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Dr. Joanne Gass
That Old Oxfordian Rag As you can see from the Frontline program, apparently many people care passionately who wrote Shakespeare=s plays and poetry, and the controversy seems destined never to be settled to the complete satisfaction of any of the parties involved. Indeed, for the Oxfordians it seems a matter of life and death. I don=t intend to rehash the arguments as they were presented in the Frontline episode, except to say that I question the producer=s choices of Shakespeare=s defenders--how can we take seriously A.L. Rowse whose age and infirmities have so obviously clouded his judgment? He almost seems a caricature of himself played by John Clees. Granted, Rowse was (he died not too long after the broadcast of this program) an internationally recognized scholar and historian, but his homophobic and irascible testimony in this particular program lacks credibility, I think. On the other side, we can only pity Charlton Ogburn, also dying, when he weeps for Apoor de Vere@ whose true greatness has been denied him lo these many centuries. Unfortunately, it seems to me that Frontline places the responsibility for the debate on the frail shoulders of two, let=s face it, doddering old men--each Arag[ing] against the dying of the light.@ Frontline focuses almost entirely on the Oxfordian debate, but, as James D. A. Boyle points out in his American University Law Review article, AThe Search for an Author: Shakespeare and the Framers,@ there are fifty-six claimants for the title. He concludes that none has real, factual merit:
Boyle argues that the authorship controversy can be traced to the Romantic construction of the idea of an author, which even today dominates our conception of the Agreat writer@ or Agreat artist.@
Given this conception of authorial genius, we can hardly be surprised that we find ourselves curiously unsatisfied with the apparent dearth of biographical information with which we can construct a Shakespeare, an author, whose genius defines and controls the works which are attributed to him. And, as Boyle says,
Bardolators and Oxfordians alike cannot stomach the notion that Shakespeare, the glove maker=s son from Stratford, could be a crass materialist with a sixth-grade education who allowed his artistry to escape his control. Thus, we have two solutions to this unpalatable situation--either Shakespeare did exist and did write the works attributed to him or he did not and someone else did. But the >author= who did write these masterpieces cannot have been the one who did not take proper care of them. The >true= author must then be discovered, and, lacking Shakespeare=s own autobiography, a biography must be composed, and many have been, which deduces the events in Shakespeare=s life from the works themselves. For example, we have Peter Levi=s book, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, published in 1988. In his introduction, Levi says, AI want to put Shakespeare=s poetry in the context of his life and times@ (xvii). Levi, to his credit, establishes the milieu of sixteenth century England, then connects it to the plays. Levi=s biography is carefully researched and responsibly written, but, he must have an >author=; he must have the god-like artistic presence which controls and defines our understanding of the work. The most recent entry in the >great author= sweepstakes comes from Harold Bloom, of Yale. His tome, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human has just arrived in the bookstores and is already a nominee for the National Book Award in non-fiction. Bloom enthusiastically embraces the concept. In his introduction, he situates himself squarely in the ranks of Bardolatry; in fact, he goes so far as to make Shakespeare a god. He says, AHigh Romantic Bardolatry, now so much disdained in our self-defiled academies, is merely the most normative of the faiths that worship him. . . . If any author has become a mortal god, it must be Shakespeare. Who can dispute his good eminence . . .? (3) He assumes, like all good Romantics, that the work is the revelation of the poet=s mind, and that that mind is no mystery to us because it is there in the plays and poetry. He dismisses the entire debate in one sentence: AIf the question can be answered, we might get inside the man Shakespeare, whose personal mystery, for us, is that he seems not at all mysterious to us@ (4). On the other side, we have the Oxfordians, the best organized and most vociferous of the anti-Stratfordians, for whom an author must also be found. They, too, reject the author who writes for material gain, who is more concerned with his investments than his artistic oeuvre, and who leaves us no guidelines as to how we might read or perform his work. They also reject the notion that a person of ordinary education could possibly have produced work so richly embroidered with references to court life, myth, travel, military lore, history, etc. A mere Stratford boy could not possibly imagine the wealth of knowledge found in the plays. Their answer, find someone who has the >proper= education, who has access to the Elizabethan court, who is a known poet, who has traveled, who, in short, is an aristocrat--not for them an untitled middle class genius. Their problem is that there is virtually no extrinsic evidence that Oxford--Edward De Vere--used the name AShakespeare,@ or that he wrote any of the plays or poems. He was, in fact, a minor poet and playwright, as is well known, but he produced those works under his own name. Then, he stopped. The Oxfordians would have us believe that he did so under the influence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Burleigh, but there is not a single document to substantiate the claim. Oxford died before a number of Shakespeare=s plays were produced, as you have seen. In my own humble opinion, the poetry that Oxford wrote is vastly inferior to Shakespeare=s poetry, and no amount of pointing out similarities will save it. To me his poems sound labored and lack the polished and sustained imagery of Shakespeare=s sonnets. Lacking extrinsic evidence, the Oxfordians fall back on a conspiracy theory. And that=s the rub. As Robert Hodges has said, AArguing for the most likely alternate candidate commits one to a conspiracy tale too fantastic to take seriously, especially because there is not a single record of this conspiracy.