Paul Cantor on the "Shakespeare Authorship Question"

[Music] welcome to conversations I'm bill kristol and I'm joined today by my friend Paul Cantor professor of English at University of Virginia a frequent converse iran conversations about shakespeare about what you've written books important books and popular culture about which you've written important books Paul is also I should say the editor or curator depending on which term you want of the invaluable website on Shakespeare and politics you can find it by just googling Shakespeare and politics it shows up right but also or go to the great thinkers org the great thinkers org and you'll see various great thinkers one of whom is Shakespeare maybe the greatest do you think no no okay we're sticking on the floss well he's the best working with writing with Plato he's the best playwright on the list I'll guarantee that that's that's that seems like a good bet right anyway thank you for joining me today and the genesis of this conversation was an article in the Atlantic but a few months ago that we emailed about claiming that maybe Shakespeare was a woman and I was a little just astonished that this was kind of what I took to be some old kind of Shakespeare's not Shakespeare trope that was turned out to have a life today and you actually knew a lot about it they've done further research so well where Shakespeare Shakespeare let's begin with that yes Shakespeare was Shakespeare I've looked at pictures of Francis Bacon and I've looked at pictures in Oxford they don't look on thin like shades that's good so they can't have written those plays come on okay so why does everyone want to what's with the whole I think it's kind of unusual I mean if you think about in history of literature or philosophy or art yes it's all like cottage industry which has gone on for quite a long time now different iterations which we'll get to of other people must have been Shakespeare so what's going yeah I can't frankly understand it but let's take begin with this example just to cite a few things here the author of the article is Elizabeth Winkler and it does appear in the June 2019 issue of the Atlantic and it's titled who Shakespeare a woman and she chooses a woman named Amelia pisano who is actually reasonably well known in Shakespeare scholarship and a man in a raus identified her as the infamous dark lady in Shakespeare's Samus she was of Italian descent in a family of musicians who lived in Elizabethan England and a fairly well-known and so she wrote poetry but suddenly Elizabeth Winkler decided that she wrote Shakespeare's plays and it's a very confessional piece she begins with the fact that she's been to a lot of Shakespeare plays and she's very impressed with the female characters and they're presented sympathetically they're often presented heroically and they show great insight into the female character and so which i think is true is always the female characters are often much superior to this counterparts especially in the comedies and I've seen the formulation that for Shakespeare tragedy is where men rule the world and comedies where women rule the world and there's a certain truth to that but from this winkler concludes that the person who wrote the plays had to be a woman now that seems to me very fallacious reasoning from the start because Shakespeare also portrays men sympathetically and he portrays men as very interesting and deep complex characters so why shouldn't a man have written it and it does strike me as an example an extreme example of the obsession with identity in contemporary literary criticism that the first thing you have to find out about an author is is the north of male female lower-class upper-class black white everything turns on the issue of the identity in all literature is simply the expression of identity I don't think that was Shakespeare's view in fact it's been a traditional view of Shakespeare that the miracle and Shakespeare is his ability to suppress his identity and get himself into all sorts of different characters the great poet John Keats who understood Shakespeare very well and I was able to imitate Shakespeare style when is that very few people have been able to he spoke of Shakespeare's the chameleon poet and by very meant he could just adapt himself xx identity and above all that was praise of course yes that was only a chameleon in politics yes yes but the great line in Keats was he could imagine an image in as well as in the alcohol now we all know we all know the great villain of fellow imaging is a the heroine in the play Cymbeline and is a truly innocent and wonderful young woman and you see the point you can imagine in imaging as well as the Argo that's precisely the point that Winkler and many of the anti shakespeareans deny they're really denying the fundamental fact of the human imagination the the real ability of a great dramatist and especially Shakespeare is to get out of his own identity in a way that suppresses identity okay Luis Borgess wrote an essay about this in which he said that Shakespeare is everything and nothing meaning that he could well have been a cipher as a human being a very ordinary human being and then what he had was the ability to imagine himself into a range of identities and that's actually what upsets me about this approach to Shakespeare it denies his imaginative ability and really denies the power of the imagination itself and it often gets quite literal just I want to be able to cite a few things here the show I'm not making this up but here's here's part of Winkler's argument