Attendant to
being an English major is the assumption that you have to like William
Shakespeare's stuff. It draws an interesting line of conformity: you can be
counter-culture conveniently by disliking the Bard or you can be part of the establishment
and, like a tool, enjoy his works.
(There is a third option, one of liking the works but distrusting the source,
but this isn't where antistratfordianism really came into my perception.)
I think this
assumption is fair, though perhaps over-worked. In my (limited) experience,
Shakespeare didn't infuse a lot of my courses, which were, for the most part,
concerned with other avenues of literature. I don't remember him creeping into
conversations, being used as a comparison to other texts, or passing by, like
streak of light, to illuminate other texts. Even my British Lit classes (easily
my preferred courses; American literature tends to leave me a little cold)
skirted about him. I think this was done as deference to their colleagues who
had the opportunity of teaching his stuff in an exclusive class, though it's
really just a guess.
I signed up for Professor Rasmussen's class
one semester. It was a spring class, which was nice because the weather was on
the up-tick and the days were getting longer. Living, as we did, in a basement
apartment, it was nice to have the extra light. By it I would struggle to
comprehend the texts that were assigned.
Looking back,
our professor had a rather laissez-faire
approach to the class, which would have bothered me more if I'd been then what
I am now. It wasn't a bad class, and
I do have fond memories of it. But I would have wanted something from a studied
source--access to his greater trove of knowledge. As it was, we were asked to provide interpretive
lenses on some of the plays and facilitate class discussions. Mine was
deconstruction applied to Othello,
which was made more difficult by the fact that my partner wasn't familiar with
critical theory yet, so she really struggled to pull the presentation off. As
it was, the professor wasn't there that day anyway: It was the department head
who covered for him, so we did just fine for our project.
For whatever
reason, the class--which only had about twelve or thirteen of us--was heavily
gender-imbalanced, with only two males and the rest females. This wasn't really
a problem, but it was an interesting inversion on how Shakespeare would've been
read in his day--by males only, in a theater company, and only with cue
scripts.
We've come a
long way.
Most of the
time was actually spent in rehearsals. In typical Shakespearean fashion, we
were all actors and directors in a brief scene. Ours was the last act and scene
of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, as
the only male on the team, I played the part of the cross-dressing Flute as
Thisbe. Because of course.
I have a hard
time memorizing things, for the most part. (Fortunately, not student names, but
almost anything else I do, yeah, it's a bit of a problem.) I distinctly
remember having my wife prompt me as I tried to get the absurdity of the
mechanicals into my brain. We were in a basement apartment at the time. I can
still see the sunlight of the early afternoon tilting into the beige carpet as
I tried to con the lines through sheer, stubborn will.
When the day
of performance arrived, I had purposefully neglected to shave for two or three
days before, giving me a scruffy look to go along with the wig, sock-generated
bust, and denim skirt (borrowed from Gayle). I spoke in a shrill falsetto and
barely flubbed my lines. The girls I studied with were a lot of fun, worked
just as hard as I, and did a great performance for a bunch of undergrads with
almost no theatre training.
In order to
'research' the play, I checked out a copy of the Kevin Kline version (which is
funny, since it's directed by Michael Hoffman but always referred to by the
actor who played Bottom). I remember liking it, for the most part, though the
bit about Bottom's wife was confusing to me. I had yet to learn how adaptations
reinterpret the text, so the artistic license that has to be applied to keep
Shakespeare fresh for the current generation to care took me by surprise.
Still, it was a worthwhile romp and one of many film adaptations that I've seen
in the intervening years.
I had to give
another lesson on one of the plays that we were studying--really an outsourcing
of the course, now that I look back at it--and it just so happened that it was
on Hamlet. I used the professor's
copy of The Simpsons episode in which
they parodied the play, with Bart as the eponymous character, Moe as the
murderous Claudius, and "Rosenkarl and Guildenlenny" as the devious
former-friends. I led a discussion on it, we laughed a little, and that was
that.
The professor
did manage to put some ideas in my head that have stuck. One was the ubiquity
of Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet.
He said that someone somewhere, every day, was putting on, studying, or filming
the play. At first I was dubious, but after having taught it for the last six
years, I tend to agree with him.
Certainly one
of the salient points of the class came in the large form of the then-head of
the department. I can't remember the professor's name--it's available, I just
don't care to find it--but I already had a beef with her. She taught my Science
Fiction course during my freshmen year and her particular critiques of my
writing weren't much appreciated it. In retrospect, I shouldn't have disliked
her so much. It was important that someone finally tell me that my first drafts
weren't always incredible, which was the message I got in high school. Truly,
thinking back on that story, it was weird for weirdness' sake and not that
worthwhile. However, I did think it unfair that she marked me down for
describing a character as being one who "hid behind her knees". I
feel that's a pretty good phrase; she thought it was unclear.
Apparently,
her critique has stuck with me. This isn't even the first time that I've
mentioned it on my blog.
Anyway,
because of her treatment (again, fairly accurate, with that one exception), I
had a severe case of anxiety when it came to my writing. Months passed without
being confident in myself enough to try actually putting words on the page
again. It shook me, so it's little wonder I didn't have much generosity in my
heart for her the day that she substituted the class.
It was
actually the day when I was supposed to give my presentation on Othello by using a deconstructive lens
as my guide. Before I began, the professor gave her own spiel about the least
exciting aspect of Shakespearean studies: The authorship question.
Now, the
amount of ink that's been spilled pursuing this hogwash is embarrassing. Sundry
claims stemming off of one fundamental fallacy have wasted more time than is
probably healthy to admit. I have put some time into studying the case, and
it's very much one of those that, with a straight dose of Occam's Razor and a
little common sense, you can see that evidence points most directly to the
glover's son being the writer after all.
(For the
record, a lot of my thinking on this has come from James Shapiro's book, Contested Will, which backs up a lot of
prior research I've done, along with providing a crucial explanation of whence
the fascination comes in authorial credit. If you've any interest in the
authorship question, I encourage you to peruse his book first--then you won't
have to read any others, because it'll cease to be a credible approach to
understanding the question.)
See, there's
an impulse of modern readers to assume that because a writer has conceived
something in his or her head, he or she must have some sort of lived experience
with the thought. Most people would argue that's absurd when phrased that way,
but that's the essence of the authorship question: Events in the plays must mirror the lived experiences of the
Bard.
But it quickly
becomes a matter of the trickiest hermeneutics. How much of a single play is
pertinent to painting a picture of the artist and how much is added as dramatic
embellishment? How can you tell if Hamlet's killing of Polonius is included as
an allusion to Edward de Vere's own arras-involved stabbing or simply a
necessary plot point to show the Prince of Denmark's unhinged state as he
"swoops to [his] revenge"? (Yes, that is one of the arguments: Edward
de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, stabbed a servant who was behind a curtain.)
Are the plays autobiography? Or are they inspired by true, current events? Or
are they coincidentally similar to the lives of contemporaries? Or are they
dramatic art, devised without reference to the external world?
The pieces are
intriguing, of that there's no doubt. I mean, they've so entranced avid
Bardophiles for the last two centuries that even Supreme Court justices have "converted"
to Oxfordians and disdained the name of "Shak-spear". There's
mystique, there's the natural allure of the Elizabethan era (forgetting, as we
often do, that it's also Jacobean era, which puts a mighty pall on, at least,
de Vere's running, as he was dead before the later plays were penned), and more
than a faint whiff of conspiracy. For those who refuse to believe in
coincidences, it all makes too much sense.
But the
posits of the antistratfordians only have superficial spots of similarities.
Certainly, you can list some of the events of de Vere's life and see parallels
between his and Hamlet's. But why pick just Hamlet? What about Prospero, the
island dwelling mage of The Tempest?
Couldn't you argue that Prospero is Shakespeare, saying goodbye (seven or eight
years after de Vere's death) to the
stage with his valedictions in that play?
You could,
because--like the Hamlet/de Vere case--there's a superficial similarity between
what's assumed of a real life and what's visible in the characters. See, the
fundamental assumption is that there is something in the plays that
specifically speaks about the man. But what one reads is always what one wants
to see. That's the incredible power of Shakespeare.
I listened to
a talk by Arthur King, the LDS Church's leading interpreter of literature
during the mid-twentieth century. He dismissed some people's readings of
Shakespeare because they "wanted to see" the nihilism or the
perversion or whatever it was he, King, disdained. He then forwarded his own
reading of Shakespeare as a proto-Mormon.
The lasting
effect of this on me was the idea of autoterritorialization when it comes to
Shakespeare. His works, in an almost literal sense, "hold the mirror up to
nature" and force us to confront our own assumptions and expectations. As
a result, the plays are as clay, capable of being molded to one concept or another.
The peril of this is that the histories of the men (or women) who could be
associated with the plays in lieu of William himself are wrought in stone. So
it makes sense that the mercurial plays can be forced into the gaps of the
stone.
For every
antistratfordian proof in poem or play of the preferred alternative, there can
be one used for the stratfordian case where an aspect reflects a known fact
about Shakespeare's life or a presumed inference based upon other records. So
why favor one reading over one?
Well, that
boils down to Occam's Razor, which urges us to consider that the simplest
explanation is most likely. Either a genius was born in a market town to a
glover who could apprehend much of human kind, reflect in his art what he'd
absorbed, and weave words into new wefts, or some vast conspiracy--devised due
to court intrigue, espionage, or professional jealousy--is at work that has
hoodwinked two centuries of history into believing a lie.
One is more
probable; the other is a better Hollywood movie. (Although, to be honest, the
fanciful rendition of a love-smitten Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love was much more enjoyable than the morose weasel
in Anonymous. Hollywood can't handle
the Bard well, either.)
If we assume
that there's something to be learned about the inward man--some sort of
confession that his poetry (in particular) or plays (in general) is
saying--then there's plenty of room for doubt. While the thoughts of
Shakespeare are definitely expressed via his characters, it's impossible to
know if the thoughts were an expression of them
or of him.
Those who
don't write or somehow generate characters have a difficult time understanding
this, I think. (Yes, that's an artistic snub at the academy mentality.) If I
have a character behave in a particular way in my story, it's obviously
something I thought of, considered, wrote, and revised. So therefore it's
something I think.
But there's a
large difference between what I think and feel and what my character thinks and
feels. It's not too far off from having a split personality and being held
accountable for my life's details inside of the artificial personality.
While authors
always include personal details--including, I'm certain, Shakespeare--it's
fallacious to assume that he left clues to decipher within the text. How are we
to know what he wrote in, say, the Sonnets reflects him and not his patron's
desires? Since all we have in terms of documentation is external to him--he
left behind no journals, no diaries, no personal papers save his will--we have
to be exceedingly careful in how we superimpose text-to-life.
I think the
largest assumption that makes me disagree with my erstwhile professor is the
idea of conspiracy running rife throughout. I mentioned before that I believe
in coincidences--because, let's be honest, sometimes you bump into a high
school friend and it does nothing except surprise you--and this is a prime
example of the utility of that pragmatic approach to the authorship question.
Are there gaps and holes in the 'narrative' of Shakespeare as the author?
Certainly. They're well-rehearsed (and used as evidence, which is shoddy
research at best and deceitful at worst) and unconvincing. Not having the explanation is not the same as having no explanation.
When it comes
to our desire to turn real life into real narrative, we bump against this
problem. It is our desire to make things fit,
to make them sensical. But that isn't how life is. Sometimes the phrase,
"Because reasons" is as
close as we get to how things really are. When a person insists that de Vere or
Bacon or Elizabeth or Marlowe or some other Lord Baron Sir Bollerbatch Esquire
or whoever is the alternative du jour,
the basic question always comes up the same: Why? Why would there be a need for
the deception?
Christopher Marlowe (not Lord Baron Sir Bollerbatch Esquire)
Often the
answer comes in about the theater's unsavory reputation in Elizabethan times
(true; however, Shakespeare's career also spanned through the much more
accepting Jacobean court, which somehow people often overlook). But the
question of why can also be
tightened: Why so long to discover this? To what end is the conspiracy? I mean,
if we're talking UFOs and nationwide security and global implications, I can
see where conspiracies could certainly make a touch more sense. But some random
earl and a mediocre actor? Seriously?
Anonymous proves this point better than
my arguments can. Go watch it. You will be wrapped up in the brilliant and
detailed costuming and the multifaceted nuances of the intrigues of the
Elizabethan court. It's thrilling. Then, for some random reason, we get this
bumbling actor coming in and ham-fisted groanings about writing in iambic
pentameter and suddenly the whole thing turns farcical. The pretense of
importance gets lost when a man who writes bawdy jokes about venereal diseases
and facial boils is pulled into the narrative. The Showtime series The Tudors shows how much drama is
inherent in this general area of English history. Anonymous shows how absurd it is to assume a playwright--even one
as capable as Shakespeare, whose importance to the world will only be
discovered in subsequent generations--somehow actively contributed to the
larger political world. Could drama make a difference? Yes, of course. We know
about Essex's rebellion and how Richard
II (not Richard III, as is
depicted in the film) are correlated. And we know Elizabeth's regal response to
the rebellion ("Know ye not I am Richard II?"). We know that modern
day films and documentaries can incite change in a system. But it's foolish to
think that someone as important as, say, Edward de Vere would risk the very
real political power he had for the paltry power of the playhouse. It just
seems so...preposterous--and pretentious to boot. The only way that it works at
all is if there's conspiracy--and that's the same way of solving a narrative
riddle as giving Superman the ability to turn back time.
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