Stromata Blog

Shakespeare, Shylock and Subcreation

People Love Dead Jews: Notes from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn, a provocative new book decrying with dark humor the way in which gentiles who care nothing much about living Jews conspicuously display their concern for those who are securely dead, was reviewed last week in The Tablet and Commentary. I’ll forgo saying anything about the book, which isn’t even available yet, but instead will look at a small item that both reviewers thought worth mentioning, namely, the author’s opinion of Shylock, the most memorable character in The Merchant of Venice (so memorable that contemporaries sometimes referred to the play as The Jew of Venice), and her consequent condemnation of the play.

In The Tablet, David Mikics, in the course of a strongly favorable review, writes:

But Horn falters in her essay on Shylock. Here she describes listening to an audio version of The Merchant of Venice in the car with her 10-year-old son, who convinces her that Shakespeare’s Jew is not at all sympathetic, but instead resembles a Batman villain who uses his personal troubles – in Shylock’s case, being kicked, spit on, and called a dog by Christian passersby – as an easy excuse for being flat-out evil. The play, Horn concludes, is simply antisemitic, and she regrets the fact that it exists.

The reviewer disagrees, insisting that –

Shylock is no comic book villain, and certainly no antisemitic cartoon. Two of the greatest 19th-century actors, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving, played Shylock as a tragic hero tormented by the Christians. This wasn’t special pleading but a genuine insight into Shakespeare’s intent. These superb actors, and their audiences, were nauseated by the Christians’ bottomless cruelty toward Shylock.

Both points of view are, it seems to me, fundamentally mistaken. They rest on the contemporary habit of treating works of literature as polemics rather than what J. R. R. Tolkien termed “subcreations”, coherent “secondary worlds” with some of the depth and richness of reality. Tolkien was thinking primarily of fantasy worlds, such as his own Middle Earth, but his concept applies to more quotidian fictions. There are no fairies in The Merchant of Venice, but there is an imaginary Venice inhabited by Antonio, Bassanio, Portia and, of course, Shylock. The city’s laws and customs bear but a faint resemblance to any reality, but they make sense in their own terms.

Readers will be familiar with the plot: Portia’s casket, the terms of Shylock’s loan, the quibble that saves Antonio’s “pound of flesh”, the fate of Shylock. One may watch or read the play simply for the crises and reversals in the plot, and that’s doubtless what most people do, treating it as a more elevated “Punch and Judy” show. On that level, it’s quite successful, and the characters are no more than marionettes. Calling Shylock a villain is no more meaningful than reporting Punch to #metoo.

But the play’s secondary world and its denizens offer the opportunity for deeper reflection, as shown by the fact that intelligent readers and viewers can argue about the morality of the fictional dramatis personae. Mr. Mikics exemplifies the conclusions that civilized men, admirers of Shakespeare, would like to reach today:

Sure, Shakespeare’s Jew is vengeful, intent on judicial murder, but watch Patrick Stewart and David Suchet in their prime trying out Shylock’s speeches. It’s impossible not to be seduced.

That’s because Shylock is simply more large-souled and honest, a bigger character with a more interesting mind and perspective on reality, than his mean and petty rivals. Shakespeare disappoints only one time in the play, when he denies the defeated Shylock the glorious final speech he deserves, instead allowing him only three final bitter words: “I am content.” Everywhere else his fierce integrity holds sway. Shakespeare, the son of a moneylender several times dragged into court for charging too much interest, was on Shylock’s side.

Dara Horn’s son sees something different. Although he uses Batman movies as his frame of reference, the lad is precociously aware of one of the maladies of our time, the invocation of victimhood as a laissez passer to disregard moral constraints. His analysis leads his mother to conclude, as quoted by Elliott Abrams’s review in Commentary:

I have a doctorate in literature. I am aware that Shakespeare’s plays contain many layers and mean many things. But the degrading hideousness of this character is obvious even to a ten-year-old…. Why, I wondered, should I feel obligated to excuse this blindingly obvious fact, like some abused wife explaining why her darling husband beat her up?

Two intelligent commentators reach radically opposite conclusions. Must we choose between them?

Implicit in Mikics and implicit in Horn is the notion that determining Shakespeare’s “intent” is crucial to deciding whether The Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic screed or a condemnation of Christian bigotry. If it is the former, the work is tainted, even if it “works” on the “Punch and Judy” level. If it is the latter, it deserves the admiration it has received during the past five hundred years.

Let me suggest that the author’s opinions of Jews are beside the point. What he did was create a secondary world whose inhabitants have enough reality to make arguments about their characters and motives possible. Shylock isn’t simply a stand-in for Jewry. He is a man with a unique life story who has suffered particular wrongs. His reaction – or overreaction – to those wrongs isn’t dictated by his religion, except to the extent that he feels stigmatized on account of it, adding another grievance to many he already feels.

We don’t know and can’t know what Shakespeare was thinking as he wrote, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” Maybe he grumbled, “Odds bodkins, so say they all. Eftsoons he will convene with the Elders of Zion to plot ye untuning of all strings.” Or he may have meant to preach that all men are brothers. Or had he promised the manuscript by Monday and found himself in desperate need of lines for a character? Whatever he intended, what emerged was a being more like a real human in a believable world than a cardboard Jew in a tract.

Some Help for “Libby”

An apparent enthusiast for the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, who goes by the name “Libby”, the other day e-mailed me a link to her (I’m guessing) gushing Amazon review of a book that I’ve pummeled in the past, Roger Stritmatter’s The Marginalia of Edward de Vere’s Geneva Bible: Providential Discovery, Literary Reasoning, and Historical Consequence. Dr. – his academic title is evidence enough of the Higher Education Bubble – Stritmatter has pored over a Bible once owned by de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxenford, and claims that the passages marked in it overlap significantly with Biblical allusions in the Shakespearean corpus. This “discovery”, to which the author assigns quasi-mystical significance (the “Providential” in his subtitle is not meant figuratively), is part of his “proof” that Oxenford was the veritable Bard of Avon.

The weaknesses in the Stritmatter analysis are numerous. For the benefit of Libby, and anyone else who may be interested, I thought it might be useful to summarize the principal defects in just a few paragraphs.

1. There is no way to know which annotations, if any, came from the hand of Edward de Vere. That he purchased the book is demonstrable, but where it was during the three centuries between his death in 1604 and its acquisition by the Folger Library in 1925 is obscure. It obviously underwent much use, as shown by the fact that it was rebound at least once.

Almost all of what Dr. Stritmatter calls “marginalia” consist of underlining and symbols (pointing hands and the like) in what look like a variety of inks of varying ages. There are only 35 marginal notes, all of them very short (mostly a word or two), some printed, some cursive. Dr. Stritmatter concedes that at least one hand other than de Vere’s is present. With so little material, there is no way to determine the number of writers or to identify any of them.

Even if some or all of the words could be shown to be de Vere’s, that would reveal nothing about the origin of the rest of the marks. A hypothesis as plausible as Dr. Stritmatter’s would be that one of de Vere’s children inherited his Bible, was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and highlighted correspondences between Scripture and the Bard. Even more plausible is that the marks accumulated over many generations and have little or nothing to do with other literature.

2. Dr. Stritmatter pretends to no statistical expertise, but he did enlist a colleague to take his data and run an elementary test of its significance. The finding was that there is a more-than-chance correlation between verses marked in the de Vere Bible and those alluded to by Shakespeare. That result is vitiated, however, by a huge sample selection bias.

Dr. Stritmatter finds far more Biblical allusions in Shakespeare than any previous investigator. Well and good. Opinions can differ on what is or isn’t an allusion. The flaw in his method isn’t the looseness of his criteria, but that he searched for allusions by looking only at verses that were marked in de Vere’s Bible. He didn’t consider how many unmarked verses also would, by his standards, be considered to be alluded to in Shakespeare. As a consequence, the density of allusions to marked versed is artificially increased. If one removes from the analysis allusions found only by Stritmatter himself, any statistical significance vanishes.

3. To bolster the statistical study, Dr. Stritmatter contends that de Vere’s contemporaries allude to the marked passages at a lower rate than Shakespeare. He offers comparisons to Spenser, Marlowe, Bacon, Montaigne and Rabelais. Let’s suppose that he is correct in his facts. His conclusion suffers from an elementary fallacy. If a relationship is not significant, it doesn’t become significant by virtue of being less insignificant than something else.

To illustrate the point: Imagine a Bible that has been marked entirely at random. A patient madman could find somebody whose work contained a higher density of allusions to marked passages than anyone else’s. Let’s imagine that Daniel Defoe had that honor. Would that provide even a slight ground for believing that there was some relationship between the markings and Defoe? Not at all.

Much else is wrong with the scholarship of Dr. Stritmatter’s opus. Once upon a time, I wrote quite a bit about it (vide “Shakespeare and Shakespeare Pretenders”). I doubt that I’ll get around to pursuing the subject further. I did, however, want to provide some reasons for this Libby and any others to reflect on the cogency of their views.

Response to comments: The quote that “psi” asks about is here. The same post goes into the deficiencies in Dr. Stritmatter’s handwriting evidence in greater detail. Even if that evidence were much stronger than it is, there is one inescapable point:

The only analysis that [Dr. Stritmatter] offers relates to the small number of written annotations, which are, he argues, in Oxenford’s handwriting. Not a shred of evidence or argument is brought forward to show that the person who wrote a few words in the Bible’s margins also drew pictures, underlined text, etc. Hence, were the handwriting incontrovertibly Oxenford’s, that would identify him as the annotator of approximately four percent of the marked verses.

In short, scores of people could have marked in the de Vere Bible in the course of three centuries. The 17th Earl of Oxenford may have been one of them, but there is no good reason to assume that all, most or any of the “annotations” are his. If any large proportion aren’t, then it is impossible to infer anything about any relationship between them and the works of Shakespeare.

Another response to a comment (12/14): We learn from a comment posted yesterday the “psi” is Dr. Stritmatter himself. He bemoans that I “have time to engage in private correspondence on this topic, in emails which continue your insulting attitude towards me, but apparently have no time to answer my question or respond to the points made publicly here”. I had at that point answered his question (in the “Response to comments” above), but I suppose that was easy to overlook. By “here”, I think he means at the link in his comment’s postscript. Well, I did look at it but didn’t bother to say anything, because it is hard to respond without betraying an “insulting attitude”.

In the linked post, Dr. Stritmatter, after much meandering, advances an argument based on a correction made by the De Vere Bible annotator to the translation of Ecclus. 14:3 (crossing out “him” and writing “to the poore”) that corresponds to the text of the Roman Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible. Dr. Stritmatter calls on this evidence to support the idea that annotator, whom he assumes to be Oxenford rather than some later owner, was familiar with Douay-Rheims.

He blithely fails to notice that the Douay-Rheims volumes containing the Old Testament and the Apocrypha were published in 1609 and 1610. The 17th Earl of Oxenford died in 1604. Dr. Stritmatter could also have discovered without much difficulty that the reading “to the poor” appeared in many 16th Century English translations of the Bible (as was pointed out to me some years ago.

Over the past decade I have spent a great deal of time and mental energy discussing Dr. Stritmatter’s anti-Stratfordian fantasies (most recently in a long post and appendix), but it’s extremely hard to take seriously a soi-disant scholar who makes elementary mistakes in his chosen field.

Further Observations

Continuing my year-end meandering. . . .

■ Yes, it’s amusing to see leftists urging President Obama to ask Hawaii to release his original birth record and the state’s incoming Dem governor promising to put the faux-issue to rest. Next comes the concerted effort to prove that the moon landings weren’t faked.

Wittingly or not, these left-wing calls for a deeper investigation into birtherism are a threat to the President. Not because there’s any possibility that he’ll turn out to have been born in Kenya (the publicly available electronic record, which no one had a motive to tamper with in Barack Obama’s behalf at the time when it was created, is a precis of the paper record), but for two other reasons:

1. The demise of birtherism would remove one of the President’s important political assets, namely, the existence of an irrational opposition whose views can be imputed to all Administration critics. In the coming months, distractions from the substance of the conservative critique will become more and more vital to the President’s reelection hopes.

2. Authorizing the release of the innocuous birth record would risk putting the President on a slippery slope toward disclosures about his youth, college and law school career, and early years in the radical matrix of community organizing. Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief covers some of that background, but Dr. Kurtz could work only with documents that happen to be accessible, often only after much digging, in public repositories. What he has put together shows that young Barack Obama was no run-of-the-mill liberal but the protegé of unapologetic socialists and an active member of the semi-open socialist network. The President has worked hard to keep that part of his life in the shadows. Does it matter? Maybe not; no man should be condemned at 50 for what he believed when he was 20. On the other hand, the most powerful man in the world ought not to have a secret biography. If he does, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why. Latter day revelations might well convince many an on-the-fence voter that the President hasn’t been candid about where he wants to take the country.

If the White House is alert, it is now cautioning its friends against disturbing the birther status quo, and nothing more will happen. One must not, however, misoverestimate the President’s men.

■ There’ll be Republican Presidential debates as early as next Spring?!? Leaving aside all the reasons why that is way too early, what sort of “debate” can it be? If the entire unwinnowed field is on stage, each candidate might get four minutes of speaking time. The event will be no more than a competition to slip in the most slogans and shibboleths.

If we must have these early outings, I propose this: Interview all of the prospects separately, asking them identical questions, for half an hour or so, then broadcast one or two interviews each evening. It wouldn’t be Lincoln-Douglas, but it might be informative, at least by comparison with what passes for political debate now.

■ Moreover, discussions about possible Republican nominees should focus on who can do what the next President will need to accomplish. All of the plausible contenders (I’m not looking at you, Ron Paul and Alan Keyes and Gary Johnson and Randall Terry) are in broad agreement about policy. At home, we must shrink government spending, particularly entitlement programs and government employment (the only way that other countries have successfully clawed their way back from the brink of insolvency, as a superlative analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal explains), while avoiding increases in the tax burden and repealing the Obamacare monstrosity. Abroad, we must confront the dangers of Islamic supremacism, Red Chinese expansionism and Russian mischief making, without the illusion that they can be wished away through “smart diplomacy”. The central question is who can win the election and implement the GOP agenda in the face of predictably intransigent opposition.

The situation today is both like and unlike 1980. Then, the country was in dire straits, suffering from stagflation, retreating before the advance of Soviet power and seemingly incapable of humbling such second rate enemies as Iran. There was not, however, much consensus within the Republican Party about what to do. That’s why the candidate with the most impressive record and appealing personality – Ronald Reagan, of course – had to struggle to win the nomination. Plenty of Republicans thought that supply side theories were “voodoo economics” and that a weakened America had no alternative to detente with the Soviet Union.

As 2012 approaches, we have policy concord but no Ronald Reagan. The candidate pool does, it is true, include a plethora of men (and a woman) who, like Reagan, have served as governors. Some have been remarkably successful in that position (Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry); some are promising but not far into their tenure (Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, Bobby Jindal); some have records that, while not necessarily discreditable, rouse unease for one reason or another (Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, George Pataki).

The argument for a governor, especially a seasoned one, is straightforward: He would contrast starkly with Barack Obama’s minor league bumbling and, once elected, would possess the skills required for an arduous legislative process. Governors who have coped with unfriendly legislatures, most notably Pawlenty, but also Christie, Huckabee, Romney and Pataki) get extra credit in this category. (Note, too, that the RINO-ish reputations of the last three owe much to Republican legislative weakness, which probably won’t be an obstacle in the post-2012 Congress.)

Contrasting with the governors are the “idea guys”: Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, John Bolton. (Rick Santorum may fit into this niche, too.) If the primary voters want to split intellectual hairs, one or more from this group may rise to the top of the heap. Unfortunately for them, the ideological rifts aren’t very wide, and their ideas can be coopted by others. (Sarah Palin has already begun touting Ryan’s “road map”, and she’s virtually a carbon copy of Bolton in foreign affairs.)

Then there are Senators: John Thune, Jim DeMint, Judd Gregg, Rick Santorum; others may opportunistically join the fray. I’ll boldly predict that all of these nascent candidacies will shrivel before New Hampshire. The GOP isn’t inclined to nominate Senators, and none of those named has either administrative experience or intellectual flair (except Santorum, for whose electability it’s hard to make a case).

Rounding out the dark horses are David Petraeus (unlikely to retire while commanding in a war zone) and Herman Cain (a fine fellow with an impressive business background, but what’s his name recognition?).

Jennifer Rubin thinks this is a “weak field”. My impression is that it suffers from too many choices. There’s no chance for anyone to stand out.

■ Haley Barbour never struck me as a leading Presidential prospect. Though he is in reality a sharp thinker and fine administrator, he looks like the stereotype of the old-time Southern politico, the species that gave way decades ago to the Carters and Clintons and Gingriches and Jindals. His very name seems lifted from Robert Penn Warren. It’s annoying, though, that whatever dreams of higher office he may harbor have been pretty much smashed by a minor deviation from historical orthodoxy.

As all political junkies now know, Governor Barbour thinks that the White Citizens Council in his home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, was largely responsible for the lack of violence there when the city’s public schools were desegregated. The Councils, he averred, were a less malign force than the Ku Klux Klan.

From the reaction, you would think that he had endorsed the reimposition of segregation, or perhaps slavery. Both liberals and conservatives expatiated on the Councils’ racism and their role in “massive resistance”. Not much attention was paid to whether the governor’s narrow description of one Council’s role in one city was factually accurate. It was ideologically wrong and therefore outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.

This attitude turns history into a branch of contemporary politics, or even contemporary propaganda. It also forecloses large areas of inquiry. What is the “proper” way to respond to a question about Yazoo City’s relative calm in the Haley Barbour’s youth if all references to the local white power structure must be uniformly denigratory? Should the credit go to Martin Luther King, Jr.?

There are, of course, noxious historical opinions. What marks them as noxious is their distortion of the past to advance present day causes. The Holocaust revisionists deny history’s best documented atrocity, because they want to undermine what they see as “Zionist” domination of the West. Russian apologists for Stalin hope to make Tsar Vladimir’s authoritarian rule respectable. When President Obama attributed the fall of the Berlin Wall to international cooperation, with no mention of America’s role, he wished to discourage unilateral action on our country’s part. On a much more trivial level, J. Thomas Looney, the inventor of the theory that the 17th Earl of Oxenford wrote the works of Shakespeare, was motivated by a deep distaste for modern egalitarianism (a little known fact reported in Jame Shapiro’s Contested Will. By contrast, Governor Barbour simply tried to explain a rather surprising historical event by drawing on his own memory. Possibly his memory was mistaken, but the mistake, if any, does not imply racial animus or lend support to resegregation.

(For the record, let me add that there’s nothing wrong with bringing honest history to bear on today’s controversies. For example, the revisionist historians of Reconstruction, whose work began at the same time as the civil rights movement, drew a lesson from their new picture: that racially integrated governments could act responsibly, even when many of their leaders were meagerly educated and otherwise ill-prepared for public office. For quite a few of the historians, that was a congenial conclusion, but it was founded not on abstract ideology but on the careful, albeit occasionally controversial, study of events in the Southern states between 1865 and 1877.)

More yet to come.

Should We Remember Joseph Sobran?

The November 1st issue of National Review includes a feature-length article by Matthew Scully about a figure most readers won’t recognize: the recently deceased Joseph Sobran, whom the title calls “Bard of the Right”. Mr. Scully drops hints that this “bard’s” songs were somewhat discordant, but the overall tone is respectful and regretful, concluding with, “What Joseph Sobran deserves right now is to be remembered at his best, as a kind and gentle person, a noble soul, and among opinion journalists, the greatest of his time.”

I beg to differ. Forgetfulness and silence would be kinder.

If I may compare the man to a thinker several orders of magnitude more significant, Sobran’s career resembled that of Tertullian, who began as an eloquent champion of Christianity and ended as a propagandist for a preposterous heresy. Similarly, the Joe Sobran of the 1970’s and early 1980’s was a witty and incisive presence on the National Review masthead. I remember looking forward to his essays and listening with interest to his radio commentaries.

At some point, however, his talent became poisoned by the conviction that American politics was being manipulated by conspiratorial Jews. He denounced President Reagan’s air strike against Libya in April 1986 as the product of “the Israeli lobby”, indulged in canards about American Jews’ supposed higher loyalty to “duplicitous” Israel, and asserted moral equivalency between persecuting Christians and persecuted Jews in medieval Europe. (Allegedly, “Some rabbinical authorities held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles” and vilified Moses Maimonides for expressing a contrary view.) None of these opinions appeared in National Review, where he was a senior editor, but Bill Buckley nonetheless published an editorial dissociating the magazine from them and strongly warning his one-time protegé to mind his manners.

The upshot was a feud that attracted much attention on the Right. Sobran lost his position with National Review, along with his syndicated column and his radio show. Buckley’s side of the story can be found in a book-length essay, In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992). Sobran’s was reiterated in his last two decades of writings: Buckley had become a “servile appeaser” after being browbeaten by “the Jews” (personified by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter). Alienated from the Right, Sobran peddled the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory (that candidate Ronald Reagan made a deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to prevent the release of the American hostages in Tehran before the 1980 election), blamed the American alliance with Israel for the 9/11 attacks, accused the Israeli government of planning to expel its Arab citizens, and routinely allied himself with the far Left on every question of foreign policy. (Of left-wing fantasist Seymour Hersh, he wrote, “Hersh really keeps his ear to the ground, has great sources, and collects well-earned enemies in every administration. I wonder how many high-level conspiracies he has aborted over the last four decades by getting wind of them in time.”) In domestic affairs, he evolved into a Lysander Spooner style libertarian crank. The tone of his columns grew increasingly grumpy and dogmatic, unsuited to persuade any but the already converted.

To grasp fully what kind of political animal the later Joseph Sobran was, one must read his speech, “For Fear of the Jews”, delivered to the Institute for Historical Review in June 2002. The history that the Institute wants to “review” is the Nazi murder of six million Jews. To this gathering of Jew haters and lunatics, Sobran declared,

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a “Holocaust denier.” I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don’t read German, so I can’t assess the documentary evidence; I don’t know chemistry, so I can’t discuss Zyklon-B; I don’t understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, “Holocaust denial” is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that’s proof enough. One Israeli writer has expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling too; but the state has spoken.

