WILL HE AM

Shakespeare is my favorite writer. I’m a Shakespeare buff. My experience of his work is, in a small way, as an actor & a director, & in a bigger way as a reader & an audience member. I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, in any literary or historical sense. The difference between me & most of those who question Shakespeare “The Stratford Man” as the true author of the plays attributed to him is that I know it.

Opening today is Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s film dramatizing the notion, around since at least the 1920s, that Shakespeare was a front, & that his plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. I wasn’t able to get to the screening earlier this week, & anyway I wouldn’t want to clutter up a movie review with a pedantic & partisan rant on this premise. So I thought I’d put the rant here, & review the movie fairly, as a movie, whenever I can get to it.

Though he seems to have been the “candidate” most in vogue for the last few years, Oxford seems like a particularly improbable alternative, even if you somehow doubt that Shakespeare could truly have written those plays. For one thing, Oxford was actually mentioned in contemporary writings, like the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, that also mention Shakespeare as a different person. No matter, say the “Oxfordians.” Oxford must have written Shakespeare’s works since he was, after all, an aristocrat, & good-looking & troubled, & because details of his own dramatic life can be made to line up with characters & situations in Shakespeare’s plays.

The idea is that Oxford must have had to hide the fact that he was a playwright because this would somehow have been an improper occupation for an aristocrat. This despite the fact that he was known to be a playwright—his own comedies, now lost, were reportedly good—& that this doesn’t seem to have been a secret, let alone a scandal. This despite the fact that Oxford died in 1604, roughly a decade before new Shakespeare plays stopped appearing. The Oxfordians have explanations for all this & for the rest of the comparative mountain of other evidence that associates the “Stratford” Shakespeare with the plays attributed to him.

I’ve spent a lot of time (way too much, actually) over the last few years reading articles & websites pro & con about this silly controversy, & I genuinely think it’s bullshit. & even though it doesn’t really matter—whoever wrote those plays, they’re magnificent—it still annoys me, because I think it arises, in part, from a peculiar self-loathing class snobbery.

It also partly stems from a misunderstanding of the history of the period, which leads people to believe that Shakespeare couldn’t have picked up enough knowledge to write about court matters, foreign countries, etc., the way he did. This is not unlike thinking that somebody else must have written Stephen King’s books, because after all a bumpkin from rural Maine could never have picked up a vocabulary like that, & could never have understood enough about, say, virology to have written The Stand.

Many still think of the Renaissance as a period in Merrie Olde England full of Lords & Ladies & Wenches & Squires & Peasants, & nothing very much in between. In truth, even a perfunctory reading of social history about the period shows that this whole system (never as quaint as it’s depicted anyway) was already long in decline. The really dynamic social force in Renaissance Europe was the Middle Class—and therein, I think, lies the heart of the matter.

Maybe the core of the whole authorship controversy, in all its forms, is something I’ve never seen anyone write about: a desire not to let the middle class have Shakespeare. Many people love & admire Shakespeare’s work, but just can’t bring themselves to like Shakespeare. The man who emerges from the existing record is too dull, too disappointingly conservative in his social and political beliefs, too interested in money, too litigious, & just generally too...well, middle class to be responsible for such glories.

If Shakespeare had been born to poverty but worked his way up to reknown, like Bunyan or Dickens, I don’t think it would bug people as much as the idea of a middle class guy from a small town whose Dad was a glovemaker & local politician turning into the greatest writer in English. So you get stuff about how scanty the information about Shakespeare is, but nobody points out how it’s still far less scanty than that of any other playwrights of the time except Ben Jonson & Oxford himself.

You get the line about how there’s no evidence that Shakespeare attended the Grammar School in Stratford, but they don’t point out that no records at all survive for any students there during that time, but that the children of public officials could attend for free, & Shakespeare’s father served as both an alderman & “bailiff” (mayor) in Stratford-on-Avon. Also, the grammar school in Stratford offered a Latin education that would probably have exceeded in rigor that of the average Classical Studies Major at a contemporary American college, & was steeped in the sort of Latin writers (Plutarch, Plautus, Seneca, etc.) that are the clearest influences on Shakespeare’s earlier work.

You get the nonsense about how Shakespeare couldn’t have learned French & Italian when, apart from the fact that knowledge of Latin makes both of those languages less daunting, the same publisher who printed the first editions of Shakespeare’s long poems Venus and Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece, a guy named Richard Field, specialized in publishing language manuals, especially for French & Italian (knowledge of these languages in Shakespeare’s time was as commercially valuable for a Brit as knowledge of Japanese is for a modern American). Field was also a Stratford guy of about Shakespeare’s age, & lived a few houses from him in Stratford-on-Avon as a kid; records show their fathers knew each other, & it’s believed that he & Shakespeare were friends. In other words, there are all sorts of connections between Shakespeare the Stratford “bumpkin” & Shakespeare the writer.

But above all, “anti-Stradtfordians” are never able to give a satisfactory answer to one simple question: why only Shakespeare? If you insist that detailed evidence about Shakespeare’s life is lacking, you may be right, but if that leads you to conclude that he therefore probably didn’t write the stuff that’s attributed to him, then why not apply the same standard to all the other playwrights, Christopher Marlowe very much included, about whom even less (often much less) is known. The obvious answer—and indeed, on some of the websites they flatly admit this—is that the other playwrights aren’t so dull and provinicial.

It’s true, too—Shakespeare’s politics are ass-kissingly in favor of the aristocracy & the status quo. Playwrights at the time, including some of Shakespeare’s pals, tended to be brawlers & radicals & horndogs—Marlowe died in a barfight, Thomas Kyd was jailed & tortured for “atheism and immorality” (&, ignominiously, informed on Marlowe to get out), Jonson & John Marston both got busted for their play Isle of Dogs, Jonson killed two men in duels in his life.

Shakespeare isn’t known to have done any of that sort of thing, though his wife was about three months pregnant when he married her, & there are a few gossipy stories about his womanizing. He was a careful businessman & very willing to participate in lawsuits, & he also was always careful not to piss off the powerful, all of which has made him utterly unsuitable for glamorous literary status now.

Absurdity certainly doesn't mean, of course, that Anonymous might not be a highly enjoyable movie, as was the willfully ridiculous trifle Shakespeare In Love a few years ago. That film also hinged on the gag that The Bard must have turned from his own torrid affairs, picked up his pen, & scribbled them into Romeo & Juliet & Twelfth Night. The difference is that Shakespeare In Love treated this idea as a goofy, borderline-campy romantic fiction, while Anonymous, at least in its marketing, treats the idea as an Oliver Stone-style expose.

Shakespeare’s works are so astoundingly good that it’s understandable, in a sense, that one might find it improbable & mysterious that anyone could have written them. But trying to turn the author from a social-climbing Stratfordian into a financially frustrated blueblood does nothing to solve that mystery.