THE CASE AGAINST SHAKESPEARE, PART TWO:
THE PRIMARY LOONEATIONS
The anti-Stratfordians’ main tactic against Shakespeare is to attack his known biographical record for not containing the data that the biography of a person considered The World’s Greatest Author, and recognized as such from the age of five, would have had to have had. I call this tactic Looneyism after J. Thomas Looney, the man I consider its greatest exemplar (though Baconians and others accomplished prodigious feats with it long before he). Primary Looneyism consists of making up one highly subjective list of the qualities The True Author would have had to have had, making sure that the rustic from Stratford lacked them–as far as they were concerned. Using this method, the Looneators—as we shall see—triumphantly show that such things as the man from Stratford’s lack of lengthy formal education, noble blood and record of wide travel outside England prove he could not possibly have been The True Author.
A supporting variation (Secondary Looneyism) consists of compiling a highly subjective summary of how the True Author would have had to have been treated by his contemporaries, and then showing how unlike the way the Stratford man was treated by his contemporaries that was. By this method, Looneators triumphantly point out such things as no one’s having published an elegy for Shakespeare of Stratford within a year of his death (so far as we know), or saved letters from him as proof that he was no writer.
The Primary Looneations
I’ve been able to isolate 13 significant primary looneations (i.e., results of primary looneyism) from the anti-Stratfordians’ writings. I may be scolded for leaving out some of their favorites. All I can say is that I only have so much room, and have sincerely tried to list the most important ones. They are: (1) looneations of working life; (2) looneations of private life; (3) looneations of class and (4) looneations of education.
(1) Looneations of Working Life
There are four instances of Shakespeare of Stratford’s not acting in his working life as he would have had he been the poet Shakespeare, according to the anti-Stratfordians:
(a) He did not write certain poems he ought to have, say they: we have no love poems to his wife from him, nor any poems to Queen Elizabeth, even so much as an elegy when she died, “such as,” in the words of Neo-Ogburnian Paul Crowley, “poured from the pens of his fellow poets.”
To this, as to so many of the looneations, I have to say, “So what?” So what if he didn’t write poems to his wife? Assuming he didn’t, and many believe that Sonnet 145, which puns on “hate away” for “Hathaway” (which was commonly pronounced Hat uh way), and “and” for “Ann,” was indeed written for his wife—not to mention the more than small possibility that any poems he wrote to Ann have been lost by now. Or maybe she wasn’t big on poetry. Maybe he was too drained by writing verse calculated to win a patron or entertain theatre-goers to write many, or any, household poems. Maybe he fell out of love with her (though his returning to spend his last years with her suggests otherwise).
The same kind of reasoning can be used to show why, “So what?” is a proper response to our not having any poems from Shakespeare to or about the queen (although she is eulogized in Henry VIII, and one sonnet may refer to her.)
The great problem for anti-Stratfordians is understanding that life is variable and complex, and no individual life follows any set rules however carefully worked out by some theorist, even one without the ax to grind that they have.
(b) He did not mention Stratford, or its surroundings or inhabitants, or his day-to-day life experiences there, in the plays he supposedly wrote–according to anti-Stratfordian research.
To this my retort is again, so what? Shakespeare was writing about long-ago history, or stories taking place in faraway lands, and he was writing for a London, not a Stratford-upon-Avon, audience. But the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew does mention several towns and real people from the area right around Stratford in Warwickshire: Scene I, line 18 says, “…I, Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton-Heath” (Barton-on-the-Heath—for which “Burton-Heath” is a common variant—is a village sixteen miles from Stratford); and in lines 21-22, we have, “Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot…” (Wilmncote—or “Wincot,” in one 16th-century spelling—is a village four miles from Stratford where Hackets are known to have lived in the 1590’s). There’s also the possible reference to Richard Field, once of Stratford, as Richard Du Champ, in Cymbeline, using the French for “field.”
(c) He did not capture a patron the way so many writers of his time did—or so the anti-Stratfordians claim.
This is a vexed question. In the first place, there is strong evidence that Shakespeare did win patronage from Southampton. We know for a fact that he fished for such patronage with the dedication to Venus and Adonis, which I will give again:
To the Right Honourable Henry Wriosthley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation. Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.
In his dedication to The Rape of Lucrece a year later, he says:
To the Right Honourable Henry Wriosthley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater my duty would show greater: meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness, Your Lordship’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.
