When Derrida contextualises ‘the author’ he is NOT denying the authorial identity. He is precisely – as we are – saying just that the identity is surrounded by ghosts, and by doubles. I would have thought an Oxfordian of all people would support that. Derrida’s writing on Marx is precisely what took me shooting back to Marx on Shakespeare!

http://is.gd/bB7se
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida2.htm

And he draws on the famous passage of Paul Valery:
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html
‘Standing, now, on an immense sort of terrace of Elsinore that stretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone of Champagne, the granites of Alsace . . . our Hamlet of Europe is watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the life and death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects of our controversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses — for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. This one was Leonardo. He invented the flying man, but the flying man has not exactly served his inventor’s purposes. We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccello sopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our day than fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the hot season to scatter it on the streets of towns. And that other skull was Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant…and Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, and Marx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls. But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? His terribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war to peace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peace to war; all peoples are troubled by it. . . . “What about Me,” he says, “what is to become of Me, the European intellect? …And what is peace? Peace is perhaps that state of things in which the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation, rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative rivalry and the battle of production; but I am not tired of producing? Have I not exhausted my desire for radical experiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? …Should I not perhaps lay aside my hard duties and transcendent ambitions? Perhaps follow the trend and do like Polonius who is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, who is something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing God knows what under a Russian name?

“Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you — or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill.” ‘

This is the sort of engagement with our ghosts that Shapiro and Greenblatt eschew! and precisely the sort of understanding of how the modern world kills the ghosts we need!

My enemy’s enemy is my friend. For me, like Coleridge and Leavis, Derrida is the great reader!

Hey ho!

Heward

Excellent — let’s replay that for emphasis, shall we:

“It’s easy to mock Allen’s approach, but in truth, communicating with the dead is what we all do, or try to do, every time we pick up a volume of Milton or Virgil or Dickens – all of whom achieve a kind of immortality by speaking to us from beyond the grave. Every literature professor is in the business of speaking with the dead – though few have been as honest about it as Stephen Greenblatt, whose influential Shakespearean Negotiations opens with the famous confession: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead,’ then argues for the universality of this desire, ‘a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle class, shamans’. While brilliantly anatomising this desire to speak with the dead, Greenblatt acknowledges that the conversation is necessarily one way (as he puts it, ‘all I could hear was my own voice’).”

“All I could hear was my own voice.”

Wow. There’s a stunning admission. The professoriate is reading Hamlet, but all it can hear is its own voice.

What kind of Shaman, were he unable to speak with the dead, and could only “hear his own voice,” would ever get “tenure”?

Well, perhaps one who lives in a culture which has no idea what a shaman is, and has forgotten that the shaman, like the literary historian, must not only speak with the dead, but also hear them when they talk back.

It becomes increasingly clear the the entire “death of the author” ideology is really just an excuse for the critic’s self-aggrandizement. If there’s no author to talk back to him, he can say anything he likes without fear of contradiction. His students will by rote take down his words as gospel. Who needs authors when you’ve got lit professors to tell you what a literary work means? Pretty soon, you won’t need to read the original work at all — you’ll get by reading the secondary literature.

Its interesting to note how thoroughly postmodernism has bought into the power=knowledge equation of Foucault et alia. But great literature teaches us the opposite.

All too often, power = the absence of knowledge.

This, at any rate, is the lesson not just of *Oedipus Tyrranous*, but of *Lear*. A wise king keeps his fool close at hand; a foolish king exiles him for offending the royal ego. We might summarize the entire problem of contemporary Stratfordiana, then, by observing that the Shakespearean industry has a Lear complex.

RAS

‘But his conception of the implicit basis of this is predicated on the simplistic individual/social antithesis which is the outcome of the secular shift towards empiricism and utilitarianism (on the basis of which he interprets Romantic individualism). With this goes the loss of the organic conception of literature implicit in the Shakespearean development of language (Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’), and first articulated by Romanticism, especially Coleridge and Keats. This is the complexity which he has inadvertently air-brushed out of the picture.

‘Contested Will’ gives us a feeling of having encountered a ghost. Just occasionally, behind his ‘Team Shakespeare’ concept, and his dismissals of the post-Romantic ‘individual psychology’ Shakespeare, there is a glimpse of the great Shakespeare, the Shakespeare who is the faultline, in his works, of the conflicts of the Tudor and Jacobean periods, the mighty Shakespeare (Keats’s ‘miserable and Mighty poet of the human heart’, Letters, Ed. Forman, p. 347), about whom G Wilson Knight, in The Wheel of Fire, and DH Lawrence in the Chapter The Theatre, in Twilight in Italy

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/l41tw/chapter2.3.html

and John Middleton Murry, in Keats and Shakespeare, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, and Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, – themselves the successors of Johnson, Coleridge, and Keats, – are writing. Ironically, we get the strongest sense, in Shapiro, of that Shakespeare, when he is writing about JT Looney’s introduction of the Oxfordian hypothesis in ‘Shakespeare’ Identified in 1920, despite his going to town on Looney’s Comtean Positivism Church of Humanity lineage, with its insinuation that Looney was not politically correct, with his Feudalist leanings, maybe even a touch sympathetic to Hitler (pp. 205-6).

