A bunch of malarkey by another other name would still be malarkey

March 24, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

The allegation that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name is the creationism of the literary world. I was pleased, therefore, to see a thorough debunking of this nonsense recently.

In the piece, Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, points out that there is tons of evidence from Shakespeare’s own time acknowledging him as the author of the plays. No one suggested otherwise until an eccentric clergyman wrote a book in the 18th century questioning Shakespeare’s authorship. Even then, it took another 100 years before others took the ball and ran with it.

What’s most exasperating about the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” crowd is that they are a bunch of elitists posing as literary detectives. One of their main lines of argument is that Shakespeare – of humble birth and not well traveled – could not have written such masterful works. Wells makes short work of this.

The most common arguments that Shakespeare of Stratford could not have written the works are that he is not known to have traveled overseas, that he was of relatively humble origins and that he came from a small provincial town where he could not have received a good enough education to have written the plays,” he writes. “The facts are that the works show no knowledge of countries that could not have been obtained from books or from conversation, that you don’t have to be an aristocrat to be a great writer — Jonson was the son of a bricklayer, Marlowe’s father was a cobbler — and that Stratford had a good grammar school whose pupils received a far more rigorous education in the classics than most university graduates today.”

Also, why can’t we just accept the fact that sometimes the simplest explanation is the best? Is no one familiar with the concept of parsimony (when used in the scientific sense) or a cool thing called Occam’s Razor?

To simplify, these concepts teach us that there is no need to devise elaborate conspiracy theories and centuries-old cover-ups when more believable explanations are right under our noses. Thus, we can feel pretty confident that the ancient Egyptians were able to build the pyramids without help from extraterrestrials because they used slave labor. A weather balloon, not a flying saucer, crashed in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. Big Oil has not squelched the car that runs on water because cars can’t run on water. We have no need for a complex conspiracy theory to explain the assassination of President John F. Kennedy because Lee Harvey Oswald shot him with a mail-order rifle from a window of the Texas Book Depository.

Unfortunately, Shakespeare-related conspiracy theories continue to circulate today – even in unexpected places. Recently, my daughter attended a production of “Richard III” at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington. I was surprised to read the following in the program: “To this day some believe that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays; others argue that Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, was the man. Still others contend that Sir Walter Raleigh or Christopher Marlowe penned the lines attributed to Shakespeare. Whether the plays were written by Shakespeare the man or Shakespeare the myth, it is clear that no other playwright has made such a significant and lasting contribution to the English language.”

I am at a loss to explain why a prestigious Shakespeare company would open the door even a tiny crack to denying credit where it is due. Perhaps they believe creating an air of mystery about the plays will lead more people to read Shakespeare. If so, they are misguided. The way to interest people in Shakespeare is to underscore the man’s greatness – not to deny it. Kooky conspiracy theories are no match for the real grandeur of The Bard.

None of these morons ever heard of an imagination? Stephen King was never a Vampire or an evil clown. Tom Clancy never served in the Navy or CIA. Dan Brown was neither a member of the Opus Dei or a good writer… (I could never get into the Da Vinci Code.)

I suspect part of this comes from the fact that Willie did not write plays about the joys of being one of the eelight. Most of the plays I studied or read, the rich & powerful were portrayed as douchebags of the highest order. About the only member of the eelight that I remember being a portrayed as a decent person was Cordelia from King Lear, but as we all know, she died.

Instead of attacking the plays, they can only attack the man.

  • As Willie put it in King Lear,

    To Willie’s doubters:
    “not worth the dust which the rude wind Blows in your face!”

  • I always thought that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare.

    After all, Marlowe was dead and many people saw him die.

    I love Shakespeare’s work so much that I am convinced that no mere mortal could have written it.

    Therefore, since a mortal could not have written ‘Shakespeare’ then it is a tautalogy that the man – William Shakespeare – could not have written it.

    Do you have any better ideas?

  • Good piece, full of sense.

