What If?

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates last week, I’m struck, yet again, by the pointlessness of our news coverage.  I’m not going to get into the particulars of the case.  That has already been done ad nauseum, and since I wasn’t a completely neutral party who was there, how can I say what went on?  I will say this:  Instead of drinking beers under a magnolia tree, it would have been better had the President joined them in the White House screening room for a viewing of Rashomon.

Last night, while I was skimming the umpteenth post on The Daily Dish about what’s being moronically called Gates Gate, I was struck by the thought of how ephemeral the whole thing is, how although it’s the big thing of the moment, in a few weeks it will be forgotten.  The news, as a concept, is a voracious consumer of outrage.  Based in melodrama, it searches endlessly for heroes and villains and works mostly by manipulating emotions by taking very real people and reducing their sufferings to a kind of marionette show.  You can’t sell papers, even digital ones, without stoking somebody’s discontent or their pity.

The news is grounded in sentimentality, which makes it harder to take any given story seriously for any particular length of time.  Since the story is sentimentalized, it is shallow.  Since it is shallow, it cannot be sustained.  To do otherwise would be like watching the same scene from a soap opera over-and-over again.  And it’s hard to imagine anything that could be duller than that.

Even longer-lasting stories, such as the War in Iraq, are presented in sentimental ways and are presented as a series of distinct sentimental stories rather than as one continuing narrative.  In the case of the Iraq War, it started out with a patriotic pageant called “Shock and Awe.”  This was followed by the desert melodrama “The Looting of Baghdad.”  “Abu Ghraib,” “al Qaeda in Iraq,” “Saddam Down the Spiderhole,” “Crisis in Fallujah,” “Improvised Explosive Device,” “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein,” and “The Surge,” among a plethora of titles, all had their moments in the sun.  And just to be clear, I am not trying to belittle the suffering incurred by the soldiers involved, their families, or the Iraqis themselves.  These are all people who experience these stories not as melodrama but as tragic farce.  Their suffering is real and should not, cannot, be diminished.

And that is part of the hell of it.  By sentimentalizing such a story, the news business does exactly that.  It diminishes the suffering of those directly involved.  It takes something profound and makes it passing fair just for the sake of making a few more dollars.

The chaff of this approach to news is the kind of person we call a celebrity.  These are people of no discernible talent who attain a sort of notoriety, quite often from a scandal, and they work quite hard to remain in the public eye.  I just saw a headline concerning Kim Kardashian this morning that described her as a star, and I’m still not sure why I should know her name at all.  Except that she was involved in some scandal at one time, which made her part of the news cycle.  For the person who gets addicted to the notoriety, life becomes a melodramatic story of various romances and break-ups and career moves.  It’s a very sad thing, this addiction to fame, and I can’t imagine the bottomless, existential dread that must envelope Ms Kardashian every time she looks in a mirror and notices an imperfection.  Michael Jackson was killed by his fame and by the sentimentalized parody of a person he became in its service.

And so the omnivorous news cycle continues, chewing up people and stories and spitting them out as parody humans, no longer noble or tragic but merely pitiable.  And there’s nothing to be done about it because most people prefer melodrama to tragedy and sentimental comedy to farce.  They like everything tied up at the end with ribbons made of avuncular smiles and homebaked pies.  It’s a reality of a kind, a shabby, sentimental one, but that’s what folks like.  For the advantage to sentimentality is this:  When the emotions produced are fake and trite, you don’t have to risk the power of true pain and joy.

Small Things

The other day while running an errand, I found myself behind a car that was behind a huge dump truck that had the words “FOLLOW ME AS I FOLLOW CHRIST” spelled out on its back gate, and I couldn’t help but hope that Christ didn’t stop short. For if He had, the owner of the dump truck would have had to change the legend to “CRASH INTO ME AS I CRASH INTO CHRIST.”

* * * * *

On a tangentially related note, this morning, as I lingered in line at a traffic light, I noticed a car in an adjacent lane that was traveling a bit too quickly and that braked a bit too sharply and that stopped with less than six inches between its front bumper and the rear bumper of the car in front of it. Affixed to the trunk of this car was one of those silver Christian fish symbols with the word “JESUS” fit inside it. This made me think of a new variation on WWJD. It’s HWJD. It stands for “How would Jesus drive?”

* * * * *

I’m so tired of those things anyway. Not the original symbol, mind you, just these modern metallic items that people are endlessly attaching to the backs of their vehicles in endless variations. The original symbol, the fish outline (I’ve just learned this is actually called an ichthys), was, of course, used by early Christians as a clue for the faithful in knowing where to go for worship. Now, for Christians, it’s merely a way of marking their vanity, not a way of marking the path to a secret meeting.

It wasn’t so bad when it was just the ichthys. Since Jesus spent a considerable amount of time, as quoted in the Gospels, speaking against being too public in one’s relationship to God, it wouldn’t be my choice were I to be a practicing Christian. However, I can understand that some people are just so brimming with pride in their relationship to Jesus that they just can’t help themselves.

The trouble, it seems to me, started when somebody decided to stick feet on the fish and to fit the word “DARWIN” inside it. Now, I have to admit that, when I first saw that, that I thought it was funny. However, there is an implication in it that just isn’t true, and that is that simply because someone is a Christian, they must be against the idea of evolution. That’s not only unprovable, but nonsense. Not all Christians are fundamentalists and to lump all Christians together into one mindless group is mere bigotry.

Unfortunately, the Darwin fish set off all sorts of responses, and it all degraded into a kind of bumper sticker debate, which is, I believe, the lowest point achievable in intellectual discourse outside of talk radio.

Logic

It seems to me that one of the great failings of our educational system is that we never teach our children how to think, and by that I do not mean that we need to try to indoctrinate them into some particular ideology or collection of thoughts. I mean they never learn how to reason properly and how to bring logic to an argument, a conversation, an election, or a decision, whether it is personal or for business. Americans tend to founder about logically. (This may also be true in other nations, but that is not my concern. I am an American, and Americans are all I really know about. For me to go beyond that boundary would be unreasonable.)

This subject has been on my mind recently because of politics and responses to recent posts of mine concerning Shakespeare and the mythical “authorship question.”

Notions put forward by the Clinton campaign as their vision of a cakewalk to coronation has fallen to pieces have repeatedly been self-serving, desperate, and lacking in logic. I’ll take a couple of quick examples to show what’s wrong.

One argument that really gets under my skin is the one that states that Hillary should be the candidate because she can “win in the big states.” The problem with this is that there is no logical connection between the results from these states in the primaries and the results in the general election. Some of those states are solidly Republican, and no Democrat could take them in the general election. Others are strongly Democratic, and unlikely to tumble the other way regardless of the candidate. And in pick ‘em states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, who’s to say how an Obama/McCain election would play out? The argument is nonsense because it relies on an analogy that cannot be made.

The second one that grates on my nerves is the one about certifying the delegates from Michigan and Florida based on the results of the primaries they held outside of party rules. The Clintons try to cast this as being about voting rights, which it isn’t. No one was disenfranchised. There is no requirement that any state hold a primary in order for that state’s party to determine how its delegates will be selected for the National convention. There is no legal requirement for any system or set of systems to be used.

However, the Democratic parties in both these states were warned by the Democratic National Committee that their delegates would not be seated if they held their primaries before Feb. 5th, and they did so anyway. At the time, they figured that there would be some runaway leader and that it wouldn’t matter whether their delegates were seated or not. It must also be remembered that all the candidates involved agreed to this procedure. It didn’t sneak up on anybody, least of all the Clinton campaign. Harold Ickes, one of that campaign’s bigwigs, signed off on that rule when it was made. The good Senator and a prominent member of her family only started worrying about “disenfranchising voters” when it became politically expedient for them to do so. In this case, the argument is flawed because it is not properly based in the facts.

Just yesterday, she was quoted as saying, “I keep telling people, no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning West Virginia,” which attempts to establish causality where none exists. Which is so much of what you get from the Oxfordians.

