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The Bard in Retirement
 Anyone
can make a silly mistake, but not all of us
find our blunders rewarded with lucrative Harvard and Oxford
professorships. Listen, then, to the shocking story of Shakespeare
scholarship.
Shakespeare biography is in what
might be described as a persistent vegetative state. This is a rather natural
result of trying to write a man’s life without taking the preliminary
step of making sure you’ve got the right guy. I own more than two
dozen biographies of the Stratford man, most of
them  fairly
recent, who has been mistaken for the real author for nearly four centuries.
Fortunately, some excellent
literary criticism of the works is still being written, because it doesn’t
depend on biography. Whoever wrote King Lear, it remains a
wonderful play. New and interesting things can still be said about it; Stephen
Booth’s brilliant study of its “indefinition” shows how its
seeming loose ends and contradictions actually display the subtlest artistry.
But the biographical department
of Shakespeare scholarship is another matter entirely, marked by amazing
obtuseness. Highly intelligent people can be obtuse when they refuse to use
their heads; and this is often the case with certified experts in any field who
claim slam-dunk certainty when simple common sense might have saved
them from embarrassing errors.
In the prestigious Oxford edition of
Shakespeare’s Complete Works, the editors Stanley Wells and Gary
Taylor commit some incredible howlers. In a section of miscellaneous items
headed “Various Poems,” they include such crude rhymes as
this, “Upon a pair of glove that master sent to his mistress,”
linked to the Bard only by dubious legend:
Then there is “An extemporary epitaph on John Combe, a noted usurer”:
![[Breaker quote for The Bard in Retirement: All the experts agree ...]](2006breakers/060103.gif) There’s
plenty more where this came from,
including the Stratford man’s gravestone inscription, with its mighty
climax: “And curst be he that moves my bones.” Such trifles
are dated to his later years, after he’d left the London theater.
How do we know Shakespeare
wrote this goofy stuff? Because someone or other said he did, and as
Professor Wells solemnly notes, “none of [these] poems was ever
attributed to anyone else.” What more proof do we need?
To say that the author of
The Rape of Lucrece descended to this level in his later years
(when he’d supposedly retired to Stratford) is like contending that
Bach finally gave up writing fugues for hip-hop. These things hardly rise to
the level of tavern-wit. The idea that they are the fruits of the great
poet’s maturity is absurd beyond words.
Lucrece is written
in rhyme royal, an extremely difficult seven-line stanza form few English
poets have ever attempted, let alone mastered. Read two pages of it, and
ask yourself if it’s even conceivable that its author spent his final
years composing bits of crude doggerel.
So what happened? Have
Professors Wells and Taylor been hooted out of academe? On the contrary,
they stand at the pinnacle of their profession. Nobody cracks a smile when
they offer such obvious nonsense.
In fact, Harvard’s Stephen
Greenblatt, author of a bestselling Shakespeare biography a year or two ago,
also includes the same items in his own edition of the
“complete” works. Not surprisingly, the biography got a rave
review from Stanley Wells.
It would be scandalous if it
weren’t so funny. These gents are not only professional scholars, but
acknowledged leaders in their field. Mr. Ripley, call your office. This episode
belongs in “Believe It or Not”!
Nothing in the Stratford
man’s will, written shortly before his death at age 52, suggests that
he had ever made a living by his pen, let alone that he’d been the most
lavishly praised poet of his day. Did that just slip his mind? Had a
preoccupation with real estate totally displaced the literary interests which,
the experts tell us, had consumed nearly his whole adult life?
Or if, as we’re also told,
he’d retired from the London theater and returned to Stratford
before he was 50, why didn’t he resume writing gentlemanly poetry
like Lucrece in his leisure time? Was writing doggerel in
Stratford more profitable than writing tragedies in London? I’m sure
no explanation would be too far-fetched for the experts — except, of
course, for the obvious one.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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