    His doubters say “How could Shakespeare know so much about sailing, warfare, court etiquette, etc., when he wasn’t exposed to them”. Indeed, his plays have many details from all fields of knowledge. He knows so many lingos. And he uses this cornucopia of borrowed experience to make rich tapestries, like Tolstoy – panoramas of life. But Shakespeare made many little mistakes in his details, as experts in those areas have found.

    I think what we see here is a difference between book learners and listeners. Intellectuals wonder “How could Shakespeare know so much without studying or training in these fields?” Well, he was a human sponge for conversation, and in pubs and gatherings he heard people speak of their own experiences and he absorbed all the buzz-words from THEIR fields of knowledge

    Speech and communication were where his deepest genius lay. He created so many diverse characters who speak distinctively. And I expect many of these characters started from the characters he met, and listened to, and partly absorbed into the great globe in his head.

  • Nice.

    I have my own version of Occam’s Razor: A senior professor when I had just arrived on the professing scene once broke up a faculty meeting (we were discussing some malevolent action by the University administration, of course) by proclaiming that there was no need to invoke conspiracy when stupidity would do. Simpler is better: Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (and he spelled his own name many ways, too, in that pre-dictionary day). A Latin-Greek background, standard fare for even poor students in his time, didn’t hurt.

    You can argue whether Henri Rousseau was a great painter or not (his reprints still appear on college dorm room walls), but the fact was he never left town. His knowledge of the exotic places, animals and plants in his works all came from the public library.

    I think part of the timelessness of Shakespeare’s works comes from the fact that he used standard lore and stories rather than having first-hand or an academic’s knowledge of things. As a result he wrote plays that everyone of his day (and some even in ours) could relate to. If the tourists want to pay good money to believe they’re standing in front of Juliet’s balcony in Verona, what’s the harm?

  • His doubters say “How could Shakespeare know so much about sailing, warfare, court etiquette, etc., when he wasn’t exposed to them”. Indeed, his plays have many details from all fields of knowledge. He knows so many lingos. And he uses this cornucopia of borrowed experience to make rich tapestries, like Tolstoy – panoramas of life. But Shakespeare made many little mistakes in his details, as experts in those areas have found.

    Producers are always amazed at how much technical accuracy on the subject is found in my screenplays. To which I answer:

    “It’s called research (“idiot” – usually unspoken but not always)!”

    Of course, the permanent sophomore English majors – aka Twits With Tenure (TWTs) – wouldn’t have a clue what that is.

  • Not to pee in the punch, but the son of one of our Minneapolis Drinking Liberally members has written a book on de Vere that is quite compelling. In this case, Occam’s Razor does seem to point to de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, because he did indeed live in all the places where Shakespeare’s plays take place.

    Nothing makes me more nervous than when scholars absolutely, positively “know” something. There have been ghostwriters throughout history, and there is no compelling reason to be “certain” Shakespeare’s plays were written by Shakespeare.

  • I seem to remember that Marlowe and/or Bacon as “Shakespeare’s ghost” had been debunked on just the basis of the language usage. Shakespeare had the equivalent of perfect pitch when it came to spoken language as well as an incredible imagination when it came to taking a commonly known phrase, giving it a slight twist and ending up with something not only new but sharper. Neither Marlowe nor Bacon exhibited the same trait in their other (attributed to them) writings.

    I didn’t like Shakespeare much when we studied him in highschool but, when I got to the U and began to read the plays in the original language I was amazed at how contemporary and natural he sounded. I guess the Polish translattions weren’t all that good. Or maybe one has to be older than 16 to fully appreciate him.

  • I don’t know enough about the arguments to have a firm opinion, but there’s one book on the subject that looks rather interesting — Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? by Robin P. Williams.

    From Amazon’s comments we learn:

    Sweet Swan of Avon sets out to prove that Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, an influential, literate, well-educated, well-connected, brilliant leader of the literary Wilton Circle, is the author of the plays and sonnets. Mary Sidney was born three years before Shakespeare and died five years after he died.

