Primrose Road

Eddie deVere and I keep running into each other.

I was doing some research on the advent of blank verse as a new medium in English in the late 16th century, and came across two short accounts that at least take a good swipe at the ahistorical idea that a nobleman would have necessarily had to write plays anonymously:

In 1589, George Puttenham (or possibly a writer with the first name Richard), wrote a treatise on English poetry in which he praised the Earl of Oxford for his comedy writing. In another essay, Francis Meres describes Oxford as one of the better comedy writers of his time.

What's that again about the Earl of Oxford having to write plays in secret?

Yes, it would have likely been far more acceptable for a nobleman to write poetry than to write plays, but Puttenham's and Meres' references suggest that Oxford was a known comedy writer by 1589, the year before Shakespeare first appears on the scene, and at least five years before any of Shakespeare's plays is printed.

There is also the far more significant fact that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604 and Shakespeare wrote until at least 1611.

In attempting to contribute an article to RationalWiki about the Shakespeare authorship "debate" -- relevant in my view only because of the ways in which the arguments behind it resemble Intelligent Design and various pseudohistorical propositions -- I have overlooked one important factor: any great idea I have after 20mg of Flexeril is probably not such a great idea after all.

I am also not what one would call a "good writer," especially when it comes to types of writing I encounter outside my specific field of study. In fact, this is one reason why I blog; I need to constantly write in order to keep my writing skills at a level where I can at least cogently express my thoughts for academic papers.

So I'm putting a request out there: if you're a better writer than I, and feel that you can better express the reasons why (1) Shakespeare's plays were for the most part accurately attributed to the guy from Stratford, and (2) the argument "one author wrote another author's plays" simply doesn't make sense in the context of what we know about writing and stage practices in the English Renaissance, please contribute a better article than the one I did.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a door to nowhere on the third story of the Starbucks on 86th and Broadway:

I've created a Shakespeare authorship page on RationalWiki, figuring it's appropriate because of the resemblance between "anti-Stratfordianism" and intelligent design and since it's a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory (the best kind!). If you can contribute to the article by making it more informative and/or more hilarious (it definitely needs to be far hilarious-er), please jump in and edit it!

While I'm hardly one to agree with an "Oxfordian," I've got to admit that Mark Anderson, author of an Oxford-as-Shakespeare bio, is, well, right when he says that it's "rather bizarre" that a free class offered at the New York Public Library requires:

"1. A conviction that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare. 2. A belief that the works of Shakespeare constitute one of the cornerstones of world literature."

It's likely that the NYU professor who heads up this program didn't intend to convey a notion of Shakespeare-as-faith, but, in, my view, she unfortunately did. Since the 1970s (at least), many scholars have rejected Bardolatry in favor of history-grounded explorations of Early Modern authorship, and have rejected the "cornerstone of world literature"/universality view in favor of historical contingency and ideological critique.

And besides, how could one have a "conviction that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare" prior to studying his works and Early Modern culture?

In my view, the "anti-Stratfordian" argument (i.e. William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays attributed to him; someone else wrote them) needs to be addressed in schools because (1) it's all over the Internet, and students researching Shakespeare are likely to encounter it, and (2) there are parallels between this argument (essentially a conspiracy theory) and pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical theories such as creationism, Holocaust denial, and anti-vaccination. Sites like Doubt About Will concern me as a teacher because of the ways in which they can contribute to the dulling of our students' critical reasoning skills.

The parallels between anti-Stratfordianism and creationism are fascinating at times: this week's Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast, for instance, featured an interview with biologist PZ Myers, who noted that creationists arguing against evolution will accuse their opponents of ad hominem attacks, then go on to make their own ad hominem attacks. The victim of most creationist attacks is Charles Darwin, who, according to the creationists, is unequivocally worshipped by "evolutionists." The problem, Myers seems to suggest, is that straw men are being set up everywhere:scientists do criticize Darwin because he (like anyone) wasn't perfect, and "worshipping" any one scientist or theory would be anti-scientific.

Here's an ad hominem attack courtesy of DoubtAboutWill.org:

"Are authorship doubters just conspiracy theorists?
It is absurd to think that all of the many outstanding authorship skeptics are conspiracy theorists. Too many highly credible people have expressed serious doubts, focusing just on this one author. This ad hominem argument is a red herring used by defenders of orthodoxy to change the subject. Those who resort to it should be asked for evidence that independent experts support this charge. It is a convenient way for them to avoid having to deal with evidence that does not support them. In writing our declaration, we have focused on evidence. Those who disagree should do likewise."