Does this agnosticism sound the slightest bit faux? Sobran also did not know Hebrew or Arabic, yet he did not doubt his own “scholarly competence” to reach conclusions about the history and politics of the Middle East.

Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it’s safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today’s mainstream press.

So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from this controversy. Of course I’m also incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen; so I’ve become what might be called a “Holocaust stipulator.” Like a lawyer who doesn’t want to get bogged down debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the standard account of the Holocaust is true. [emphasis in original]

The normal point of stipulating something in an argument is to dismiss it as inconsequential. Someone who “stipulates” that Barack Obama was born in the United States is almost certainly a “birther” at heart. “Stipulating” that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty tyrant is a standard prelude to excoriating the war that removed him.

Sobran brushed past the greatest atrocity of the 20th Century so that he could characterize it as “a device for exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and oppress.” Like Iran’s Ahmadinejad, he said that “the chief use of the Holocaust story is to undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel” and denied any historical connection between Jews and the Promised Land, calling Israel “a ‘homeland’ most [Jews] have never lived in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived”.

National Review’s eulogium has little to say about that Joseph Sobran. Mr. Scully doesn’t overlook him completely but shies away from the obvious conclusion:

Joe traded a friend and mentor who loved him [Buckley] for new company that was beneath him, National Review for the Institute for Historical Review. His appearance before that sorry outfit a few years ago (it’s the kind of group where they talk about “the Holocaust story”) remains impossible to explain, at least if you’re trying to absolve him. If, as I had always supposed, Joe was just one damn stubborn spaniel who didn’t know when to let the point go, then what was he doing with all those wolves? It calls to mind a Sobran line directed at Mario Cuomo, in that letter rebuking the governor’s way of sounding pro-life while encouraging exactly the opposite cause: “The worst thing I can say about you is a thing that is too obvious to deny: that these fanatics accept you as one of their own.”

A few minutes’ googling will unearth plenty of fanatics who accept Joe Sobran as one of their own. Maybe they aren’t wrong.

National Review displays big-heartedness when it devotes a thirteenth of an issue to a generally favorable portrayal of a man who called its founder “jumpy about Jews”, a “servile appeaser” and worse, and who worked hard, albeit not very influentially, to promote causes that NR has strenuously opposed. Well, magnanimity is a virtue, and the so-called “Bard of the Right” was too extreme and eccentric to do much damage. In the future, he will do less.

Addendum: In addition to the political views discussed above, Sobran devoted much energy to an unharmful lunacy, the belief that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or, as he himself preferred, “Oxenford”), was the real author of the works of William Shakespeare. About this hobbyhorse, Mr. Scully writes,

He did, in 1997, finally publish his masterwork on the Shakespeare authorship question, resolving the case in favor of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. He loved Shakespeare, who “seems to know us better than we know him,” and if the author was actually someone else, then it seemed to Joe worth ten years of his life to prove. It didn’t really matter to him that even the small group immersed in this 400-year-old controversy refused to give him much of a hearing, dismissing Alias Shakespeare with condescending lectures on “serious scholarship.”

Actually, anti-Stratfordians edged away from Sobran largely out of distaste for his antisemitic ramblings. His arguments and approach otherwise fall well within the mainstream of their movement. Most of his material was, in fact, cribbed from Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s megabiblium, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, which spreads the case for Oxenford, such as it is, over eight hundred disjointed pages. Alias Shakespeare has the virtue of being a well-written precis. It makes just two original contributions of any note.

First, Sobran insists that Oxenford’s homosexuality (for which there is scanty evidence; the earl fathered children by at least three women, though political enemies did once accuse him of goings-on with a Venetian choir boy) was central to the “plot” to keep his authorship secret. For reasons never quite revealed to us, using a pseudonym and, especially, omitting the Shakespearean poems from the First Folio were essential to preserving Oxenford’s reputation.

Second, Sobran believed himself to have a particularly acute ear for Shakespeare’s “voice prints”. An appendix to Alias Shakespeare reproduces the undisputed Oxenford corpus – 20 poems of widely varying merit – and finds passages in Shakespeare that, in Sobran’s judgment, must have come from the same pen. To those of us without the analyst’s gift, it looks like he has simply set side-by-side passages where the two authors use the same words, a method that could prove that almost anyone wrote almost anything. We can, however, go beyond that vague objection, for the appendix includes a “natural experiment” testing whether Sobran was in truth able to “hear” Shakespeare under other guises.

As Sobran evidently did not realize, the first 16 lines of one of Oxenford’s poems (beginning “In Peascod time when hound to horn gives ear while buck is kill’d”) were written not by Oxenford but by Thomas Churchyard. Oxenford then added 12 lines of his own as a continuation. (Vide Poems IVa (Churchyard) and IV (probably Oxenford) in Steven May’s edition of the poems, published in the journal Studies in Philology (1980) and in his study The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1999).)

If the Sobran ear is reliable, one would expect it to find few, if any, Shakespearean echoes in Churchyard’s verse. Yet his 16 lines are credited with 16 parallels. There are ten in Oxenford’s dozen lines. Indeed, the “Shakespearean density” of the Churchyard portion exceeds what Sobran detects in any other passage of comparable length. In the one poem that the earl published under his own name, there are a mere 15 parallels in 26 lines.

It appears, then, that Sobran could not distinguish Churchyard from Oxenford or Shakespeare. His method proves nothing but the power of wishful thinking.

Anti-Stratfordianism on the Screen

This could be hilarious:

Fresh from annihilating the entire planet in 2012, Roland Emmerich is soon to set to work on the reputation of the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, with Anonymous.

It’s a major departure for Emmerich, who’s abandoning global cataclysms and puppies-in-peril for sonnets and subterfuge, and swapping CGI for live action. Anonymous tackles the thorny theory that's circulated for the past 100 years that Shakespeare’s plays were, in fact, written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. . . .

So how does Emmerich describe Anonymous? “It’s a mix of a lot of things: it’s an historical thriller because it’s about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It’s the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled ‘William Shakespeare’.”

The reporter goes on to confuse Robert Cecil with his father William, Lord Burghley. Whether that muddle comes from Mr. Emmerich, I don’t know, but the casting of David Thewlis, languid romantic werewolf, as old, fat, gouty Burghley suggests a certain casualness about mere historicity.

What I look forward to is learning which of the batty Oxenfordian theories about their idol’s political role will wind up on the screen. Roger Stritmatter’s notion that he fathered the Earl of Southampton on Queen Elizabeth and resented her refusal to name the child as her heir? Nina Green’s that he was the prime mover in James VI of Scotland’s accession to the throne? Ron Hess’s that he ran an European-wide intelligence network and used the plays of “Shakespeare” to chronicle his life-long rivalry with Don John of Austria? Paul Streitz’s that he was Elizabeth’s son as well as her lover? It’s not impossible that Anonymous will make 2012 look relatively sober.

Historical Footnote: Oxenford played a role in the drama over the succession to the throne, though not at all like the one apparently assigned to him by director Emmerich. In March 1603, a few days before the Queen’s death, he invited the Earl of Lincoln, a rather dissolute and worthless nobleman, to supper and proposed a scheme to derail James of Scotland’s seemingly inevitable ascension. In James’s place, he put forward Lincoln’s nephew, an 18-year-old with a remote royal claim in the Yorkist line. (He was a direct descendant of George, Duke of Clarence, of butt-of-malmsey fame.) The idea was that the lad would travel to France, gather supporters there, and bring back a French army to vindicate his pretensions. Oxenford was confident that the French would back any alternative to James, “how small soever his title were”.

The proto-plot was, of course, crack-brained, though some figures at the French embassy may have encouraged it. Lincoln had the good sense to report the conversation to the lieutenant of the Tower of London, who passed the word onto other authorities. No one, however, felt any need to take action. Oxenford was even allowed a nominal place on the council that handled English affairs pending the new King’s arrival. He had no money or influence. Arresting him would have thwarted no real danger, but might have reflected badly on important men to whom he was related, notably his first wife’s half brother, Sir Robert Cecil, and the husbands of his two eldest daughters (one an earl, the other a baron).

This minor incident displays Oxenford at his vainglorious and ineffective norm. He would be a better subject for a comedy than a thriller.

Sources: Alan H. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, ch. 81 (2003); Sir John Peyton, Letter to Robert Cecil (Oct. 10, 1603).

Bits and Pieces from Westercon

Westercon, the movable west-of-El-Paso-east-of-the-Pacific regional, no longer draws a couple of thousand fans on Independence Day weekend, but a lot of the attendees (about 700 this year) are people I know, and in programming, parties and SF gossip it remains in the convention Big Leagues.

Tempe is very hot and not as dry as advertised. The convention venue, the Mission Palms (to be the site of the North American Discworldcon over Labor Day weekend), offsets the heat with ferocious air conditioning. It is located in the middle of a restaurant-dense downtown area. On the night of the Fourth, the pool deck offered a splendid view of Tempe’s forty-minute fireworks show.

To start with unhappy news, I learned that Khen Moore, a Southern fan best known for his incredible art collection, died a few days ago. He had been ill for a long time, suffering the effects, sadly, of inveterate alcoholism. While I didn’t know him well, we had a few pleasant chats, and he thoughtfully pointed out to me where I could buy a print of an Alan Clark painting that he had commissioned and I had admired. It’s not clear yet whether he left a will and made arrangements for the disposition of his paintings. If he didn’t, I’m much afraid that Tennessee probate costs will lead to distress sales and the effective loss of a number of excellent pieces of art. (Let that be a warning to all of you who keep putting off will making till the Greek calends.)

Worldcon bidding has not emerged from its lull. Reno, unopposed for 2011, threw a couple of nights of reasonably good parties. Chicago, unopposed for 2012, had a bid table but no party. Texas will announce a 2013 bid at Anticipation; the city is a secret (at least from me). I predict San Antonio, which was a delightful site in 1997. Also on the verge of announcement is a British bid for 2014, reportedly for the London dockyards (overbuilt for the 2012 Olympics and therefore cheap). San Diego has made noises about 2015, though I’ve heard nothing new for several months and am told that there is local skepticism. Japanese fans have politely informed reliable sources that they’d like to bid again in 2017 and establish a once-a-decade tradition à la Australia.

And that’s it. No year has more than one likely bid, and the out-years are not promising. I’d bet a great deal that Los Angeles will pounce on 2016, or on 2015 if San Diego looks shaky. If anyone in Boston is currently enthusiastic about campaigning for any year, he, she or it is keeping very quiet. Philadelphia is equally mute. Balto-Wash will surely bid someday. Alas, the local fans seem to be waiting for the D.C. city council to give the go-ahead for a hotel adjoining the new convention center. Cargo cults will have their prayers answered more quickly.

There are moments when I muse that we ought to give up selecting cities and vote instead for con committees, leaving it up the winner to come up with a place. I look forward to the epic battle of Yalow vs. Standlee.

Westercon bidding is tame, too. Glenn Glazer’s San Jose bid won unopposed for 2011, and Seattle has announced for 2012. If chosen, it will use either the Marriott or the Hilton at SeaTac airport.

