Strange to be a friend as well for fifty years of Michael Kirby whom he tried to destroy. It’s a funny old world, as Private Eye used to say.

It is now clear Bill must absent himself from the Senate for the three or four years it takes to clear his name of the charge of homophobic knuckling, and Pyne from the House while his treason, if that is the charge, in seeking to overthrow the speaker in wartime goes to the High Court and is appealed and reinvestigated by a Royal Commision for a year or two.

This will secure Labor the numbers they need, with or without Craig or Slipper, to eneact and protect the many new laws that will ensure their re-election.

Discuss.

He said in his blog I had ruined my career by defending Strauss-Kahn and his rude, rapid bedtime ways, which I called ‘vigorous wooing’ of the sort that was common in the fifties when Dominique and I were teenagers in the back seat of cars in different drive-ins in different hemispheres, and I should henceforth give up writing, I was finished, no way back, trousers round my kneees and shitting semen, and the rest of it. He said Strauss-Kahn was guilty of rape, the oral rape without a weapon of a woman twice his size in three minutes, a Guinness world record if I ever heard one; and,when he proved innocent and his ‘victim’ daft as Ashby, made no apology. What a grub he is. He kept proclaiming himself the winner of our dialogue, and asking me to go away. No doubt he would have punched me had I taken up, at seventy, his offer of a stoush in the street.

The principal dinner guest, Joe McGinnis, the writer of Rogue: A Seach For Sarah Palin, admires both him and me. He was a good man as old as I am and exactly as I wanted him to be: a sane Mailer, a cool and sober, unarmed and slim-spoken Hunter Thompson, a Waugh, a Breslin, a Bryson, who travels the miles and does the research and risks his life (like Hitch) and prevails, and changes the world.  It was surprising to hear such a notable immortal quoting my work with accuracy but there you go. I read first in I971 his The Selling Of The President but no book since. I have a lot if catching up to do. His dialogue with Annabel is a near classic, and should be punched up on your computer and heard in bed with a friend. She ‘stalked’ him, she said, and you can tell this is in some way, though not the obvious one, partly true.

Annabel is a superb cook, but involves herself in the kitchen so much she is barely part of the conversation, one she would illuminate. We did not speak of the Crabb Wars. We remain, I think, friends. She is the best example I know of that unique genus Adelaide Woman: beautiful, articulate, multi-tasking, sexually under-occupied, authentic, true of heart.

It was a model dinner party in many ways, Mark Colvin taking time off his dialysis to be there. But what would I know. I have been out of the loop for thirty years and sometimes, not always, regret it.

Certainly, destiny may easier be foreseen, than avoided: considering the strange and wonderful signs that were said to be seen before Caesar’s death. For, touching the fires in the element, and spirits running up and down in the night, and also these solitary birds to be seen at noon days sitting in the great market place: and divers men going up and down in fire: and furthermore, that there was a slave of the soldiers that did cast a marvellous burning flame out of his hand, insomuch as they that saw it thought he had been burnt, but when the fire was out it was found he had no hurt. Caesar himself also doing sacrifice unto the gods founds that one of the beasts which was sacrificed had no heart; and that was a strange thing in nature, how a beast could live without a heart. Furthermore there was a certain soothsayer that had given Caesar warning long time afore to take heed of the day of the Ides of March, which is the fifteenth of the month, for on that day he should be in great danger. That day being come, Caesar going unto the Senate house, and, speaking merrily to the soothsayer, told him the Idea of March be come: so be they, softly answered the soothsayer, but yet are they not past. And the very day before, Caesar supping with Marcus Lepidus sealed certain letters as he was wont to do at the board: so talk falling out amongst them, reasoning what death was best: he preventing their opinions, cried out aloud, death unlooked for.

Then going to bed the same night as his manner was, and lying with his wife Calpurnia, all the windows and doors of his chamber flying open, the noise awoke him, and made him afraid when he saw such light: but more, when he heard his wife Calpurnia, being fast asleep, weep and sigh, and put forth many fumbling lamentable speeches. For she dreamed that Caesar was slain, and that she had him in her arms. Insomuch that Caesar rising in the morning, she prayed him if it were possible, not to go out of the doors that day, but to adjourn the session of the Senate until another day.

But in the meantime came Decius Brutus, surnamed Albinus, in whom Caesar put such confidence that in his last will and testament he had appointed him to be his next heir, and yet was of the conspiracy with Cassius and Brutus: he fearing that if Caesar did adjourn the Senate that day, the conspiracy would out, laughed the soothsayers to scorn, and reproved Caesar, saying: that he gave the Senate occasion to mislike with him, and that they might think he mocked them, considering that by his commandment they were assembled, and that they were ready willingly to grant him all things, and to proclaim him king of all the provinces of the Empire of Rome, and that he should wear his diadem both by sea and land. And furthermore, that if any man should tell them from him, they should return again when Calpurnia should have better dreams.

Therewithal he took Caesar by the hand, and brought him out of his house. Caesar was not gone far from his house but one Artemidorus, a Doctor of Rhetoric in the Greek tongue, who by means of his profession was very familiar with certain of Brutus’ confederates, and therefore knew the most part of all their practises against Caesar, came and brought him a little bill written with his own hand of all that he meant to tell him, and said: Caesar, read this memorial to yourself, and that quickly, for they be matters of great weight and touch you nearly. Caesar took it of him, but could never read it, though he many times attempted it, for the number of people that did salute him: but holding it still in his hand, went on withal into the Senate house, and all the Senate stood up on their feet to do him honour.

