“Chronicle of the Russian Tsars: The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Russia”, by David Warnes

224 pages, Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500050934

There are several of these “Chronicle” books about, and I own a bunch of them; thus, Chronicle of the Russian Tsars: The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Russia by David Warnes is one that follows the format of all the others: basic thumbnail sketches of all of the imperial monarchs of Russia, with all sorts of pictures and paintings and a grab-bag format of tidbits that should come in handy if you ever find yourself on Jeopardy! You’ll read all about the beginning of Rus as a very small land area which, over the centuries, grew into the country we are familiar with today, even with all of the changes of the past decade or two. I thoroughly enjoyed this balanced account of the Czars (I prefer the old spelling), but I wish there could have been more treatment of those that preceded the Romanovs, but it’s probably ‘cause 19^th Century sources are more plentiful than 15^th Century and before.

Be careful, however, as the editor of this volume must have been having an “off” day. In one diagram somebody’s wife is also indicated as that same somebody’s daughter; this is just plain laziness as they evidently neglected to review the diagram and delete the offending 5mm line segment. In another a factoid box summarizing Nicholas II, his father is listed as Alexander II when, in fact, his father was quite obviously Alexander III. Also, the book steered uncomfortably clear of some of the unsolved mysteries of the throne, e.g., by reducing the eighteen-day rule of Czar Konstantin (November 27^th to December 14^th, 1825) to but a single, unstressed sentence. In overall quality, this book compares favorably to the other members of the series: indeed, it is often superior. But, in its striving for balance, it omits some important coverage. More deserves to be said about Ivan IV, “the Terrible” (actuality, Ivan “the Formidable” is the more proper translation of his title Grozny) and Peter I, “the Great”, because these czars made outstanding contributions that shaped the character of Russia, and not only because they were on the throne for 30+ years. The Czars’ role in Russian history cannot be compared to the role of any other succession of leaders in the history of any other nations, for they were the heart and soul of the empire they so tenderly loved with such religious conviction (not to mention “the divine right of kings”); without exaggeration, the Czars WERE Russia.

“The Shakespeare Miscellany”, by David Crystal & Ben Crystal

224 pages, The Overlook Press, ISBN-13: 978-1585677160

A pastiche of linguistic and theatrical knowledge and experience, The Shakespeare Miscellany by David & Ben Crystal is a precious resource sure to be treasured by all fans of The Bard. This thin tome contains all kinds of useful information, nuances and details that shed light on the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean world in which Shakespeare live and wrote, all neatly presented in the Miscellany. The book consists of a series of clear, semantically independent entries, so you can start reading from any page. This is not to give the impression that the book is randomly comprised; rather, there is an overall logic and regularity through the whole book for one to navigate easily and logically (the timeline at the end of the book and maps of British locations and play settings are very helpful and accurate, as well). Of special interest to me was the entry Did Shakespeare write his plays?, a representative and, indeed, exhaustively accurate treatment of the frivolous debates over Shakespeare’s authorship. No doubt, anyone – an Oxfordian or Baconian or others – once they read the remarkable entry they will suddenly become converts, given the objective, learned and convincing facts introduced. The merit of the book is the multidimensional perspective applied by the authors: Shakespeare is appropriately introduced as a playwright-pragmatist and an actor, a linguist (given his amazing metalinguistic instinct and language creativity), a 16^th Century citizen, and a human being (as far as letters or written memories of others can tell about) – everything displayed in an objective, factual and entertaining manner. And all in a mere 200+ pages, to boot.

“Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time”, by Joseph Sobran

311 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-0684826585

Pop Quiz: what do Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Charlie Chaplin, Vladimir Nabokov, Mortimer Adler, John Gielgud, Lewis F. Powell, Harry Blackmun, Orson Welles, John Paul Stevens, Derek Jacobi, Michael York and Kenneth Branagh all have in common?  Give up? Quitter. They all believed that William Shakespeare was a pseudonym for Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford. In Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time, Joseph Sobran attempts to demonstrate that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and William Shakespeare the Playwright of the Globe (see what I did there?) could not possibly have been one-and-the-same. The burgher from Stratford who became an occasional actor and an investor in a London playhouse appears, to Sobran and all other Oxfordians, to have had neither the schooling nor the experience of the world to have written the most spellbinding and sophisticated dramas produced in the English language. Nor did he have, Sobran assumes, the essential aristocratic and erudite contacts to have been able to write so knowledgeably about law courts, literary antecedents and the lives of the nobility, for while Sobran purports to match lines of the Shakespeare plays to an overwhelming number of individuals and experiences from the life of de Vere, he can find no corresponding connections to William Shakespeare – or, I guess, “William Shakespeare”. Declares sage Sobran: “Oxford seems to have known everyone Mr. Shakespeare should have known if he was Shakespeare”. To clinch the matter, Sobran finds no sources for the famous plays emerging after the Earl’s death in June 1604. Hmmmmm…where shall we begin? Okay, how ‘bout here:

• Why the absence of any contemporary documentary evidence that Oxford wrote the plays? Did nobody in his contemporary circle ever sniff him out?
• If they did figure out de Vere’s little secret, why did they keep mum? Were they threatened? Were they blackmailed? Were they murdered?
• Are there any bibliographic ties betwixt the good Earl’s handwriting and the spellings in the folios and quartos of the canon? Any unusual spellings common to both?
• How about the fallacy – nay, lunacy – of treating literary documents as objective sources of evidence? 
• How about the arrogance of charging the other side with rhetorical cheap shots, and then using rhetorical (not logical, evidentiary) methods to push Oxford's case?
• Why has the alleged identification always faded before? Why were there no contemporary claims? 
• The earl may have wanted to conceal his connection with a money-grubbing trade, but why, in a lively press, did no gossips expose, even posthumously, the stand-in for his imposture?

This book, like all of the books I have read on this subject, is an ideological gem: it takes an assumption (Shakespeare’s work MUST match his life) and then, absent hard evidence, creates a lovely theory-world of intrigue, conspiracy and undercover writing. While not much is known about the gentleman Shakespeare, through those gaps Sobran merrily (and sometimes meanly) drives his conspiracy bus onward, gaining clueless passengers as they ride to the land where naughty earls handpicked country illiterates to front the greatest literary works in our language; the literary equivalent of Oliver Stone. Just why do the Oxfordians believe that a non-nobleman could never have written these? They were too erudite? What about the mistakes found in the plays, some real whoppers? I’ll leave you with one example: over the course of The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, husband to Paulina, the loyal friend to Hermione, abandons a child on the coast of Bohemia, reporting that Hermione appeared to him in a dream and bade him name the girl Perdita. He leaves a fardel (a bundle) by the baby containing gold and other trinkets which suggest that the baby is of noble blood. A violent storm suddenly appears, wrecking the ship on which Antigonus arrived. He wishes to take pity on the child, but is chased away in one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear”. My point? Bohemia is the modern-day Czech Republic…a land-locked country that NOBODY could have been shipwrecked on, something you would think a Peer of the Realm would know but a detail a guy from BFE Stratford-upon-Avon would get wrong.