Michael Prescott's Blog

Graham Holderness clarifies his position

Some time ago, I put up a post about Professor Graham Holderness, a Shakespearean scholar who, at a seminar, made a comment that seemed to imply that the Earl of Oxford's biography is reflected in Shakespeare's plays.

Oxfordians like myself made much of this. But today I received an email from Prof. Holderness, which I gather he is circulating to all interested parties, and which he gave me permission to make public. In his statement, he disavows any belief that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.

The statement is long, but in fairness I think I should quote all of it. (Ellipses are in the original.)

=======

The Road to Oxford

Graham Holderness

Nearly twenty years ago I launched, together with my colleague Bryan Loughrey, a series of Shakespeare Quarto texts under the title Shakespearean Originals. The texts were presented in an unusual way, and claims were made for them that seemed, at the time, quite radical. But they were essentially just the same old Quartos that everyone had known about since the 16th century ...

A couple of journalists got the idea that these texts were hitherto unknown and newly discovered: mouldy books dug up from Shakespeare’s grave perhaps, or crumbling texts located by some Professor Robert Langdon in the Vatican archives. The consequent publicity was both extensive and embarrassing. I remember feeling, as I sat down in front of my Amstrad, ready to put the record straight, a distinct sense of impending deflation. After all, here beckoned celebrity, here was the clarion-call of fame, here was Indiana Jones’s ‘fortune and glory’, just within my grasp. Did it matter that it was all based on inaccurate and unsustainable claims that we’d never even made? You just can’t buy publicity like that ...

So I proceeded to set out the banal truth, that there is nothing new under the sun. I’m not aware that it did me any good, though I certainly learned that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. So what to do when another opportunity for fame, another shot at fortune and glory, presents itself? I was informed by various internet sources that during the ‘Rowe to Shapiro’ conference at Shakespeare’s Globe, a light flashed around me, and I fell to the ground, and blurted out that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was: Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

Headlines can’t lie: ‘Holderness: Shakespeare’s biography is that of the earl of Oxford’, blogs Roger Stritmatter. And here is Julia Cleave of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust:

From an Oxfordian point of view, most startling of all was the declaration made by Professor Graham Holderness, University of Herefordshire (sic).  In the middle of a discussion re the questionable facticity of tales of deer-poaching, calf-killing and horse-holding, he stated baldly - without further comment:

If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes - if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it - it wouldn’t be Rowe’s, it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s.

Clearly the earth moved for somebody. The comments flow thick and fast: ‘The very foundation of Stratfordian biography is on the verge of breaking apart’. The centre cannot hold. ‘The quote from Holderness is a swinging gate through which Oxfordians ought to immediately drive their full coach and horses’. 

One of the great things about conversion narratives is that your pre-conversion life gets revised until it precisely parallels your new one. St Paul was never so zealous a persecutor of Christians as he appeared, retrospectively, to be, after he had became one himself. In the same way, it wasn’t until I blindly stumbled upon the road to Oxford that I became quite so definitively ‘a major Shakespearean scholar’ of ‘considerable reputation and standing’: indeed ‘one of the foremost "orthodox" Shakespeare scholars in the world’.

Now before I was suspected of falling out of the Oxfordian closet, no-one ever called me ‘major’ or ‘foremost’, and certainly not ‘orthodox’. I sort of like it in a way. Could I have this all the time, I think to myself, if I just keep dropping suggestive pericopes into the conversation? Could I really retain this reputation as ‘one of the foremost orthodox Shakespeare scholars in the world’, if I just occasionally blurted out mysterious soundbites on the Shakespeare Authorship Question: ‘I’m an Oxford man, you know’; or ‘I’m only here for de Vere’.

Tempting as it is, I’m going to have to pass. My eyesight is a lot better now, and though in my temporary visual impairment things might have appeared brighter, much more shiny and new, the hard grey light of another common day gives light enough to read the truth by:

‘My name is Graham Holderness, and my position on the Shakespeare Authorship Question is that I am interested in reasonable doubt, but not in alternative certainty’.

I don’t think Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems. I wouldn’t especially care if he did, or if the real author was proven to be a wandering Kentish tinker, or Queen Elizabeth I, or the Pope. I don’t have any strong personal investment in ‘the Stratfordian hypothesis’, but it does seem to me a reasonable one. Of course there are lacunae, and doubts and questions about ‘the man from Stratford’ (who is not in these circles permitted even to enjoy his own name). But they are nothing compared with the lacunae and doubts and questions that would apply to any other candidature. There may well be ‘reasonable doubt’ about Shakespeare. But how much reasonable doubt would one have to countenance to explain that someone else wrote those works? How much historical evidence would we have to dispel, how many conspiracy theories would we have to swallow? 

Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 biography of Shakespeare, whose tercentenary was celebrated at the Globe conference, depicts Shakespeare as a young man from a peasant farming and agricultural trading background; who received little formal education; worked in his father’s business; got into trouble with a local landowner by poaching deer from his estate; fled from Stratford, and turned up outside a theatre in London seeking work as a ‘serviture’. Rowe’s biography has been widely regarded as inaccurate and fanciful, but recent scholarship has offered to revise this view, demonstrating that Rowe’s narrative is historically sourced,  independently corroborated and not in itself improbable. 

Of course this raises issues for Stratfordians, since it depicts a life of some deprivation that seems unlikely to have flourished into that of the world’s greatest dramatist. Biographers of Shakespeare have looked for better explanations, scenarios that put the author of the plays into an environment of literacy and learning, and provide him with access to the cultural and entertainment industries, to the worlds of aristocratic patronage and court favour.

Anti-Stratfordians would rather believe Rowe, since it is their contention that the subject of his biography could not possibly have been the man who wrote the works: quod erat demonstrandum. The more authentic and credible Rowe becomes, the less likely it is that this Stratford man is the true author.

I think, with René Weis and the late Eric Sams, that Rowe should be trusted. His historical sources were sound and verifiable; his claims are corroborated by other early traditions; and most importantly, there is nothing in his account that should seem in any way improbable as a life of the author of the plays of William Shakespeare. A young man from a trading family in a provincial town, who acquired there a rich and varied education in both life and learning, who worked in his father’s business, ran wild and got into trouble, left home and entered the theatre as a menial, became an actor and then a writer. None of that seems incredible to me. To assert, as Oxfordians invariably assert, that only an aristocrat could have mastered such learning, acquired such favour and displayed such genius is surely to underestimate the lower orders, and to overestimate the upper class. Let’s list on our fingers all the great writers produced by the British hereditary aristocracy ... all right, then, just use one hand ...

Now it is true that the facts of the Shakespeare life as depicted in Rowe do not necessarily quite match up with the works. It would be very odd if they did, since the works are dramatic poems in which every word is spoken by a character on stage, and no space at all is provided for confessional material (would the same were true of modern literature). Even the Sonnets are not as clearly autobiographical as they have often been received. But for me the problem lies deeper than this. In this blogging, twittering world we have lost all sense of any relationship between the self and writing that does not invest heavily in autobiographical narcissism and the refraction of personal experience. We have no equipment for tracing the complex and subtle connectivities between the self and more impersonal forms of writing. Shakespeare might have become an actor, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ great story ‘Everyone and No-one’, because he had no sense of identity at all; and he may have written so many lives, because he never felt that he had lived even one.

