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.

J. Thomas Looney: schoolteacher, scholar, and friend to Sigmund Freud and Leslie Howard.

In 1948 Columbia Professor O.J. Campbell, a much more formidable and substantive intellect than either Mr. Marche or Professor Shapiro, at long last reviewed J. Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified (1920) in the page of Harper’s.

It was an event of some importance.  How many books do you know that are “reviewed” with the aim to refute them twenty-eight years after-the-fact? But  the good professor from Columbia felt the need to castigate Looney for his apostasy, even if he was a bit late to the party and didn’t seem to understand what the fun was all about. There were to be no cakes or ale in Shakespeare.

Not having the advantage of playing for the team from the Birthplace Trust, Looney was never given the opportunity to reply in a widely known public forum like Harpers (a problem that Lewis Lapham, many years later, has gone out of his way to rectify).

Looney replied in the pages of the Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly:

I accuse him of setting [the case]  forth so flimsily, even grotesquely, that hardly anyone but an imbecile would believe in it if it rested on nothing more substantial…This is the kind of argumentation one associates with political manuevering rather than a serious quest for the truth on great issues and it makes one suspect that [Campbell] is not very easy in his own mind about the case.

Sixty years later, the words still ring true. Anyone with an ear for the shrill tones of an embattled orthodoxy that has run out of real arguments can detect between the lines of the tired rhetoric of Professor Shapiro and his allies, the same kind of  desperation — only to the cubed degree — to which Mr. Looney was responding in 1948.

Reviewing the history of the subsequent scholarship, in the writings of such independent scholars as Eva Turner Clarke, Charles Wisner Barrell, Dorothy Ogburn, or Charlton Ogburn, Jr. — to name only some of those from 1948 to 1984 — one can only wonder where professors like Shapiro have been all those years, and stand agape at how little they have learned.

Your Brain on Sonnet 76.

Don’t look now, but Shakespeare makes you smarter.  At least, that’s what the neuroscientists are saying.

This article from BigThink reports on research by Professor Philip Davis from the University of Liverpool’s School of English,  conducted with assistance from colleagues in neuroscience, showing that Shakespeare’s “creative mistakes…shift mental pathways and open possibilities” for what the brain can do.

In the words of BigThink’s Daniel Honan, this means the ways Shakespeare’s “deliberate syntactic errors” — like changing the part of speech of a word– can serve to excite, rather than confuse, readers.

Why doesn’t that surprise us?

I hope so, but you never know.  Here’s what it looks like:

Ecclus. 28.3-5, from the de Vere Bible: “He wil showe no mercie to a man wch is like himself: and will he aske forgiveness of his own sinnes?” Kindness the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This is of course the most obvious Old Testament precedent for the much more familiar part of the Lord’s prayer, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” (Matt. 6.14 or Luke 11.3-4)– and when one adds references to the thought as it appears in these New Testament passages, the idea’s prominence emerges from the shadowlands of Shakespeare’s bewildering conceptual and linguistic superfluity to become a characteristic of the bard’s thinking.

Such overt references to particular Bible verses, moreover, belong to a much larger pattern in the Shakespearean works devoted to considering the problem of Mercy, an idea noted in the margins of the Bible.

It was an idea he wanted to transmit.

For example, when he puts the concept in the mouth of Henry condemning the conspirators at Cambridge, he seems to have in mind a kind of double irony:

The mercy that was quick in us but late,

By your own counsel is suppress’d and kill’d.

You must not dare, for shame, to talk of mercy.

Henry’s reference to mercy being “by your own counsel…suppress’d and killed” refers to the fact that the conspirators, now begging for their lives,  had only a few lines earlier urged harsh punishment  for a man accused only of criticizing his rule.

As it turns out, the execution of the conspirators is only a kind of practice for greater glories to come. The man who began his career as king by exiling Falstaff will end up at Agincourt killing the prisoners — a violation of the rules of war every bit as ethically problematic as the French killing the “poys.”    Like Portia herself, he’s not really the one to give lectures about mercy.