Those looking for a contest may have to be content with the NASFiC. Raleigh has been running all alone to host the North American regional in 2010, when the Worldcon will be held in Australia. Since the filing deadline has passed, it ought to be a shoo-in, but late word is that next year’s Westercon (Pasadena) is launching a write-in bid to add the NASFiC to its banner. If the effort is serious, it will be interesting. Having good friends on both bidcomms, I am going to declare my strict neutrality and tell no one (maybe not even myself) how I vote.

I’d have more to say about the program – one of my retirement resolutions is to attend panels rather than simply look at them in the program book and intend to show up – but I found myself preoccupied with finishing my Hugo reading. (The voting deadline was Friday night, so, if you didn’t cast your ballot, it’s too late now and you have no right to curse the idiots who picked the winners.) For various reasons, I’d put this task off. Hence, I absorbed in a short time what some subset of fandom thinks were the best works of 2008.

This concentrated reading left one particularly strong impression: Our contemporary writers are fascinated by bold new ideas but not too interested in making them into genuine stories. I’ll single out one especially blatant example, Robert Reed’s Best Novella nominee “Truth”. The concept is fine: a lone time traveler who, wanting to destroy Western civilization, arranges to be captured shortly after 9/11, pretends to be one soldier in an army invading from the future, and tricks his too-clever interrogators into taking the counterproductive actions that will bring about his goal. In precis, it sounds like a great story, and a sufficiency of nominators must have seen its potential. In fact, however, we are never told how the saboteur carried out his mission, and its unraveling is heavier on atmospherics than ratiocination. In the end, the tale remains potential rather than realized. It is not alone among the nominees.

One program item that I will mention is the panel on “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?”, where Rick Foss found himself moderating between two anti-Stratfordians. Since one of them was Eric Flint, the session was basically a monologue. Mr. Flint, who doesn’t pretend to be a deep student of the “authorship question”, declared his support for the fatuous idea that a whole bunch of playwrights used “William Shakespeare” as a handy pseudonym. (Yeah, if I wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, I’d let some angel take the credit, too.) His “decisive” argument against Shakespeare of Stratford’s having been the sole author (making allowances for occasional collaboration, as with Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen and with Middleton on Pericles) was that “he retired permanently to Stratford in 1604” – a “fact” about which his certainty was unshakeable, even though there’s not a shred of reason to believe it. For the rest, he expounded some of the standard anti-Stratfordian delusions, e. g., that Venus and Adonis is exceptionally learned and that the Stratford Man made his money as a “grain trader”. To give credit where it’s due, he also had the good sense to knock down some of his own side’s stale chestnuts; as an author himself, he knows that Shakespeare didn’t have to visit Italy in order to use it as a setting.

Oh, I mustn’t overlook a personal milestone. At the Westercon business meeting, I spoke on the prevailing side on a motion. That hasn’t occurred at any business meeting at any convention (including the mock business meeting at the Colorado Springs SMOFCon) since 1986.

To conclude, it was an enjoyable Westercon, arguably the most satisfactory in several years. My hope is that this, the oldest of continuous science fiction conventions after the Worldcon itself, is now on an upswing.

Shakespeare and the Supremes

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article on what the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court think about the pseudo-controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Justice Stevens naturally got featured billing. His belief that the “true author” was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or, as the man himself preferred, “Oxenford”), has long been known to people who pay attention to such matters, even if it was a surprise to many commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy. Of greater novelty were the revelations about the views of other members and former members of the Court: Justices Scalia and Blackmun are also identified as Oxenfordians, Justice O’Connor as a generalized anti-Stratfordian and Justice Ginsburg as a possible advocate of the very longshot candidacy of John Florio (though she admits to having “no informed views”, a statement that could be applied to other aspects of her thought). The Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Souter and Alito declined to comment.

Justice Scalia’s heterodoxy may be disconcerting to admirers of his judicial philosophy, but, based on the brief statement he gave to the Journal’s reporter, it is in character. He read an Oxenfordian monograph when he was a boy and apparently maintains his allegiance in order to annoy his wife. The only argument he is quoted as making is, “It is probably more likely that the pro-Shakespearean people are affected by a democratic bias than the Oxfordians are affected by an aristocratic bias” – not exactly compelling.

Justice Stevens’ reasoning – if that is le mot juste – is presented at greater length, and is of such tawdry quality that I’m relieved not to have him on the Stratfordian side. The nadir is an argument that I’ve never before seen from even the least perceptive Oxenford backer:

Shakespeare dedicated two narrative poems to the earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, “who also [like Oxenford] was a ward of Lord Burghley and grew up in the same household,” Justice Stevens says. “The coincidence...is really quite remarkable.” He asks, “Why in the world would William Shakespeare, the guy from Stratford, be dedicating these works to this nobleman?”

For the same reason that hundreds of other Elizabethan commoners penned dedications to the nobility, in the hope of monetary and other rewards. One need only read the what the poet wrote to Southampton to realize that these are not the words of the holder of the oldest title in England to a much younger man whose earldom went back only three generations. From Venus and Adonis:

Rght Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen; only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather : and never after ear [plow] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest, I leave it to your Honourable survey, and your Honor to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation.

And The Rape of Lucrece:

The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

We are also told that “Justice Stevens admits there’s a ‘fringe’ element of anti-Shakespearians who spin elaborate but unlikely theories.” With a little digging, the reporter might have discovered that the Justice himself has written a complimentary missive to one of the theorists furthest out on the fringe (though not absolutely the nuttiest slice of the fruit cake – that honor belongs to the pair of linguists who claim that Oxenford wrote not only Shakespeare but almost all other Elizabethan literature).

As the saying goes, “The country’s in the very best of hands”. Thanks to a man who is incapable of understanding the prefaces to Shakespeare’s poems, unlawful enemy combatants have habeas corpus rights and homeowners don’t have rights under the Fifth Amendment.

Sir Henry Neville Finds a Follower

Appended to a Daily Telegraph story about a different Shakespeare-related topic is this news from the world of anti-Stratfordian eccentricity:

John Casson supports the thesis first mooted in 2005 that an Elizabethan diplomat named Sir Henry Neville was the real author of William Shakespeare's plays.

Dr Casson, in his book Enter Pursued by a Bear, identifies ‘Shakespeare’s’ first published poem as the ‘Phaeton sonnet’, his first comedy as ‘Mucedorus’ and ‘Locrine and Arden of Faversham’ [sic] as the first of the tragedies. All of these were created ten years before the Henry IV plays.

“After 400 years we can now see ‘Shakespeare’s’ early artistic development. What we thought were the first plays by ‘Shakespeare’ appeared anonymously in the early 1590s. It is inconceivable however that his first plays were the massive trilogy of Henry VI. Writers develop over time from simpler beginnings. I have discovered some of those earlier writings,” he said.

The findings have been welcomed by leading actor Sir Derek Jacobi. Sir Derek said: “I consider it to be a work of first class research and scholarship, full of fascinating indicators all pointing away from the orthodox belief.”

Young Google, my research assistant, quickly turned up the publisher’s Web site, where they know that Locrine and Arden of Feversham are two different plays. (“Feversham” and “Faversham” are variants, the former being the earlier.) Here is the blurb for the forthcoming book:

Following Brenda James’s discovery of the true identity of the writer of Shakespeare’s works, Henry Neville, John Casson has applied this to apocryphal works with startling results. He has thus discovered:

Neville’s first nom-de-plume (before he used the name ‘Shakespeare’)
Shakespeare-Neville’s first published poem: the Phaeton sonnet
Shakespeare-Neville’s first comedy: Mucedorus
Shakespeare-Neville’s first tragedies: Locrine and Arden of Faversham
Shakespeare-Neville’s first Falstaff: ten years before the Henry IV plays.

Dr. Casson also explores Thomas of Woodstock and A Yorkshire Tragedy, revealing the connections between them and Henry Neville’s life and letters. He reclaims the lost play Cardenio in the surviving text of Double Falshood, showing that this is a genuine work by Shakespeare-Neville and John Fletcher.

After 400 years we can now see Shakespeare-Neville’s artistic development before his early known works.

John Casson, PhD, is an independent researcher, psychotherapist and playwright.

There’s no need to reprise what I think about the Neville-Shakespeare theory (but those who wish to can read The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu, The “Tower Notebook” and Filching from the Baconians, which examine it in more detail than most people can endure). As for the plays that Dr. Casson assigns to “Shakespeare-Neville”, they are familiar parts of the “Shakespeare Apocrypha”, various dramas attributed to the Bard by the editors of the Second, Third or Fourth Folio, usually on the strength of initials on the title page of an Elizabethan era print run. Shakespeare could have had a hand in some of them, but there’s no way to know.

One sure thing, however, is that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors and Henry VI are quite adequate as “simpler beginnings” for the Shakespearean corpus.

Sir Derek Jacobi’s endorsement of the book is interesting. He has hitherto been a stalwart supporter of the claims of the 17th Earl of Oxenford, and Oxenfordians have no truck with the Nevillian heresy. In the words of Oxfordian News,

[At] the April 20-23[, 2006] 10th Annual Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference . . . Lynne Kositsky politely demolished Rubinstein’s credibility. [William Rubinstein is the Neville theory’s co-originator.] Anyone who has followed the authorship question as a topic in intellectual history is aware that for many decades (at least since 1984, if not 1920), there has been no serious alternative to the Oxford case.

I trust that the Oxenford hierarchs will be prompt to herd the erring Sir Derek back into the onr true theory’s corral.

Random Reading: Joseph Pearce’s Papist Bard

Browsers at conservative Web sites have probably seen adverts for The Quest for Shakespeare by Joseph Pearce, which, according to the publisher, is –

a stimulating and vivid biography of the world’s most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard.

Actually, he is interested in only one historical fact or fiction: Shakespeare’s religious affiliation. His theses are, first, that the playwright was, “beyond a reasonable doubt”, a Roman Catholic and, second, that his faith is crucial to understanding his works.

The first is not an outlandish idea. Among the writers of his day, Shakespeare is noteworthy for the absence of anti-Catholic animus. His history plays fall outside the popular “elect nation” paradigm, in which England’s story is identified with the advance of Protestantism and the rejection of Papal authority. He puts nuns, friars, cardinals and Catholic rulers on the stage without suggesting that they are other than normal human beings. His most famous hero whispers, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered” and converses with a soul from Purgatory. His most famous buffoon was originally named after a proto-Protestant martyr; complaints from the man’s descendants prompted a switch from “Oldcastle” to the less controversial “Falstaff”.

From these signs alone, one can be fairly certain that the Bard of Avon was out of step with the bigoted Protestantism of many of his countrymen, and might well have been a Catholic himself. Not many scholars believe, however, that such inferences from negative evidence are enough to support an indisputable verdict.

Mr. Pearce’s confident judgement rests not on the works but on scattered facts about the author and his family. He has taken them almost entirely at second hand. His main authority is Michael Wood, whom he describes as “an historian of some repute”. Mr. Wood is, in reality, a film maker, whose In Search of Shakespeare was written to accompany a BBC television production. He is able at what he does, but what he does isn’t path-breaking literary and historical scholarship. His book rarely cites sources, speculates well beyond the data, and ignores interpretations that don’t fit his thesis. The Quest for Shakespeare accepts his conclusions as proven, without subjecting them to even cursory analysis.

