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Friday, July 18, 2008
Who Was Shakespeare?
Back when I was in grad school at SUNY Buffalo I was roaming the library stacks one day and came across a whole section devoted to books seeking the true Shakespeare; most of them dated from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I knew that the question had been raised, but I didn’t realize it had attracted so much attention back in the day.
The question still lingers. These days the issue seems to have as much to do with distrust of academics, who aren’t much interested in the question, as it does with the state of the rather meager evidence. Bardiac considers the issue in four posts, with comments by some anti-Strafordians. Here’s the fourth post, with links to the earlier three.
UPDATE: Comments are closed, but are listed below the fold.
Comments
This is a bit of a ‘chestnut’, isn’t it? I tend to agree with the contributor who said positive identification wouldn’t make any difference to how ‘we’ teach Shakespeare - after all, no-one bothers hugely about the identity of Homer when discussing works attributed to ‘him’, do they? It might close a few teashops in Stratford (where I was once a frequent visitor - it’s not all that bad!) but apart from that it’s just intriguing in the same way as any ‘gap’ of knowledge seems to be to some.
More worrying, to me, was that someone writing on such an important topic used the wrong spelling of ‘their’!
"The 19th and 20th Centuries have been rife with doubters [about identifying the London businessman Shakspere as Shakespeare], among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After John Looney’s *Shakespeare Identified* was published in 1920, prominent figures like Sigmund Freud, Sir John Gielgud, Orson Welles, Leslie Howard and Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun have counted themselves among the ranks of the Oxfordians [those who think Edward de Vere wrote the works that go under the name Shakespeare].”
This from one of the best resources for the argument that Edward de Vere is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare Oxford Society website: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/. The evidence - laid out there (quite succinctly in the FAQs for starters) and argued widely elsewhere – seems to me to be overwhelming that Edward de Vere is Shakespeare.
I’ve never made a systematic research project out of it, but having looked into it a good bit, my view is that the evidence seems hands-down to be overwhelmingly in the favor of de Vere. Edward de Vere is Shakespeare, seems clear to me.
Establishment ideology on a wide variety of matters in the humanities and social sciences, especially, and elsewhere, is notorious for ignoring or missing the import of highly relevant facts. The Shakespeare/de Vere argument is a current example, of a sort, and quite striking since Shakespeare is no marginal literary figure. Some facts and analyses just take awhile to make sense to people. Others are ideologically blocked on purpose. Other times people are not interested enough to give it much thought. The Shakespeare/de Vere confusion seems to be a combination of these well known phenomena.
Tony, I had you down as a friend of the working man.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit I know something about “Shakespeare authorship” trivia, having happened upon what was supposed to be a general-interest Shakespeare discussion group that was in the process of being taken over by the “partisans” of both sides, fighting for control of the public space (and thus, eventually, of the discursive space it represented), but I’ll weigh in.
The idea that amateurs (and academics, like “Ben Jonson,” who is sui generis) who are convinced that a particular person who was not the William Shakespeare born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564 wrote the body of work attributed to him, etc., are in it because of hostility towards academics is interesting but I think only a partial truth. In the group I mentioned, there seemed to be a large number of people on both sides of the “issue” who had done some graduate work in literature. This fact may not be relevant. Of course, all of us, to some degree, exist in a twilight world between the airy ideal of perfect knowledge and impeccable scholarship, and the muck of flawed ideas, false trails, and poor judgement in choosing sources or authorities. But that group of “Shakespeare enthusiasts” appeared, to my eyes, peculiarly devoted to the task of casting out the bad guys, whether they defined “bad guys” as academics or as people who don’t know the “right” way to conduct a discussion of literature. It was often difficult to predict which group a given person would feel inclined to demonize—just as it was difficult to predict whether a given approach or source would be stigmatized as leftist and postmodern or as conservative and authoritarian-traditionalist. But the conversational moves were pretty restricted: limited to either “I know how to do this and let me do it without interference,” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about and let me prove it to you sentence by sentence.” Maybe that’s what they were taught to do, maybe that’s how they somewhat resentfully perceived they way they’d themselves been treated, maybe there is some other explanation. (What is unquestionable is that many, if not most, felt some issue of great significance to Western civilization hung on the outcome of their research.)
Stephen Greenblatt has compared Shakespeare authorship proponents to Holocaust deniers and creationists. This seemed overly Godwinian to me, and counterproductive.
That said, there are a lot of historiographic oddities (to say the least) both in Shakespeare biography and in Shakespeare scholarship overall. I don’t think Shakespeare academics have come to terms with the history of the field. In my personal opinion, saying simply “once everyone was a totalitarian racist but now we have all been persuaded to become anticolonialists and feminists” isn’t enough.
"The evidence - laid out there (quite succinctly in the FAQs for starters) and argued widely elsewhere – seems to me to be overwhelming that Edward de Vere is Shakespeare.”
