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_____N e i t h e r   a   b o r r o w e r   . . .

 
Were parts of the hit movie "Shakespeare in Love" lifted from an obscure 1941 novel?

BY CRAIG OFFMAN
When Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman accepted their Golden Globes last week for best screenplay, Hollywood got a quick boost in literary credibility. The collaboration of a British playwright and theatrical blue blood like Stoppard and L.A. screenwriter Norman on "Shakespeare in Love" seemed to confirm that movies could be smart, make money and win awards. The crowds applauded wildly for this marriage of true minds. Yet there may be another couple that didn't get their just reward.

That would be Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, who wrote the 1941 comic novel "No Bed for Bacon." For anyone familiar with the plot of the movie, the superficial resemblance between film and book is remarkable. In the introduction to a 1986 Hogarth Press reprint of "No Bed for Bacon," BBC radio personality Ned Sherrin sums up the novel's story: "Lady Viola Compton, a young girl from the Queen's Court, visits the theatre and is so infatuated by Shakespeare and his plays that she disguises herself as a boy player and inspires 'Twelfth Night' and the playwright's affection."

And there are other similarities. Early in both versions, an ambitious William Shakespeare experiments with variations on his signature. The novel makes much of the friction between Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, who has been flirting with Lady Viola. In the film, Lord Wessex, a stuffed shirt with a plantation in Virginia, is engaged to Lady Viola. Both film and novel make a running joke out of the odd places Shakespeare gets his most famous ideas. In the film, he steals lines from a Bible-thumping anti-theater clergyman; in the book, a couple of minor actors suggest a play about a Danish prince with a comic gravedigger. Sir Francis Bacon offers young Will a few tips in "No Bed for Bacon"; in the movie, playwright Christopher Marlowe provides an essential plot twist for "Romeo and Juliet" (both men have been suggested by some historians to be the actual authors of Shakespeare plays). Both versions feature the same grand scene, in which a troubled production of Shakespeare's play finally reaches the stage after many disasters (in both cases, connived by a rival theater owner) -- only to have one of the first actors on stage struggle to spit out his lines.

Yet measure for measure, the differences may outweigh the similarities. In the film, Will's marriage to his faraway wife and Viola's reluctant engagement to Lord Wessex provide the obstacles to their true romance. In the novel, there don't seem to be any obstacles beyond the Victorian sensibilities of the authors, whose style can only be described as more English than the English. (Despite their WASP-y pen names, Brahms and Simon -- nee Abrahams and Skidelsky-- were both Jews, from Turkey and Manchuria, respectively.) Unlike Viola De Lessups of "Shakespeare in Love," Viola Compton of "No Bed for Bacon" joins the theater on a whim, rather than out of a lifelong passion for the stage -- and Will Shakespeare's not much of an actor. Marlowe has died before the beginning of the novel (even if the death of a fellow actor disturbs the Will in "No Bed for Bacon" almost as much as Marlowe's murder troubles the Will in "Shakespeare in Love"). Finally, the romantic plot that dominates the movie is only a subplot in the novel. The book, considered a witty success in its day, contains much tedious nonsense about Francis Bacon trying to obtain a bed in which the queen has slept and Sir Walter Raleigh's doomed efforts to own the court's most sumptuous cloak (you can see where that one's heading). And "No Bed for Bacon" culminates in a long, nostalgic remembrance of England's defeat of the Spanish Armada.

If Stoppard and Norman did find inspiration for "Shakespeare in Love" in "No Bed for Bacon," their borrowings would certainly be in the finest tradition of the Bard himself, who never met a plot in old books he didn't like. But whether they did or not, one thing is sure: Stoppard possessed and had looked at the novel. Ned Sherrin, who penned the introduction to the 1986 edition of the novel, is a fixture of the London theater scene, an old friend of Stoppard's, a friend to the late writers Brahms and Simon and the executor of the rights to "No Bed for Bacon," which he and the pair made into a short-lived stage musical. After Sherrin discovered that Stoppard would be working on the rewrite of Norman's script, he gave Stoppard a copy of the novel. In an interview with Salon, Sherrin seemed unsure of just how much Stoppard availed himself of the gift. In his view, Stoppard made a "few affectionate nods" to the novel -- namely the scene in which Shakespeare practices his signature, and a scene in which Raleigh lays down his cloak for Her Majesty to step over a puddle. But later in the conversation, Sherrin claimed that Stoppard "made jolly careful not to plunder" the book. David Parfitt, the movie's producer, told Salon something similar: "When we were putting together references, Tom looked at the book, flipped through it and decided it wasn't useful."

Stoppard, visiting India at the time of press, was unavailable for comment. But this week the playwright wrote a letter to London's Evening Standard, responding to a charge in the paper that he had "swallowed a large slice of 'Bacon.'" "My knowledge of the book is so skimpy that these cross-references were news to me, too," he explains. "This is not surprising: both book and screenplay borrow from the same well of Shakespeareana." Norman, the originator of the screenplay, is less ambiguous. "I've never seen, read this novel or until recently even heard of it," Norman said to Salon. "Any student who studies Shakespeare's life soon finds there are very few facts, but a great body of lore."

With an M.A. in English literature from UC-Berkeley, Norman seems comfortable utilizing historical information about Shakespeare's life and times. And certainly the similarity between screenplay and book may be explained by the fact that both seize upon some of the easiest jokes that the Shakespearean legacy has to offer -- Shakespeare's vanity over his signature, girls dressed as boys, jesting gravediggers, the cloak thrown over the puddle.

But can all of the coincidences between "Shakespeare in Love" and "No Bed for Bacon" be attributed to the common pool of Shakespearean lore? Some correspondences remain provocative. In Norman's original version of the screenplay, for example, the heroine's name is Belinda -- only toward the end of the filming did Stoppard change her name to Viola. (Of course, one could argue that if Stoppard was trying to conceal a debt to the novel, he would hardly have changed his heroine's name to the one used in that novel.)

As the popular and critical enthusiasm for "Shakespeare in Love" escalates and Stoppard and Norman rack up awards -- the screenplay also has been nominated for the Writer's Guild Association's award and is being touted as a dark-horse candidate for an Oscar -- Brahms and Simon's book languishes in oblivion. While "Shakespeare in Love" is dubbed "the most enchanting entertainment of the year" by the New York Times, and Stoppard and Norman are profiled glowingly in that newspaper and elsewhere, "No Bed for Bacon" receives nary a nod. Hogarth Press, a division of Random House in Britain, has no record of the novel, and Sherrin, the executor, has no plans to reprint it. "I've never heard of it," replied a Hogarth editorial staffer when asked about the novel's status. Well, he has now.
SALON | Feb. 5, 1999

Craig Offman is a writer-reporter for Time magazine.