The bard is twisting and turning this problem every which way — pointing to the concept that, in the case of mercy, handsome is as handsome does. There seems to be a warning about trusting people who talk too much about how merciful they are.

But then we turn to the usage of 2 Henry VI, where the Bible reference is put in the mouth of Lord Say, about to be executed with his aristocratic comrades, it has a different resonance. Say has all the words to provoke our sympathy.  He first appeals to the mob as his “countrymen,” and then offers a paraphrase of the marked passage from Ecclesiasticus:

Ah countrymen, if when you make your prayers

God should be so obdurate as yourselves,

How would it fare with your departed souls?

The citation is ultimately ironic, since Jack Cade (yes, the same Jack Cade who says “first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”) can’t hear Say’s point about the cycle of retribution.  Ecclesiasticus is futile; the heads go up on grisly pikes.

There’s another significant wrinkle to the story. I did not understand this when I wrote the Notes and Queries article, but now I do: the quoted extracts from 2 H. VI 4.7  are merely fragments of a larger conversation that is inflected in multiple ways by the Bible verses in question.

The question of the (no doubt) both literal and metaphoric weakness of Say’s flesh forms a dominant current from the start when Say volunteers: “These cheeks are pale with watching for your good.”  Naturally things go downhill from there, until a few lines later we have the exchange:

But.Why dost thou quiver, man?

Say. The palsy, not the fear, provokes me.

Cade. Nay, he nods at us; as who should say, “I’ll be even

With you”: I’ll see if his head will stand steadier on a

pole or no. Take him away and behead him.

The line “as who should say, ‘I’ll be even with you,’” occurring, as it does, less than twenty lines away in the same scene from the more overt reminiscences of the verse — and ending with Cade’s brutal “take him away” — suggests that Ecclus. 28.2-5 has helped to shape not just a particular line, but a whole philosophic discourse in the scene. Cade, in fact,  is enacting a parody of the marked Bible verses.

But then look what our author will do with this in Tempest.

Here those  Ecclesiasticus verses seem to have defined his concept of the troubled relationship between matter and spirit, between the fleshly magus Prospero and the airy Ariel —  the imagination personified.  Like de Vere himself –yes, in fact,  he described himself so — Prospero is  a former “Duke of Milan” and devotee of the arts. He’s too much of a humanist to compete in the new Machiavellian world of his brother Antonio.  Brute force was now to rule, and the idea that a man’s word was his pledge, was becoming an antiquated fardel preserved in wrappers of cultural mystification.

Ariel uses Ecclesiasticus 28 to offer Prospero a lecture on his own humanity:

Ariel. …your charm so strongly works them,

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

Prospero. Does thou think so, spirit?

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human.

Prosper. And mine shall.

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself

One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,

Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art?

(5.1.16-23; emphasis mine)

Prospero may have been an old man, but he sure was  a quick study. ‘)

The influence of Ecclesiasticus 28 on these verses became known to scholars via my 2009 Notes and Queries article.

The HuffPo Wishes you a Happy New Year. Now I feel all warm inside.

I’ve always wondered what it must feel like to be an important blogger writing for a celebrated and widely read publication like the Huffington Post, a publication I greatly admire.

Wouldn’t it feel  great to know that your words are actually influencing public perception, and that you have the opportunity to engage in informed and civil conversation with a wide range of respondents, including some who had very different ideas from your own?

Well, now I know the answer, at least in part.

In a recent Huff-Po commentary Howard Kissel  revisits the authorship question, fondly recalling how in an earlier article he had “chastised then Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for adhering to the cult that thinks Shakespeare’s plays were written by the 34th Earl of Oxford.”

Having –perhaps intentionally — established in that one sentence a rather diminished credibility in anything having to do with the study of  16th century literature by misidentifying the 17th earl of Oxford as the 34th (someone who never existed), Kissel goes on to wax eloquent at the Stratfordian game of assailing the messenger with various pejoratives.

According to Mr. Kissel’s informant, the charming “painter” Ms. Cornelia Foss, seated at dinner next to Mr. Kissel during one of his haute coutoure research junkets, anti-Stratfordians are engaging in “nihilism.”  What Ms. Foss’s credentials for making such a judgement are, we haven’t a clue and neither, apparently, does Mr. Kissel.

