Peter Hooley and Hal Austin
Television chat show host Oprah Winfrey, one of the wealthiest black women in the world, is to quit because she fears a killing on live television.
Winfrey’s claim comes amid growing concern on both sides of the Atlantic at the increased culture of sleaze on some daytime TV talk shows. Now the woman whose show spawned a whole new genre of “confessional” TV has admitted: “I am in disbelief about things that are happening on television talk shows. How low can we get?”
Winfrey, talking about the ever-cruder nature of “shock TV” said: “We will see sexual intercourse on TV, and I would not be surprised if one person actually kills another.”
Recently, a stunt on the Jenny Jones show, when a man was encouraged to believe he was meeting a former girlfriend who wanted a reunion on air, was shocked to find his secret admirer was a gay man named Scott Adedure. Three days later he shot the admirer dead.
Winfrey’s intervention may also start a backlash in the growing popularity of “confessional television” in Britain, with talk shows such as Kilroy and Vanessa on BBC TV and Trisha on ITV.
Winfrey has blamed her rivals for the coarsening of programmes, and dismissed the growing popularity of Jerry Springer’s show.
“Up until a few months ago, I felt that Jerry Springer was giving us some serious competition.
“But I don’t think it is sustainable because his show is such a vulgarity circus. Unless you are going to kill people on the air and not just hit them on the head with chairs, and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse – and not just, as I saw the other day, a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis – then there comes a point when you have over-saturated yourself.”
Winfrey has now apparently tired of the “circus” and told the Sunday Times: “Even now when I have re-signed for another two years I am thinking: `What did I do that for?'”
Winfrey, who has won seven Emmys, US TV’s answer to the Oscars, was last year credited by Time magazine as being one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. One of her rivals said of her: “She consistently maintains a decency and morality on her show that gives talk shows a positive name.”
Winfrey said: “I would actually count the hours each day until I could get back on the film set. Then I returned to my show and had a depression. Coming off that wonderful film to be just interviewing more dysfunctional people was a let down.”
@Bards of a feather
Writers have steered clear of the life of Shakespeare for fear of putting words into his mouth. Mark Lawson on the perils of taking him on
Two works of art to be released soon – from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum – have a surprising factor in common. The hottest movie of the year, Shakespeare in Love – a reworking by Sir Tom Stoppard of a script by the American screenwriter Marc Norman – is a romantic comedy based around the idea that Romeo and Juliet may have been inspired by the writer’s own love life.
And an edition of the Collected Fictions Of Jorge Lus Borges, the great Argentinian writer, includes the first English translation of Shakespeare’s Memory, a short story in which a man supernaturally acquires access to the recollections of the playwright in place of his own.
What’s intriguing about this coincidence of events is that the odds are very high against such a double sighting of Shakespeare in fiction. Roughly equivalent figures in other fields – such as Christ, Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln – have been frequently fictionalised, but there have been very few literary representations of Shakespeare. Browsers in second-hand bookshops will occasionally find such forgotten novels as Gentleman of Stratford by John Brophy, but the astonishing durability in print of works by Shakespeare continually mocks the small print-run and short shelf-life of books about him. There are two reasons for this reticence, one practical, one psychological.
Fictions about the once-living usually grow a few flowery speculations from the compost of biography. But – by an irony which becomes daily greater for an age which treasures writers’ lives above their work – the most famous author of all is almost wholly unknown. The entries in literary reference books creep around on such tiptoe words as “probably”, “suggests”, “interesting speculation”. And so, in fictions about him, he is largely an imagined character.
However, if writers who create Shakespeare must expect to have their findings questioned, their motivation will also be considered suspect. It is a widespread critical assumption that the period or people selected by a writer of historical fiction is self-revealing. For modern authors to seek to understand Shakespeare – to put their prose into that mouth – is to invite the easy accusation that they believe themselves to be his equal. It’s rather like a Pope announcing that he will take as his pontifical name Jesus.
Accordingly, the serious writers who have risked engagement with Shakespeare have tended to be cussed men of high self- confidence – among playwrights, Edward Bond and George Bernard Shaw; among novelists, Anthony Burgess and Mark Twain.
Bond’s Bingo (1973) is doubly brave. While novels about Shakespeare have a certain cordon sanitaire of genre, he is tackled here in the very art form which he dominates. The play is also rare among Shakespeare fictions in being bitterly critical of the central character.
Bond – claiming to work from “the material historical facts so far as they’re known, and on psychological truth as far as I know it” – dramatises an incident late in Shakespeare’s life in which it seems that he sided with local landowners against the poor in a dispute over the enclosure of fields at Stratford from which he derived rent.
At the end of the play – apparently realising the hypocrisy of this action from a writer whose works are celebrated for their humanity – Shakespeare commits suicide. Although no one can prove that he didn’t kill himself, this is a polemical invention: Bond is warning that the writer must not side with the establishment.
