Charles Boyle (8)

I've long been interested in the dramatic events surrounding the death of actor Leslie Howard at the hand of the Nazis in World War II. Returning to England from a propaganda trip (and maybe more secret activities) to Portugal, Howard was aboard an unarmed civilian airliner when it was attacked by German fighter-bombers and shot down over the Bay of Biscay. A great deal of discussion over the years has centered upon this attack, with three theories emerging as most prominent: (1.) the attack show more was a deliberate attempt to kill Howard, whose propaganda work and films ridiculing the Nazi regime had made him a target, and who may possibly have been carrying out a more secret mission on behalf of his government; (2.) the attack was because the Germans somehow mistakenly believed British prime minister Winston Churchill was aboard the plane (despite the fact that with the might of British air power at his disposal, Churchill was quite unlikely to be flying on an unarmed, unescorted regularly-scheduled passenger flight); or (c.) the attack was nothing more than a bit of Nazi nastiness against a random unarmed target. With ANOTHER HAMLET, Charles Boyle has created not a book but an essay and an essay-derived screenplay of sorts in which he posits the suggestion that something else was afoot -- that England knew the Germans were targeting Howard and his plane, but did nothing to prevent the attack because England either did not want to reveal that it had broken the German code OR that Howard was sacrificed because...wait for it...British higher-ups did not want him to continue spreading the rumor that the plays of Shakespeare had been, in fact, written by the Earl of Oxford instead. Now, putting aside the relative believability of the notion that Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden of the British High Command would let their leading propagandist and a national hero die over who really wrote the Shakespeare plays, one must ask why the author himself believes it is one of the possibilities. That belief, according to Mr. Boyle's essay and unproduced screenplay, stems from the fact that Howard said three or four lines about Oxford writing the plays while playing a secret agent who was pretending to be a British academic nincompoop in a film called PIMPERNEL SMITH. In the film, Howard's character wants the Germans he is interacting with to think he's a bit of an absent-minded professor so when they are questioning him about suspected spy activities, he drones on about trivial academic matters such as who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. On the basis of the lines this character says in his subterfuge, Boyle has created the idea that Oxford-as-Shakespeare was the REAL propaganda Leslie Howard was interested in spreading, and that it is possibly the most important theory explaining Howard's death. I have not delved deeply into the various theories of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, as I do not care very much who wrote them, since the plays stand as the plays, regardless of the name on the program. I know there is vocal and intense discussion and disagreement about the issue in academic circles and even in the theatre (though I've heard infinitely less about it from actors than I have from professorial types). It's a discussion worth having. Whether it's a discussion that would have allowed great statesmen to permit a national treasure like Leslie Howard to be murdered for is a leap I'm not willing to make. Therefore, while I admire some of the scholarship Mr. Boyle has indulged in, and while I've always believed a good movie about Howard's life and death was both possible and desirable, the excess baggage Mr. Boyle puts on the last flight Howard took forces me, with deep regret, to shoot it down. show less

Typical Oxfordian fantasy based on nothing but wishful thinking.