Let me take this apart:

1. "Too many highly credible people have expressed serious doubts, focusing on just this one author."
-- The 'doubters' aren't clear here on what they mean by "highly credible." They excitedly report, for instance, that "More stars declare their doubt of Shakespeare". What evidence do these "stars" have for their doubt? (I will return to the issue of evidence momentarily.) And yes, some university professors have signed the declaration; see the National Center for Science Education's Project Steve for an excellent counterargument to what I'll call the argument from "a handful of scholars say so."

2. "This ad hominem argument is a red herring used by defenders of orthodoxy to change the subject."
-- This ad hominem argument is used by proponents of an ahistorical theory to make Shakespeare and Early Modern scholars look like stodgy old men who regularly bow to the bust of Shakespeare sitting on their mantles. Especially since the introduction of film theory and adaptation theory into our field, we are not Bardolaters: many scholars acknowledge the fact that Shakespeare is only "special" because he's the most published (though not the most prolific) Early Modern dramatist. We also acknowledge (unlike Kenneth Branagh ...) the fact that every word printed inside the BOOK we call "Hamlet" was not written by William Shakespeare. Finally, we are aware that the concept of "authorship" in the Early Modern era did not exist in the form it does today: play development was a collaborative process among author(s), actors, and theater managers; the printed versions of plays "belonged" to printers, not to authors. The argument that someone authored the entire text of someone else's plays is ahistorical and simply does not make sense in light of 16th and 17th century cultural practices.

In fact, "orthodox" scholars do make authorship arguments: recently, it was discovered that Thomas Middleton likely wrote parts of Macbeth and Measure for Measure.

3. "In writing our declaration, we have focused on evidence. Those who disagree should do likewise."
-- Unfortunately, unlike our counterparts in the sciences, we can't offer much more than anecdotal evidence; scholars tend to acknowledge, however, that they are piecing together arguments from a handful of documents. But we do have considerable documentary evidence that Shakespeare was indeed who we think he was, and we do have very good reasons for not using the plays themselves as biographical evidence: even supposed 'true believer' Sigmund Freud thought that good authors don't write autobiographical romans-(or dramas-)a-clef.

In sum, anti-Stratfordianism isn't something that teachers and scholars should brush aside simply because we know it's ridiculous; equipping our students with the critical reasoning skills necessary to evaluate arguments like these will also help them to evaluate the conspiracy theories, fundamentalisms, and pseudohistories they're bound to encounter.

During my weekly scan for all things Shakespeare on the WWW, I came across a "God created the earth because the Torah says so" article that not only aligns creationists with "evolutionists" on the basis of what the author calls a " 'something from something' orthodoxy" but also invokes Shakespeare to explain a Torah-based "something from nothing" principle.

Chasidic readings of Torah are often rather poetic and profound (though in my view, of course, not objectively 'true'). Except here, the essay writer seems to base his understanding of both God and Shakespeare on a Romantic/Freudian view of author-as-creator.

After explaining the ways in which God thinks the world into existence, the essayist turns to Shakespeare's 'writing process' as a means of explaining this abstract concept:

"Shakespeare dreamt up King Lear. In order to get King Lear where Shakespeare wanted him, namely as a foolish old man, Shakespeare did not have to imagine his birth, weaning, adolescence, and middle years. Shakespeare's King Lear is not the product of a series of somethings, e.g., an indulgent, permissive mother, poor social skills as a teenager, and so on. Rather, he is the product of nothing: Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect."

King Lear is not "the product of nothing": his story comes from Holinshed's Chronicles. While the play's fully fleshed-out subplot was quite an innovation at the time, the subplot's story is borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia. Yes, Shakespeare did not have to imagine Lear's childhood (as some writers and actors might be encouraged to do with their characters today), but he is surely not a product of "Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect." He is a product of Shakespeare's carefully stitching together previous work; he is a product of the work of actors and theater managers. Contrary to what the (highly entertaining) film Shakespeare in Love suggests, Shakespeare did not pull his story ideas and characters out of the ether, from "nothing."

Which gets me wondering: was there an equivalent to "creationism" in the Early Modern Era, prior to the emergence of the notion of individualist "creativity"? What would God-as-creator have meant to the Early Moderns?

Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an Oxfordian biography of Shakespeare (or Shakespearean biography of Oxford?), references Indiana University's Arden Project on his blog this week:

As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.

