Shakespeare at Roswell
CFI-LA is having an event next Wednesday featuring skepticism about Shakespeare. Oy. Skepticism about Shakespeare is like skepticism about vaccinations, or the collapse of the twin towers, or the moon landings. It’s skepticism turned inside out, skepticism in the service of silly conspiracy theories.
Doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works have been raised over the years, most recently by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC). To support those doubts, John Shahan, chairman and CEO of SAC, will speak at Café Inquiry on Wed., May 25, at 7:30 p.m.
In 2007, SAC launched its Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare, first in the U.S. in same-day signing ceremonies at UCLA’s Geffen Playhouse and at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Later that year, renowned Shakespearean actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar this year, led a signing ceremony in the U.K. The Declaration has been signed by more than 3,500 people – more than 1,300 with advanced degrees, over 600 current/former college/university faculty members, and 68 notables, including leading academics Robin Fox and Dean Keith Simonton, and U.S. Supreme Court justices J.P. Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor.
Sigh sigh sigh. Yes lots of people are into it, including lots of people who should know better. Mark Twain was one. But it’s still a silly bit of nonsense.
What it is at bottom, of course, is sheer benighted snobbery – Will of Stratford was just some lower class bumpkin, so how could he have written all that glorious wording? He didn’t go to a university, and there’s no record that he even went to Stratford Grammar School!
True, there’s no record that he went to Stratford Grammar School, but there’s no record that anyone of his time went to Stratford Grammar School, because the records were all destroyed in a fire. And what there is is a mass of contemporary records of friends and colleagues and acquaintances of his, along with some enemies of his. They knew him. If he’d been a thicky who couldn’t possibly have written those plays, they would have noticed – especially his colleagues in the Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, who were shareholders in both the company and the theater building with him, and fellow players with him, and actors in the plays he wrote. How a beard could possibly have played that role for twenty years or so with nobody noticing that they weren’t his plays is hard to imagine.
Shakespeare was Shakespeare. He wrote the plays. He pissed off Robert Greene by being so good at writing plays while being just a player (an actor). Ben Jonson knew him well, and resented his success, but once he read all the plays together in the First Folio he was struck all of a heap and gave him one hell of a blurb. If Shakespeare had been an empty-headed zero who couldn’t have written the plays, Ben Jonson would have been all over it like a bad rash. Ben Jonson knew very well that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. So did Richard Burbage, so did John Heminges and Henry Condell, colleagues and editors of the First Folio. People at court knew him. The Earl of Southampton knew him. Doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare is not reasonable; it’s fatuous.
Shakespeare’s plays were written by Shakespeare or by someone else of that name. (I thought that was a famous quote, but, somewhat to my surprise, I’ve not been able to find a source anywhere on the Internets.)
Snobbery, both intellectual and class-based, seems a plausible explanation for the motivations of the Shakespeare deniers.
What’s the point?
A book to read on this is Contested Will, by James Shapiro. It’s not about “who wrote Shakespeare.” Shapiro says that question is considered unworthy even of discussion among real Shakespeare scholars. Rather, it’s about the “deniers” themselves: who they were and how the denial thing(s) happened. It’s fun, authoritative and entertaining.
Okay, see, I thought at first they were suggesting he had uncredited collaborators (NOT ‘the real authors’, just people he would work with), or that they were talking about the very common theory that he stole much of his plots (because nothing is new under the sun) from lesser works and then padded them out with subplots and iambic pentameter.
In addition to the class-based snobbery, there’s probably the love of contrarianism.
Another book rec–Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. The author points out that all we really know about who Shakespeare was is through his works, and considers what the plays can tell us about his life and relationships. They certainly paint a coherent picture of a person consistent with what we know historically about Shakespeare. (The one thing I vividly remember from the book is that the only really happy and healthy marital relationship in any of the plays is the Macbeths.)
The museum at Stratford does an excellent job of describing how what we know about Shakespeare’s family, background and early life contributed to the images and metaphors in his writing.
Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, devotes a chapter to Shakespeare denialism. He debunks it handily.