There is a rather touching and haunting passage, though characteristically ambivalently located where he is writing about Percy Allen’s endeavours, quite common at the time (William James and Freud were members of the Society for Psychical Research), but embarrassing now for Oxfordians, to ascertain who wrote the plays by consulting the medium Hester Dowden, and so to have conversations with Oxford, Bacon, and Shakespeare in this way (it was indeed revealed as a ‘team effort’!):

‘It’s easy to mock Allen’s approach, but in truth, communicating with the dead is what we all do, or try to do, every time we pick up a volume of Milton or Virgil or Dickens – all of whom achieve a kind of immortality by speaking to us from beyond the grave. Every literature professor is in the business of speaking with the dead – though few have been as honest about it as Stephen Greenblatt, whose influential Shakespearean Negotiations opens with the famous confession: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead,’ then argues for the universality of this desire, ‘a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle class, shamans’. While brilliantly anatomising this desire to speak with the dead, Greenblatt acknowledges that the conversation is necessarily one way (as he puts it, ‘all I could hear was my own voice’).

But when Percy Allen spoke with the dead, the dead spoke back.’

But if the dead do not speak to Greenblatt and Shapiro, or any of us, we are out of a job, if we are professors. Are Greenblatt and Shapiro perchance fringing over into the post-modern ‘death of the author’ position, misunderstood as that may be?

Shapiro’s Shakespeare is mostly as silent and ordinary as the homely living room chairs and tables the morning after a séance.

His is a Shakespeare seen, analogously to how, Nietzsche argues, in The Birth of Tragedy, Greek Tragedy was seen subsequent to the rationalism of Socrates, through Enlightenment, Utilitarian, and Whig Interpretation eyes. Looney was endeavouring, in relation to Shakespeare, what Nietzsche, Gilbert Murray, and TS Eliot attempted in relation to Greek Tragedy, the restoration of the sense of the pre-bourgeois dimension, of which also Marx had so fine a sense, in his comments on Shakespeare here and there.’
http://hewardwilkinson.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/de-imagining-imagination-an-essay-on-%E2%80%98contested-will-who-wrote-shakespeare%E2%80%99-by-james-shapiro/

Will tackle all this on my blog when the volcano permits me to return to the UK from Ireland!

On the question of history and the past, have you come across the very fine writings of John Lukacs?
http://is.gd/bAfVM

Greetings, and thanks for your kind words. Yes, I read your plea, and welcomed it even though I was, in a certain sense, contradicting your call for moderation. But it seems that you agree that in this case (and I believe some others), we ought to be willing to calling Shapiro’s nonsense, nonsense. You may or may not know that two years ago Lynne Kositsky and I wrote to Shapiro to offer our support as informants and friendly critics. His response was to totally ignore our communication. With that history in mind, I hope you may forgive me for feeling a bit of shadenfreude at these gaffs. But was also most struck by your remark about the two sides in the debate seem sometimes to be parodic mirror images of one another — I hope that other Oxfordians will heed your insight and try to avoid simply mirroring the denials of the Stratfordians.

One critic who I think has done a great job of that is Warren Hope — whose review (mine is really not so much a review as a commentary on a tiny but consequential blunder) is at the Shakespeare Fellowship site. He focuses on Shapiro’s primitive either/or logic. I think the best critique of Shapiro would pursue that insight further. From a psychological and intellectual point of view the book is really quite atavistic if you think about it.

In connection with your theme of losing touch with the past I was struck by the manner in which Shapiro set up his attack of Percy Allen (who contributed some excellent scholarship to the debate before getting lost in his Ouija Board attempts to contact Oxford’s soul). He quoted Greenblatt’s famous line about wanting to speak to the dead, and then said words to the effect that, of course, no one spoke back to Greenblatt. I can’t help but think that’s a bit pathetic, and that it illustrates your point that these professionals have lost all sense of a real past. They are like sentries on guard in Elsinore who can’t hear or see the ghost. Yet it speaks to those with ears.

All Best Wishes,

RAS

What I tried to suggest in my own essay was that Shapiro belongs to a generation which has lost touch with the greatness of Shakespeare and the past. This of course is very very common, in all disciplines, and it is very easy for those who are drawn to these recognitions to be drawn into very atavistic political positions. Looney was actually fairly sensible in that respect; I have just discovered that my beloved revered Wagnerian conductor, Reginald Goodall, whose Ring I attended in 1973, was actually a holocaust denier and a Mosleyite.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2007/05/reginald-goodall-holy-fool.html

I shall write more about this in a wider context, but as we Oxfordians gather strength, as I believe we are doing, we have to be mindful of precisely that ‘wider context’!

Have you seen any Baconian or Marlovian reviews of Shapiro by the way?

Congratulations on this powerful review!