All the purported *evidence* only becomes such if you buy into the highly questionable premise of the Oxfordian movement:
1. that it is “highly unlikely” that a person of Shakespeare’s education and social standing “could have composed” the plays.
There is just no good reason to buy into this premise. But, once you buy into it, then you must immediately start conjuring conspiracies, etc. In any event, you must surely admit that some of the purported *evidence* attesting to de Vere’s authorship is laughable: such as de Vere’s being “an enthusiast for Italy,” “a follower of sport, including falconry,” etc. This is just the worst kind of grasping after straws.
Does “the working man” want someone to lie on his ostensible behalf, to show connection with a frequently establishmentarian ideologue like Shakespeare? That would be a double insult to “the working man.” Nevertheless, in many ways the writing of de Vere/Shakespeare is marvelous.
I am Shakespeare, um, err, Spartacus. That’s right, I’m Spartacus.
That said, there are a lot of historiographic oddities (to say the least) both in Shakespeare biography and in Shakespeare scholarship overall.
I’d like to see what would happen if we dropped the practice of dividing the plays into five acts. Those divisions aren’t there in the quartos and folios but were added by later editors. Of course, if we dropped those divisions, it would wreak havoc with our citation practice, but . . . .
Sooner or later I suspect biologists are going to have to dump the current classification system. Systematists have been arguing over it for years, but I fear it will have to be done. And when it’s done, what a grand mess that will be.
You bring that up, Bill, because you think that literary evolution isn’t Lamarckian? I’ve been thinking about a cladistics of generic and stylistic evolution.
Yes, yes, but who wrote John Webster’s plays? How is our knowledge that it was “John Webster” any more secure than our knowledge of Shakespeare’s authorship? But no one cares about Webster. Why?
“Nevertheless, in many ways the writing of de Vere/Shakespeare is marvelous.” Yes, in many ways!
"There is just no good reason to buy into this premise”: “that it is ‘highly unlikely’ that a person of Shakespeare’s education and social standing ‘could have composed’ the plays.”
Here’s a good reason: Apparently the parents of William Shakspere ("Shakespeare") were illiterate, along with Shakspere’s wife and two daughters, along with Shakspere himself.
Jonathan, I just mentioned it as an example of a case in another field where people are going to have to five up a venerated way of doing things.
As for literary evolution, it’s a case of cultural evolution, and I don’t think cultural evolution is Lamarckian. Have you ever read Gary Taylor’s Cultural Selection (Basic)? It’s more of a popular book than an academic, but very well done.
I’d be interested in anything you do on style and generic cladistics.
Bill, I don’t know who Shakespeare was but I’M Spartacus!
"Apparently the parents of William Shakspere ("Shakespeare") were illiterate, along with Shakspere’s wife and two daughters, along with Shakspere himself.”
This sentence contains two pieces of information that are irrelevant and one that is demonstrably false.
Granted, though, were Shakespeare illiterate, that would be good reason for doubting his authorship. It is not enough to point out--as the Oxfordians like to--that his existing signatures are messy.
Besides, why would Shakespeare care that his wife and daughters couldn’t read? Why should we suppose that he cared a great deal about this?
What’s more interesting is that a bunch of amateurs and autodidacts should turn so viciously upon the best instance of the emergence of the amateur and autodidact as author divorced from authority. (And these days the literary profession is built on a foundation of nonprofessionals.)
"viciously”
Clinical analysis is vicious? The professors who organize and attend conferences on the matter are “amateurs and autodidacts”? The professional writers and other professional workers are “amateurs”?
Edward de Vere was a notorious troublemaker, though he was also later probably funded by the crown for his writing. And his work is scarcely divorced from authority in its ideological committments.
Tony: ‘Apparently the parents of William Shakspere ("Shakespeare") were illiterate, along with Shakspere’s wife and two daughters, along with Shakspere himself.’
That ‘apparently’ says it all, doesn’t it? We don’t know so we surmise, guess, pass on those suppositions, they become the ‘apparent’and transmute into facts. My abiding question is: does it matter? Personally, I would say ‘no’ because the plays are still great whoever wrote them and that’s what matters.
Well, Sue, I guess that makes Spartacus a cultural universal. QED
"messy”
In fact, “the Oxfordians” have shown that his signatures were signed by different people, the letters all different. Apparently others were signing for this illiterate man.
Knowing the literate condition of his immediate family helps us to know the man. Of course, alone, it’s not conclusive. It is however highly suggestive, not least given the rest of the evidence.
I am beginning to see that Christini’s preference for the Oxfordian thesis must be strongly allied to his reading of the plays, which he sees as “frequently establishmentarian” and “scarcely divorced from authority in its ideological committments.” How unfortunate.
