In spite of the fact that the vast majority of people who care about Shakespeare don't even know there is a controversy surrounding the authorship of the Bard's plays, I am becoming highly irritated and bored with the line of increasingly defensive, shrill and insulting series of essays in the popular media championing the Stradfordian cause.Stratfordian: One who believes the actor from Stratford named William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.
Case in point: Yesterday's paean to Shakespeare in the NY Times - The Modern Elizabethan. None of it is necessarily untrue, though little of it is based in fact, only speculation. I no longer care if I believe Shakespeare's plays were written by De Vere, Bacon, Marlowe or by committee. None of those makes sense. But neither does the idea that WS of Stratford wrote them, not really, and wildly wishing that he did doesn't make it true.
Comparisons between Shakespeare and George Washington do not prove WS wrote Hamlet. The fact that Dickens was also an actor turned writer have no connection to Shakespeare's having been both. And it's sweet that critics are "fond of imagining" that WS may have been writing Midsummer and R&J at the same time, but then they are free to imagine that I may have done the same thing. There's no logic, no fact, and yet there is plenty of vitriol and abuse, as though anyone who speculates upon the authorship of Shakespeare's work is some kind of conspiracy fantasist - and worse yet, some kind of elitist.
But I do like a good birthday. Nine years ago Toni and I happened to be in Washington D.C. on the weekend the Folger Library holds their annual Shakespeare Birthday Party (the Folger, by the way, holds documents that strongly suggest De Vere was the author) and rather than focusing on the man, they put on a great family festival celebrating his work, the plays, making costumes and putting on impromptu shows - improv comedians work the crowd, riffing on famous passages, and anyone who wants to get up on the stage of their recreation of the Globe Theatre to perform a scene is welcome to.
It is a festival to honor and commemmorate the work and passion of the Bard, the end product, the message, not the man.
I wish Christmas were more like that.
2 comments:
Did you hear the new one, that Edward de Vere was the secret love child of Elizabeth I? A bit far out, even for me.
Not making it up.
Not surprising. Like all authorship speculation, it is no doubt wild fun to read. Except for speculation of the Stratford man's life, which is hideously boring. Give me court intrigue and state secrets any day, it's much better than reading another warmed-over biography that goes, "Court records clearly prove young Will was arrested for poaching, which most certainly proves he most likely saw the inside of a courthouse, where we can surmise the distinct possibility of his having heard a clerk of the court stuffily spouting legal jargon, the kind Eddie, Earl of Cantor spouts in act five of the Bard's "King Lemmy." The youthful Shakespeare of Stratford no doubt found such raw material irresistible, and couldn't wait to use it when the opportunity presented itself some seven years later when the Queen could have maybe personally asked him to create a new play based on her most famous ancestor in love ..."
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