My Official Statement Regarding the Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays

(By the way, 2 more people have now visited my profile, doubling the total [to 4]. Who are they? Does this mean I am taking off in the Blogosphere? If I get to ten I must get those books out of the library and figure out how to get some graphics on here...)

Since the question, or skepticism, surrounding the Shakespeare authorship appears to be in its own way as immortal, as well as popular, as the works themselves, it seems to me that every commentator of literature and the arts for a middlebrow readership ought to declare his position on the matter. Highbrows are: A. simply more interested in the ideas and use of language contained in the works than in figuring out who could or couldn't have written them; and: B. aware of who the author is in a far more intimate sense than any identification of a long-dead man, even one of excellent birth, would be able to provide them with. I, however, am not at this level, so my emotional stake in the question remains quite high, and has indeed prompted the necessity of writing an essay about it when there are so many more pressing issues to discuss.

While the question about whether the glover's son from Warwickshire could really have been the greatest writer in the history of the English language has been raised since at least the 19th century, it is of a type that is especially suited to several conceits that seem particularly current. The first of these conceits has to do with intellectual credentialing, and the second with the belief that our knowledge and understanding of history is superior to that of all previous ages, often including those who lived in the times under consideration themselves. Recently published histories, with very few exceptions, are always assumed to supercede in accuracy and theoretical rigor those from the 1950s or 1930s or, heavens, the very dark ages that preceded these, with little consideration given to the often formidable minds that composed these earlier studies. Sometimes an old historical-themed book of exceptional intelligence and literary merit such as Henry Adams's Mont-St-Michel and Chartres will be permitted to survive under the umbrella of literature, but I do not find that it is often referred to by professional historians as recommended reading on its subject, nor indeed is anything else more than ten or so years old.

There is apparently a new candidate for the "real" Shakespeare, an alpha-man named Sir Henry Neville, impeccably educated, who served as a diplomat and spoke 8 languages, can be presumed to have been familiar with royal courts and falconry and the law, had a number of events in his life which closely mirror episodes in the plays, etc. I do not know where the idea that Shakespeare must be some kind of great gentleman originated, especially of this exceptionally polished and rather effortlessly perfect variety represented by the Nevilles and DeVeres and so forth. I think it is a great stretch to imagine that men of such prodigious gifts and station would aspire to write so assiduously for the theater, which we are told was an occupation so far beneath such people at this time that we can hardly suppose they passed many hours at rehearsals and in the company of actors, and for which they would have had to use simple Bill Shakespeare as a proxy to present their ingenious productions to the world, either unbeknownst to everyone else in the company, or with the secret persisted in by all to the grave (I am thinking of the 1st Folio of 1623, largely compiled by surviving actors in honor of the supposed author, including the famous engraving of our large-browed poet). I could be wrong about this, but I believe most of the great playwrights of all time are pretty dyed in the wool theatrical people who have worked in numerous capacities in that milieu relating not merely to writing but in all aspects of putting on productions. Certainly the author of Hamlet appears to have been such a man. This seems to go for film as well, and I suspect also for opera and other musical concerts where the performance aspect is at least as important as the writing aspect, a circumstance which especially straight book scholars seem to have difficulty understanding. There is likewise very little history of people engaged for the most part in aristocratic pursuits or diplomacy or falconry or law producing masterpieces in performance-oriented artistic fields. The writing of books or even poems, if one lives in an age where poetry is not an alien means of approaching and experiencing language as our own is, is an essentially solo act, and can be done well in a certain degree of isolation and in idle hours separate from a wholly different occupation, but the performing arts at the highest levels especially are an intrinsically different matter, and the writer must be deeply immersed in the peculiar culture of his art--indeed it must be the dominant reality of his existence--for him to really succeed in it.

