[Corrected] New York Public Library Shakespeare class: You WILL Believe

[Creative Commons image here]

A class held this week at the New York Public Library, according to the class listing on the library's website, requires its students to hold the "conviction" that the Shakespeare canon was written by Will Shakspere of Stratford. Heretics who profess to other "convictions," evidently, need not apply.

The course is called "Shakespeare: From Stratford-upon-Avon to the New York Public Library" and was held on Feb. 21. An earlier version of this blog posting attributed the course to NYU prof. Alycia Smith-Howard, whose blog also listed the New York Public Library class. (A reader of the "Shakespeare" By Another Name blog contacted Dr. Smith-Howard, who says she was as intrigued by the NYPL's course requirements as he was.)

A student taking the hourlong NYPL class, according to the course description, would be examining "various beautiful and unusual illustrated editions of Shakespeare's plays and poems" and use the library's computer resources to "experience Shakespearean research for the 21st century."

It also posts two rather bizarre requirements for the course. One is something that shouldn't require a profession of belief at all. It's just fact: "[We require] a belief that the works of Shakespeare constitute one of the cornerstones of world literature."

The other "requirement" for the course is slightly more odious: "A conviction that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare."

Amazing. A taxpayer-financed institution hosts a Shakespeare class that prohibits Oxfordians and other Shakespeare dissidents from enrolling. Of course, many Shakespeare courses today are taught with the implicit understanding that venturing into the authorship question is verboten. But putting such restrictions in writing as a course requirement brings on a whole new game.

Well, then, as Major League umpires around Florida and Arizona will soon enough be saying, let's play ball!

(This post was corrected on Feb. 23, thanks to new information provided by reader R.N.G.; original tip from M.H.)

New York Public Library class listing
Archived class listing on website of NYU professor Alycia Smith-Howard

WSJ: It's all "skimble-skamble stuff"

[Creative Commons photo here. ("Skimble" is, a quick google reports, evidently the name of one of the felines from the musical Cats)]

Today's Wall Street Journal reviews two recent Shakespeare biographies: Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare and Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage. Nicholl and Bryson, the reviewer says,

are both "Stratfordians" -- that is, they assume that "Shakespeare" was the man from Stratford and not Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or the queen herself. For most of us ordinary folk, the authorship wars are irrelevant, "skimble-skamble stuff" (in Hotspur's phrase), and "Shakespeare" means interchangeably the man and his works. ... Shakespeare was an actor, writing for actors; the plays are, above all, scripts.

The plays are scripts. And novels are books. And many great films are now available on DVD. So bleedin' what?!

The assumption that authorship doesn't matter, in my experience, is usually made by those who are in no position to judge. While entire books have been written about how the authorship question does indeed matter (mine included), my first response to the above quote is to say, here. Listen to this. [MP3]

This space will also be announcing a conference in Concord, Mass. on May 30-June 1 devoted to the proposition that the Shakespeare authorship question does indeed matter. More on that shortly. For now, though, as John Hodgman says, that is all.

Rushdie: "You will find no trace of me"; Quaid: "I am Falstaff!"

In a speech on Sunday at Emory University, Salman Rushdie said he has erased himself from most of his writing. "Too much of my life story has found itself in the public domain already," the Booker Prize-winning novelist said. "In my later works, you will find no trace of me."

The aversion to autobiographical and topical portrayals in his fiction, of course, springs from well-known sources, and one can certainly understand such reticence, given his own harrowing experiences in drawing too closely from life for too controversial a topic.

Rushdie also told the crowd, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, "Shakespeare had it right... when he left behind no diaries or letters that might lend a window into his inspirations" (the reporter's paraphrase, not Rushdie's exact words).

But Rushdie, whom I personally admire and revere as one of the great literary figures of our time, is nevertheless taking a leap of convenience when he says that the source for his inspirations are now opaque ... and, as luck would have it, so were Shakespeare's.

As regular readers of this space know, it is this writer's contention that much of the Bard's inspirations spring from a single life. (*cough* Edward de Vere, Edward de Vere, Edward de Vere *ahem*) And while no one disputes Rushdie's masterful craftsmanship -- and his right to creatively annihilate all that he wants -- with Shakespeare, the situation is actually much closer to what the author says in Sonnet 76: "Why write I still all one, ever the same/ And keep invention in a noted weed [disguise]? / That every word doth almost tell my name..."

Pace the great contemporary Indian-British novelist and essayist, Shakespeare keeps telling variations on the same life story over and over again. Falstaff, King Lear, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Leontes, Bertram, the list goes on... They all convey one man's epic tale. But it's not going to be found in any records or (should they ever turn up) diaries in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The creative vacuum that orthodox Shakespeare interpretations leave behind allows for all kinds of leeway, granted. Great novelists can imagine that, in eliminating themselves from their works, they are following in the footsteps of the greatest writer in the English language. And... not-so-great figures of the page or stage can just thrust themselves into the emptiness.