I don’t want to turn this thread into one of the already existent pro/anti Stratfordian listserves that are out there, but suffice it to say that (1) legal documents of landowning gentry were often signed by their legal representatives (the *spuriousness* of Shakespeare’s signatures has been answered many times and is easily researchable.) (2) it is highly dubious to move from a consideration of Shakespeare’s parents literacy to his own, because of the relative ease in social movement from the laboring and yeoman class upwards in the latter 16th century--due in part to educational reforms and to changing economic realities (amply treated in many well-regarded social histories of England from the period). That’s all for me. These arguments have all been made and answered before. No sense for Christini and I to go on repeating them.
But I still strongly reject what seems to be his reading of the political ideology of the plays, whoever their author happens to be.
You said “his existing signatures are messy,” but then you accede that they might not even be his.
Obviously, and this is uncontroversial, there is very little information about William Shakspere.
And there is no connection between him and the works of Shakespeare, except that he was apparently a cover for Edward de Vere.
Was Shakespeare an anarchist, a liberation socialist, a progressive revolutionary - that is, do his plays express such ideology? Uncontroversially, no. I’m saying nothing controversial in this regard, and you pretend that I am, or simply misunderstand my brief notes.
I returned to ideological issues because the apparent Shaksperians here made consistently dubious, as I see it, ideological points. Those commenters certainly didn’t refer to “Shakespeare” as “landowning gentry,” as you have, but rather referred to “Shakespeare” as a “working man” (apparently) and as an “amateur and autodidact...author divorced from authority.”
How interesting that those who reject de Vere as author here have no remotely consistent view of the author (even from post to post) but, rather, seem to be making it up on the fly, out of thin air.
Shakespeare was Spartacus.
1. that it is “highly unlikely” that a person of Shakespeare’s education and social standing “could have composed” the plays.
There is just no good reason to buy into this premise.
Especially since we know that that guy who wrote Shakespeare’s plays (whether W.S. himself or not) is a genius, right? It’s almost as highly unlikely that a contemporary of his who was well off and well educated could have written the Shakespeare canon—he was exceptional, so it’s no great leap to accept that he was even slightly more exceptional.
Sue,
There is little or no evidence that any of the immediate family was literate, which suggests that Shakspere could not have been Shakespeare, again, especially given all the other evidence. And yet we are told otherwise, as if it were fact.
And there is considerable and compelling evidence to suggest that Edward de Vere is by far the most likely author. And yet we are told otherwise.
As a historical, cultural, social, political matter and issue, and so on, it’s valuable to understand. Of course the works have been and can be appreciated immensely beyond such knowledge.
Sooner or later I suspect biologists are going to have to dump the current classification system. Systematists have been arguing over it for years, but I fear it will have to be done.
Interesting. Are they really arguing over the foundations of the discipline, or are they only hashing and re-hashing the borderline cases?
Chronologically, Bill, Spartacus must have been Shakespeare, not the other way round ... you’re losing your last, tenous grip on reality here. There’s even a movie - you know, ‘Spartacus in Love’?
Tony: ‘There is little or no evidence that any of the immediate family was literate, which suggests that Shakspere could not have been Shakespeare.’
Sorry to appear obtuse but - why?
Okay, the LAST comment on this from me:
1. on signatures: whether they are none of them his, or one of them, or two of them, makes no difference for deciding his literacy. everybody knows who knows anything about legal documentation in early modern england knows this. but i am sorry i was not precise enough in my first rejoinder.
2. christini continues to believe that the fact that none of shakespeare’s immediate family was literate is, or should be taken as good evidence of, his own illiteracy. for reasons i’ve mentioned earlier, this doesn’t plausibly follow.
generally, there is an inverse relationship between the persuasiveness of the oxfordian “arguments” against shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and one’s knowledge of actual elizabethan history. this--rather than some deep or mysterious ideological commitment--is why real scholars don’t pay any attention to the oxfordians.
finally, i took christini to be saying, in part, that shakespeare’s plays generally side with authority, and i took him also to be saying--though here i might have stretched--that their generally authoritarian tendencies could be further evidence for their aristocratic authorship. my only point was that i read many of the plays as deeply subversive of authority (and of course am not alone in this), so that christini’s admittedly brief characterization of the plays seemed to me to be way off.
There’s another movie, Sue, Shakespeare, in which the Bard is given an Italian holiday, hanging from a cross on the road to Rome. I think Donald Rumsfeld arranged for that. I believe he called it “Elizabethan Rendition.”
Bianca, I don’t know enough about biology to answer that question. My sense is that it’s somewhere in between. It’s not just marginal cases. It’s about how you construct a taxonomy. The “species” notion is a matter of considerable contention—look up “Evolving Thoughts” at ScienceBlogs. And it’s clear that there’s more “horizontal transfer” of genetic information in single-celled species than had been imagined. That means that a tree is not a good way to indicate relationships among those species.
OTOH, they’re not about to give up on evolution as random variation among genotypes and selective retention among phenotypes.