The Wood-Pearce argument for Shakespeare’s Catholicism boils down to this: His father John Shakespeare’s name appears on a Catholic profession of faith discovered in the 18th Century (and since lost again). A few other facts are consistent with the hypothesis that John was a Papist for at least part of his life (and a few others need explaining away). His mother’s relatives included many Catholics. An appreciable number of residents of his home town, Stratford-upon-Avon, clung to the old religion. His daughter Susanna, though married to an outspoken Protestant, has been suspected of Catholicism on the ground that she appears once in a list of Stratford townspeople who missed Easter communion. There is no affirmative record that Shakespeare himself ever received the Anglican sacrament. His friends and business associates included known or likely Catholics. A note written 70 or more years after his death, by a man in no particular position to know, states, “He died a Papist.”

In a period when cross-sectarian relationships were commonplace, that is thin gruel. Mr. Pearce thickens it with speculation. His method consists of composing a narrative on the assumption that Shakespeare was a committed Catholic and finding ways to fit as many facts as possible into it. No one during the Bard’s lifetime suggested that he did not conform to the Established Church. He was baptized, wed and buried within it, as were his wife and children. His name appears on no lists of recusants. All that could have been a blind, as Mr. Pearce expatiates at length, but it is a bold step to be certain that appearances deceive us.

There are also indications that whatever pro-Catholic sympathies Shakespeare felt were more emotional than ideological. If he was in fact a practicing Papist, it is odd that the version of Scripture he most often uses is the Geneva Bible, a hardline Protestant translation whose notes brim with hostility toward the Church of Rome. [Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, pp. 38ff. (2002).] Furthermore, his and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII climaxes with the birth of, and a lavish tribute to, Queen Elizabeth, whose death Mr. Pearce is sure he greeted with delight. Macbeth roundly condemns the Gunpowder Plot and “equivocation” (which Protestants routinely associated with Catholicism), praises the House of Stuart and endorses King James’ platform of “concord, peace and unity” (IV.iii.97-100) – hardly signs of hostility to the new, Protestant dynasty.

Mr. Pearce ignores all such objections to his thesis. So far as I can tell, he is unaware of their existence. He is, on the other hand, much aware of facts that aren’t so, such as, to take an especially egregious instance, “that the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatrical world was strongly Catholic in spirit” [p. 98], a view that he picks up from a secondary source but that no one who has read non-Shakespearean plays from that era, brimming with anti-Papist bombast, could possibly share. As noted above, the absence of overt anti-Catholicism makes Shakespeare’s oeuvre stand out from his contemporaries.

All in all, I see no way to render a verdict on Shakespeare’s religious allegiance more definitive than “Not Proven”. Nonetheless, we may, as a thought experiment, imagine that Mr. Pearce’s confidence is justifiable. How significant would the “fact” of Shakespeare’s Catholicism be?

Mr. Pearce’s answer is a classic of what C. S. Lewis called “the personal heresy”, the belief that literature is, first and foremost, an expression of the author’s personality and should be read in that light. Mr. Pearce alters “personality” to “personhood” but otherwise stands on the side of E. M. W. Tillyard in the famous Lewis-Tillyard debate (The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939)). There Lewis argued that what is important about a literary work is what is “public”, that is, discernible to any reader who is literate in the author’s language and possessed of the knowledge common to his milieu. What the author himself thought or felt or meant to convey is of interest only to his biographer. “I maintain that when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all [emphasis in original].”

Mr. Pearce, by contrast, asserts, “Even if we accept, as we should, that a great work of literature will have a profundity of meaning beyond the conscious design of the author, we still need to see the transcendent beauty through the prism of the personhood of the author [pp. 177–78, emphasis in original].” Hence,

We must know what the author believed in order to know what he is saying and doing in his work. We must empathize with, even if we don’t sympathize with, the author’s beliefs. Failure to understand the author’s beliefs will lead to a failure to understand the work. Our prejudice or our ignorance will have made us blind. [p. 178]

An approach to reading books cannot be incorrect in the same sense as an approach to solving equations, but it can be profitless. If our appreciation is vitiated by ignorance of “what the author believed”, any work by an unknown author is condemned ipso facto to an inferior rank. We know nothing reliable about what Homer believed. Le Morte d’Arthur bears an author’s name, Sir Thomas Malory, to which scholars have attached a patchy biography; the beliefs that can be inferred from that biography do nothing to help us understand the last great chivalric romance. Tens of thousands of other works languish in anonymity or auctorial obscurity. As for those writers whose lives and opinions are thoroughly documented, are we to read their biographies before their novels, plays and poems? That is the inescapable corollary of Mr. Pearce’s doctrine. Were it to become universal, it would kill off reading altogether.

What’s more, the doctrine works poorly even when applied to Mr. Pearce’s particular quest. He has convinced himself that William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic. There were, however, many flavors of Catholicism in that era, ranging from fanatics of the Guy Fawkes/Robert Persons stamp to saintly dissidents like Edmund Campion and Henry Garnet to loyal subjects like the court musician William Byrd to nominal believers whose adherence to Rome was a matter of heredity, fashion or contrariness, like Ben Jonson, Edward de Vere and countless country gentlemen. Mr. Pearce doesn’t pretend to know where on the spectrum the author of King Lear fell. How, then, can he claim a true understanding of his beliefs?

The last part of The Quest for Shakespeare is a reading of Lear that, Mr. Pearce avers, “shows how our knowledge of the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy permits us to read the plays through the eyes of the playwright himself [p. 10]”.

Really? One of the leading themes of the Pearce interpretation is that the play protests against the secularization of the English state under Elizabeth and James. What in the biographical factoids that Messrs. Wood and Pearce have assembled suggests that Shakespeare held the anachronistic view of the relationship between Church and State that Mr. Pearce attributes to him? Some Roman Catholics, like Father Persons and Cardinal Allen, favored a Catholic confessional state. Others, including many rank-and-file Catholics, thought that the Pope had provoked persecution by foolishly “deposing” Elizabeth from her throne. Neither of those positions is easily reconcilable with the “meta-historical” meaning that Mr. Pearce discovers. In lieu of “the playwright’s religious faith and philosophy”, we seem to have what a 21st Century Roman Catholic apologist would like them to have been.

Without pretending to possess a window into the author’s heart, I can’t help concluding that The Quest for Shakespeare is primarily a venture in wish fulfillment. William Shakespeare would indeed be an ornament to the 16th Century Catholic Church, but rational scholarship is a greater ornament still.

Charlton Heston on Shakespeare

Death brings forth the secrets of a man’s life. Not being a movie buff to any degree, I always associated Charlton Heston with Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes and the NRA. Now I learn, via Power Line, that he was an enthusiastic Shakespearean actor and even weighed in once on the Shakespeare authorship pseudo-controversy, in a letter a decade ago to the Weekly Standard. He was prompted to write by the magazine’s review of Alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran, a foolish tome that pushed the 17th Earl of Oxenford as the true Bard. Unlike some other actors, Heston didn’t try to display superiority to the groundlings by parroting anti-Stratfordian malarkey:

Paul Cantor scathingly dissects Joseph Sobran’s conviction that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays bearing William Shakespeare’s name. I would like to add a few words. . . .

Shakespeare was exactly the parvenu player from the country Sobran describes, scribbling away on the South Bank and turning out the 16th-century equivalent of Movies of the Week. It took the richness of the middle plays for London to realize his true size. The world began to catch on only after his death, when Heminge and Condell published the Folio, prefaced by praise from his fellows. (They did not ignore him, as Sobran states.)

Being a writer, Sobran misreads Shakespeare as academics do: He treats him as a writer. I know, there he is on the page, but that’s not where he or his plays live. Shakespeare leaps alive in air, in the spoken sound of his words. Only actors really understand this, though audiences sense it subliminally, in performance. When you’re redacting the plays in rehearsal, you make the changes in terms of the sound as much as the meaning. Also the pauses.

That’s what Shakespeare did as actor/manager. His plays loom so massively over all the other writing in the world because of his sublime gift, but it was a poet-player’s gift. He created those men and women to live on a stage, seen in light and sudden dark, heard in cries and whispers. Exploring them there reveals more than a lifetime in a library can.

I began working on the plays when I was in high school, and I guess I’ve played his people more than any other current American actor. I know how they defeat you, leave you bleeding on your knees in the sand, aching to try again.

When I was adapting Antony and Cleopatra for a film, fearing the outrage of scholars over some radical redactions I’d made, I asked Laurence Olivier’s advice. “Do what you think he would’ve done, laddy,” he said. “They none of them f--g know.”

That’s as good a summary as I’ve seen of why the fundamental anti-Stratfordian premise, that writers of genius can be identified by their biographies and credentials, that the Sobrans and Ogburns “f--g know” what it took to be a London playwright 400 years ago, is fundamentally absurd.

More Arguing About Shakespeare

One of this blog’s sidelines is the pseudo-debate over who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. It’s a lot more entertaining than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama!

One aspect that the “authorship debate” has in common with politics is that believers in alternative Shakespeares are as persistent as believers in the alternative reality of plastic turkeys and John McCain’s 100 years’ war in Iraq. Therefore, something new arises, if not every day, at least every month or two.

A couple of the more ostensibly scholarly anti-Stratfordians, Roger Stritmatter and Lynn Kositsky, have lately embarked on a series of essays designed to refute the generally accepted idea that The Tempest was written in 1611. Their hope is to remove an obstacle to the acceptance of their Shakespearean pretender, the 17th Earl of Oxenford, who inconveniently died in 1604, but an examination of the date of the play is interesting regardless of their motive. Their opening salvo, “Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited”, appeared last September in The Review of English Studies, a respectable journal (without, of course and quite properly, any indication of their Oxenfordian views).

In that essay, they address a narrow question: the date of A True Reportory of the wracke, and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight; upon, and from the Ilands of the Bermudas by William Strachey. This account of events that took place in Bermuda and Virginia between July 24, 1609, and July 15, 1610, is traditionally considered to be the kernel from which The Tempest grew. (Vide David Kathman, “Dating The Tempest”.) Stritmatter & Kositsky contend that this opinion must be mistaken. They claim to have proved that the True Reportory was written after the first recorded performance of the play, on November 1, 1611, and therefore cannot have inspired it.

I have devoted a separate article to the merits of their case. In summary, it appears to me that the plain and reasonable interpretation of the data is that the True Reportory is correctly dated July 15, 1610, as its first editor, Samuel Purchas, thought, and that the text was available in London by November 1610 at the latest. The Stritmatter-Kositsky arguments to the contrary are weak and mostly assume their conclusions.

The only real unknown is how Shakespeare would have obtained a copy of the True Reportory, which did not appear in print until 1625, but that is merely unknown, not mysterious. Strachey moved in the same theatrical crowd as the playwright and evidently intended his work for publication. Circulating the manuscript among people with connections to publishers was a natural step. Alternatively, Shakespeare had many links with shareholders of the Virginia Company, so there is nothing astonishing about his seeing a letter from one of the Company’s employees.

