The Beard of Avon

In Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon, directed by Norman Blumensaadt, a bumpkin known as “Will Shakespeare” — who longs to be an artist — flees from his filthy barn, his homebound wife, and her incessant chores. In Elizabethan London, did this stage struck dreamer become a front man for Sir Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and even Queen Elizabeth, authors too proud to admit they scribbled plays for the unwashed masses? This delicious and witty farce fashions the longstanding debate over who really penned the Bard’s cannon into a merry look at the mortality of artists and the immortality of their legacy.