Shakespeare by Shakespeare for The Sake of The Globe

Scrolling through my Facebook Newsfeed (or whatever it’s called these days while I whiz by whatever conspiracy theories my former high school classmates, or coworkers I knew for a few weeks share…) I came across the following status update:

“So had an interesting back and forth with a patron who came to one of our shows. I said Shakespeare — he or she (since we don’t really know) will stand the test of time. They said I hope you are joking. Question for you Shakespeare heads out there — if we are not 100% sure who the man was that wrote the plays, are we 100% sure it was a man who wrote the plays?”

• Christopher V. Edwards, Artistic Director of Actor Shakespeare Project in Boston

…since we don’t really know…?

It was one of those head scratching moments for me? Do I dare comment? This is an artistic director of a theatre I liked? Even though (at the time being), I’m pretty much out of the acting game for a spell I still don’t like courting a confrontation. I have a lot to say on this topic (as far as Facebook comment lengths go), and I can pretty long winded in these situations. I don’t really know the man well, and thought “It’s best just to let this go. What you’d write would feel like a smack down from a mouthy pseudo-intellectual.”

Then I started reading other comments…

“FWIW I personally have very little doubt that man from Stratford wrote the plays.”

Very little doubt?

As if there is any doubt? I know there was that whole terrible Anonymous movie, and Mark Rylance still goes around inexplicably preaching the gospel of Edward de Vere, or whoever it’s in vogue to believe wrote Shakespeare these days (is it Queen Elizabeth again?), but I thought we, as a people, agreed that, generally speaking, Shakespeare had written Shakespeare, and that vaccines don’t cause autism, that 9/11 did happen and wasn’t a government conspiracy, that there was a lone gunman on grassy knoll in Dallas, and that we should believe all the women accusing Harvey Weinstein because…well…these things are true and factual.

Then I scrolled down further…

“Mind blown! Never thought of this at all!”

I mean…it’s well documented there were female writers and playwrights scattered (and ignored) throughout history, but why should this blow one’s mind? I guess it would if one were to accept this as gospel and, you know, ignore the actual unique contributions to theatrical literature by women throughout history.

“Don’t know about the plays, but a man definitely wrote the sonnets.”

Really? Based on what research, metric, or wild guess (at best) are we basing that information?

“He would have written more and better (even better) women than he did, and he wouldn’t have written Shrew.”

He also might not have written Measure for Measure, or dozens of references to being “womanist,” or written the plays and sonnets at all because, you know, he wouldn’t have been William Bloody Shakespeare. By the way, I think I saw “Bloody” as his middle name on a facsimile of his birth certificate.

That’s not true, but I wrote it on the internet…so it must be true. It splits the difference of truth just like this comment:

“A man? A woman? A man in touch with his anima? A bisexual male…probably… An Earl of Oxford? It doesn’t matter from the purposes of playing and all the better for out story telling going forth… great conversation.”

It doesn’t matter?

That comment bothered me.

It doesn’t matter, but hey it’s a great conversation! Something about that screamed in my head “That slogan should be the angsty Nietzschean teenager bumper sticker slogan of our age!” It also gave me the permission to say to myself, “If everyone else in this thread can play armchair theatreologist so can I!

I don’t claim that I am a preeminent Shakespeare scholar. There has been much better, much more thorough scholarship written about him EVERYWHERE. Just go look it up. Maybe I’ll make a separate post with suggested reading on the man, his time, his works, looking at them through a feminist lens, etc., and all the other things people in this thread opted to ignore with the magic of google at their fingertips. My comment below isn’t mean to be a statement about Shakespeare’s authorship as much as it is a vain gasp at trying to be a voice of sanity for truth and fact in quite insane times. Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

A mannamed William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon wrote the plays. We could go into the various references that come directly from the Stratford countryside found in the plays, allusions to luxury glove making that came from being exposed to his father’s shop, all of the scholarship into boys schooling and the various references from his standard education he put into his plays, the passages he directly lifted from Holinshed’s histories and what that says as Shakespearean markers, or, you know, all of the official documents that prove he did it…and more…

The basic fact that matters is that he did it. Any question of that fact only came up over 100 years after his death (primarily in the late 18th, into the 19th century), when revolution and (later) Marxism were on the rise. Aristocrats saw the underclasses were questioning their necessity to society and what better way to claim cultural relevance than to appropriate a working class hero like a popular writer?

If such genius belongs to a class then it must mean that class (and ONLY that class) can produce such genius and better the world, right? Talking with a Shakespeare scholar years ago I asked why it’s so important to know this and firmly establish who wrote the plays. He answered simply, “It’s important because whoever controls this kind of information controls the way it’s used, and thereby controls people’s perceptions about it.”

This kind of wishy-washing of Shakespeare’s authorship is maybe the original, hugely successful attempt of calling factual information “fake news.” It’s now mutated into this weird defense of aristocratic authorship as some form of being a cool, defiant outlier, but it’s basically achieved the goal of the subterfuge originally carried out by those ye olde aristocrats. It keeps the plays as a part of the realm of maintaining monarchical dominance, hereditary ownership, and legacy endowment. It neuters the plays and makes their world view singular and myopic. It took a 20th century essayist by the name of Jan Kott who came of age under a repressive Communist regime of all structures to see the inherently anarchic and revolutionary checks to oppressive power that Shakespeare’s plays can be. He handed that understanding to us in SHAKESPEARE OUR CONTEMPORARY and to Peter Brook and others.That only comes from understanding the plays in context, both original and transplanted. That only comes from giving credit where credit is due, and it’s due to that dude from Stratford. Questioning that fact in any large scale way says much more about those who question it than whether or not Shakespeare wrote his own plays.

In the end even though I’m certain about thise facts I have my doubts about what is the truth. Are those who believe in “fake news”, or “conspiracies”, or “fake playwright conspiracies” without doing some basic research into what information is actually, you know, Factual, doing anything different than what Shakespeare himself did with his Histories? If one reads Richard III and thinks, “Oh that must be true because Shakespeare wrote it” has another think coming. He skewed facts for his own storytelling over and over again, while robbing words, ideas, and even entrie storylines from other sources.

Maybe rewriting history, truth, and fact aren’t just mini-and-macro Stalinist (or Elizabethan police state) games people play with each other just for momentary power in politics, sex, war, international diplomacy, money, drama, and poetry. Maybe this tendency to lie, and, more importantly, willfully believe lies isn’t a bug in the human programming, but a feature. Maybe believing a lie, even about a playwright, allows people to see not who they are, but who they believe they could be. It’s an intoxicating drug, I guess, that belief. It lets people feel like kings and queens in charge of their own kingdoms of destiny, even if they’re more like peasants blindly bumping around their own tiny, closed off hamlets. Such is the life most people choose to compose for themselves.

Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!

I wrote that last sentence. Seriously. I did. No help at all.