Capitol Ideas: Outing Shakespeare
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Outing Shakespeare perhaps the greatest difficulty in discussing the Authorship Question is persuading people that it is serious: Who wrote the plays and poems...
...Auden privately concurred—Shakespeare was in the "homintem," he said...
...The evidence that he was can be reduced to two comments in the prefatory material to the First Folio (1623): Ben Jon-son's "sweet swan of Avon," and a reference to "thy Stratford monument" Such a monument was indeed placed within the Stratford church...
...The Stratford lawyer in the moot court debate made the same mistake, arguing that Oxford had all sorts of blots on his character...
...Its author was J. Thomas Looney...
...whereas if we assume the existence of the missing Oxford centerpiece, everything else comes into focus, at the same time resolving a host of Shakespearean problems...
...Shakspere from 1564 to 1616...
...There matters stood until 1984 when Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare was published...
...That is what the heart of his book is all about...
...We know that the Stratford man was connected with the theater as actor and factotum, but nothing in his lifetime identifies him as an author...
...Sounds like a playwright to me," he replied...
...He traveled to Paris, Strasbourg, Venice, Padua, Florence, and Siena, and like Hamlet was briefly captured by pirates in the English Channel...
...A friend of Samuel Johnson's, who sought information about Shakespeare in Warwickshire, concluded in the 1780's that the Stratford gent wasn't the right manafter all...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Outing Shakespeare perhaps the greatest difficulty in discussing the Authorship Question is persuading people that it is serious: Who wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare...
...There is evidence for this: the comments attributed to the actors Hemming and Condell were almost certainly written by Ben Jonson, for example...
...Evidently, publishers knew there was no chance of retaliation...
...The timing could not have been worse for the new book that came out in 192o: Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford...
...He brings to the subject not only an outstanding knowledge of the historical facts that have caused such persistent doubts, but an almost unrivaled familiarity with the works themselves...
...The philanthropist and Oxfordian David Lloyd Kreeger organized a moot court debate at the American University in 1987, adjudicated (in favor of Stratford) by three U.S...
...Or perhaps the works were written by someone else—someone who died in 1604...
...Make thee another self, for love of me...
...With the help of this book, readers will be able to make up their own minds about this fascinating story...
...The problem is that, given the Stratford centerpiece, nothing else fits...
...That is all we have...
...That climate of opinion is very difficult to change...
...of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward Earl of Oxford...
...Justice Stevens alone was sympathetic to Oxford's claims...
...The easy recourse to "genius" as an explanatory device, our blithe faith in the Common Man, our understanding of English literature and of Western culture itself could be shaken by the radical revision offered here...
...In the end, as Sobran shows, it is the Stratfordians who come out of this crucial 12-year period the worse for wear...
...Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays, did much to discredit the case...
...At the same time, cranks proliferated, and the authorship question attracted many...
...The question is nonetheless a serious one, as Joseph Sobran shows in his new book, Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery ofAll Time (Free Press, $25...
...But no source material in the plays is indubitably post 1603, it turns out...
...He employed the playwrights John Lyly and Anthony Munday as personal secretaries...
...Some would say it's a contest between the couple of solid pieces yielded by the First Folio and the richer but more speculative Oxfordian material...
...That is the usual spelling in parish records and preserving it helps to clarify the distinction between him and the author, whoever he was...
...I n his youth, Oxford was "the most hopeful" of the courtier poets, but he "became mute in later life," according to Edmund Chambers...
...the lack of evidence of any education, or of any letters written by him or books in his possession...
...Readers should be warned that Sobran is a friend of mine, but I have no hesitation in saying that this is the best book ever written on the subject...
...and many other problems, argue that someone else wrote the works and used the Stratford man's name (no doubt with his consent...
...Perhaps Shakespeare stopped reading at 40, retired at 45, threw his pen down in mid-play, found a collaborator, and went back to Stratford to pursue debtors in small claims court, finally leaving his second best bed to his wife...
...I once tested him on his claim that he knew the whole of Shakespeare by heart...
...If the academy has been wrong about something as basic to their curriculum as this, and obstinately wrong, then we may well wonder how many other things have gone awry at our fabled universities...
...Allies had asked him if he wouldn't mind changing his name, just as the author of Hamlet had done...
...Shakspere makes it unlikely that he wrote anything...
...But the awkward facts of Mr...
...Shakspere's life, the petty lawsuits, the lack of reference to literary remains in his will (when half his plays were still unpublished), his "retirement" at the age of 45, London's silence at the time of his death (the far less highly esteemed Francis Beaumont had received almost a state funeral a few weeks earlier...
...It sounds as though one has joined the ranks of the conspiratorialists...
...T he authorship controversy goes back as far as the earliest real attempt to unearth facts about William Shakspere of Stratford...
...Emerson made the summary case when he said he could not "marry" the man and his verse...
...Reading lines at random from the Collected Works, I asked him to continue...
...The American Spectator • May 1997 23...
