O for a Bit of Certainty!
0 FOR A Bit of Certainty! In his rather splenetic review of my book Alias Shakespeare, Paul Cantor ("Oxford Blues," April 28) charges that my views of literature are "Romantic," "multiculturalist,"...
...Lacking a title, men lived and died in obscurity, unless they got in trouble, like Marlowe...
...He created those men and women to live on a stage, seen in light and sudden dark, heard in cries and whispers...
...G.PV...
...If, as I believe, Shakespeare was indeed the author of his plays, he had every right to feel superior to the typical aristocrat of his day or any other...
...But Cantor refuses to deal with this and much more evidence of Oxford's authorship, and his only positive evidence for the Stratsfordian amounts to the very testimony that is in doubt...
...Being a writer, Sobran misreads Shakespeare as academics do: He treats him as a writer...
...Sobran disdains such an approach, pointing out instead what a dashing, well-traveled, and altogether admirable fellow Oxford was...
...They did not ignore him, as Sobran states...
...I would like to add a few words...
...The queen and Oxford's family would have been "scandalized," Sobran says, to know he'd written works of genius...
...The more important question is: Why is this position so controversial...
...I began working on the plays when I was in high school, and I guess I've played his people more than any other current American actor...
...If Sobran knows as much as he claims about discussions of the sonnets, then he is aware that the story of the dark lady and the question of her identity have preoccupied students of the sonnets as much as any issue he raises...
...Cantor, moreover, doesn't even know the orthodox scholarship very well...
...I evidently do owe an apology to the current Earl of Oxford...
...Akrigg, Robert Giroux, and many others have held, autobiographical...
...He says I read the sonnets as the poet's self-revelation because I "naively" assume that "poets simply translate their personal experience into poetry...
...Third, for his evidence of Shakespeare's knowledge of Italy, he simply quotes two whole pages from Ernesto Grillo's Shakespeare and Italy...
...Kittredge, John Dover Wilson, C.S...
...When I was adapting Antony and Cleopatra for a film, fearing the outrage of scholars over some radical redactions I'd made, I asked Laurence Olivier's advice...
...Right or wrong, this is anything but a mere "summary of arguments others have developed (but which, alas, Shakespeare scholars have long since refuted...
...Evidently, if something in the sonnets points in the direction of Oxford, it constitutes a "story" for Sobran...
...To anyone with an open mind, it is quite clear that Mr...
...Bradley, E.K...
...a "lame" man...
...Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, published at least one book and wrote music and songs for court masques...
...Shakspere did not write the works of Shakespeare...
...As an academic scholar whose credentials as an expert are at stake, perhaps he has his own "axes to grind...
...her successor, James I, sponsored the first production of Macbeth mounted indoors, at court...
...if it does not, it is reduced to a mere "series of situations" we can safely ignore...
...The Shakespeare authorship question offers fascination and even fun to anyone who can approach it with an open mind...
...a man well versed in the law...
...This question—with the dilemma it poses for the traditional view—is also at the heart of the authorship controversy...
...Cantor says the book "adds little if anything" to the Shakespeare authorship debate...
...The historical references to the performers of the plays don't work...
...I know, there he is on the page, but that's not where he or his plays live...
...according to Sobran, Elizabethan readers were supposed to pick up from hints that they were written about Southampton, but not that they were written by Oxford...
...Sobran joins an earnest band who, citing how little is known of Shakespeare's education, experience of the world, and private life, believe not only that Shakespeare didn't write the works, but that he couldn't have written them...
...When you're redacting the plays in rehearsal, you make the changes in terms of the sound as much as the meaning...
...Thus he somehow contrived to have the sonnets circulate under somebody else's name (Shakespeare's...
...It could have been another commoner, a noble, or another actor at the Globe...
...Of course I make no such assumption, as my book amply shows...
...Exploring them there reveals more than a lifetime in a library can...
...Chambers, G.L...
...Did he smuggle them into the theater in disguise, or was Shakespeare a willing ghost—which gets us back to, "Why...
...Sobran expects us to believe that a disguise, which he is able to penetrate today, would have deceived the contemporaries of Oxford and Southampton...
...Joseph Sobran Burke, VA Paul Cantor responds: I came to doubt the originality of Joseph Sobran's book from a few facts...
...1 was braced for hostile reviews, but I didn't expect to become a victim of McCarthyism...
...All this points to Oxford...
...As for Sobran's theory of the sonnets, I still do not quite understand it...
...Neither Southampton nor Oxford is named in the sonnets...
...Charlton Heston Beverly Hills, CA In his review of Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare, Paul Cantor spends a great deal of effort refuting a straw man...
...But I'm afraid my Marxism is showing...
...It took the richness of the middle plays for London to realize his true size...
...the issue is, and always has been, whether these poems record this poet's experience...
...Sobran supports his thesis with detailed analysis that Cantor chooses to ignore...
...They none of them f—g know...
...Stephen Fleming Atlanta, GA...
...but Cantor seems not to enjoy it much...
...I've always had trouble telling English aristocrats apart...
...Rowse...
...When a book is clearly this derivative, one begins to wonder if anything in it is original...
...In that sense, I did have an axe to grind in my review...
...Shakespeare leaps alive in air, in the spoken sound of his words...