My brother is a charming painter who lives right near Stanford, in Palto Alto, Ca.  Can I put his opinion about Shakespeare in my Huffpo column?

Nor does either Mr. Kissel or Ms. Foss enlighten us about why this particular label, nihilism,  applies.  Reason?  Ms. Foss seems to regard nihilism as the antithesis of genius.

Hmmm?  How did we get there? Well, we said “these people are bad because of x” — and they are “also bad because of not- y, which looks like an antithesis of x but really isn’t.”  Huh?  This may not be nihilism, but trust me, its not genius.  Even I can figure that out.

Not that the bard ever became a nihilist – but the bard saw the things a nihilist sees without endorsing nihilism as the solution.  What is that solution according to Mr. Kissel?   There’s apparently no need for any. As the bard says, “a stick is easily found to beat a dog,” and “nihilism” is always a  handy stick, so Mr. Kissel made use of it.

But this is only the first chapter. Harken to the remainder.

In a series of three carefully written comments on Mr. Kissel’s  blog, I responded to this characterization from the perspective of someone who has studied the history of the debate for nearly twenty years.

I wasn’t nice. I don’t believe in being nice to people who call me names while at the same time failing to get even the most basic facts about their story correct.  I had to write three comments because the HuffPo, probably quite appropriately, limits comment length.

Within the length constraints I believe I even ventured to answer some of Mr. Kissel’s more extravagant declamations in logic, chronology, and style  – his words to the effect that it is of course impossible to even consider the idea of Oxford’s authorship since we are so undeviatingly certain that several of the plays were written after he died.

How do we know this?  That’s philosophy, and Mr. Kissel does music. Go ask a philosopher or an English professor.

Now, there is a significant ideology which attaches to the privilege of writing comments on internet publications.  Not infrequently Internet writers, like Huffpo’s  Mr. Kissel, are rather informal about the facts. Those who take their craft seriously, and abide by standards of professional conduct appropriate to their calling as journalists, therefore appreciate the value-added nature of any comments section.

“On any given story,” says Minnesota Public Radio’s Michael Skoler, “there’s someone in the audience who knows more about it than we do. Our goal should be to tap into that expertise.”

Not at HuffPo, at least not on articles written by the inimitable Mr. Kissel on the subject of Shakespeare.

In this case, Kissel deleted all my comments, which objected to his promotion of what Richmond Crinkley, writing in the Shakespeare Quarterly in 1985, referred to as the “bizarre mutant racism” on which Shakespearean orthodoxy seems to predicate its existence — Crinkley’s words and point, in the SQ, 1985 — not mine.

Especially in view of the industrious scrubbers employed to keep Mr. Kissel’s blog acceptable to adults, Kissel’s article is a pretty good illustration of what Crinkley was talking about. Neither he, nor his informant, knows me or (I suspect) any other Oxfordian from Adam (or Eve). Yet all of us can summarily be deported into the journalist’s own private little  Gulag.

“Anti-Stratfordians,” wrote Crinkley summarizing the ideology at play here, which was far more prevalent at the Folger then than it is today,   are “lesser breeds before the law.”

Perhaps more importantly, I also noticed that Kissel had a problem distinguishing between comments that are “hostile” and those that are well-informed but happen to contradict the assumptions of the original writer.

Comment deletion always plays a useful role in such a circumstance.  If you delete enough comments you can always substantiate the HuffPo Happy New Year’s  conclusion that Justice Stevens  (along with et alia ad infinitum, yours truly included) is not only a “cultist” but also a “nihilist.” This, to Mr. Kissel, is “memorable.”

Fine. Whatever. I’m a nihilist and Mr. Kissel is the sort of guy who thinks that it improves his resumé to boast about having “chastised” a Supreme Court Justice for reading books on a subject about which Mr. Kissel himself knows almost exactly nothing.

My, the carefree life of an internet journalist.  Where do I apply?

Rhys Ifans as De Vere.

