Anonymous may be garnering praise for its meticulous CGI recreation of Elizabethan London, but few critics can bring themselves to laud it as a film. As was noted in Roger’s earlier post, many film critics – the bulk of whom are surely not Shakespearean scholars themselves – apparently feel compelled to decry the film for its Oxfordian thesis, rather than limiting themselves to critiquing it as a film. Even those who do praise Anonymous as a movie nonetheless must affirm for their readers that they believe it to be hokum. Roger Ebert, for example, wrote, “this [is a] marvelous historical film, which I believe to be profoundly mistaken.”

Yes, the film does take substantial liberties with certain historical events, compressing and reordering them for the sake of entertaining drama. For instance, the murder of Christopher Marlowe and the publication of Venus and Adonis are depicted as occurring a good ten years later than they actually did. Yet Anonymous is hardly alone on this score: the 1984 film Amadeus won great acclaim and dozens of awards — including the Best Picture Oscar — for its fanciful “what if” treatment of the life and death of Mozart.

Like Shakespeare, Mozart is a pillar of Western culture, but critics of the time didn’t fall over themselves to condemn it for its inaccuracies. And the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love was of course completely fictional yet was well-received by audience and critics alike, also winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.

What we are dealing with here though is not really a concern over historical fidelity. Rather, what we have in the SAQ are clashing epistemological ideologies, such that entire world views are at stake. It is therefore not surprising that we should see this consistency in the response to Anonymous on the part of the majority of critics, punditry and experts cited in the major media.

A colleague of mine, having recently started reading about Oxford, remarked that it seemed to him like a conspiracy that the  Oxfordian theory would be so routinely belittled. I replied, a conspiracy, no: but a pattern, yes. And one for which we have a ready model and explanation.

In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The book examines the sympathetic portrayal of American foreign policy in the major media through the lens of what they called a Propaganda Model of News, which consists of “five filters” through which information must pass before it is deemed “fit to print.”

1. Size, ownership and profit orientation of Mass Media
2. Advertising as a major Funding source
3. Sourcing
4. “Flak”
5. Anti-communist ideology as a control mechanism.

While Herman and Chomsky specifically considered how the filters informed reportage and commentary concerning American foreign policy during the Cold War, the filters are equally potent in restraining newspapers and network television from championing any number of perspectives that are deemed “fringe.” The authorship debate is not an exception.

That mass media have structural ties to corporations and are dependent on advertising makes them naturally averse to controversy, and hesitant to challenge dominant narratives that would run counter to the interests of these pillars. When we consider Shakespeare as cultural industry, replete as it is with many thousands of books, films, and consumer paraphernalia of all kinds, it is immediately apparent that a wholesale rejection of the Stratford mythology would be unwelcome for more than the hotels and restaurants in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Furthermore, in an era of ever-greater concentration of ownership and integration between media platforms, the same corporations that run newspapers, TV and radio also own publishing houses. While scarcely on the scale of, say, the oil and gas industries, the commercial interests that might be collectively (and only somewhat facetiously) referred to as “Big Shakespeare” are nonetheless highly influential and naturally unenthusiastic about the upheaval a new Oxfordian reality would mean for their investments.

Therefore the Oxfordian theory is by definition unthinkable; there is no perceived advantage to be gained by it, and reputations hang in the balance. Ridicule, by contrast, is entertaining to read and sells more newspapers.

The third filter, sourcing, is readily observable in the response to Anonymous. Reporters and editors, under the rubric of objectivity, depend upon expert commentary to inform their customers, rather than taking and defending positions themselves. But as Herman and Chomsky point out, these are, by and large, establishment actors representing a very narrow range of orthodox opinion, as opposed to alternative social actors challenging dominant narratives. Accordingly, media outlets have been quick to call in conventional Shakespeare experts to criticize the film and affirm the traditional view.

Championing unorthodox views in the mass media – whatever those may be — carries with it the threat of flak, which is the fourth filter. Flak is the negative response to news stories or opinion pieces on the part of mass media’s constituencies, be they citizens groups, “watchdog” agencies, institutions, or individuals. Letter-writing campaigns or boycotts can result from hostile consumer reaction. In the case of so beloved and foundational a figure as Shakespeare, there would be a much greater probability of a negative response from adherents to the established view, than from those arguing for Oxford.

The prospect of backlash from readers and institutions such as universities might be a factor in a media outlet choosing to marginalize Oxfordian theorizing. Journalists and critics are also likely leery of being ridiculed by their peers, so steer clear of advocating for beliefs marginalized by others.

The fifth filter explicitly identifies ideological marginalization. Manufacturing Consent examined how anti-Communism was a control mechanism that readily helped media categorize acceptable and deplorable views, which in turn rendered official policies and foreign regimes palatable to the American public, while vilifying those associated with the Soviet Union.

In the post-Cold War era this filter has morphed into an “anti-terror” ideology, and, more generally, an “anti-ideology” filter that conveniently allows pundits to equate the views of their opponents with other belief systems deemed to be beyond the pale. For example, J. Kelly Nestruck – theatre critic for Canada’s newspaper of record the Globe and Mail, responded to the film this way:

It has become clear to me that contemporary Shakespeare denial is part and parcel of a dangerous, anti-rational mode of thinking that is on the rise in our society. Such thinking is a gateway drug for Truthers, Birthers (who deny that Barack Obama was born on U.S. soil) and believing in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion…we must insult and belittle the Shakespeare deniers until they get embarrassed and shut the hell up.

Curiously, the LA Times’ Charles McNulty frames the SAQ  in remarkably similar terms:

like those who deny global warming, President Obama’s birth certificate and the basic tenets of Darwinian evolution, the Oxfordians prefer shadowy doubts to irrefutable data. That De Vere died in 1604, years before a few of Shakespeare’s prodigious masterpieces were completed, is of little consequence to their conspiratorial parlor game.

This conflation of what is seen as unacceptable dissent with other belief systems held to be abhorrent (like anti-Semitism) is a form of intellectual laziness, of course, in that it allows the author to avoid actually addressing the contentions of their opponents in a constructive way. More significantly however the anti-ideology filter is a form of fallacious rhetoric that condemns through association. The term “denial” here is particularly potent, as it immediately conjures up in the mind of the reader Holocaust denial, a connection made more explicit by Nestruck’s reference to the Protocols.

What is curious however is that these authors essentially treat Stratfordian skepticism as if it were some kind of recent phenomenon, a symptom of post-modern relativism perhaps, when it is a literary and historical problem that has occupied researchers for over a century and a half.

Such efforts to cast issues as either black-or-white is part of another powerful filter: that rendering complex issues into simple ones. In their book Exploring Mass Media for a Changing World, authors Ray Hiebert and Sheila Gibbons  describe the pronounced tendency of mass media to drastically simplify information for its audiences’ presumed reading and comprehension level, with the effect that specialized information is rarely conveyed adequately.

