Kenneth Branagh stars in and directs an English movie about the later days in the life of William Shakespeare, from a screenplay by Ben Elton. The title is taken from an alternate title, or perhaps more an advertising slogan, for a production of the Life of Henry VIII offered at the Globe Theater, during which, according to the pre-titles a prop canon set the Thames bankside theatre ablaze, burning it to the ground, and with it the creative life of Shakespeare. The film begins with him galloping home to Stratford-Upon-Avon, to settle back into a quiet country life, haunted by the memory of his son, Hamnet, who reportedly died of plague in 1596 at the age of eleven.

The title of “all is true” seems to suggest that the film is making the argument against the controversies surrounding the authorship of the plays and poetry William Shakespeare. The film presents an engaging enough but fairly dramatically limited picture of the domestic home life of the renowned author, taking some sparse public records of his activities in Stratford and drawing a picture of life at home, with a Puritan son-in-law hoping for his fortune and wife long abandoned for his busy days in the London.

If this was the intent, I am unconvinced. The film does make a very clever argument for the oddity of bequeathing his “second best bed” in his will to his wife Anne Hathaway, but not all that much else. The film furthers an authorship controversy theme by postulating that Shakespeare doted on some poetry verses he believed written by his dead son, when his daughter eventually claims that she came up with them and her brother only wrote then down, because boys were taught to write.

This curiously intersects with some of the controversy or at least mystery, surrounding the anonymous publishing of Frankenstein, leading to questions of its authorship over the centuries, and thematically at the center of the recent biopic version of “Mary Shelley”. Kenneth Branagh directed “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” the movie that intended to hear closer to the novel than previous film versions, so that Branagh will be forever connected in search algorithms to Mary Shelley. Perhaps even how you found this article.

The arguments against the man from Stratford, son of a middle-class glove maker, who left a limited education to write of kings and foreign lands with such convincing authenticity, to return to life of middle-class modesty, has always been about where does writing inspiration come from. Some have argued that it was about class, but I have always held it is about experience. The writer of “All is True” was born in Australia, but he writes about Shakespeare because he went to a college in Stratford, and so was steeped in the lore of the town.

If you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, signs in the famed tourist town will warn you that only seven sites in town are officially connected to an historic William Shakespeare. What it doesn’t say is that none of them point to a creator of a library of plays and poems that have defined the English speaking world. The film posits that after the Globe burned down, Shakespeare decided he would never write again and spent his days in solitude digging a garden to honor is dead son, named Hamnet, so close to Hamlet it seems a misspelling by a grave marker mason. In seeming to attempt to answer where the inspiration and knowledge to produce his body of work came from, in the form a question asked by a young writer hopeful, like many a Comicon convention attendee might ask at an autograph signing, “how he did it”, Branagh as Shakespeare, answers dismissively of the earnest seeker of wisdom, that it was all from his imagination.

Mark Twain, who notoriously offered his opinion on many things, especially authorship, a subject he felt close to, was a non-believer in the man from Stratford. Twain complained of his friend and companion author, Bret Harte, that the dialogue of his pioneer west characters had the ring of an author who wrote of people he observed, rather than a life he lived, though the writing did come from his travels in the worlds of his stories. Twain traveled and wrote of his travels, but his most genius books came from his earliest days of personal experience and drawn on people he knew well.

In the present worlds of film and television, aspiring writers are told to “write what you know”. An entire system of hiring writers to work in writers rooms, based not on the alien worlds they can imagine but the authenticity of the lives they’ve experienced are what counts. Writing a courtroom show, hire a former lawyer, a spy show, a former spy. Maybe add some imagination.

Does this relate to the teeming theatre world of the Elizabethan Age of the late 16^th Century? Could a young man of 19 from a small provincial town, seeking a stage acting career, sit down in some inexpensive hovel in London and invent entirely from his own imagination the accurate lives of royal households, details of foreign lands and indeed what was important to foreigners, setting his stories in Italy as mere convention, and produce accurate descriptions of the landscapes of Burgundy, France, cited from Lear by the Shelleys in their travels in the very landscape in the Secret Memoirs on Mary Shelley?

The puzzling question of Shakespeare has always redounded to idea that one man of ultimate genius created that incredible oeuvre of work of vast understanding of the wider world and laser grasp of the human heart and behavior. Whether candidate for authorship be the man from Stratford, DeVere or others, to dismiss the fact of the breadth of Shakespeare’s work as “I imagined it all”, seems at best a hopeful, yet hopelessly hollow, belief in miracles. And then to set it all aside in later life to retire with never a look back, beyond a casual visit with an old theater pal, entirely unsatisfying.

Mary Shelley didn’t just imagine a monster from a waking dream. She took the sum of experiences from her youthful life, her many travels and the complex people she knew and lived with and formed them with some research into one rich and imaginative enduring work. Mark Twain wrote often and the best from his experiences growing up on the Mississippi River in frontier Missouri.

Shakespearian scholars point to historic events which they site to attempt to place the date of his 37 or so credited plays. They count on public notices at the time which seem to indicate an upstart playwright, but relating as much to an actor, but almost no identifiable element that can point to an author’s inspiration or interest from the life of a provincial glove maker’s son who found his way to London, while swaths of elements in the plays and characters can be tied to the lives and experiences lived by others. Maybe Shakespeare was a really good listener and someone offered him visiting privileges to their private library, but to accept that all the Shakespearian canonical lore is true, requires an even broader imagination.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

Get Mary Shelley Memoirs Audiobook Free with Trial at Audible

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook at Amazon