oday’s saint (among others) is Thomas Becket, the subject of
T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
and Jean Anouilh’s Becket, the former
of which is a personal favorite and the latter of which we had to read in high
school. (There was this movie, you see….) He was also (sort of) the inspiration
for one of my favorite episodes in the Blackadder series. But I’m not (sad to
say) inspired by the subject myself, and therefore will have to cast about for
something unrelated to say.
Fortunately just such a subject is close at hand. Amanda Marcotte
replies (“
The unsavory motivations of the Shakespeare truthers”) to a
Newsweek
article I haven’t read that (she says) is “a surprisingly sympathetic piece
about Shakespeare truthers”—those raving loons that believe Francis Bacon or
Edward de Vere or Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays and poems attributed to
William Shakespeare, actor and theatre shareholder, of Stratford-on-Avon.
Raving loons is my characterization, by the way. Amanda
Marcotte finds its origin in a “knee-jerk respect for wealth and authority”
that is “fueled by an unsavory classism and hostility to bohemianism that
manifests in an unwillingness to accept that someone could develop as a great
poet without a formal education but merely by practicing through his work as a
writer and actor.” This certainly characterizes some noted writers on the
so-called authorship question—Thomas Looney, Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn and
their son, and no doubt others. These guys are champions of the seventeenth
earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, a bad poet (mediocre is much too kind) who is said by Francis Meres to have written plays,
and who was in fact a patron of writers of the age, including the famous and
influential John Lyly.
Personally I think it is a mercy that his plays have not
survived.
Some of his poems, unluckily, have. Here’s a sample:
The drone more honey sucks, that laboureth not at all,
Than doth the bee, to whose most pain least pleasure doth befall:
The gard'ner sows the seeds, whereof the flowers do grow,
And others yet do gather them, that took less pain I trow.
So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine,
And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine.
And here’s another:
If women could be fair and yet not fond,
Or that their love were firm not fickle, still,
I would not marvel that they make men bond,
By service long to purchase their good will;
But when I see how frail those creatures are,
I muse that men forget themselves so far.
The guy that wrote these lines was no Shakespeare. He could
have been the author of Sir Clyomon and
Sir Clamydes, or one of the plays of the era when rhymed and awkward verse
was all the rage, maybe, but not in the age of Kyd and Middleton and Webster.
I skip over the glaring fact that the guy died too soon to be
Shakespeare. Sources for Lear and The Tempest hadn’t even been published
when he died. The teacher Charlie Moore in Head
of the Class dismissed one of his student’s objections on that ground by
saying that it’s true only if you follow the conventional chronology—but that
conventional chronology is solidly based on dates of publication, entries in
the Stationers Register, datable allusions, source analysis, records of
performances, and so on and so forth. One nutjob Oxfordian had the earl writing
Sir Thomas More (a play to which
Shakespeare appears to have contributed part of a scene during a rewrite) in
1580—well before the 1587 edition of Holinshed actually used by its authors.
Another put The Winter’s Tale before
Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the novel
on which it was based.
There are plenty of legitimate literary mysteries out there—but
who wrote Shakespeare’s plays isn’t one of them. Robert Greene, or somebody
writing in his name, bitched about an actor (whom he referred to as Shake-scene)
who had dared to write his own plays, thus robbing his betters of a job. An
anonymous university writer (who obviously considered Shakespeare a
lightweight) lampooned his fellow-actors Will Kempe and Richard Burbage, having
Kempe say, “Few of the university men pen plays well. They smell too much of
that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of
Proserpina and Jupiter. Why! here's our fellow Shakspeare puts them all down;
aye, and Ben Jonson too.” The first folio of his plays refers to his Stratford
monument. And so on and so forth.
“It’s true” as
Ophelia Benson writes, “that it’s mysterious
how Shakespeare got to be Shakespeare, but you know what? It would be
no less mysterious if he were Edward
Vere or Elizabeth Tudor or John Dee or anyone else.” There’s the fact of it.
Occasionally a few people manage to write songs or poems or plays or books that
appeal to their own time. Out of this small group only a handful produce
anything that lasts beyond its moment, that continues to appeal to people out
of its immediate time and place. Even fewer from this group manage to keep
people entertained, interested, intrigued, or enthralled as the centuries go
by. There’s your mystery. Solve that one, if you can.
