Oxford Blues
It has always been difficult for ordinary mortals to cope with the genius of Shakespeare. How could anyone have come up with works of the magnitude of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth in the space of a few seasons writing for the London stage? Faced with such apparently superhuman creativity, many have groped for an explanation in the idea that the plays must have been written by someone other than the man born in Stratford in 1564 to whom they are traditionally credited. Two main objections are usually offered to this man's having authored the plays: 1) He seems to lack the education required to produce such profound works since he did not even have a college degree; 2) the Stratford man was a commoner, and the plays seem to be written by someone with intimate knowledge of the world of the nobility.
Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare is the latest contribution to the debate over who authored Shakespeare's plays. It presents the by-now familiar theory that the plays were really written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who, as a nobleman and a graduate of Cambridge University, had the qualifications the man from Stratford lacked. Unfortunately, Sobran adds little if anything to the authorship debate; his book is not based on any original research and is simply derived from evidence others have advanced on behalf of Oxford. The vulgar and pretentious subtitle of the book -- "Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time" -- makes it sound much more original than it is. In fact, the most one can say for Sobran is that he gives a lucid summary of arguments others have developed (but which, alas, Shakespeare scholars have long since refuted).
The central problem with all attempts to ascribe Shakespeare's works to someone else is their promise that they will thereby make the creation of the plays more comprehensible. But does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet? There is something embarrassingly bourgeois about this way of thinking, as if some 12-step program were available that leads to literary achievement of the highest order. Some of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights, like Christopher Marlowe, did have university degrees, but the fact is that many of the greatest authors in history never set foot in college. Geniuses are geniuses precisely because they do not play by the ordinary rules.
Consider a modern case, where we know the facts. Thomas Mann's great novel, Doctor Faustus, is loosely based on the career of Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone method of musical composition. Reading this book, with its intricate and elaborate analyses of imaginary and real musical compositions, one would think that Mann must have had a Ph.D. in musicology from one of Europe's finest institutions. In fact, like Shakespeare, Mann never really got beyond a high-school education (he did take a few courses at various institutions of higher learning in Munich), and he was not professionally trained in music at all. Careful research has revealed that whenever Mann needed a technical musicological passage, he simply consulted his friends, who helped him find what he wanted in textbooks and other sources. His description of twelve-tone composition is, for example, copied almost verbatim from Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music. The degree of specialized knowledge manifested in Doctor Faustus equals or surpasses anything in Shakespeare's plays, and yet in this case, where we can actually observe how Mann worked, we see that no formal education was required for him to give the impression of being extremely knowledgeable in an arcane field. He just had to find the right person from whom to plagiarize, as Shakespeare did with Plutarch.
Sobran makes a great deal of the fact that Shakespeare's works display detailed knowledge of Italy. We have no record of Shakespeare's having travelled to Italy, and the Earl of Oxford did make the journey. Aha! But much of the knowledge that Sobran claims could have been obtained only by visiting Italy was readily available to Shakespeare in books, such as Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, and whatever other facts he needed he could have gleaned from conversations with fellow Londoners who had been there. Shakespeare displays just as intimate a knowledge of ancient Rome as he does of the Italy of his own day, and among the many capacities Sobran attributes to Oxford, time-travelling does not figure. The fact is that Shakespeare is able to convince us that he had been to Prospero's island in The Tempest, which does not even exist. That is what a great poet can do -- embody his imaginary conceptions so concretely that they appear to be real, or, as Shakespeare himself put it, the poet " gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."
Sobran's argument throughout is based on a fundamental misconception of the poetic process, especially as it was understood in the Renaissance. Thoroughly steeped in Romantic notions of poetry as selfexpression, Sobran naively assumes that poets simply translate their personal experience into poetry. Thus he finds something mysterious about Shakespeare's sonnets: "they speak in an aging man's voice, while at the apparent time of their composition Mr. Shakespeare was only about thirty." Since Oxford was 14 years older than Shakespeare, he thus becomes in Sobran's eyes a better candidate for the authorship of the sonnets.