And so if you tried to infer a life from Shakespeare’s works you might not, it is true, arrive at the man from Stratford. But that is not because he did not write them: but because the relationship between the life and the works is far more complex and devious than you imagine, and may consist in discrepancy and discontinuity rather than in coherence. You might think that some other life-story would fit the works better: the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, or the Holy Roman Emperor.  But you would be whistling in the dark, because these works will never give up the identity of their author in anything like so definitive a way.

Insofar as Shakespeare Authorship inquiry is interested in pursuing these profound questions about life and writing, the self and identity, personal expression and impersonal artistry (and I know that some authorship doubters are interested in such matters), then there is common ground for debate. Insofar as such inquiries are obsessively concerned to lobby for alternative candidates, and to discredit ‘the man from Stratford’, there really won’t be all that much to talk about.   

This, too, is neat

Longtime readers know that among my numerous other eccentricities, I think Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the true author of the plays and poems attributed to "William Shakespeare."

The overwhelming majority of Shakespeare scholars reject this idea, though I have not been very impressed with their arguments.

Now comes word that one of the foremost "orthodox" Shakespeare scholars in the world has made a rather interesting public statement on this question.

The blog of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reports on a recent "orthodox" gathering in which the various biographies of William Shakespeare were discussed. In the midst of much learned talk about the many bios that have followed Nicholas Rowe's pioneering 1709 effort, the editor of the peer-viewed journal Critical Survey slipped in a few intriguing words.

Quoth the SOS blog:

From an Oxfordian point of view, most startling of all was the declaration made by Professor Graham Holderness, University of Herefordshire.  In the middle of a discussion re the questionable facticity of tales of deer-poaching, calf-killing and horse-holding, he stated baldly – without further comment:

If you were to construct a biography which ticked all the boxes – if you were to read Shakespeare’s plays and infer a biography from it – it wouldn’t be Rowe’s, it would actually be the Earl of Oxford’s.

Hmm. The devil you say.

 

The statement is, of course, quite true, as any reader of Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare" By Another Name can affirm. To give one example, the parallels between Oxford's life and the storyline of All's Well That Ends Well are ridiculously obvious. Like the fictional Bertram, Oxford was pressured into marrying a lower-born woman he despised, after which he fled abroad (apparently without consummating the marriage), only to be eventually reconciled with his wife by means of a "bed trick."

 

Or consider Henry IV, Part 1, which includes an ahistorical episode in which the riotous Prince Hal and some friends, wearing disguises, engage in an act of banditry at Gad's Hill. In May of 1573, de Vere and his friends robbed two servants of Lord Burghley (de Vere's father-in-law), as a merry prank. Where did the incident take place? Gad's Hill.*

 

Multiply such "coincidences"  by a factor of 100 or more, and it's abundantly clear that Oxford's biography fits the Shakespearean canon like a cheveril glove. It's kind of an open secret, actually.

 

What's startling is to have someone as distinguished as Professor Holderness blurt it out -- and to an audience of Shakespearean academics, no less.

 

-----

 

*Oxfordians believe that The Famous Victories of Henry V (registered in 1594), which introduces the Gad's Hill incident, was itself written by de Vere as an early attempt at telling the story of Prince Hal. See this essay for details.

Polonius in Queen Elizabeth's court

Because my last post glanced at the Shakespeare authorship controversy, I thought it might be interesting to lay out the kind of argument that Oxfordians -- those who believe the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford -- rely on when making their case. Most of these arguments involve parallels between people and events in Shakespeare's plays and people and events in Oxford's life.

There are countless possible examples, presented in detail in The Mysterious William Shakespeare, by Charlton Ogburn, and "Shakespeare" By Another Name, by Mark Anderson. Here I want to focus on just one instance, the remarkably close correspondences between William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Oxford's father-in-law, and Polonius, Hamlet's prospective father-in-law.

Burghley was the closest adviser to the English queen. Polonius is the closest adviser to the Danish king and queen. Burghley was a spymaster with a network of informants; he was known to intercept private correspondence and to infiltrate private households with paid operatives. Polonius's main activity in Hamlet is spying; he intercepts Hamlet's letters to Ophelia, and repeatedly eavesdrops on Hamlet.

One of Burghley's hirelings was stabbed by Oxford in a scuffle. Polonius himself is stabbed to death by Hamlet.

Burghley, worried by reports of his son Thomas's wild living in Paris, arranged for Thomas's friends to spy on him and send back reports. Polonius, worried that his son Laertes will embarrass himself in Paris, arranges for Laertes's friend Reynaldo to spy on him and sent back reports.

Burghley was known for his tedious prolixity; so is Polonius. ("More matter, with less art," the queen tells him.) Burghley wrote sententious maxims for the benefit of his son Robert. Polonius delivers sententious maxims for the benefit of his son Laertes. (Burghley: "Neither borrow of a neighbour or of a friend, but of a stranger ..." Polonius: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be ...")

Burghley was the father of Anne Cecil, whose marriage to Oxford was brought to near ruin by Oxford's antagonism and distrust. Polonius is the father of Ophelia, whose romantic relationship with Hamlet is brought to ruin by Hamlet's antagonism and distrust. Oxford believed Anne had been unfaithful to him, and separated from her for years. Hamlet unaccountably implies that Ophelia has been unfaithful to him, impugning her as a whore, and refuses to see her again. ("Get thee to a nunnery" can be read as Elizabethan slang for "You belong in a whorehouse.")

Burghley was widely known and resented for having pushed through a law requiring the British populace to eat more fish; the intent was to stimulate the fishing trade. Hamlet, either mad or feigning madness, identifies Polonius as "a fishmonger."

Burghley liked to recall that his date of birth coincided with the Diet of Worms, a convocation at which Emperor Charles V presided. Hamlet, jesting cruelly after killing Polonius, says, "A certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet."

Burghley's motto was Cor unum, via una. In the First Quarto of Hamlet, the character later known as Polonius is called Corambis. Cor unum, via una means "one heart, one way." Corambis means "having two hearts." Most likely the name was changed because "Corambis" was just too obvious, at least to those in the know.

The correspondences are sufficiently clearcut that many "orthodox" Shakespearean scholars have accepted the Burghley-Polonius connection. These include such notables as John Dover Wilson and A.L. Rowse.

The Stratford player would have had no plausible motive to burlesque Lord Burghley. Nor is it likely he would have dared. Burghley was the most powerful figure in in the realm, other than the queen herself; he was widely feared, and, at a whim, could have had any commoner tossed into jail or subjected to the tender mercies of the torturers. Other writers had been jailed and tortured for less.

Oxford, by contrast, did have a motive. His relationship with his father-in-law was contentious. The two men, opposites in all respects, despised each other. As the highest ranking member of the aristocracy, Oxford could afford to beard the lion. Burghley couldn't touch him.

Of course, many additional parallels between the events in Hamlet and the events in Oxford's life can be drawn. Oxford was captured and later released by pirates, just as Hamlet is. Oxford lost a vast sum of money funding expeditions to discover a Northwest passage; Hamlet says wryly, "I am but mad north-north-west." One of Oxford's closest friends and confidants was his cousin, Horace de Vere, also known as Horatio; Hamlet's closest friend and confidant is named Horatio. Oxford's mother remarried soon after his father's death; Hamlet resents his mother's hasty marriage to Claudius soon after his father's death. And so on. For a discussion of the numerous parallels in Hamlet, see Chapter 16 of "Shakespeare" Identified, by J. Thomas Looney, online here.

