POETICKS

28 November 2009

I’ve always found Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography a fascinating book. I’ve even read it all the way through twice, writing notes on its pages as I did so, and I’ve reread many pages of it since.  In my own book on the authorship controversy, I mentioned it a number of times, devoting 16 pages to its bizarre method of evaluating evidence in an appendix to the first edition of my book.  Needless to say, I also argued in many threads here and elsewhere on the Internet about it.  Not being a Crowley, I did find a few of its arguments reasonable though far from persuasive.  But I found the bulk of them foolish at best, and more often than not incredibly flawed.  Since I’m the sort who enjoys dismantling wacks’ theories and believes it advances the cause of truth to do so, I spent a fair amount of time getting together a critique of it.

But, as happens with too many of my projects, I got side-tracked, and never got anything of consequence concerning it done other than the appendix.  I’ve a yearning to give it another try, though, thanks to the wack who recently claimed that there was no paper trial for Shakespeare, one of Price’s central delusions.  Ergo, I’m beginning this thread as a sort of notebook for reactions against or in defense of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.  I plan to dump ll my thoughts about the book into it, a little at a time, two or three times a week.  I hope others will join me.

1.  Price becomes an Anti-Stratfordian.

In her introduction, Price “was surprised to find nothing in Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life “to prove that Shakespeare had written any plays.  Prior to that she claims, as so many wacks do, that she had always taken it for granted that Will wrote the plays attributed to him–until she investigated the matter.  This may be the truth, but I’ve heard that her father was an Oxfordian. 

What establishes Price on her very first page as a probable propagandist, however, is that she claims not to have found anything in Schoenbaum’s book that PROVED rather than established beyond reasonable doubt that Shakespeare was a playwright.  The latter is all that historical data can ever do, but Price wants her readers thinking something is wrong with the case for Shakespeare if it can’t be proven that he was a playwright.

In the paragraph she writes immediately after the one in which she tells about
Shoenbaum’s book, Price begins lying.  “Fact after fact stopped me in my tracks,” she says.  “No biography could account for Shakespeare’s education.  His own children grew up functionally illiterate.  Shakespeare retired to an illiterate household at the height of his resumed literary powers.  He wrote nothing during the last several years of his life.  He left behind dozens of biographical records, but unlike those surviving for other writers of he day, not one of them suggests literary activity.”

Okay, when I accuse Price of “lying,” I may be exaggerating.  She is doing two things: (1) stating something as a truth that is not a truth or (2) stating  something in such a way as misleadingly to suggest something that may or may not be true were its historical context.  Call either of these some form of not-lying if you must, but to me they are lying. 

For instance, when she tells us “no biography could account for Shakespeare’s education,” she is guilty of (2) because she is misleadingly suggesting that Shakespeare has no (formal) education.  She leaves out the historical context, which is that no records exist for Shakespeare’s formal education–NOR for anyone else during his boyhood who went to his hometown grammar school, or, for that matter, to many others.  As a propagandist, she doesn’t want the reader to know the historical context of her statement because she wants him to fall for what is an implicit lie: that Shakespeare had no formal education. 

She is wrong, to boot: I’m sure most, or all, of the Shakespeare biographies she read DID account for his education by informing the reader that there was a free grammar school a few hundred feet from his house where his father, a prosperous businessman would probably have sent him.  The bottom line here is that we don’t know for sure if Shakespeare was formally educated or not because of lack of data.  Hence, it is a lie to say or suggest either that he did or did not; one can only say that it is likely that he did (since his funerary monument said he could write, and he had a documented acting career which strong suggests he could read scripts).

I suspect Price was not “stopped in her tracks” when she found out all the attendance records of the grammar school Shakespeare probably attended during his time and for many years before and after that have disappeared.  Time devours records.  So, another probable lie.

Very close to a definite lie is her assertion that “his children grew up functionally illiterate.”  We have two signatures from one of them, Susanna, who married a physician and was considered unusually wise (at least according to her tombstone).  One record suggests to some that she was shown her husband’s handwriting but failed to recognize it as his, which Price considers evidence of illiteracy.  But it is not.  Furthermore, the likelihood is that she did no more than glance at the handwriting, if she looked at it, at all.
(She was shown a book said to be her husband’s because the man showing it to her recognized its handwriting as her husband’s; she denied the book was by him; that says nothing about her literacy.)  One can certainly reasonably claim that it’s possible Susanna was functionally illiterate, but we lack sufficient data to assert, as Price does, that she definitely was.  To do that is to lie.

Ditto Price’s assertion that Shakespeare’s household was illiterate. His father signed with a mark but so did