Sue,
No problem. By an illiterate immediate family, I meant to indicate an illiterate William Shakspere himself as well, as I noted earlier.
Yes, I realised that was what you meant, Tony, but I don’t quite see that being a member of an ‘illiterate family’ (how do we know this, by the way?) means that one has to be so. There are many documented accounts of men and women from illiterate or semi-literate backgrounds who became writers(John Clare springs to mind, as do the many female Romantics who were largely ignored until recently).
Bill, I think you’re onto something there - that’s why so many of Il Bardo’s plays are set in Italy!
"1. on signatures…”
The signatures are what Shaksperians typically grasp at to show that Shakspere was even marginally literate. Once that is taken away, as it has been, what is left to show his literacy? Again, the fact that this is even an issue shows how the argument for Shakspere must be manufactured out of essentially thin air.
“2. christini continues to believe”
No, I said it is suggestive, given the other evidence. Also, for that matter, it is suggestive even on its own right, though of course not conclusive. Perhaps my unclear remark to Sue confused matters.
“generally there is an inverse"…"real scholars don’t pay attention to the oxfordians”
This is dogmatism. And laughable.
“finally, i took christini to be saying”
Shakespeare’s plays are embraced - institutionalized - by the establishment and long have been. “Deeply subversive”? Some conservatives think liberalism is deeply subversive. And some liberals think other liberals are deeply subversive, but Shakespeare’s works hardly embrace anarchism, which finds all such defense systems of the status quo to be oppressive.
I am not saying that Shakspere being of an illiterate family means that he is illiterate, in any sense that may be conclusive.
I’m saying that, regardless of his family, the evidence shows that Shakspere was either illiterate or marginally literate. Far from the super literate Shakespeare.
It’s possible that a super literate person such as Shakespeare would raise illiterate daughters, and choose to marry an illiterate wife, and be born from illiterate parents, but it seems to me this would be atypical. It becomes highly suggestive when the other evidence is considered. Evidentiary fit after evidentiary fit after evidentiary fit not only shows de Vere to be Shakespeare, the dearth of such evidentiary connections shows Shakspere not to be Shakespeare.
Again, I stress, the issue of literacy is just one of many pieces of evidence that show that compared to the strength of argument for de Vere as Shakespeare, the strength of argument for Shakspere as Shakespeare is extremely slight. There’s plenty of evidence and research to look into if you like, as noted.
[To Valve administrators: I am having to double post everything to get anything to post at all, and double (identical) posts from others are showing up in my mailbox.]
Tony,
I can see that you have looked into the background of the author of the plays generally attributed to Shakespeare than I and, as I have said, the actual identity of the author doesn’t matter to me that much.
This is actually quite strange because in general I think that knowing about the background of an author can help understand their work. I would cite ‘David Copperfield’ as a good example of this (I have written about the novel and its background for ‘The Literary Encyclopaedia’, if you’re interested) because within that work Dickens explores so many secret aspects of himself.
However, I don’t see the same imperative with Shakespeare, possibly because he’s writing about the generic human condition as a tragedian in the Classical sense. I have always been taught that this was because he had been given a ‘grammar school education’ by his nouveau riche father, a Stratford glover.
I also thought that he was considered ill-educated by those we would now term ‘the critics’ especially by comparison with, say, Ben Johnson. This, I think, adds to the notion that he was ‘a diamond in the rough’ not having the lustre of the aristocrat of which many other contenders to authorship of the plays could boast.
Certainly, though, some of the plays, whoever wrote them, were considered ‘subversive’ at the time, especially ‘Richard II’ and ‘Julius Caesar’ both of which were banned for political reasons; this is documented, I’m sure.
So, we are left with an intriguing mystery and a mass of literary achievement - no complaints here!
I think people forget how small and how very gossipy the Tudor and post Tudor theatre world was. If Ben Jonson could gossip about Queen Elizabeth’s tough hymen in Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, I think that he would have in his cups with William Drummond or in his commonplace books, made sure that we knew who Shakepeare really was. Instead, Jonson talks about how he loved Shakespeare this side of idolatry, but goes on to say that Shakespeare should have blotted more of his lines (edited himself more). And that John Donne, for want of being understood, would perish.
It’s a whole lot of a stretch to have both Robert Greene and Jonson agree to perpetuate this.
Yes, the author and the works were complex and challenged some conventions, but plays and novels continue to get banned for all sorts of relatively minor reasons, very far from revolutionary issues or ideology, as evidenced by the banned books list, for one.
There is some memoir in Shakespeare’s plays from de Vere’s life, which I find interesting (especially from a novelist’s perspective).
De Vere was quite knowledgeable, with an immense vocabulary estimated to be far beyond that of a typical well educated person.
"It’s a whole lot of a stretch to have both Robert Greene and Jonson agree to perpetuate this.”