Does all of this prove that Oxford wrote Hamlet and the other plays and poems? Well, no. All the circumstantial evidence in the world cannot establish the authorship of the Shakespearean canon with absolute certainty; but as more and more of it comes to light, the explanation that the parallels are merely coincidental becomes, I think, progressively less persuasive.

At any rate, I concur with John Michell, who, in his excellent overview Who Wrote Shakespeare?, writes:

We shall be abused and laughed at for our interest, for even thinking there is any doubt about who wrote Shakespeare... All that we can say in return is that we enjoy the subject, find mystery in it and are introduced by it to the finest literature and some of the greatest, as well as the crankiest minds of our age and culture. It is a harmless, stimulating and instructive subject to dwell upon, which is more than can be said for many other types of obsession. [p. 16]

=============

For an in-depth discussion of the Burghley-Polonius issue, see Mark Alexander's comprehensive four-part series "Polonius as Lord Burghley," beginning here.

Various relevant source texts are helpfully provided here.

Much ado about ranting

The blog "Shakespeare" By Another Name recently pointed me to an amusing online free-for-all in which a columnist for the London Times, Oliver Kamm, mixes it up with various anti-Stratfordians (i.e., people who doubt that the works of Shakespeare were written by the man from Stratford).

This issue is not as interesting to me as it once was. I'm still in the Oxfordian camp - I think the author was most likely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who used Will Shakespeare as a beard - but my world would not come crumbling down if definitive proof to the contrary were obtained. (For some of my thoughts on why Oxford is a good candidate to be the "true" author, click on the "categories" link at the bottom of this post.)

What I found most interesting about the long, heated online debate was how angry Kamm allows himself to become. In fact, he seems to be aboil with rage and indignation almost from the start. He repeatedly characterizes his opponents as cranks and worse, yet seems honestly perplexed that anyone could accuse him of using ad hominems. He also insists that his opponents have no proper academic credentials, though he himself is described in his Times bio as "having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund" who has an interest in "economic policy, foreign affairs and European literature." It seems odd that his main complaint about his opponents is that they are "amateurs," when he himself is clearly an amateur in Elizabethan studies, as well. Perhaps it is a case of psychological projection.

That's not to say Kamm makes no good points. He strikes a few "palpable hits," I think, though many of his arguments are question-begging and appeals to authority (the very errors he accuses his opponents of committing). He is obviously very intelligent, a fact that makes his vituperative style of expression that much more baffling. You would think that as a bright, sophisticated writer, he would see how he's coming across, but he seems oblivious. His increasingly agitated commentary is perhaps an object lesson in the ego run amok. It underlines a point I've been reflecting on lately - that of all human skills or virtues, self-possession may be the most important. Imagine a world in which everyone could remain self-possessed under even the most trying conditions. War, violence, and cruelty might not vanish altogether (there are self-possessed sociopaths), but would certainly be rarer than they are now.

After reading the debate, I found myself flipping through the book that inspired the Shakespeare blog - Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare" By Another Name, a biography of Edward de Vere written from the perspective that de Vere wrote the works of Shakespeare. Innumerable parallels between de Vere's life and elements of the Shakespearean corpus are explored. Some of these parallels are more convincing than others, but the cumulative effect is immensely persuasive, at least to me.

Here's a small but telling example from page 169 of Anderson's book. De Vere (Oxford) betrayed two friends who were plotting against the Queen; these friends were arrested and imprisoned. Understandably furious with Oxford, they launched a series of attacks on him, alleging a variety of vices and evils. One of the pair, Charles Arundell, testified:

First, I will detect him of the most impudent and senseless lies that ever passed the mouth of any man.... His third lie which hath some affinity with the other two is of certain excellent orations he made.... The second vice, wherewith I mean to touch him though in the first I have included perjury in something [sic] is that he is a most notorious drunkard and very seldom sober ... thirdly I will prove him a buggerer of a boy ... fifthly to show that the world never brought forth such a villainous monster, and for a parting blow to give him his full payment, I will prove against him his most horrible and detestable blasphemy in denial of the divinity of Christ our Savior and terming the Trinity a fable ... that Joseph was a wittold [cuckold] and the Blessed Virgin a whore.

To conclude, he is a beast in all respects and in him no virtue to be found and no vice wanting.

Note the confused syntax and the eccentric numbering, in which the third precedes the second. (It is the third lie, but apparently an example of the first vice.) Compare the above with the speech that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of the inept constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing:

Marry, sir, [the accused] have committed false report. Moreover, they have spoken untruths, secondarily they are slanders, sixth and lastly they have belied a lady, thirdly they have verified unjust things, and to conclude, they are lying knaves.

The similarities are obvious, right down to the words "to conclude." It would seem likely that Dogberry is a cruel burlesque of Arundell. If so, whoever wrote the play must have been familiar with Arundell's testimony and must have had reason to lampoon it. Oxford, of course, would meet both criteria.

To publicly lampoon a man whom one has betrayed and handed over to the jailers of the Tower is not the most admirable course of action, to be sure. But no one ever said de Vere was a likable or well-adjusted fellow. Indeed, some of the accusations made against him are probably accurate, though others seem like boilerplate Elizabethan slander. It is quite plausible, for instance, that de Vere was "very seldom sober." But some high-functioning alcoholics can be astonishingly productive; their overconsumption of alcohol can bring on periods of remarkable creativity; they are even capable of works of genius, as I discussed here. Such people are also capable of extraordinary malice -- the kind of malice that might prompt a man to ridicule a desperate enemy whose downfall he has brought about.

The only credible alternative to the Oxfordian theory, it seems to me, is that someone else wrote the plays but was guided by Oxford. This is not impossible, since Oxford was known to serve as a mentor and patron of young writers.

Clare Asquith's book Shadowplay (though it does not include Oxford in the mix) makes an argument along these lines, suggesting that Will Shakespeare of Stratford came under the aegis of Catholic noblemen and served as their mouthpiece. Trouble is, I see little in the Stratford man's background that would supply him with the erudition to write great poetry; and some of the plays, like Love's Labour's Lost, seem to have been written before young Will had even arrived in London. (But the dating of all the plays is endless debated, so this point cannot be conclusive.)

Kamm and others like to point out that Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were of middle-class origins, yet wrote great plays, and this is true; but both Jonson and Marlowe were recognized early for their talent and given special treatment. Marlowe went to Corpus Christi College; Jonson went to the acclaimed Westminster School and later received an honorary degree from Oxford University. By contrast, the Stratford man appears to have had no education beyond a few years in the Stratford grammar school. Still, we cannot rule out the possibility that Will showed early promise and was shipped off to the household of wealthy relatives who supplied him with tutors and books. This is the theory advanced by E. A. J. Honigmann (discussed somewhat sympathetically by Eric Sams here), and it might be profitably combined with Asquith's musings.

In these matters (as in most matters) it's best not to be too dogmatic. Otherwise we may find ourselves, like Dogberry, declaring that those who disagree with us are, firstly, amateurs and cranks; thirdly, mere dilettantes; secondarily, lacking in all academic respectability; sixth and last, dishonest villains; fifthly, unfit for public debate; and to conclude, they are lying knaves.  