In their enthusiasm for their cause, they tend to fall into a series of logical traps, one of the most common of which is assuming causality where none can be shown. In the comments to a post called “Beards,” a commenter writes that Shakespeare’s name is not on any quarto published before 1598. He then notes that Lord Burghley–the queen’s chief adviser and the most powerful man in England at the time–died in 1598. He then avers (although I have not taken the time to track down the facts because I have a job and a family that come before this argument) that Shakespeare’s name first appears on a quarto after Burghley’s death. He then comes to the conclusion that Burghley’s death somehow precipitated the emergence of Shakespeare’s name on the quartos.

However, this is, quite technically, a logical fallacy. It is called post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it is the supposition that simply because one event follows another that the first event caused the second. Other events–such as the jailing of the printer who published a pirated edition of Romeo & Juliet–are ignored and skipped over. Can they show cause and effect from the facts? No. Since they wish to see a connection, the connection is formed.

Another example (and many more can be found) of the poor reasoning associated with the Oxfordian cause is their assertion that the Earl must have written Hamlet because he was once abducted by pirates and, in a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, it is claimed that Hamlet’s ship was beset by pirates. There is, of course, the usual twisting of facts, and Hamlet is made out to have been dumped naked on the shores of Denmark when his letter, in fact, states that he was treated well and released. However, without the twisting, the occurrence of pirates in both the life of the Earl and the fictional Prince of Denmark sounds coincidental. It must be jerryrigged in order for it to make sense as a “clue.” Of course, the whole logic is flawed. That Hamlet was abducted by pirates is nothing more than a plot device and nothing that the writer couldn’t have devised without having had the experience for himself. Further, using the same logic, I can state that there are pirates in Treasure Island, and that therefore the Earl is also the author of the works of Robert Louis Stephenson. It’s all wishful thinking and not based in fact and the scientific method.

Now, to be fair, Shakespeare’s orthodox biographers are not immune to to such capering. Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World read more like a boy’s adventure novel than a serious biography, and the only reason why I didn’t fling it out the window while reading it was because I was on a plane at the time and doing so would have condemned 150 innocent people to a fiery death. It is speculative and fruity with phrases such as “he must have” and “we can infer,” phrases that are merely cover for the plain and simple fact that the author is making most of it up out of whole cloth. (The Oxfordians prefer formulations such as “many people believe,” which really means “because I assert.”)

Claire Asquith wrote a book called Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare in which she puts forward the theory that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic and that he merely wrote his plays as an excuse to transmit coded messages to the other secret Catholics in his audience. This one I had to put aside before I harmed someone by turning it into a projectile. It suffers from the same basic flaw that I find in the Oxfordian cause: “Evidence” is manufactured by the simple desire to find it. She manages to turn these magnificent, breathing, and breathtaking plays into a sort of Orphan Annie decoder ring to no one’s benefit.

There have been two other major biographies in recent years that I have read, Michael Wood’s Shakespeare and Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography. Both try valiantly to hew to the facts, but can’t in the end. Michael Wood, unfortunately, hasn’t met the piece of gossip or most far-fetched connection that he doesn’t love, and he speculates wildly about things that can’t be known. Ackroyd, whose book is chockful of useful information about Shakespeare and the period he lived in, often falls into the trap described above in which he uses phrases like “he must have” to dress up the assertion of pure opinion as statements of verifiable fact. It’s too bad. It’s a good book, but it could have been truly a fine one with less speculation.

The difference between the Oxfordian (and other pretenders) cause and the orthodox view, however, is that it is possible to write an orthodox book that is based entirely in fact. I can say this because the best of the recent biographies, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, does precisely that. Bryson is to-the-point and entertaining, and his book is the perfect starter volume for the person who is just dangling a toe in the biography of Shakespeare.

It’s fun to speculate. I am hardly immune to it. However, there is a difference between speculation and scholarship. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but it likes to see order and patterns where none exist. This is why we can look at clouds and see baskets of kittens and Moe hitting Curly with a wrench in their forms. This is why we have the scientific method. You form a hypothesis and test it against the facts. And if that works to the disadvantage of your hypothesis, you don’t re-engineer the facts and skip the ones you don’t like. You get a new hypothesis. One based in facts, not in suppositions.