It’s far less of a stretch than reality, which is far more fantastic: institution scholarship (most though not all of it) oblivious to the quality of the authorship arguments for decades now, if not centuries. And the reality is, there are plenty of other examples of this sort of thing as well, long-time falsified histories, far longer than a few centuries. Pretty remarkable stuff, yet there it is. Examples can be found in all sorts of histories, especially as we consider the major religions with their millenia of scholar believers, etc. Such phenomena is utterly common. Shakespeare is another particular case.
“Jonson talks about how he loved Shakespeare this side of idolatry, but goes on to say that Shakespeare should have blotted more of his lines (edited himself more).”
People who idolize people will do a whole lot on their behalf, though whether or not that was an actual motivation, I don’t know. As for blotting more lines, doesn’t that sound like a whole long list of criticisms of great imaginative authors, by lesser editors, or critics, or imaginative writers, etc. Not all of it necessarily unjustified of course.
It’s a whole lot of stretch to actually look at the arguments and to actually critique them - as the “Oxfordians” have most thoroughly - and to conclude for Shakspere and not de Vere.
"I’m saying that, regardless of his family, the evidence shows that Shakspere was either illiterate or marginally literate.”
Er, you’re ignoring that, whether or not Shakespeare was also a playwright, he was most certainly an actor and a major shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men. This is indisputable, since we have official documents from a number of various governmental departments and entities of the time listing Shakespeare as a prominent person in that troupe, as well as fellow members of the King’s Men mentioning bequests to Shakespeare in their wills. Ben Jonson also lists Shakespeare as performing in two of Jonson’s plays.
It’s not very likely that a major actor would be illiterate - troupes would put on many plays in a season, and particularly need to quickly learn new ones for the very profitable performances at court. That’s made even less likely due to Shakespeare’s quick rise to prominence as an actor - it might theoretically be possible for an actor to slowly build up a reputation and remain illiterate, but it’s hard to see how Shakespeare could have obtained such quick renown as a young actor if he couldn’t read his lines.
Lots of the playwrights of the time were (so far as we can tell) also from illiterate families: Jonson (son of a bricklayer), Marlowe (son of a shoemaker), John Webster (son of a coach maker) and Thomas Middleton (son of a bricklayer) probably came from largely illiterate families.
As I’ve said, Tony, you know much more about this than I.
However, being intrigued, I’ve done a very quick browse on the subject and there seems to be quite a lot of evidence against de Vere - easily as much as against Shakespeare or A.N. Other, even Lord A.N. Other - so I wondered what you thought of the dating difficulties e.g. de Vere having died before 9 or 10 of ‘the plays’ appeared?
I read that James I asked, somewhat mysteriously, for 9 or 10 of ‘the plays’ to be performed when de Vere died and this would tie in but it doesn’t seem probable that de Vere would hide so many late works, nor that he would dedicate the sonnets to a younger relative, as I read he was clever but boastful, and thus wouldn’t be likely to give credit to another author either. (Jonson was very ‘gossipy’, too, as Rebecca points out so if there was doubt over authorship, he’d know and would have no reason to keep it to himself.)
The ‘memoir’ to which you refer is probably the reference I read to de Vere’s travels in Italy and the biographical connection with Polonius and de Vere’s father - I’m sure there’s more but I found all of this amazingly quickly so there are clearly doubts and I didn’t read any really substantial or convincing ‘evidence’ and I’ve no particular bias on this. But, as I said, I’m a novice which is probably self-evident and you’ll answer each of these queries in a trice.
As an afterthought, de Vere was in the pay of the crown, wasn’t he, so more likely to be ‘Establishment’?
Is anyone in the 17th century on record thinking that someone else wrote Shakespeare’s work? It would seem not… Ben Jonson and Milton thought Shakespeare was Shakespeare. I understand these theories to be later developments, responding to newer notions of who Shakespeare had to be. Ironically, Shakespeare has often considered to be a wild, relatively uneducated genius, warbling his woodnotes wild (in Milton’s phrase.) The idea that we have to find a less uncouth person to be the real author of Shakespeare’s work would have struck Milton, or Dr. Johnson in the 18th century, as rather odd.
There are other counterintuitive features of the claim that Shakespeare was not the author of Shakespeare. Surely the ascesis, the refusal of ego, in refusing to claim authorship of these works would be a superhuman feat, a kind of reverse plagiarism. The author of the sonnets, who frequently puns on the name “Will,” is quite conscious of his poetic powers. Can we imagine Dante or Goethe willingly giving some other guy credit for his work? I know there are authorship controversies about individual works, but there is not another case I know of where the entire authorship of a whole oeuvre attributed to an author during his own lifetime has been disputed 200 years later.
Tony, you’re going to have to provide a little more evidence for Shakespeare being illiterate rather than simply saying it’s obvious because his family was.