Contrary to the prevailing trends within the Shakespearean industry, it seems to me that Shakespeare, like the Duke in Measure for Measure, must have been one who “above all other strifes contended especially to know himself.”   Such a view of Shakespeare as a man of accumulating wisdom and self-awareness, if it is not impossible within an orthodox paradigm of authorship, is at least alien to its usual construction, which seems largely to consist of what Keats called an “irritable searching after fact” coupled with various avoidance mechanisms to prevent considering any more rational possibilities.

Such a perspective may help us to more fully comprehend the the vexing problem of Shakespeare’s creativity.  For there is no question, whatever some of our savants insist, that the romantics had a particular affinity with Shakespeare that had not previously been experienced, and probably has not been since.

As is well known, before the romantics, Fletcher and Beaumont or Jonson would by popular acclaim have been the most accomplished dramatists. The full appreciation of the Romantics had grown over the previous century, after Rowe wrote the first “life” to accompany his 1709 edition of the works; by 1769, Garrick had established the foundations of today’s Stratford-Upon-Avon tourist industry, and Shakespeare was on his way to being liberated from the neo-classical assumptions of nearly two previous centuries.

The question is not, as some have posed it, that there is an affinity between the romantics and the bard, but why?  I’m sure this topic has been written on by somebody, but for the most part leading commentators seem to just ignore the problem.  I think the answer is probably pretty simple. I suggest that Shakespeare was a romantic living in a different century. I started to write “the wrong century” and then realized that its not that Shakespeare’s romanticism was at the wrong time, but that it was different from the 19th century standard.

The literary structures around Shakespeare were mostly medieval or neo-classical.*  So his literary variations remain more closely tied to the traditions of those two literary ideograms than did the poetics of Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. He is still attuned to the power of number.  They saw further down the trail he  had already blazed for them, into the possibilities of human subjectivity.

But if that is so, then the comfortable problem remains that we seem attached to a Shakespeare who just wrote a bunch of stuff, collected his paycheck, and went home to the sheep-shearing.  How can we reconcile this child of nature with the artistic implications of the former portrait?

Let us suppose that we try a thought experiment. This is especially recommended for any Stratfordians who may be reading. Suppose that the man who wrote the Shakespearean plays starting publishing his work under names other than his own at about the age of Mamilius? That he grew up as one who “takes the pain to pen the book” but “reaps not the gift of goodly golden muse,” as he would once put the dilemma under his own name.

How, I wonder, might that influence his psychology?  He was a man surrounded by the voices of characters whom he could not suppress. And, his work was anonymous. He was alone.

What might such a man discover?

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

* n.b. 10/7/11: Of course, in a strictly technical sense, “neo-classical” refers to a period spanning approximately a century (or more) after the bard, the age during which Jonson was venerated.  But I am using the term more broadly to refer to the entire literary/cultural response to the recovery of antiquity that began during the 1490s in Florence and continued to exert a powerful influence for at least another two hundred years in various permutations — bringing with it in England at least a great of the high literary traditions of Chaucer or Skelton. I have come to think that the differences between Shakespeare and Jonson in this regard have been, like reports of Twain’s demise, unduly exaggerated.  In this sense, “neo-classical” really continues up until the decisive event of Wordsworth’s redefined poetry in Lyrical Ballads (1800) as  ”the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Honest Ben.

Next to the bard, I like Ben Jonson best.  There is no writer in the English language, even Shakespeare, quite as logical and lyrical at the same time as Ben Jonson.

And no writer, I believe, has been more misunderstood than he.

We call him “Ben” and pat him on the shoulder to assure ourselves that we understand everything he’s up to, since we’re sure it can’t really be anything of any consequence, and certainly should not be hard to understand….

Sure, Ben Jonson is difficult. I can understand the impulse to greet him with a “hail old fellow, well met, see you next time.”  Its much easier than enduring the humiliation of admitting that a great deal of what Ben says makes no sense at all to us and might as well be written in Martian.

So, this time around, I’m finding the poems yield greatest fruit of comprehension. I still can’t read Bartholomew Faire without feeling like a three year old in a Gothic cathedral.

