Wednesday 28 April 2010

The Shakespeare-didn't-write-Shakespeare crowd

What fun there is to be had at the expense of the daft Shakespeare-didn't-write-Shakespeare crowd!
Despite the failure of early cipher-hunters such as Owen, Elizabeth Wells Gallup and Ignatius Donnelly to find anything meaningful, the idea that Shakespearean texts contain coded messages of authorship remains central. The Sonnets, with their apparently confiding, first-person voice, have proved fertile ground. Oxfordians find anagrams of “Vere” everywhere, especially in the line from Sonnet 76, “Every word doth almost tell my name”. In the famously puzzling dedication to the first edition of 1609 – ostensibly written by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe – the author is styled “our ever-living poet”. Oxfordians point out that the first three words are (almost) an anagram of one of Oxford’s mottoes, Vero nil verius (“Nothing truer than truth”). Yet the same dedicatory text, when examined by Brenda James in Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code (2008), reveals an entirely different secret, achieved by putting the 144 letters of the dedication into a 12x12 matrix, and juggling them around according to certain cryptographic rules, whereupon there emerges first the encouraging message, “The wise Thorp hid thy poet”, and then the all-important name of the poet, “Nevill”.
Of course, as Wilde might say, this (I mean the contumely heaped on the silly heads of Baconians or Earl-of-Essexists or whoever) is all really Caliban's rage at seeing his face in the mirror. It's what we all do, in one way or another: inserting texts into a 12x12 matrix, and juggling them around according to certain cryptographic rules. We're too clever to do so according to the logic of 'biography', of course; and we don't like to talk of 'conspiracy', but ideologically, hermeneutically, creatively it's our work. What's so very cool about the “Every word doth almost tell my name” line is the license implied by that almost.

8 comments:

Rich Puchalsky said...

Well... the charitable impulse should always be encouraged, I suppose. And perhaps before I throw stones I should think back to those days when I was finding things hidden in Iain M. Banks novels that Iain Banks once Emailled me to say weren't really there. (At least he liked my interpretation in one case).

But cryptography is not really part of the same thing as close reading, or reading through psychological theory, or any of the other standards. It's not something that can really be said to potentially exist somewhere in the mind of the ordinary reader.

Also, the main reason for laughing at that crowd -- well, one of the main reasons -- is the political disreputability of their interpretation. They can't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because clearly only a noble could have done it? That's an argument that they always refer to. That's deeply conservative, and not in a Burkean way -- in a typical enforcing-social-hierarchy way.

Howard Schumann said...

No one is interested in who could have written the plays and poems. I am only interested in who did write them and here the overwhelming evidence points to a court insider.

Of the 37 plays, 36 are laid in royal courts and the world of the nobility. The principal characters are almost all aristocrats with the exception perhaps of Shylock and Falstaff. From all we can tell, Shakespeare fully shared the outlook of his characters, identifying fully with the courtesies, chivalries, and generosity of aristocratic life. Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, etc.

The history plays are concerned mostly with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power and are concerned with righting the wrongs that fall on people of high blood. His comedies are far removed from the practicalities of everyday life or the realistic need to make a living. Shakespeare's vision is a deeply conservative, feudalistic and aristocratic one. When he does show sympathy for the commoners as in Henry V speech to the troops, however, Henry is also shown to be a moralist and a hypocrite. He pretends to be a commoner and mingles with the troops in a disguise and claims that those commoners who fought with the nobility would be treated as brothers.

But we know there was no chance of that ever happening in feudal England. What can scarcely be overlooked is a compassionate understanding of the burdens of kingship combined with envy of the carefree lot of the peasant, who free of the "peril" of the "envious court", "sweetly…enjoys his thin cold drink" and his "sleep under a fresh tree's shade" with "no enemy but winter and rough weather". This would come naturally to a privileged nobleman.

E.T. said...

That was possibly one of the grossest cases of oversimplification of Shakespeare's texts I've heard, ever.

Adam Roberts Project said...

