Suzman told the Observer she felt the time had come to kill off the Shakespeare myths once and for all. “I suddenly got mad as a snake about it,” she said last week. “I realised that so much energy and time is spent on this complete smoke-and-mirrors myth. It annoyed me… I suddenly felt like Joan of Arc riding into battle.”
In the book she writes: “You have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine the earl secretly wrote 37 plays, performed and printed over a quarter of a century, without being found out. And you have to be a snob if you just hate it that the greatest poet the world has produced was born into the humble aldermanic classes of a provincial town.”
It is absurd, she adds, to take the view that “only an aristocrat can enter the soul of a king, or that only a university-trained mind can display such a ready wit. How strange it is that Jacobi and Rylance, hundreds of years later, with their outstanding acting instincts, should embrace such a haughty view of the man who has made them as big as they are … Common sense might not come amiss … I keep wondering exactly when their own professional experience went flying out the window, and why?
“We have seen a dozen times how thrillingly they themselves can conjure up fantastical character studies of fictional persons – without ever having been crowned king or murdered a rival in real life. It’s what actors do for heaven’s sakes, and Shakespeare was one too. It’s called imagination.”
Janet Suzman takes on Mark Rylance and others who claim that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare: