In a charming publicity stunt turned terrifying commentary on the state of the American judicial system, several Supreme Court judges have just decided in a mock trial that Shakespeare didn’t actually write Shakespeare. Yes, they’ve revived the old “Shakespeare authorship question,” in which scholars only one degree less legitimate than “ufologists” attempt to prove that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or one of several other candidates, and not by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
As the Wall Street Journal reports: “Since the 19th century, some have argued that only a nobleman could have produced writings so replete with intimate depictions of courtly life and exotic settings far beyond England. Dabbling in entertainments was considered undignified, the theory goes, so the author laundered his works through Shakespeare, a member of the Globe Theater’s acting troupe.” Now John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, the retired Sandra Day O’Connor, and several other justices have come forward to agree, throwing their support behind Edward de Vere as the probable author. The decision is ludicrously wrong in more ways than we can count, but here is a layman’s summary of a few of them:
- De Vere died in 1604, prior to the composition dates accepted by most scholars for Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and numerous other works. (Most of Shakespeare’s plays can be dated to within a year or two based on recorded performances, references to contemporary events, and so on.) This inconvenient fact is explained away by “anti-Stratfordians” either by creative dating or by fantasizing that the Bard’s real identity was such a damaging secret that the as-yet-unknown plays he left behind in 1604 were leaked out slowly, at a rate of one per year or two, by complicit friends.
- To credit de Vere as author, you have to believe that his “secret identity” was so important—a matter of national security, perhaps—that it was still being maintained nineteen years after de Vere’s death, when two former theater colleagues of the actual William Shakespeare compiled the First Folio. The Folio contains an introductory poem by Ben Jonson, in which he refers to the plays’ author as “the Swan of Avon” (i.e., Stratford-upon-Avon), as well as the famous engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Dreshout, which looks nothing like contemporary portraits of de Vere. So the Folio editors, Jonson, and Dreshout were all in on the conspiracy!
But enough of the factual evidence (of which there is plenty more); here are a couple of idiotic logical fallacies embraced by Stevens, Scalia, O’Connor, et al.:
- “Where are the books? You can’t be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home,” Justice Stevens says. “He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event—the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.” That Shakespeare listed no books in his will doesn’t mean that he never owned or read any. (Perhaps he gave them away privately; perhaps he was in the habit of borrowing from friends.) Likewise, that Shakespeare’s correspondence hasn’t survived doesn’t mean that he never maintained any. It’s a myth that Shakespeare’s biography is unusually full of holes; in fact he was quite famous in his day, and his life is better documented than those of most of his contemporaries. We can simply never know enough to satisfy our curiosity. As for “the coronation of James,” etc., historians 400 years from now won’t be able to show conclusively that I was at a Yankees game (a large public event) last fall, yet I was.
- On the other hand, “a lot of people like to think it’s Shakespeare because…they like to think that a commoner can be such a brilliant writer,” [Stevens] says. “Even though there is no Santa Claus, it’s still a wonderful myth.” By this same astute reasoning, Stevens has proved that Walt Whitman, a poor carpenter’s son who left school at eleven, never wrote Whitman, while Stevens’s colleague (and fellow Shakespeare doubter) Antonin Scalia, educated at a Queens public school, never became a Supreme Court Justice.
The lesson here is that questions about Shakespeare are best left to the real authorities on matters literary and artistic: the Arbiters of Style. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, should return to applying their penetrating minds and unerring judgment to the cases that actually come before them.
What is perhaps the most offensive is that the Supreme Court is a mere half a mile from the Folger Shakespeare Library. The fine folks there could have easily set our Justices straight.
The liberal in me wants to know how they’d rule on miracles which occurred in a desert a few thousand years ago…
Well said.
Wonderful!
The attribution of Shakespeare’s plays and poems to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford rests on sturdier foundation than the simplistic assertion that only a courtier could have written the plays. I never heard a proponent of Oxford state this, only those wishing to discredit Oxford as a candidate.
The question is not who could have written the plays and poems, the question is who did write them and here the evidence as thoroughly detailed in Ogburn’s “The Mysterious William Shakespeare” and Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare by Another Name” is very convincing in favor of Oxford. I recommend these books to those willing to think for themselves and not pass their intellectual integrity over to so-called experts.
Howard – thank you for the comment, and we admire your willingness to stick your neck out in a forum where people clearly disagree with you. However, “thinking for oneself” as you define it here seems to entail simply trusting a different set of self-proclaimed experts, i.e., the authors of the books you mention. Best of all would be to familiarize oneself with the actual composition history of the plays and with contemporary references to Shakespeare, a few of which we mentioned in the post. These all clearly point to the man from Stratford. It is telling that no “alternative author” theory existed until centuries after William Shakespeare’s death; his contemporaries had no doubts as to who wrote the plays, and neither do we.
Thanks for your cordial reply. Thinking for oneself involves accessing different points of view and examining the evidence as presented. Most people laugh off the suggestion that Shakespeare was a pseudonym without considering the evidence.
Contemporary references only refer to a name on a title page. No one claims to have met the man. The traditional biography presents us with a major disconnect between the life of the presumed author and his creative output. It’s almost as if we have a disembodied body of works with little or no relationship to the author.
There is a long and distinguished history of doubting the traditional Stratfordian attribution of the Shakespeare works. Noted doubters over the years include Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, and Sigmund Freud.
Here are some of mine:
There is no reliable, contemporaneous evidence that William Shakspere of Stratford ever wrote anything in his life. Not even so much as a letter exists in his handwriting, let alone any manuscripts of plays and poems. Illiteracy ran in his family. His parents, wife and children all seem to have been illiterate or semi-literate at best.
Though there are tons of speculation, there is no actual evidence how he could have acquired the vast educational, linguistic and cultural background necessary to write the masterpieces of English literature attributed to William Shakespeare.
The few signatures of Shakspere of Stratford that exist are barely legible and show that he did not even spell his own name Shakespeare. Spelling was notoriously fluid in those days, but the name of the author was consistently spelled Shakespeare or Shake-speare with a hyphen. Shakspere’s family name was almost never spelled Shakespeare in the official records.
Shakspere of Stratford took no legal action against the pirating of the Shakespeare plays or the apparently unauthorized publication of Shake-speare’s Sonnets in 1609, even though he was known to frequently initiate lawsuits to recover petty sums of money owed to him.
Shake-speare’s Sonnets, published in 1609, paint a portrait of the artist as a much older man. The scholarly consensus today holds that most of the Sonnets were written in the 1590s, when Shakspere of Stratford was in his late 20s to late 30s, a relatively youthful age even in Elizabethan times. Yet, the author of the Sonnets at times is clearly much older and anticipating his own imminent death. Inexplicably, the publisher’s dedication in the 1609 volume of Sonnets refers to Shakespeare as our ever-living poet, a term that implies the poet is already dead, but Shakspere of Stratford was still alive until 1616.
The Sonnets also suggest strongly that Shakespeare was a pen name and that the author’s real identity was destined to remain unknown. In Sonnet 72 Shakespeare asks that his name be buried where my body is. Sonnet 81: Though I, once gone, to all the world must die. If Shakspere truly was the famous author of the Sonnets, why would he think his name would be buried with his body? The name Shakespeare which appears on the title page of the Sonnets themselves — certainly wasn’t buried with the body of the poet, whoever he was.
Unlike many other authors of the period even those who were far less famous or prolific not a single manuscript or letter exists in Shakspere’s own handwriting. Nothing survives of a literary nature that connects Shakspere during his lifetime with any of the written works that are supposed to represent his literary output.
There is no evidence of a single payment to Shakspere of Stratford as an author. Nor is there any evidence of Shakspere of Stratford seeking out or establishing an ongoing literary patron as was a common practice for writers of the day.
Shakspere’s will makes no mention of anything even vaguely literary no books, unpublished manuscripts, library or diaries. Not even a family bible. Why didn’t Shakspere make even a passing reference to these invaluable unpublished manuscripts in his 1616 will?
Shakspere of Stratford’s death in 1616 was a singular non-event, despite the fact that the name Shakespeare was widely recognized at the time as one of England’s greatest writers.
Howard – Thank you for these points, which are familiar to us and to anyone who has engaged with the authorship question. Several (for example, the matter of book ownership) we have dealt with already in our post and comments. Without engaging point by point, we will say a few general things:
- Arguing for a different attribution of the plays based on historical evidence we DON’T have–a catalog of books WS owned, a manuscript or letter in his hand, etc.–is fallacious and distracts from the abundant evidence we DO have. Yes, historians and scholars would love to have all those artifacts, but the reality is that our record of almost everyone who lived 400 years ago is necessarily incomplete. The clamoring of “anti-Stratfordians” for more and better smoking-gun evidence of WS’s authorship is preposterously hypocritical in light of the cases they make for other authors on the basis of sheer speculation and humbug. It reminds us of the “anti-Darwinians” who won’t believe in evolution until they are shown a complete and perfect ape-to-man fossil record (and who even if such a thing were possible, would then shift the burden of proof to some other standard).
- Arguing anything about Shakespeare’s life or identity based on the Sonnets is ultimately a fool’s errand. They are poetry, not autobiography, and it’s impossible to know how literally we should read them. Intimate as they seem, they are only a small corner of the work of an author who was literature’s great master of disguise. Trying to “prove” that the Sonnets’ author could only have been a nobleman, a person of a given sexual orientation, etc., as so many have done, is finally as impossible and silly as saying that the author of Hamlet must have been a university intellectual, because he portrayed one so well.
- You dismissed the “he was too humble and uneducated to have become Shakespeare” argument in a previous comment, then turned around and repeated it again here. That Shakespeare was from a small town and had a comparatively undistinguished education (”small Latin and less Greek”) we know from Jonson’s famous tribute to his late contemporary (http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/benshake.htm) and other, less famous sources. Again, none of this precludes his having become a great author. We return to the example of perhaps America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, who in doubting Shakespeare’s authorship should have known better. No one, reviewing Walt’s background and education on paper, could possibly have predicted that he would become the master of language that he did. Yet he did.
It is really quite remarkable to have a rational discussion with someone on this issue so thanks, but I can see there would be no real point in prolonging it. Except to say this. You talk about the abundant evidence we DO have, yet the only real evidence for the Stratfordian attribution is The First Folio. While this has to be acknowledged as strong evidence, it was written seven years after his death and contains many mixed messages.
The truth is there is NO contemporary evidence while Shakespeare was alive that would lead any neutral observer to conclude that the actor from Stratford was the greatest writer in the English language, or even a writer for that matter. Meanwhile Oxford’s biography seems to support his connection to the plays and especially the sonnets.
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?