For me, what we learn from the second dedication is that Shakespeare believed he had ‘the warrant’ of Southampton’s ‘honorable disposition’—he knows Southampton is honorable and therefore will accept Shakespeare’s “pamphlet.” One way he could know this is that Southampton accepted his previous poem. We can be fairly sure this was the case because now Shakespeare is writing a second poem for him, as he said he would not if the first had not been well-received.
That Southampton accepted the first but did not reward Shakespeare in money for it is possible but why would Shakespeare waste a second poem on him had that been the case? Why, too, would Southampton, a patron of poetry, not have patronized the writer of such a good one as Venus and Adonis?
Moreover, the second dedication’s words and tone strongly suggest a change in the relationship between poet and dedicatee. In the Venus and Adonis dedication Shakespeare spent most of his text apologizing for his poem, obviously unsure how it would go over with Southampton. In his second dedication, a year later, he hardly mentions the poem it prefaces. From its very start, he overflows with love and good wishes for the earl. He also leaves off the formal “Right Honourable” the body of the other dedication began with, which surely indicates a lessening of distance between the poet and the aristocrat, however subtle. In short, the second dedication is much more personal and friendly than the first. Too much so to seriously believe Venus and Adonis was not taken well by Southampton–well enough for Suouthampton to have become Shakespeare’s patron.
Nor can it be said that this view is entirely unsupported since there is the anecdotal evidence from Aubrey that Will got two thousand pounds from Southampton. There is also the coincidence that it was within two or three years of the two narrative poems that Shakespeare began to seem affluent, helping his father get a coat of arms and buying the second most expensive house in his hometown.
At the same time, there is little hard evidence that any other specific writer of the time won patronage for a literary work, though we know many must have. Diana Price, researching 25 literary figures of the time, found only one piece of evidence that explicitly indicated any of them got money from a patron for a literary work.
She did find evidence that 16 of them won patronage, but that evidence, to one not doing all she could to deny Shakespeare credit for his achievements, is no better for them than Shakespeare’s dedications are for him. The record Price uses to claim that Spenser had a patron, for instance, is a dedication of Spenser’s in which he only speaks of the “infinite debt” he owes Sir Walter Raleigh for “singular favours and sundry good turns.” That Spenser does not connect these “favours” and “good turns” to his poetry the way Shakespeare connects Southampton’s warrant to his, is suggestive, too.
Another Pricean piece of evidence for a writer’s having a patron is just a letter by Gabriel Harvey asking Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, for help in getting an academic position.
In the second place, it is foolish to compare Shakespeare’s writing career to others of his time. Why? Because Shakespeare was both actor in and writer for a very successful acting company, in which he was a partner, which made his situation as a writer unique in his time. For one thing, it gave him greater security than almost all other writers. That meant he did not need a patron after the early nineties. So even if it could be shown that neither Southampton nor anyone else became Shakespeare’s patron, it could cause only a fanatic predisposed to do so to doubt he was a writer.
(d) He did not protest the piracy of his plays
Of course, we don’t know which, if any, of Shakespeare’s published plays were actually pirated, though I feel sure at least a few were. Sir George Greenwood suggested that Shakespeare, had he been our litigious bumpkin from Stratford, would have tried to obtain justice had a play of his been pirated. But Greenwood also conceded that there was no record of any author of the time’s ever having successfully stopped something he had written from being pirated. He shrugged off that as due to most of the pertinent official documents having been lost.
In that case, though, how can he be sure Shakespeare did not go to court? But likelihood of any author of the time’s going to court is, according to Irvin Matus, very low. In his Shakespeare In Fact, Matus says, “There is no evidence there was in Shakespeare’s lifetime any concept of author’s rights. How a stationer came by the work he was entering, whether or not his copy was corrupt, whether or not the author wished it to be published, had been compensated for it, or could in any way be damaged by its publication, were not questions asked by the wardens of the company when licensing a work.”
