Strafordians

 Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? opens with an autobiographical confession. He says that he first came to question Shakespeare's authorship of his plays in a spirit of playful controversy. He took the part of the devil's advocate mostly to keep his Stratfordian riverboat captain entertained: it gave him someone to argue with. But once he had defended the Baconian position often enough, the habit grew into real conviction, in an almost Pascalian manner. He writes:

Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine. 

So it is with many a belief first taken up in a spirit of fun. When I approached Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey, I did so out of an interest in kooky speculative pseudo-scholarship. I thought I would enjoy Butler's hypothesis in the same way I do the Fortean theory that we are "fished for by supercelestial beings" (as Gaddis summarizes it in The Recognitions). Twenty pages in, however—I was already convinced. Butler sold me. 

And now, the same thing happened to me with Twain's essay. My whole life I've been a Strafordian by default—since I knew this is the position taken by most mainstream and legitimate scholars. I therefore turned to Twain's argument in a spirit of smirking fun. Within a few paragraphs, though, I was willing to take Twain's skeptical position "almost seriously." A few pages further, "utterly seriously." And now I'm ready to knock anyone down for it. 

God help me if I ever pick up a book arguing the Flat Earth hypothesis. 

And yes, I'm still aware that most modern scholars who have looked deeply into the Shakespearean authorship issue now accept the simplest solution—i.e. that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. I am likewise cognizant that the entire "question" about Shakespeare's authorship was never a serious academic dispute at all—but rather, was set in motion by a scholarly reductio ad absurdum originally propounded in order to satirize Biblical criticism. 

Yet, even knowing all of this, there is one fact above all others that staggered me, as soon as Twain had pointed it out. He observes: we have direct, physical evidence of only one poem ever written by Shakespeare's hand, and that is the one that still appears on his gravestone to this day: the notorious "Curse." It reads: 

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare:

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones

And curst be he yt moves my bones.  

This was the only poem that the man from Stratford left behind. This. No manuscript was found among his papers or mentioned in his will. He left behind him no books or any other evidence of an active intellectual life. All he bequeathed to posterity was a single four-line poem, and here it stands. 

This evidence is so damning that Twain returns to it no less than four times—quoting the curse in full on each occasion. And indeed, these four lines alone are enough to take the scales from anyone's eyes. The person who wrote that doggerel simply could not be the author of the sonnets, of Hamlet, of Macbeth. Surely not. 

At any rate, it makes it seem at the very least possible that someone else wrote the plays. And having persuaded myself of this much, it began to seem certain—in a fashion common to academic debates. As Gogol puts it, in Dead Souls: 

At first the scholar sidles up to it with extraordinary lowliness [...] starting from the most humble inquiry: "Can it be from there?" [... A]s soon as he sees some hint, he sets off at a trot and plucks up his courage [...] forgetting entirely that he started with a timid supposition; it already seems to him that he can see it, it is clear—and the reasoning concludes with the words, "This is how it was [...] this is the point of view to take on the subject!" Then, proclaimed publicly, from the podium, the newly discovered truth goes traveling all over the world, gathering followers and admirers. (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.)

Which, it has be said, is precisely what Twain accuses the Stratfordians of doing. When they suggest that Shakespeare could have picked up his abundant knowledge of the law from listening in on court sessions as a layman, he observes that they are really arguing in this manner: "Since all these things COULD have occurred, we have EVERY RIGHT TO BELIEVE they did occur." Twain goes on: "Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same for them. [...] it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it."

It soon becomes clear that Twain is talking here about something more than just Shakespeare. He is satirizing religion, dogma, scholarship, the whole human pretension to knowledge with absolute certainty. ("It took several thousand years to convince our fine race—including every splendid intellect in it—that there is no such thing as a witch;" he reminds us, and "several centuries" more "to remove perdition from the Protestant Church’s program of postmortem entertainments.")

He is saying, with James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis) that "all the oracles are dumb or cheat / Because they have no secret to express[...] none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain/ Because there is no light beyond the curtain; That all is vanity and nothingness."