...Correspondence Sobran wonders how the commoner Shakespeare could have presented himself in his sonnets as equal or even superior to a noble lord...
...A few years ago, Claremont College completed a three-year computer-driven battery of tests to determine whether any of the 27 most mentioned candidates for the mantle of the Bard of Avon actually matched Shakespeare's stylistic peculiarities...
...It is instructive to watch the inhabitants of academe link arms to repel revolutionary new ideas...
...I must have misheard Burford's name when I was introduced to him or misremembered it...
...That occasion fixed in my mind the distinction, which I referred to in my review, between a conventional aristocrat (like the modern earl) and a natural aristocrat (like Shakespeare...
...For example, early on he casually announces: "The twenty-six sonnets about the dark mistress record a series of situations, but not exactly a story we can follow, and I set them aside...
...The subjects don't work...
...Sobran deals with the plays themselves only glancingly, avoiding the fact that many, including four of the five tragedies and the sonnets, are dated after Oxford's death...
...An amazing story, which until now even Oxford's partisans have missed...
...Also the pauses...
...But he seems unfamiliar with what has been said or who has said it, as witness his confusion of the Earl of Burford, one of Oxford's leading advocates, with "the current Earl of Oxford...
...Lewis, Kenneth Muir, A.L...
...First, its central thesis, that Edward de Vere wrote the works of Shakespeare, is old hat...
...Sobran's discussion of the sonnets is as good an example of his selective use of evidence as anything I chose to analyze in my review...
...Sobran is a good writer, but he makes a sorry case for his clearly cherished conviction that the works of William Shakespeare were not written by the provincial glover's son whose name they bear...
...No theory that claims to account for the sonnets as autobiographical can be adequate if it fails to explain the role of the infamous dark lady...
...My basic point remains the same: Listening to Burford or Oxford or whoever showed me how English upper-class snobbery fuels the questioning of Shakespeare's authorship...
...I was trying to point out the difference between a false aristocracy of social status and a true aristocracy of the spirit...
...Paul Cantor scathingly dissects Joseph Sobran's conviction that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays bearing William Shakespeare's name...
...Cantor is following a century-old tradition of political correctness, in which anyone who questions the authorship of the plays is branded an elitist snob, a Marxist, or worse...
...If he didn't, who did...
...Sobran makes a strong argument for the Earl of Oxford, one that I find convincing...
...Are we to conclude that this prominent nobleman wrote 36 plays and a wealth of poetry in the last dozen years of his life, arranged to have them produced and published anonymously and, largely, posthumously, and did not preserve one page of this glorious work, nor leave behind one note to claim his authorship for posterity...
...His plays loom so massively over all the other writing in the world because of his sublime gift, but it was a poet-player's gift...
...That was his job...
...Can Cantor possibly be unaware, even after reading my extensive treatment of the debate, that the long dispute over the Sonnets rages precisely around the question whether they are, as A.C...
...Shakespeare was exactly the parvenu player from the country Sobran describes, scribbling away on the South Bank and turning out the 16th-century equivalent of Movies of the Week...
...The tone, contents, and target of the sonnets don't work...
...The world began to catch on only after his death, when Heminge and Condell published the Folio, prefaced by praise from his fellows...
...The dates don't work...
...it can't possibly describe Stratford's son...
...Orthodoxy at the expense of the data may be an admirable way to run a religious cult, but it is certainly not what we expect of scholarship...
...Yet he never even mentions my chief thesis: that the Earl of Oxford was bisexual and used the alias "William Shakespeare" to disguise his love for the young Earl of Southampton...
...He seems to claim that Oxford wished to immortalize Southampton in verse, but not to associate his beloved young earl with his own disgraced name...
...And, how...
...Modal analyses of the work of each, using pattern-recognition techniques borrowed from radar to measure the incidence of hyphenated compound words, relative clauses, open lines, and feminine endings, disqualified everyone tested...
...Sobran is not claiming that a commoner could not have written works of genius, but that this particular commoner (William Shakspere of Stratford) could not have written these particular works of genius...
...Since it has never been said before, as Cantor appears not to realize, it can hardly have been refuted...
...Alias Shakespeare shows that the Sonnets yield a detailed portrait of their author: an aging nobleman, in love with a younger one...
...In his rather splenetic review of my book Alias Shakespeare, Paul Cantor ("Oxford Blues," April 28) charges that my views of literature are "Romantic," "multiculturalist," and even "Marxist...
...If it will make Sobran feel better, however, I stand corrected: Some of the silliness in his book is original...
...Only actors really understand this, though audiences sense it subliminally, in performance...
...None does...
...a public figure who has suffered "disgrace" and "vulgar scandal," and who hopes that his own "name will be buried," lest it "shame" both his lover and himself, though he expects his poetry to be "immortal" when he himself is "forgotten...
...Do what you think he would've done, laddy," he said...
...The record of Shakespeare's life is meager because he was a commoner...
...That's what Shakespeare did as actor/manager...
...Second, he lifts the title for one of his chapters, "Reinventing Shakespeare," from the trendy book of the same name by Gary Taylor...
...I know how they defeat you, leave you bleeding on your knees in the sand, aching to try again...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 35