So far, I think, stodgy orthodoxy remains unthreatened. We’ll have to see whether the Oxenfordian rebels do better in their subsequent installments.

Random Reading (2): A Distaff Shakespeare?

A perk of blogging is that one receives – frequently if one is Glenn Reynolds, every blue moon or two if one is me – unsolicited copies of newly published books. Thus Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? appeared in my mailbox some months ago. I had the good intention of repaying the author by reviewing it, but time slipped by and, though the book was read, the review remained unwritten. Then, a few days ago, I ran across a Usenet post commending the author’s thesis. That stirred my sense of responsibility, so here are my thoughts.

Anti-Stratfordianism at the WaPo

The definitive proof that Valerie Plame Wilson’s Congressional testimony disappointed left-wing hopes is that the Washington Post has space on today’s opinion pages for an essay by Roger Stritmatter, titled “Is This the Bard We See Before Us? Or Someone Else?” Dr. Stritmatter is an earnest proponent, to the point of quasi-religious fervor, of the theory that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxenford (1550–1604; the archaic nomenclature was the earl’s own preference), was the True Author of the works commonly attributed to William Shakespeare. His doctoral dissertation (to which I’ve devoted more than a few comments) tries to prove an Oxenfordian connection by reading deep, albeit incomprehensible meanings into the markings in a Bible that Oxenford (among other people over the centuries) once owned. His Post op-ed follows more ordinary lines, offering the thin, tired, hyper-speculative arguments that have been the anti-Stratfordian stock in trade (leaving the cryptographers aside) for the past hundred years. Time has not rendered the case more compelling.

Preliminarily, readers should bear in mind that “William Shakespeare” is not an imaginary name attached to mysterious manuscripts. He is not like “Martin Marprelate”, the pseudonymous author of anti-ecclesiastical polemics. There was no real man named Marprelate, but there was a real William Shakespeare. He was among the leading members of the troupe that produced most of the plays of “Shakespeare”, was identified as their author in the first collected edition, and was praised for his literary achievements in a monument erected in his home town after his death. Further evidence is summarized in a riposte to Stritmatter by Stanley Wells. (For a more detailed treatment, vide Tom Reedy & David Kathman, “How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts”.)

In the face of such evidence, Dr. Stritmatter offers the supposition that Mr. Shakespeare of Stratford did not have the right sort of character and experience to pen his immortal dramas. He was merely “a possibly Catholic businessman and sometime actor from Stratford-upon-Avon who did well by writing. Unlike every other writer in history, he didn’t put himself or his experience into his work.” How could he have written King Lear “without ever suffering the ostracism of Kent, the madness of a hunted Edgar, the dilemma of Cordelia or the alienation of Lear”?

This line of argument makes two rash assumptions: first, that deep psychological insight, which Shakespeare’s works certainly display, is granted only to those who lead tormented lives; second, that we can infer Will Shakespeare’s inner life from the scaffolding of external facts that happen to have survived. The anti-Stratfordian caricature is that the “Stratford Man” was a smug bourgeois without the slightest depth to his soul. How can they possibly know that?

A Female, Jewish, “African American” Shakespeare?

The past couple of years have been productive of new claimants to the works of William Shakespeare: Sir Henry Neville (about whom I’ve had a few words to say), Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (whom I’ll be discussing RSN) and, coming to my notice just a few days ago, Emilia Lanyer née Bassano. The last has been the object of eccentric attention before. The late A. L. Rowse identified her as the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, an hypothesis that has not met with general acceptance, to put it mildly.

If I may introduce this new pretender, Emilia Bassano was born in London in 1569, the daughter of Baptista Bassano (d. 1576), a musician at the royal court, who, with his father and older brothers (also court musicians), had immigrated to England as a boy 30 years earlier. Her mother was a prosaic Englishwoman, one Margaret Johnson. After her father’s death, she was brought up in the household of the dowager Countess of Kent. In her early 20’s, she was the paramour of the elderly Lord Chamberlain Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon (1526–1596). Becoming pregnant, she was married off to a cousin-in-law, Alphonso Lanyer, who made a career as a musician, soldier and minor civil servant. The marriage produced numerous miscarriages and a daughter who died young. (The son by Lord Hunsdon grew up to become a flautist to King Charles I.) Troubles at home led Mrs. Lanyer to consult the astrologer Simon Foreman, whose diaries provide intimate, though perhaps not wholly reliable, details of her domestic life.

In 1612, Alphonso was awarded a monopoly on weighing hay and straw brought into London, apparently worth a not insubstantial £40 per annum. Unluckily, he died the next year. His widow agreed to share the monopoly with her brothers, which led to a lifetime of inter-family litigation. Little is known about the rest of her life beyond what can be gleaned from legal records, but she kept up a household, cared for her grandchildren after their father’s death and died in 1645, seventy-six years old.

Her one known literary work is Salve Deus, Rex Judaeorum (1611). The title poem is a meditation on Christ’s death that has become popular among feminists. Readers may judge for themselves whether it is Shakespearean in sentiments or literary merit.

The theory that Emilia was the “true Shakespeare” is the basis for a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, described thus:

The Dark Lady Players will be the first company in the world to put on a Shakespearean production using the Amelia Bassano Theory, which is based primarily on a recent academic discovery by John Hudson that Shakespeare’s plays contain a Jewish religious allegory. The theory reveals they were written by Amelia Bassano Lanyer, who has never before been considered as a potential Authorship candidate. An African American Jewish woman educated by a countess from the age of seven, for at least a decade this “Dark Lady of the Sonnets” was mistress to the man in charge of the English Theater. She was the first woman in England to publish a book of poetry (in 1611), which included a long feminist epic poem criticizing the Gospels.

John Hudson is, we are told, “a cognitive scientist specializing in complex literary and organizational analysis”, but, assuming that the reporter has conveyed his conceptions with any degree of fidelity, he doesn’t bring much cognition to this particular topic. One shouldn’t waterboard this poor butterfly, but –

• Emilia Bassano was not an “African American”. She never set foot in America, and her Italian-English genealogy is unlikely to have included any recent natives of the African continent. (We are all Africans, of course, if one goes back far enough.)

• She may have had Jewish ancestry, but the family was Roman Catholic by her grandfather’s generation (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography s.v. “Alvise Bassano”). Her father worshiped in the Church of England (ibid.), and she herself was baptized, wed and buried as a Protestant (id. s.v. “Emilia Lanier”). According to her own testimony, her upbringing was “directed” by the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, a staunch Protestant. The principal dedicatee of her book is the dowager Duchess of Cumberland, “an exceedingly pious lady, a zealous puritan who helped foster the spread of her beliefs” (id. s.v. “Margaret Clifford”). The definitive proof that Emilia had no attachment to, if she so much as knew about, her Jewish forebears, lies in “Salve Deus” itself, where her statements about the Chosen People echo centuries of Christian denigration, e. g.,

  Yet could their learned Ignorance apprehend
  No light of grace, to free themselves from blame:
  Zeale, Lawes, Religion, now they doe pretend
  Against the truth, untruths they seeke to frame: [ll. 546–49]

  and –

  The Jewish wolves, that did our Saviour bite;
  For now they use all meanes they can devise,
  To beate downe truth, and goe against all right:
  

  Yea now they take Gods holy name in vaine,
  To know the truth, which truth they doe prophane. [ll. 684–88]

• For Emilia to have become Lord Hunsdon’s mistress at about age 13 and then remained childless for a decade would be not impossible, but there is no evidence that it occurred. Most likely, the relationship lasted no longer than it took a still vigorous father of at least 12 other children to impregnate a fertile young woman.

• The publication of a collection of poetry was unusual for a woman of that era, but Emilia was not “the first”. A few minutes’ research uncovers several earlier female English poets in print: Isabella Whitney (A Copy of a Letter (1566/7) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573)), Margaret Tyler (The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (1578)), Anne Dowriche (The French Historie (1589)) and Mary Countess of Pembroke (Antonius (1592)).

• Finally, there is nothing in “Salve Deus” that “criticiz[es] the Gospels”. What attracts feminists to the poem is its focus on the women who were present at the Crucifixion. They are portrayed as devoted to Our Lord, while men put Him to death. The poet also offers a spirited defense of Eve, arguing that she does not bear the guilt for Adam’s Fall. In this, she follows the “defense of women” trope that had become popular in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. That stance may be “feminist”, in some sense of that cult, but it is far from anti-Christian.

The Hudson version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed by an all-female cast, except for Titania, does promise to be, well, unique. I cannot resist an extended quotation:

“Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Comic Jewish Satire” unwraps the play to its deepest allegorical level, revealing its nature as a Jewish satire against Christian idolatry. The allegory takes the form of a dramatization of the Jewish-Roman war (66-70CE), in which Oberon (Yahweh) was fighting against Titania (Titus Caesar). The latter has stolen away the true Jewish messiah (the Little Indian/Iudean boy), whose mother was a Virgin/Votaress, and crowned him with thorny flowers. He was then turned into a Changeling, namely Jesus, who is allegorically represented on stage as Bottom/Pyramus and crucified in a series of actions that the playwright has taken straight from the Gospels. . . .

Each character represents an allegory for a Christian or Jewish religious figure as follows:

PUCK carries the name of a traditional English devil. PYRAMUS and THISBE were characters in a medieval allegory for Jesus and the Church. PETER QUINCE is named after Petros Quoin or Rocky Cornerstone, and is St Peter. WALL is the partition thought to divide Earth from Heaven, and to separate Jesus from the Bride of Christ, with whom he longed to be united. OBERON was composed in part out of the Psalms and represents Yahweh. This is why he is the king from India (a recognized synonym for Judea). LITTLE INDIAN/IUDEAN BOY (whose mother is a prayerful virgin or votaress) is the Jewish messiah who was stolen away to create the account of a pro-Roman Jesus in the Gospel stories. TITANIA, who steals him away, corresponds to Titus Caesar – the man who destroyed Jerusalem – and at whose Court some of those Gospels were written. HONEY BEES have their legs cut off under dramatic orders from Titania, a parallel to the orders Titus gave to prune the limbs off a Jewish rebel who came from the family of the Maccabees.

The allegory has been used to create the detail of the characters. In particular, the death of Bottom/Pyramus has been carefully composed out of the Gospels’ crucifixion story. The stabbing in the side, the disappearance of the light and the references to playing dice, are all framed within two mentions of the ‘passion’ (V,1,277 and 303). Bottom’s coming back to life again parodies the resurrection, which is why he previously promises “by and by I will to thee appear” (III,1.82), like Jesus who promises he will “come again” (John 14:3). Bottom’s asshead is recognized by scholars as another comic satire on the medieval Christian belief that Jesus should be worshipped as a metaphorical holy ass in a special annual church ceremony.

Oberon takes revenge against Titania/Titus by making her fall mindlessly in love with Bottom/Jesus, before Oberon kills her by the administration of Wormwood (another name for Dian’s Bud) – the same substance supposedly administered to Jesus on the cross. Finally, after the Wall falls down and it is the Apocalypse, the spirits come out of their graves to dance and Oberon/Yahweh distributes dew, which is not part of Christian imagery but is found in Jewish sources like the Zohar.

Comment would truly be superfluous.