Shakespeare’s father was a rather important city official in Stratford-upon-Avon, something roughly equivalent to councilman, I think (a position that would seem to require literacy). This position also allowed him to send William to grammar school, a fact I’ve been hearing in Shakespeare biographies since high school (and I’ve seen the Stratford grammar school myself). He not only would have learned to read and write, but he would have learned some Latin and with it classical myth and history. Combined with Shax’s status as an actor and businessman, I don’t really see how it’s at all likely that he was illiterate.
The “Shakespeare question” probably appears more pressing if one thinks of Shakespeare as a singular light in early modern drama. Considering the many other excellent and renowned playwrights of the period (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, etc.) it doesn’t seem very strange that a man like Shakespeare, existing in a thriving creative atmosphere already, would exist and write his plays. Shakespeare is of course a giant of a writer even among Elizabethan dramatists, but it’s not like he is existing in some sort of vacuum where his presence can only be explained by a conspiracy of the aristocracy.
Anyway, this discussion is distracting us from the real controversy: how the poetry of John Milton was actually composed by Charles II.
Also, despite the cliche that “we don’t have much evidence about Shakespeare’s life,” it seems to me that, relative to most people (and most dramatists) in early modern England, we have quite a bit of information about Shakespeare. Maybe “Oxfordians” just haven’t spent much time studying early modern history, but it’s not like we can expect the same amount of information on Shakespeare as we can on, say, Dickens. Given the man’s time, place, and profession we seem to know a fair deal about him.
I’ve been involved in the Adam Bede thread for some weeks, but I’ve only just now stumbled across some incendiary sites on the internet that claim that George Eliot was actually a woman called ‘Mary Anne Evans’. But there’s no way this can be true: for one thing, the perpetrators of the ‘Mary Anne’ hoax can’t even agree to spell ‘her’ name a uniform way (’Marian’ sometimes, ‘Mary Ann[e]’ others). For another no woman in the nineteenth-century could have been as learned and informed as this ‘Mary Anne’ is alleged to have been. She didn’t even go to university, yet she supposedly translated German, Greek and Latin? I don’t think so. No, the truth is it suits the received wisdom of ‘feminist literary studies’ to foist this fiction upon us. Unfashionable as it may be today, George Eliot was a real figure, an Oxford educated nobleman, who passed on much of what he learned as a writer to his illegitimate son, Thomas Stearns.
Tony, Robert Greene didn’t love Shakespeare this side of idolatry and I rather suspect you haven’t actually read Jonson’s comments.
We today see writing as a prestige career. This was not the case in Elizabethan England--theatre in particular would have been like being a jazz musician or a rock musician circa 1955. Theatre in Shakespeare’s day was vigorous because it was the bright poor boy’s way to get out of keeping shop. Greene’s background was no much different.
Also, while I sympathize more with Jonson or Marlowe for their more radical perceptions, those more radical perceptions got them into trouble. Shakespeare’s father thought the family should granted a coat of arms—S’s got the coat of arms approved. He had some investment in the system as it was, and had a much easier time not kicking so overtly than Jonson and Marlowe had in kicking. These people were writing in a theocratic police state.
Some of this comes across like saying Bob Dylan had to have been upper-class and a Columbia University graduate because of all the literary references. It’s very obvious that Lita Hornick was Bob Dylan. Her own literary style was a hoax. She had the Ph.D. from Columbia University in Dylan Thomas if I remember correctly, and travelled in radical poetry circles. Why imagine a middle class kid from Montana who can’t sing very well and who never went to college would be able to write as well as all that?
An interesting set of comments, Adam Roberts’ satire by far the most astute.
It’s interesting, striking, how nobody is quoting the arguments as laid out most extensively by “the Oxfordians” and refuting them. They are the experts on the argument for de Vere. If you have some ambition to refute de Vere as author, I suggest you attempt to refute their substantial research, and take a close look at the very skimpy bit of evidence that can be gathered to support Shakspere as author.
As it is, I’ll be on the road this entire day (with some uncertain but probable internet connection several states away) but hope to get back to the discussion at least awhile more.
Again, if anyone is serious about this question, it’s most appropriate that you take on the experts you doubt: http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/. They directly address many of the points above, as have others, like Michael Hart, in his excellent chapter on Shakespeare/de Vere in The 100 (most influential people).
I have it on good authority that Adam Roberts is working on a new piece of speculative fiction which includes a scene were some little green men are slapping high sevens and congratulating one another on successfully diverting attention from the truth about Shakespeare and those witches and ghosts and other strange creatures that show up in his plays.
I’ve been through this material once before, and it answers neither Greene nor Jonson. Again, we had a major cultural shift in how poets who did popular entertainments were perceived (the Dyer’s Hand sonnet is what it was like to have to write for a living then and how it was perceived).