Ben was a deep one, that’s for sure.

Exactly who we’re dealing with here became even clearer to me today  reading “A Fit of Rime against Rime” from The Vnder-wood. Here are the first few stanzas:

Rime, the rack of finest wits

That expresseth but by fits,

True Conceipt,

Spoyling senses of their Treasure,

Cosening Judgement with a measure,

But false weight.

Wresting words, from their true calling;

Propping Verse for feare of falling

To the ground.

Joynting Syllables, drowning letters,

Fastening Vowells, as with fetters

They were bound.

Soone as lazie thou wert knowne,

All good Poëtrie hence was flowne

And Art banish’d.

The stanzaic structure places great emphasis on the third short line, and in effect those lines alone can tell the progression of Jonson’s narrative structure, beginning from the power of the poetic art to express “True Conceipt,”  through becoming a “false weight” in virtue of spoiled senses, all the way in descent into bondage and banishment. And the very next stanza says:

For a thousand yeares together

All Parnassus Greene did wither,

And wit vanish’d.

The consequence, in other words, of the process related in Jonson’s poem was an age, lasting a thousand years, during which time  ”wit vanished.”

I hope I am not alone in expressing the dismay that a thousand years is a long time to go without a joke, and wondering how Jonson could ever even have thought of such a thing, let alone made it a theme for one of his rather more curious literary productions.

At this point in fact I suppose the reader of Jonson’s poem has two choices.

One of these I’ll call the default Stratfordian option.

Its possible that when Jonson wrote this, he was sitting on the beach with his sunscreen on in Cuba somewhere sipping a Pina Colada and doing his best to think of how to write a good poem, one designed to hoodwink his readers into the idea that he is actually miserable.

When Stratfordians are asked a difficult question about  the genesis of a particular literary work this seems to be at least one of their favorite conventions of  answering.

And a good one it is. The beach. The Pina Colada….No papers to grade….Surely  no one can possibly object to that, could they?

Well, there is the other choice. Maybe Jonson was writing about something that he actually felt he had experienced.

Is that really such a bizarre supposition that anyone who asks the question should be denied professional advancement because the question itself is proof that the Prof. isn’t “carrying his weight” in the battle against the monstrous adversary?

Have we determined by divine inspiration, handed down through the elect who are responsible for educating the public, that not only Shakespeare, but also Ben Jonson, lived in an age so dull and backward that it doesn’t even deserve our serious intellectual consideration?

Is authority sanctioning us to steadfastly ignore explicit statements like Jonson’s poem, about the circumstances of his own age for writers, simply because we are afraid that if we didn’t ignore them, we might  come to understand a rather different Ben Jonson than the one we all thought we’d come to love and know within the “big tent” of Stratfordiana.

Are we afraid of coming to the far end of Jonson’s fit against rhyme with a better understanding of the countryside over which we had “erred” with “honest Ben?”

He that first invented thee,

May his joynts tormented bee,

Cramp’d for ever;

Still may syllables jarre with time,

Stil may reason war with rime,

Resting never.

May his Sense, when it would meet

The cold tumor in his feet,

Grow unsounder.

And his title be long foole,

That in reasoning such a Schoole,

Was the founder.

John Keats (1795-1821), poet and Shakespeare scholar.

“Shakespeare lived a life of allegory. His works are comments on it.”

These words by John Keats, perhaps the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, distill the essence of authentic Shakespearean biography — as distinct from the seemingly never-ending parade of sham biographies inflicted year after year on an unsuspecting public.

In 21^st century literary circles it is no longer fashionable to speak of essences. But this book does have an essence – even, especially, a quintessence – that fifth part of what is essential, the constituting DNA of life, from which everything that is worth saying owes its genesis and germination.

In 16th century alchemy and neo-Platonism — the philosophy of Shakespeare’s own age —  the  quintessence of a substance could be separated from impurities by chemical means through distillation to reveal the concealed but “divine signatures impressed on earthly things by the Creator for their proper use” (Debus 4).

Shakespeare lived a life of allegory.