“(The one thing I vividly remember from the book is that the only really happy and healthy marital relationship in any of the plays is the Macbeths.) ”
Not really true. There’s Hotspur and his missus in Henry IV, who have an affectionate, teasing relationship.
Also, my snobbery goes the other way. I really like the idea of a hard-working professional writer told that they must run up another play in the next few weeks, and include a decent part for Dick Burbage otherwise he’ll kick up a fuss, rather than some aristocrat using his leisure time creating masterpieces. And as the new Scottish king is going to see it, and he’s into witchcraft, a setting in Scotland and a few hags wouldn’t go amiss.
I assume Shakespeare never went to Scotland and except for a few place names there are no real specific Scottish references in Macbeth. The ravens and owls could be anywhere. But it does have a Scottish sense of heathland and lonely sinister castles. (That could be north of England as well of course).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Shakespeare “skeptics” have none.
As a working class grammar school girl from the Midlands this does make me a little annoyed…
Shakespeare couldn’t have had all that technical vocabulary? Maybe not but he lived in freaking London, one of the great international ports of his time. Want sailing vocabulary? Head down the pub, chat up a few sailors (quite possibly in the modern meaning of the word), buy ’em a few drinks, get a tour of their ship, get them talking about their job, soak up the words they use. Maybe make some notes with a charcoal stick on paper. Same for any other technical details.
No library? Fine, but we know playwrights had sponsors who were men of means, probably with libraries. Become one of the monarch’s favourite providers of entertainment and you’ll be tripping over access to good libraries. Maybe you’ll even make one or two “very close friends” amongst the upper classes.
Repurposing stories and characters wasn’t an issue in Will’s day. Audiences didn’t think about originality the way we do. All playwrights did that. What mattered was the execution of that version of the story.
My feeling is that WS had too great an understanding of life to have been a pampered aristocrat. His great gift – on top of his language skills – was to present human motivations, reactions and situations in psychologically utterly believable way. That’s why plays like Romeo and Juliet survive and change their interpretation – originally it’s likely the interpretation was of two daft teens caught up in intense emotions they can’t handle who should have been guided by their wiser elders and the tragedy occurs because they aren’t. WS makes the family dynamics so real and the reprsentation of the urgency of teen love so acutely that today we are able interpret the play very differently – as a romance. Similarly Othello was likely to have been “intended” to portray the savagery that ran below the veneer of a civilised black man. But Othello is drawn so well as a legitimate character that today he stands up to an interpretation of a genuinely civilised man pushed beyond his limits by the spite and jealousy of others on top of a society that has never trusted him fully because of his colour.
I honestly think to know people this well you need to have been bounced around by a lot of different sorts of people you can observe and interact with as you live among them. An aristocrat, even were he inclined to mingle outside his class, would not have been able to observe people at ease with him the way someone who is just another guy would.
KB @ 8 – yes exactly. The real story, of the working playwright who was also a stakeholder in the company and the actual building – unique to the Chamberlain’s/King’s men – is vastly more interesting than any invented stories about Oxford or any other aristocrat.
Steamshovelmama @ 10 –
Hmm. Interesting, but I don’t think that’s the real pattern…although both of them are present. (That’s what Keats called his “negative capability” – unless George Keats’s wife misread John’s handwriting when she transcribed the letter years after John and George had died.) Conflicting readings are possible because he leave so much open. But I don’t think he set out to do a “savage revealed” story – because I think it’s much more about the unmotivated malice of Iago.
But one unmistakable (I think pattern) is one that is in a lot of the plays, and that’s the pattern of men accusing a woman of being a whore, and being completely wrong in every way – morally as well as factually. Most of his contemporaries wrote about women being accused of whores and really being whores; Shakespeare alone flipped that pattern, and he flipped it repeatedly. (Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Much Ado.)
Another pattern is female constancy vs. males who change their romantic loyalty the second they see another woman who is pretty. This drove a lot of his romantic comedies. Females tended to be honest and loyal to their men, while the men were often fickle philanderers.
