A Film Worthy of the Bard

Nothing Is Truer Than Truth is a documentary film, telling in a very convincing way its own truth—that the writer of the works of Shakespeare was not the man we thought at all but Edward De Vere, who lived in the Elizabethan era, traveled to Italy

Edward De Vere

for a year and a half, and returned to bring the Renaissance to England almost single-handedly.

The film, brilliantly written, produced and directed by Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, relies heavily on  the book Shakespeare by Another Name, a biography of De Vere by Mark Anderson. It focuses on the years of De Vere’s life when he lived in Italy, drawing parallels between the works attributed to the man from Stratford and the real life studies and adventures of the English nobleman. Recent thought has brought much attention to the lack of evidence that the man Will Shaksper (sic) of Stratford had the scope of knowledge it would have taken to write what is considered to be the greatest literature in the English language. Eagan-Donovan says little about the man from Stratford, whose life has confounded scholars for centuries, and wisely reveals instead the very colorful and well-documented travels of Edward De Vere.

With footage of the architecture and festivals of Venice, Nothing Is Truer Than the Truth is a visual feast, calling to mind how Italy must have been in the 16^th century. There are film clips from Shakespearean productions featuring crucial scenes from A Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors--all illustrating Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of Italy in his time. There is commentary by Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, both players who are knowledgeable about the details of Shakespeare’s work and his times. Jacobi openly espouses the idea, and here defends his position strongly, that whoever wrote the plays would have to have been to the locales and known some of the characters he wrote about—and that Edward De Vere fits that requirement remarkably.

Scholars, too, appear in the film and discuss their findings about the Shakespeare authorship question. Roger A. Stritmatter, who has done primary research on the Geneva bible owned by Edward De Vere (and annotated in such a way as to confirm its connections to Shakespeare’s writing), Alexander Waugh (grandson of Evelyn), Richard Whalen, (author of Who Wrote Shakespeare?), John Shahan, Diane Paulus, Tina Packer, and many others, talk about Edward De Vere and the works of Shakespeare.

Nothing Is Truer Than Truth is exhaustively researched and a joy to watch, leaving the viewer with a sense that there is more to this story than we yet know.

My Mother, My Friend

Maudetta Graham was the baby of the family born to Maude Melia Matthews Graham and John Richard Graham, born in 1914. The family lived in the town of Crichton, hard by (and now a part of) Mobile, and she grew up in poverty with a brilliant underachiever of a father and a doting mother. She learned to love from her mother Maude and her devoted aunt Etta, both of whom she was named for. She was to contract the double name into a shortened version which had an old-fashioned, genuine ring to it, much like herself. She worshiped her older brother, Theodore, known as "Doe," an entertainer and professional golfer. Her brother Claiborne, a year older than she and thought of as the smart one of the three children, died of spinal meningitis at the age of 15, a trauma she never really overcame.

She loved little children and dolls. For her 16th birthday, she received her last doll. Two years later she was married.

There was something innocent and childlike about Maudetta Timbes all her life. She was an expert at denial: Every child she loved was "the smartest" and everybody she knew was nice. A gifted and natural writer, she dabbled in poetry and short fiction. When we moved near the bay she began combing the beaches and collecting driftwood which she fashioned into furniture and lamps. She loved her gardens, always claiming that she didn't like the work but she loved the result. She had a wonderful sense of humor and an almost accidental wit. Her three children had a way of gathering and trading wisecracks and jokes in order to keep her laughing. Even at the nursing home, debilitated by a stroke and enormous discomfort, she was able to laugh if we were able to come up with the right thing to say.

She has never handled harsh reality well. When bad things happened she was overwhelmed. After my father died, desperately needing projects to fill her time, she threw herself into researching and creating a long and complex family history. Aided by a local family history club, she learned the techniques of looking into records--long before there was the ease of the Internet. She spent several years compiling what will always be a family treasure, a 200-page volume of stories, charts and anecdotes of as many family members as she could find, on both sides of our family. She peppered her writing with tales about people and events--rather than creating a family tree, as most do when presenting family history. The family research sites like Ancestry were not there, so she did the looking into old census records on her own. She visited major libraries and browsed ancient cemeteries and church records for her information. Her book is charming, insightful, but full of mythology--just as she herself was.

Her three children adored her but she was in many ways more like an older sibling than a mother. When I returned to Alabama, to live near her as she entered her 80s, I was a different person than the girl who had left at 18. We were able to thrash out some of the details of both our lives, together, and I came to know her on a new level. We never quite reached the natural role reversal of child becoming parent but I helped care for her as she lost a step, then another--and wonder of wonders--she died in 2008--she is still with me every day. She had done the best she could to make her life good, and memories of her make all of us who knew her, better.