------------

Postscript. For those who can't be bothered to read the whole comments thread on the Times site, here are some excerpts from Oliver Kamm's posts.

He characterizes those who disagree with him as: "delusional," "conspiracy nutters," and "unscholarly cranks" who make "bogus and ahistorical assertions" and whose arguments are "buffoonery," "absurd," "snobbish, hapless idiocy," a "mound of dross," "pure snobbery and conspiracy theory, and ... an offence against historical scholarship."

"Your entire method of reasoning is ignorant of history and of literary criticism."

"The entire Oxfordian edifice is built on ignorance, snobbery and nothing else."

"[Anti-Stratfordian] arguments bear as much relation to literary scholarship as do creationism to science and Holocaust denial to history. It's a sociological and pathological phenomenon rather than a literary one."

"Mr Malim [an anti-Stratfordian] himself is a retired solicitor, with all the competence that that implies for the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature." (Kamm's own background is that of a hedge fund manager.)

"I said you were unscholarly cranks. And yes, of course the Supreme Court Justices you mention [who agree with the anti-Stratfordian position] come into that category. Their expertise in the law is extensive and entirely irrelevant to the field of literature."

"I do not treat my opponents with contempt. I treat them in this case and on this subject with derision."

"Mr Wilkinson, let's get one thing straight. At no time have I engaged in abuse. I've called you a crank and I've described your contributions as fatuous. I've further described the comments on this thread from your comrades as hapless idiocy. If you consider this to be abuse, then you're not cut out for public debate. I invariably address correspondents with courtesy but also directness, and I'm not going to flatter you by pretending that your opinions are worthy of respect or have any value whatever." ("Courtesy"?!) 

"I have carefully explained that I do not engage in abuse, but my restraint doesn't mean that I'm going to have a dialogue with you. Your theories are are no more interesting than they are educated, and while you have every right to be heard, you have no right whatever to be listened to."

"I never engage in personal abuse, but nor do I engage in flattery of cranks, whether creationists, 9/11 truthers, Holocaust deniers or Oxfordians, all of whom use similar methods of reasoning."

"That puts [the anti-Stratfordian position] outside the bounds of legitimate debate: it's at best irrationalism and unabashed amateurism ... More generally, it's pathological and in some cases (e.g. Delia Bacon, who first propounded Francis Bacon as author) literally insane."

"You're yet another who complains about name-calling while failing to identify a single example. I've referred to you (collectively) as cranks and I've commented on the fatuous, pitiful, amateurish and fraudulent contributions that you have made uninvited on this site. What on earth is wrong with that? How does that qualify as name-calling?" (How, indeed?)

"Either you're incompetent or you're a fantasist."

"I decline to treat you with a respect that you haven't earned. Yet again, you complain about abuse yet fail to identify any instance of it. The terms crank, conspiracy theorist, amateur and snob are plainly all descriptive." (Nope, no abuse there. I'm sure Kamm wouldn't take it as an insult if someone used such "descriptive" terms against him. Would he?)  

"What possible value is the opinion of a Supreme Court judge on Elizabethan literature? He may be intelligent and professionally accomplished, but his opinion on Shakespeare is intrinsically worth nothing." (But the opinion of a hedge fund manager is of great value.) 

"I didn't seek your opinions and have no interest in them."

"I can only suppose you thought you'd be treated at worst as a legitimate contributor to honest debate, and at least you now know better."

"Once you intruded into this space, I didn't ignore you but told you the brutal truth: you're a crank, an ignoramus and an amateur. How that can be termed 'vilification' is beyond me: it's a frank and objective assessment of your views and behaviour." (Why, it's not vilification at all. It's just frank talk - and "objective," no less!) 

Although Kamm does make a few substantive points, his overall tone is so hostile that the term "crank" or "nutter" would seem to apply more aptly to him than to most of his correspondents.

I don't know to what extent Oliver Kamm may be typical of hedge fund managers in general, but if the qualities he displays in these comments - overbearing self-righteousness, disdain for any contrary viewpoint, and an unwillingness to even consider the possibility that he is mistaken - are found in equal measure in his colleagues, then the derivatives crisis, which nearly brought down the financial systems of the world, becomes a good deal easier to understand.

Courting Shakespeare

Just in time for the birthday of William Shakespeare of Stratford (on April 23) comes an enjoyable Wall Street Journal article on the Shakespeare authorship controversy.

The Journal article focuses on the Shakespeare debate as it affects the Supreme Court. Apparently our most powerful jurists have been squabbling over this issue for some time.

I'm in the Oxford camp, as I discussed here - though some of the arguments in Clare Asquith's Shadowplay did get me to briefly reconsider good old Will as the true author. In the end, though, I just don't think these plays and poems were written from the perspective of a commoner. They carry too strong an odor of the aristocracy, I think.

And the events of Oxford's life match up uncannily with key plot points in the Shakespearean plays. To take one small example, Oxford was captured by pirates when he was abroad, but the pirates released him, sans possessions, after learning that he was a nobleman. The very same thing happens to Hamlet (offstage). A trivial thing in itself, but when you discover that there are literally dozens of such parallels, it's hard to believe they're all purely coincidental.

The Journal reports:

"In two of the plays Shakespeare has an incident using the bed trick, in which the man is not aware of the identity of the woman he's sleeping with," Justice Stevens says, referring to "All's Well That Ends Well" and "Measure for Measure." "And there's an incident in the Old Testament where the same event allegedly occurred."

Justice Stevens says he reasoned that if de Vere had borrowed the escapade from his Bible, "he would have underlined those portions of it. So I went over once [to the Folger Library] to ask them to dig out the Bible [once owned by de Vere]."

Unfortunately, the passage involving the substitution of Leah for Rachel in Jacob's bed, Genesis 29:23, was not marked. "I really thought I might have stumbled onto something that would be a very strong coincidence," Justice Stevens says. "But it did not develop at all."

But there's a good reason why Oxford didn't need to underline that passage. He didn't get the idea of the bed trick from the Bible. He got it from his own life. Oxford was pressured into marriage with a woman he didn't love, and after the marriage he set off for the Continent (very much like Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well). While he was away, his wife gave birth to a daughter. It is possible that Oxford had never consummated the marriage, perhaps because he was hoping for an annulment; in any case, for some reason he seemed certain that the child was illegitimate. Later, however, he allowed himself to be be convinced that the child was his. His wife claimed to have cunningly played a "bed trick" on him, visiting him in the dark in the guise of an anonymous lover.

Whether or not Oxford actually believed this story, it allowed him to save face and accept the child (and reconcile with his wife).  And yes, the bed-trick motif does play a prominent role in not one but two "Shakespeare" plays - as does the theme of a jealous husband who suspects his wife of being unfaithful (Othello, A Winter's Tale) - not to mention the theme of a father's reconciliation with an abandoned daughter (Pericles, A Winter's Tale, King Lear).   

I also liked this part of the article:

"My wife, who is a much better expert in literature than I am, has berated me," says Justice Scalia. "She thinks we Oxfordians are motivated by the fact that we can't believe that a commoner could have done something like this, you know, it's an aristocratic tendency."