Then part of Brutus’ company and confederates stood round about Caesar’s chair, and part of them also came towards him, as though they made suit with Metellus Cimber to call home his brother again from banishment: and, thus prosecuting still their suit, they followed Caesar, till he was set in his chair. Who, denying their petitions, and being offended with them one after another because the more they were denied the more they pressed upon him and were the earnester with him: Metellus at length, taking his gown with both his hands pulled it over his neck, which was the sign given the confederates to set upon him. Then Casca behind him strake him in the neck with his sword, howbeit the wounds was not great nor mortal, because it seemed the fear of such a devilish attempt did amaze him and take his strength from him, that he killed him not at the first blow. But Caesar turning straight unto him caught hold of his sword and held it hard: and they both cried out, Caesar in Latin: O vile traitor, Casca, what doest thou? And Casca in Greek to his brother, brother, help me. At the beginning of this stir, they that were present, not knowing of the conspiracy, were so amazed with the horrible sight they saw that they had no power to fly, neither to help him, no so much as once to make any outcry.

They on thother side that had conspired his death compassed him in on every side with their swords drawn in their hands, that Caesar turned him nowhere but he was striken at by some, and still had naked swords in his face, and was hacked and mangled among them as a wild beast taken of hunters. For it was agreed among them that every man should give him a wound, because all their parts should in this murder: and then Brutus himself gave him one wound about his privities. Men report also that Caesar did still defend himself against the rest, running every way with his body: but when he saw Brutus with his sword drawn in his hand, then he pulled his gown over his head, and made no more resistance, and was driven either casually, or purposedly, by the counsel of the conspirators against the base whereupon Pompey’s image stood, which ran all of a gore blood, till he was slain.

Thus it seemed that the image took just revenge of Pompey’s enemy, being thrown down on the ground at his feet, and yielding up his ghost there, for the number of wounds he had upon him. For it is reported that he had three and twenty wounds upon his body: and divers of the conspirators did hurt themselves, striking one body with so many blows.

Caesar died at six and fifty years of age: and Pompey also lived not passing four years more than he. So he reaped no other fruit of all his reign and dominion, which he had so vehemently desired all his life, and pursued with such extreme danger: but a vain name only, and a superficial glory, that procured him the envy and hatred of his country.

This second passage is from Sir (aka Saint) Thomas More’s unfinished life of Richard III, as told to him by an eyewitness, the Bishop of Ely. It turns up, almost unchanged, as ‘the strawberry scene’ in what soon proved to be, alongside Lear and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s most popular play:

Soon after, that is, to wit, on the Friday the thirteenth day of June, many lords assembled in the Tower, and there sat in counsel, devising the honourable solemnity of the king’s coronation, and the Protector came in among them, about nine of the clock, saluting them courteously, and excusing himself that he had been from them so long, saying merely that he had been a-sleep that day. And after a little talking with them, he said unto the Bishop of Ely: ‘My lord, you have very good strawberries at your garden in Holborn. I require you let us have a mess of them.’

‘Gladly my lord,’ quoth he, ‘would God I had some better thing as ready to your pleasure as that.’ And therewith in all the haste he sent his servant for a mess of strawberries. The Protector set the lords fast in commoning, and thereupon praying them to spare him for a little while, departed thence.

And soon after he returned into the chamber among them, all changed – with a wonderful sour angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and gnawing on his lips, and so sat him down in his place: all the lords much dismayed and sore marvelling of this manner of sudden change, and what thing should him ail. Then when he had sitten still a while, thus he began:

‘What were they worthy to have, that compass and imagine the destruction of me, being so near of blood unto the King and Protector of his royal person and his realm?’

At this question, all the lords sat sore astonied, musing much by whom this question should be meant, of which every man wist himself clear. Then the Lord Chamberlain said that they were worthy to be punished as heinous traitors whatsoever they were. And all the others affirmed the same.

‘That is yonder sorceress my brother’s wife and other with her.’ Meaning the queen. ‘Ye shall all see in what wise that sorceress and that other witch of her counsel, Shore’s wife, with their affinity have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body.’

And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, where he showed a werish withered arm and small, as it was never other. And thereupon every man’s mind sore misgave them, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel. For well they wist, that the queen was too wise to go about any such folly. And also if she would, yet would she of all folk least make Shore’s wife her counsel, whom of all women she most hated, as that concubine whom the king her husband had most loved. And also no man was there present, but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth. Natheless the Lord Chamberlain (which from the death of King Edward kept Shore’s wife, on whom he somewhat doted in the king’s life, saving as it is said he that while forbare her of reverence toward his king, or else of a certain kind of fidelity to his friend) answered and said: ‘certainly my lord if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous punishment. ‘

‘What, thou servest me I wean with ifs and ands? I tell thee they have so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor!’

And therewith as in a great anger, he clapped his fist upon the board a great rap. At which token given, one cried ‘treason!’ without the chamber. Therewith a door clapped, and in come there rushing men in harness as many as the chamber might hold. And anon the Protector said to the Lord Hastings:

‘I arrest the traitor!’

‘What, me, my lord?’ quoth he.

‘Yea, the traitor!’ quoth the Protector. And another let flee at the Lord Stanley, who shrunk at the stroke and fell under the table, or else his head had been cleft to the teeth: for as shortly as he shrank, yet ran the blood about his ears.

Then were they all quickly bestowed in divers chambers, except the Lord Chamberlain, whom the Lord Protector bade speed. ‘And shrive him apace, for by Saint Paul I will not to dinner till I see thy head off.’

It booted him not to ask why but heavily he took a priest at adventure, and made a short shrift, for longer would not be suffered, the Protector made so much haste to dinner: which he might not go to till this were done for saving of his oath. So was he brought forth into the green beside the chapel within the Tower, and his head laid down upon a long log of timber, and there stricken off, and afterward his body with the head entered at Windsor beside the body of King Edward, whose both souls our Lord pardon.