By “the company,” incidentally, Matus means the stationers’ company, which had total control over the (legal) publication of books. “What Greenwood found impossible to believe—’that a publisher might, without let or hindrance, publish a stolen manuscript if only he had obtained the license of the Stationers Company for such publication’” Matus goes on to say, “turns out to be precisely the case.” He then quotes from the poet and pamphleteer George Wither’s Schollers Purgatory (1624):
Yea, by the laws and orders of their corporation, they can and do settle upon the particular members thereof a perpetual interest in such books as are registered by them at their Hall, in their [the printers and booksellers] several names: and are secured in taking the full benefit of those books, better than any author can be by virtue of the King’s grant, notwith-standing their first copies were purloined from the true owner, or imprinted without his leave.
Matus follows this with several pages of supporting evidence and commentary thereon, including a quotation from the preface Thomas Heywood wrote to a play he had published long after it had been pirated. In it, Heywood declared that he was now presenting the play as it was meant to be read, not in the mangled form that the pirates had published it in. He, like Shakespeare, was powerless to do anything about the earlier piracy. Aside from all that, it is absurd to believe that Shakespeare necessarily would have lept to the law if a play of his had been pirated. Maybe he didn’t have time to. More likely, it would have been up to the company of players of which he was a member, which would have owned his plays.
A question now occurs to me. If, as the anti-Stratfordians contend, Shakespeare’s plays were pirated because The True Author, not wanting his part in them known, couldn’t prevent it (through some behind-the-scenes pressure, or even violence, and it is a matter of record that Oxford, for one, had street-fighting ruffians in his employ; he also supposedly had backers in high places), why weren’t more of “his plays” pirated? Why wasn’t Twelfth Night pirated? Or the unpublished Comedy of Errors? Or Macbeth? Surely they’d have sold well.
Be that as it may, a portion of Shakespeare’s plays were printed, and some were probably pirated editions (as Heminges and Condell suggest in one of their two prefaces to The First Folio). Other plays, such as As You Like It, were merely registered for publication but never printed. This was a way of keeping others from printing unauthorized editions of a book. After James I assumed the throne, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men, few of the Shakespeare plays were published, with or without their owners’ permission. Sane scholars assume that this was because the players now had the clout generally to prevent such publication. Oxfordians believe, however, that the death of Oxford, a year or so before Elizabeth died, had something to do with it, but I can’t follow their reasoning well enough to try to explain it here.
(2) Looneations of Private Life
The previous looneations are what are missing from Shakespeare of Stratford’s alleged writing career, according to the anti-Stratfordians, but should not have been; the next three looneations have to do with what was inexplicably missing from his day-to-day life that could not have been missing had he been the World’s Greatest Writer, and recognized as such from the age of five. Hence, we have no record of:
(e) personal effects of the kind proper to a writer, such as manuscripts, letters and books.
The absence of manuscripts might be mildly odd if it weren’t that almost no writer of the time left behind any manuscripts. According to the very biased Diana Price, surveying her group of twenty-five men, including Shakespeare, we have no manuscript from Jonson but a masque; we have just a Latin verse written while in Cambridge from Nashe; from Massinger we have an autograph copy of one play; Gabriel Harvey left some verses; Daniel left portions of a poem; Peele left one manuscript of a poem; William Drummond left behind one sonnet; Anthony Mundy contributed to Sir Thomas More, the manuscript of which has come down to us; Middleton left behind one play in manuscript as did Heywood; from Greene, Lodge, Dekker, Lyly, even Spenser, Drayton, Chapman, Marston, Watson, Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Kyd, Webster: no manuscripts of any kind.
In short, considerably less than half of these men, by Price’s reckoning, left behind any kind of literary manuscript, and only one left behind more than one literary manuscript! And from all the dramatists of the time, we seem to have only three or four entire manuscripts of plays. How, then, can any sane person think it at all noteworthy that we have none from Shakespeare?
And many scholars think we do have one from him: a portion of Sir Thomas More. Charles Boyce, in Shakespeare A to Z, reflects the scholarly consensus about this work: “Play attributed in part to Shakespeare. Sir Thomas More presents episodes from the life of Thomas More, a Catholic martyr who was executed by King Henry VIII for his refusal to accept the English Reformation. It was probably written around 1593 or 1600 (scholarly opinions differ) for the Admiral’s Men. The manuscript of Sir Thomas More, which was assembled around 1595 (or 1603), is mostly in the handwriting of Anthony Munday, but with additions in five different hands, one of which—known as ‘Hand D’ and consisting of three pages of script comprising one scene of 147 lines, in which More subdues a riot with a moving oration—is generally accepted as Shakespeare’s. If so, this is the only surviving sample of his handwriting aside from the six famous signatures.
