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The Shakespeare Bigots
 We seldom know
what our adversaries are doing behind our backs until it’s too
late, but sometimes, when we are fortunate,  they
expose themselves without realizing it.
Writing in the Washington Post, Stanley
Wells, doyen of Shakespeare scholars, asserts that there is
“overwhelming evidence” that “William Shakespeare from
Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems for which he is
famous.” To prove this, he devotes much of his argument to pointing
out that those who disagree with it don’t always agree with each
other! Wells cites an American lawyer who expressed doubts about the
Stratfordian’s authorship in 1848. Then,
“The [anti-Stratfordian] heresy grew in force in
the following years, and since then at least 60 candidates, including Queen
Elizabeth I, have been proposed as the ‘real’ Shakespeare. In
recent times the most popular have been [Francis] Bacon, playwright
Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, but the list
increases year by year and has been extended recently with Sir Henry Neville
and Lady Mary Sidney.”
Wells doesn’t see how easily this trite argument
could be turned around. A Baconian might with equal logic point out,
“The anti-Baconians have never been able to agree; they have
proposed over 60 candidates, including the Stratford man, Christopher
Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and even Queen Elizabeth I, and their list keeps
growing every year.”
Any number can play this game. Hitler might have
argued that the opponents of National Socialism were inconsistent: they
included Bolsheviks, Christians, democrats, monarchists, libertarians, and so
on. Or think how President Bush could use the same kind of reasoning against
critics of the Iraq war, if he’s not already doing it.
According to Wells’s way of thinking, the
greater the number of people who disagree with you, and the more various
their reasons and alternatives, the stronger your own position must be.
Wells goes on: “It often seems as though the anti-Stratfordians
don’t really care who wrote the plays so long as he was a
well-educated and well-traveled man (or, rarely, woman), preferably of
aristocratic birth.”
![[Breaker quote for The Shakespeare Bigots: Why can't the dissenters agree with each other?]](2007breakers/070322.gif) No,
Mr. Wells, I think I speak for everyone you want to
ridicule: we care very much who wrote the plays, and it’s far from a
matter of mere pedigree or even education. The authorship question comes
down to the individual characteristics of the author, many of which seem to
be disclosed in his Sonnets. Do all those who reject the Stratford man have a
duty to be unanimous?
To most people nowdays, who barely think at all,
bigotry means hating people of other races. But bigotry
doesn’t always mean that sort of hate, or indeed any sort of hate.
More basically, it means a sort of stupidity: indignant bafflement that others
can disagree with you, along with an inability to comprehend why they do and
a refusal to deal with the reasons they actually give.
The term may apply to any side in any argument
— to the liberal believer in evolution as well as to his fundamentalist
opponent, and to the Stratfordian professor as well as to the
anti-Stratfordian amateur (who has at least had to learn how his opponents
really do think). The loose ascription of bigotry is itself a form of bigotry. I
sometimes think bigot has become the real bigots’ favorite
word.
Sorry, Mr. Wells, I can’t accept responsibility for
those who believe Queen Elizabeth I was the real Shakespeare. The Sonnets
would seem to point to a man — an aging man, by his own description
“old,” “in disgrace,” “despised,”
“poor,” “lame,” despairing, worried about his
“name,” expecting and hoping to be “forgotten”
after his death (though he also expects his poetry to have “immortal
life”), probably bisexual.
Why, it sounds very much like what is known of that
Earl of Oxford, doesn’t it? It doesn’t quite seem to fit Bacon,
Marlowe, Elizabeth I — or the Stratford man. Maybe this is why so many
of your colleagues dismiss those Sonnets as “fictions,” useless
to biographers — and of course inadmissible evidence in the authorship
debate.
Yes, some anti-Stratfordians are outlandish. Does it
follow that all anti-Stratfordianism, of every sort, is inherently outlandish?
Only if the belief that some authors use pseudonyms — and that
William Shakespeare was a pen name — is a bizarre conspiracy
theory.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 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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