For he did not write alone. It is known that the three Henry VIs, A Winter’s Tale, Pericles, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Tragedy Of Sir Thomas More and The Yorkshire Tragedy, to name but nine, had other writers. It is thought the Porter scene in Macbeth was a ‘turn’ done, in stand-up comedy style, by the actor. It is thought that the Falstaff scenes might have been in part improvised, or co-written, by the company clown Will Kempe who in his book Morris-Dancing From John O’ Groats To Land’s End showed how good a writer he was. It is also known that parts of Dr Faustus were not by Marlowe, Beaumont wrote plays with Fletcher, Fletcher with Shakespeare, Webster with Beaumont, Webster with Ford, and it is not known for certain who wrote The Spanish Tragedy or The Revenger’s Tragedy or the Ur-Hamlet though Kyd, Tourneur and Shakespeare when young, or Kyd perhaps, or Greene,are at present the prime suspects.

It is, however, certain that about twenty percent of Julius Caesar was written by Tom North and all of it, including the ghost scene, cribbed from his translation of Plutarch, and about thirty percent of Antony and Cleopatra. It is also certain that at least one scene, the ‘strawberry’ scene , of Richard III was lifted word for word from St Thomas More’s unfinished biography of him, and the ‘never a borrower nor a lender’ speech of Polonius was one Lord Burleigh gave unremittingly to anyone who, in his blithering old age, would listen to him. The ‘hey ho, the wind and the rain’ song, which appears in both Lear and Twelfth Night, may have been by another hand (the tune certainly was) and a good deal of Hamlet’s philosophising was derived from Montaigne and the witch’s chant from a Scottish cult known to James I, a direct descendant of Macbeth.

So here we have, almost for certain, ‘Shakespeare’ working with twenty-two collaborators in eighteen years. Or perhaps only eighteen. It is not too big a stretch, I submit, m’lud, for ‘Shakespeare’ to be someone other than Will Shaxper, the jobbing actor, theatre co-owner, grain merchant, real estate speculator and part-time stage director. In the modern age, films written by the Hollywood Ten were signed — as in The Front — by men of lesser talent who won Oscars for them; C. Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, a royalist snob like Edward De Vere, wrote, fearful of exposure, detective stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake; Gore Vidal ditto under the name Edgar Box; Orson Welles claimed to have written all of the works on his Radio Theatre when other hands, Howard Koch, the co-author of Casablanca, among them, wrote most of them, including the War Of The Worlds script that rocketed Orson to Hollywood fame; John F. Kennedy signed a book, Profiles of Power, that was written by Ted Sorensen and won the Pulitzer Prize; Paul Keating ‘owned’ a Redfern Speech that was written by Don Watson and praised world-wide; Julia Gillard ‘gives’ Gallipoli speeches written by Carl Green; and there were even the strange sur-titles, ‘Verdi’s Othello’, ‘Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet’, and ‘Barry Kosky’s King Lear’.

For now as then, authorship is a fluid concept. I wrote episodes of Number 96 that Don Cash and Bill Harmon in some way ‘owned’. My wife Anne Brooksbank wrote episodes of A Country Practice that Jim Davern still makes big money from. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks wrote sketches that Sid Caesar miraculously ‘owned’ and made famous,’ Big Julie, I told him, don’t go, already’; and so on. Even so it was in ‘Shakespeare’s’ time actors, musicians, royal patrons added lines and scenes {as Hamlet did to ‘The Mousetrap’) to texts that differed from week to week and town to town, a longer version at Bankside, a shorter version at Richmond, and so on.

And it may well be that Will Shaxper, as Andrew Upton does now, overvalued his contribution to a text that arrived by messenger from time to time from a lordly, diffident aristocrat, who wrote and did not sign it. Will would have copied it out several times, or bits of it, in his own hand, and given it to actors that he then cast and directed in it, playing some of the parts himself, as Orson did his various adaptations of Conrad, Melville and H.G. Wells; but that is hardly ‘writing the plays’ as John Bell said he did.

It is worth noting that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and that Macbeth, premiered that year, is half as long as Hamlet, and its hero/villain has no death speech as do all his predecessors, perhaps because the playwright died before he could supply it or work the play over; and that no other dying hero thereafter (Coriolanus, Timon) has one either. So Doug Quixote’s idea that fragments of eight or nine plays were worked on by De Vere’s Men not always competently makes some sense. Nothing after Othello actually works. Antony and Cleopatra is hopeless, unplayable and free of sexual interest; Cymbeline is ridiculous, and described by the supportive Dr Johnson as ‘unresisting imbecility’. Pericles uses a rough-hewn verse form that seems alien to its ‘author’. The first act of a Winter’s Tale is a frantic, pox-driven, stammering nonsense. Henry VIII is a windy plotless cock-up; The Tempest full of lordly debating points but free of narrative. Oxford, dead, is no longer there to give a work its overarching momentum. Minnows shuffled about, trying to sort it. Coriolanus was not performed till 1632, when most of the company were dead; Timon not even in that century.

I will put up in these columns a chapter of Tom North’s Plutarch’s account (note how the apostrophes accumulate) of the last days of Julius Caesar; and then ask you to tell me the ‘author’ of scenes very like them in ‘Shakespeare’s’ most enduring and accessible work. It was successful, I submit, m’lud, because it was reportage of actual events more than a work of the imagination. It had no more ‘author’ than Oliver Stone’s JFK.

And a great deal of ‘Shakespeare’s’ work was like that.

And Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, suitor if Queen Elizabeth, the first of that name, who sent his wife, Burleigh’s daughter, to a nunnery,coould have been part of the mix.

Discuss.

What was Katter’s party on? Where did his preferences go? Did they ask?

Come on.

They know full well the swing away from Labor federally is to Katter, and ninety percent of it will come back in preferences.

This is in a week when Labor picked up half a million votes according to Newspoll and a million actually.

Doomed is it? Really?

The million more votes it got put it on 49. It can win from there. When the eight hundred dollar, and the sixteen hundred dollar, cheques come in for the migrant parents of schoolkids it will go to 50. When they come in again next year and Abbott proposes to cancel them, to 52. That’s a landslide.

And when it becomes better known that Hockey on Wednesday promised to cancel the money now promised to blind, crippled and intellectually challenged children, it will go to 54.

And that’s a wipeout. A Coalition left with twenty-five seats, and the Katter Australian Party with twenty.

But this is what journos do in the Murdoch Age. They stick to the plan. They print the legend. They ignore the numbers and skitter about shouting doom and quicksand and bunker and class war.

What a pathetic bunch they are.

And how soon unemployed, the lot of them.

We have a right to know.

First item is that nothing of interest was burned in the fire at “Shakespeare’s house”, for De Vere did not live there.

One of De Vere’s houses was sold in about 1590 and the lady who bought it mysteriously turned up with a Shakespearean poem in about 1591, later published. Very interesting as ‘Shakespeare’ published no poetry before the classics “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”.

(Published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, that was)

The next item of interest is from Derek Jacobi :

“Like a growing number of interested parties, I have had grave doubts for some time now of the validity of the Stratford man’s claim to have written some of the greatest literature the world has produced. Indeed, I must admit that it still seems incredible to me that one mind could possibly have encompassed such a monumental feat–but if so, that man is most likely to have been Edward de Vere–possibly with a little collaboration. …

I have taken part in thirty-one of the plays so far, and I can imagine–I can feel–someone behind the words whose education and life experiences, whose knowledge of all strata of society, whose relationships and temperament simply do not fit the grain hoarder, the money lender and the entrepreneur, but chime accurately, and at times indelibly, with what we know about de Vere. And it’s not enough to say, “Oh, but the works of Shakespeare survive whoever wrote them; it doesn’t therefore matter.” Yes, it does! The disclosure of the real author would enhance not only the historical significance but also the contemporary excitement of these treasures for both actors and spectators; and it shouldn’t be regarded as potential professional suicide, heresy or an actor’s silliness to come out and say so. “ (Derek Jacobi)

Jacobi has lived and breathed Shakespeare for forty years, and may have aquired some insights.

As Eric Blair was ‘George Orwell’, so is Edward De Vere ‘William Shakespeare’.

….allthumbs May 19, 2012 at 12:51 am

Ah but Doug, John Bell of Bell Shakespeare is of the opposite hue, see his book “On Shakespeare” and draws the exact opposite conclusion.

Funnily enough I was reading Stephen Greenblat’s “Will in the World” and he makes reference to a view from a Stratford bridge, where the current of water does a strange curling back on itself and Shakespeare uses it in one of his plays, and Greenblatt notes something like only a Warwickshire lad would have noticed that, and De Vere is no Warwickshire lad. Not more than a day later I was persuing some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and by sheer chance noticed the following lines from the story of Scylla and MInos:

Just as the Phrygian river Meander sports and plays in his running stream with the ebb and flow of his teasing course-
and keeps his wavering currents in motion, back to their headspring, or out to the open sea so Dadedalus’ warren of passages wandered this way and that.

Now, it is often said that Shakespeare used and cited Ovid often and lovingly, and his grammar school education would have had him learning the entire book by rote in Latin. And is it not uncanny that a Warwickshire lad would note the similarity of the eccentric way a river ran in the same motion, in Stratford as in ancient Greece? And would that not have been a moment of wonderful pleasure to notice such a thing and marry the two instances? Please don’t say, “and your point is?” I offer it as an observation.

…..Doug Quixote May 19, 2012 at 6:59 am

And thus do all the Stratfordian apologists.

They find a passage which might be twisted to support the illiterate man of Stratford, and then extrapolate “it must have” and “surely he did”
etc etc etc.

Have you looked at this site?

http://www.authorshipstudies.org/index.cfm

There are several articles, well researched and written.

De Vere loved Ovid. In his youth he lived with Arthur Golding :

“Scholars regard Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a leading influence on Shakespeare, second only to the Bible.

Arthur Golding was Edward de Vere’s maternal uncle, and Edward, when a teen, lived with him. Golding, in a dedication of one of his works to the young Edward de Vere, saluted his nephew’s interest in and command of history.”

(Mark Alexander and Prof Daniel Wright op cit.)

Third item is that De Vere had work in progress at the date of his death, and it seems clear to me that several of the later plays were unfinished, and other hands tried to complete them – as Schussmeyer completed Mozart’s Requiem, and as Barry Cooper has attempted to complete Beethoven’s “10th symphony”.

Since De Vere died in June 1604, the dates of the plays should be revised; but as we generally accept Mozart’s Requiem, so may we accept that Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles and Henry VIII in particular were partly completed by other playwrights, but are still ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays.

‘If it means saying he shouldn’t get a hundred times the wage of a night nurse, I’m all for it.

‘Why should he get that much? Can somebody tells us? He digs up stuff we own and he doesn’t even dig it. He doesn’t risk his life, as miners do, in any way. He merely provides the shovel.

‘If it’s Class War to say this is unfair then I’m a warrior.

‘Bring it on.’

