This week saw the premiere at the London Film Festival of ‘Anonymous‘, a film directed by Roland Emmerich which explores the theory that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The 17^th Earl of Oxford was proposed as an alternative author in the early twentieth century by J. Thomas Looney, and although academic consensus rejects the idea, Looney continues to inspire some lively conspiracy theories today: see http://shakespeareidentified.com/ and http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/, for example…

Whereas conspiracy theory websites are by their nature niche, a film soon to be on general release has the potential to reach a great many people. Might cinema-goers up and down the country be so taken in by actor Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of the Earl of Oxford that the authorship rumours will become universally accepted, and Shakespeare pulled down from his pedestal? The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon is concerned and defensive, so much so that this week it launched an original publicity stunt to coincide with the London Film Festival screening of the offending film. On the road signs near his place of birth that proudly proclaim Warwickshire as ‘Shakespeare’s County’, Shakespeare’s name has been temporarily crossed out (see picture here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-15440882). With this very public protest the Trust draws attention to what it sees as an attempt to rewrite English culture and history, their censored road signs emblematising the idea that Shakespeare can’t simply be crossed out and replaced with another name.

Bidding ends on 31 October for the 169 ’emblems’ created by a motley array of writers and artists to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Lawrence Sterne’s marbled page. Dropped into volume III of his enthralling, exasperating shaggy-mammoth story Tristram Shandy, the marbled page is proposed as a ‘motly emblem’ of the work as a whole, with its endless digressions, its unpredictable eddies and cross-currents, its colourful, chancy swirl of ideas. The Lawrence Sterne Trust are auctioning off 169 visual and verbal meditations on Sterne’s 169th page, and in true Sternean fashion are playing a game of anonymity–will you end up with a Quentin Blake, a Lavinia Greenlaw, a Ralph Steadman, an N. F. Simpson, an Iain Sinclair, a Lemony Snicket? The eye-watering exhibition can be viewed here.

Reflecting on last Thursday’s History of Material Texts Seminar, given by John Rink from the Faculty of Music, brings me out in a fit of overblown adjectives. Rink has been at the helm of two extraordinary digitization projects, Chopin’s First Editions Online and The Online Chopin Variorum Edition. His talk took us through the bewildering profusion of different witnesses to Chopin’s scores–compositional drafts, presentation manuscripts, engravers’ manuscripts, proofs, multiple editions issued simultaneously in France, England and Germany–each of which might contain revisions–and printed copies marked up or elaborated by Chopin whilst he was teaching. That level of variability is an editor’s nightmare. (Even the celebrated ‘Funeral March’ from the Second Sonata was rethought and became a mere ‘March’ in some editions). But it’s meat and drink for a hypertext edition, which allows users to move between different versions, cross-compare, and put together their own text from the surviving evidence.

That said, the amount of work which goes into preparing such an edition–in terms not just of acquiring photographs of sufficient quality from archives across the world, but also of marking them up, bar-by-bar, so as to facilitate meaningful comparison between them–is prodigious. The results, though, are hugely worthwhile, since the application of new technologies raises fundamental questions about what a work of music actually is. Did this improvisational composer work towards a final, perfect goal, or did his pieces go on growing endlessly in different environments and different moments? How did publishers (including the women who actually engraved the music) go about regularizing and rationalizing Chopin’s sometimes idiosyncratic drafts? And how much license do performers today have in interpreting the textual evidence?

In questions, Rink suggested that it was fine for performers to pick and choose, in an informed way, from the different witnesses. He saw the quest for musical authenticity as often the enemy of important freedoms, imposing a rigid historicism on playing which in fact always takes place in the present. But he would presumably not condone re-opening Chopin to radical improvisation… How far should we go in our celebration of textual fluidity?

The New Yorker recently published an article about ‘the rise of bulletproof couture’, alerting us to the fact that every world leader worth his or her salt now has defensive panels sewn into a stylish coat or jacket. They’re mostly supplied by a company in Colombia and rely on a miracle formula that improves on Kevlar, the traditional petroleum-based monomer used in bulletproof jackets, which was invented by accident in a lab in the 1960s. The company ships its goods all over the world and is adept at adapting to local tastes–so it has safari vests for Nigeria, tunics for Dubai, and ecclesiastical vestments for Latin America. The churchmen have it easy–they can also buy ‘a bulletproof blanket, which can be thrown over a pulpit’ and ‘a large bulletproof Bible, which a priest can use, mid-sermon, as a protective shield’ (Sept 26, 2011, p. 71).

‘In an increasingly dangerous world threatened by terrorism and militant regimes, our soldiers, police, journalists, NGO workers and others from all walks of life are increasingly coming under fire, and what better a gift than the Bible which can withstand a bullet!’ So reads one website that offers to sell you a life-saving version of Holy Writ. Purists and completists beware: ‘to keep it light, and an easy fit in the backpack or breast pocket of those in the front line, we have just included the New Testament part of the American Standard Version (1901)’. Another such Bible looks like it doesn’t get much further than Genesis, but comes with a 20% discount for ‘active military with ID’. You can also buy versions with more impressive pedigrees–such as a World War II ‘soldier’s bible with a super hard steel metal cover. It was made to be carried in the left breast pocket to cover the heart. It is inscribed May The Lord Be With You.’ One careful owner…

All of this assumes that you need some special hard-binding to make a Bible bulletproof. But the ‘Iconic Books Blog‘ traces legends about soldiers whose lives were saved by the good book back into the nineteenth century, and finds that the latest examples come from the Iraq war. Meanwhile, don’t trust just any heavyweight book to save you. The latest crop of novels may take a while to read, but they can’t stop a bullet–as is proven here, by the doubtless horribly-biased people at Electric Literature.