“That this is Shakespeare’s composition is demonstrated through several lines of evidence. First, the handwriting is very like that of the playwright’s six known signatures. Further, peculiar spellings—such as “scilens” for “silence”—occur both in Hand D’s pages and in editions of Shakespeare’s plays that are known to derive from the author’s foul papers (manuscripts in his hand). Perhaps most tellingly, the imagery used in Hand D’s text resembles Shakespeare’s, especially in lines that are very similar to passages in both Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida. Lastly, the political ideas expressed in Hand D’s scene agree with what we know of Shakespeare’s thinking, for they demonstrate a respect for social hierarchy combined with sympathy for the common people and stress the malleability of the commoners through oratory.
“The odd manuscript of Sir Thomas More was the result of government censorship; apparently, the play was orignally submitted to Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, who refused to permit its performance without major revisions. Accordingly, several pages were torn from the original manuscript and replaced with others.”
Again, though, even if Shakespeare had nothing to do with the Hand D (and no one has found another writer whose handwriting matches it as well as his–although some feebly argue that the handwriting was that of some scribe’s, a scribe who made a number of unscribelike cross-outs and revisions as he wrote), and we have absolutely no manuscripts from him, why should anyone be shocked? Anyone, that is, who knows, for instance, how neglected so many of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manuscripts were after his death, despite his having zillions of sons who, as composers themselves, should have had some interest in preserving their father’s work.
As for letters by the writers of the time, they are less rare than play manuscripts—still, even Diana Price found that just fourteen of her sample of 25 men left posterity any letters, and most of them left only one or two. So what, then, if Shakespeare was one of the eleven who left behind none? Nor, really, would it have been any big deal had he written no letters (as opposed to leaving behind some). Some people hate writing letters, especially some who have to write for a living.
Then there is the matter of his books. His will mentions none, but Francis Bacon’s will, among the wills of more than a few other writers of the time, likewise mentions none. Shakespeare’s will does mention “household goods,” which could have included books, however, and an inventory was originally attached to his will which was lost but may well have mentioned his books, if he had not given them away by then.
A final missing personal effect ought to be mentioned in this section, too, although it is quite minor. It is Shakespeare of Stratford’s not leaving behind any record of the shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres that Shakespeare the actor was known to have owned. Those shares also fail to turn up in the records of any of his heirs. If this were the case with anyone other than Shakespeare, and being considered by anyone other than a crank, the conclusion would be that he sold these shares before he died. Exactly what the anti-Stratfordians make of it, I don’t really know—except that they consider it suspicious.
(f) We have no record of Shakespeare’s insuring that his children could read, or of his horror that his daughter Judith (apparently) could only sign her name with a mark. Anti-Stratfordians simply can’t believe a Great Writer could allow any of his children to grow up illiterate–or, for that matter, put up with an illiterate wife, as his may have been. The main problem with this is the obvious fact that a person’s ability to write poetry and plays is dependent only on his own literacy, not that of anyone else.
A second problem with it is, of course, is that it takes all kinds, something beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of anti-Stratfordians. Given that Shakespeare was a world-class writer, it does not automatically follow that he thought literacy the most important quality possible. In my time, the world-class basketball player, Bill Russell, referred to his profession as “grown-ups playing a child’s game in their underwear.” Shakespeare may even have abominated writing, but done it anyway.
Absurd? Maybe. But not impossible. There are numerous better possible explanations: (1) his girls were resistant to formal education (as he probably was); (2) he didn’t believe in the education of females; (3) his wife preferred that her daughters stay in the house helping her than go to school; (4) his daughters lacked academic ability; (5) Shakespeare hated school so much that he kept his daughters from repeating his bad experiences; (6) his father or mother or wife saw how badly Shakespeare turned out due to formal education (he became a disreputable actor) and did all they could to prevent the same kind of thing from happening to his daughters; (7) the preliminary dame schools where writing was taught would not admit the girls because of their father’s profession; (8) Shakespeare had a weird idea of proper education, thinking he could do better with his girls than a school could by simply reading the Bible to them, and he was wrong; (9) the girls loved school but misbehaved so much at home that Anne kept them away from school as punishment; (10) the girls feared that if they learned to read and write, boys would be afraid of them, so they didn’t.