In the Q&A after I asked Duigan if this film about the choices faced by university students, one of which was part-time prostitution, was about ‘Howard’s children, or Dawkins’ children’; and he havered, calling it a ‘very interesting question’. Both, I would think, is the answer; how ridiculous that university students in this bitterly competitive postgraduate world should be forced into any extra work at all, and that rich parents are the crucial advantage in this world. A levy of a dollar a week on every taxpayer would end this inequality. Even at a dollar twenty it would be worth it.

Student prostitution is growing world-wide, with Asian females preferred: ‘the other’, as always, attracts. Though only two nude shots of Linh, the central character in this film, occur and they are tasteful, it is clear that this is so, and too much risk, too much shame, too much soul-distortion and heartbreak result from this Dawkins-led adjustment to lifestyle and urban corruption (Dawkins, born rich, never understood this) to let it continue any longer. They get AIDS, for Christ’s sake. They die of it. They get beaten to death. Too great a cost for a degree in Philosophy, surely.

The film is much funnier on the big screen; not exactly a hoot, but wryly and sometimes harshly amusing in its football-vernacular and student-tutorial scenes, and Duigan himself as an egoistic lecturer pleased to be called ‘sire’ shows that he gets it, on many levels, this awful question of what men need, or require, or quite like sometimes, and how dire is a woman’s task to now and then provide it. Barry Humphries thought it was ‘very good indeed’; and agreed, or I think he did, to play Noel Coward in my and Denny’s Intimate Stranger, an extra bonus for a good night at a great cinema, and a party afterwards.

See it in the next week if you can, lest it go off everywhere. It is a great Australian film, in the top ten, and a great enduring crown to our best writer-director’s career.

It was a long year ago I spoke to you first on this wavelength of the then assumedly invincible Hewson plague and I counselled hope, assuring the many who had already almost surrendered alas in their hearts to what they fear was the inevitable that the dread virus of Ferrari barbarism, so fatal in Britain and New Zealand, might yet be stilled, and our decent Australian civilisation preserved against the monetarist buffetings of the straiteners and the punishers who would enslave our workforce and bind our souls to a set of numbers and flog us into service of their avarice and their sadism and their greed like the braying mules in Pinocchio who once were little boys. A long year ago I stood alone and spoke alone, with only Paul Keating in distant echo of my trumpet call. And the word spread, and from that dim genesis last March the light of our promised salvation reached its glad beams nationwide. This week victory was in sight. Tonight it is uncertain. Some say the moment, with yesterday’s figures, has passed. It may be so. I hope, I pray and on the whole, grasping the larger hope, I believe that this vile infection of our national genius for kindly solutions will be expunged, and by tomorrow night, with a majority of five to thirteen – most probably nine – the crisis will be over, the boil lanced, the spreading cancer arrested, the day saved.

But if it does not turn out that way and darkness henceforth enshrouds our civility and our cheery hearts, and we again in its shadow revert to the wolf and the jackal and the shark and the leech that this late-blooming Thatcheristic viciousness would have us be, and Hewson, its wetly jogging prophet, would make us into. If we become again, as in other centuries and countries, but weasels fighting in a hole – no sisterhood, no brotherhood, no neighbourhood, no number other than one, no person other than me – and compulsory voting is, as threatened, abolished and election campaigns reduced to a week, and unions emasculated, and schools reduced to engines of profit for mindless philistine profiteers, and health services run on the noble principle of your money or your life, and boss and worker, as in olden times, again at each other’s throats, and Kakadu mined, and the Daintree logged, and the Hawkesbury dead and rank and stinking, we shall in that stark hour of tyranny have learned a lesson too late, as did those foolish democratic Germans who believed that Hitler could be housetrained. The lesson is one of eternal vigilance – the price of liberty– of discerning tyranny when it threatens, and moving fast.

It is possible that I shall not speak to you again, since I am on the list, and satire and thought are unwelcome under Coalition broadcast guidelines, unless it is some secret meeting of the democratic underground in a Bondi sewer or similar. If that is the case, and this is indeed my last such broadcast under the sort of democratic freedom for which till now we have shown, I fear, too little gratitude by half, I thank you for your attention and big you sincerely…take care.

It is wrong that this great candidate should have to wait until even September for total power in this most corrupt and supine and sybaritic city since the Rome of Crassus and Pompey and Julius Caesar, whose language he shares and in whose night life he is yet but a fumbling amateur, alas, but learning fast.

Needless to say he is the best equipped lawyer-candidate for such high office — in looks, in voice, in rare male beauty, in policy innovation, in Fabian conscience, in charm and literary zest — since my great mentor and sometime lover Don Dunstan, and as great a hit, thus far, with the homosexual community, whom I trust he will not disappoint when the great night comes.

His policy of gay marriages on the Opera House steps, valid in Vermont, of happy couples sworn to honeymoon in that far jurisdiction within three years, will steal, I believe, the sodomite vote from the shorter-haired Clover Moore and see him early enthroned and full of patronal advantages for his mates by the Vernal Exinox, or very soon after.

It is WRONG that we should wait so LONG, but that is the law of the land, alas, until we change it by main force into a lifelong position of infinite royalty with weekly lobster-and-champagne parties in his Chambers for his growing circle of glutted, and drunken, insipid, and listlessly lustful fiends.

This is a Primates Candidate for the ages, and I recommend him to the ignorant electorate with confidence, a nod and a wink, and a toast.

To the Italian Ambassador, a man for all seasons, and for these greedy, troubled and interestingly variable times.

Spruce up Sydney!

The hurt feelings of James Ashby outweigh a Budget of a trillion dollars, the only one in the world in eighty years to spend less money than the year before. Discuss.

