Animala Polar Bunny, of whom I have spoken frequently, has decided to weigh in on the claims of the self-styled "Oxfordians" in the Supreme Court. It seems to me that unnecessarily labeling yourself is a feature of wacky movements. For instance, take the made-up categories of "creation scientists" and "evolutionists," which is not the real conflict at all. You in fact have "non-scientists" versus "scientists." I think that we might see in the Shakespearean/Oxfordian division a similar black-and-white opposition between credible scholars and...gits.
Shakespeare was Sicilian and sort of Jewish!--by Animala Polar Bunny (pictured below)
In 1987, Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, William Brennan and Harry Blackmun considered the case of de Vere vs. Shakespeare, in which they heard evidence that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote the works commonly attributed to William Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford glover. At that time the justices found that there was insufficient evidence to prove de Vere’s authorship.
Now, however, Stevens has changed his mind. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the senior justice and recovering English major finds that “the evidence that he [Shakespeare] was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.”
He is mistaken, unless the definition of “reasonable doubt” has changed radically in the centuries since Stevens attended law school or an English class.
It is unnecessary to recount all the claims and counterclaims that have been made concerning the authorship of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare. That is why God made Wikipedia. I will confine my comments to the vast weight of evidence that Stevens and his fellow justices have brought to bear on the issue.
As many others have done before him, Stevens worries about Shakespeare’s library, or lack thereof: “Where are the books? You can’t be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home.” Well, fair enough. But just how does Stevens know that Shakespeare didn’t have books in his home? That home is itself long gone. It is true that Shakespeare did not mention any books specifically in his will, but he mentions comparatively few items specifically. He entailed his home and the bulk of his estate on his daughter Susannah. It then passed to her daughter Elizabeth. (Strictly speaking, he entailed it on a putative male line descending from Susannah. When that male line failed to materialize, the estate ultimately settled on Elizabeth.)
If Shakespeare had books, they were presumably in his primary residence New Place. New Place and all “thappurtenaunces” went to Susannah and then to Elizabeth. I suppose one could argue that the books would have been so important to Shakespeare that he would have mentioned them. We could also argue that they were so important to him that he would want them to be kept together as part of his estate. If one argued that he wouldn’t have left them to Susannah, one could be accused of sexism. One might also be reminded that he intended that the estate would ultimately fall upon a grandson.
Can we be sure that Shakespeare possessed a large library? No, of course we can’t. Stevens’ argument, however, is an example of the appeal to ignorance: we don’t have Shakespeare’s books; we don’t have positive proof that he ever had books. Therefore, Shakespeare never had books. Stevens enjoys this fallacy so much that he follows it with another example: “He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries.” We don’t have any letters that Shakespeare wrote to, say, Ben Jonson, something along the lines of, “Dear Ben, just a quick not to say that—unities, schmunities—400 years from now, I’ll be much more famous than you. P.S Are we still on for poker on Thursday? Verily yours, Will.” Since no such letters survive, it naturally follows that Shakespeare wrote no such letters. Similarly, we don’t have any letters that Shakespeare wrote home to his wife, children, siblings or parents when he was working in London. We must logically conclude then that he did not keep in contact with them. Coincidentally, there are no letters from the earl of Oxford in which he shows an unusual degree of pleasure in the success of that Shakespeare fellow.
Stevens adds that Shakespeare “never was shown to be present at any major event—the coronation of James or any of that stuff.” Well, perhaps, perhaps not. The king arrived in London on May 4, 1603. On May 19, 1603, Shakespeare’s company was issued a charter that officially made them the King’s Men. Shakespeare, as a member and shareholder of the company, became a servant of the Crown. According to Nick de Somogyi: “As Grooms of the Royal Chamber, Shakespeare and his eleven fellow actors may have walked in the procession in their official livery of red velvet cloaks, doublets and breeches” (Searching for Shakespeare by Tarnya Cooper, Yale UP, 2006).
More importantly, however, why should we expect a poet and actor to be present at important historic events, unless those events were large celebrations with entertainments provided by actors and poets?
Actually Shakespeare’s company, then the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, did play a strange, unwitting role in one historic event: the Essex rebellion. Supporters of Elizabeth I’s former favorite, Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, planned to stage a coup against her in the earl’s favor. To rouse up support, the rebels requested that Shakespeare’s company perform his play Richard II the day before the attempted coup. This play dramatizes a monarch’s forced abdication. Essex’s rebellion failed, Essex was tried and executed, and Augustine Phillips, a member of Shakespeare’s company, appeared at the trial to explain why the company had agreed to perform the play. Sometime later, Elizabeth explained to her archivist, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”
Aside from non-evidence that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, Stevens cites shaky evidence that Oxford was. Most of this is of the snobbish, “only a nobleman could have known or done that” variety. According to the WSJ article, Stevens believes that Oxford’s position at court makes him the most likely candidate for author of the plays:
“. . . Stevens mentions that Lord Burghley, guardian of the young de Vere, is generally accepted as the model for the courtier Polonius in Hamlet. ‘Burghley was the No. 1 adviser to the queen,’ says the justice. ‘De Vere married [Burghley’s] daughter which fits in with Hamlet marrying Polonius’s daughter, Ophelia.’”
