POETICKS

Whoever William Shakespeare really was, it was during the late 1500’s and early 1600’s that he composed the poems and plays attributed to him. Only a few of the era’s other writers commented in print on “The Ouevre,” as I will most of the time be calling those works. What they had to say about it was generally favorable, but only once or twice exceptionally so, and for several decades after Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson—in the view of most of his countrymen—was the greatest of recent English writers, not William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare steadily gained in popularity, though. By the middle of the 1700’s, he was widely considered to be for England what Homer had been for Greece, Virgil for Rome. Unfortunately, his reputation rose even higher. By the middle of the next century, he had become one with the gods for many of the culturati of his native country (and America). It was at that point that it began to seem implausible to some that “William Shaksper,” a haphazardly-educated commoner from the small, out-of-the-way town of Stratford-on-Avon, could have had anything significant to do with the plays and poems so long ascribed to him. The most committed of these anti-Stratfordians, as they have come to be called, began writing articles and books advancing their theories.

They have not stopped. And they seem to be gaining respect: in recent years; there have been several highly-visible articles about who really wrote Shakespeare in such publications as Harper’s (April 1999), Time (15 February 1999) and History Today (August 2001). Moreover, in January 2002, the Shakespeare Folger Library’s Gail Kern Paster debated anti-Stratfordian Richard Whalen on the authorship question under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institute—an event that occasioned an article in the The New York Times (10 February 2002). At about the same time, Michael Rubbo’s movie about the question, Much Ado About Something, was released nationally. Just about all the articles mentioned have been slanted against poor Will, the Times article particularly so. Much Ado About Something unabashedly advanced Christopher Marlowe as The True Author. More recently, in November 2008, Hal Whittemore spoke about his book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he believes the Earl of Oxford wrote, at the Globe Theatre in London. And Concordia University in California opened a $15,000,000 Shakespeare Authorship Research Center in the fall of 2009, the first of its kind in academia. It is directed by another who believes the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works, Professor Daniel Wright. In short, those opposing Shakespeare have definitely been on a roll.

Do they have a case? No. The authorship question has been answered for over four hundred years. Nonetheless, I am treating it at length in this book. Why? Partly to help those who haven’t time to study the question sufficiently to see how wrong the anti-Stratfordians are. But chiefly to try to settle a question that interests me far more: how seemingly sane people can go off the rails when it comes to question of who wrote Shakespeare’s works. My answer? Because certain defects of temperament make them either what I call “rigidniks” or followers of rigidniks. In the last third of this book, I will explain the psychology of each of these in detail according to a theory of temperament types I’ve developed over the years (as part of a full-scale theory of psychology). As I do so, I will show how their cerebral dysfunction compels them, each in a different way, to become unhinged where Shakespeare is concerned. (The first two-thirds of the book will demonstrate beyond rational doubt exactly how irrational the anti-Stratfordian belief system is.)

Before getting to all that, I want to comment on the one statement that, of all the statements that have been made about The Ouevre, bothers me the most. It is that it doesn’t matter who was responsible for it, the works themselves are what count. While I can understand the impatience of some for the intrusion of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly intrusions into what should be untroubled encounters with story and verse, I find it short-sighted. Not only does it matter who wrote The Oeuvre, it matters significantly. First of all, it’s only fair that the person responsible for a body of work be given credit for it. This is no abstract sentimental gesture toward a person long dead who is unlikely to care much, but an encouragement to present-day writers who, human, want to know that they will get credit for what they write—and keep it. At least as important, the identity of the author of any work of literature is part of history, and history matters, even literary history. Where would studies of creativity be without it, for instance? Nor should the ability of knowledge of who wrote what to give later would-be writers accurate role-models to emulate and be inspired by be sneered at. Then, too, there is such knowledge’s ability to add to readers’ appreciation of literature by clearing up the cloudier sections of particular works, and adding colors to its surround to make it not just literature, but literature and a place, time and human being.

In short, I have no qualms about devoting an entire book to the Authorship Controversy rather than to Shakespeare’s plays and poems. That the latter, in themselves, are clearly more important than how they came to be does not mean that how they came to be is a trivial question.

 
First Chapter here.

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