His hurt feelings are much, much more important. Discuss.

This is the shared opinion of Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan.

They should be sacked for disproportion, and innumeracy, and girly, giggling triviality.

Discuss.

But I now find that he robbed them of, if anything, only seventeen thousand dollars, plus six thousand dollars for hookers, the Electoral Office having exculpated, praised and forgiven him. This would bring the amount owed to each Member down to twenty-five cents, and it would not cover the return postage.

I also note that it was not Craig who used the hookers (will one of them put her hand up? why not?) but someone else using his mobile innards falsely, ‘spoofing’, as it is called. And it may be no hooker was used at all, merely booked, cancelled, not fucked, and paid for.

This leaves me, customers, in a dilemma.

I will not pay a debt that Craig did not incur. The maximum possible debt now is less than the price of a stamp, and two stamps are required. A further sacrifice of tens of cents by the already bruised and suffering HSU members would be now necessitated if I persisted in this kindly project any further. And since their interests are those uppermost in my heart I cannot, I think, continue it.

With sadness and regret for those who have already bought, at great personal cost, the two stamps, and with profound and grovelling apologies, I now withdraw the offer.

I will make it up to you, somehow.

I have never proposed a bloody great pipe from the Fly River to Brisbane. It was a bloody great pipe from the Fly River to the sources of the Darling, some thousand miles to the north of Brisbane, or the nor’-nor’-west of Brisbane, if I have got that right. I never said no water would ever come again to Southern Queensland. I have never used the words ‘Southern Queensland’ in my life. My birthplace is three miles from the Queensland border, and the concept is bizarre to me. South-East Queensland, yes. Far North Queensland, yes. ‘Southern Queensland’, a concept unknown to cartographers, would be, if it existed, the size of France, Belgium, Luxemburg and San Marino put together. It is a worthless concept and of no use to a traveller coming from anywhere.

I do not believe the end of the world is nigh. I did so until I was fourteen and, as the semi-autobiographical movie The Nostradamus Kid attests, fell into doubt and atheism at eighteen and a half; which is fifty-one years ago now. I have written that human life on earth might end, if we are not careful, in a thousand years or so but that is hardly ‘nigh’. I have always thought the earth has billions of years to go; a billion years is not ‘nigh’. I never said Brisbane’s water would come from the Fly. It was the Murray-Darling’s water, where water was needed, it would come to under my plan from the Fly. Brisbane usually has a lot of water.

And water thus transported is not such a strange, or unprecedented, idea. Roman viaducts took snow-melt water hundreds of miles into parched regions in need of it a hundred years before Christ, a man Gerard eats on Sundays. Los Angeles’ water comes similar distances from the High Sierras today. Oil pipe lines go thousands of miles across Eurasia. A pipe is a pipe. It can be built. It can be any length. Gerard’s idea that I am insane to say so is an insult to Esso and Standard Oil.

As to his not having ‘wanted’ the ABC privatised, this is not my recollection. I recall a gathering of Rightists in, I think, 1997 in a basement room of Balmain Town Hall which I briefly invaded but was told I must leave, containing him, Paddy McGuiness, Alan Jones, Piers Akerman, and others, whose purpose was ‘The Future Of The ABC’. Kerry O’Brien was there too, speaking up I imagine in the embattled institution’s defence, and noticed my eviction, more with humour than dismay, and would testify as to whether Gerard, who attacked the ABC a lot in those days, had put his hand up when privatisation was discussed, or voted on. Perhaps he only wanted the ABC abolished; and advocated this lethal punishment of its unremitting ‘left wing bias’ in those early, heady days of John Howard’s hegemony, Howard the man for whom he was once Chief of Staff. Perhaps he can tell us which. He certainly did not belong to The Friends Of The ABC and therefore, logically, wished it ill. I ask him to deny this, and lie again.

In his letter he makes no mention of whether or not he works for the CIA. Slipped his mind, no doubt. I ask it again.

I am tempted, of course, to go him for libel with malice since his letter implies that I am not in my perfect mind, and his malice towards me turns up in his paragraphs every three months or so and has done for twenty-five years and the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus costs is tempting. But I hear his wage has been lately halved by Fairfax and I would not want to further emaciate his earnings in his imminent crotchetty eighth decade, or inconvenience the CIA if that entity is also what he works for.

So I will merely reiterate my offer to Fairfax that I will accept Gerard’s job at not his wage, nine hundred dollars, down from eighteen, but six hundred for a trial period of a month, to see if I can bestir more readership than he. If I do not, he can be re-employed.

In the meantime will someone give me an instance of when Gerard was right, about anything.

You sense too that Romeo and Juliet, his first big hit, written when he was twenty-nine, was derived from some actual event in his own life, some great thwarted longing for an unattained beloved by cruel fortune lost and always mourned. Would that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! You do not get from this much sense of the Victorian Gentleman image of Shakespeare, chastely at work with his quill in his Blackfriars boarding house, each night writing home a letter to his doting, distant wife.

It seems more roisterous, promiscuous and risky than that, more fuelled with ale, and flighty wives and one-night-stands. The contemporary diaries of Simon Forman – astrologer, herbalist, psychologist, necromancer and surgeon, the model for Dr Tench in the film – show a blithe attitude to sex in Elizabethan women, many of whom he himself had stand-up encounters with in his surgery, rapidly, between appointments. Though contraception was unknown and pregnancy likely, they did it anyway, and let the risk of death by clap or jack – as fatal as AIDS then – come and go as it may. It has been through the ages – in bed, park, alley or brothel – a popular pastime, no mistake. It is rarely foregone, even in times of the closest scrutiny, five people in a room, wakeful children, chickens on the bed. The Great Urge will out, that’s certain.