    There is plenty of documentary evidence that Mary Sidney was a writer–indeed she was the first woman to publish a play in English (a closet drama, meant to be performed in a small family setting, not for the public). She was trained in medicine, and had her own alchemy laboratory; she was fluent in French and Italian, and translated works in those languages. She was knowledgeable about hawking and falconry; she was able to play music, both the lute and virginal.

    The acting troupe the Earl of Pembroke’s men, sponsored by Mary Sidney and her husband, performed three or four of the eight early anonymously published Shakespeare plays.

    While it says of Shakespeare’s background:

    William Shakespeare’s mother, father, wife and 2 of his 3 children were illiterate.

    And it seems reasonable that a woman, especially an aristocratic woman, might not publish under her own name.

    So yes, Occam’s Razor and all. But this one seems a claim worth at least a little investigation.

  • I have it on unimpeachable authority that the bard was, in truth, the earl of Limbaugh.

  • The best argument that I’ve ever heard in favor of Shakespeare writing the whole damn lot was put forward by Jonathon Miller (MD, actor, producer and director, polymath, etc), which he derived solely from the known facts of Shakespears life:

    Here’s a guy who runs a theatre company by day, puts on the shows at night and carouses until the early morning with all the low/mid life’s of a major port city (London) before he goes back to essentially a garret to sleep it off and do it all over again the next day. Every few weeks he needs to dash of a new play, or act or something to bring the money in or provide work for his troupe.

    This is a lifestyle *tailormade* to produce creative output
    Before he goes to sleep he writes a few lines and scenes that are snatches of converstation or stories that he heard that day and puts it in the bottom drawer. When he needs new material he digs through the drawer and slaps something together.

    It then gets workshopped through rehearsal and actual performance. Gradually over time the scenes/jokes/lines that work are reworked into larger works that are staged as larger productions and the most successful are published.

    What we see now are the published works – the best of the best.

  • “We have no need for a complex conspiracy theory to explain the assassination of President John F. Kennedy because Lee Harvey Oswald shot him with a mail-order rifle from a window of the Texas Book Depository.”

    What turnip truck did you fall off, Morbo?

    You probably also believe that the WTC towers imploded because of jet fuel fires.

    You are a retarded ass.

  • The assumption behind the support for William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author has to be that he was no ordinary mortal because otherwise there is no accounting for the detailed knowledge of the law, foreign languages, Italy, the court and aristocratic society, and sports such as falconry, tennis, jousting, fencing, and coursing that appears in the plays. I do not have any doubt that genius can spring from the most unlikely of circumstances. The only problem here is that there is in this case no evidence to support it. Would the greatest writer in the English language have allowed his daughters to remain illiterate?

    Further, the sonnets are written by a man who is clearly much older. Conventional chronology dates the sonnets to between 1592 and 1596. At this time, William of Stratford would have been in his late twenties and early thirties (Oxford was 14 years older). Even if we up the date to 1599, William of Stratford was still in his thirties. The sonnets tell us that the poet was in his declining years when writing them. He was “Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,” “With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’er worn”, in the “twilight of life”. He is lamenting “all those friends” who have died, “my lovers gone”. His is “That time of year/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs that shake against the cold.”

    The sonnets that most contradict Will of Stratford’s life story are those about shame and disgrace to name and reputation. Here Shakespeare’s biographers have nothing to go on. In addition he refers to having “born the canopy” (Sonnet 125), a reference to carrying the canopy over the head of the monarch during a wedding procession. There is no evidence that the man from Stratford ever came within a thousand yards of the Queen or ever carried any canopy. It would have been forbidden to a commoner.

  • I have read the very well written and enjoyable Anthony Holden’s life of Shakespeare (William Shakespeare wrote William Shakespeare), and then later Robin P Williams book that Mary Sidney Herbert could have been the author. I have to say the latter is my preferred option. What seems an incredible initial hypothesis simply grows on you as you read. Connections begin to jump out at you everywhere and it just seems to make so much sense, particularly with the mystery of the meaning of the sonnets. I recommend the book Sweet Swan of Avon to anyone with a curious and open mind on the authorship question.

    “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
    By any other name would smell as sweet”

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