This makes it easier for media to repeat expert opinion ruling out Oxford’s candidacy because he died in 1604 – years before standard chronologies date the performance and publishing of Shakespeare’s plays – rather than to explain the conjectural, conflicting and controversial nature of those chronologies, and the extent to which they were shoehorned to adhere to the life of William Shaksper of Stratford.

While it is true that the media environment has been dramatically transformed by the World Wide Web since the end of the Cold War, the imperatives of the filter are still present, and even within the bold new world of social media: Wikipedia editors are also vigilant gatekeepers of established views on controversial subjects, ensuring that certain information is confined only to pages specifically about those controversies, rather than allowing them to be “mainstreamed.”

As Herman and Chomsky demonstrated, the exercise of media filters has very real socio-political consequences, as it contributes to an environment in which certain lines of inquiry are considered forbidden, thereby undermining democracy. In the case of the authorship debate, we should see that the marginalization of the Oxfordian view is just one example of a larger structural problem. Social, cultural and intellectual transformations of all kinds have been long frustrated and delayed as a result of such narrow ideological “framing” on the part of the mass media; as such, media reform aimed at diminishing the influence of these filters would benefit not just Oxfordians but any new and emerging paradigm challenging the status quo.

*Michael Dudley is the Senior Research Associate and Librarian at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He has degrees in Theatre, Library Science and City Planning. His review of James Shapiro’s Contested Will for the Winnipeg Free Press may be read here.

The Vatican Decrees Shakespeare a Catholic? Really?

My blog post about the Vatican’s coming out for the Catholic Bard thesis and Peter Dickson’s flamboyant response is now available.

Dickson comments:

“Given the report concerning the bombshell announcement and apparent claim by the Vatican’s official newspaper (L’Osservatore Romano), anti-Stratfordians and Oxfordians can never say I did not warn them since 1998 of the importance of the issue of whether the Stratford man was a secret Catholic as many Stratfordians believe.  And many of them devoutly hope this ”truth” would help explain why the traditional Bard from Stratford-on-Avon is so mysterious, so elusive when it comes to proving that he really was the great literary figure.  The secret Catholic theory which actually goes back to the mid-1800s was in part a response to the anti-Stratfordians.”   More.

Dickson’s analysis of the Catholic-Protestant split in Shakespearean studies from the Oxfordian (2003) is available here.

Harvard's Marjorie Garber: "I have remained in dialogue with Oxfordians and others, not because I concur with their opinions but because I do not dismiss them out of hand.”

Many readers will already have heard something about the authorship wiki-wars.

One of the fictions effectively perpetrated on unwitting newbies in these edit battles by the usual gang of diehard orthodoxists is that anything dealing in an intelligent way with the authorship question does not constitute a “reliable source” (is not RS) — apparently because so many academicians are agreed that intelligent discussion of the topic is by definition unreliable.

These wiki-pundits also believe that the issue itself and any alternative theories of authorship, including the Oxfordian one,  belong to the venerated Wikipedia category of “fringe theory” — along with the idea that an alien ate your mother and the earth was created in 4004 BC.

Exactly what does constitute a reliable source, according to these arbiters of public morality, and what distinguishes a minority viewpoint from a “fringe theory” remains, of course, usefully ambiguous. The point is not to develop a systematic classification based on principle, but to have handy at one’s side a usable stick to make sure that only sources that represent one viewpoint are allowed, and that anything that might endanger the sanctity of smug orthodoxy  or make the debate more complex by acknowledging that more than one rational point of view exists, is immediately labelled “not RS” and kept out of the footnotes.

If one is dedicated to the principle that the authorship question is a bad idea, this makes sense. As soon as one levels the playing field by outlawing argument by prejudicial a priori definition, the Oxfordians start winning points on the merits of their case.  This cannot be allowed if we want to keep the world safe for the ideal that Shakespeare is a cliché.

And, ironically, it appears to this reader at least that Archbishop Usher’s Bible-centered geo-chronology is treated more respectfully on Wikipedia than the Oxfordians are — but of course this makes sense, since Usher’s views are in fact so marginal that they constitute no threat to geological orthodoxy, while the case for Oxford’s authorship of Shakespeare is sufficiently persuasive to have gained the endorsement of several supreme court judges and some of the leading Shakespearean actors of the 20th and 21st centuries. The heat, in other words,  is in inverse proportion to the actual legitimacy of those fighting against the idea.

Recently Richard Whalen, author of Shakespeare — Who Was He: The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon?, a book continuously in print since its publication in 1994, sent us some notes documenting the extent of Oxfordian influence on ostensibly orthodox academicians. These are grouped by analysis of public comments by each of several leading Shakespearean scholars, starting with Harvard’s Marjorie Garber, author of Shakespeare’s Ghostwriters (1987) and Shakespeare After All (2004, 2010) -Ed

Guest post by Richard Whalen begins here

In Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (1987 from Methuen, 2^nd ed. 2010 from Routledge), Garber  devotes most of her first chapter, “Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers,” to the authorship question, which informs the rest of her book. Her first sentence in the 27-page chapter is a question, “Who is the author of Shakespeare’s plays?” She then asks why doubts about his authorship have been so “tenaciously dismissed?” (a deliberate oxymoron?) She notes that Jonson’s praise in the First Folio “may not identify him with the prosperous citizen of rural Warwickshire” (1). She goes on to discuss the arguments for both sides, citing Looney, Ogburn, Freud, Twain, Chaplin, and others.

Significantly, in a second, expanded edition this year, from Routledge, she confirms her continuing interest in the SAQ: “When I first wrote about the Shakespeare authorship controversy . . .the topic seemed both fascinating and off-limits” (2^nd edition Preface, xiii). On the next page: “I take it seriously and am less interested in any “answer” or “solution” than I am in the enduring nature of the controversy. Thus, I have remained in dialogue with Oxfordians and others, not because I concur with their opinions but because I do not dismiss them out of hand” (xiv). You can read her Preface to the Routledge edition on Amazon’s LookInside.

Later Garber asks, “Why does the question persist? . . .That is the question I would like to address. I would like, in other words, to take the authorship controversy seriously . . . to explore the significance of the debate itself, to consider the on-going existence of the polemic between pro-Stratford-lifers and pro-choice advocates as an exemplary literary event in its own right” (3)

On page 26, she says the plays raise questions like “Who wrote this? . . the apparent author or the real author. . .is the official version to be trusted? . . As will become clear in the chapters that follow, the plays not only thematize these issues, they also theorize them, a critique of the concept of authorship.” It’s the 1980s and it’s typical academic jargon, probably knowingly.

Garber has written six books about Shakespeare. She is a chaired professor of English at Harvard and chair of the department of visual and environmental studies.

Her 945-page book from Pantheon, Shakespeare After All (2004) confirms her interest in SAQ quite dramatically. She has a chapter on each play (probably from her lecture notes), and although she gives only a half dozen sentences to the controversy in her Introduction, she concludes that “despite the persistence of the Authorship Controversy [her caps], there seems no significant reason to doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the plays” (22). A rather half-hearted defense of Stratman.