Mr. Hudson has written a book, as yet unpublished, expounding his discoveries. I look forward to much amusement when and if it finds a publisher.

Of Nietzsche and Shakespeare

Some years ago, Duke Law School professor James Boyle served as “defense counsel” in a mock trial pitting William Shakespeare against the numerous upstart claimants to his laurels. The event attracted attention, because three Supreme Court Justices (Brennan, Blackmun and Stevens) presided, and Justice Stevens became a convert to the anti-Stratfordian cause (to what should be the embarrassment of progressive lawyers everywhere).

Professor Boyle found the event fascinating, both professionally and otherwise.

I can say with complete truth that my first and only oral argument was in front of Supreme Court Justices, that my client was William Shakespeare, and that I have a perfect win/loss record. That was my introduction to the baroque and remarkable conspiracy theories that surround the question “who wrote Shakespeare,” theories that put The Da Vinci Code to shame, but which also struck me as novelistically interesting on a much deeper level.

The novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles, was begun almost immediately but, like many avocational belles lettres, took a long time to finish. That is why it is set in 1989 and blemished by the occasional anachronism. A good editor would have smoothed the chronology and caught a few other errors, but, whether by necessity or choice, the author chose to self-publish. If no commercial house was willing to take the book, that is another sign of publishing’s decay, for this dark comedy is fully worthy of a place on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Like Rodney Bolt’s History Play, it turns anti-Stratfordian fantasy into entertaining fiction.

The protagonist, Stanley Quandary, is a small-time English professor at a small-time college. In personality, he is one of those meek who may hope to inherit the earth but have no life estate in it. He’s the kind of man who regards service on the college snow days committee as an important challenge. In only two respects does he deviate from dreary normalcy. First, he was once married to a sexy, post-modern feminist, whom he predictably divorced after catching her in flagrante with the gardener. Second, he harbors secret doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare. Naturally, he has never voiced those heretical thoughts to anyone.

Then two events upend his routine. One is the attainment of tenure. The other is a series of dreams or, rather, dreams. Vivid scenes from the era of the first Queen Elizabeth haunt his nights. Slowly he deciphers them as glimpses of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the most popular, if scarcely the most plausible, alternative Shakespeare. The conviction grows on Quandary that these images confirm his long-held doubts. Ultimately, they tell him the whereabouts of the elusive, indisputable proof that the literary world has for 400 years been victimized by a titanic fraud.

Before that, tenure and the dreams work other changes in Quandary:

I am reborn. I am reborn in sin, cleansed in heresy, wrapped in iconoclasm. These are my chronicles. My old self would have found these words too showy, too redolent of religion, would have worried about being laughed at, would have dithered endlessly over nuance and punctuation. Now I simply write.

He also shaves his head, dons an earring, updates his wardrobe, trades in his clunker for a hot new sports car, boffs a slutty coed, and flaunts egotistic eccentricity. The transition from Quandary to Stanley Q is a midlife crisis on steroids. Soon he is off to England to unearth the evidence that will make him the most famous Shakespearean (or, to be accurate, Oxenfordian) scholar of all time. Along the way, he decides that he’d like to take up again with his ex-wife and revenge himself on her stuffy second husband.

Both the seduction and the vengeance are successful – for a time. Then nemesis overtakes the soi disant superman, and his quest ends in a farcical fiasco. In the last pages of the book, his literary executor, commenting on the journal that has been the vehicle for the narrative, reviews events from the perspective of an unperceptive dryasdust and fashions a rational explanation of the less believable aspects of the tale.

The story of Stanley Quandary’s rise, exaltation, overreaching and fall could have been constructed around a different mania: Atlantis or alien encounters or 9/11 conspiracy theories or the innocence of Alger Hiss. Still, the authorship heresy is more than a macguffin. There is a certain parallelism between Q’s willful o’erleaping of the bounds of nature and the anti-Stratfordians’ confident imposition of their opinions on recalcitrant evidence. The typical adherent of the cult is as timid as Quandary, but maybe a Q-in-waiting lies beneath many of those reticent exteriors.

While the book doesn’t pause to expound the cases against and for the “Stratford Man” (admirable self-restraint on a law professor’s part), it does offer what I believe is an entirely new theory (introduced a bit clumsily; here is a place where an editor would have been helpful) of Edward de Vere’s motivation for concealing his identity as an author. To avoid spoilers, I’ll not reveal it, but it won’t amaze me to see it showing up in anti-Stratfordian writings a year or two from now. If that happens, Professor Boyle will have unwittingly helped to make the folly a trifle more entertaining and foolish. Come what may, though, he has penned a work as full of oddities as, and far more readable than, anything conceived by Sobran or Stritmatter or Ogden.

The Landlubberly Shakespeare

Tom Reedy, co-author of one of the best elementary discussions of the Shakespeare Authorship “controversy” (“How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts”, with David Kathman) has unearthed a hard-to-find but illuminating article titled “Shakspere and sea-glasses” by Brinsley Nicholson, M.D. (New Shakspere Society Transactions (1880)) that calls attention to a gap in Shakespeare’s nautical knowledge.

In the last scene of The Tempest, the playwright twice repeats that the action of the play, from the opening shipwreck through the denouement has occupied three hours. First Alonso says,

If thou be’st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wreck'd upon this shore.

Then to his son Ferdinand, who has met and fallen in love with Prospero’s daughter:

What is this maid with whom thou wast at play?
Your eld’st acquaintance cannot be three hours.

Shortly after, the boatswain enters and likewise makes a statement about the length of the comedy’s action:

The best news is, that we have safely found
Our king and company; the next, our ship –
Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split –
Is tight and yare and bravely rigg’d as when
We first put out to sea.

It is clear that Shakespeare thought that one “glass” equaled one hour. His only other reference to “glass” as a unit of time is consistent with that (All’s Well That Ends Well, II.i.163–4):

Of four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass.

Yet, as Dr. Nicholson points out, a nautical “glass” is thirty minutes long, eight glasses to a four hour watch. He quotes a 17th Century sailors’ manual to show that the term meant the same in Shakespeare’s day. From this evidence, he infers that Shakespeare never went on a sea voyage.

If he had been, we must suppose that, quick, inquiring, and sagacious as he was, ever ready to pick up even crumbs of information, he failed to pick up what every boy picks up at once, and what every one, sailor or passenger, must have picked up. Shakspere could not have been “in the cabin,” unless in a mere coasting craft, and the steerage passenger is even more bound than he “in the cabin” to learn ships’ hours if he would live. A cabin passenger of that day was also more bound to attend them than he is at present, when passenger ships have become floating hotels.

This argument has a chink that allows the Bard a little scope for foreign travel. Some biographers speculate that he visited Italy during a prolonged theater closure in the early 1590’s. All’s Well That Ends Well was written at least a decade later, and The Tempest was his last solo play. After such a long interval, he may have recalled that seamen told time by “glasses” while forgetting what a “glass” signified.

For believers in “alternative Shakespeares”, the sea-glasses are more of a crux. The 17th Earl of Oxenford and Sir Henry Neville, to take two popular current candidates, each crossed to the continent several times. Oxenford, according to his partisans (though non-Oxenfordian scholars disagree), even sailed with the English fleet opposing the Armada, subjecting himself to the discipline of a sailor. Plausibly explaining how either man could have been under a misapprehension about the length of a “glass” is a challenge, though anti-Stratfordians have a knack for contriving excuses for anomalies.

For Want of a Nail

In war, as the familiar rhyme teaches, trivial causes can have huge consequences. “For want of a nail, a horse was lost”, leading in logical progression to “For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost – and all because of a horseshoe nail!”

The Hamdan decision is certainly an enemy victory in the War on Terror, for reasons that others can explicate more learnedly than I. The United States of America, which under President Roosevelt did not hesitate to try and execute German saboteurs with speed and secrecy, has become the first nation in history to commit itself to affording due process of law to unlawful combatants in time of war. It is only slightly alarmist to say that the Supreme Court has made us party to a treaty with Osama bin-Laden, one under which only our obligations are enforceable. That is a grave defeat, yet it was brought about by little more than chance.

The Court divided five to three, with Chief Justice Roberts recusing himself. Since he was one of the judges who handed down the decision under appeal, one can assume that he would have sided with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito. The conventional wisdom is that Justice Kennedy’s vote was decisive, as he is the least predictable of the Court’s current members, but one other deserves scrutiny: John Paul Stevens, the author of the prevailing opinion.

A four-four tie would have upheld the Court of Appeals, so, leaving Justice Kennedy aside, we lost this judicial battle on the whim of an octogenarian who, among other eccentricities, thinks that there is much of value in a book whose thesis is that Queen Elizabeth had an illegitimate son who wrote the works of William Shakespeare and was also the father of another of her offspring. If a man regards Oxford, Son of Queen Elizabeth I as a work with historical merit, it isn’t startling that he bought the arguments of Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers.

The moral that I draw from these circumstances is not that there ought to be a mandatory retirement age for the Supreme Court but that this setback sprang mostly from bad luck and is not irreversible. The day when Justice Stevens will step down from the Court cannot, in the course of nature, be far away. (I wish him a long life in retirement, though I hope that he will make better use of it than further ventures into Shakespeare denial.) His successor is more likely to be an Alito than a Ginsberg. Justice Kennedy, too, is no radical. His concurrence in the Stevens view was narrowly drawn and left him essentially uncommitted. Hence, the al-Qa’eda Treaty may not last long enough to give a great deal of aid and comfort to the enemy.

Another moral is that it is silly to regard the Hamdan case as an intellectual defeat or a “rebuke” for the Bush Administration, as liberal commentators gloatingly call it. The Administration “failed” only in the sense that it couldn’t sway a decision maker who may, on the available evidence, be only lightly wedded to rational thought. That failure reflects not at all on the soundness of its arguments, just as Justice Stevens’ opinions about Shakespeare are not a meaningful rebuke to literary scholarship. Against stupidity, as we all know, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Ten Years in the Shakespearean Trenches

Having slept very late today (the inevitable aftermath of the midnight Pascha liturgy), I have other affairs than blogging to attend to. Nonetheless, I mustn’t neglect to take note of the tenth anniversary of the founding of The Shakespeare Authorship Page, the Web’s best resource for information concerning the pseudo-controversy over who wrote the works of William Shakespeare.

Almost all Shakespearean specialists regard the “anti-Stratfordians” as a comical irrelevancy, about the way that astronomers look at the Flat Earth Movement. While that attitude is understandable, its consequence is that the scholars best equipped to refute oddball authorship theories have no interest in doing so. When they are inveigled into discussing the topic, they often come off badly, owing to unfamiliarity with the other side’s case. Even preposterous arguments can’t always be refuted off the top of one’s head.