Justice Scalia prefers to turn the tables.

"It is probably more likely that the pro-Shakespearean people are affected by a democratic bias than the Oxfordians are affected by an aristocratic bias," he says....

[Similarly, Justice Stevens observes,] "A lot of people like to think it's Shakespeare because ... they like to think that a commoner can be such a brilliant writer. Even though there is no Santa Claus, it's still a wonderful myth."

I think that's about right. Ever since Milton versified about the Stratford man "warbling [his] native wood-notes wild," it's been popular to think of Shakespeare as a poorly educated rustic who somehow, by sheer dint of genius, elevated himself to the heights of literary accomplishment. It's a beguiling story, a celebration of the genius of democracy, but a tale I find highly unlikely. And by the way, the author of the Shakespearean works was no democrat, nor was he a fan of the common folk, whom he depicts alternately as clownish buffoons and unruly mobs.

Of course, many members of the middle class have distinguished themselves as writers, and some did so even in Shakespeare's day; but they had the benefit of a decent education and a constant exposure to books. Will Shakespeare, growing up in an illiterate household in a farming town with a one-room schoolhouse and virtually no books in English available to him other than the Bible, is not likely to have mastered the sophisticated language on display in even the earliest "Shakespearean" plays. (Imagine a barely literate new arrival from the provinces writing Love's Labours Lost, a play steeped in topical allusions, courtly in-jokes and complex wordplay.)  

There probably are a few allusions to Will Shakespeare in the plays, but they are not very complimentary and they don't help the Stratfordian cause. In The Taming of the Shrew, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly of Warwickshire is often seen as a stand-in for the Stratford man (Stratford is in Warwickshire), but what is the upshot of the Sly story? He is brought into a noble's house and dressed up like the owner, to play-act at being a great man when, in reality, he is a mere nobody. Another likely reference to Will is the character of William in As You Like It, but poor William, while goodhearted enough, is an ignorant yokel who becomes the comic butt of the sophisticated aristocrats who encounter him. Why would the author depict "himself" as a drunken phony or a bumptious stooge? Self-deprecatory humor? Or was he taking a few shots at the upstart actor whom he was obliged to use as a literary front man? 

I think the latter explanation is more plausible. And it appears I'm in good company.

Hey, maybe I should be on the Supreme Court! (I already spend a good part of the day in my robe.)

From the archives: Shakespeare the drunk?

As a break from quarrels about consciousness, religion, and other weighty topics, here's a post that originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2006. I've updated some of the links and made a few minor changes in the wording. For my other posts on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, click here.

----

A fascinating article appears in the latest edition of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, a publication of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, which seeks to prove that Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, was the actual author of the works attributed to the man from Stratford. The essay, by Robert R. Prechter, Jr., is entitled "Might Edward de Vere Have Suffered from Alcoholism?" (The essay is online here.) Since Oxfordians believe that de Vere was Shakespeare, this question is tantamount to asking if the most famous author in English literature was an alcoholic.

On its surface, the idea might seem absurd. As Prechter points out, many people assume that no high-achieving individual could possibly suffer from an addiction to drink. But, as he goes on to say, this belief "is not just false, but backward.... One of the behavioral signs in early and middle-stage alcoholism is a drive for extreme achievement.... Not only can most alcoholics function, but many of them, in some ways, perform better than the rest of us."

Citing alcoholism researcher Doug Thorburn as his main source, Prechter lists a number of famous, high achieving people who were known for an addiction to alcohol and/or drugs: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Beethoven, John Lennon, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen King, e.e. cummings, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker ... and the list goes on. At the end of this section, Prechter concludes, "One may certainly wish to argue against de Vere's having alcoholism, but his prodigious achievement in the arts is not good evidence to the contrary."

There is certainly reason to suspect that de Vere had trouble with liquor. His personal life was a mess. His first marriage devolved into a shambles; he became estranged from his wife for years after being convinced that the daughter she had borne him was illegitimate. He expended stupendous sums on travel and entertainment and prodigious feats of charity, depleting his once vast estate, and eventually had to depend on lavish government subsidies to maintain his lifestyle. His investments generally took the form of high stakes gambles that rarely paid off. And like many alcoholics, he was prone to angry fits of tempers and even violence. He once killed a man in a street brawl. On more than one occasion he alienated the Queen by disobeying her commands, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for several months.

If he was Shakespeare, then he could be almost unconscionably cruel; some of the Bard's buffoonish characters are clearly parodies of de Vere's rivals at court, depicted in the most humiliating possible terms. Prechter asks, "Who among us would want to be lampooned as was Malvolio in front of our eyes and those of everyone in town?... How many non-alcoholics craft such detailed humiliations of others? On the other hand, some alcoholics, such as Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson, were expert at doing so."

Indeed, the portrait of Malvolio in Twelfth Night may be one of the cruelest examples of literary revenge in history. Oxfordians believe that Malvolio was based on the courtier Christopher Hatton, a man of modest origins who had risen in Queen Elizabeth's favor. Malvolio, whose very name translates into something like "ill will," is depicted as a social-climbing oaf, an overreaching servant who imagines that he can woo his aristocratic mistress and who is utterly humiliated in the process.

If the play, or some early version of it, was performed at court for the entertainment of the Queen and her hangers-on, then Hatton would have had the excruciatingly uncomfortable experience of seeing himself ridiculed unmercifully in front of all his friends and colleagues, while de Vere presumably chortled with amusement. It is certainly possible that a non-alcoholic could come up with such punishment for an adversary, but a man "in his cups" might seem more likely to carry through on the project.

Prechter notes that Shakespeare's works often feature the tavern as their setting. One of Shakespeare's most distinctive characters is Falstaff, who is perpetually intoxicated. Prechter notes, "He even casts Prince Hal, the obvious de Vere figure in the Henry IV plays, as a smart, affable carouser who will rise heroically to the occasion when the time comes for him to reign."

Another possible indication of Shakespeare/de Vere's alcoholism is the sheer vividness and verve of his writing, the remarkably sustained explorations of intense emotional states, the almost giddy wordplay with its inexhaustible variety and inventiveness, the rash of metaphors and similes constantly spouting from his pen, sometimes in such quick succession that their meaning becomes difficult to follow even on the printed page, let alone in the theater. Much of Shakespeare's work gives the impression of having been written at white heat, in a kind of fit of creativity, a passionate state of rapture and self-absorption. At the very least, this type of writing is not inconsistent with the wildly overflowing output of the high-achieving alcoholic.

As Prechter says, "De Vere's writing is so noble, so insightful, so passionate, that he stirs us to the zenith of our emotions. But then again, that's what peak-performing alcoholics do best: they win people over and make us love them. Although their personal lives exasperate us, we excuse their behavior because we are infatuated. We love Marilyn. We love Sinatra. We love Lennon. We love Elvis. We love Shakespeare. Non-alcoholics do not generally inspire idolization, but alcoholics do, all the time."

Much ado about very little

In the wake of Charlton Heston's death, the Weekly Standard republished a letter written by the actor to that publication some years ago championing the Stratfordian cause. Among other things, Heston criticizes the view that "the queen and Oxford's family would have been 'scandalized' ... to know he'd written works of genius."