Significantly, despite only a few sentences on SAQ in the Introduction, her “Suggestions for Further Reading” (940) has a major section on “Shakespeare and Authorship” with seventeen books. Nine of them–a majority–are by Oxfordians, including Looney, E. T. Clark, Ogburn (twice), Sobran and myself. But only three anti-Oxfordians: Dobson, McManaway and Schoenbaum. She also includes her Ghost book.

Stanley Wells

Stanley Wells, perhaps the dean of Shakespeare scholars, devotes 18 of 174 pages in Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare (n.d. c. 2008) to SAQ. Notably, the cartoon cover depicts the SAQ; it shows a dumbfounded Shakspere being pulled in one direction by Marlowe and the other direction by Bacon or Oxford.

In the 18 pages he covers six candidates in a very sketchy, informal challenge/response mode and of course dismisses all of them. The publisher is a tiny, home-based company, but this is the eminent Stanley Wells, and it’s the first time he has addressed SAQ at any length. Testimony perhaps to the gathering momentum for the SAQ. I emailed him noting errors; he ignored them and said he “believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.” That’s their default mantra.

David Bevington

David Bevington, has a difficult time with the SAQ in his Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford UP 2010.) His opening chapter, “The Biographical Problem,” is full of unanswered questions about the presumed literary life of Stratman. His 7-page last chapter, “L’envoi,” has four pages on SAQ. He cites Matus, Shapiro and my book and makes the usual arguments but not dismissively. He doesn’t address the significance of the SAQ as such. At various points, he discusses attempts “to look for connections” between the plays and Stratman’s biography (138.)

Bevington, whom I know quite well, is one of the top five Shakespeare establishment professors. He is editor of the HarperCollins (now Longmans) collected works and is the only president of the SAA to hold that office twice.

Norrie Epstein

In her racy, colorful Friendly Shakespeare (Viking 1993) Norrie Epstein devotes twenty-eight pages to the SAQ. Although she does not take a position, she contrasts Stratfordian and Oxfordian arguments and says the arguments for an alternative candidate are “extremely persuasive” (277). She concludes, “In short, there is no solid evidence for attributing the works to the man whose name they now bear.” And she notes that most academics dismiss SAQ.

Epstein has been a lecturer on Shakespeare at the universities of California, Rochester and Stevenson and at Goucher. Her book is still in print. Maybe you can use it. Epstein addressed the Boston conference of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in  1993.

James Shapiro

From my online SOS review of Contested Will:

“For the first time, a leading Shakespeare establishment professor, James Shapiro of Columbia University, has given serious consideration to the controversy over Shakespeare’s identity in a book-length analysis—a precedent that may help make the authorship issue a legitimate subject for more research and discussion in academia, even though Shapiro remains a Stratfordian.

His book is a history of the authorship controversy, from Delia Bacon in the 1850s to DoubtAboutWill.org in 2007. He recognizes that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford is by far the most impressive challenger and that his backers have achieved considerable success in recent decades. His final word is that a choice must be made, which he calls a “stark and consequential” choice.

“The book’s cover will dismay committed Stratfordians. It’s the Stratford monument depicting a writer with pen, paper and a pillow, but his head is cut off by the author’s name and the book’s title, including Who Wrote Shakespeare?  And indeed that is the question.

“Shapiro, however, states at the outset that he aims to answer a different question: Why have so many eminent people doubted that Will Shakspere of Stratford was the author and argued for someone else, such as Oxford? In so doing, he declines to enter the debate over the evidence for Shakspere or for Oxford in any depth of detail. As a result, the general reader is left with the impression that the question of Shakespeare’s identity may well be legitimate, despite efforts by many Stratfordians to dismiss it. That a scholar of Shapiro’s standing in the Shakespeare establishment should take this approach bodes well for Oxfordians.”

Die-hard Stratfordians, of course, will be able to find what they need to defend Will Shakspere and reject Oxford. Shapiro cleverly provides quotable snippets. Still, the discerning general reader, for whom this book is intended, should be able to see through this stratagem. . . .

. . . Granted, there is much for Oxfordians to critique and rebut, including material omissions, unbalanced emphases, unsupported opinions, faulty judgments, the usual straw-man arguments, contradictory stances and some other clever rhetorical tactics. At times, his handling of evidence is so devious as to deftly conceal his errors of interpretation. Oxfordians would have preferred a book by a Shakespeare establishment professor that would open the door even wider to scholarly discussion of the evidence for Oxford as Shakespeare, but Shapiro’s is a big step in that direction.

“On balance, Shapiro’s book might be considered good news for Oxfordians, who could have expected much harsher treatment by an Ivy League professor and scholar in the Shakespeare establishment. He shows a fair measure of appreciation for the Oxfordian proposition, and he freely acknowledges Oxfordian successes. That alone is reason enough to welcome his book. In addition, the book’s title and cover deliver a strong message of legitimacy for the authorship question.”

The Critics, trying to decide how they feel about Anonymous.

I’ve noticed something striking about the critical response to Anonymous. 

According to data available on Moviephone,  which not only collates reviews by professionals but  also supplies a forum for ordinary moviegoers to post their own evaluations, there’s a huge perception gap about how good or how bad a movie it is (if I were Sony, I’d want to pay attention to this….)

Among the cognoscenti of the film world, who write reviews for a living, Anonymous looks like a real stinker. If you ask these self-appointed historians and dubiously informed amateur scholars — who unlike the amateur “Oxfordians” have never read a book on the subject Anonymous has suddenly made them “experts” on — no good can come of thinking about Shakespeare except as a cliche.

Their Anonymous rating hovers along the ground with an only 50% positive rating.

But look at the reviews by ordinary audience members.

They rate the movie a steady 83-88% favorable, with the vast majority of the ratings being either 4 or 5 stars.

That’s a 33+ point spread.

Now, I don’t know how untypical or statistically valid any of this is, or if that even matters.  My hunch is that this is an unusually large discrepancy, and even as anecdotal evidence, compensating for all the factors that a professional statistician would want to take into consideration like selection bias (which actually seems unlikely here, since I see no reason why those who hate the movie would be any less motivated to express their opinions than the many who love or at least like it),   — it’s at least suggesting something quite fascinating.

The professional reviewer class doesn’t like Anonymous.  Apparently it feels that its own self-identity requires it to endorse the politically correct belief that only cranks would entertain the film’s premise as anything more than an entertaining fiction. They go on from that position to trounce the film as bad fiction.

Anonymous, in other words, seems to have exposed an occupational hazard of the critics. They  can’t seem to do their jobs by reviewing the movie’s merits and weaknesses as work of cinema. They feel it’s their professional calling to point out, preferably  in chorus, that Emmerich and Orloff don’t know anything about history or literature. That’s what “they” — namely the people who want to us to forget about Shakespeare except in the authorized ways — said about Charlton Ogburn also.

Their motto is that of the popular Wikipedia critic who recently announced, with all the conviction of a born-again tele-evangelist saving the souls of unlettered sinners:

No matter what anti-Strats think, their positions are firmly wedged in  the dustbin of crackpot conspiracy theories, and I feel bad that their  lives are being wasted on a comic-strip power fantasies. There’s  really nothing I can do about it, though, but I think–I hope–that I might have influenced some people not to waste their time pursuing an  outrageous lie.