Cross-read Chaucer against Shakespeare and you’ll see that Chaucer and his wife really worked with the upper classes and had a much less star struck attitude about them (no man is a hero to his accountant).
S was doing what a lot of very clever, very intelligent poor boys tried to do in that day. Pace the Oxfordians, the prestige was in being a rich guy or the patronized poet (Spencer) of the rich guys, not in writing for the common stage.
Yeats put the cultural shift from a poet being a person with so much money and such and such education to being the Poet God figure as happening around 1914 or so. I suspect it was earlier.
If the sonnets weren’t just literary exercises, the Dyer’s Hand sonnet says, “Damn, I have to work for a living and theatre is making me coarse.”
When I taught Hamlet, I pointed out to my students that nobody went to see a play for the plot. The productions were more like rock theatre productions than like contemporary theatre—big, gaudy, vibrating with words, and tremendously entertaining and an inspiration to the poor clever kids like Jonson who wanted to get beyond being a bricklayer and common soldier.
It was get rich or die trying (and Greene and Marlowe plus some others did die trying).
I think the whole issue is more interesting as a sociology of knowledge question than as a genuine controversy. I wonder if someone’s done a meta-analysis of the history of alternate candidates for Shakespeare from this point of view, trying to look at the motives and interests that underlie the enterprise? The point isn’t really Oxford, because there have been many other candidates before, most notoriously Bacon.
Oxfordian arguments have a decidedly amateurish, autodidact, crankish “smell” to them that makes me want to reject them out of hand. If these people want to be dismissed by mainstream academics, they certainly have developed some good strategies to that end. A list of famous actors and Supreme Court justices who didn’t believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for one! As an academic but not a specialist in this area, it is pretty obvious to me who has the better arguments. But how much of that is my own academic habitus?
(The combination of distrust of academic authority with the idea that the author of the plays and poems had to have had a university education has always struck me as odd.)
I agree with you, Jonathan. It’s fascinating from that point of view.
There is, however, the question of just how outsiders get purchase for their ideas when the academy is inherently conservative, and pretty much has to be. I found out about this particular discussion in the comments to a conversation Timothy Burke had started:
http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=617#comments
Burke had seen a TV program about an engineer who devoted a good deal of his life to arguing that Einstein was wrong and was wondering how scholars should respond to such people, if at all.
The issue, of course, is every once in awhile one of these cranks turns out to be correct.
There are, of course, academics who teach Shakespeare and who hold that Oxford wrote it (not just scientists or composition teachers who hold that). The only one I’ve seen explain much of his approach, as best I can determine, sees Edward de Vere as a typical Renaissance man and thus appropriate for teaching students about the early-modern period by way of getting them to understand how Shakespeare thinks.
It certainly sounds interesting. However, I’m not a teacher, but it seems to me “would be helpful for my teaching” doesn’t really entail “true.” And pace Tony Christini, the implications don’t seem especially leftist to me either.
Please stop telling Tony that he “know[s] more about this than [you] do.” He believes more about this than you do. There’s a difference.
The important Stratfordian points have been made. I’d add that the usual conspiracy theory evidentiary double standard is at work in Tony’s arguments. He argues from probability right until people ask if it’s likely that Jonson and others would lie on Shakespeare’s behalf, at which point he says that it’s not impossible. In his argument, there is no point at which his side has the burden of proof.
It’s seems to me that the single strongest piece of evidence in the matter is that the name on the plays is pretty much like the name of the man from Stratford, well within contemporary spelling standards. OTOH, the name on the plays is not remotely like de Vere or Bacon or Raleigh, or Spartacus, or Zorgmantus, or anything else. Given how very conservative people are on the matter of names, that counts for quite a bit. In the absence of any explicit positive evidence that the name on the plays is a pseudonym, the sum total of all this conjecture is not strong enough to outweigh that simple fact. That the conjectures go “convincingly” in various directions doesn’t auger well for any of them.
Tony, I did as you advised and looked at the Shakespeare-Oxford Society’s website. Not being a scholar of Shakespeare or the period, I assumed that there would be a collection of facts and claims that I couldn’t refute. In fact, the page is a bargain bin of easily rejected arguments. Everyone even mildly interested should follow the links Tony provided; it’s as convincing a demonstration you will find that the anti-Stratfordians are not motivated by logic, but by the thrill of a conspiracy and by anti-academic sentiment.
I don’t want to bore people, but here are a couple choice moments:
“There should be masses of contemporary documents about the life of the world’s greatest writer.”
Why? Are there masses of contemporary documents about the authors of the world’s most popular religious text? As Amateur Reader pointed out above, there are plenty of authors who have the same, or less, evidence for their identities than Shakespeare does without a resultant controversy.
“During the past two hundred years, many people have decided that the name “Shakespeare” must have been a pseudonym, and have tried to identify the true author.”
And yet Shakespeare didn’t die two, or even three hundred years ago. Why weren’t there people questioning Shakespeare’s identity back when they were in a position to know?