about Shakespeare yet he left behind not a single book though the play is drawn hundreds of texts including some in Italian and French that hadn't yet been translated to English nor did he leave any musical instruments though plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments this is bizarre reasoning for Shakespeare to mention 26 musical in service he had to own each one of them and moreover detail them in his will in fact scholars who've looked into Elizabethan inheritance law have shown that typically wills did not list objects there were separate inventories but really the Shakespeare had to only each instrument he wrote about it and wheel it specifically to his heirs on the matter of books it's very complicated we'll come back to it but it has been shown that Shakespeare's son-in-law in the very same house and inherited from Shakespeare in the inventory that house there are books so where they come from we don't know but the fact is we don't know that Shakespeare didn't own any books simply because they're not listed in his will I own thousands upon thousands of books some of which I have with me here and then I listed my will I'm gonna dispose of them differently so this is what I object to but I have to say this is what makes this kind of thing person persuasive that's someone reading this would say oh yeah we're all the books and were the musical instruments now I don't want to go through the article line by line but I do want to get to the key point for me where she says I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter's Tale Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale was likely completed 1611 was the same year pisano published a book of poetry solve a deus rx2 Dora hail God and King of the Jews her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare's in his plays though one critic strains this is as similarities the overlap lies in the feminist content now this to me is the weakest point in all these arguments the stylistic point here we have poetry by Amelia Pisano and it turns out it sounds nothing like Shakespeare now we're gonna come back to this baby when we get to the of Oxford but at least the case of Earl of Oxford his poetry dates from very early in his life and people are able to dismiss it as juvenilia and say even though this doesn't sound like Shakespeare he had years to develop the style that is distinctively hears but here Winkler is insisting on the fact that Wow Shakespeare published something finished the play insisting over and Bassano published a book of poetry at that time now I'm just gonna read one brief passage from her poem and then read something from The Winter's Tale the poem was about the Passion of Christ it's a very religious poem and I'm gonna I've chosen randomly basically a passage about Adam and Eve this will show you the feminist content of the work because it's arguing that Adam was more at fault in the fall of man than Eve was but surely Adam cannot be excused her fault Eve's though great yet he was most to blame what weakness offered strength might have refused being Lord of all the greater was a shame although the Serpent's craft had her abused God's Holy Word or all his action frame for he was Lord and king of all the earth before poor Eve had either life or breath who being framed by God's eternal hand the perfect dismantle read on earth and from God's mouth received that straight command the breach whereof he knew was present death yay having power to rule most seal and yet when one Apple one to lose that breath which God hath breathed in his beauteous face bring us all in danger and disgrace now that's very bad poetry and very unlike what Shakespeare was writing at the time it's the kind of poetry you get from people think poetry is what rhymes and you will notice this all the time to this day that people think a poem estarán and more to the point if it rhymes it's gotta be poetry this is very conventional it's end-stopped as we say my profession that is the the the Lions heavily end with the rhyme words many of the rhymes are off like earth and breath I don't think you'd find that kind of off Rhine in Shakespeare and I'll just read a passage from The Winter's Tale again this is supposed to convince us that pisano rode Shakespeare's plays this is early in the play when a character de Leon T's has gotten jealous that a friend has seduced his wife gone already inch-thick leave D deep or head and ears a forked one go play boys this is talking to his child who we now thinks is Oh Jim it go play boy play my mother plays and I play too but not so disgraced apart whose issue will hiss me to my grave contempt and clamour will be my nail go play boy play there have been or I am much deceived chuckles air now and many a man there is even at this present now while I speak this holds his wife by the arm that little thinks she has been sluiced in this absence and his pond fish by his neck next neighbor by smiles neighbor may there's comfort in it while others men have kids and those gates are open as my now this is dramatic no end-stopped lines no rhyme I mean if you knew that Emilia Bassano knew independently that she had written Shakespeare's plays you might desperately try to reconcile that poem with this play but if you're talking about evidence that she wrote the plays you have to have something stronger than that and indeed it's amazing that she says the content is the same but the style is different well style is one individual authors not content to different authors can save roughly the same thing but in different styles