The Shakespearean authorship debates have their highs and lows. At best, they elevate the level of discussion about The Bard’s poetic style and the culture of Elizabethan England. At worst, they can devolve into the equivalent of a shouting match: “Yes, he did!” “No, he didn’t!” “Wabbit Season!” “Duck Season!” Amy Freed’s play, The Beard of Avon falls somewhere in between these two extremes. While the Pulitzer-nominated play (written in 2001) is meticulously researched, it is also replete with sharp humor. In short, it is very smart historical fiction. A current production of the play makes the case that the authorship question can be fun instead of antagonistic.

The conceit of the play is fairly straightforward. Young Will is a dreamer from the country who yearns for a theatrical life in the big city, far away from his hag of a wife (poor Anne Hathaway, who—justly or not—is neck and neck with Yoko Ono for most maligned spouse of an artist). Once he ditches Stratford and the shrew he couldn’t tame, he finds himself in London, where he meets Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The Earl, it seems, longs to write for the theatre, but needs a cover since playwriting (and the theatre as a whole) is considered déclassé. What ensues is a kind of literary Cyrano de Bergerac with lots of Shakespearean inside jokes thrown in for good measure. Fact, fiction, or somewhere in between, The Beard of Avon finally gives the debate a much-needed sense of humor.

The Globe has always enjoyed the greatest fame of any location associated with Shakespeare. One can make arguments for Will’s homestead, but certainly people are going to find more immediate connection in places where the plays were (and still are) performed. The current Globe, which is just over a decade old, was a reconstruction of the original, based on varying pieces of historical evidence. Scholars are found of debating the accuracy of the reconstruction, but really that matters very little. It’s the name that carries it. If the reconstruction had been proven exact, but they had named the theatre something else (say, The Fluffernutter), I doubt it would be as popular.

The Globe’s dominance may change as breaking news as thrown a new competitor into the fray: The Theatre. The remains of the place believed to have originally housed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men . Though The Theatre cannot boast a terribly original name (can’t you just hear a theatrical variation on “Who’s on First?” “We’re going to see the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?” “Where?” “At The Theatre?” “Yes, but which one?”….), it was the site of some of the earliest productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

Naturally, there are already whispers of a reconstruction. Regardless of its accuracy, the idea of it being Shakespeare’s first stage will doubtlessly create a theatrical allure. Regardless of how few or many of them there are, these reconstructed spaces are the closest thing Shakespeare fans have to a time machine.

Shakespeare is once again rewriting history. For those of you who find fault with Will for glossing over details in telling the stories of real-life rulers, get ready for further potential offense. Oregon Shakespeare has just commissioned a huge playwriting project. The theatre is seeking to produce a large series of plays on American history. Just as Shakespeare reinforced (albeit not always accurately) the mythos of past English kings, this project will no doubt examine and reexamine key figures in the history of the United States.

As an enterprise, this undertaking is certainly noble, though I hope the parties involved have braced themselves. Historical accuracy is a sword wielded by many a critic to rend a play that purports to be biographical. Whether that is fair or not lies at the heart of the validity of this undertaking. Ostensibly, these plays should both reinforce and question ideas about American identity and its evolution. This dichotomy can be a tough balancing act, as some will criticize these works as revisionist history.

The problem has always been that real life is not necessarily neat nor is it structured for maximum dramatic impact. Its dogged randomness partially explains why dramatists frequently bend the facts. You may disagree with it as history, but understand it as theatre. Still, history has been proven time and again to be incredibly unreliable, changing based upon who does the telling. In that respect, it seems hypocritical to fault playwrights like Shakespeare and those soon to be employed in Oregon for their dramatic license. In many ways, don’t we create the versions of history that speak to our own times?

In unusual anniversary news, we just passed the 395th anniversary of the burning of the original Globe Theatre. Ironically enough, you could blame Shakespeare for the fire if you wanted to. After all, the fire was started during a performance of one of his last plays, the less-frequently performed Henry VIII. During the production, a canon was fired which caused the roof to erupt into flames. Though it would be rebuilt (and rebuilt again), it is the first one that has all the Shakespearean mystique.