He asks,

Why? Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, published at least one book and wrote music and songs for court masques; her successor, James I, sponsored the first production of Macbeth mounted indoors, at court.

This is mixing categories. Yes, some nobles published the occasional book -- a sober religious tract or a sententious political essay, written not for money or personal glory but for the betterment of society. And it was perfectly acceptable for nobles to pen plays and masques for the private amusement of the court. But any form of remunerative work was considered an affront to a nobleman's dignity. To write plays for the unwashed public -- to openly consort with common players, who were legally in the same class as pickpockets, prostitutes, and vagabonds -- and worst of all, to publish vulgar, crowd-pleasing plays for money ... this would have been unthinkable for any self-respecting member of the upper class. Even so noted a poet as Sir Philip Sidney published nothing in his lifetime; his works were printed posthumously, by special arrangement of his adoring sister.

In any case, the Oxfordian claim is not that the queen and Oxford's family didn't know about his pastime; they surely did. But they did not want this secret to become general knowledge -- embarrassingly public knowledge. That was the "scandal" they feared.

Linked to Heston's letter is an article by Paul Cantor, a professor of English dead-set against the Oxfordian heresy. Cantor's 1997 piece, a hostile review of Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare, sternly informs us that an education wasn't necessary for a natural genius like the Stratford man:

But does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet? There is something embarrassingly bourgeois about this way of thinking, as if some 12-step program were available that leads to literary achievement of the highest order. Some of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights, like Christopher Marlowe, did have university degrees, but the fact is that many of the greatest authors in history never set foot in college. Geniuses are geniuses precisely because they do not play by the ordinary rules.

Well, this is silly. The argument is not that only college graduates can be geniuses; rather, Oxfordians point to the many indications that these particular plays and poems were written by a highly educated man. Among other things, the author

-- seems to have been fluent in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. (Several of the plays' sources were available only in those languages; Shakespeare coined many English words from foreign tongues; significant parts of Henry V are written in French.)

-- was widely versed in Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and the intellectual controversies of his day, as well as the customs and climes of foreign lands, notably Italy. (Some of this information could have been picked up in grammar school, in church, or on the street, but the breadth of Shakespeare's learning argues for an extensive education and considerable foreign travel.)

-- was intimately familiar with the law. (Legal expressions and concepts turn up constantly in the plays and, most noticeably, in the sonnets, even in seemingly inappropriate contexts.)

So whoever wrote the Shakespearean corpus was multilingual in contemporary and ancient languages; was widely read and well-traveled; and had studied law. "Does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet?" Indeed it does, precisely by providing knowledge in all these areas -- as a university education of the time, augmented by a tour of the Continent, would have done.

Incidentally, having branded Sobran "embarrassingly bourgeois," Cantor goes on to suggest that his way of thinking places him in company of "contemporary radicals" with "a Marxist view of literature." Bourgeois or radical Marxist - which is it? Apparently anything goes when the argument consists only of empty name-calling.

Cantor acknowledges that Shakespeare the author was in sympathy to the aristocracy, or at least to aristocratic virtues. But he cannot believe the Bard was an aristocrat himself. Addressing the Oxfordian claim that the earl of Oxford was very much like a character in a Shakespeare play, Cantor seems to agree, but he sees a purely negative significance in this fact.

How could anyone [like de Vere] who led such a dissolute life find the time and discipline to write the plays we know as Shakespeare's? Sobran confuses living an aristocratic existence with being able to portray it. He writes of Oxford: "His life sounds more like the subject of a Shakespeare play." But could King Lear have written King Lear or Macbeth Macbeth? If literary history teaches us anything, it is that authors are usually the opposite of the heroes they create. Homer was no Achilles.

"Authors are usually the opposite of the heroes they create." Really?

Ernest Hemingway wrote about hard-living men who fought in combat, hunted big game, and loved a good bullfight.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about expatriate American intellectuals searching for meaning while idling on the Continent.

Mark Twain wrote about imaginative, energetic boys growing up in rural Missouri.

Ayn Rand wrote about fiercely individualistic, chain-smoking capitalists who defied the moral conventions of their day.

Is there no similarity between these authors and characters they created?

Moreover, if some of Shakespeare's characters do indeed resemble de Vere, as even Cantor appears to concede, then how did the lowly commoner from Stratford get away with writing such plays? Depicting a living nobleman on stage was the sort of thing that got people thrown in the Clink -- the Clink being an actual jail of the period. Ben Jonson was jailed twice for sedition on account of topical references in his plays, and other playwrights suffered similar fates; Thomas Kyd seems to have been driven to his grave by government persecution. Yet the long arm of the law never touched the Stratford man, even when "his" plays were making unmistakable (and derogatory) references to leading figures of the realm. It is widely acknowledged that Polonius in Hamlet is based on the Queen's counselor (and de Vere's father-in-law) William Cecil. What commoner would dare mock a man who could easily toss him in prison and throw away the key?

Or consider Richard III. The title character is very likely a caricature of Cecil's powerful and much-feared son, Robert -- right down to Robert's humped back. Clare Asquith, though a resolute Stratfordian herself, provides a persuasive rundown of parallels between Robert Cecil and King Richard in her book Shadowplay:

Richard III, a play about the hunchbacked fifteenth-century king notorious for murdering two princes in the tower, dates from the early 1590s and is a startling portrait, not merely of the general style of the 'Regnum Cecilianium' but of the unpopular public persona of Robert Cecil in particular.... Cecil is recorded as saying, 'God knows I labour like a pack horse'; the 'pack' one of his joking references to his own deformity. The only play in which Shakespeare uses the word 'packhorse' is when the hunchback Richard describes the services he did for his brother, the king, in the role the Cecils so often adopted -- that of the selfless public servant: 'I was a pack-horse in his great affairs,/A weeder-out of his proud adversaries' (I.3.121).... Richard's spectacular success in seducing the widow of one of his victims over her husband's corpse recalls another Cecil characteristic -- his unlikely prowess as a womaniser.... Both Richard and Robert were called 'Toad'; 'Here lies the Toad' was scrawled on the door of his house. Robert was an 'Elf' to Queen Elizabeth; Richard is called 'elvish-marked' (I.3.227) in the play. [pp. 79-80]

We have, then, a playwright and poet who aligns himself with the aristocracy; who shows all the signs of learning and foreign travel to be expected of an aristocrat; who has the temerity to attack the most powerful men in England, and the ability to get away with it; and whose plays repeatedly feature characters and incidents strongly reminiscent of the life of Edward de Vere -- known in his day as a leading poet, though one who (like other nobleman) did not publish under his own name.

More than ten years since the publication of Cantor's hit piece, the Oxfordian case is stronger than ever.

Devils and porters

Those of us who doubt that "the Stratford man" wrote the works of Shakespeare, and who prefer the candidacy of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, are frequently confronted with the objection that some of Shakespeare's plays postdate de Vere's death in 1604. The two plays most commonly cited in this respect are The Tempest and Macbeth. The case for a late date for The Tempest has gotten a lot weaker in recent years, thanks to some first-rate scholarship. But how about the Scottish play?

Conventional wisdom holds that Macbeth was written to flatter King James, the king of Scotland who assumed the English throne after Elizabeth's death. This in itself is not fatal to the Oxfordian hypothesis, since Oxford did live long enough to witness the earliest part of James I's reign.