His works – down to the tiniest particles of meaning, the letters that make up words, like sequences of amino acids on the double helix of life –  are comments on it. Macbeth felt that life was a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but Macbeth is not Shakespeare; in Shakespeare every dust mote signifies, every exclamation echoes to the reverberate hills.  He signed his works.

The only unanswered question is: are we human enough to hear?

There is an old tradition, going back even before Keats, that Shakespeare was a magician.

He was. But like Prospero in the concluding scene of his Tempest, he was a magician caged within the confines of his own magic, shipwrecked and alone, unable to remove the spell of his own devising, but left to solicit forgiveness and redemption from comprehending readers.

Divided within himself, he transformed his own alienation into the wellspring of his art. On the one hand, he followed the admonition to self-sacrifice so explicitly inscribed in Matthew 6.1-4, underlined in his Geneva Bible: “when you give your alms, do not blow your trumpet in the marketplace.”  But, he was also, in the prophetic words of Walt Whitman,  a “wolfish Earl”  one of those with a “towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance.” Could he follow Christ’s path?

Figure One: Matt 6.1-3, underlined in red in the de Vere Geneva STC 2106: "When you give your alms, don't blow your trumpet."

We will probably never know when he marked those verses in his Geneva Bible; that he did so is beyond dispute, just as it is beyond dispute that his contemporaries regarded those verses as the spiritual justification for completion of great works in secret, read them as Christ’s injunction to anonymity (See Stritmatter, 2001, 23-30, 217).

If you are an average literate reader of the 21^st century you are now experiencing doubt.

Chances are, you have been told that it is ridiculous to think that Shakespeare was anyone but Shakespeare. You thought that Bill Bryson, Stephen Greenblatt, and James Shapiro had laid all this nonsense to rest. You may even have heard Birthplace Trust Fund promoter Stanley Wells declare that “Shakespeare of Stratford wins the debate.”

You do not, yet, count yourself among the “unsatisfied,” do not feel compelled to share Henry James’ conviction that Shakespeare is “the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.”

Stay with me for a moment longer.

Try an experiment. Imagine, if you can (even against your “better judgment” if you must)  that what the Oxfordians have said is true.  Imagine that “Shakespeare,” aka Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604),  following the admonition of Matt. 6.1-4 (among other reasons), hid himself and allowed his works to appear under the “noted weed” (Sonnet 76) of a pseudonym and a literary “front.”

What kind of psychology does that dilemma produce? If you were that man, how would you feel, what would you do?

That’s right.

Something there is, says Robert Frost, that does not love a wall.

And something there is in “Shakespeare” that does not want to be concealed, a part that wants, nay yearns to be known, a small still voice inside that protests with every fiber of his literary being against the “loss of his good name”:

And this desire, to be known by the reader, is the secret spring of the Shakespearean vernacular, the language and mythos Shakespeare created for himself, about himself.

We may commence consideration of this claim by considering a recent article by independent British Columbia scholar  Nina Green, which appeared in the 2010 issue of Brief Chronicles.

Green begins from a puzzle left us by Shakespeare. Noticing that the bard  at least three times, in three different plays (Titus Andronicus, 4; I Henry IV, 2; Merry Wives, 4) alludes to the same page and passage in Lily’s Latin Grammar, perhaps the most generally known book (except the Bible) in early modern England, Green wonders, why?

Figure Two: "Of the Noune" from Lily's Latin Grammar: content from this exact page is alluded to three times in Shakespeare.

Was the bard trying to tell us something, using Lily as his trusted confidante?

If so, was there some method to his madness?  Had he some precedent or guide?

What might we find, on that thrice-marked page of Lily’s grammar, that he  wanted us to know?

Perhaps – Green does not say this herself but it seems to me a reasonable speculation – the bard was following a clue from his favorite source, the book to which, above all others save the Bible, he turned over and over  for wisdom and literary sustenance: Ovid.

Perhaps the bard was imitating a  motif which Leonard Barkan –former Bliss Snyder Professor of English and Art History at Northwestern University and now Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton — identifies as the connecting link between Shakespeare and Ovid,

the first signal that Shakespeare knew his Ovid at first hand, and that he read The Metamorphoses with a deliberate and original purpose.