“There has never been an authorship controversy surrounding other great literary figures: - Swift, Pope, Milton, Joyce, Woolf, Chaucer or Dante. If sensible people can maintain that there is one about Shakespeare, then it is folly to ignore it - as orthodoxy unfortunately has to.”
First, all but two of the figures mentioned postdate Shakespeare, and so don’t run into the same problems of verification that he does. Second, it’s obvious that the reason there is a controversy is that Shakespeare is the most famous author in history. This is akin to saying, “There isn’t much controversy about other terrorist attacks, so doesn’t the controversy around September 11 mean that there’s something fishy?” No, because everyone cares about September 11 more than any other terrorist attack. (Sorry if this seems Godwinesque; I’m just trying to use another well-known set of conspiracy theories.)
Finally, the section on the chronology of the later plays--the ones after de Vere’s death--is a joke. It looks exactly like the anti-evolution arguments about the unreliability of carbon dating: all they can do is say that no one knows anything about dates. And, like anti-evolutionists, the authors of the site seem to have a very poor grasp of what evidence is, when it’s required, and when it’s sufficient to convince.
The Oxfordians aren’t thinking about what a playwright was in S’s day. He’s only appeared to be great in the last couple of centuries.
We’re all fortunate that a number of highly intelligent and excitable men came together at the one place in Elizabethan society that was open to people because of sheer talent. They made a world for themselves between the bear pits and the brothel for a very intense popular entertainment that speaks to us still.
One lord collected all the plays published. Either at his death or later in his life, these were offered them to one of the two big universities who turned the collection down saying that while there might be some gems in the mix, most of this was trivial and forgettable trash.
I’d be curious about when Oxford or Cambridge acquired First Folios. Quick search: Looks like some of their holdings came from private hands well after publication, including Garrick’s library.
I’ve read somewhere that our current image of Shakespeare comes from the late 18th Century and early 19th Century, more specifically with the rise of Romanticism and theatre revivals. Cheaper to put him on than to hire a contemporary writer.
Beowulf was written by Cotton Vitellius, either. It’s a big conspiracy, guys.
’I’ve been involved in the Adam Bede thread for some weeks, but I’ve only just now stumbled across some incendiary sites on the internet that claim that George Eliot was actually a woman called ‘Mary Anne Evans’.’
I agree, Adam, quite absurd. However, I do give some credence to the theory that the novelist was actually called Adam Bede and his first ‘novel’ was virtually a memoir of the rise of a simple English artisan, with only the country schooling of one ‘Bartle Massey’, whose own identity has produced much speculation but might be the source of Dickens’ Wackford Squeers (later headmaster of Rugby School); it is well-known, after all that Dickens referred to the author as ‘Adam Bede’. Of course, the dates don’t fit but that has nothing to do with literary theory, we are told.
Of course, lack of orthodox educational background leads most to suppose that Bede’s becoming a writer was impossible, ignoring the obvious fact that he was descended from the ‘Venerable Bede’ thus proving the evolutionary theory being proposed at the time that genetic encoding could be passed down the generations.
(BTW ‘Hetty’ was, of course, based on the early life of Harriet Beecher Stowe.)
Bill: How could you give away the plot of Adam’s novel? I’d sue if I were him. (He’s calling it ‘The Not Very Convinci Code’, I think, but it’ll fool no-one - ‘high sevens’? Everyone knows that those aliens have only ‘pricking thumbs’, it’s mentioned in that Scottish play by Will McSpartacus.)
I was thinking of that exact same Tim Burke post, Bill, and of an NPR story I heard a few weeks ago about a high-school girl with a Global Warning denialist web site. There’s a very remote possibility that Oxford wrote some work attributed to Shakespeare, but e = mc is not within the realm of possibility at all. There’s a difference in degrees of certainty, but as a sociological matter it seems there’s a similarity.
I agree with tomemos too that the Oxford authorship website seems flimsy. Sure, the Tempest could possibly have been written earlier, and not in reference to a Bermuda shipwreck that happened after Oxford was dead, but anyone who doesn’t have a stake in the authorship debate would have no reason to date it earlier.
Then there’s the crappy poetry written under Oxford’s own name, and the ignorance of the author of Shakespeare’s work of Italian geography, which Oxford should have known well. Shakespeare thought that Milan had a seaport, that you would pass through Denmark on the way from Norway to Poland, etc…
Then there’s the crappy poetry written under Oxford’s own name...
That’s a deal-breaker, no?
Still alone here in my view, am I? After an 8 hour drive from Appalachia to Michigan don’t know how far I might go into this tonight (early a.m. actually) but we’ll see. First, I’m going to say something that I suppose will sound harsh, at least to some, then I’ll give the brief background on where I’m coming from in relation to this issue, then I hope to begin commenting on the comments in order.
The fir