Whether Shakespeare was as promiscuous as Forman (who came to some of his opening nights) or as obsessive and true-hearted a lover as Romeo or Hamlet will never be known. His letters and diaries and play-drafts were burnt in the 1660s by the man who bought his house and needed the room they were in to breed pheasants, the worst act of burning since the ninety lost plays of Sophocles and Lord knows what else were destroyed when Caesar’s army unintentionally set alight the Library of Alexandria, and the destruction of Jerusalem burnt much that was written, I guess, of Jesus Christ and his followers.

So Shakespeare, like the mysterious Nazarene rabbi, has become a tabula rasa, and to some extent therefore the eye of the beholder. We mould him in our own image, find evidence in his work for Christian belief, agnosticism, spiritualist summoning of dead fathers, love of countryside, love of metropolitan squalor, love of battle, hatred of war, love of revelry, respect for temperance and getting early to bed, whatever. What he was really like, unless the Dark Lady’s diaries turn up, will never be known.

How he wrote, however, at the rate he did, two and a half plays a year while acting, directing, theatre-managing and the occasional acrimonious visit to Stratford, is easier to guess.

What he did, I think, was this.

He would stay up late, drinking and quarrelling and (possibly) wooing and swiving in stews and alleyways and then before he slept would go to his desk and write, without preparation, while his mind was tender and wounded, whatever was there, unpurged, in his head. Tomorrow and tomorrow. To be or not to be.

He would then put it in a drawer, and forget about it. Days or weeks later, stone cold sober, he would begin the writing of a play. It would always be based on something, a history, a legend, an Italian novella in translation, or, as in the case of The Yorkshire Tragedy or The Tempest, a sensational contemporary event, the equivalent of a headline story of the day.

And he would write it like a modern television hack – with exposition (‘What news on the Rialto?’), character, motivation, plot points, act breaks and the rest of it. But when he came to a certain point, the point where you might, in a Broadway musical, need an aria or a big song number, he would go to his drawer, and pull out one of his spontaneous night ruminations, and paste it in. Whatever it was, it would always fit, somehow.

This immediately explains how he was able, unlike any dramatist writing since, to give us both the workaday and ordinary, and the unspoken, nightmarish parts of the lives we lead, the hidden depths, in the same play. It explains why he never lost control. He was as a writer a puritan in the workplace by day, and a demonic reveller by night. He was, like all of us, to double business bound, but he admitted it.

And so he could be a respectable burgher in Stratford, and a tempestuous barroom roué in London (a reverse of Oscar Wilde’s pet formula ‘Ernest in town and Jack in the country’), a faithful husband when under the scrutiny of a close provincial (and largely Catholic) community, and a passionate bisexual cruiser in a poxy violent metropolis, where every day might be your last.

I suspect he knew too, what has only lately become plain to me, that human personality is not a constant, it is situational. We are each of us a wandering archipelago of random impulses, and in another place, where the plane lands, or the ship docks or the train pulls in, we are another person. Romeo might have settled down with Rosaline, and met no trouble. Instead, he found himself booked, as it were, into another story (O I am fortune’s fool!) and played it out.

We all do this, and might have done otherwise. And Shakespeare shows us this great truth all the time. Each of his heroes is given a task, to which he is inadequate, and it brings him down into ruin, or the climactic laughter that soon heals all. He is enduringly popular because of this. He shows us how changeable we are, and how readily we can look into his dreams, and go with them.

Dear False Prophet

I was disturbed, deeply disturbed, to read on your Table Talk blog yesterday that The Drum Unleashed – now called The Drum Opinion – “no longer prints” your “pieces” and you “don’t get invited on The Drum any more let alone Q&A” .

This is tantamount to a national disaster. As someone who has to fill a Media Watch Dog blog each Friday, I need your contributions. I look back in appreciation on your pieces in The Drum where you:

▪ referred to Liberal MP Jillian Skinner as “like a long-detested nagging landlady with four dead husbands and hairy shoulders” and

▪ described Julia Gillard as “short, crow-voiced, intermittently bulbous and living in sin with an affable barber”.

Nancy and the team at MWD need copy like this. Desperately. So I propose to unleash another OCCUPY ULTIMO campaign – this one aimed at restoring your rightful place in The Drum Opinion, on The Drum and on Q&A. I’m working on a campaign strategy – but, right now, I’m inclined to go with “Bring Back the False Prophet of Palm Beach – Bang The Drum for Bob Ellis”.

I still remember your proposal on Q&A in 21 May 2009 that the only way to solve Brisbane’s water crisis was to build a “bloody great pipe” from the Fly River in New Guinea to Southern Queensland. At the time we were on different sides of the river, so to speak. I argued, then, that Brisbane’s drought would be resolved by, yes, rain. Whereas you – believing in the end of the world, as we know it, was nigh – maintained that there would never be substantial rain in Southern Queensland again. However, I did love your contribution to the debate to get Brisbane’s water from the Fly River – and it got a run in MWD. Hence my OCCUPY ULTIMO plan.

One final point. In your blog yesterday you wrote that, in 1998, I “wanted” the ABC privatised. I have never advocated this. To use an Ellis-ism, prove that I lie.

Best wishes

Gerard Henderson

… I will reply to this in an hour or two. It is well written and very effective and contains no more than a dozen barefaced lies which I will enumerate after my toast and eggs. For the twentieth year I ask him to debate me on a topic of his choosing anywhere, anytime.