Eternitie

Yesterday, I came across an article at the New York Times website by Donald Foster that had research that speaks to my recent piece concerning the Sonnets of Shakespeare. After reading his research, I have to retract some of what I wrote. In discussing the term “the onlie begetter,” I was wrong, completely and unquestionably. Excerpts from his article follow.

In the winter of 1983-1984, contemplating a doctoral dissertation on the Sonnets, . . . I [thought] I should learn something about the conventions of the age with respect to Renaissance book dedications, epigraphs, and prefatory epistles, about which I knew very little. So I parked myself at a microfilm reader and began to explore what was then a brand-new research tool called “Early English Books, 1475-1640,” a microfilm collection of every surviving English book, pamphlet, and single-page broadside printed during this historical period[.]

He finds the following in regards to the terms “our ever-living poet” and “onlie begetter.”

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term “ever-living” was applied sometimes to deceased Christians (once, to Chaucer, a dead poet), but reserved usually for God. When poetry was attacked by Puritans as an idle pursuit, its defenders typically replied that the word poet (from the Latin poeta) means “maker,” and that God is himself a poet. This God-is-our-Poet trope appears in at least three books already known to Shakespeare by 1609 if not to Thorpe, including a book published by Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Thomas Heywood only four months before Shake-speare’s Sonnets.

Nor could a human begetter like William Shakespeare deliver on a promise of ETERNITIE, a blessing mentioned in hundreds of Renaissance book prefaces and dedications but referring always to eternal life in heaven, not literary fame, and promised, according to the convention, in Holy Scripture, not in the sugared sonnets of a London playmaker. For English readers of Thorpe’s generation, God in heaven was our EVER-LIVING POET (“Author,” “Creator”), as opposed to a talented mortal like Mr. Shakespeare, and God was also the only Maker who can truly promise us ETERNITIE.

Note that none of the sonnets offer eternity or eternal life. “Eternal lines” comes closest, but is not the same thing. Foster continues:

Who, then, was Mr. W.H., the only begetter of those ensuing 154 Sonnets? According to past scholarship, “W.H.” was either the young man eulogized by Shakespeare as “beauty’s rose,” or he was the person who supplied Thorpe with manuscript copy. Looking around, I found that those two inferences were probably mistaken as well. The “BEGETTER” in Renaissance texts was an absolutely commonplace metaphor referring always to the author.

Therefore,

Unless Thomas Thorpe was introducing a new twist to seventeenth-century convention, the “ONLIE BEGETTER” of the Sonnets had to be the mortal poet who wrote them.

So here’s what he makes of the dedication. Nothing could be less confusing, so let’s just leave that criticism in the trash bin where it belongs.

When I viewed the 1609 epigraph in the light of these historical conventions, Thorpe’s wish to the only begetter of Shakespeare’s Sonnets seemed no more original or mysterious than the greeting on a Hallmark card: “To Mr. W. H., the sole author of this text, I wish happiness in this life and eternity hereafter, as promised in Holy Scripture by our Maker, the ever-living Poet.”

Unfortunately, we do have to assume a compositor’s error for the “Mr. W.H.” instead of “Mr. W.S.” Or “Mr. W.SH.”

But that second initial is wrong. One might suppose, from this front-page salutation, that Shakespeare’s Sonnets were actually written by a Mr. William H.—fuel for new anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theories—were it not for the fact that Elizabethan printers often made mistakes when reproducing personal initials from manuscript copy. Such misprints occurred most often when the stationer of copyright did not have his own printing press, and paid someone else to do the printing—as Thomas Thorpe did the printer George Eld. Eld’s typesetter may have made a mistake, misreading a majuscule S for an H (letters that can look very much alike in the standard “secretary hand” of the seventeenth century). More probably, he just omitted a letter from Thomas Thorpe’s “Mr. W. SH.” (Shakespeare’s name during his own lifetime was abbreviated “W. SH.” on other publications; and Thorpe himself elsewhere signs himself “TH. TH.”)

Personally, I think, since Thorpe signs himself “T.T.” at the bottom, that “Mr. W.H.” was probably supposed to have been “Mr. W.S.” but I could be wrong, and I don’t think it can be proved beyond that.

No dark conspiracies, no convoluted theories, just good, straightforward scholarship.

Beards

Okay, here’s another thing about the whole idea that anybody but Shakespeare wrote all that stuff: Why would anybody resort to such elaborate ends just hide their authorship? All right, I’ll concede that authors sometimes publish anonymously or using a pseudonym, but actually getting somebody to be the beard is a much rarer act. It happened some during the 1950s here in America during the Communist witch hunts, but then people were being persecuted not really for writing, per se, but because of their political beliefs. And the idea that an Earl would have been persecuted for writing poems and plays–unless they were advocating the removal and disposal of the Queen–is absurd.

How could the act of writing poetry have been considered a capital crime when the Queen herself wrote poems? How would the writing of plays have been a crime when she often had plays presented in court and when she quite enjoyed them? And let’s not even get started on James I, who sponsored Shakespeare’s company of players and retained them in his royal retinue, and whose wife, Queen Anne, was an avid playgoer (although, technically, she had the plays brought to her).

The only people who were really, seriously against the showing of plays at the time were the Puritans, who thought they led to sloth in the lower classes. You see many of the same arguments made against television today, especially by certain fundamentalist preachers, such as Donald Wildmon. Many members of the court wrote poems and plays, including the Queen’s one-time favorite, Walter Raleigh. That any member of the ruling class would have had to go to such lengths is absurd. Especially one who publicly repudiated his Catholicism in 1580 and went as far as to rat out his Catholic friends. So little was he in her doghouse that she, in 1586, awarded him a pension of £1,000 per year, the equivalent of £161,459.28 in 2007. Not bad for a guy who had to go to such lengths to hide his “authorship” of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.”

Nonsense. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Not if you know anything about Elizabethan England.

The Code

Don’t read this post.  Read this one instead.  It covers the same ground and gets things right.

The idea had been eating at me for a while. As someone who is interested in Shakespeare’s biography, I’m also someone who is interested in some of the ancillary questions that have popped up over the centuries. There is, of course, the alleged “authorship question,” of which I have shot my beak off about quite enough, lately, thank you. There are theories about Shakespeare’s marriage and his retirement to Stratford. There’s the dating of the plays and poems, a task which is far beyond my humble abilities to be able to contribute. Most of all, there are questions about the sonnets.

The sonnets originally appeared, as a whole, in a volume that was printed in 1609. It was called, appropriately enough, Shake-speare’s sonnets and was advertised on its cover as being “never before imprinted.” It looked like this:

There were 154 of them, 152 of them “neuer before imprinted,” the bulk of them apparently to a young man and most of the balance to a young woman. The names go unrecorded, as does the name of a so-called “rival poet.” The writer of the sonnets identifies himself as being an actor, as being middle-aged (a term that connoted someone younger than it would today), and as being named Will (he puns on the name several times). The poems are challenging and difficult. The author (oh, what the hell, let’s just go right out on a limb and call him Shakespeare) often pushes the sonnet form to its breaking point with the power of his language and the complexities of his thoughts.

One of the mysteries surrounding this volume is a dedication written apparently by the publisher, one Thomas Thorpe. It’s an odd thing, written in a seemingly strange fashion:

Who is Mr. W.H.? Why is it seemingly so cryptic? What does it mean? Who is being addressed and by whom?

It’s hard not to look at such a thing and, eventually, to start thinking that it’s written in some sort of code. It has been decoded many times, all attempts coming up with different messages and ideas. Most of these have been done by people who call themselves “anti-Stratfordians,” and they are looking for confirmation that their candidate is the “true” author. Therefore, any deciphering that doesn’t lead them down that path is dismissed.

Since I am not so handicapped–that is, I’m not trying to “prove” Shakespeare’s authorship by decoding the message, I can let the name on the cover do that for me–I thought that I’d look into orthodox scholarship into possible codes embedded in the dedication. I came across an article by a fellow named David Basch that purported unravel the hidden meaning of the dedication. I did not realize at the time that Mr. Basch had his own ax to grind, namely the notion that Shakespeare was Jewish. I, personally, don’t see it, but I wish him well.

His deciphering I found unconvincing. It was too selective, didn’t account at all for why those particular words were arranged in that particular fashion, and I think that a method like his can be manipulated to reveal that Hootie and the Blowfish wrote the sonnets. However, he did provide me with some interesting information.

He quotes Leslie Hotson, a hotsy-totsy 20th Century Shakespeare expert, as pointing out that the phrase “our ever-living poet” was not a formulation that applied to people. It was, in fact, and Hotson apparently found at least 30 examples, a reference to God. I looked back at the dedication. It actually, for the first time, made sense to me. So it wasn’t in code. It was a straightforward dedication, and he was wishing Mr W.H. all the happiness and the eternal life promised by God for believing in his son, Jesus the Christ.

The question left then, has to do with the term “begetter.” What did Thorpe mean by this? Hotson turns to Samuel Daniel, a poet and Shakespeare’s almost exact contemporary. Apparently Daniel used the term “begetter” to refer to the woman who inspired his sonnets. That is, she planted the seed that grew inside him. Begetting and creating are not synonyms. A father begets and a mother bears. Parents create and get stuck with the result. What this has to do with anything, I’m not 100 percent sure.

If we can accept Thorpe as the author of the dedication (and those are his initials at the bottom), then I think it possible that the begetter could be the person who acquired the manuscripts for him. In this analogy, the manuscripts would be the seed and the printer’s office the womb. I won’t take the analogy any further, just in case somebody’s squeamish.

This would make the mysterious “Mr W.H.” the person who provided him with the manuscripts, perhaps by being the go-between between Thorpe and Shakespeare. I don’t think that’s any more out there than any of the other theories I’ve heard. In fact, I can say without doubt that I am not even remotely the first person to come to that conclusion. And who is Mr W.H.? I have no idea.

It can’t be said. There’s not enough information to go on. The “Mr” tells us that it was a man and that he was a commoner and not a nobleman. It also implies that he was a man of good repute and not the fellow who tended the pig-crap silo at the local whorehouse. Beyond that, there is no use in speculating.

Thorpe then styles himself “the well-wishing adventurer” who is “setting forth” in the adventure of publishing the book.

So here’s my tentative translation: “To Mr W.H., who acquired the manuscripts for me, the publisher wishes all the happiness and eternal life promised by God as he puts the book before the buying public.” It has the one advantage of making sense, which has never been a given when it comes to interpreting this particular text. In fact, most interpretations, for me, wind up in a place somewhere to the left of “huh?”

But this is all speculation. None of it is provable. None of it is fact. It’s just opinion and should be taken as being nothing more than that. Maybe someday an ancient letter will fall out of a tattered book, and we’ll find Thorpe negotiating with Shakespeare or treating with Mr W.H. Maybe all the mysteries will disappear. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it, but you never know.

Conspiracy

We live in the Age of the Conspiracy Theory, which is not quite the same thing as living in the Age of Enlightenment. An event that overwhelmed our collective ability to comprehend–the assassination of President Kennedy–took the conspiracy theory from the realm of the paranoid and insane into the mainstream. The reality was so inconceivable and the cause so insignificant that people took comfort in the fantasies of conspiracy as a way to help them explain the unexplainable and to give greater weight to a death that otherwise seemed cheap and meaningless. Saviors are supposed to be plotted against by Pharisees and Romans, not picked off by random unhinged drifters. Lee Oswald wasn’t grand enough a killer, so new ones had to be invented.

The same kind of thing holds true with the anti-Shakespeare cabal. That the son of a glover from a small to midsized town in the Midlands of England could grow up to write plays and poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight irks them. It’s not a grand enough notion, it doesn’t assuage their own vanity. Great things must be done by great men from great families and hidden for great reasons, otherwise it is all just too mundane, too ordinary, too real. Genius could crop up in the house around the corner and then you have no excuse for not being a genius yourself.

It’s all foolish and is encouraged by the kind of thinking that passes for logic in the novels of Agatha Christie. Supposition replaces evidence, and insinuation replaces facts. All laws of probability are thrown to the wind, and suddenly the idea that a train car can contain only one detective, one sidekick, one victim, and a passel of murderers becomes plausible and likely. Raymond Chandler, in his famous and delightful essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” refers to the solution to Murder on the Orient Express as “the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.”

And yet, because people don’t reason clearly and let themselves be led by their prejudices, such an explanation is thought wonderful and correct. Now there is a difference, of course, between a mystery novel and the murder of a President, but we, as a species, practice in play what we work at in life. And we come think that the obvious solution must be wrong, that it’s not clever enough and that it is insufficiently grand. And when no other explanation than the obvious presents itself, we grasp onto the idea of conspiracy.

Without the invention of a conspiracy, no other part of the theory can exist. It is all dependent on furtive meetings in darkened rooms and hushed conversations in inconspicuous places. Never mind how easily true conspiracies, like Watergate and Iran Contra, get exposed and picked over. That’s meaningless because the conspiracy that the conspiracy theorist has come to love and trust is a better, finer, more professional one than those.

Well, I say poppycock. (My thoughts on conspiracy can be gleaned from this humor piece I had published in the online magazine, The Cynic.) There are few conspiracies in this world. Even the anti-Shakespeare cabal is not a conspiracy, even though they do have meetings and an agenda. They are simply people who have gotten a notion into their heads–a rather silly one to my mind–a notion that they cling to like it’s the last board left from a sinking ship. They invent not one, but two conspiracy theories, an old one that put the plan into effect in the first place and the new one that they dub “the Shakespeare industry.” Their theories can’t survive without either.

(In the interests of full disclosure, let me state that, if there is a conspiracy called “the Shakespeare industry,” I have never been invited to any of the meetings. But then again, the goose is high and there’s a flagon with a dragon next to the vessel with the pestle.)

There is no conspiracy that needs inventing in order to accept William Shakespeare as the author of the plays and poems. There need be no high signs or vested interests. All the documents from the time name him as the author. We believe it. Simple, elegant, and real.

Side-by-Side-by-Shakespeare

The folks who champion Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the person who wrote the works generally attributed to Shakespeare find themselves in a bit of a difficult position once one of the Earl’s dreadful poems are produced. Let’s take the following, as an example:

Who taught thee first to sigh, alas, my heart ?
Who taught thy tongue the woeful words of plaint ?
Who filled your eyes with tears of bitter smart ?
Who gave thee grief and made thy joys to faint ?
Who first did paint with colours pale thy face ?
Who first did break thy sleeps of quiet rest ?
Above the rest in court who gave thee grace ?
Who made thee strive in honour to be best ?
In constant truth to bide so firm and sure,
To scorn the world regarding but thy friends ?
With patient mind each passion to endure,
In one desire to settle to the end ?
Love then thy choice wherein such choice thou bind,
As nought but death may ever change thy mind.

And now compare a similar poem written by Shakespeare:

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate’
To me that languish’d for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
‘I hate’ she alter’d with an end,
That follow’d it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’

Both are sonnets, both are addressed to woman, both are concerned with love. The first is leaden. Notice how each line is a statement unto itself, how dull the choice of words is, how lacking in music.

The second, on the other hand, while still considered to be perhaps the least of the sonnets, has ingenious line breaks and music and muscle. It also contain a sly reference, in the next-to-last line, to Shakespeare’s wife, Anne. (“Hate away”=Hathaway.) Now, apparently the so-called “Oxfordians” claim that the surviving poems of the Earl’s (and he signed them all) were the mere productions of youth and are ungainly for having been written by a tyro, and yet, even if that is true, I cannot personally imagine anybody progressing that far. I mean, how young would he have had to have been? Six? We are talking about improving by orders of magnitude, not by small degrees. We are talking about someone who would have to go from using the word “alas” in the first line of the first poem for no other reason than to add two syllables to someone capable of wrapping his first thought into three lines of a four-line stanza. The mind reels.

If you want to see the progress that a great poet makes between his juvenile work and his mature work, compare Shakespeare’s sonnet to his wife, above, with “When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought.” One is clearly inferior, but the seeds are there.

Show me. Don’t explain away or rationalize. Show me. Don’t make excuses or invent intricate theories. Show me. Show me. Show me.

The Burden of Proof

One of the most amusing aspects of the anti-Shakespeare cabal is, to me, how they assume that the burden of proof is somehow on the orthodox opinion. The idea that plays from Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to King Lear and The Tempest were written by William Shakespeare is a very old one, with the first printed connection between him and the canon appearing in 1592. That’s 416 years and still running.

The first attempt to connect Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, with the canon came in 1920 when it was put forward by a man named Looney. That still puts the Man from Stratford up by 328 years. A sizable gap.

The burden of proof falls to them.

Can they show any facts that show that anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays and poems? In the case of Shakespeare, as I have already shown, his name is attached to the plays and poems repeatedly in his lifetime and immediately following. That is fact. Combing the works for stray references that might be twisted to fit the facts of someone else’s life is not proof. If I worked hard enough, I could probably use that technique to “prove” that I wrote the plays.

Facts. Show me. The burden is yours.

Shakespeare v. Aristotle

Although we, here in the West, like to think that our intellectual history has progressed in an unbroken line since the ancient Greeks, the truth is that when Rome fell (although it was really more of a mudslide than a sudden collapse), it fell hard. And while the term Dark Ages as a description of the time that followed that fall might be a bit harsh, the intellectual lights of the European tradition did dim very noticeably. Ancient documents were lost, connections were broken, and much of the intellectual life of Europe retreated to monasteries and abbeys.

The ancient documents of Greece and Rome–or what was left of them, actually–returned to Europe thanks to Islam. The Moors in Spain communicated with their foes and trading partners, the European Christians, through the mediation of Sephardic Jews. Part of this communication involved translating the ancient texts of Aristotle and others that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

By this point, the Early Middle Ages were morphing into the High Middle Ages. Cities were reviving, smart people were coming out of hiding, and students began gathering and hiring teachers in what would become the first degree-granting universities of the time. And Aristotle was the Eckhart Tolle of his day.

I bring all this up because one of the prejudices that is the basis of the anti-Shakespeare cabal is that William Shakespeare could not have written those plays because he wasn’t well-educated enough. That, however, doesn’t bear with the facts, and, actually, the lack of a university education is indicated by the content of the plays and poems.

A university education in Elizabethan England was not the same as a university education is today. Universities supplied the world with clerics and lawyers, and there were no creative writing programs. The only part of a university education that would have had an effect on the writers of the time was the study of Aristotle, and, particularly, his work called Poetics.

In the work that survives, Aristotle talks a great deal about tragedy, and he sets down a number of rules for the writing of plays, a version of which became known as the Unities. According to this theory, a good tragedy will take place during one day, should have only one setting, and should stick to just one story with the fewest number of subplots possible. Ben Jonson–a university man–held these dear, but Shakespeare trampled all over them. He also mixed comedy and tragedy freely, an approach that shows more of an acquaintance with medieval mystery plays (and one was still being performed in Coventry, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in Shakespeare’s youth) than it does a university education.

Now that is not, in and of itself, proof of a lack of a university education, however, it supports even less the notion that the writer had spent time at either Oxford or Cambridge.

It is also amazing how many mistakes of history and geography were made by an author who, it’s alleged, had to be supremely well-educated and well-traveled. He gives Cleopatra a mechanical clock and landlocked Bohemia a coastline. Time and again in the plays, he reveals himself to know little of the foreign lands he writes about, but a great deal about

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare should not be confused with James Joyce. His best qualities are not that he is either erudite or learned. His best qualities are his perceptiveness and his humanity. These qualities are tied to a native sense of the power and sweep of English that did not originate in a course on rhetoric. He is forever mixing his metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles”) and writing in ways that break all the formal rules. Shakespeare’s genius was born, not made, a volcano of talent that erupted brilliant plays with lousy endings, strange and difficult sonnets, two long poems of varying quality, and that hypnotic, exotic, wonderful poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.”

He paraphrased, he plagiarized, and he stole. He also transformed and illuminated. He was smart, but not scholarly, reasonably well-read for the period, but not bookish. Simply because the things that were common knowledge then (the figures of Greek and Roman mythology, for example) are now arcane is no reason to suppose that the author of the Shakespeare canon had any sort of extraordinary education. His greatest knowledge came not from books or even an Oxford don, but from the great and terrible vicissitudes of life.