This “first signal” and  connecting link, says Barkan, is the myth of Philomela,[i] the natural “point of entry to the powerful relation between [the] two geniuses,” Ovid and Shakespeare.

Figure Thee: The rape of Philomela by Tereus. Engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses Book VI, 519-562. Fol. 80 r, image 6.

In that Ovidian myth, the rapist Tereus cuts out his victim’s  tongue  to prevent her from naming him; the inventive Philomela, tongueless,  instead weaves a tapestry to identify and accuse him.

In so doing she supplies a model for the literary figure, well known to modern literary critics but first named by Ovid, in another passage[ii] of his Metamorphoses, of intertextuality. Intertextuality is the study of the conversations which literary texts have with one another — for example the way Shakespeare makes deliberate use of such Bible passages as Ezekiel 16.49 in order to supply a context and commentary for Hamlet or Joyce’s Ulysses retells The Odyssey.

In his comparative analysis of Titus Andronicus and the Philomela motif, Barkan notes that both stories involve “escalating efforts to stifle communication” and he argues that  ”The [Philomela] story attracts Shakespeare because it is centrally concerned with communication.”[iii]

Concluding that this Ovidian motif forms the deepest and most potent strata of Shakespeare’s involvement with Ovid, Barkan leads us directly to the center of our shared question:

Titus takes us back to the darkest side of Ovid’s poem…[but]….it is not lessons in perversity that Ovid offers Shakespeare – there are many other classical sources for that – but a series of paradigms for the act of communication. Many of the great figures of Ovid’s poem define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages….Narcissus, [like Philomela], must discover a language of paradox that suits his situation….Shakespeare appears to be still struggling [in Lucrece and Cymbeline] with the problems of Philomela, the juxtaposition of mutilation and communication.[iv]

“Inventing new languages?”

Appropriating “a series of paradigms for the act of communication” in order to “struggle with….the juxtaposition of mutilation and communication”?

Surely this is not the Shakespeare you studied in 9th grade.

We may wonder:  just as Shakespeare’s characters are forced by circumstance to follow Ovid’s exemplars to “define themselves by their struggle to invent new languages” and “discover a language of paradox that suits their situations,” is Shakespeare himself  following the same Ovidian template? Could such a communicative strategy be the concealed key to otherwise obscure passages or subterranean connections to third party texts like Lily’s Grammar?

Let us see.

Here is the first passage, from I Henry IV, alluding to Lily’s discussion of nouns:

Figure Four shows a detail of the passage from which the line “homo is a common name to all men” is drawn:

Figure Four (After Green, 2010): Close up from Lily's discussion of nouns, showing phrase "Eduardus is my propre name."

In Merry Wives of Windsor in Act 4, scene 1 the bard also draws  from the same page while Sir Hugh Evans tutors “William” during his Latin lesson. Evans introduces the lesson by asking, “How many numbers is in nouns?”  The answer is found in Lily’s discussion of nouns:  ”in nouns be two numbers,” immediately following the above excerpt.

Neophytes may have some difficulty appreciating how funny this is, but it is, in fact, hilarious: William is getting his Latin lesson from the page  in Lily, used to  illustrate the definition of a “noune substantive,” which announces the name of the real author.  In renaissance philosophy, a substantive is distinguished from an accident —  it describes  a real thing, while an accident is merely a quality of a thing and has no independent existence. Reading Lily and Merry Wives together, we might say that the message is that William is an unlettered accident — an adjective — of Edward.

The jest may even remind some of Thomas Nashe’s remark to Gabriel Harvey to watch out for de Vere: “he may be a little man, but he hath one of the best wits in England.”

Under the revivifying influence of the bard’s literary magic, Lily’s book is filled with a new signifying presence, speaking what cannot be said in propria persona.

It is the first grammar lesson for a post-Stratfordian epistemology, a strand from the double helix: Eduardus is my propre name.

Shapiro “confuses imagination with fantasy……”