Bard buffs would drool at the thought of his original stage still standing. It would afford the enthusiast the opportunity to walk where he walked, breathe in the air of the place where he created some of the greatest plays in history (depending on who you ask). There is something to be said for historical spaces, which explains the still-fervent interest in Shakespeare’s homestead and other contemporary structures. It’s hard to walk through one of these places and not feel as though ghosts occupy them.

Sadly, The Globe was not the only theatre to be consumed by fire and forever eradicated. History is littered with theatres that burned to the ground largely due the primitive theatrical tools and minimal firefighting capabilities. In fact, many of the theatres in Shakespeare’s period burned not once, but several times. It’s a shame because aside from whatever mystical auras we might assign to them, these spaces were invaluable historical artifacts.

When I was thinking about how to link Shakespeare to the Fourth of July, I admit I was a bit stumped. Despite being appreciated by millions of Americans, it didn’t seem like Shakespeare had any close ties to the founding of the country. While religious, political, and economic freedom might have been high on the list of the colonist’s concerns, I don’t know where Shakespeare or any other writer would have fallen (except perhaps under the general umbrella of freedom of expression).

Even when thinking about the day in contemporary terms, our observance of Independence Day has little to do with theatre or literature. This is not a criticism; rather, the winter holidays seem lend themselves more to celebrations of a theatrical nature. Mostly, we go to parties, cook food over an open flame and, most importantly, watch a fireworks display, often with patriotic musical accompaniment.

I was delighted to find a unique way to celebrate July Fourth that does connect somewhat to Shakespeare. In Massachusetts, Shakespeare and Company holds an annual reading of the Declaration of Independence. Imagine what it would be like to hear the words that founded our country spoken by performers trained in Shakespearean verse. It seems to me that you might be able to hear these familiar words in a new way.

The Declaration of Independence is a document that changed not just our country, but also the world. It doubtlessly inspires feelings of patriotism and a sense of history. It is also a beautiful piece of writing, every bit as poetic as any of the “literary” texts we hold so dear. In this way, it is very, very closely tied to Shakespeare because both writings demonstrate the beauty and power of words.

When you think of Shakespeare, do you imagine saloons, horses and boots? I don’t, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been numerous productions of The Bard’s plays re-set in a western milieu. Still, if you’re a purist, you may have trouble imagining Shakespearean characters squaring off with six guns instead of swords. In a recent news item, I found Shakespeare in a most unexpected place: the southwest corner of New Mexico, right near the Mexican border. Shakespeare, New Mexico is a ghost town; one of many in that part of the country that enjoyed a brief boom in the 1800’s followed by rapid economic fallout that left the town’s structures utterly abandoned (or, dead, if you will).

Shakespeare wasn’t always called Shakespeare (no authorship jokes here, please). In fact, the town changed its name several times over the course of its rather brief life. It gained its current name in an attempt to cover up a scandal. The town had been the location of a fake “diamond boom” which turned out to be a scam, so the town was renamed to disassociate itself with the crime. What’s interesting to ponder is why they chose the name Shakespeare (the ghost town’s website—it’s now a tourist attraction—doesn’t explain its origin). The town saw plenty of notorious traffic in its day, as many outlaws passed through its borders. Its history is certainly juicy enough for a good play, but unfortunately, this Shakespeare died around two and a half centuries after the original did.

For a dead guy, Thomas Middleton is having quite a year. As reported yesterday, another tome of his works is being published on the heels of the two-book Oxford edition. In addition, England has been awash with productions of his plays, particularly The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Changeling, in the past season. The new text is titled Our Other Shakespeare and the title is causing as much furor as the texts themselves.

For the uninitiated or uninterested, there is a pile of scholarship debating which plays of Shakespeare’s were co-written or later revised by Middleton (who was a few generations younger than Shakespeare). The most substantiated of these theories is his collaboration on Timon of Athens, though other plays have been brought into the fray as well. Still, the title is troubling to some because of the air of competition it gives off.