if we had handwriting here something in Shakespeare's handwriting and something in Pisano's handwriting that's what we would use to determine who robot because handwriting is individual and specific to a certain person works again content can be general they could be saying the same thing but in different styles so I find it really quite incredible that she allows that point in her own article and to me that undermines the whole thing right there and it shows how much we've lost sight of the style of poetry and quite frankly the quality for me that's what's striking yes similar content as if I mean obviously anyone could have a feminist the heart and almost every serious thinker has it some point or other from Plato on or before Plato but the idea that you then dismiss while the style is somewhat different but isn't yeah this is what differentiates authors and it shows what has happened here in a lot of contemporary literary criticism that identity trumps every other aspect of literature that what you're really looking for is what is the identity of the author and as he or she able to express it as if that's what literature's poetry drama is about and I do think this essay reflects a dilemma in contemporary criticism by the way the tracted a lot of criticism and it even the the Atlantic was forced to rewrite the headline of the issue because of some of the criticism of it but English studies have backed themselves into a corner at this point so much has been devoted in the past few decades to showing the prejudices the limitations of authors the whole obsession with dead white males the ideas how how can we remain in thrall through these authors who come from an earlier period and do not share our contemporary enlightenment I think it's one reason the humanities in general are in danger in colleges and universities today in particular English departments is suffering large drops in enrollment we as English professors just champion the works we taught that was our point to show people how great the literature of the past is and how it could open their eyes to hold different worlds and increasingly the way literature's taught we're just learning that Shakespeare was a creature of the patriarchy as he would see in a play let's say like Taming of the Shrew that he was racist in his portrayal of a fellow that he was anti-semitic in his portrayal of and there are some truths to this approach and you can see some ways in which Shakespeare was bound by the views of his time but that really doesn't make the literature very welcoming to students and I think they've turned away from that so there has been a counter movement in literary studies a desperate attempt to find that Shakespeare was a minority of some sort to shift gears a bit but this I think illustrates the point there's been an increasing movement to claim that Shakespeare was a Catholic you have been struck by that that's their site different champions from thee yes although some of the experience of women well but also I'll show you the relation now there are arguments on both sides here they're really the questions with Shakespeare what's technically known as a wreck you send someone living under the Protestant regime of Queen Elizabeth who remain loyal to the old Catholicism and remember England had gone Protestant under Henry the a that had gone back to Catholicism under Queen Mary and now back again to Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth and certainly was confusing to people at the time and and there's plenty of evidence that there were people who secretly maintained their Catholic faith in some cases not that secretly and I can understand why Catholics would like Shakespeare be Catholic in general people want Shakespeare to agree with that and it's almost as if they feel this will legitimate whatever their beliefs are and quite frankly I think Shakespeare's greatest ability is to represent the world and represent it accurately and it does allow for people to react to Shakespeare the way they react to the world Shakespeare gives a very accurate portrayal of the political world if your right wing you're gonna find right wing and thoughts and Shakespeare the left wing you'll find left wing thoughts I take great credit I'm a libertarian and I've never thought that Shakespeare was a libertarian I'm willing to further research will allow you to discover this no I've shown that Ben Johnson's play Bartholomew fair is a libertarian play with deep associations with Friedrich Hayek so I've done my bit there but Shakespeare I've just read them and read them and I don't think it was your measure libertarianism yes but I believe he had an aristocratic worldview anyway but I just like to say I'm an exception there I expect that everyone feels they've got again Shakespeare on their side so again I think it's understandable that Catholics have argued that Shakespeare was Catholic you know by the way I think an honest freedom displays shows that he was anti-catholic in the terms of his day that he wanted religion taken out of politics and you can see in his history place you can see a measure for measure that he thought having a Catholic politics would be this answer saying anyway that's a subject for another conversation but in any case what surprised me is when non Catholic critics started arguing for Shakespeare as Catholic and this would include Stephen Greenblatt and a whole set of critics many of whom were Jewish and have no Catholic axe to grind I was actually a little puzzled by it I was reviewing Michael woods I think it's called in