Ignoring for the moment the fact that Hamlet did NOT marry Ophelia, there is no reason to suppose that the play’s author would have to be Burghley’s son-in-law: Burghley and Oxford were both famous men, even infamous in Oxford’s case.
Stevens also believes that Oxford was more likely than Shakespeare to have dedicated two poems,
Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece to Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton. Both earls were wards of Burghley: “The coincidence . . . is really quite remarkable. . . . Why in the world would William Shakespeare, the guy from Stratford, be dedicating these works to this nobleman?”
Oh, I don’t know, because the theaters were closed due to an outbreak of the plague and Shakespeare was seeking a patron? Poets dedicated works to nobles all the time, men and sometimes women who were their patrons or who they hoped would become patrons. The acting companies had patrons, and poets had patrons. They weren’t raking in big bucks from the publication of their works. Shakespeare’s fellow players, John Hemminges and Henry Condell, dedicated the first folio of his works to William and Phillip Herbert, the 3rd and 4th earls of Pembroke.
The earl of Oxford would have had no need of the earl of Southampton’s patronage. One might also wonder why Oxford would have to disguise his authorship of these narrative poems (or the sonnets, for that matter). The usual argument is that such a nobleman could not have his name attached to something as common as the theater. This argument is less convincing in regard to other forms of verse. Many people of high rank were known for their poetry. Virtually every member of Sir Phillip Sidney’s family seems to have made use of their quills, including his brother, Robert, earl of Leicester, Robert’s daughter, Lady Mary Wroth, as well as Robert and Phillip’s sister Mary, countess of Pembroke, who was also an inveterate patron of poets, as was her son, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke.
Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, son and heir of the duke of Norfolk, the highest ranking nobleman in England, was also an important and influential poet. He was the first English poet to use blank verse and the “Shakespearean” sonnet form. Oxford himself was known as a poet, and some of the poems attributed to him survive. Why would he allow some poems to be attached to his name but permit other far better poems to be attributed to the “guy from Stratford”?
Why, moreover, would the earl of Oxford write a dedication to a man who was his social equal and 23 years his junior in terms that suggest that he, Oxford, was of inferior rank?
Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation. Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare
--Dedication to Venus and Adonis, 1593
It must have been galling for Oxford to have signed the name “William Shakespeare” to the poem. It must have been equally galling for him to have had to refer to his 19-year old social equal as “you” rather than “thou.”
If, as seems likely, Oxford had known Southampton since the latter was a child, it also seems odd that he would have addressed Southampton so formally in 1593, and so much more intimately in 1594:
The love I dedicate to your worship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable deposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater my duty would show greater, meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life still strengthened with all happiness. Your Lordship’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.
Dedication to The Rape of Lucrece, 1594
Most of Stevens’ evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” is based on a lack of evidence. What evidence he provides is highly dubious. He believed at one point that he might find physical evidence for his belief, but this proved illusory. Noting that the “bed trick” that appears in
All’s Well that Ends Well and
Measure for Measure has a parallel in the biblical story of Leah and Rachel, Stevens inspected a Bible which had belonged to Oxford and which now resides at the Folger Shakespeare Library, thinking that if Oxford had written the plays, “he would have underlined those portions of it.” He hadn’t.
If we were to use Stevens’ favorite appeal to ignorance, we could conclude decisively that the lack of underlining proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Oxford did not write
All’s Well that Ends Well,
Measure for Measure and, by extension, the other plays attributed to Shakespeare. Quod erat demonstratum.
As for the other justices who submitted amicus briefs in support of the earl of Oxford, Antonin Scalia, who admits that his wife “is a much better expert in literature than I am,” does not hesitate to point out her romantic root-for-the-little-guy bias: “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,” because obviously Scalia has
no biases and is
never wrong.
Now, who were some of the other great poets and playwrights of Shakespeare’s day? Let’s see, there was Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker; Ben Jonson, the stepson of a bricklayer; Michael Drayton was the son of a butcher or tanner. Shakespeare’s sometime collaborator, John Fletcher (
Henry VIII,
Two Noble Kinsmen), came from more elevated stock. His father was Bishop of London and his uncle was an important diplomat; however, both got into trouble and Fletcher had to support himself through his writing. In other words, while some aristocrats had great poetic talent, so did some members of the middle class. Furthermore, the middle class writers had the time—and the financial need—to devote themselves to writing full-time. This is to say that they did not have other obligations, such as statesmanship and public affairs, to attend to.
Perhaps the most illuminating observation comes from Jane Ginsburg, the daughter of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In an email to her mother, she mentioned an Italian television program she’d seen which suggested that “Shakespeare was Sicilian and Jewish, sort of.”
Well, obviously, isn’t that what we’ve all suspected?
A.P.B.
Seed Newsvine