There are scholars who like to be contrary and thus specifically go after someone like Middleton to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t the one and only Elizabethan playwright. As with other contemporary playwrights, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over issues like delayed or limited publication to explain why Shakespeare got to hog the spotlight. Some of this is undoubtedly true, and playwrights like Middleton only enrich our discussion not just of Shakespeare, but also theatre as a whole. Still, for whatever the reason, Shakespeare is the one most people have heard of, so we’ll all just have to get over it. If we do, maybe we can focus on rediscovering playwrights like Middleton and then their name recognition will increase without having to make, if you’ll pardon me, a big production out of it.

In It-Must-Be-A-Slow-Newsday news, a portrait of the wife of a man believed to be the only known patron of Shakespeare made the papers of the world. With headlines evoking the words “ghosts” and “Shakespeare” in the same sentence, the items seemed to promise some kind of Hamlet tie-in. As it turns out, the story is this: the painting of this woman appears to have a “ghost” image in it. In other words, it was painted over an existing painting and remnants of the original work are still detectable. The painting beneath the painting is believed to be Shakespeare’s patron. The article mentioned that there were no plans to strip away the outer layer of paint to reveal the image underneath. How lucky for the wife in question.

Certainly, the root of the interest in this is potential information about a man who many have influenced Shakespeare’s works. After all, if his money was fueling the Bard’s efforts, he may have had strong opinions about what Will should and should not write. How might the plays we now consider classics have been changed by this relationship? We will never know, just as we will never know how most of the people who lived in late-Elizabethan England influenced him. Therefore, I cannot help feeling that this story is a bit like people buying a decomposed pork sandwich on eBay just because Elvis might have eaten it. Certainly, it would be great to know more about Shakespeare, but after a certain point desperation hangs over some pursuits.

Don’t mess with a Dame. If you’ve ever seen Judi Dench’s stage or film performances, you know she’s not someone to be toyed with. In fact, tartness is her specialty, whether she’s rattling off iambic pentameter, telling a certain world-famous superspy what to do, or trying to elevate cutesy fare like Chocolat. She won an Oscar for roughly eight minutes of withering dryness, yet it was potent and memorable despite its brevity. It would be ironic if in real life she were docile and lamblike, but a recent news item suggests such a dichotomy is not the case.

Dame Dench has joined a protest, one that specifically deals with Shakespeare’s heritage. Plans are underway to construct and eco-town in England, which normally would be cause for celebration among those who care about the environment; however, in this case the response has been far from universal praise. The issue is that this particular eco-town is to be constructed within six miles of Shakespeare’s home in Stratford. What is raising the ire of La Dench and company is that it will bring extra tourism and commercial construction to an area revered for its historical value, forever changing the landscape.

Our Dame has been very careful to point out that she fully supports eco-towns and environmental consciousness. In this case, she simply objects to the location. Ultimately, it’s a case of earth versus history. While it remains unclear who the victor will be, I think those eco-peeps should be plenty scared. I would be willing to bet that one icy stare from Her Royal Judiness would be enough to raze FIVE eco-towns.

A large part of any forum for discussing, debating or analyzing Shakespeare is about what he and his plays mean to us. Often, we judge productions of the plays based on what our own assumptions about what/who Shakespeare is. If those notions lean towards the classical, the erudite and the poetic, then we’ll be disappointed, if not incensed, by productions that over-conceptualize his works. Conversely, if when we think of Shakespeare, we imagine hip, rebel poet, we’ll yawn expansively at productions that are too staid.

It is interesting, then, to think about Shakespeare from the opposite perspective: as the effect rather than the cause. In other words, are there certain things with which we immediately associate Shakespeare? A recent item on British tourism hotspots suggested this very idea. According to the article, Buckingham Palace and Stratford-upon-Avon are two of the hottest tourist attractions in the U.K. because when people think of England, two of the first things they think about are the Queen and Shakespeare. Oddly enough, when people from other countries think of the U.S., I doubt one of the first things to pop into their heads would be Eugene O’Neill.

If this is true, is Shakespeare inseparable from his British-ness? When Shakespeare is done with Yank accents, does it not work for some people based on their assumption that Shakespeare must be British? More importantly, are Brits forever associated with Shakespeare (i.e. do we automatically assume anyone with an English accent must love and be thoroughly familiar with The Bard’s works)? Does Shakespeare’s international popularity obscure other important people, landmarks and ideas from the country’s long and rich history?