Primrose Road

I was going to wait a few days before blogging about the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, but since there's a link to a story about it on AOL Mail's welcome page, I think it's worth it to address this "Declaration" now. Stay tuned for a series of responses to the Declaration and DoubtAboutWill.org; for now, the most significant flaw with the 'Shakespeare may not have been Shakespeare' argument is, simply put, as follows:

"Authorship" in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century does not mean the same thing that "authorship" meant to the Romantics and the Victorians, and it does not mean the same thing that it means today.

I think it is absolutely wonderful that talented doctors, lawyers, actors, and people from all walks of life are reading Shakespeare and asking questions about Shakespeare. I do not believe that the people who have signed the "Declaration" are in any way unintelligent; I think, however, that many are armchair Shakespeareans but not armchair historians. When viewed in light of history and Elizabethan/Jacobean cultural practices, the argument that 'one individual wrote another individual's plays' falls into the Not Even Wrong category.

Shakespeare adapted and adopted from Holinshed's Chronicles, Saxo Grammaticus, the Gesta Romanorum, Chaucer, Gower, Kyd, and Marlowe. The creation of a play was a collaborative process among author(s), actors, and theater managers; the printed versions of plays "belonged" to printers, not to authors. Copyright as we know it did not exist - copyright belonged to the printer, not the author. (See David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book for further discussion of how this worked.) Texts were not stable -- while I can fairly confidently hold up a copy of Three Sisters and say, "this is Three Sisters," I can only hold up two rather distinct texts of Doctor Faustus and say, "these point to a play called Doctor Faustus." (See Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, for an in-depth explanation.)

The Declaration claims that "orthodox scholars claim that there is no room for doubt that Mr. Shakspere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him." Scholars acknowledge that authorship was a collaborative process because they acknowledge that (1) the past was different, and (2) the past wasn't all Victorian/Romantic/an HBO costume drama.

The only aspect of DoubtAboutWill.org that I find genuinely unsettling is the "Shakespeare Authorship Coalition"'s address to students. The "was Shakespeare Shakespeare?" question isn't hyper-relevant to most of society today, and it probably shouldn't be. But, compare the following two arguments:

- Since all of the evidence we have for William Shakespeare of Stratford writing the plays attributed to William Shakespeare would be classified by present-day lawyers as "circumstantial" (cf. The Playgoer's post about the declaration), then it's perfectly reasonable to believe that deVere/Marlowe/Bacon/Queen Elizabeth secretly wrote the plays.

- Since evolution's only a theory (like gravity), and since all the evidence we have for the Big Bang is technically "circumstantial" (i.e. no direct witnesses), then it's perfectly reasonable to believe that the world was created by the Judeo-Christian God only 5000 years ago.

Ay, there's the rub.