How plausible are any of these excuses? That’s immaterial so long as any of them is possible. Once it is established, as it has been, that all the direct evidence indicates that Shakespeare and only Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare, then the only way an anti-Stratfordian can overturn the case for Shakespeare is to show how some lack of his would have made it impossible for him to have written the plays attributed to him. That’s what looneations are all about. The weakness with them is that to refute them one need not disprove that they apply to Shakespeare, only show that there is at least one possible way he could have become a writer in spite of each of them.
Ironically, in this case, as in many others, one can give strong evidence that the lack that is alleged is imaginary, for we have documentary evidence that Shakespeare’s daughter Susannah could sign her name, so very probably was literate. Particularly, as she managed to entice a widely-respected doctor, some of whose case-studies were posthumously published, to marry her, and was said on her gravestone to be especially wise. Shakespeare’s other daughter did sign one document with a mark, but many women (and men) of the time who could read and write sometimes signed with marks, so this is not conclusive evidence that she was illiterate.
(g) The item missing from Shakespeare’s life that I think anti-Stratfordians are silliest about is Properly-Extended-Commitment-to-His-Art. They know this is missing from his life because he retired from his career and London around 1611–when he was only 47 and at the height of his career! Furthermore, what in Stratford-upon-Avon could possibly have drawn such a man back from the splendors of London?! If he was really Shakespeare the poet, he could never have left London!
First off, I wouldn’t say Shakespeare was “at the height of his career” in 1611; I’d say the height was a few years earlier. As to why Shakespeare retired (if he entirely did), why not? He may have been getting tired of the grind of acting and writing, and had enough money to retire to Stratford, so he did—although he continued to keep his hand in, collaborating on at least one play with his replacement in the King’s Men, John Fletcher (according to most Shakespearean scholars).
Several of Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights really did retire at the heights of their careers. John Marston did it in 1608, at the age of 32, when he was one of the most popular playwrights in England, to become a preacher in the country. Francis Beaumont also retired at the height of his popularity, at the age of 29 or 30, having married an heiress. In other times, Rimbaud stopped writing in his early twenties, Rossini stopped composing for decades while still young although the leading composer of opera in Italy at the time, other artists have left their art temporarily or permanently (J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, is another instance—so far as we know, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch Twenty-Two, was dry for many years).
As for retiring to the country, what’s odd about that? Particularly considering the town he retired to might have had a nostalgic value for him, and was where his wife and many long-time friends lived.
(3) Looneations of Class
Of much more importance to the anti-Stratfordians than the previous two kinds of looneations are the looneations of class. The rejectors simply can’t marry the Bard’s middle-class origins, which they frequently term “lower-class,” to his having become a world-class writer. They find three principal looneations of class in his biography:
(h) Shakespeare’s coming from the wrong kind of people and the wrong place, being the son of middle-class illiterate parents born ninety miles from the big city. Such a person not only could not have written sophisticated poems and plays, he couldn’t even have made it as an actor because of his Warwickshire accent and dialect! As though no one can overcome a manner of speech he was born to, particularly a man who became an actor. Regarding the sophisticated literary output, surely the poetry of the Cockney, Keats, to take just one example, shows that it is possible for a commoner to write elegant poetry. Indeed, almost all of the English-speaking world’s best literature was written by comoners, many of them not originally from big cities.
(i) Shakespeare’s being neither an aristocrat nor an intimate of aristocrats.
According to J. Thomas Looney, Shakespeare did not have, nor could he have made, the “exalted social and cultural connections” that the narrative poems’ publication indicated their author had to have had. But all those poems show is that by his late twenties Shakespeare was capable of writing two fairly standard, if well-done, long poems, and getting them published, apparently with the financial help of one very young nobleman, whom he buttered up in one introduction, and spoke with friendliness of in a second.
All this implies is that somehow he made the acquaintance of Southampton. This is no big thing. When the mere actor Richard Burbage died, the Earl of Pembroke was said to have been too disconsolate for a period to attend any plays. Friendships could develop then between talented commoners and the nobility. In Shakespeare’s case, all that need have happened would have been for someone to mention to Southampton that Will wrote well, and Southampton’s asking for a sample.