But whatever the larger and more timeless themes of Twain's satire may have been—he succeeded also in planting a seed of doubt as to the narrow authorship question in my brain. 

To be sure—I'll never be persuaded that the Baconians necessarily have the better case. If Francis Bacon did wrote the plays—why the deception? Why take his name off of these works, when he was perfectly willing to add it to the title page of imaginative romances? (I opt, instead of Baconianism, for Twain's position, which he calls the "Brontosaurian"—and stands in relation to full Baconianism in something like that of agnosticism toward atheism.)

The Oxfordians surely have an even weaker case. As David Markson queries in one of his great "notecard" novels: "Have the people who conclude that Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford ever read the poetry Oxford actually did write?" 

But to think that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon—if he really had written the plays—would have left behind him no books, no manuscripts, no evidence of a literary life apart from those four wretched lines on his gravesite—indeed, no obvious hint or indication of an intellectual existence at all...

Of course, this argument itself—while it takes an iconoclastic attitude to the "man from Stratford"—depends on a certain superstitious idolatry of the plays themselves. It demands of us that we regard Shakespeare's works as so miraculous and inspired that some rustic hind with a grade school education could not possibly have written them—too divine to have emerged from such mundane clay as the historical Shakespeare appears to have been. 

It's the same argument people sometimes use to suggest Joseph Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon, unless he really were reading from the golden plates. 

But the thing is: the Book of Mormon really does seem very much like the kind of thing a semi-literate nineteenth century man well versed in the phraseology of the King James Bible might dictate to a friend while staring into a hat. 

Whereas the plays of Shakespeare really do not seem like the kind of thing a human being could write unless they participated in some way in the larger intellectual life of their time. 

Of course, there has always been a tradition that tries to portray Shakespeare as a sort of untutored genius—a rustic prodigy à la John Clare who had no need of books or learning in order to achieve his instinctive wit. Milton wrote of him as: "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," who would "Warble his native wood-notes wild."

But I think Ezra Pound has the better of the argument when he observes—in the ABC of Reading—that "the gross and utter stupidity of Milton was never more apparent than" in these lines. In the great dialectic between art and nature, after all, Shakespeare was very plainly on the side of artistry. His works were erudite, finely-wrought achievements of extraordinary technical competence. 

Let me make clear: I don't worship the plays as much as some do; and my argument should not be thought to depend upon any form of "bardolatry," as Shaw called it. Indeed, I have never really liked the bard all that much. 

Shakespeare is taught in school, which means that I early conceived a resentment for him. Such is the predictable result of any literary education. It renders eternally odious any author who comes within its purview. And I can only thank whatever gods may be that American schools teach so few authors: only a handful of them were permanently ruined for me in this manner. 

But Shakespeare was one of that handful, alas. And so, for years, I could not stand to touch him. It was not for his "faults, but mine," as Byron puts it in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. "I abhorred / Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake, / The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word / In my repugnant youth." (Byron was writing of Horace, in that case; but the same applies here.)

And so, the first work of Shakespeare criticism I ever read with pleasure was Tolstoy's—that is, the one in which he savages the bard as a monstrously overrated and immoral charlatan. 

It was this same iconoclastic spirit that Samuel Butler brought to his study of the Odyssey—and which enabled him, in his view, to see what no prior reader had done before (though, as soon as it is pointed out, it comes to seem inevitable): namely, that the epic was written by a woman. 

It was only because he avoided the poem for so long, Butler insists—in reaction against its place in the dead routine of an English classical education—that he was able to approach it at last in a new light and make of the poem his own special province: "I know very well that I should never have succeeded in doing it if I had not passed some five-and-thirty rebellious years during which I never gave the Odyssey so much as a thought," he writes. 

And so with me—I think my general lack of interest in Shakespeare may aid me in approaching the authorship question with unbiased eyes. 

I do not arrive at the anti-Stratfordian position, then, out of some superstitious adoration of the work. I don't say that only a God or an aristocrat could have written the sonnets and the plays. I am perfectly willing to believe a self-taught man could have done it. 

But such a tremendous autodidact would have to have left a book or two behind him. He would have mentioned such a thing in his will.