The above reason, however, I take as merely an aside, because I am convinced by other reasons that "Shakespeare", whoever he was, was a person of a background more like Shakespeare of Stratford than an aristocrat. The greatest objection made against the tradition of Shakespeare as the author is that he did not have the education that would have been necessary to produce such works. Presumably thousands of other people, including many prominent living scholars, have had such an education over the past 400 years, and most have not come close to approaching works of similar quality themselves, so I think it is hard to say exactly what this education must consist of. Shakespeare is most celebrated for, roughly in order, his domination of the English language, his knowledge of the souls and characters of men, his knowledge of the world, alike in its human and natural and cosmological organizations, including professions and stations as disparate as physician, soldier, lawyer, prince, clown, etc, his wit and humor. His was quite obviously a unique intellect, of the very rare sort that does not merely absorb the lessons of a mentor or collect information, but embellishes and redefines human experience and understanding of such phenomena as he is presented with. I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that such a person, perhaps having been arrested on an occasion or two and gone through a process of law, or been engaged in a lawsuit, would not be able rather easily to decipher the customs and principles which prevail in that milieu. I have passed a few days of my life in district courts myself and following the processes in person for several hours does much to demystify the various auras which educated people especially tend to invest in fields of knowledge outside their own expertise. I suspect the same would apply, for intelligent people, in other professions requiring forbidding amounts of experience such as medicine, politics, the military, etc, if we were not so easily intimidated by the idea of knowledge. Shakespeare was not intimidated by knowledge. Nor was Aristotle, nor Tolstoy, nor Wittgenstein. They appropriated to themselves the right to present and declaim upon all subjects as these presented themselves to their intellects. Of course one must have a modicum of intelligence to justify oneself in doing so, but good native intelligence of this sort is not so rare as our current culture appears to have artificially rendered it.

But of course the best, as well as most indispensibile, means to become wise in societies where writing has made any advancement at all, is by reading, and reading no doubt was an activity in which Shakespeare, even if we presume by this to mean the Stratfordian, engaged in often and with an admirable degree of skill. It is also here that the most compelling argument for the middle-class origin of our author is to be made. For in the Elizabethan period and indeed for some time afterwards, men of the best formal educations would have done most of their primary reading in Latin; indeed they would have written in it foremost upon serious matters too, as dissertations on science and philosophy, legal treatises, requests for favors to important people, etc, were generally composed in this tongue. Authors of this class such as Francis Bacon or even Ben Jonson, when they take up English demostrate a decided Latinate influence on their diction and style and bring with them a whole host of allusions and devices from Latin literature that are absent from Shakespeare, who when set beside such learned authors has such a fluency in his sentences as mark in one for whom English was his first language both of reading and composition more than any other prominent writer of the age (I will try to provide some demonstrations in a future post, I don't have time to dig them out right now). Also I think it is instructive to note that the sources from which Shakepeare gets his plots--Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch, the book of Italian romances that contained the seeds of Romeo and Juliet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, etc--are fairly limited in number and are all books that were available in English in that time. The Roman plays especially it must be noted (Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, etc, are all out of Plutarch. Any influence of Juvenal, Seneca, Plautus, even Virgil and Horace, which formed the backbone of the reading of those educated in the universities and from which influence few men of letters could escape who were once taught them, is decidedly muted in comparison to other English poets and playwrights of the era, appearing as it were at second or third hand if one insists on its being present at all. This may be the effect of Shakespeare's genius steamrolling even these titanic authors in its expansiveness, but if this is the case then I don't see why it is necessary that he must be an Earl to do so. This is not to disparage the learning of Latin, of course. People who are capable but not possessed of genius ought to learn as much Latin and anything else that they can certainly, and so even should the genius, but the genius can get away with a few more imperfections in his learning because his insight in other places is so exquisite.

I cannot believe how long it takes me to write these articles. 3 little boys under 5 is my excuse, though I am aware that Dickens wrote 4 or 5 1,000 page novels in the span from 1837-41 in the corner of a room full of young children, guests, men of the world and ladies. But his was a unique intellect.