It isn't all true

Another chance to see Kenneth Branagh's All Is True last night was very welcome. In a long and varied career, it must rate as Ben Elton's finest work, alongside Blackadder maybe.

I must have written about it here when I first saw it so I'll either repeat myself, contradict myself or say something I didn't say before but while some of it was familiar, much of it wasn't.

It's not all true, of course - some of it is far-fetched- but it is deeply moving like The Remains of the Day, the best of Depardieu, Un Coeur en Hiver and belongs somewhere up there with them as a very favourite film. Lit as if by Caravaggio, Shakespeare in retirement in Stratford is haunted by the loss of his son, Hamnet, who in this account was much loved. The characters of Anne, Judith, Susannah, John Hall, Southampton are all brilliantly conceived and Ben Jonson puts in a cameo at the end. The fact that Elton and Branagh take off from certain established biographical facts into high unlikeliness doesn't detract from how compelling it is.

The first thing one notices is that Branagh's Shakespeare looks more like Tennyson, a misunderstanding that could lead to even wilder versions of literary biography, but the crucial turning point is when Shakespeare realizes that no other children died of plague in Stratford in 1596. That leads him to uncover a wholly more disturbing family secret regarding Hamnet's death, his treatment of the difficult Judith and the troubling story of what 'really' happened. 

It's probably more brilliantly imaginative than it needs to be. Unless there is any truth in the statistics of child mortality due to plague in Stratford in 1596, the whole film contributes not much of use to Shakespeare biography but it is an immensely powerful fiction none the less.

 

I might be developing a sideline into reading bad books, to see how bad they really are, following my excursion into Jacob Rees-Mogg. Prof. Sir Stanley Wells undoubtedly knows more than most about Shakespeare but also much of what he 'knows' is preposterously billed as What Was Shakespeare Really Like? which, if he answers his own question in 138 pages in his latest book, is rightly being dismissed as supposition wherever I've so far seen it mentioned. 

So, having seen my own participation in the question rubbished by Prof. Sir Stan some years ago, I will see if Portsmouth Libraries can find me a copy. Stan is all but black-listed and no books written entirely by him are given permanent houseroom. However, I will gladly take two or three hours to read his fond, faux-academic imaginings and find fault in return, possibly giving credit where it's due if he accidentally says anything sensible. The difference between Wells and Elton-Branagh is that one purports to be a genuine insight, as such books are regularly announced as being, whereas the other pretends to no such thing and, as Shakespeare said of his own plays, is such things as dreams are made on and all the better for it.

Right, then, Sir Stan, I'm not convinced you will be worth the effort but it will be much more worthy and invigorating sport than fox hunting. Game on.