@ The conspiracy would have had to have been kept a secret until 1952, at the earliest, when Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn revealed it in their 1300 page tome The Star of England. As a number of people have pointed out, since the secret had to be kept by members of the court, members of Oxford=s family, his allies and his enemies at court, and by the actors of at least two acting companies, it challenges one=s credulity to the breaking point. Thomas Pendleton, in his review of Irvin Matus= Shakespeare: IN FACT, says, ABut then, no one did. No one associated Oxford with the Shakespeare plays, not during Oxford=s life, nor Shakespeare=s, nor the rest of the 17th Century, nor, for that matter, the 18th, 19th, and the first couple of decades of the 20th. If this was a conspiracy, it was far and away the most successful in human history@ (9). We know, from the events of the past two years in Washington, that no secret goes unpublished, and Elizabethan England was hardly different. The Ogburns have been roundly refuted by Shakespeare=s defenders. Even their son=s 900 page book, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, filled with textual evidence which Aproves@ the Oxfordian claim, cannot produce evidence of a conspiracy except through innuendo and by lifting selected quotations from the plays which, used in another context, might even prove that the CIA conspired to kill John F. Kennedy. Pendleton goes on to say of the conspiracy theories:
Ogburn, like his parents before him, employs internal evidence to deduce that the true Shakespeare is, indeed, Oxford. In fact, the strongest critiques of Ogburn=s book point to a critical double standard that he uncritically employs. David Kathman, in AWhy I Am Not an Oxfordian,@ reminds us of T.S. Eliot=s assertion that the biographical details of an author=s life could not and should not be found in the author=s work itself:
That Ogburn has skewed the material is patently clear, as any number of easily procured documents show. I think, also, that watching him in the Frontline show exposes his biases as well. Since the broadcast of that show, much more has been added to the controversy. First, the Supreme Court (three of its justices) agreed to hear the arguments. Two of the three agreed that William Shakespeare was probably the author of the plays and poetry. A number of famous people have taken sides on the issue: Derek Jacoby has >come out= and said he does not think that Shakespeare was the >true= author. Two very substantial web sites have been established on the Internet, and they keep the argument going. Both are quite complete and well worth a visit. Finally, the July/August 1998 issue of Lingua Franca contains an article about Donald Foster, who developed a computer program called Shaxicon, which is Aan electronic index of words that appear fewer than twelve times in the Shakespeare canon@ (33). Don=t ask me how it works, but by applying this program, he has convinced a number of scholars who count that Shakespeare is the author of Funerall Elegye and the portions of Henry VIII attributed to Shakespeare. In addition, he provided technical aid and support to the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic. This clinic, whose original intent was to prove that Shakespeare did not write the plays, in 1991 published the following report in the journal Computers and the Humanities (otherwise known as Chum): Seven tests ruled out every poet whom the clinic had suspected of being the true Shakespeare--including [Ward] Elliott=s favorite, deVere@ (35). The founder=s of the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic no longer doubt the identity of Shakespeare. The Oxfordians aren=t going to go away. They have a conference every year at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. They have their website and their substantial list of supporters like Derek Jacoby and Charles Champlin. The trouble with a conspiracy theory is that it can really never be disproved, or proved, for that matter. Just as the Kennedy assassination continues to breed mountains of >evidence= that proves that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald either did not kill the president, or did not do it alone, so the Oxfordians will continue to read the plays and the poetry in such a way that it >proves= that a conspiracy of world-wide proportions is still at work to deprive this man of his rightful place in the literary pantheon. Once Pandora has opened the box, there is no putting things back. So, the Oxfordians will not be convinced; they will continue to attract believers. They will continue to play that Old Oxfordian Rag. What remains in doubt is not who wrote the plays, but who he really was, this genius from Stratford. We still cannot conceive of a workman-like author who cranked out play after play, reworking them when necessary for the actors in his company. He must have been more. He must have shone when he walked. He must have been larger than life in life. We have to have our Author--with a capital >A=. Harold Bloom would have us worshiping at his shrine. We would know him. But he will elude us. All we have are the few documents which establish his material existence. What we do have, of course, is still the work. He may not, as Harold Bloom would have us believe, have invented the human, but he has surely told us more than any other English author what it means to be human.
A Partial Bibliography
Web Sites
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