Near the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a humbled Falstaff laments, "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass." In a $6.5 million contemporary musical adaptation of Merry Wives that just closed in Seattle, entitled Lone Star Love, the girthy braggart evidently didn't need any assistance from the text to do just that. The actor portraying him took care of the asinine bit himself.

Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Lone Star Love was not only a farcical mess dramatically, but backstage the man in the title role (Randy Quaid) earned such scorn from his colleagues as to cause Actors Equity to fine him $81,572 and ban him for life from any future Equity production.

Quaid reportedly engaged in such winning behavior as smacking fellow performers on the head onstage, threatening colleagues who made eye contact with him, and making lewd remarks about an actress's "gynecological instruments." In his own defense, Quaid said he was just staying in character.

"I am guilty of only one thing," Quaid said. "Giving a performance that elicited a response so deeply felt by the actors and producers with little experience of my creative process that they actually think I am Falstaff."

So there you have it. Rushdie is glad we'll never know the source of Shakespeare's inspirations. And Quaid is Falstaff.

Of course, ham-hock thespians will always be able to claim squatter's rights over a Shakespearean character, no matter who the author is seen to be.

But, getting back to Rushdie's point, the true tragedy of Shakespeare today is the fact that a void is perceived where in fact something very different actually is. The Bard's artistic legacy is not of nihilism and authorial self-obliteration -- but rather a compelling and all too tragic biographical odyssey found in the self-revelations of a playwright who ultimately knew his own name would be lost.

Hamlet, in the Garden, with a Vial

[Creative Commons image by Gonzales2010]

Yesterday, fellow Oxfordian blogger Dr. Neil posted an unusual analysis of the Danish tragedy: Hamlet killed his father!

The analysis rests on a line from Hamlet's most famous soliloquy ("[death], the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns"). With these words, the interpretation goes, Hamlet admits that nothing ever comes back from the dead. And yet the Great Dane has been conversing with the ghost of his father throughout the play. So what gives?

Hamlet is mad, according to this reading. And he's desperately trying to foist the soul-crushing guilt of this regicide on his already hated uncle.

It's unclear, though, what the point would have been to so markedly deviate from Hamlet's ancient source text(s) -- in which Hamlet's (Amleth's) uncle is unambiguously guilty. The primary expose in Hamlet, in my view, is the duplicitous actions of various murderous Machiavels at court, including the Earl of Leicester (inspiration for Claudius) and William Cecil (de Vere's father-in-law and inspiration for Polonius). Adding a regicidal component to Hamlet's own story muddies the waters and is hardly the sort of thing that might "catch the conscience" of a court or monarch.

I'm not convinced, in other words.

Remember too that in later on in the play (3.3) Claudius prays and meditates on the murder that he essentially admits he committed. Would this now be some kind of confession under duress? A tall order to fill.

The good doctor promises a second posting that will allegedly demolish Claudius's altar-side testimony. Defense attorneys take heed. Can our Elizabethan Dershowitz rescue his royal client from the noose of the open-and-shut guilty verdict? Stay tuned, he says.

[Feb. 6 Update: Nothing like being reminded that one has already written about this subject. Hamlet's "undiscovered country" -- the line upon which the whole strange Hamlet-murderer theory turns -- is a reference to a book that Edward de Vere had translated into English in 1573, Cardanus Comforte, a book of philosophical consolations for the melancholic soul. Discussion about Hamlet's reference to Cardanus is, ahem, in a certain book about which this blog is concerned, page number 64. (Thanks to R.B., B.F., C.W. and other correspondents for edifying discussion about the "undiscovered" excerpt from Hamlet's immortal soliloquy.)]

The Bard via iPod, iPhone and iDon't Know What Else

This from a posting today on The English Teacher Blog -- which refers back to the "Shakespeare" By Another Name podcast series:


"Podcasts are perfect for students who have a hard time reading Shakespeare -- HEARING Shakespeare is undoubtedly better for them … maybe for all of us."



Back when Shakespeare-upon-iPod was first posted online, in the spring of 2005, just one other Shakespeare-related podcast graced the Interwebs. My sole competition was a rather fascinating punk rock-fueled exploration of Macbeth that argued that the Scots tragedy was a far, far bloodier and darker play than the critics (elbows bepatched and all) generally appreciate. I was with him on that.


These days, though, the American Shakespeare Center, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Folger Shakespeare Library all post podcasts, too. The competition is definitely going upscale. So, please... Keep on downloading!

Shakespeare: The Big Disconnect

[Creative Commons image by Juan23]

Best-selling author Bill Bryson recently wrote that Shakespeare is "a kind of literary equivalent of an electron -- forever there and not there." Resorting, as Bryson does, to metaphysical mumbo jumbo is one way of handling a very thorny problem.