That we have no direct evidence indicating that Shakespeare knew an aristocrat similarly means nothing to me. Perhaps he felt uncomfortable with aristocrats, and avoided them as much as possible once he was established. Particularly once Southampton got in trouble. But that’s mere surmise and doesn’t prove anything. The bottom line is that we can’t assume anything about Shakespeare’s circle of acquaintances, for there’s little evidence as to whom he knew and didn’t know. Nor should there be.
Part of this looneation is Shakespeare’s lack of the knowledge of aristocrats he had to have had to have written the Ouevre. Few if any reputable scholars believe Shakespeare knew a lot about how aristocrats acted, as aristocrats. Most of what his plays indicate of their behavior could have been lifted from Holinshed and other books. But, most obviously, there was a tradition already in force in the theatre for how nobles should be depicted, and Shakespeare clearly followed it.
His nobles are no more “real” than any other characters of playwrights who created stylized plays like his—unless you think aristocrats spoke in blank verse and customarily made long, often brilliant speechs with no ums and other pauses much less any errors, to each other. How, I might add, did actors know how to portray aristocrats if they were not themselves aristocrats?
A final note: the authority for much of what we know about Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats, perhaps the very best, was a commoner named John Chamberlain whose letters from 1597 to 1627 have been a treasure trove as to what was going on at court then. He went to Cambridge but got no degree. At some point, he pops up with friendships in court circles. But his main source of information seems to have been St. Paul’s Cathedral where he went almost daily to get the latest news, and fresh books. Why could Shakespeare not have been similar?
Assuming his plays reflect a great deal of court knowledge, I several times requested examples of data in the plays the only an aristocrat could have known about from the anti-Stratfordians I argue with at HLAS. Only one item was ever produced. A completely silly reference to an eccentric who was made fun of at court in the eighties named Monarcho. The anti-Stratfordians’ reasons for believing Shakespeare could not have heard about this fellow unless he’d been an insider at court during those years are so ridiculous, I will be discussing them in some detail later on as an example of what I term “rigidnikal” Shakespeare-Rejection at its most insane. All I will say about them here, is that they did not seem persuasive.
(j) Closely related to the previous looneation is the belief of the anti-Stratfordians that Shakespeare’s being of the middle class would bar him from having the aristocratic point-of-view manifest in the plays.
This is the most preferred “argument” of several Oxfordians, which is why I give it its own section. It’s pretty obvious why it is popular with those who believe an aristocrat had to have written The Oeuvre: it is so stupidly fuzzy that it is extremely hard to argue against in few words, and who wants to spend an entire book trying to refute it? I’ll do my best to take care of it, but will not spend many words on it.
First of all, who knows exactly what an aristocratic point of view is? Even if it could be stated in such a way as to get just about everyone’s agreement on what it was, who is to say the plays express it? You can get one authority, and probably many more than one, to argue for the plays’ expressing any Outlook X or not-X that you want. Some say they were Catholic, some Church of England, some some other strand of Christianity, one of two even think they read Judaism in them, and there are more than a few who think the religious view expressed agnostic.
Ditto their political outlook, though most would agree that they seem to back the status quo—strong central monarchy, etc. But even if they did, how do we know that was their authors’ point of view, politically, not that of individual characters, or of a given play? It is the only view that would have pretty much assured popularity and minimal interference from the authorities, so why wouldn’t a playwright whose main interest was art, not politics, have gone along with it, even for a whole play or series of plays, in spite of its not being his outlook? What seems most certain to me is that Shakespeare expresses many different points of view on every sort of topic; that is a main reason he gotten and remained as popular as he has.
Where, to make one last point, is it written that aristocrats all have some unified, agreed-upon point of view, commoners another—and the middle classes perhaps a third? Where did comoners like Nietzsche, Hitler, Mencken, even Shaw, and many others come up with their decidedly elitist contempt for the herd? And how was it that Lafayette fought on the side of commoners for America? How, finally, can we possibly know what Shakespeare of Stratford’s private views on politics, religion or anything else really were? Sure, it would appear, from his life in Stratford, that he was no radical, but how do we know that he was not really a wild radical but practical enough to behave sensibly and go along with a world he knew he couldn’t change?