...Some plays are conventionally dated after that year but it is all guesswork, not dictated by any fact...
...Only one of the 'wolfish earls' so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works...
...If his life had been a blank, like Homer's, we could ascribe to him whatever qualities we like...
...In every case he did so...
...One of Oxford's daughters was married to the latter, another was engaged to the former...
...his six semi-literate signatures on legal documents, suggesting that he was not even used to writing his own name, let alone the Sonnets...
...That is certainly a tenable position...
...Chronologically, Shakespeare appears as a poet just as Oxford appears to cease writing poetry...
...The history plays were "conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism...
...Beneath the bare foundations of fact, Whitman added, there lay "elusive" hints of something else, "tantalizing and half suspected—suggesting explanations that one dare not put into plain statement...
...The Baconian thesis had proved sterile, and was degenerating into absurdity...
...But the most remarkable comments came from Walt Whitman...
...Hawthorne, Henry James, Freud, and Mark Twain were among the skeptics...
...Shakespeare" on the cover...
...And some later plays (Pericles, Two Noble Kinsman) shows signs of a coauthor...
...By the mid-nineteenth century this opinion was widespread...
...Their descriptions were graphic...
...Well, it makes a big difference...
...The best for comedy among us be Edward Earl of Oxford," Francis Meres wrote in 1598...
...The authorship debate may be compared to a jigsaw puzzle where most pieces are missing...
...22 May 1997 • The American Spectator Joe Sobran does put them into plain statement, and for the first time...
...It was pronounced LOE-ney, but too bad, now we had the Loony Theory on top of everything else...
...Having contributed to an Atlantic Monthly debate on the subject (October Ho), I have found that a common Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...This was the "tantalizing" possibility that Whitman dared not mention...
...Oxford was a patron of acting companies in the 1580's and he did write plays...
...The author of The Art of English Poesie wrote that members of the nobility had often written well but "suffered it to be published without their own names to it, as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned...
...Like the author of the Sonnets, he refers to himself as "lame...
...Many archives in England are still virgin territory...
...His song was worthy merit," a poet named Barksted wrote in 1607...
...The EngLit departments don't want to discuss it, and they have marginalized it...
...Decipherers began finding in the text directions to buried manuscript-filled boxes...
...Shakespeare also seems to be in love with the young man...
...It came as a breath of fresh air...
...Supreme Court justices...
...Shakespeare's First Folio was dedicated to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery...
...Even within conventional scholarship it is widely accepted that Southampton is the young man upon whom Shakespeare in the first seventeen Sonnets presses matrimony...
...The great problem was (and remains) that what we know about Mr...
...He died a disappointed man...
...Now Sobran has greatly strengthened the case for Oxford...
...But I move ahead of my story...
...As for the Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of the two long Shakespeare poems, he came under strong pressure from Queen Elizabeth's leading minister, Lord Burghley, to marry Oxford's remaining daughter Elizabeth Vere (who was also Burghley's granddaughter...
...Much is at stake...
...After a few years of such absurdities someone said, "Let's just say that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, shall we...
...The Sonnets were published in 1609without the author's cooperation, the publisher's dedication referring to "our ever living poet...
...So the period 1604-1616 is perilous to Oxford...
...Older or more conservative Oxfordians have sought to downplay these details about Oxford, apparently thinking that as candidate for Bard he must have an impeccable curriculum vitae...
...The question still nags: did he write the plays...
...Shakespeare is alluded to in the past tense...
...Ciphers are one's new hobby, perhaps?...In fact, the main contribution of the academy to the authorship debate has been to encourage just such a response...
...Plays not by Shakespeare (The Yorkshire Tragedy) were boldly published in quarto with "W...
...Some had written "excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out...
...What happened...
...Justice Stevens had the right response...
...Scholars have been unable to find any other instance of "ever living" referring to a living person...
...Once scholars start looking, new information about Oxford's life will almost certainly turn up...
...Twain and Whitman lived in the Age of the Amateur, which yielded invention and creativity...
...It appears that the greatest passion of our greatest poet was a furtive homosexual love," Sobran writes...
...response is: "What difference does it make, as long as we have the plays...
...Sobran argues that the dread of scandal persuaded Oxford's family to dissociate Oxford from Southampton and to ensure that the Folio pointed to someone else as author...
...The date of his death has always been considered Oxford's great weakness...
...The anti-Stratford case must therefore posit that the Folio preliminaries were in part fabricated...
...We know that Oxford brought a boy singer with him on his return from Venice, and a few years later was accused of pederasty by three courtiers (themselves admittedly facing accusations of treason...
...He lived from 155o to 1604, Mr...
...The comedies, he wrote, were written "for the divertissement only of the elite of the castle, and from its point of view," and were "altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy...
...If Sobran is correct, remember, much of the historical research has been done in the wrong place...
...In contrast to the daunting, unedited tomes that have preceded it, Sobran's book is short, and very well-written...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
