Colin David Reese replies to Mark Rylance and prof.Stanley Wells

Colin David Reese, actor and artistic director of “La Compagnie du Cèdre” (France) replies to Mark Rylance and Prof. Stanley Wells :

The Shakespeare Authorship debate continues complete with invective and name calling, not to mention light hearted remarks taken out of context and turned around to invoke further accusations of professional slurs.

The “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” raises some very interesting points. However there are several elements missing from it, two of them essential.

Firstly as Gerald Eades Bentley points out in his 1971 book ”The Professions of Dramatist and Player in Shakespeare’s Time” :
“Too often the assumption of the critic – generally tacit – has been that Elizabethan standards and values were those of his own time, and on these assumptions the critic posits the reputation or the response of Shakespeare or Marlowe or Heywood and of the audiences for which they wrote.”

This is a large part of the problem with the “Declaration”. Its writers talk about a ‘literary career’ and the lack of evidence for it. Shakespeare did not have a literary career in the way we would understand it.

Their argument revolves around the lack of visibility of the man from Stratford, particularly concerning the lack of reaction to his death. As somebody who has worked in the entertainment industry for over 40 years, I am acutely aware of the relationship between visibility and status.

With status comes visibility and in the entertainment industry without status you are invisible.
A modern parallel could be the Hollywood screenwriter. The “best” film of the 20th century would be considered by many to be Gone With The Wind. Who can name the screen writer? Who can recall when he died and how? I leave you to do your own research, you will be surprised by what you find in his brief obituary in the New York Times. The man (a clue) in question had no status and therefore no visibility.

The status of professional playwrights in Elizabethan and Jacobean England was equally low, even below that of players (and theirs was that of ‘rogues and vagabonds’) Philip Henslowe, in a letter to an actor referred to Benjamin Jonson as a “bricklayer” even though a number of Jonson’s plays had been performed in Henslowe’s theatres. Jonson did indeed achieve status later, not as a playwright, but for the masques he wrote for the court.

According to Bentley there were about 22 professional playwrights (of which Shakespeare was one) active in the period. For most of them there exists little or no documentation about their lives beyond their contribution to the playhouses’ repertoires.

Playwrights of the time fell into two categories; “amateur” and “professional”. The amateur had a certain status in that he wrote (usually) one play on a particular theme and was often a man of letters. The professionals by contrast were considered hacks and their output unworthy of consideration in poetic or literary terms. In much the same way as the scripts for TV soap operas would be regarded now. Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library, referred to plays as “riff-raff” and “baggage books” refusing categorically to accept them in his library. John Donne was of much the same opinion. (It was not until the 18th century that the Bodleian started to collect plays of the period)

That the Stratford man did not boast of his writing successes in his native town is understandable, being that “wool merchant” would carry a great deal more status than “playwright” - a rather shameful way of making money, perhaps best hidden. The fact that the extant documentation concerning William Shakspeare revolves around other activities than writing plays reflects more an attitude to playwrighting as a profession than anything else.

So when the “Declaration” refers to Shakespeare as ‘The Greatest Englishman of all Time’ this is emphatically not an opinion that would have been shared at the time.

The second point missing from the “Declaration” and indeed from all the documents referring to the authorship debate, is the undeniable fact that whoever created these plays was a theatre worker. Very much more important than all the “extensive knowledge of law, philosophy, classical literature etc. etc. etc.” cited by the authors, is the knowledge of Theatre. These plays are perfect in their theatricality and stage craft. Only a true theatre professional could have “wrought” these masterpieces... someone who was intimately familiar with the playmaking process, with the scenic progression that produces tension and drama, with what an actor needed technically to create a character. No other writer comes close and only a man of the theatre could have written like that.

The “Declaration” refers to Shakespeare from Stratford as a “minor actor” - a somewhat speculative assumption given the number of contemporary references to his performances at court and before sundry nobility. This is, in fact, another example of the writers doing exactly what they accuse the ‘orthodox’ scholars of doing; adapting the known facts to support their theory. The two major stars of the era were Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, but the company of which Shakespeare was a member stayed together almost unchanged for a period of nearly 30 years and enjoyed a success unparalleled in British theatrical history, either before or since. The actors - all of them - must have been superb; that sort of success can only be achieved with an immense talent pool. Any weak member would be replaced. That is how it has always been in our business.

That there is doubt is true. Is it reasonable? As a working professional, I find it perfectly reasonable that a half educated man from a provincial town could do the research necessary to create these plays, given the talent and the imagination. And that the eternal nature of these creations would be completely ignored due to the intellectual snobbery of the literati of the day.

What is so ironic is that this same intellectual snobbery seems to have come full circle.

Finally, the most disturbing aspect of the “Declaration” is its inherent attack on the fundamentals of art. Its entire argument revolves around the contention that an artist is incapable of creating anything beyond his or her own personal experience.


Colin David Reese plays the head of the SOE, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, in Female Agents, starring Sophie Marceau and will be appearing in his own play “Gift to the Future” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer. For more details see www.codecedre.com