(4) Looneations of Education
Of all the looneations, the anti-Stratfordians seem most upset by the following three looneations of education:
(k) The first has to do with the paucity of his formal education. The anti-Stratfordians are close to unanimous in believing that no writer of Shakespeare’s brilliance could have reached the level he did without a university education. And it is a fact that we have no record of his attending a grammar school, a University or the Inns of Court, or even of his having been a page or the like in the household of a great family where he could have received an education, as Michael Drayton did.
On the other hand, it is near-definite that Shakespeare got a good grammar school education, for there was a grammar school in his hometown a block or so from his home that he could have attended for free, and there is little reason to believe he didn’t. Unfortunately, all its attendance records have been lost (as have all those of almost every other such school of the times). That his Stratford friends were all literate, that he could sign his name, and became an actor, and such evidence as his monument’s speaking of “all he hath writt” puts his literacy beyond reasonable doubt, and makes it hard to claim he had no formal education, at all—though that, too, is possible.
But, argue the anti-Stratfordians, a mere grammar school education would not have been enough. Notwithstanding the example of Ben Jonson showing how erudite and learned a collegeless playwright could be back then, and the examples of less erudite but certainly effective playwrights of the time as Kyd, Dekker, Drayton, Chapman, Mundy, Chettle, Webster, Heywood, Fletcher . . . In recent times, Tom Stoppard became a world-class playwright without more than high school (although I understand that later in life he got a degree) as did Bernard Shaw before him. Other world-class writers in English who had little or no formal education include Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, Hemingway, Blake, Burns, Dylan Thomas . . . Leonardo, to consider famous persons in fields other than literature, had no college, either, nor did Edison, Faraday, Herbert Spencer . . .
What about the necessary literary apprenticeship, the anti-Stratfordians continue. Even a genius has to acquire knowledge and skills, yet there is no evidence of any literary “apprenticeship”—no early, immature works such as we find for example with Mozart. Even the early plays, supposedly written in the late 1580s, show a maturity which one would not expect to find in someone only in his middle twenties. Also, there is no way he would have had time to learn to write plays, they say. Just look at the practicalities. If, as the Shakespearean scholars purport, he left Stratford around 1587 at the age of 22 to go to London to become an actor, he would have had very little time for anything else while he was making his living as an actor and learning the trade of acting; yet at the same time he would have had to educate himself in the various subjects referred to in the “Shakespeare” plays as well as keeping an eye on his grain business in Stratford, a four-day journey away.
All this is absurd. Early Shakespearean plays like Titus Andronicus and the ones in the Henry VI cycle show no particular maturity. And he would have had plenty of time as an actor to learn a great deal about plays. If he could read, and it is to be assumed that he could, he would have had books to learn from, as well. The matter is subjective, of course, but I think many would agree that no training could have better fit Shakespeare to become a playwright than the on-the-job training he got in his early years as an actor. (Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, is near-proof that he was an actor by 1592, and strongly suggests he must have been one for a few years or more by then. We have no other documentary evidence regarding his early career in acting, however. Jonson’s case is similar, so this is nothing to wonder about; why should a beginner in any field leave behind many records of his apprenticeship–especially in Shakespeare’s time?)
Shakespeare would certainly have had time to learn to write while being an actor, acting not being a full-time profession. Obviously, once he showed any talent for it—by writing a scene, or even a few lines of dialogue, it follows that his company would have found time for him to write. In any case, any biography of a world-class writer will tell you that writers somehow always find enough time to write. The baloney about his need to run his grain business, by the way, is without foundation. His household in Stratford stored grain like the majority of households in the town, and there’s no reason his father couldn’t have looked after it for him, or a brother, or his wife. It would have been the equivalent of a four-times-a-year garage sale.
As for his need to educate himself, since he would have needed no more knowledge to have written the plays than the kind anyone with a healthy mind absorbs automatically through simple life experience, talking to others, and haphazard reading, he would not have needed extra time to do this. Nor is there any reason to believe he would have made many trips back to Stratford while acting. Even if he had, he could have used the travel time to think out his plots, etc., as many writers have been known to do.
(l) Shakespeare’s lack of specialized knowledge, already touched on, is another of the looneations that the anti-Stratfordians never tire of bringing up. According to them, the Stratford man didn’t have the knowledge of the law and other fields that he would have had to have had to have written the Ouevre. They can even get various experts to back them up. They have two problems, though. First of all, for every expert asserting Shakespeare’s expertise in field X, our side can find more than one to assert his lack of expertise in that field. Second, the experts arguing for his specialized knowledge tend to refute each other.
