"Or Didn't They?"

"It all starts in 1612, when an educated, bilingual, actual Irish spy named Thomas Shelton translates part one of the 'Quixote'—to rapturous acclaim and sensational sales —as 'The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant Don-Quixote of the Mancha.' About a year later, an aging William Shakespeare and his anointed protege, John Fletcher, co-write their third play together, 'The History of Cardenio.' That would be the same crazed, cuckolded Cardenio whom Don Quixote met in Chapter 23 of the novel, then helped reunite with his inamorata a hundred pages later.
"Yes, as the wittie Ring Lardner might have said, you could look it up. In 1613, almost surely without ever meeting in person, it was Shakespeare who helped usher Cervantes onto the British stage for the first time.
"Or so we think."

David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times wonders about connections between Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, who both died four hundred years ago this month.

The Winter of His Disinterment

"The injury appears to confirm contemporary accounts that he died in close combat in the thick of the battle and unhorsed – as in the great despairing cry Shakespeare gives him: 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!'"

Maev Kennedy in The Guardian reports the confirmation of the discovery of Richard III's remains in Leicester, England.

Looney's Tune

"'Anonymous' offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatizing this conspiracy, Mr. Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence. Indeed, Mr. Emmerich has treated fact-based arguments and the authorities who make them with suspicion."

James Shapiro in The New York Times criticizes the new movie Anonymous.

Full of Sound and Fury

"A quarter-century ago all this was unimaginable. In fact, Stevens, along with fellow Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan, ruled unanimously in favor of Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford in a celebrated moot court in 1987. The objection to Oxford's authorship was obvious: Because he died in 1604, he could not have written, sometimes in active collaboration with other dramatists, 10 or so plays after that (including 'Henry VIII,' described by contemporaries as 'new' when staged in 1613).
"What then accounts for the reversal? The facts haven't changed; what has is our comfort level with conspiracy theory as well as our eagerness to seek authors' lives in their works."

In the Los Angeles Times, James Shapiro wades into debates over William Shakespeare's authorship.

Jeremy McCarter in The New York Times reviews three new books, including Shapiro's, about Shakespeare.

Not a Single Luxury

"In the second week of May 1610 they set sail for Virginia, and arrived about 10 days later. The survivors of the rest of the colony greeted them with amazement, having long believed them to have been lost, and for their part the castaways themselves were in for a surprise: 'When William Strachey and the other castaways came ashore at Jamestown . . . they had their first look at the settlement they had been told was a miniature England in the Virginia woodland. What they found instead was a band of skeletal people who had faced starvation while the castaways lived in ease and plenty on the Devil's Isle.'"

Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post reviews Hobson Woodward's A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest.