The Dan Brown Conspiracy

With the release of the film Angels & Demons, the time has come again for op-ed pages all over the movie-going world to ask the burning question of the 21st century:  “Why does Dan Brown sell so many more books than I do?”  Many theories are posited, from Mr. Brown’s alleged proselytizing for some sort of suburban demi-Christianity to, I suppose, mass hypnosis.  The deeper sort of reader is puzzled by the enduring allure of drivel, and the more mercantile sort drips with envy over money being generated so easily and quickly by someone who is obviously no more talented, clever, or intelligent than they.  And yet, I think none of this explains the implausible popularity of  Angels & Demons or, more especially, The Da Vinci Code.

For many people, of course, it is simply a matter of–to use an old comedy nostrum–”buy the premise, buy the bit.”  It seems unlikely to me, though, that there’s 100 million copies-worth of the suspension of disbelief available in any one century.  If that is true, another explanation must apply.

Being a modern, frantic, beleaguered American, my mind leaps immediately to the conspiracy theory.  It’s not so much that I think that there is some hidden international conspiracy that is trying to sell Mr. Brown’s books–although that would explain a lot–it is that, I think, the appeal of The Da Vinci Code and its lesser brethren, all of which invent huge, unseen conspiracies, comes from a widespread need for the conspiracy theory as a way of understanding reality.  I would contend that, in a dizzyingly complicated and existentially fragmented world, a world in which most people feel themselves to be the victims of their lives rather than the heroes, the finding, keeping, and maintaining of conspiracy theories is a lifeline that people latch on to in an attempt to keep themselves functional, to keep themselves sane.

There’s a paradox in using something that is fundamentally paranoid and insane as a defense of one’s sanity, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  And the proof of the usefulness of conspiracy theories is in their very ubiquity:  Off the top of my head, I can come up with a great pile of popular conspiracy theories.  There is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the alleged conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination.  There’s the idea that someone besides William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems.  There is a whole slew of them having to do with the Tri-Lateral Commission.  There are the ideas of the left-wing media, the mainstream media, and the vast conspiracy that uses right-wing radio as its mouthpiece.  There are conspiracy theories about 9/11, various recent elections, the Moon landing, Israel, Jews in general, the Queen of England, and a number of Popes.  There are conspiracy theories involving the Mormons, freemasons, Democrats, Republicans, Communists, and Fascists.  That’s the problem with conspiracy theories:  They’re everywhere if only you look hard enough.

We are taught to be rational.  In fact, one of the hallmarks of Western civilization has been its championing of the rational mind.  And rationality has led to many boons and wonders.  Unfortunately we live in an irrational universe, and when we are confronted with something that challenges the order that our rational minds have imprinted on the world–such as that a deluded loser can kill a President, that 3000 people can die in a lunatic’s idea of a publicity stunt, that a middle-class burgher in the Midlands of England can have the greatest ear for language and feel for character of any writer in English–we feel that we have to explain it in terms other than the obvious.  If the prejudices and biases we use to defend ourselves are wrong in this, how else are they wrong?  Without the shield of these biases, we are Lear on the heath and the world is a madness.

One of the lies of the conspiracy theory is that conspiracies are cloaked in an impenetrable secrecy.  The Bush Administration, to use a recent example, has shown us that this is not true.  They operated mostly openly, behind only a thin veneer of secrecy.  As the recent release of the so-called torture memos makes clear, they colluded and conspired and–most importantly–rationalized their way around and past laws both national and international.  They hid their intentions and lied to our faces to start a war on terror and a war in Iraq that they thought would combat–wait for it–a vast international conspiracy.  Perhaps it was a case of “it takes one to know one,” but I think it was just another collective delusion.

And so Dan Brown sells books.  It’s comforting to think that a rational explanation is readily available for something–the divinity of Jesus, for example–that doesn’t seem rational, that challenges our prejudices, that tests our biases.  If only Mr. Brown’s books were rational.  Or readable.  But I guess the appearance of rationality is better than no rationality at all.

Brian Blessed on Have I Got News for You

I can’t seem to get my brain together enough to write a cogent post today, so instead I’ve posted, below, a compilation of clips of the appearance Brian Blessed made last year on the BBC comedy quiz show, Have I Got News for You.  My favorite part is the story he tells concerning John Gielgud, but it all makes me laugh.  Enjoy.

The Real Article

I’ve just finished copying all my recent posts on logic and the alleged “authorship controversy” and conspiracy theories together into one coherent article that I will try to shop to some magazine somewhere.  The monster I currently have in a Word doc is almost 10,000 words, and it will change.  It may even get longer, since there are several thematic strands I’m hoping to braid together.

I plan to start by printing out what I have and cutting it to pieces with scissors. I’ll then rearrange the sections and start my revisions from there.  As is my best practice, I will revisit every word, every thought, and every assumption along the way.

Oh, well, I guess it’s time to place my proboscis squarely on the grindstone.  Wish me well.

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.