While the Technology Review article is indeed rather pessimistic about the project's future (Castronova seems to suggest that this was only an early phase of the project, and that they're going to try again), Anderson's suggestion as to why Arden failed is a little bit disconcerting, mainly because he (as many Oxford-was-Shakespeare proponents do) tries to relate every problem we face in Shakespeare studies back to Oxford. Alas, if only we knew the truth, that Edward de Vere wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, we would all be saved.

My own sarcasm aside, here's what Anderson has to say:

I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off.

Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.

The reason why Shakespeare is so "fragmented," he claims, is that "history has stuck [us] with the wrong guy." I've written before about why the 'one guy wrote another guy's plays' argument is ahistorical in terms of how Early Modern authorship worked, I've discussed how 'traditional' scholars actually don't believe that every word written under the name of William Shakespeare was written by William Shakespeare (in fact, a recent discovery suggest that Thomas Middleton wrote parts of Macbeth), so I won't rehash those arguments now.

But I will note once again that pseudohistory is genuinely dangerous.

I've mostly seen references to this on About.com and the like (my students' favorite "research tools"), but there was also an NPR interview a few years back:

Martino Iuvara, a retired professor from Sicily, argues that Shakespeare's plays were not written by William Shakespeare of Stratford, but rather by Michelangelo Crollalanza, a (what do you know?) Sicilian who wrote a play titled "Tanto Traffico por Niente" (which basically could be loosely translated as "Much Ado About Nothing") and whose life story bears some passing resemblance to Romeo and Juliet and Othello. And, of course, "Crollalanza" can be translated as "Shakes spear."

I thought I already settled this issue in my essay Down With Tradition: A New And Exciting Exploration of the Highly Relevant Question of Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays.

As for Shakespeare's apparent familiarity with Italian names and landscapes, I have to go with the Reduced Shakespeare Company's pizza delivery theory.

The London Times reports that "computer assisted research" strongly suggests that portions of what we now know as Macbeth and Measure for Measure were written (actually, added afterwards, perhaps after Shakespeare's death) by Thomas Middleton, known for his city comedies A Chaste Maid at Cheapside and The Roaring Girl and the tragedy The Changeling.

Notice that no one's arguing that there was a major coverup going on: Middleton added some lines to Shakespeare's plays. In fact, Middleton added some important lines to the Scottish Play (the MacDuff family scenes). Researchers didn't pick up on it for generations because for the last two centuries or so, Shakespeare has been presented 'bookishly' -- as though every word that appears inside a cover labeled "William Shakespeare" were composed by Shakespeare himself. What this argument in no way says is that Middleton wrote the entire Shakespearean corpus or even one full play. And it suggests that the fact that Middleton wrote parts of Macbeth and Measure for Measure would have been 'common knowledge' of sorts in the seventeenth century; it's a fact that was overlooked historically, not covered up by some vast conspiracy.

(I still hold that if Christopher Marlowe -- a spy and possibly a double agent with a Catholic agenda -- didn't have to write his plays under an assumed name, no one had to write plays under an assumed name.)

Anyhow, there are some sticky areas in this Middleton argument: previous "computational" studies establishing Shakespeare as the author of the anonymous Arden of Faversham and others contradicting Shakespeare's "authorship" have been criticized for not taking historical and cultural factors into account. Additionally, the argument partly relies, according to the Times article, on the "circumstances of Middleton's childhood," a Romantic (or perhaps Freudian reading in which an author is inspired by his or her personal life. Overall, though, the research looks both promising and interesting, especially in that it deals with some of what I find to be the most moving and tragic scenes in Macbeth.

Brunel University in London is offering the first MA in Shakespeare Authorship Studies this term, and Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi, two of the (very, very good) Shakespearean actors behind the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare, are, of course, excited about the program.

First, let me say that actors are (generally) awesome. I wouldn't be able to do what I do -- I wouldn't be fascinated with what I do -- if it weren't for actors. The guys and gals up on stage can force us to think, make us want to change the world or our lives, or can make us stop breathing for just one spectacularly suspended moment.

Thanks to Early English Books Online, actors and armchair Shakespearians can learn from primary sources how production and printing worked back in the English Renaissance. (OK, they'd need to visit a university library with a subscription to EEBO, but it's still to some degree accessible.) Or go to any library, read a couple of scholarly monographs and essay collections, and learn about how there's not only not really a "Shakespeare vs. other guy issue" but also how, in spite the straw man that the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt relies on, academic-types are actually against treating Will Shakespeare like an untouchable god.