search of Shakespeare when I first realized AHA now we can say he's a minority he's an oppressed minority as a Catholic under the oppressive Elizabethan regime and increasingly critics present Elizabeth's regime as oppressive and there's a great deal of truth to that but the idea you know it's bad enough that Shakespeare is a dead white male but he's a wasp he's a white anglo-saxon who brought along with his plays performed at core and so on and so if he could be a Catholic then you could have him in a minority position he's persecuted he's speaking truth to power and I do think he was but not for this reason by the way I do not think he was a at all a creature of the establishment I for example if argue that he was a republican small-arms well and that he was his plays about Rome were attempt to revive the idea of Roman republicanism and to modify the British monarchy in the direction of the mixed regime of the Roman Republic and I think he actually succeeded in that task but anyway just to show I'm not taking a conventional view Shakespeare myself but here you have the idea of Shakespeare as a Catholic then we can start invoking or methods of reading people who are outside the mainstream and and battling persecution and champion imanari cause and so the other side of that would be here to say that shakes these plays were written by a woman now it's a kind of fantasy I and what troubled me and a lot of other people about this article is that the evidence is very weak in it and winkler more or less admits I'm sitting there in a play and I'm thinking it's really giving good portray as well oh we must have wrote in the Ridley's plays and that you know it's just I wish this was true so it is true and it's another illustration of how post-modernism has corrupted our world that this postmodern claim that there is no truth with a capital T has now opened us up to all sorts of fake news and it is now fake news in the academic world it's clear the Atlantic published this because they thought it would sell copies and get interest and it did and again it would be the idea well we got attention who cares if it's mainly negative attention our name is in the news and that by the way is what Stokes this whole movement and keeps it alive almost two centuries at this point that it's not news that Shakespeare wrote his plays we all know that but it is news if Francis Bacon wrote them with the Earl of Oxford or Amelia basado well let's go back maybe then to the beginning of this movement but see there's this sort of postmodern you might say yeah attempt to say Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare maybe couldn't have been Shakespeare but the earlier movement I mean it's not coming out of nowhere so yes history of this Shakespeare and I know it's not as long as as some people think in the the Atlantic's original sub-header was the authorship controversy almost as old as the works themselves has yet to surface a compelling alternative to the man bearing Stratford well as people quickly pointed out the authorship controversy is not as old as the plays themselves Shakespeare was controversial in his day and there were arguments whether it was stealing from other authors and so on but no one at the time doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays so if you go online now to which Shakespeare woman what you read is the authorship controversy as yes the surface of compelling Walter took out there yeah so this is the problem in the world of the Internet the history just gets rewritten right here and it's an interesting case that did happen anyway to give credit where credit is due the first person to question seriously that Shakespeare Rose plays was named James Wilmont and this was in 1785 is that right that late yeah so basically in the 17th century or the 17th century critics oh it's an 18th century which there were a ton yeah appreciators of Shakespeare they had no issue I mean it was just that was Shakespeare yeah anyways and there was none of this there's a false idea that there are only a few references to Shakespeare in his time and there are dozens upon dozens of references people writing poems as tributes to him people referring to him as the author of the plays and as a great poet we talked in one of our preceding conversations about Sir Francis meters and as pallidus tamia where he lists the great playwrights of his day and present Shakespeare as the greatest of them and in shortly after I mean I don't know much about this but in the 17th today early 18th century it's taken for granted that he's a very great oh yes right it's like he's well and obscure is I what he thought yeah something was forgotten for decades ya know do you know he got eclipsed by his sidekick John Fletcher after Fletcher replaced him as the main playwright for the Kingsmen but he was soon as plays were revived in 1660 with the restoration his plays were revived and in the 18th century he emerged as the bard yeah even a big you know do you see this deep into the Federalist Papers yes a quotient yeah analyst 2 and I think it's the buzz if we may quote the bard they don't even mention Shakespeare's name Sara yeah now I'm just the the best book on this controversy is by James Shapiro and it's called contested will who wrote Shakespeare great tide of the time that's the real I wish I could come up with titles like that but he points out it it was only when Shakespeare became idolized and indeed turned into a god that heretics became possible it's a very interesting way of looking at that let's say people could live with