The Oxford Deception

The Shakespeare author controversy is virtually a sub-genre and a pseudonymous Craig Janacek has even written a thriller of sorts that goes so far as murder in the war between Stratfordians and Oxfordians. I say "of sorts" because the novel is somewhat pedestrian in style and plotting. The summation of the controversy is entertaining but the dialogue tends to be too expository and the characters so far seem cut out of cardboard merely to introduce the controversy to fiction readers. I may yet be surprised and I'm not even sure yet whether Janacek is a convinced Oxfordian or simply setting them up for a fall. The title, after all, is ambiguous.

The play is the thing

My blog title is one of those quotes from Shakespeare that typically is taken out of context. I meant to say that it is the works themselves, not the author's identity, that really matter in Shakespeare. But now that I reach the actual quote in context in Hamlet, I see that it could be a pun:

The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

The play is a trap to see if Claudius truly is guilty of killing Hamlet's father, a kind of lie detector test. My wanting to reread the plays while studying the Oxford controversy belies my statement that it doesn't matter. If, in fact, I can read the plays with a new considering Oxford as the author, then it does matter. In a sense, the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the identity of the author.

The weakest link in the Oxfordian argument, I think, is that the poems and plays we know that Oxford wrote are of inferior quality and in a different style than those attributed to Shakespeare. The Oxfordians start to sound like Stratfordians when they deal with this argument: Well, the signed works are earlier and every writer matures, yada, yada, yada. I'm still willing to buy it, but this is definitely a caution for the whole theory.

Another weak link of course is the absence of any documentation or manuscript linking Oxford to the plays. All the evidence, such as it is, is circumstantial.

In short, while I'm easily convinced that Shakesper of Stratford did not write the plays, I'm willing to entertain that the real author was someone other than Oxford. I've just bought another book, North of Shakespeare by Dennis McCarthy, claiming that Sir Thomas North is the real author, so that should be interesting reading, too.

Genius

It seems to me the main argument of the Stratfordians is that Shakespeare's genius was such that he didn't need all that education. Marlowe, Jonson and other dramatists of the age all had university degrees, while there's no certainty that Shakesper even attended grammar school in Stratford.

Genius may account for a lot, but it can hardly grant knowledge. The clear familiarity with various works of literature, various places in Europe, history and philosophy is not something one can pick up from snatches of conversation in the pub, and in the absence of a library, Wikipedia and Google, there is no way Shakesper could have come by this knowledge. That is really the end of the story, I should think.

Reading Hamlet now, there's nothing particularly knowledgeable in the text so far, except perhaps for some familiarity with wars between Norway and Denmark. It strikes me again how many of our everyday expressions come from Shakespeare: to the manner born, more honored in the breach, method to his madness, etc. I'm tempted to highlight the lines I recognize -- so many -- but there's really little point in that. So I'm looking simply for lines that strike me:

But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill 

Youth to itself rebels, though none else near. 

It's not a memorable line, but the wit of Hamlet's answer when Polonius asks him what he is reading is remarkable: "Words, words, words."

One of the peculiarities of the Kindle versions, apparently, is that the line numbers contained in the print version don't get included. While the "footnotes" in the Signet edition don't appear at the foot, but just wherever they happen to be in the print edition, they contain line references that are useless, since the line numbers are missing. Also, I find most of the notes superfluous, though I'm sure they're helpful to high school students who are not as familiar with the wide range of meanings words can have.

My Oxford project

Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous about the true author of Shakespeare's plays, Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, reminded me of my fascination with this centuries-old controversy. 

Emmerich's movie got mixed reviews and predictably met a lot of resistance from people who simply don't want to hear it. I thought it was quite good, though too hard to follow because of all the backward and forward in time. Vanessa Redgrave puts Judi Dench and her eight-minute Oscar to shame with her portrayal of Elizabeth and Rhys Ifans transforms himself into a completely different person to portray Oxford. His sensitive depiction of Oxford's devotion to the power of words make the achievement of the plays freshly memorable. The awe of the other playwrights hearing the magic of this poetry for the first time is infectious.

I've been an "Oxfordian" for some time actually. When I went on my fasting cure at a spa on Lake Constance in the late 1980s, I had a lot of time to read and spent much of it reading Charlton Ogburn's The Mystery of Shakespeare. It opened my eyes to the controversy  because on reflection the idea that the historic Will Shakespere of Stratford-on-Avon was the author was so patently improbable.

As Derek Jacobi intones in a "prologue" in the movie, the fact that Shakespeare died many years after the last play appeared and had no books or manuscripts to bequeath alone is suspicious. He made no mention of any writings in his will and the sole documentary evidence we have of his existence largely deals with his activity as a grain merchant.

The academic establishment nonetheless vehemently defends his authorship. As the torturous Wikipedia article notes, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson were from a similarly un-aristocratic backgrounds, and we just happen to know more about them because of, er, their education and their manuscripts. Imagine!

Can anyone really believe that a writer whose worth was widely recognized by contemporaries could die such an obscure death and leave so few traces behind? It's not only Marlowe and Jonson, we know more about Dante and Chaucer and virtually every minute of Goethe's life has been documented. The historical record for this 16th century writer is virtually as thin as it is for Homer or the historical Jesus.

It doesn't matter obviously who actually wrote the plays. Whoever it was is dead, and the treasure for mankind is the corpus of literature this author left behind. And yet, curious minds want to know and we always look for further meaning in works of literature by trying to get to know the author's mind better.

So I'm embarking on this "Oxford project" -- solely for my own gratification, and not to take part in any academic debate. I'm convinced Oxford's the man and simply want to rediscover Shakespeare with this in mind. 

This is really the point of Mark Anderson's Shakespeare by Another Name. He traces the main details of Oxford's life and notes the overlap in the plays, and it truly does give insight into the work. So I want to read the Anderson book as well as the recent book by Kurt Kreiler and perhaps re-read the Ogburn book, while re-reading or reading the plays themselves. 

It might be fun to experiment with the functionalities of ebooks while reading -- highlighting, notes, bookmarks. I've already downloaded the Complete Shakespeare (for $1.99!) and will experiment with the Signet annotated editions. If I actually get this off the ground, I will probably create a separate Twitter account for it as well.