This is a good example of how anachronistic Sobran's thinking is. The average lifespan was a good deal shorter in the Elizabethan era than it is today. Thirty may seem young in 1997, but in the Elizabethan era, it seemed a lot older; considering the fact that Shakespeare actually died at fifty-two, by the time he was thirty, his life was more than half over.
More important, nothing in the history of literature suggests the slightest connection between a poet's chronological age and the "age" of the speaking voice in his poetry. Two of the most moving poetic expressions of the feelings of old age are "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," and yet Tennyson wrote these poems when he was only 24. Yeats sounds younger in the wildly experimental poems he wrote in the 1930s than he does in the dreamy, late Romantic poems he wrote in the 1890s. This is precisely what great poets are able to do: imagine themselves into situations other than their own.
Implacably literal-minded, Sobran time and again fails to check his speculations against the known facts of literary history. Developments in Shakespeare's career that he finds anomalous turn out to be a matter of course in the documented careers of other authors. Nowhere is this error more evident than in Sobran's treatment of Shakespeare's social status. To read Sobran, one would think that Shakespeare was the only commoner who ever wrote successfully about the aristocracy. In fact, the vast majority of authors throughout history have come from what we think of as the middle class. They generally stem from humble origins and indeed used writing as a means of bettering their condition. The aristocrat who is also a great author is the exception, not the rule (a Sir Philip Sidney, a Lord Byron, or a Count Tolstoy), and one can see why, when one reads Sobran's account of the Earl of Oxford's life.
How could anyone who led such a dissolute life find the time and discipline to write the plays we know as Shakespeare's? Sobran confuses living an aristocratic existence with being able to portray it. He writes of Oxford: " His life sounds more like the subject of a Shakespeare play." But could King Lear have written King Lear or Macbeth Macbeth? If literary history teaches us anything, it is that authors are usually the opposite of the heroes they create. Homer was no Achilles.
I wonder if Sobran realizes that his argument places him in the camp of today's multiculturalists, and that his book is simply a case of identity politics, Renaissance-style. Contemporary radicals insist that authors are merely the reflection of various ethnic, racial, gender, and class categories, which is why they say that the canon must be expanded to represent a diversity of viewpoints. Only a black can legitimately write about blacks, only a woman about women, only a Jew about Jews, and so on. Sobran's argument is a variant of this principle: Only an aristocrat could write sympathetically about aristocrats. I happen to agree with Sobran that Shakespeare's plays present an aristocratic view of the world, although I would add that Shakespeare was concerned with distinguishing the true aristocrat, the aristocrat by nature, from the false aristocrat, the aristocrat merely by convention, and thus he did not unthinkingly endorse the political arrangements of his day. In any case, unless one wishes to maintain that nobody could dispassionately or disinterestedly hold to aristocratic principles, I see no reason why Shakespeare had to be born into the aristocracy in order to admire it.
Sobran inadvertently offers some telling evidence against his own argument. Twice he makes a point of associating Shakespeare with Edmund Burke. Unfortunately for Sobran, Burke, the great spokesman for the English aristocracy and the age of chivalry, was thoroughly middleclass in origins, the son of an Irish Protestant lawyer. By the same token, in the appendix Sobran offers of Oxford's poems, the first turns out to express a remarkably bourgeois and anti-aristocratic spirit:
The labouring man that tills the fertile soil,
And reaps the harvest fruit, hath not indeed
The gain, but pain; and if for all his toil
He gets the straw, the lord will have the seed.
I have no idea whether Oxford was a traitor to his class, but at least we see that in poetry he was capable of imagining how the other half lives and sympathizing with their plight. Incidentally, if this verse does not sound like the Shakespeare you know and love, be assured that none of Oxford's other poems does either.
Sobran sticks to a Marxist view of literature: Authors are the captives of the class into which they were born, and their works are merely the ideological superstructure of their class interest. Thus Sobran ends up presenting a completely conventional view of a completely conventional Shakespeare: "Shakespeare's philosophy is thoroughly feudal. He puts a premium on fealty and what used to be called 'knowing one's place.'" For all Sobran's claims to be revolutionizing the study of Shakespeare, to open "a door to a completely new understanding of the great plays and poems," when he comes to interpret individual works, he merely rehashes what undergraduates were being taught half a century ago: the good old Elizabethan World Picture approach associated with E. M. W. Tillyard.