One professional critic who rose above the crowd (not the only one, but an exemplary one) is Roger Ebert.

Although accepting the traditional bardoholic view of history,  Ebert is a true professional who also wrote a  fair review of the film. He opined that even though “there seems little good reason to doubt that [the Stratford Shakespeare] wrote the plays performed under his name,” Anonymous is still a  ”splendid experience.”

Even if Ebert’s stance depressingly reminds me of Hank Sander’s brilliant critique of the know-nothingism school of modern criticism, you’ve got to respect the fact that Ebert didn’t project his own biases into the sort of postmodern lament about how Anonymous is destroying Western Civilization that we’ve been compelled to endure in “reviews” like the paranoid screeds appearing in such supposedly leading publications as the New York Times.

Anonymous is far from a perfect movie. But it is a damn good one. As a work of cinema it reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of director Emmerich. Visually stunning, with some fine scripting and performances — above all it is a movie that dares to challenge the preconceptions of such grand Poohbahs of the Shakespeare world as James Shapiro. The most sophisticated review of the film I think I’ve read is one by Richard Waugaman published right here on my own site.

Another fine one is in the form of a letter to Ebert, by James Ulmer, a member of the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable from Pacific Palisades, CA.

Here’s the first part of Ulmer’s letter:

I was grateful yet frustrated with your review of Anonymous. Grateful that you found it a “marvelous historical film”; frustrated that you fell into the common trap of critics who use their reviews of the movie to flaunt their pre-conceptions about the authorship issue.

Invariably, these critics rant against the very idea of an authorship question without nearly enough of a knowledge base to do so credibly.  At least [the fact that you held this view yourself] didn’t prevent you from appreciating the enormous artistry and emotional resonance of the film itself,  regardless of how misinformed many of your comments were.  So bravo for that.

But my kudos pretty much end there. Your review’s lead sentence, for starters, is simply wrong: ”Very few commoners of his time are as well documented as Shakespeare.” As a matter of fact, Shakespeare is the least documented of the major writers of his time, with virtually no example of his handwriting on any letter or play or work of writing of any kind.

Only six signatures of his survive, and these are of widely varying kinds of handwriting, with little consistency in the spelling of the name. There are volumes of letters and papers, on the other hand, in Ben Jonson’s hand, and Kit Marlowe’s, Thomas Nashe’s, etc. etc.*

Your review’s second sentence is also off the mark, for there is more than good reason to doubt the traditional story of the grain dealer from Stratford as the playwright of the Shakespeare canon; men such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sir John Gielgud have done so, quite eloquently.

After reading this far through your review, it was tough for me to give credence to your other comments about Shakespeare.  When I read your line, “I must tiresomely insist that Edward de Vere did not write Shakespeare’s plays,” my response was simply:  Who are you, Roger, to insist on any such thing?  Did I miss taking your graduate seminar on the Aristotelian Paradoxes Inherent in the Question of Bard Authorship?

I didn’t think so.

Nothing irks a reader more (or at least this reader) than name critics indulging their egos by creating the facade of expertise in order to rationalize their opinions, at the sad expense of their own intellectual credibility.  Why not just trust the reader to make up his own mind about the issue and proceed with your review from there?

Of course, audiences will be the final arbiters of the film’s merits. Obviously the average moviegoer doesn’t care a whit about a century-old “authorship” debate but does care about getting his 12 bucks worth of entertainment.

And that’s exactly what Anonymous delivers –  a rip-roaring mystery and adventure told with extraordinary artistry, craft and emotional pull. Much of its poetic license serves the needs of compressed storytelling that a two-hour movie demands.

It was never meant to be fact-based and historically meticulous (Shakespeare took plenty of license with his history, too).  That’s why I loved the frame the writer John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich gave the movie:  we’re presented the entire story as a show from the get-go, and the movie itself is contained within the boundaries of a stage performance on Broadway.

Reality?  No.  But plausible possibility?  Absolutely.

************************************************************

*The case for Marlowe and Nashe may be somewhat overstated here – but Ulmer’s general idea, that there’s something highly peculiar about the “Shakespeare” paper trail is, as Diana Price has proven, “spot on.”  Marlowe is actually one of the least well documented of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, perhaps because he died in 1593 as an outcast to the state – a gay atheist killed under violent circumstances. Quite a bit different from the comfortable bourgeois life of the Stratford businessman, who died in quiet retirement, one of the wealthiest landowners in his, uh, hamlet, well into the Jacobean period. -ed

The Man of Many Voices: Ferdinand Pessoa wrote under more than 70 "heteronyms."

Roland Emmerich’s new film, Anonymous, is inspired by the same theory that gripped Freud during the last dozen years of his life—that “William Shakespeare” was the pseudonym and front man of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). The film has generated much debate, some of it acrimonious.

Why should this be?

A film is just a film, after all. But this one challenges widely accepted “truths.” And those ostensible truths are intertwined with an idealizing transference to the bard. Freud observed that we know so little about the traditional author that we can imagine he was every bit as great as his works are.

The acting in the film has won praise from many critics. Vanessa Redgrave portrays the older Queen Elizabeth most convincingly, while her daughter Joely Richardson is the younger Elizabeth. Rhys Ifans departs from his past film roles to become the older Edward de Vere. He brings to life de Vere’s passion for writing, his awareness that “All art is political,” his reckless impulsivity, and resigned awareness that he would not receive credit for his politically polemical works.

Anonymous chooses one among many possible narratives as to the how and why of de Vere’s choice of Shakespeare of Stratford to serve as his front man.  It depicts the theory that the offspring of de Vere’s affair with Queen Elizabeth was the Earl of Southampton.

This was the earl to whom Shakespeare’s two long poems of 1593 and 1594 were dedicated. Further, many of us believe that Sonnets 1-126, the so-called “Fair Youth” sonnets, address Southampton. But this is where any consensus disintegrates. Some of us believe the bisexual de Vere had an affair with Southampton.

Others—possibly because of their discomfort with de Vere having been bisexual—instead claim that Southampton was de Vere’s son by Queen Elizabeth. They can then explain the unusual warmth of these sonnets as reflecting paternal love.

Incest is another  theme in the film. The allusions to incest in the plays might reflect de Vere’s quasi-incestuous relationship with his first wife—they grew up as virtual step-siblings.

Confused?

I’m not surprised. Don’t you have to be a snob and a conspiracy theorist to doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?

Actually, Elizabethan authorship was a bit more complicated than it is today. Most plays were published without the author’s name. Literary anonymity and pseudonymity were common before the 20^th century.

We often study paradigm changes retrospectively. But we are in the midst of such a paradigm change now when it comes to Shakespeare’s identity.

A recent poll found that only 70% of people still accept the traditional Shakespeare as author of the canon. We now have a chance to study the individual and group psychology of asking people to reconsider their assumptions about the identity of the greatest author in English literature.

