Da Shakespeare Code

Forget the Billy-Bob Shakespeare we've all come to know and love. Turns out the guy was down-right subversive and wrote in code. Yup. All those lovely little plays were just chockful of dangerous political messages.

Your alternatives are: 1) Get busy re-reading all Shakey's plays and try to figure out his byzantine network of clues that gives away his strong Catholic loyalties and his fears for drab, Protestant Elizabethan England; or 2) Find yourself a copy of Clare Asquith's new book Shadowplay. (Personally, I think she'd sell more copies if she changed the title to Da Shadowplay and wrote under a less pretentious name like, say, Dan Brown.)

Asquith contends that Elizabethan Blighty was fraught with dangers for Will and all loyal Catholics, so he had to pretend to suck up to the Queen and her new-found religion with plays that sold the current political line. Still he was a good Catholic boy, so he coded the language and images in his plays to get him off the hook, eternally speaking. He was also more edu-ma-cated that previously surmised, sneaking off to Oxford for some real readin' and writin' (not sure about the 'rithmatic).

It was scary times in England:

It is now widely accepted that the era was not a period of political consensus, says Asquith. Instead, it was a time in which opposition voices were banished and censorship meant the burning of illegal pamphlets and printed works.

Whew! Sounds suspiciously like 21st century USA, eh? I really must start coding these blogs. All right, my little Gad-Poor-Alecks, you can read about it in today's The Observer.