His early notes for Bingo decided that Shakespeare would “not be seen working”. This highlights the biggest problem of this genre: how to avoid the parodic Hollywood biopic scene in which he sits at a desk thinking aloud “to live or not to live?”, then scratches out the line, substituting a shorter verb.
A related difficulty is the question of how Shakespeare should speak. There is always a bad moment in plays or films about Oscar Wilde when he spouts in casual conversation a famous epigram from his plays. Writers do sometimes give verbal try-outs to phrases intended for the page, but these moments feel as corny as a fictional Beethoven suddenly tapping out der-der-der-DER with his spoon on a plate. The mystery of imagination easily becomes ridiculous when dramatised.
In Bingo, Bond addresses this problem by making a point of the great writer’s verbal poverty at the end of his life: he is morally and physically exhausted, often speaking only in monosyllables. (In Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard is sensibly wary of allowing his Will any self-quotation, although there is a moment when we see him squirrelling away an overheard phrase about “a plague on both your houses”.)
George Bernard Shaw – who shared with Bond a fierce self-belief and a fondness for polemical prefaces – had engaged with Shakespeare as a critic and a playwrighting rival throughout his long career and, with neat symbolism, dramatised him in the final play to be staged during his lifetime. Oddly, Shakes Versus Shaw (1949) was written for a puppet theatre, but it is remarkably frank about Shaw’s sense of his own historical status, as the two dramatists trade achievements:
SHAKES: Where is thy Hamlet? Couldst thou write King Lear?
SHAW: Aye, with his daughters all complete. Couldst thou have written Heartbreak House? Behold my Lear …
This fragment usefully establishes two rules for writing about Shakespeare: don’t measure yourself against him directly and don’t make him speak blank verse.
Anthony Burgess’ novel Nothing Like The Sun (1964) is an early contribution to a strain of Shakespeare fiction which is continued by the new movie: jokey speculations about the bard’s sex life. Burgess suggests that the mysterious “dark lady” of the sonnets was a black prostitute who, in this fiction, gives Shakespeare syphilis. He is also cuckolded by one of his brothers. Burgess explains in an introduction that this detail came from “many folk tales” which he had heard in “the English Midlands”.
It is perhaps revealing of the difficulty of these enterprises that, in the case of two novelists, their single work about Shakespeare is the least known and least available. John Mortimer’s obscure novel Will Shakespeare (1978) was based on his six-part TV serial of the same name.
That had been commissioned by Lew Grade for ITV to conclude a trilogy of dramas on great figures from history which had already covered Moses and Jesus. The series had many superficial similarities with Shakespeare in Love – Tim Curry’s lad-about-town is a close cousin to the Will played by Joseph Fiennes in the new movie.
In one of his volumes of memoirs, Mortimer remarked on the freedom given to the fictionaliser of that obscure life. The few surviving documents (law suits, wills) reveal only “the unsensational moments of a life spent keeping out of trouble”, but he “was kind enough to leave us some blank years, between leaving Stratford and turning up in a London theatre, during which time you can create your own Shakespeare: a lawyer’s clerk, a soldier, a traveller to Italy, a tutor in an aristocratic household – what you will”. Mortimer’s inventions included various love confusions and a meeting with Elizabeth I.
Another writer with a little-known piece of Shakespeariana is Mark Twain who, in 1876, wrote 1601, or A Fireside Conversation in Ye Time of Queen Elizabeth, which has as its central character a playwright called William Shaxpur. This includes meetings with Elizabeth I and Ben Jonson (who also talk in Bond’s Bingo) and ribald discussion at court about sex and flatulation. However, perhaps in admission of the difficulty of this genre, Twain published the work only privately.
Two Nineties novels featured Shakespeare himself but made little impact. Translated from Spanish, The Last Days of William Shakespeare by Vlady Kociancich went quickly out of print, but seems from reviews to have been a Bingo-like meditation on the writer and society. Stephanie Cowell’s The Players (1998) is a romp set in the dramatist’s youth, featuring a bisexual love triangle including the Earl of Southampton and an Italian singer.
Many of these obscure or forgotten works may hope for reprints or increased sales if Shakespeare in Love achieves its predicted Oscar successes. Praise from American critics suggests that it follows the rules of the most successful works in this form by being freely speculative but careful of cod- Shakespearean dialogue. Yet viewers of the film will still face the usual nagging question: could those plays really have been written by this character?
Revealingly, the man in the Borges story who inherits the memory of Shakespeare rapidly comes to resent it. Although he is in a position to write the ultimate literary autobiography, he chooses not to. This is because the facts of the man of Stratford’s life come to seem irrelevant: the unfortunate narrator of the story is reduced to ringing around trying to find someone to take Shakespeare’s memory off his shoulders. It serves as a metaphor for the difficulty of writing about this writer.