Ben Jonson plays an intriguing if invented role in the film. He was ostensibly de Vere’s first choice to serve as his front man, but he declined. His admiration for de Vere’s literary genius stirs deep envy in him. Here, the screenwriter John Orloff was making his homage to Amadeus, which was a major inspiration for him.

In fact, the soundtrack includes a brief snippet of Mozart’s Requiem during de Vere’s wedding to Anne Cecil. This wedding follows on the heels of the adolescent de Vere murdering a servant who was spying on him, in the home of his guardian William Cecil (yes, Anne’s father).

De Vere did kill a servant with his fencing rapier when he was 17 and, as in the film, Cecil assisted in de Vere’s legal defense. However, I doubt that his marriage to Cecil’s daughter four years later was any sort of quid pro quo. This is one of many moments in the film where poetic license trumps a strict (if less dramatic) hewing to the documented historical record.

When his wife Anne pleads with de Vere to stop writing plays, he replies, “The voices! I can’t stop them. They come to me. I would go mad if I didn’t write down what the voices say.” This is an intriguing surmise about de Vere’s creative process, as though his Muse speaks to him aloud.

In fact, I suspect that some form of unusual awareness and tolerance of multiple self states plays a crucial role for some literary geniuses such as de Vere. Part of Shakespeare’s magic is that he evokes specific self states in us. Great authors tap into several of their own respective self states when they write. Writing under pseudonyms may loosen the grip of the author’s central self state, and activate a wider range of ego states.

Psychoanalysts are in a unique position to elucidate the psychology of literary anonymity and pseudonymity. The evidence suggests that keeping one’s authorship secret helps promote what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—keeping his own identity in the background as he created hundreds of utterly convincing characters.

For another example, the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote to a friend that the 70 “heteronyms” who did his writing were real characters to him. In a sense, Edward de Vere’s most magical character of all was his pseudonym and front man, “William Shakespeare.” With some likely assistance from the man from Stratford, this character lives on for most people more vividly than does de Vere himself.

Why did de Vere have to conceal his authorship?

For many reasons. Nobility did not write for the common theater. They rarely published poems under their own name during their lifetime. And the plays of Shakespeare spoof many powerful court figures, and comment on various court intrigues.

The film has de Vere tell Ben Jonson, “All art is political.” Attributing the plays’ authorship to a commoner helped conceal some of their provocative critiques. Even so, the Elizabethan theater audience as depicted in the film recognized the character Richard III as a spoof of de Vere’s hunch-backed brother-in-law, Robert Cecil.

And they also recognized Polonius in Hamlet as a disguised portrayal of de Vere’s father-in-law. Some Shakespeare scholars still admit the latter is correct, though others have backed off from this identification, since it strengthens the case for de Vere’s authorship.

Anonymous is introduced by Derek Jacobi, who also provides the epilogue. This was an inspired choice, since Jacobi is a highly respected Shakespearean actor who happens to believe de Vere wrote the canon. He is thus an apt intermediary to introduce the film’s audience to its controversial and theatrical subject. Other great Shakespearean actors who have rejected the traditional author include Mark Rylance, Michael York, and Sir John Gielgud.

In 2007, Jacobi and Rylance announced their support for the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt,” that acknowledges room for honest disagreement about Shakespeare’s identity. Stanley Wells, Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, reacted venomously.

Wells  said “the time for tolerance is over.” He cited the fact that one 19^th century authorship skeptic died in a mental hospital, then added, “So beware, Mark [Rylance] and Sir Derek [Jacobi]!”

Rylance replied, “I think [Wells] is blinded by an attachment to the Stratford actor… more worrying to me is his tendency to simply ignore evidence if it contradicts his argument… When we meet as friends, I wouldn’t dare bring this subject up for fear of his anger… We shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied out of a natural curiousity” about the authorship question.

You have no doubt read some of the vitriolic attacks on Anonymous by Columbia University’s James Shapiro and others.

This fierce backlash intrigues me. The academic Shakespeare establishment usually treats the authorship question as taboo. In other words, many Shakespeare organizations and publications will not even discuss it.

One English professor told me it would be “academic suicide”  to research de Vere’s possible authorship. One Shakespearean publication invited me to write a book review, then changed their mind once they read it, explaining that they had “blundered,” and would never publish anything by an Oxfordian.

So it’s my hunch that if these bright scholars are going to enforce their taboo, they have to convince themselves that it is justified—that all challenges to the traditional author are, as they claim, based on ignorance or mental aberrations, ranging from snobbism all the way to psychosis. This makes it unlikely they can evaluate contradictory evidence objectively.

Both Emmerich and Orloff admit their film takes poetic license in order to provoke and entertain. But the Stratfordians are not amused. Their over-reaction to the film is Inquisitional in its tone. We instinctively sympathize with the underdog, all things being equal. The Shakespeare establishment may have made things worse for itself by forgetting this is just a film.

Although Anonymous is bringing fresh attention to the issue, the authorship debate is longstanding. In my view, Oxfordians try repeatedly to introduce new evidence into the discussion. Traditional Shakespeareans don’t even admit their theory is a hypothesis—they claim absolute certainty. So, instead of arguing ad rem, about the issue itself, they keep reverting to arguing ad hominem, with personal attacks on us authorship “heretics.”

We’re accused of being like Holocaust deniers; being anti-semitic; being like the birthers who deny that Obama is a U.S. citizen; being like people who claim we never landed on the moon, or who claim the U.S. organized the 9/11 attacks. Seriously. Do you detect a whiff of desperation in such despicable accusations?

If we want a strictly accurate film about de Vere, Emmerich has failed us. But if the goal is to introduce the general public to the Shakespeare authorship theory that so seized Freud’s imagination, then Emmerich has succeeded admirably. After all, even Shakespeare’s own history plays sometimes play loose with the historical facts.

Many of the reviews of Anonymous have panned the film because its premise is so controversial. A common theme in these critical reviews is the assumption that the Shakespeare scholars must be correct, and there is “no evidence whatsoever” that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Certain premises are repeatedly asserted to be incontrovertible refutations that de Vere could be the author.

You’ve  heard that many plays of Shakespeare are known with certainty to have been written after 1604, the year that de Vere died.

Unfortunately, the facts are a bit more complicated. As some Shakespeare scholars admit, we simply do not know with certainty when any of the plays were written. The conventional dating of the plays is based on Shakespeare of Stratford having died in 1616. So it was assumed he wrote roughly two plays per year, and these assumptions played a crucial role in the conjectured dating of when the plays were written.

What about the possibility that de Vere left some unfinished manuscripts at his death, and playwrights such as Fletcher finished them? Since the late plays do show evidence of collaboration, I find this narrative more plausible than the orthodox speculation that Shakespeare “apprenticed himself” to other playwrights when he began writing Romances such as The Tempest.

I have noticed an intriguing pattern in orthodox attacks on de Vere and his supporters. Again and again, they launch attacks about issues where they are actually themselves most vulnerable. They thus seem desperate to distract us from the weakness of their own case.

