Debating
Shakespeare
July 8, 1999
A recent
issue of Harper’s Magazine was devoted to a
debate on the Shakespeare authorship question. Interest in the topic is
high, and the exchange brought an avalanche of mail.
Spreading belief in the Earl of
Oxford’s authorship of the Bard’s works has now driven
Sylvan Barnet, editor of the Signet paperback editions of the Shakespeare
plays, to add several pages to his introduction in order to rebut the
Oxfordian view. But Professor Barnet succeeds only in showing how weak
the case for Stratford’s son really is.
Like most adherents of the traditional
Stratfordian view, Mr. Barnet caricatures his opponents’ views. He
says that “all” — not many, not some, but all —
anti-Stratfordian arguments are motivated by “snobbery,” a
charge for which he offers no evidence and whose relevance he fails to
explain. Then he proceeds to attack a few minor points advanced by some
of the heretics (mostly the cipher-hunting advocates of Sir Francis
Bacon).
Mr. Barnet doesn’t address the
stronger points the heretics have always raised. He is typical of the
Stratfordians in that he doesn’t know how to debate. He
doesn’t know that a good debater states his opponent’s case
in terms the opponent would agree with; he doesn’t know that you
have to address that case at its strongest, facing all the evidence. He
thinks you win an argument by saying snotty things about your
opponent.
Oxford’s partisans argue from the
Shakespeare works. They contend that the plays (especially
Hamlet) and poems (especially the Sonnets) reflect
Oxford’s life in great detail and have nothing to do with the life of
William of Stratford. Prince Hamlet, for instance, is captured by pirates
in the English Channel, as Oxford himself once was. Polonius and his
children are clearly based on Oxford’s in-laws, the great Cecil
family. The play also contains echoes of Oxford’s letters. Nothing in
the play links it to William, its supposed author.
![[Noticing what
our opponents DON'T
say]](breakers/990708.gif)
What’s more, Stratfordians like Mr. Barnet
don’t even try to link the works to William. You might think the best
way to prove a man’s authorship of works attributed to him would
be to show how his personal life shaped and inspired those works. But the
Stratfordians prefer to treat the works of the Bard as inadmissible
evidence that might damage their client’s claim.
Think of it! If someone questioned John
Milton’s authorship of his poems, it would be easy to show that
Milton’s early poems, his sonnets, and his late masterpieces reflect
his public and private life as a passionate Puritan. Milton’s life
leaves no room for doubt that he wrote the works bearing his name. Why
isn’t this true of Shakespeare?
The task of literary biography is to show
an author’s life and works as a unity. This can be done with almost
every great author of whose life we have records — but not with
Shakespeare. William’s many biographers are stuck with dull facts
that can’t be integrated with the works, and their biographies are
devoid of literary illumination. In short, there is no such thing as a
literary biography of William of Stratford.
But if Oxford is the Bard, a genuine
literary biography is possible. The plays and poems reflect his education,
his legal training, his experience at the court of Elizabeth I, his travels in
Italy and France, his marital troubles, his feuds, his confinement in the
Tower of London, his waste of his huge fortune, and his fall into
disgrace.
Oxford’s partisans constantly
appeal to the texts of the works to make the case for Oxford.
William’s professional champions avoid those texts, which
don’t support the case for William.
If William were the Bard, the works
would speak for him, just as Milton’s poems speak for Milton. But
his defenders treat the Shakespeare works as irrelevant to the question of
Shakespeare’s identity — a virtual admission that those
works have no discernible relation to William, except that his name is on
them. Their “argument” is chiefly the baseless accusation
that Oxford’s partisans are all snobs.
In any debate, it’s important to
notice not only what your opponents say, but what they don’t say.
The Stratfordians never say: “Only William could have written these
works. Look at all their obvious links with his life!” The only man
with such links is the Earl of Oxford.
Joseph Sobran
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