is by James Merifield) goes to great lengths to make every scene appear authentic. Shakespeare’s New Place appears as large and beautiful as it probably was; it no longer stands. (A subsequent owner destroyed it in 1759, apparently out of pique with his neighbors and the town). The church and marketplace are depicted with great care and detail; you can practically smell the fish the young boy is grilling in the corner of the picture as Judith stalks out of Quiney’s store after rejecting another proposal.
So All is True is not always true (the name derives from the original title of Shakespeare’s last play, The Life of Henry VIII, which he wrote with John Fletcher. That wasn’t always true, either.), and is sometimes manipulative and soap opera-ish as well. So what? Critics made the same accusation about Shakespeare in Love, and people are still watching it today. All is True is not Citizen Kane (which was not always true, either) but is it fair to demand that it be? We don’t make the same demands of Avengers: Endgame, do we? At least in All is True the dead stay dead.
All is True is now playing at four movie theatres in our area.
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