In passing, however, I can't help noting that the best way to flatter a Scottish king might not be to put on a play about the assassination of a Scottish king and the murder (by his own rebelling subjects) of his successor. It is usually argued that James would have been pleased by the inclusion of Banquo, his distant ancestor, in the story - but since Banquo is brutally killed by Macbeth's henchmen and is then seen as a blood-dripping wraith, it is uncertain if James appreciated the compliment. It's also odd that Banquo's moral stance relative to Macbeth's regicide is left ambiguous. You'd think a flatterer would want to make Banquo's motives as pure as possible, instead of leaving them in doubt - especially when said motives pertained to the murder of a king, the worst conceivable offense in the Elizabethan-Jacobean imagination.

Regardless of the flattery issue, there is no problem for Oxfordians in saying that the play was written in James's reign. This would make it one of the last plays Oxford/Shakespeare ever wrote – perhaps not an implausible assumption, given the play's brevity and some rather odd story problems, which may suggest a not-quite-finished piece of work.

The real problem is that some scholars have identified in Macbeth numerous references to the Gunpowder Plot, a scheme hatched by the infamous Guy Fawkes and other Catholic recusants – people who clung to the dream of driving the Protestants from power. To this end, the plotters stashed a huge quantity of gunpowder in the cellar of Parliament, intending to blow the whole building sky high when James addressed the peers. The death toll would have been staggering, and the English government would have been toppled at a stroke. The plot was foiled at the last minute, the plotters were executed, and the Catholic cause was damaged beyond repair.

Garry Wills wrote a whole book, Witches and Jesuits, arguing that Macbeth is a "Gunpowder play," and others have agreed. But the Gunpowder Plot took place in 1605, the year after de Vere's death. If Macbeth really is inspired from start to finish by the actions of Guy Fawkes et al, then Oxford could not have written it, and could not have been Shakespeare.

Before we give up the Oxfordian cause in despair, it's worth asking whether Macbeth really is as saturated with Gunpowder allusions as some critics maintain. No doubt the play contains references to treachery, but treachery is a standard theme of Shakespeare's, and indeed of all drama. There are also hostile references to the Jesuits, but Jesuit-phobia had been rampant in England for decades, fueled by Protestant propaganda.

In her worthwhile book Shadowplay, Clare Asquith summarizes what she sees as Gunpowder elements in Macbeth. Many of these connections seem like a stretch. They include:

The line "the crow makes wing to the rooky wood," supposedly a reference to Ambrose Rookwood, one of the plotters.

Lady Macbeth's advice to look like a flower "but be the serpent under't," supposedly alluding to a Gunpowder Plot commemorative medal.

The fact that "images of dead children and murdered boys fill the play," supposedly inspired by young Prince Henry's close call.

The line "Let this pernicious hour stand aye accursed in the calendar," supposedly a nod to the inauguration of Guy Fawkes Day.

Various references to eyes and eyeballs, supposedly a reference to the fact that one of the conspirators was blinded when some of the gunpowder went off by accident.

The alleged inclusion of mystery-play motifs in the drama, which would point to Catholic rituals.

To me, these claims seem rather thin. Asquith spends most of her time on the mystery play idea, but the parallels between Macbeth and the old religious melodramas are doubtful. Among other things, Asquith wants us to see the ghost of Banquo as a stand-in for the resurrected Christ - a hard sell, given that Banquo, unlike Jesus, appears as a gory, grinning ghoul.

But there is one point raised by Asquith and many other critics that is harder to dismiss. This involves the famous "devil porter" interlude. Asquith writes,

In a curiously comic scene immediately after Duncan's murder, often thought to be a later interpolation, the castle porter struggles to answer a knocking at the gate, parodying stock characters from mystery plays, the minor devils who keep the gates of Hell. A famous sequence of references to the trial of Henry Garnet [executed as part of the Gunpowder conspiracy], including a play on his alias, 'Farmer', and on his defense of equivocation, make it clear that the porter expects Garnet to join him in Hell ...

As Asquith and others have said, the allusions to Garnet would have been clearly understood by the audience of the day. There is no way around it; the porter's monologue was undoubtedly inspired by the Gunpowder Plot. What's an Oxfordian to do?

The simplest way out is to assume that the porter material was a later addition to the play, inserted for reasons of topicality. Asquith herself notes that the scene is "often thought to be a later interpolation," and there are good reasons to believe that it is.

For one thing, the scene does not advance the plot and can be excised without affecting the narrative flow. In fact, it was omitted in standard 19th century productions because it was deemed in bad taste. It is almost always retained in modern productions, probably because the juxtaposition of low comedy with high drama appeals to postmodern sensibilities; but this artistic choice is not necessarily wise. The punning, preening porter has a tendency to stop the show.

Asquith observes that the scene is "curiously comic," and indeed its tone is markedly different from the rest of the play. Following directly on the murder of Duncan, the effect is jarring. Of course this may have been Shakespeare's intention. But it may also reflect the uneasy congruence of different authors' sensibilities and styles.

If Macbeth were a text in pristine condition, then claims of later interpolations would be harder to justify. But the consensus of scholarly opinion is that the play has been worked over by more than one hand. Continuity lapses suggest the possibility that some material was cut. Some of the witch scenes, including the appearance of Hecate, queen of the witches, have been attributed to Thomas Middleton and may have been added to pad out an unusually short play or to capitalize on the later popularity of masques (Hecate leads the coven in a dance). There is no reason why Middleton or some other hired hand could not have added the porter scene as well - perhaps in an effort to provide comic relief for what is otherwise an exceptionally grim afternoon at the theater.

All in all, the porter scene is certainly expendable and its artistic merits are debatable. Indeed, traditionally critics and producers alike regarded the scene as unworthy of Shakespeare, though this view has fallen out of favor today.

If we add the drunken porter to the list of scenes usually accepted as interpolations, then the alleged Gunpowder elements in Macbeth are reduced to a few cryptic lines that may or may not have anything to do with the scandal. Which means the play, in its original form, could have been written before 1605 – perhaps even many years before, if we reject the notion that it was meant as royal flattery.

None of this proves that Oxford wrote it. It only suggests that nothing in the play rules him out as the author. The positive case for Oxford as the real Shakespeare has been made elsewhere, notably by Mark Anderson in his book "Shakespeare" By Another Name. But that's another story.

Tempest in a teapot

Mark Anderson's blog makes note of six new scholarly articles apparently establishling that Shakespeare's play The Tempest, long thought to have been written after 1604, was actually based on sources that considerably predate that year. As Mark says, this is important to the authorship controversy, because the leading candidate for the "real Shakespeare," Edward de Vere, died in 1604. "If any Shakespeare play could definitively be dated after 1604," Mark writes, "then de Vere is kicked to the curb as a 'Shakespeare' candidate."

The two plays most often cited as post 1604 are The Tempest and Macbeth. If The Tempest was penned before 1604, then only Macbeth remains - and only if we buy the dubious argument that a play about the assassination of a Scottish king was written to "flatter" King James, himself a Scot.

The debate continues, and the level of scholarship on the anti-Stratfordian side just keeps climbing higher.