Here's another way. Michael Pennington, a player who's logged some 20,000 hours of stage time performing or directing Shakespeare, brings his one-man-show about the Bard ("Sweet William") to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis through Dec. 22.

Friday's Minneapolis Star Tribune quotes Pennington musing in his own way about the same problem Bryson describes:

"Despite his long association with Shakespeare's work and the obvious research that he's done, Pennington said he feels that he still doesn't know much about the man.

'We're thrown back on the plays, undistracted, as we always were,' he wrote."

Of course, "undistracted" is a loaded word -- suggesting investigation into anything other than the plays themselves is a waste of everyone's time.

Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the theater where Pennington will perform, thought otherwise. The Tony Award-winning impresario who also set up the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada penned these words in The New York Times in 1962:

"There is a theory, advanced by reputable scholars, seriously and, in my opinion, plausibly, that Shakespeare merely lent his name as a cover for the literary activities of another person."

The idea that Shakespeare was a mask behind which was concealed a political operative in Queen Elizabeth's court certainly adds a new layer of possible meaning to these plays and poems. It might just be what's needed in something called "Arden, The World of Shakespeare."

As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.

I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off.

Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.

There's a nearly insatiable public desire to make a visceral, emotional connection with the greatest author in our language. And when history has stuck you with the wrong guy, the best one can hope for are fleeting and fragmentary glances at what should be vast, profound and meaningful biographical revelations.

This is no game either -- although I'd venture that some great interactive entertainment centered around the authorship question could readily be brought to market.

Rather, the enterprise at hand is the literary equivalent of (sorry Mr. Bryson) a grand unified theory -- forever interconnected, forever yielding new insights, forever there.

Pericles and the "Cranks"

[Creative Commons images by De Shark and Kaptain Kobold]

Two items on the agenda today, both of which are red herrings used by orthodox Shakespeareans to dissuade people away from the Edward de Vere camp:

First was raised this week by British blogger Oliver Kamm, who ran through the standard-issue tirade against Oxfordians (snobbery blah blah conspiracy theory blah blah) that reveals the all-too-standard-issue problem that he doesn't begin to grasp the state of the debate he criticizes.

Shakespeare disbelievers, to him, are "outright cranks" who fail to appreciate that "the number of scholars of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature seriously entertaining [alternate theories about who wrote Shakespeare] is, to my knowledge, fewer than half a dozen."

As blogged about on these pages back in April, in fact, The New York Times conducted a survey of four-year colleges and universities across the U.S. this year and discovered that 17 percent of Shakespeare professors said there may in fact be "good reason" to doubt that Will Shakespeare of Stratford wrote those plays and poems.

Kindly count again, Mr. Kamm.

Second is a bigger issue raised by a bigger voice in a bigger venue.

In this weekend's edition of The Guardian, James Shapiro reviewed a new Shakespeare book by Charles Nicholl. In his review, Shapiro raises what looks to be an emerging anti-Oxfordian argument, that in 1605 "George Wilkins, a violent low-life with literary pretensions ... was soon collaborating with [Shakespeare] on Pericles."

De Vere died in 1604, and so this would be a devastating argument for de Vere partisans... if anyone had any proof for it.

As it is, the Wilkins-Shakespeare collaboration theory is like practically everything else in Stratford-ville: A whole lot of possibly-maybe-perhapses packaged neatly with a big red bow and presented to the reader as fact.

Here's what we know: A guy named Laurence Twyne wrote a book in 1576 that contains a story that was then appropriated (to put it politely) by another guy named George Wilkins in 1608. Wilkins's book says it's "The true history of the play Pericles as it was lately presented..." Shakespeare's play Pericles was published the following year, in 1609.

The conventional theory goes that Wilkins and Shakespeare worked together on this plagiarized story from Twyne, and that Wilkins and Shakespeare worked together on the play that was attributed solely to Shakespeare. But this is pure speculation.

Here are some other facts: Twyne registered his story with the state censors in July 1576. Three months before that, de Vere raced across the English Channel on a ship from France (intercepted by pirates, no less) convinced that in his absence, his wife had borne a daughter out of wedlock. Twyne's tale is of the tribulations of a daughter born under tumultuous circumstances involving both pirates and a disastrous journey at sea.

Furthermore, de Vere knew the Twynes -- having rented lodgings for Laurence Twyne's brother Thomas in 1573 so that Thomas could translate a book about the history and geography of England.

In other words: Whoever one thinks wrote Pericles, Laurence Twyne's book and the distressing events from de Vere's life in 1576 constitute the best source(s) for the play. George Wilkins -- and with it, yet another anti-Oxfordian silver bullet -- have essentially nothing to do with it.