Certainly plain snobbery is a huge motivator. But then comes the projection of dubious hypotheses onto strikingly limited data. When we only know the past through sanitized, trigger-warning laden glosses, the actual history is too startling to be recognized.
The owner of the Rose Theatre doesn’t mention Shakespeare in his journal? Damning, until someone points out that he didn’t mention ANY actor or writer. Shakespeare’s lack of documentation is a shock, until you realize there isn’t any MORE for anyone else.
Bart Ehrman has gone over the accumulated ‘evidence’ for Jesus denialism with a similar eye. Claiming someone didn’t exist, when ANY evidence for his existence is infinitely stronger than it is for 999 out of a thousand of his contemporaries….
Sure, some of Shakespeare is lost, and several texts are muddled, or may show other hands. But really? Shakespeare denial is just another mental bolt-hole.
And there actually is quite a lot of Shakespeare documentation – far more than for most other Elizabethan pen-pushers.
I was thinking later yesterday about Ben Jonson’s complaint – in Conversations with Drummond – about how the players (meaning the other Chamberlain’s / King’s Men) made it a boast that Shxpr never blotted a line: “would he had blotted a thousand” – and then he goes on to point out blunders and what he took to be violations of the unities, jumping from Venice to London in a scene and the like. But how would the players know he never blotted a line? They would know that if he wrote the lines in front of them, on the fly – which of course is extremely likely, if Burbage said god damn it Will I can’t say this.
He was their hot property, their special sauce. They published some of the quartos to prevent rivals from stealing them by reconstituting them from memory. He was their ticket to a decent living and royal patronage. He was mad skilled at writing plays that sold tickets.
And continue to sell tickets 400 years after his death.
Ayup. My point is that they knew him and they knew how he worked, because it was their business – he wasn’t locked in a room scribbling, he was in the theater with them every damn day, rehearsing and doing re-writes. A beard could not possibly have done that. A beard could have pretended to be the author of the sonnets and the two narrative poems, but the plays – not possibly. Not when he was directing them and acting in them and re-writing them under the noses of a bunch of other people.
That was by far the best part of Shakespeare in Love, from my point of view – showing the working Shakespeare.
There’s a new BBC sitcom called “Upstart Crow” starring David Mitchell as Shakespeare. Only two episodes have been shown so far. Not sure whether you can access it outside the UK yet (it’s on i-Player and broadcast Monday nights). One episode flips the whole Marlowe theory and has Shakespeare writing plays for Marlowe because the latter is too busy roistering to be bothered. Shakespeare is struggling to be recognised because of the snobbery of the profession and Greene in particular.
When Shakespeare complains to Greene about the snobbery the way the upper classes control everything, Greene says something to the effect that it’s has also been that way and always will be. Shakespeare replies that he hardly thinks that centuries hence Britain will be run by a clique of posh boys.
It’s good stuff. By Ben Elton so similar to Blackadder in humour.
I’ve heard about Upstart Crow, because I listen to Saturday Review, and they talked about it a week or two ago – maybe the one Helen Lewis was on. It does sound good.
It is a quote Theo, it’s Woody Allen.
I second the recommendation of Contested Will by Shapiro despite the horrible title. He makes a more plausible argument for the continuing authorship debate (although snobbery is a part of it, especially for Oxfordians) and that is that everyone finds themselves in Shakespeare and so tend to recreate him in their own image. Twain, for example, was basically an autobiographer, so felt that Skakespeare must be the same.
It’s true that what’s surprising about Shakes is how much we know about him, not how little. Although he was probably one of the most famous men in the world (of London at least) in his day, almost certainly the most famous commoner. A huge percentage of London’s population would have regularly seen his plays, and he would have been a recognised face and celebrity, which explains the folio and the stuff about ‘idolatry’.
There is a tantalising anecdote about a 17 century antiquarian vicar and diarist that was in the Shapiro book, I think. He records in his diary while on his travels that he had heard that Shakespeare’s grandaughter lived in the neighbouring parish and how he had decided to go and visit to find out what she knew. But she dies that night . Aaaargh!