the thought that this guy from Stratford was a very good playwright but once you claimed he was a god and and that's the language used by the late 18th century that you you encourage people to think well this keg it can't have been so great at least not some country bumpkin from war she can't be so great and so it encouraged people to start quote the line of attack as les he's not a god the plays are all flawed but rather I guess that would be one possible line of attacks the other possible night of attack is he didn't write them right exactly and that's when you get start to get these arguments that again Francis Bacon was the first alternative proposed and I have here just to drill you in the audience this is a first printing first edition of the first book to question that Shakespeare wrote his plays it's called the philosophy of the plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia bacon now no relation to Francis but towards the end of his line of her life she started to think she was this extremely valuable book which I purchased for $5 in the Hughes bookstore you can email us if you're interested in making it really outlandish offer condition no markings and this play went to Sheila when does she write this in 1857 oh that was so what is I I brought it to show that this whole contras room is quite late I mean in there were various comments and he's going around but the first serious book the first serious challenge to Shakespeare authorship was 1857 so recent I own a copy the first printing of it and I just had it authenticated by a bibliography that is the first printing now it's actually a pretty remarkable book and for example Nathaniel Hawthorne not only wrote a preface for but he paid for its printing in England he was so impressed with her though he's rather cagey in the preface in not revealing not saying that he agrees now this book is talked about but very seldom read fact I read one comment and said that no one has ever read it and I have to confess there may be some truth to that is perhaps the most unreadable book I've ever seen it's 700 pages long and very small print I've now read about 300 pages of it and not consecutively because I read like the first hundred pages the last hundred pages and a middle hundred pages it's one of the strangest books ever written she writes very well though her sentences are infinitely long her prose is overheated she's making Titanic claims on every other page about changing the world I'm gonna try to state her thesis but it's very hard because she never does I it's very hard to understand how weird this book is she almost never gives birth to her holes yes yes she almost never names names everything is porifera says she'll be talking about the only man in England who is great enough to comprehended a subject to such that now she should say Francis Bacon but she won't you can read four pages and not be sure who's she talking about but as far as I can gather her thesis it is that the Elizabeth of the euro was one of great repression that Elizabeth ruled as a tyrant and the writers at the time reacting to this absolutism of the Tudor regime could not speak openly and therefore they had to find coded ways to write in fact she she disses I don't she talks openly about esoteric writing she's like the Leo Strauss of the 19th century and it's quite remarkable I don't have time to read passages but there are extended passages about the nature of esoteric writing that in an era of persecution authors have to learn to write secretly and and she believes that Shakespeare's plays are the esoteric expression of the bacons philosophy but this is all in conjunction with Sir Walter Raleigh as well she's a real conspiracy theorist she believes that the men who opposed Elizabeth's regime and wanted to end tutor absolutism working Lee's secret working secretly to subvert the regime she chooses Walter wall Raleigh as a first example and discusses him at great length but then she sees Raleigh in league with bacon and she brings in the great poet edmund spenser she actually mentions the year of Oxford she claims this there was this conspiracy of philosophical opponents of Elizabethan tyranny who wrote works like Bacon's Novum organum and the advance of learning but settled upon plays to be the means of getting this message out to the audience and and that's where we get Shakespeare's play is now she's again there's remarkable passages where she uses the word esoteric of writing and she has read Bacon very carefully particularly the advancement of learning I've written about the advance for learning and so I know she's she's quoting the right passages I know that these are the same passages I quote in my essay on Francis Bacon she knew Morse of Morse code Fame and so she was alive to the notion of ciphers of coding and so she came upon 20 pages of advanced learning that disgusts codes and they are really remarkable they are tucked away in the middle of the book and if they I'm saying this now they are the key to the whole book Bacon's discussion of secret codes is a discussion of esoteric writing and it's just an amazing example of esoteric writing he seems to be talking about something as trivial as cryptograms but he's really telling you how to write esoterically and she understands that and she works out babe bacon had something called the bilateral cipher I can actually explain it but we don't have 20 minutes but she understands the bilateral cipher and she thinks it's at work in Shakespeare's they did use a lot of ciphers because yes state Matic yes that's right