Rich: I absolutely agree with you on the hidden class agenda of the anti-Shakespearians. And I'm impressed at the number of British SF novelists with whom you have a relationship! But I don't know about the 'cryptography/close reading' thing. They're not exactly the same, no, but they do both depend upon a process of decoding, and the translation of text into meaning. I'm not entirely sure I take the force of your 'It's not something that can really be said to potentially exist somewhere in the mind of the ordinary reader'.

Howard: thank you for your comment. For the evidence you present to be other than circumstantial, though, wouldn't you need to demonstrate that only a court insider can write about court-life? Which is to say, at first blush the many counter-examples would seem to falsify your thesis: I'm talking about examples of fictional accounts of court life written by commoners, from Fairy Tales to Modern Fantasy fiction, from Victorian Silver Fork novels to -- and this is surely the clincher -- pretty much all the drama of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries.

Howard Schumann said...

That would be true if the essence of the narrative in the plays were totally fictional. However, in the case of Shakespeare, the plays are highly political, often satirical accounts of real individuals such as Burghley, Hatton, Queen Elizabeth, Essex and others.

If you read the plays aware of the political and social status of Oxford, his exile from the court, his stormy relationship to the queen and his struggle to retain his identity, only then do the plays make any sense.

As Beauclerk has said, "A satirical writer as trenchant as Shakespeare would not have kept his head for long without the monarch's indulgence".

Adam Roberts Project said...

Howard: I don't know whether you have any wish to persuade me of your case, or not.

"If you read the plays aware of the political and social status of Oxford, his exile from the court, his stormy relationship to the queen and his struggle to retain his identity, only then do the plays make any sense."

The 'only' here is surely, empirically, untrue. There have been myriad readings of the plays of Shakespeare that find all manner of sense in them without any recourse at all to the life of Oxford. The most one can say is that 'it is possible to read these plays as informed by an understanding of the life of Oxford'. And of course it is possible; although it seems to me a reading neither exclusive of, or preferable to, all the others.

Howard Schumann said...

You can have all manner of interpretations as indeed academics have for decades. However, the bottom line is that the plays and sonnets are either entertaining abstractions without any connection to the life of the author or they reveal the life experience and emotional truth of the author.

It is understandable why orthodox interpreters would not want to view these as reflecting life experiences since there is nothing in the plays or poems that as far as we know connects to the biography of William of Stratford.

What is true for me is that these plays have maintained a high degree of popularity with audiences for centuries because the audience can connect with the emotional pain of the characters. They convey an emotional authenticity born of deep feeling.

There is a naked truth in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth that reveals the emotional state of the author. The consistent themes of the plays have to do with bastardy and succession, and reflect circumstances in the personal life of Edward de Vere which are too numerous to discuss here. His words perfectly express our feelings as viewers when we realize that the stories being told by Shakespeare not only are entertaining and full of passion but also have the ring of truth.

Adam Roberts Project said...

"It is understandable why orthodox interpreters would not want to view these as reflecting life experiences since there is nothing in the plays or poems that as far as we know connects to the biography of William of Stratford."

There is there is nothing in the plays or poems that as far as we know connects to the biography of anybody at all. I do not see this as a problem, or as disqualifying the plays from reflecting life experience. After all, there is there is nothing in the Oresteia that connects to the biography of Aeschylus; nothing in the Famous Five books that connects to the biography of Enid Blyton. You seem to have, if I might suggest it, confused 'literary criticism' with 'biography'.

There's nothing wrong with biography, mind. Biography can be very interesting and worthwhile. But in the first instance, it is not the same thing as literary criticism. And in the second, more particular instance, there are lots and lots of biographical data that connects Shakespeare with Shakespeare's plays, from Groatsworth of Wit through to the dedicatory poems of the First Folio.

"What is true for me is that these plays have maintained a high degree of popularity with audiences for centuries because the audience can connect with the emotional pain of the characters."

This rather seems to contradict what you say earlier, about the plays' uniquely aristocratic tenor, necessarily (you argue) born of an aristocratic life experience. These centuries of audiences have not, after all, been aristocrats.

"They convey an emotional authenticity born of deep feeling."

Why should Oxford have a monopoly on 'deep feeling'? Mightn't William Shakespeare have had access to that, also?