In addition to its conceptual problems, Alias Shakespeare is badly written and badly organized. Sobran keeps repeating his points; nearly identical sentences appear at odd intervals throughout the text. Moreover, he has a habit of contradicting himself, sometimes on the same page. One of his arguments against Shakespeare's authorship is that "his death in 1616 apparently passed unnoticed in the city that adored the plays and poems bearing his name." Barely five lines later, Sobran writes: "The Elizabethans . . . weren't curious about authors." If the Elizabethans were not curious about authors, why is it strange that Shakespeare's death in Stratford failed to provoke any reaction in London? Once again, we see how anachronistic Sobran's thinking is. He is living in the world of media celebrity and Entertainment Tonight, but in 1616 there was no Renaissance equivalent of Leeza Gibbons to announce the death of the Swan of Avon to a stunned and saddened television audience in London.
The worst aspect of Alias Shakespeare is Sobran's incessant special pleading. He subjects Shakespeare to standards that he refuses to apply to the Earl of Oxford. For example, Sobran is obsessed with Shakespeare's will, which he considers important enough to reprint in an appendix. Sobran is made deeply suspicious by the fact that no signs of literary talent appear in this one bit of writing legally linked to Mr. William Shakespeare. The obvious answer to this profound conundrum is that Shakespeare's will was written by his lawyer, and we all know how much literary talent lawyers possess. Sobran himself has to admit this possibility, but he cannily tries to turn it in his favor: "It may have been composed by his lawyer, Francis Collins; and this doubt of [Shakespeare's] authorship calls his very literacy into question." I hope Sobran will believe me when I tell him that I have a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, but when it came to writing my will, I had a lawyer do it; that is what lawyers are for.
In the case of Shakespeare's will, Sobran simply loses sight of the genre he is dealing with: "It is difficult to imagine the great poet writing a document of more than 1300 words without leaving a single recognizable touch of his literary personality, distinctive expression, or sheer verbal energy." If Sobran is going to make this claim, the ordinary canons of evidence dictate that he show that Elizabethan wills were commonly something other than conventional legal documents. He needs to show that other Elizabethan authors left their personal stamp upon their testaments. I want to see that Edmund Spenser's will is written in archaic diction and Spenserian stanzas; I want to see the iambic pentameters in Marlowe's life-insurance policy.
By contrast, when Sobran goes through the Earl's correspondence to show that he often used the same words as Shakespeare, he pauses: "It may still be objected that Oxford's letters, however congruent with Shakespeare's vocabulary, show nothing that we can call genius. But this is to misconceive genius as a source of unremitting inspiration, like a powerful electric current that can never be turned off." If Oxford's genius could be turned off in his letters, why could not Shakespeare's be turned off in his will, especially if he was virtually on his deathbed when it was composed?
I will not even go into Sobran's attempt to use Shakespeare's bad handwriting in his surviving signatures as evidence that he could not have been a writer; I thought Mel Brooks had disposed of that issue years ago in one of his 2,000-YearOld Man routines. ("Did you see the originals, the first folios? I saw them, do you wanna know what they were? They were blots of ink, an m that didn't look like an m, an o that looked like a p, every letter was cockeyed and crazy. Don't tell me he was a great writer, he had the worst penmanship I ever saw in my life!")
The most significant fact in this whole controversy is that none of Shakespeare's contemporaries ever raised a single doubt concerning his authorship of the plays; indeed, nobody seriously challenged his having written them until well into the 19th century. And most of the advocates of alternative candidates have had an axe to grind.
The first champion of Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays was curiously named Delia Bacon. And the most active promoter today of de Vere's claims is the current Earl of Oxford. As for the mystery of how anyone managed to write the works of Shakespeare, I am afraid that we will have to go on living with that. The plays encompass such a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and deeds that the idea of ever finding one man who was qualified in terms of personal experience to have written all of them is chimerical.