I would suggest that William Shak[e]spe[a]re of Stratford was born 14 years too late to have been the author, since many plays of “Shakespeare” rewrote earlier plays that were written when Stratford was only a boy. Because of circular reasoning, many scholars assume these anonymous earlier plays had to be written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. They accuse Oxfordians of being too wedded to their theory. We all need to be cautious to avoid cherry-picking evidence that confirms our preconceptions.

When I am told that Oxfordians are simply unable to admit they’re wrong, I point out that every Oxfordian I know started as a Stratfordian, until they looked into the matter more deeply. So it doesn’t look as though we’re the ones incapable of admitting we’re wrong. Oxfordians are told we do not know how to evaluate the historical evidence. In reality, all the recent evidence about the ubiquity of anonymity and pseudonymity in Elizabethan authorship is mostly getting ignored by the Shakespeare specialists.

Finally, please indulge me for a moment. We Oxfordians know how empty and dishonest is the accusation that we haven’t produced “a shred of evidence” the de Vere wrote the canon.

Roger Stritmatter’s discovery of the evidentiary value of de Vere’s Bible is the gift that keeps on giving. In October 2011, the most read online article in Notes & Queries  of the past 150 years was a 2009 article that showed the psalms de Vere marked with pointing hands in his copy of the musical Whole Book of Psalms are a huge but  previously unknown literary source for Shakespeare’s works.

Dear Ms. Gardner:

Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger, co-founders of Wikipedia. Sanger has now gone on to establish Citizendium. You may contribute money or expertise the latter at www.citizendium.org

Naturally, you are very welcome for the gift, even if it is no more than a widow’s mite.

However, at the risk of sounding like one who is attaching strings, I’m not really the one you need to thank.

Indeed, I’d like to let you know that this may be both the first and the last donation I’m able to give to Wikipedia.

Let me explain why. Your note refers to the value of “providing free, easy access to unbiased information” (emphasis mine).

That would be nice if it were true.

[Addendum: and, no doubt it is true for the vast majority of Wikipedia articles - just not the ones I'm concerned with].

I don’t know if you are the one who processes the comment forms from the donations or not. If so, I apologize for repeating myself, but here’s my “story” — in a little more detail than what I gave on the comment form.

I am a tenured University Professor with a PhD on a controversial topic from a tier one research institution.

Currently I am banned from even posting comments to talk pages on subjects that I have studied for almost twenty years, and on which I have published widely, both in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and in what one might call “alternative revolutionary” publications that are not peer reviewed but which contain a great deal of highly competent scholarship both by established University scholars and by writers from the broader community of readership that takes an interest in such things (teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) — many of whom, in my own opinion, have contributed more to the understanding of this topic than all but a few of those with better credentials.

Sue, I’m not going to say that I didn’t do some things to invite this ban.

By nature not being a person who deals well with Kafkaesque bureaucracies well peopled with graduates from Peter Principle‘s Institute for Advanced Studies, I made many mistakes and no doubt incurred the wrath of some who might have become allies had I been more accommodating to the dubious practices that were gradually brought to bear in a concerted effort to marginalize me from the wider community of Wikipedia editors and administrators.

But in my own defense I must add that the context of my perhaps overly defensive responses was one of standing up to Wikipedians of the sort quite prophetically described by Larry Sanger in his well-known Kuroshin analysis:

I thought that the project would never have the amount of credibility it could have if it were not somehow more open and welcoming to experts….The other problem was the community had essentially been taken over by trolls to a great extent.

A few days ago, on the verge of a permanent ban about to be imposed on me by administrators of the sort Sanger describes, I received a surprising post to my talk page.

Here’s what it said:

Hello, Wikid77 (talk) here. I am thinking that Wikipedia needs to create a group of graduate-level admins (“gradmins”), who can be considered to have a graduate degree from a major university, as a group of credentialed admins who help decide major issues. I suspect that Wikipedia will continue to support unneeded topic bans unless a more-scholarly approach is used to determine if a “clear and present danger” is really caused by a user writing on some article-talk or user-talk pages. Of course, in history, we have the Athens tribunal of 587(?)* and the condemnation of Socrates for asking too many “uncomfortable questions” at the wrong times; enter Plato meets Archimedes re/ education.

The test to promote gradmins would likely be transparent, in most cases: just ask a candidate some graduate-level questions about their specialty and whichever university granted their degree(s), and the answers should reveal whether the claim is true. I would also consider graduate students to become gradmins, but that might cause some conflicts, so perhaps limit to those who have already finished an advanced degree.

Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that an admin has yet to finish a primary-school education, so I wonder what level of thinking to expect in that case. I am reminded, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Imagine being an average 18-year-old person and trying to judge the impact of talk-page comments. Meanwhile, there are 500 other major topics, not banned, which need work to improve the quality of articles. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:30, 10

For the first time in six years a Wikipedia administrator seemed to have understood the real values at stake in my efforts, and those of many others, similarly harassed and browbeaten for their labors, to inject a degree of impartial honesty into the discussions in which [we] had been participating.

I take the liberty of repeating what seems to me to be the essential message of Wikid77′s remarkable and refreshing sign of the continued vitality of the idea of principlewithin your organization:

Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that an admin has yet to finish a primary-school education, so I wonder what level of thinking to expect in that case. I am reminded, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Imagine being an average 18-year-old person and trying to judge the impact of talk-page comments.

Had I not received that communication, from at least one Wikipedia editor who “gets” it, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Perhaps your day would be easier, and your reading load lighter, but you also wouldn’t have this rare opportunity to consider the significance of the widow’s mite of decency that Wikid77 has just donated to the future of your organization, to which his commitment could not be more obvious and for which his vision could not be more apt.

Imho, Wikipedia has a real opportunity here to make a long-overdue change.

If you don’t, I am confident in predicting that your project will only continue to attract such unwanted attention as that found in Adam Gopnik’s February 2011 New Yorker article: Wikipedia can’t deal effectively with topics “on which one side is wrong but doesn’t know it.”

I don’t know if this chance will come again. Good luck.

Carpe diem.

Sincerely Yours,
Roger Stritmatter, MA, PhD
Associate Professor of Humanities
Coppin State University
General Editor, Brief Chronicles

*399 BC is the correct date.

David played the secret chord. That’s what we’re going to look for in the Bard.

The secret chord.

He took David for his example.  

“Set your whole delight” in God’s wisdom, urged his uncle Arthur Golding in dedicating his 1571 translation of the psalms to him.

“Occupy yourself day and night, to lay it up in your heart….to make your songs of it, to remember it night and day, to count it sweeter than honey, to take it as an heritage, and to make it the joy of your heart.”

So let’s not have any more guff about what a nasty piece of work he was. He was no worse than Lear, Hamlet, Poor Tom, or even….David.

His tongue was the pen of a ready writer….

Heward Wilkinson, Phd.

Our modern canons of rational textual criticism slowly emerged during the roughly four centuries of what we call the Mediaeval Age, from around 1050 to 1450, the end date, not coincidentally, being the time of the development of the printing press by Gutenberg. This Mediaeval development created the mentality for, and opened the way to, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, the beginnings of the Modern Age.

