Leslie Howard may be today the least known of the best known actors / movie stars of his day (1930s-1940s). Part of that lost legacy may be because he died relatively young, but part of it may also involve his life outside of Broadway and Hollywood. Before the war Howard starred in such films as The Petrified Forest and Gone with the Wind), and on stage (Hamlet). Upon his return to England he shifted his attention to the war effort, making films that celebrated the English spirit and attacked the Nazis. In one instance he introduced the Oxfordian theory about the Shakespeare authorship question into several scenes in his popular Pimpernel Smith (the Oxfordian theory of the Shakespeare authorship is that the true author was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford).
Meanwhile, Howard was also serving as a spy for his government, a spy who wound up dying a very public and yet mysterious death in 1943 in the only instance of a Nazi shoot-down of a civilian airliner in the whole war. His life today remains shrouded in mystery, since some records of the shoot-down remain classified until 2025, and —even more astonishingly— records in Howard’s personal estate will remain classified until 2056, following their reclassification in 1980 (See the Defense Media website for some background and details: defensemedianetwork.com).
In this revised, second edition of Another Hamlet Charles Boyle explores this story of Leslie Howard’s interest in the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare, and how that may have played into both his role as an artist and propagandist in World War II, and, finally perhaps, as a factor in his fate at the hands of German fighter pilots in 1943. Since Goebbels had openly condemned Howard, why was he flying commercial when other prominent British celebrities flew protected on military transports? Why didn’t Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden afford him more protection?
In this current year (2017), with recent and older history of Britain seemingly everywhere (Dunkirk, The Darkest Hour, the Netflix series The Crown, plus PBS’s Elizabeth’s Secret Agents), Boyle’s Another Hamlet is the perfect tale to bring these two ends of that history (16th and 20th century) together.
In both Another Hamlet and a companion book on Shakespeare/Oxford’s unveiling of Elizabethan realpolitik, A Poet’s Rage (which includes several other essays by Boyle, also available on amazon.com), the Oxfordian theory of the Shakespeare authorship makes clear how the politics of 400 years ago shaped both Shakespeare himself and Elizabethan England, and continues to matter centuries later.
In Another Hamlet Charles Boyle has produced a riveting political thriller that explores the life and tragic death of actor and film-maker, Leslie Howard, a British patriot drawn into a deadly propaganda duel with the Germans. Deftly interweaving the behind-the-scenes politics of World War II with the decadent showbiz world of the 1930s-1940s, Boyle makes the tantalizing suggestion that it was Howard’s growing conviction that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare which sealed his doom. From Leslie Howard himself to Humphrey Bogart, Merle Oberon, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Joseph Goebbels, Boyle brings to life a fascinating and often chilling cast of characters to tell the story of a maverick artist’s losing battle with the power-brokers of his age. – Charles Beauclerk, author of Nell Gwynn and Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom.
Charles Boyle has opened a window on an amazing true story with immediate implications for our own time. His narrative essay on Leslie Howard and ‘Shakespeare’ is impossible to put down and I have no doubt that his screenplay, which follows, will become a stunning and important movie. I can’t wait! – Hank Whittemore, author of CNN: the Inside Story and Your Future Self.
