This guest entry was contributed by Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of The Wonderful World of Anagrams (New York, 2006).
"Just last week, the Washington Post published a pair of articles on "who wrote Shakespeare's plays." The one claimed that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the other re-asserted the traditional view that William Shakespeare wrote William Shakespeare's plays. By juxtaposing the two articles -- one for, one against -- the Post is guilty of outrageous anti-intellectualism.The authorship of the Shakespeare plays is not an open question. It's as if the Post were to offer its readers two articles, one in support of evolution and the other in favor of new-earth creationism. Just as the matter of evolution is a settled question, so the authorship of the plays is not -- and never has been -- in any sort of doubt. The true believers who keep stirring the pot are faith-based cranks, fanatics, and conspiracy theorists who ignore the usual rules of evidence and reason. Shame on the Post for giving them a voice!
The nay-sayers discard the historical record and ask this question: is it likely that Shakespeare, with his small-town background and (it's claimed) limited education, could have written plays that demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the law, the court, geography, seamanship, etc? As to the matter of likelihood, who could possibly disagree? Of course it isn't likely that these extraordinary plays would have been written by anyone -- but it happened nevertheless. It's also unlikely that the theory of relativity would have been developed by a civil servant in a Swiss Patent Office; it's extremely unlikely that the most transcendent music ever written would have been composed by a man who was totally deaf; it's beyond belief that an autodidact living in intellectual isolation in Madras could single-handedly recreate a big hunk of modern mathematics; it's more than incredible that a hermit-like lens-grinder living in self-imposed intellectual exile would be one of the western world's most innovative and progressive philosophers. What is "likely" and what actually happens are two entirely different kettles of fish -- especially when genius is concerned. Despite the unlikeliness, Shakespeare existed and he wrote plays and poems. His name is on thirty-six of the plays and his friends and colleagues and contemporary admirers testify not only to his existence but to his accomplishments. Among the thousands of books and the corridors of unpublished manuscripts and records that survive from his time, there's not a scrap of information to hint that the plays weren't his. Not a scrap, not a jot, not an inkling, not a tittle. Nothing.
The fallacious claims of the Oxfordians, Baconians, Elizabethians, Rutlandians, et. al. have been refuted time and time again. Here's a representative sample of the quality of the argument -- it's from the recent Washington Post article. "[It's unlikely that Shakespeare wrote the plays because he] never left England -- but sixteen of the plays are set in Italy or the Mediterranean." Persuasive? In what universe must authors travel the world in order to set their plays outside of England? Certainly not in the world of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Did Christopher Marlowe travel to Malta in order to compose The Jew of Malta or to the Asian steppe to astonish the world with the Scythian shepherd or to Wittenberg to trouble the orthodox with Doctor Faustus? Thomas Kyd never left England, but managed to startle theater-goers with The Spanish Tragedy. Ben Jonson never made his way to Italy, but he had no trouble putting Volpone in Venice. John Ford, no traveler, set 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in Parma. John Webster's two great plays The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil are set in Italy, a country on which Webster never set eyes. Thomas Middleton's masterpiece, The Changeling takes place Alicante, in Spain -- but Middleton was a Londoner who never went abroad. And so on and on, endlessly. Like his friends and competitors, Shakespeare wrote out of books. He, and they, pillaged the literature for promising stories. If the story happened to have originated in Italy, that's exactly where it remained. The playwrights were not geographers or social historians and they created not real but literary places. Marlowe's Germany and Middleton's Spain and Webster's Italy are no more German or Spanish or Italian than Shakespeare's Belmont is Belmontian or for that matter, W. S. Gilbert's Mikado is Japanese. Did Shakespeare need to travel to Denmark to write Hamlet or to Vienna to write Measure for Measure? It's nonsensical to think so. It's an argument without a scrap of merit. It's not honest.
But is it even a fact that that sixteen of Shakespeare's plays are set in "Italy or the Mediterranean." Only by a stretch. Do the sixteen plays include Othello, the Moor of Venice -- four acts of which occur in Cyprus? And is the argument that Shakespeare or some other author had to travel to off-the-beaten-Elizabethan-track Cyprus in order to write it? Do the sixteen include A Midsummer Night's Dream, nominally set in Athens but in fact stuffed with English tradesman and English fairies? Or The Comedy of Errors, which takes place, in part, in ancient Ephesus in Asia Minor. Or Pericles in Antioch? The Tempest occurs on an enchanted island which is called Bermuda but seems to be somewhere between Naples and Libya. Would a playwright need to traverse the Mediterranean in order to bring Ariel and Caliban to life? Is it any sort of argument that plays set in the great age of Rome (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus) required a playwright to abandon his careful reading of North's Plutarch for a time-travel trip to ancient Italy? Shakespeare no more had to cross the Alps to write his sixteen plays than he had to board a time machine to dark age Scotland to write Macbeth or teleport himself to ancient Britain in order to write King Lear or Cymbeline.
The author of the Post article knows these facts. He knows that the travel argument, and the other tissue-thin assertions that he advances, have been refuted over and over again. But like all faith-based controversialists, he does not withdraw or concede or counter. He merely repeats and repeats and repeats, because his personal conviction is prior to and more important than either evidence or reason. He's not conducting a legitimate search for truth; instead, he is in thrall to an irrational and deeply-held conviction. Facts will be bent to support his extra-logical hypothesis. His intellectual processes mimic the creationists, the holocaust-deniers, the flat-earthers. Such minds are not reachable -- but there's not the slightest reason for a respectable newspaper to give them space."
Thanks, Pauline. I couldn't have said it any better myself. V.
