Hey Kevin,

I got a great review in the main city paper the Montreal Gazette today with
a photo.  Check it out.  I've pasted it underneath if you can't click over
to it.

Long live Mark Twain.

Keir

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/columnists/story.asp?id=DAAE3FC6-98E4-4392-BFB4-365704C041A6


Seeking Shakespeare's ghostwriter

MATT RADZ
The Gazette

Saturday, January 11, 2003

The orthodox theory that an obscure country bumpkin from Stratford who quit
school at age 15 wrote the "Compleat Works of William Shakespeare" is a
fabrication stitched with surmise and conjecture by tenured English Lit.
Dept. troglodytes.

That's the Bard-gospel truth preached by Fringe-circuit superstar Keir
Cutler, one of the two solo acts at this year's Wildside Festival of
cutting-edge drama running at Centaur Theatre until Saturday, Jan.18.

Cutler dons lawyer's robes and wields an impressive plaster bust of the
Divine Will, purchased online, in casting more than just reasonable doubt on
the alleged authorship of the more than three dozen plays, 154 sonnets and
poetry generally attributed to "Shakespeare."

Is Shakespeare Dead? Cutler's dramatic monologue, constructs an irrefutable
case against the glove-maker's son from Stratford, arguing with passionate
conviction that the 17th Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere), Christopher
Marlowe or Francis Bacon were all far more likely to have written the Works,
as were several other Earls, and for that matter, Queen Elizabeth I herself.

"If Francis Bacon didn't write the Works of Shakespeare, he missed the
opportunity of a lifetime," Cutler says in pointing to what he considers the
likely solution to literature's most persistent puzzle.

But we'll never know who really wrote Hamlet, Titus Andronicus or Richard
III, he admits. This is because of the academic troglodytes' power to
assume, the high stakes Bard tourist-trade, and the blanks in our knowledge
of the literary activities of a man who started out in theatre by holding
playgoers' horses just outside of it.

"The few available facts about Shakespeare's life are mostly mundane
details," says the Wordsworth Dictionary of Shakespeare. By contrast, we
know plenty about Marlowe, Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, all of it
consistent with the supreme knowledge of the world and the human heart
reflected in the Works.

Is Shakespeare Dead? was inspired by Mark Twain, whose skepticism about
Shakespeare's role as the Greatest Author of All Time has been shared over
the years by such bright lights as Walt Whitman, James Joyce and Charles
Dickens, as well as by Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles.

Cutler has a unique talent for knocking library dust off serious research
and a gift for being smart without boring the audience, as displayed in the
brilliant urban satire Teaching Detroit performed at last year's edition of
Wildside.

Is Shakespeare Dead? marshals startling facts into an elegant and often
tenacious argument that floats on a current of delicious irony.

Cutler delivers his 45-minute summation again at 7 tonight