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Who Wrote Don Quixote?
By Francis Carr
198 pages
Published by Xlibris at $17.84 (paperback)
Dateline: 12th May, 2005
For the past 40 years Francis Carr has run the Shakespeare Authorship
Information Centre. Its raison d'être: to prove that Shakespeare
didn't write the plays which bear his name.
I interviewed Carr a few years ago for a documentary I was making on
the authorship controversy. He described Shakespeare as the "abominable
no-man" because "there is no evidence he was born in the birthplace
(in Stratford); there is no evidence that he went to school; there is
no evidence that his parents or his children were educated; there is
no Shakespeare play in manuscript; there is no evidence that Shakespeare
could write; there is no name on his grave in the church at Stratford;
and there was no notice taken of his death - nobody mentioned it until
seven years later."
Carr firmly believes that the lawyer, philosopher, scientist and Lord
Chancellor Francis Bacon was the true author
Now Carr has gone one step further: he reckons Bacon also wrote Don
Quixote, voted the best book of all time in a survey of about 100
of the world's most revered authors.
According to Carr, Cervantes wrote only one masterpiece - and that
was the novel Don Quixote. It was far better than his plays which
are "flat-footed and frequently garrulous. He never mastered the
techniques of writing for the stage."
There are indeed parallels between the lives of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
Much of the Stratford man's background is sketchy and no one knows what
happened during the "lost years". Similarly there is no record
of Cervantes from his birth to when he was 22.
Four decades of Cervantes' life were marked by failure, says Carr,
and when Cervantes died there was no record of his burial place, no
will and no manuscript. Very much like Shakespeare.
The problem with Who Wrote Don Quixote? is that it takes too
long to get to the nub of the story. Carr spends half a dozen chapters
delving into Cervantes' life and arguing that the English text of Don
Quixote came before the Spanish translation. It's not until page 83
that there's a suggestion that Francis Bacon might have been the author
of Don Quixote.
Carr then cites quotations in the works of Cervantes, Bacon and Shakespeare:
"The appearance of identical or similar phrases points unequivocally
to one single author," he states. However, this fails to take into
account the lack of copyright in the 16th and 17th centuries, when plagiarism
was rife. And I fail to see how Cervantes' "The honest woman gets
not a good name only with being good, but in appearing so", Bacon's
"Machiavel directs men to have little regard for virtue itself,
but only for the show and public reputation of it" and Shakespeare's
"Assume a virtue if you have it not" are identical.
When Carr talks about the importance of the number 33, which is supposed
to indicate a code, and several lines of text which make a "Y"
formation and point to Bacon as the author, I'm left way behind.
Although Carr makes a convincing argument that Don Quixote was
written by an Englishman and the text was later translated into Spanish,
he harms his cause by talking about hidden meanings. After all, even
the respected author N B Cockburn said in his book The Bacon Shakespeare
Question that Baconians took a wrong turn when they became obsessed
with ciphers and "a moment's thought shows the utter absurdity
of the Baconian concept of cryptograms".
BTG editor Peter Lathan has argued in these
pages that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Yet there are a growing number
of people who are sceptical about the Stratford man's credentials; Mark
Twain and Shakespeare's Globe artistic director Mark Rylance are among
those who believe Bacon actually wrote the plays.
It's a fascinating idea that Francis Bacon was such a prolific author
that he could write a major tome like Don Quixote as well as
the whole Shakespeare canon. But is anyone really bothered who wrote
Don Quixote? If it could be proved that Bacon wrote Shakespeare,
people would look on Bacon in a different light and would be more inclined
to accept that he wrote under the name of Cervantes too. Until then,
Who Wrote Don Quixote? will remain a book that slots into the
"quaint idea" rather than the "life-changing" category.
Steve Orme
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