A one-two punch

In 2001 Diana Price published an outstanding work of scholarship titled Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem, in which she reviewed all the extant documentary evidence for the life of William Shakespeare and concluded that there was nothing from the Stratford man's lifetime to tie him to any literary works. There were, of course, references to literary works by someone who called himself "William Shakespeare" (or, just as often, "Shake-Speare"), and there were references to the business and legal activities of a man hailing from Stratford with a similar (but not identical) name, but there was no clear connection between these two sets of references. It was as if they were records of two different people -- which some of us believe they are.

In the last chapter of her book, Price masterfully sums up her case. I can't quote it all, but here are some representative excerpts. Naturally, to get the details, you have to read the book itself. I should note that, following a long-standing convention among anti-Stratfordians (those who are skeptical of the Stratford man's claims to authorship), Price refers to the man from Stratford as "William Shakspere" (as he himself appears to have spelled it) to distinguish him from the author "William Shakespeare."

The biography of William Shakspere is deficient. It cites not one personal literary record to prove that he wrote for living. Moreover, it cites not one personal record to prove that he was capable of writing the works of William Shakespeare. In the genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary biography, that deficiency is unique. While Shakspere left over seventy biographical records, not one of them tells us that his occupation was writing. In contrast, George Peele's meager pile of twenty-some personal biographical records includes at least nine that are literary. John Webster, one of the least documented writers of the day, left behind fewer than a dozen personal biographical records, but seven of them are literary....

One can make a case for Shakspere as a shareholder, actor, moneylender, broker, entrepreneur, real estate investor, or commodity trader, but one cannot make a case, based on the biographical evidence, for Shakspere as a writer....

Although the documented facts about Shakspere are nonliterary, they present a coherent and consistent character. Those same facts lose their coherence when combined with other facts that emerge from the literary works themselves. When biographers try to fit the two sets of facts together, they find them incompatible. Their solution has been to put the conflicting information into the same book, but into different chapters....

The constraints have forced biographers to create an abnormal noncharacter with no discernible personality. What is known of Shakspere's character is canceled out by the attempt to splice his life onto Shakespeare's literary output. The manipulation of data to obscure or rationalize the more flagrant contradictions reduces the Shakespeare of biography to an amorphous nonentity....

Shakspere, the man, is an unbelievable conflation of a self-effacing nonentity and an aggressive wheeler-dealer. Ian Wilson found it "notable" that when actor Augustine Phillipps drew up his will, he appointed "as his legal overseer trusty book keeper Heminges ... significantly not choosing for this [responsibility] an arguably dreamy writer like Shakespeare." In his next chapter, Wilson described the "hard-headed clique of businessmen, Shakespeare among them, making commercial decisions." Wilson's conception of "Shakespeare" alternated between "dreamy" and "hard-headed," and that contradictory character is indicative of a hybrid person. No consistent traits can emerge from the artificial splicing together of two distinctly different personalities....

Shakspere was supposedly a skilled writer, but his will was utterly nonliterary, and his handwriting was practically illegible. Shakespeare the poet believed his verses were powerful enough to outlive marble, yet Shakspere, a man of documented self-interest, did nothing to ensure their accurate preservation through supervised publishing....

Shakspere's documentary records are not those of a literary genius but those of a man with financial acumen and a mediocre intellect. If all the Shakespeare plays had been published anonymously, nothing in William Shakspere's documented biographical trails would remotely suggest that he wrote them....

Who, then, was William Shakspere of Stratford? The records tell us. The uncontested documentation proves that he was a successful businessman who invested shrewdly and made a lot of money. That documentation, augmented by satirical allusions, supports the career of an entrepreneur who brokered plays, costumes, frippery, loans, a marriage, and probably an impresa assignment [a minor work-for-hire job for the court].

One personality trait that is particularly well documented is tightfistedness.... During the very years that he was a tax delinquent, Shakspere was busy investing in real estate, hoarding grain, and being approached for financing.... Shakspere seems to have been quick to sue to recover debts, but slow to pay off his own obligations....

[Robert Bearman, author of Shakespeare in the Stratford Records,] found "little, if anything to remind us that we are studying the life of one who in his writings emerges as perhaps the most gifted of all time in describing the human condition. Here in Stratford he seems merely to have been a man of the world, buying property, laying in ample stocks of barley and malt and, when others were starving, selling off his surpluses and pursuing debtors in court, and conniving, as it seems, at the Welcombe enclosures" [a scheme to fence off public lands for private use]. Shakspere was lampooned early in his career as a miserly [figure], greedy for game, and his documentary records are consistent with that portrayal....

All the documentary evidence shows that Shakspere was a shrewd negotiator at the bargaining table, manipulative, sometimes involved in shady deals, and pretentious. Those characteristics are amply reinforced by the satirical allusions that biographers reluctantly introduce, only to drop like hot potatoes. Again and again, the satirical portraits deliver the same bombastic operator with an overblown opinion of himself, but none of them points to a writer.

The theatrical documentation shows that his role with the Chamberlain's/King's Men was not that of a dramatist but that of an entrepreneur and financier. The records also point to an opportunist who was associated with some of the published Shakespeare plays, and with a number of inferior texts. Shakspere's vocation as play broker could account for a number of plays, known today to be somebody else's, but published then over the name of William Shakespeare or over the initials "W. S." [The scholar E.A.J.] Honigmann observed that in the 1600s, "unscrupulous men used [Shakespeare's] name to sell plays that, as all the world now agrees, could not have come from his pen." The evidence suggests that one of those unscrupulous men was William Shakspere....

Any financial interest in play scripts that Shakspere retained as a theater shareholder was subverted by the theft of the Shakespeare plays. Shakspere therefore stood to lose hard cash from any unauthorized sale of the Shakespeare plays unless Shakspere himself stood to gain by that sale. In other words, either this aggressive businessman with a financial stake in the Shakespeare plays inexplicably did nothing to stop the piracy -- or he was the play pirate....

The contradictory and incompatible evidence has prompted anti-Stratfordians to search for an alternative author. When the hard evidence is examined, what emerges is an overwhelming weight of probability that William Shakspere of Stratford did not write the plays of William Shakespeare, and an equally overwhelming weight of probability that a gentleman of rank did. The idea that "William Shakespeare" was the pen name of an Elizabethan aristocrat is ultimately less fanciful than ascribing to an alleged grammar school dropout the most exquisite dramatic literature in the English language....

Shakespeare's chroniclers should be able to write a biography that has a rational relationship to the literary output of the man. The fact that biographers have failed after countless attempts strongly suggests that they are writing about the wrong man.... Unfortunately, until the authorship question gains legitimacy in academic and literary circles, we will all be stuck with a biography out of joint with the plays. [Pages 289-300]

Luckily, the pessimism of Price's last prediction has turned out to be unjustified. We did not have to wait for the authorship question to gain academic legitimacy in order to acquire a superb biography of the man who really wrote the works. The book is "Shakespeare" by Another Name, by Mark Anderson, and it recounts, in fascinating and meticulous detail, the countless parallels between the plays and poems of Shakespeare and the life of Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Furthermore, Anderson demonstrates that De Vere, in contrast to the Stratford man, had precisely the educational opportunities and life experiences that one would expect from the author of the Shakespearean canon.

Together, Price and Anderson deliver a devastating one-two punch to the conventional wisdom about the "sweet swan of Avon." And who knows? Someday the academic world may actually start to pay attention.