Modern criticism begins with Erasmus, Luther and others, coinciding with the take off of printing, and the increasingly ‘mass’-based communications that opened up, for instance with the vernacular editions of the Bible, such as Tyndale’s. Relevantly to the Authorship Question, this is all well established, and in place, by the time Shakespeare comes to be educated, and is completely factored in to the Humanistic education of this author. It begins to be systematically applied to Bible Studies by Spinoza and other pioneers, such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, of modern scientific naturalism in the Seventeenth Century.

In England, in the mature Enlightenment period, the Eighteenth Century, the great critical systematiser was Samuel Johnson. Having created the foundational Dictionary of the English Language, the greatest single analytic systematisation of the English language ever achieved, and one of the greatest scholarly feats of any epoch (published in 1755), he moved on to his edition of Shakespeare.

The bard was already becoming a classic, and Johnson contributed to his canonization in Preface to Shakespeare, published in 1765. Johnson’s total achievement, which eventually also included critical biographies of, and commentary on, all the English poets from Abraham Cowley onwards, ran parallel to the systematisations of such French Enlightenment Encyclopaedists as Diderot and Voltaire, and was therefore a central part of the consolidation of the Enlightenment.

Writing  about Shakespeare in the Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Johnson sagely remarks,  at this time when systematic criticism had come of age in the English Enlightenment:

The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. (my italics)

Johnson, then, attaches enormous importance to survival over time, and considers it an epistemic criterion of established valid authority. He further writes:

To works, however, of which the excellence is not absolute and definite, but gradual and comparative; to works not raised upon principles demonstrative and scientifick, but appealing wholly to observation and experience, no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem.

What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour …… Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time.

The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments. (Preface to Shakespeare)

Discussions of provenance were by this time becoming common, Johnson himself forcefully putting sceptical arguments about the, wildly popular Europe-wide, Ossian epic writings, published by MacPherson, whom Johnson accused of fabricating a bogus oral tradition.

But historically based criticism was, by the end of Johnson’s life, being systematised, particularly in Germany, as the Higher Criticism, and it was the development in Germany of this historically based critical methodology that led to systematic attention being paid to the really big beasts, the Old and New Testaments, Homer, and Shakespeare, themselves. This historical development coincided with the process of the shifting of the centre of gravity of European philosophical thought from Britain to Germany, beginning with the polymathic Leibniz, and culminating in the great critical systematiser of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant.

Despite partial reservations in the Anglo-American sphere, Kant has retained his authority, and his position as the most important modern philosopher, the modern Aristotle, ever since, and neither phenomenological existential philosophy, nor analytic philosophy, nor post-modernism, have seriously challenged it. And likewise the impact of the post-Higher-Critical methodology of the modern critical-historical examination of texts has been irreversible in our modern scholarly world, however it is applied, and to attempt to by-pass it is like trying to by-pass Darwin in biology.

To illustrate the implications of all this for the Authorship Question, I turn now to James Shapiro. In one of those frequent, and yet inexhaustibly astonishing, ironies of his book on the Authorship Question, Contested Will,  Shapiro himself applies the biographical methodology, which he outlaws as applied to Shakespeare, only to those he opposes, including to those very writers who devised the biographical methodologies! But those who are useful to him are exempt from it.

If he had been even-handed in this, then the critique would have even-handedly ‘divided through’ both opponents and allies, forcing him into a more balanced approach, is but one of the many ironies here.

And so, with his light conversational style of communication, it is easy to pass over one of the most extraordinary of these exemptions, one with the most stunning implications, his discussion of Samuel Mosheim Schmucker, who, Shapiro tells us, was a Lutheran Biblical scholar fiercely opposed to the sceptical Biblical criticism of David Friedrich Strauss, author in 1835 of The Life of Jesus, arguably the inaugural text of modern New Testament criticism. To make his challenge to ‘Modern Infidel’ criticism more graphic, Schmucker applied it systematically, with deliberate and crushing irony, to the parallel case of Shakespeare, whom he considered unassailable. In his vivid dramatic way, Shapiro continues  in Contested Will:

The result – Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare Illustrating Infidel Objections against the Bible – is almost unknown, but it probably tells us more about the Shakespeare authorship controversy than any other book, though without setting out to. Remarkably, before that controversy even broke out, Schmucker, who never for a moment doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, anticipated and carefully mapped out almost all the arguments subsequently used to question Shakespeare’s authorship. [86, my italics]

Clearly, because Schmucker ‘never for a moment doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare’, his position is the paradigm of which Shapiro totally approves, and will exempt from both criticism and biographical analysis, and Schmucker’s prior mapping of the arguments is accordingly bequeathed almost godlike authority.

The consequent corollary implication almost numbs us with disbelief.

It is this:  if Shapiro approves of Schmucker’s methodology as applied to Shakespeare, he must by extension approve of it as applied to Homer and the Bible as well.

Thus, without realising what he has done, Shapiro, as an argument of convenience, repudiates the whole trend of modern Higher Critical thought and methodology, and has painted himself into a position as obscurantist as the most extreme American Evangelical Fundamentalist Creationist.

To bring the implications of this point home, we must return to Samuel Johnson, and his longevity criterion for the validity of a valuation. Ostensibly, of course, Shapiro deprives himself of the consequences of his alliance with Schmucker regarding Biblical criticism, and regarding the Homeric problem. On the former he does not comment; but it is unlikely in practice, however, that he, as a state-of-the-art Professor of English in a major American University, would want to embrace Biblical Literalism, which is where Schmucker, of course, would necessarily take him.

And, of the latter, he conveys, by implication, that it is a dead problem (but overtly, he seeks to imply, only because there cannot be an authorship problem):

The battle over Homer’s identity, though no longer the struggle it once was [my italic], continues to this day. Classicists now have a better understanding of how oral poetry was transmitted; almost all accept [my italic] that there was no Homer in the traditional sense which all readers for over two thousand years had imagined. Happily, since no one was advancing alternative candidates from ancient Greece – what contemporary rival, after all, could even be named? – there wasn’t anything to fuel an authorship controversy, and the problem was more or less ignored; the less said the better. Still there are those who refuse to give up on the traditional story…( 81)

Here, however, it is in practice clear,

a. that Shapiro actually does think it is a dead problem, and,

b. that he believes it to be so, because traditional concepts of individual authorship have collapsed, in virtue of Higher Critical understandings we have acquired concerning oral tradition, and the analysis of the layering of text. (And of course, he further leans in this direction vis a vis Shakespeare and his ‘team-writer’ solution to the ‘biographical’ dimension, c.f., for details.)

His appeal to the absence of an authorship problem, as contingent on ignorance, is sophistical, and an equivocation; he knows perfectly well that that is not the argument against Homer the individual author. Nor is it the reason why this is, apart from the occasional diehard (he mentions the translator, EV Rieu), a dead problem. It has been resolved.