Worse than that, it seems now, Ashby (hereinafter known as ‘Kabuki Jim’) made his complaint too early. He should have tried to ‘resolve the situation’ before taking it to the media and accusing the second highest official in the land of sending text messages that made him ‘uncomfortable’ (the horror, the horror) and thus ‘overshadowing’ a trillion dollar Budget with this heinous wrong, and the further atrocity of Cabcharge dockets that ran to scores of dollars, according to the Commonwealth Solicitor.

He has since withdrawn the Cabcharge allegation, his horror having miraculously abated, but boosted the workplace charges saying women and heterosexuals were treated more kindly in that office than he. Can this government long survive these allegations? How long, oh Lord, how long?

The greater wonder is that Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan, not to mention the entirety of the Murdoch media in Australia, said this ongoing persecution of Kabuki Jim ‘overshadowed’ a trillion-dollar Budget, the first in the world in eighty years to spend less money than the year before, and merited the standing-down of the Speaker, and speeches intended to bring down a government grown ‘toxic’ with the ‘stench of corruption’.

Fran, Michelle and the railing Murdochists in this, the hour of the arrest for corruption of their prettiest CEO, have culpably ignored, I think, the arguable treason of Kabuki, Brough and Pyne, and what may have been an harassing phonecall to Kabuki from the Whip in his passion to shame and drive to constitutional perdition the highest official in our Parliament and end his considerable achievement as the sheep-dog of that institution in a holocaust of slimy headlines.

This disproportionate response to an event which involved no physical violence, no workplace denunciation, no sacking, no threat of sacking and no bathroom invasion and no touching-up, saying it ‘overshadowed’ a the expenditure of a trillion dollars and its effect on the world economy, and the cover-up of treason, if any but I dare call it treason, adds up in my view to a sacking offense, and all these culpable journalists should now be brought before the Bar of the House and suffer interrogation by the Speaker as to their motives. Did they collude in the persecution of a good government by the magnifying of trivialities for any reason? Or for no reason, out of mere ignorance of the harm they were doing to our democracy?

Whatever the cause they have acted culpably, and the Government should examine closely for what cause they should not be evicted bag and baggage from the building, and not let back in again until they have explained themselves to the shocked and horrified nation, or issued a joint Apology speaking in unison on parliament lawn.

I have a solution to all this that halves the cost and triples the happiness and abolishes the anxiety of everybody. It is this.

You have a roll of tickets equal to the number of seats in the venue, a different roll for every session in that venue. The tickets indicate the row but not the number in that row. Row L, say, Row M, say, and you shuffle along, the number of Row L tickets being equal to the number of Row L seats.

Half these tickets are handed out three hours before the session, and half of them thirty minutes before. They are shown to ONE PERSON at the door, knowing there will be a seat in Row L for you, somewhere in Row L, and the ONE PERSON lets you in.

You do not have to queue up for two hours. You can do other things, like buy and read a book, or have a glass of wine with a friend.

I have suggested this many times, but the sado-masochists in charge of punishing the literate for their love of writing have kept spending tens of thousands on these barbarian gauleiters trained in Woomera and Baxter to hurt the disobedient and making life miserable for those in their old age, like my poor wife, who would like a piss now and then and would like to have one in a toilet.

I humbly ask that this plan be taken on. It will save twenty thousand dollars which could pay for a few more guest writers with Nobel Prizes to come here before they die.

In those hours Rebekah Brooks, the intimate of Cameron and Murdoch was arrested for hiding and shredding evidence; Bob Katter launched his book; Christopher Pyne was shown to have phoned Jeff Ashby after swearing he hadn’t; Craig Thomson was shown not to have thieved or misused two hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars; Mitt Romney was shown to have beaten and terrorised a homosexual at college; Greece was forced to a second election which the anti-austerity forces would win; Francois Hollande’s plane was struck by lightning but he didn’t die; and Joe Hockey said he mightn’t give money to the Disabled which Gillard had promised them. There are as many Disabled as there are Tasmanians and as many Disabled Carers as there are South Australians and as many relatives and close friends of the Disabled as there are Queenslanders and this alone could landslide Joe’s party out of politics forever.

It is interesting how these things feed into each other. The arrest of Brooks, the CEO of News Limited, for concealing things the police want shown casts doubt on anything said by News Limited and Newscorp or Sky News or Fox News reporters. The Thomson exculpation opens those reporters up to individual quarter-million lawsuits.  The Katter book reminds us that Newcorp’s numerical hit-man O’Shannessy concealed polls showing Katter’s party doing well — or so his silence every time I asked this portends. Romney’s assault on a homosexual will energise the young vote and assure his defeat by Obama, a Social Democrat. Hollande’s survival means Socialism is back, and merciful, and popular, and confident in Europe. Rebekah’s arrest meant Cameron would fall and Miliband would be PM or Deputy PM to Clegg by year’s end. Greece’s imminent default would mean that Europe goes belly-up and Swan’s Budget now looks like an act of prescient wisdom. And Hockey’s proposed persecution of cripples shows the Liberals (though not necessarily Abbott, who is DLP) to be a pack of bastards.

Historians will show that these were the hours when it all fell down, and the Australian Liberals received five bullets to the brain, or possibly six
.
It might be worthwhile asking now if Christopher Pyne has ever used prostitution services of any kind in any country, and if he paid for them with his parliamentary wages, money the taxpyers gave him these last twenty years.

For me the most fascinating moment was when I asked who Craig’s whore was and why Laurie had not interviewed her. It then became plain that ‘hookers’ to most people had no human meaning. It meant rather something like those blow-up life-size female rubber dolls that young men take to Antarctica. The idea that some actual young woman with a birthplace and a biography went to Craig’s room suddenly seemed very, very unlikely. And if she did, where is she? Who is she?

This question may be the coup de grace to everything.