As the inimitable nut, John Michell tells us, various “experts” have written books affirming that Shakespeare was world-class in (1) the law, (2) sports of all kinds, especially of the nobility, (3) Philosophy, classical and esoteric, (4) statecraft and statesmanship, (5) Biblical scholarship, (6) English and European History, (7) Classical literature and languages, (8) French, Italian and Spanish languages, (9) Italian geography, (10) France and the court of Navarre, (11) Danish terms and customs, (12) Horticulture and garden design, (13) Wales and the Welsh, (14) Music and musical terms, (15) painting and sculpture, (16) Mathematics (!), (17) Astronomy and Astrology, (18) Natural history, (19) fishing, (20) Medicine and physiology, (21) the military, (22) Heraldry, (23) Exploration and the New World, (24) Navigation and seamanship, (25) printing, (26) Folklore, (27) the theatre profession, (28) Cambridge University hjargon, (29) Freemasonry, and (30) cryptography and spying.
Simple question in response: how could he have become an authority in all of these subjects? The very fact that one goof is sure that he is an expert in, say, medicine (on the basis of a passage listing a bunch of diseases in Troilus and Cressida that he could have copied from a book or gotten from his son-in-law) while another is just as sure that he was a brilliant lawyer (based on his use of legal terms several authors have shown playwrights of the time to have been widely familiar with) tends strongly to suggest that few are trustworthy, each out to make his hero a member of his own specialty.
I haven’t space or time to say much more on this topic except to point out that anti-Stratfordians have a good deal of trouble citing passages in Shakespeare’s plays that indicate knowledge someone of Shakespeare’s background could not have picked up. They also have trouble understanding how creative writers absorb knowledge, and can artfully make small knowledge seem great knowledge by picking where in a story to insert it—for instance, if I want a character in a play of mine to seem an expert in geology, I need not master geology, only read up on one small aspect of it and arrange a scene in which my character deals with that aspect of it; the probability will be that I don’t even have to read up on geology but will have picked up a few facts that I can find places in my play to insert to make it seem like my character is a genuine geologist.
I frankly do not remember anything in Shakespeare that could be used to further a student’s knowledge of any particular subject, except the history he got from other writers. I wonder, too, that he says just about nothing about the nitty-grit of writing. Does that mean the author of the Oeuvre was not a writer?
Here’s one quick example of specialized knowledge Shakespeare is seen to have by bardolators which is actually no big deal. I believe all other examples of his specialized knowledge can be dismissed similarly. It is said that he had a great knowledge of falconry—more than a commoner could have. But, Gerald Lascelles, an expert on the history of falconry, has said that the technical terms of falconry were household words in Shakespeare’s day. The timeline at the PBS website (http://www.pbs.org/falconer/man) verifies this indirectly: “1600 Falconry reaches its highest level in England and is governed by strict rules– a king could fly a gyrfalcon; an earl would fly a peregrine; a yeoman could have a goshawk; the sparrowhawk was reserved for priests; and servants would have a kestrel,” which indicates that anyone could have been a falconer and picked up as much information about the sport as Shakespeare’s plays evince.
(m) The last of the primary looneations has to do with Shakespeare’s geographical knowledge. The Stratford man could not have been the Author because it is widely accepted that whoever wrote the plays had a detailed and first-hand knowledge of Italy whereas we have no record that the Stratford man ever went abroad. Of course, “no record” does not mean “no travel.”
And again, we have plenty of experts sure he traveled against others sure he didn’t. Aside from that, anti-Stratfordians are, as usual, hard put to cite evidence to support their claim, in this case of Shakespeare’s wide travel. Some of what he says about Italy, for instance, is flat out wrong, and the rest things he could have picked up from his reading or heard from others. It cannot be stated too often, that the theatre was, and still is, the most collaborative of all the arts. Shakespeare was always surrounded by actors and related professionals quite capable of giving him tips on other lands, languages, professions.
With that, I am finished with the Primary Looneations the anti-Stratfordians have used (until chapters where I will use them in discussing the properties of anti-Strafordian mentalities), but there are still the Secondary Looneations, some of them as important to the anti-Stratfordians as any Primary Looneation. It will take, I fear, a whole nother chapter to do justice to them.
Next Chapter here.
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