Titans of History

Another candidate is the feisty and brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated shoemaker’s son who dabbled in espionage, and who was suspected of atheism and homosexuality. Conspiracy theorists insist that he did not die in a bar-room brawl in 1593, as is widely believed, but that he went underground to avoid the authorities and continued to write plays, using “William Shakespeare” as a pseudonym.

A third candidate is the earl of Derby, whose aristocratic status precluded him from dabbling in the theatrical world as a professional. He had a company of actors, and among his papers were found several poems authored by a “W.S.” His wedding may have been the first occasion on which A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed.

A final favorite in some quarters is the earl of Oxford, a poet, playwright (although no plays survive) and patron of an acting company. Oxford stopped producing poetry just before Shakespeare first went into print with the dramatic poem Venus and Adonis in 1593 (although his first plays had already been produced). The case for Oxford is, however, handicapped by the fact that the earl died in 1604, before at least a dozen of Shakespeare’s works were written. In 2011, Hollywood even produced a film—Anonymous—about the “real” Shakespeare. It was not a hit.

Despite all these ingenious arguments, Shakespeare’s contemporaries seemed in no doubt that he was the author of his works, and in 1623 his former colleagues compiled the First Folio edition of his plays “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” Modern textual analysis backs up the theory that all the poems and plays are by a single author whose name was William Shakespeare.

ABBAS THE GREAT

1571–1629

I preferred the dust from the shoe soles of the lowest Christian to the highest Ottoman personage.

Abbas the Great

Abbas was the most successful shah of Iran in the period between the great kings of the ancient world and the modern era. He extended the kingdom both eastward and westward but importantly for understanding Iran today, it was the triumphant Abbas the Great who consolidated the Twelver Shiism that is so distinctive now; he and family offered themselves as the divinely chosen representatives of the Hidden Imam; and reassembled Iran as a great power for the first time since the Arab conquests. All of this is very relevant to understanding Iran in the twenty-first century.

It was not Abbas who brought this form of Shiism to Iran: he was the descendant of a line of Shia sheikhs backed by a fanatical following of Turkoman tribesmen known as Qizilbash—“redheads” after their red bonnets: these featured twelve folds to symbolize the twelve Imams of the Shia. They believed that after Muhammad, God gave the guidance of humanity to a line of his descendants beginning with Ali and continuing with his son Husain. The line ended with the murder by the Sunnis of the eleventh imam in 874. His son, the twelfth imam, disappeared having been “occulted”—hidden by God—ready to appear as the Madhi, the Chosen One, “to bring justice to the world.”

In the meantime, other intermediaries—namely Abbas’s Safavid family—touched by this divinity would rule until the twelfth imam reappeared. Abbas’s great-grandfather Ismail had come to power in 1501, declaring himself shah and making this form of Shia the official religion. Ismail threatened the Ottoman sultans, who were Sunni, with his resurgent Shiite Iran, until Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Ismail in 1514. But this new Iran fell into disorder after Ismail’s death, putting both its future and that of its distinctive Shiism into doubt. The Ottomans regained their dominance over the Caucasus and reconquered Iraq

Abbas was the grandson of the old reclusive Shah Tahmasp. Though his father was the eldest son, he was disqualified from the throne because he was blind. Abbas grew up amidst turbulence and vanished glory, dominated by powerful Qizilbash generals who behaved with unwise arrogance around the young prince. Abbas was lucky to survive the short and murderous reign of his demented uncle Ismail II, who actually ordered his execution but was found dead himself before it could be carried out. His mother was murdered by tribal rebels. Abbas’ blind father was then placed on the throne in spite of his handicap, but the kingdom was cursed by marauding over-mighty Qizilbash warlords, Ottoman and Uzbek invasions, Portuguese imperialism, and family civil wars.