Order in the Courthouse: The Wrath of Kahn

The legal newswire syndicate Courthouse News Service today ran a column taking on the Oxfordians and "Shakespeare" By Another Name in particular. And while I try to resist the temptation of answering critics at every turn, this particular columnist -- Robert Kahn -- cranked out some factually dubious and just-plain-untrue statements that deserved some kind of recognition.

Kahn leads off his opening argument with the remark that "[Oxfordian] U.S. Supreme Court Justice... John Paul Stevens doesn't know Shakespeare from a goose."

Attempting to correct the record, Kahn goes on to goose up some of his own Shakespearean claims. "We know that Shakespeare acted in Macbeth before King James II [sic]," Kahn says. (There actually are no records of any performance of Macbeth for the first King James. A restoration version of the Scots play may have been performed for James II, but unless Kahn's Bard was also a vampire, it's unlikely that the 123-year-old Stratford actor would have been doing much when the restoration Macbeth treaded the boards c. 1687.)

We also know, Kahn says, "that someone knocked out 'the Scottish play' in a few weeks especially for the new king, who liked ghost stories."

Um... nice try. James I may have liked ghost stories, but the other bit about the Scots play isn't true either.

A few potshots ensue about SBAN and the "dreck" of de Vere's early song lyrics. (I'd be curious to know if the columnist has read any great authors' juvenilia, such as the Bronte sisters' none-too-soaring early works.)

But then come Kahn's two real howlers. First that Mark Twain only believed that "someone else wrote Shakespeare -- who also happened to be named William Shakespeare." (Yours truly, Kahn says, "cheats" by supposedly falsely stating that Twain was an anti-Stratfordian.)

Again: Wow. Kahn is just plain wrong. He seems to be a witty guy who might enjoy a good read. Mark Twain's 1909 anti-Stratfordian opus Is Shakespeare Dead? comes highly recommended.

Last but not least, Kahn states that SBAN is itself fundamentally flawed, because, "The notion that the man who may have been the greatest creative genius the world has ever known would spend his old age rewriting his old plays over and over, after they already had been acted, is psychologically ridiculous."

"A creative genius," he says, "does not spend his old age polishing up stuff he wrote as a pup."

By way of counter-example, one might point the wayward jurist in the direction of a man who in fact did just that. Many consider the man to be a "creative genius." Some, in fact, consider the man to be the closest America has ever come to our own Shakespeare.

Whatever the case, this "creative genius" did spend his latter years, into old age, revising and re-revising his own masterwork.

His name was Walt Whitman.

And bonus round, Mr. Kahn: Whitman was an anti-Stratfordian too.

[Creative Commons image by Thomas Roche]

Getting Skeptical

The August issue of Scientific American contains an article providing "A Skeptic's Take on the Life and Argued Works of Shakespeare."

The piece represents the latest column from Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a man whose work I certainly respect -- and typically agree with.

But like anything else, "skepticism" sometimes needs a healthy dose of skepticism.

Shermer devotes his column to refuting the arguments from the April 18 Wall Street Journal article on U.S. Supreme Court justices who have concluded that Edward de Vere wrote the "Shakespeare" canon. (The WSJ piece was previously blogged about here.)

After calling Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens a snob, in so many words, Shermer points out that "it's not enough merely to plant doubts about Will."

"We should grant that Shakespeare wrote the plays unless and until the anti-Stratfordians can make their case for a challenger who fits more of the literary and historical data," he writes.

Fair enough.

The case he's looking for is in a book called "Shakespeare" Identified in Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, published in 1920. It's a classic that should be on the bookshelf of anyone who professes any interest in the Bard and his life.

Of course, it's only fair that if I get to cite a book, so does he: Shermer ultimately rests his skepticism about de Vere on a 2005 book called The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Purchase College theater professor Scott McCrea. McCrea, he says, "demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt" that Will Shakspere of Stratford was the author.


I don't want to get into a full-on book review here, but suffice it to say that McCrea's tome is the latest in the lot of "anti-Oxfordian" books. (Not for long, though. Next year, bestselling author James Shapiro -- author of 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare -- will reportedly be taking on the Oxfordians himself in his next book, Contested Will.)

McCrea's book scores a few points that demonstrate why the Shakespeare authorship question remains a contested topic on both sides of the orthodox-heretic divide. For instance, McCrea rightly points out that Oxfordians have over-stretched their arguments that the Shakespeare canon's references to hunting and hawking necessarily point to an aristocratic author. (This would be because lower classes were prohibited by law from enjoying these sports.) In fact, these sports appear to have been more widely practiced than most Oxfordians have claimed. Point taken.

But McCrea also goes for the jugular on a number of arguments that are either poorly researched or poorly plotted out. Or both. Case in point: He occupies eight pages making some ill-informed claims that the Shakespeare canon contains numerous "errors" in its references to Italy and France. As pointed out at length in both "Shakespeare" By Another Name (chapters 4 and 5) and the book's Audio Series, Episodes 3 and 4, the Bard's references to Italy are so specific and accurate that they instead suggest that the author had some kind first-hand knowledge of Italy himself. Some Italian allusions in the Shakespeare canon, moreover, date specifically to the mid-1570s, when Edward de Vere was traveling there. (Listen to Episode 3 for a sampling of this latter variety.)

Finally, McCrea's polemics could certainly use to be less hysterical in places. Comparing Oxfordians to Holocaust deniers (“though obviously it lacks the same moral dimension,” he notes) is the kind of tawdry ploy that serves only to cheapen his rhetoric and anger anyone seeking a rational exploration of the Shakespeare mystery.

These are times when well-researched and sharply-written skeptical critiques of truly nutty ideas -- Obama "birthers" come to mind -- are clearly needed.

But Michael Shermer's impulse simply to defer to academic authority has done him no favors this time around. The kind of "skeptical" reasoning Shermer practices in his latest column should make any careful reader skeptical about his brand of "skeptical."

[Creative commons images by wburris and Senor Codo]

Look where my abridgment comes

This news item was passed along by reader A.Z. -- detailing a school district in Mesa, Arizona taking a field trip to see the farce The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), only to be sent packing when an unnamed school official deemed the play "inappropriate."

The Complete Works... is a whimsical and irreverent trek through the Shakespeare canon, typically very improvisational, that was first performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in 1987 and has afforded actors, class clowns and perennial hams the opportunity to chew scenery whilst waxing pseudo-Bardolic for two decades running. The one production of The Complete Works that I saw, in New Haven about ten years ago, was certainly enjoyable and, at times, gut-bustingly funny. But its unabashed bawdiness could -- I suspect -- readily be deemed inappropriate for schoolkids as young as sixth grade.

Yeah, yeah, I know... they see this stuff every day on their TVs and play it on their Xbox'es. But, said the unnamed school official, "That's not what we believe in presenting to our students."

I'm inclined to chalk this whole incident up to an underpaid, overworked teacher somewhere seeing the name Shakespeare on a flyer and thinking, Edith Bunker-like, "Saay, here's some cultcha for the kids!"

I also suspect if those same censorious authorities actually knew how much "inappropriate" material is in even the greatest Shakespeare plays, they'd be burning as many copies of the real Complete Works of Shakespeare as they could get their little Jergens-moisturized palms on.

Case in point: Macbeth. Listen to this cool (unfortunately, incomplete) podcast series from 2005 and marvel at the Scots tragedy's dirty little secret: This play practically revels in torture porn.

Just goes to show how important it is to speak your most unpleasant truths in a language the hoi polloi cannot comprende. Why do you think Hamlet uses such fancy words?