David Kathman and Terry Ross set up the Authorship Page to provide the refutations and corrections that otherwise are not easy for a layman to find. Examples are “How Do We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare?”, summarizing the evidence that the “William Shakespeare” whose name appears on the plays and poems was indeed an actor born in Stratford-upon-Avon, “Shakespeare’s Stratford Friends”, showing that the playwright’s home town was not the cultural backwater of anti-Stratfordian fancy, “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ‘Stigma of Print’”, casting doubt on the standard anti-Stratfordian explanation of why the noble author of the plays couldn’t have admitted his connection with them, “The Survival of Manuscripts”, explaining the supposedly “suspicious” absence of any extant writings in Shakespeare’s own hand, “What Did George Puttenham Really Say About Oxford?”, exposing a distortion long used to advance the proposition that the 17th Earl of Oxford was a “secret playwright”, and “The Oxfordian Hamlet: The Playwright’s the Thing”, performing a similar demolition of alleged connections between the famous play and events in the earl’s life. There is much more, as well as numerous links to other sites, both orthodox and anti-Stratfordian, that discuss the “controversy” (including, I’m pleased to note, some to pieces of my own). Much of this material, incidentally, is of interest to readers who care nothing about the claims made on behalf of the horde of alternative Shakespeares but would like to know more about the Elizabethan literary world.

So, Happy Birthday to the Shakespeare Authorship Page, as well as to William Shakespeare himself!

A Shakespearean Note

The University of Illinois Press has published an on-line version of one of the classics of Shakespearean scholarship, T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), a copious description of the curriculum and pedagogical methods of the kind of grammar school that the future playwright attended. The work is interesting for three reasons: first, as a reminder of how much less we demand of pupils than our ancestors did; second, as an aperçu into Elizabethan culture; and, finally, as disproof of the notion that a lad from a country town, lacking a university education, could not possibly have acquired the literary skills needed by a master of the English language. As Baldwin says in his conclusion,

The grammar school gave the linguistic basis of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The university perfected the logic, together with some rhetoric and made the application to the professions of physic, law, and divinity. The universities were professional schools.

If William Shakspere had the grammar school training of his day – or its equivalent – he had as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries. At least, no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that is required. The miracle lies elsewhere; it is the world-old miracle of genius.

Kudos to the Illini for making this publication freely available to the world.

Supreme Court Thank-You Notes

So now the media are suspiciously scrutinizing the courtesy notes that Justice Samuel Alito sent to various backers of his nomination to the Court. One went to the controversial James Dobson, and the usual hysteriacs construe it as pledge of allegiance to Dobson’s not always level-headed Focus on the Family organization.

Well, what about Justice Alito’s colleagues? A few years ago, liberal hero John Paul Stevens penned a rather effusive thank you to Paul Streitz, author of Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, the second nuttiest book ever written about the “controversy” over the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. (Look here for a review of the first nuttiest.) Mr. Streitz’s thesis is that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), not only secretly ghosted Shakespeare’s plays and poems but was Queen Elizabeth’s illegitimate son, as well as the father of another of her bastards. He was supposed to become King after her death but was cheated out of the throne, after which he faked his own demise and retired to the Isle of Man, where he translated the King James Bible.

Justice Stevens called this feat of scholarship “a most interesting and impressive piece of work”, from which he “learned a great deal” and which “provide[s] strong additional evidence supporting the Oxfordian position on the authorship issue”.

There’s nothing especially political about Mr. Streitz’s screed, leaving aside his call for deposing the House of Windsor in favor of a descendant of the Oxford earls, but does it increase your sense of comfort to know that his opinions are viewed favorably by a man who holds one-ninth of the votes on our nation’s highest court? Should not the media find that at least as fascinating as a conservative Justice’s routine courtesy?

Imaginary Shakespeares

Though I pay quite a lot of attention to aberrant Shakespeare authorship theories, I can’t read everything that issues from prolific anti-Stratfordian pens. So I’m glad that David Propson, writing in the February issue of The New Criterion has spared me the trouble of slogging through the 600-plus pages of Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name. From what I had seen of Mr. Anderson’s work (e. g., his collaboration in Roger Stritmatter’s badly flawed dissertation), I had no expectation that the book would repay the time spent reading it. Mr. Propson demonstrates that I was right.

More recently, the beast [Shakespearean pseudo-scholarship] has birthed a faddish preference for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as true author of the works. . . . God willing, Mark Anderson’s infuriating new biography of the Earl may put an end to that. Tendentious and speculative, it is the preposterous apotheosis of the Oxfordian case.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (3): Filching from the Baconians

[Continuing my critique of Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein’s The Truth Will Out, a book purporting to prove that Sir Henry Neville was the real Shakespeare, this post examines the last of their claims of documentary evidence. Other posts in this series are –

1. The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu
2. The “Tower Notebook”]

The third of the documents in which James & Rubinstein claim to find proof of Sir Henry Neville’s authorship of “Shakespeare” has long been a staple of the Baconian strand of anti-Stratfordian argument. It consists of the first page of a 90 page manuscript volume. E. K. Chambers gives this description [II William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), p. 196]:

The MS., reproduced as a whole in F. J. Burgoyne, Collotype Facsimile and Type Transcript of an Elizabethan MS. at Alnwick Castle (1904), is imperfect, but still contains some essays and speeches by Francis Bacon, a letter by Sidney, and a copy of Leicester’s Commonwealth. On f.1 is the beginning of a list of contents, and the rest of the page has been covered by a second hand with scribbles, which include (a) the name of ‘Mr ffrauncis Bacon’; (b) many repetitions of the whole or part of the name ‘William Shakespeare’; (c) the titles ‘Rychard the second’ and ‘Rychard the third’; (d) an inexact quotation of [Shakespeare’s] [The Rape of] Lucrece, 1086–7; (e) the word ‘honorificabilitudine’ (in Love’s Lab. Lost, v.i.44, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’); (f) the title ‘Asmund and Cornelia’; (g) references to ‘Ile of Dogs frmnt’ and ‘Thomas Nashe & inferior plaiers’; (h) the names ‘Dyrmonth’ and ‘Adam’. . . . The date cannot be earlier than 1597, when Nashe’s Isle of Dogs was suppressed [this play, produced in July 1597 and quickly banned, is now lost] and Rich. II and Rich. III printed, and it is probably not earlier than 1598, when Love’s Lab. Lost was printed. Bacon, here ‘Mr’, was knighted on 23 July 1603.

The conjunction of Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s names is seen by Baconians as fraught with significance. J&R direct their attention elsewhere: The name “Nevill” appears at the top of the left side of the manuscript, and the Neville family motto, “Ne vile velis” (“desire nothing base”), is among the scribbles. J&R take it for granted that “Nevill” is their Neville rather than anyone else with that surname and that he was the owner of the manuscript. That is far from a necessary conclusion. The document was found in the archives of the Earls of Northumberland and originated during the tenure of the ninth Earl, Henry Percy (1564–1632, succeeded to the title in 1585). Percy, a noted bibliophile, was the son of Katherine Neville, daughter of John Neville, fourth Baron Latimer. That family connection is adequate to account for the “Nevill” references; there’s no need to drag in a distant cousin.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (2): The “Tower Notebook”

[Second in a multi-part series on Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out, which posits that Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. Part 1 was the first of three discussing James & Rubinstein’s claim that “concrete documentation” supports their theory.]

The “documentary evidence” that supposedly goes furthest to prove Neville’s authorship is an anonymous 196-page manuscript bearing the title, “Serieantiez of sundrie kindes, Namely, Personall Services appertaining to the thronne and kings of this Realme as well in tymes of warre as of peace and pastime, Especially at there Coronation, Copyed and collected out of the Recordes in the tower Anno 1602”. James & Rubinstein deal with only one page of this document, describing posts of honor claimed by various personages at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. This, they declare, “contains many parallels with the coronation scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, although Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, more than ten years later” [p. 44].

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu

Reviewing the newest tome in the Shakespeare authorship “controversy”, The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, is harder than I expected. This “case” for Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) as the real Bard of Avon is such a mass of howlers, begged questions and non sequiturs that one is at a loss to decide what a critique should bring to the fore and what should be omitted for want of space. What should I do, for instance, about this bizarre effusion on page 261?

Athena, bride [sic] of Apollo (the sun god), held a great shining spear, from which the light was reflected in such a way that three sections of sunlight were said to emanate from it. She is also known as the Tenth Muse [sic], whose qualities encompass those of all the others [sic]. Her name in Greek actually means ‘spear shaker’ [sic! sic! sic!].

That isn’t central to much of anything, but how can one pass it by in silence?

The book comes near to raising its own “authorship question”: Can a discourse this ill-argued and uninformed be from the pens of two academic historians, one of whom has respectable historical works on his résumé? It’s true that Professor Rubinstein’s expertise doesn’t lie in the pre-modern era, but moving to a different terrain ought not to have deprived him of all of his capacity to read and reason. The theory that The Truth Will Out was written by a precocious but too cocky teenager and then passed off as the product of more mature minds is highly attractive. Perhaps the True Author is someone like Prince Harry, whose royal position forbids his association with a thesis that would undermine the national faith in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Whatever the merits of that speculation, I’m going to try developing a full review by taking advantage of the blog format to examine various facets of the book in semi-random order. The first is a matter far more crucial than the etymology of “Athena”. James & Rubinstein (hereafter “J&R”) assert that Henry Neville is superior to all other Shakespearean pretenders, because there exists “concrete documentation” linking him to the works.

They proffer, in fact, three documents: a manuscript, dated 1602, summarizing “Personal Services Appertaining to the Throne and Kings of This Realm”, marginal notes in a copy of the 1550 edition of Edward Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, and a page of scribbles known as the “Northumberland Manuscript”, which has long been a playground for Bacon-is-Shakespeare promoters. Today’s topic is the second item, which, if one believes J&R, represents Henry Neville’s personal notes on one of the major sources for Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

Prime Time Party Blogging (Part 3)

The three co-hosts met at 12:30 p.m., as planned, right after John finished his Art Show docent tour. We had to rearrange our itinerary, however. For the past few years, our menu has included a raw vegetable crudité from Bristol Farms (a high-end L.A. supermarket). I called the nearest store this morning to order one and learned that its catering department had taken the day off. Hence, we had to make arrangements with a more distant location. Despite the longer drive, shopping, at Smart & Final and BF took less time than usual, largely because we didn’t digress too far from our shopping list or reargue at length such perennial questions as whether to get soft drinks in cans or 2-liter bottles. Total purchases were a little over $400. I won’t bother to list it all but will report tomorrow on how much was actually consumed.

John is now off carrying out his Masquerade duties, leaving Becky and me to buy ice and a couple of other items at a nearby Ralph’s. After than comes setup.

I’ve been amusing John with the Neville theory of Shakespearean authorship. (Becky refuses to listen to such discussions.) He was much interested in James & Rubinstein’s “evidence” that Measure for Measure reflects Sir Henry Neville’s real life experiences. In his youth, it seems, Henry visited Vienna in the company of the savant Henry Savile and there met the imperial librarian, Hugo Blotius, a key figure in the history of the National Library of Austria. Herr Blotius was a Calvinist. Therefore, in J&R’s words (p. 166),

he was doubtless over-strict in some matters. Who but someone with first-hand knowledge of these facts could have invented the complex character of the Duke in that play? And who was better placed than a member of Savile’s circle to be able to set such a play in that particular city?

Obviously, only someone who had met a Calvinist in Vienna could have created a Viennese character who would enforce a law against fornication.

RSN, I’ll get around to a full review of The Truth Will Out. It isn’t as screwy as Brame and Popova’s Shakespeare’s Fingerprints but is still a worthy addition to the bibliography of cracked pots.