In this, following Johnson’s criterion in reverse, the problem of Homer is a solved problem, and it had been solved completely within about seventy years of its formulation by Wolf (1795), as Shapiro’s mention (79-80) of Nietzsche’s Inaugural Address at Basel (1869) demonstrates.

And, in this, it follows the pattern of the solution of major problems of thought in the modern age, in the Humanities, as well as the Natural Sciences.

One thinks of Wegener’s theory of continental drift (formulated 1915, confirmed by 1950, though well after Wegener’s death) or Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was accepted in major outline by the scientific world within about thirty years, and rejection of which has indeed become a standard criterion of obscuranticist rejection of the implications of modern critical and scientific thought. And likewise, as already indicated, the implications of what Moses Mendelssohn called Kant’s ‘all-pulverising’ critical thought were broadly accepted by philosophical Europe within forty years of the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.

Applying this to the authorship controversy, it is indeed striking that, in Johnson’s terms, it has indeed well outlived its century.

Peter Dickson, in his Bardgate: Shake-speare and the Royalists who Stole the Bard, points out both that this is virtually unprecedented in any modern era unresolved problem; but, further, that it remains true of the most completely established, and the greatest, of all authors is absolutely unprecedented. This is the only ‘big beast’ of a critical problem that has not yielded to modern critical method. This degree of longevity about a largely factual historical problem, and one of this scale, is apparently unique.

And that means that the longevity of the problem as an unresolved problem is itself evidence.

Shapiro is too intelligent not to realise this.  His equivocation and bad faith regarding the Homeric problem, which, as we saw, he tries to bring into parallel with the Shakespeare authorship controversy, thus off-setting the uniqueness of the latter, illustrate the point. But he cannot do this without introducing either the gross tacit inconsistencies and self-contradictions with which, as is clear, his work is in fact riddled [c.f., also, on this, again], or, alternatively, equating the conclusions he wishes to establish as positions of Faith, analogous to Schmucker’s Biblical Literalism, which is to be pronounced exempt from both criticism and reductive biographical analysis.

Again, from Preface to Shakespeare:

The Poet, of whose works I have undertaken the revision, may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration. He has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit. ( my italics)

The wisdom of Samuel Johnson is powerful still. Applying his criterion, The Shakespeare authorship controversy has long outlived its century, the term commonly fixed as the test of the assimilation of a valid solution of a scientific or critical problem.

Epistemologically, then, Johnson has proposed an extremely powerful criterion, and, in its status as an unsolved problem, the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy meets it.  If the Stratfordian hypothesis were satisfactory, it would be a dead problem by now, as the  cases of Wegener, the acceptance of Kant, the understanding of the mode of writing of Homer and so on, were laid to rest well within their century. But this hypothesis has signally failed to achieve this.

Shapiro’s tacitly obscurantist attempt to turn it into a matter of faith, by his invocation of the Ghost of Samuel Schmucker, itself might have turned into one of those amazing radical sidesteps, by which the fideistic giants of the period from Descartes onwards, such as Pascal, Newman, Kierkegaard, and Barth, sought to sidestep the impact of Humanistic Criticism.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Shapiro is not aware of this; if he was, he would be a greater, more systematic, mind, and we would have more respect for him. His implicit repudiation, when it suits him, of critical methodology, and his appeal to faith, is concealed in highly characteristic textual equivocations.

So, as it is, he is not a man of faith, but merely one of bad faith.

http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk

The title page of "Shake-Speares Sonnets."

Not really.  Gotcha!

However, with Anonymous packing at least some theatres, moving some audience members to tears, and prompting spontaneous applause by others, the Stratfordian thought control machine has gone into overdrive.

One of the machine’s strongest arguments is that the Authorship Question began only 150 years ago.

Those anachronistic romantics looked back at Shakespeare and just didn’t have the willpower or self-discipline to avoid indulging in the subjective fallacy that Shakespeare must have been just like them.

This argument is a central plank in Shapiro’s Contested Will (2010), and many people –not having been challenged to think otherwise and finding the argument a convenient way of rationalizing continued allegiance to the Stratfordian myth —  apparently believe it.

No doubt. The argument supplies a convenient coat of fresh paint to the tired cliche that “if Shakespeare wasn’t written by Shakespeare it was written by somebody else with the same name.”

But before we go too far down this road, we may wish to acquaint ourselves with the contents of Shake-Speares Sonnets (as they are titled), first published in 1609 but not widely available to readers until the late 18th century.

For example, let’s listen in on Sonnet 71:

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone. (71)

Orthodox Shakespeareans cannot explain why the author would warn against even “so much as my poor name” rehearsing. The theory that the authorship question is an anachronistic projection of the Romantics onto an early modern world lacking in subjectivity can be maintained only at the expense of treating the sonnets as fiction, as Shapiro insists we must do.

But look how the thought is extended in Sonnet 72:

O lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth (72)

Does that sound like a fiction to you? Why is this author making up a fiction that says “my name be buried where my body is”?

Is this  an illusion? How can we be reading something that by Shapiro’s own fiats can’t have existed — an authentic rendering of human subjectivity, somehow existing in the “wrong” century, according to the tradition of literary historians now represented so eloquently in Contested Will? Is the volume retro-dated by 300 hundred years?

Stephen Booth in his (in many ways) outstanding edition of the poems clarifies that this is an exhortation. The author is exhorting his readers to bury his name along with his body!

Hello!

The authorship question did not begin 150 years ago. It began sometime before 1609, when the sonnets were published — during the waning days of the reign of Elizabeth I, when the author was already lamenting the erasure of his name from history.

Last Will and Testament, Premiering November 28, 2011 at the Globe Theatre in London

The Shakespeare Authorship Trust, a British educational foundation dedicated to exploring the authorship question (including adherents of multiple views) has announced the premiere of Last Will and Testament, the 1604 Productions documentary film produced to accompany Anonymous.

The ninety minute documentary film “explores the evolution of the authorship question since Shakespeare’s time, with particular reference to William Shakspere of Stratford and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, though other candidates are discussed.”

Professors Stanley Wells and Jonathan Bate, both of whom were invited to appear at the premiere but apparently are not doing so, are featured on behalf of the orthodox view.

The beautifully shot documentary contains exclusive access to footage from Anonymous. According to the SAT announcement, 

At a time when the Shakespeare world is being rocked by the imminent appearance of Roland Emmerich’s feature film, Anonymous, as well as the publication of several books based on new research, including Richard Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy and Katherine Chiljan’s Shakespeare Suppressed, there comes the first major documentary on the authorship question for 22 years.

The timing could not be better, and we are very fortunate to have the film’s director Lisa Wilson with us to introduce the work and answer questions on it. (Lisa was also a consultant on Anonymous, and is a trustee of the SAT.)

Wilson will be joined by no fewer than seven scholars who took part in the documentary: Diana Price, author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Professor Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University in Baltimore, actors Sir Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave (pending availability), the Chairman of the SAT, Mark Rylance, Head of the School of Arts at Brunel University Dr. William Leahy, and Charles Beauclerk, author of Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom.

For further details of the event, please contact the Trust Fund.