it wasn't ridiculous and you had Francis Walsingham Elizabeth spymaster who was charged with tracking down on these codes and breaking them so there's an awful lot of truth in this book and she she writes at length about King Lear Judas's Coriolanus she's Coriolanus which is my personal favorite among Shakespeare's plays and I've written two books about it she devotes more time to Coriolanus in this book they're kind of the Paul Cantor of the night spit it that way okay yeah all right all right I'm legendarily how did legendarily write clearly yes she doesn't see the door and you don't write 850 page yeah it is it's so strange that I keep waiting for her to say what a play is about and she never does she hinted stuff and and the most frustrating thing about the book is she keeps saying she has another volume of historical studies that prove all this and it's very possible she did and no one would publish it there were but the all the evidence is not in the book it's in an unpublished book then we have no access to a good project for you for the next in a few years one down and somehow house Country Manor in England she is America and I'll say she went over to England with the project of digging up Shakespeare's grave so that she could find the manuscripts in his plays and she was not allowed to do and then she wanted to dig up Bacon's tomb to find the manuscripts it's really I should I've been hesitant saying she was insane two years after this book came out very sad story and their cancer this book that she's on her way and in that sense you know I don't want to impute orion's I'm I'm saying much nicer things about her than almost anyone does anyway so she gets this whole thing going yes and what is the thrust of the general arguments that then get take over Italy okay so let X pure can't be why can't Shakespeare be shakespeare according to these nineteenth-century okay okay should start with that the basic argument turns on education the idea is that we have no records of Shakespeare's education and in fact we don't have records if it's not education because the records of the Grammar School in Stratford have been lost we do know a lot about that grammar school and Shakespeare probably went there because his father was virtually mayor Stratford at one point was a wealthy tradesman he was a Glover he was in the glove trade and one thing we know is these students in Stratford were very well educated latin people said they probably came out of that high school knowing Latin better than most classics majors conscious today one thing they did for example again we have records what the curriculum was they were really their reading of it one thing they would have to do was translate a passage in line into English and then read translated into Latin without making reference to the original that really teaches you Latin Ben Jonson famously said of Shakespeare that he had small lighting at les Greek but Ben Jonson was one of the great classical scholars of the age so that means Shakespeare had a good deal of Latin and even new Greek probably new New Testament Greek but anyway the argument is that he was uneducated and didn't go to college now it turns out Ben Jonson didn't go to college Ben Jonson who was the son of a bricklayer got into the Westminster School in London we'd call it a magnet school doubt the best school London and got a great education there but never went to college a few of the playwrights like Christopher Marlowe went to college and the group with them were even called the university wits and it does seem that they made fun of Shakespeare when he first came to London for not having a college education but so a lot of the argument is he didn't have a college education he chose knowledge of foreign lands such as Italy his description of Venice it's pretty accurate he knows the business is done on the Rialto and he knows what a gondola is and so and of course he displays great knowledge of the aristocracy and I'd say really deep knowledge that he understands the aristocratic nature as well as Plato and Aristotle do for example and so that's why people think that this man from Stratford as they refer to was not well educated enough to write these plays and so that's what also not from noble be better if you were from noble yes right yes a commoner yes and there was a now remember this this is flourishing in the Victorian era and so one thing you get is laid pure in response to the vulgarity of the plays all the dirty jokes and all the double entendre and people wished that wasn't part of the place so the argument would be that someone like Bacon wrote the plays and he arranged to have them staged and Shakespeare was the front man but being this vulgar country bumpkin he added these dirty jokes to please the audience so you know Shakespeare was highly powderized expurgated in the 19th century the the weather's mr. Butler he's it's 19th century in century and so and there were all these efforts to rewrite Shakespeare clean the stuff up and so that was a thinking in the Victorian period and in a weed way this is all very middle-class though it's trying to conjure up an aristocratic Shakespeare it's a kind of middle-class fantasy of the aristocrat as well bred contrary the nature of these Elizabethan aristocrats who will seem we talk about the Earl of Oxford we're not exactly the most admirable people in the world but just to focus on the issue of college education it's such a bourgeois thing to think that you need a college education to write a great work of literature obviously throughout most of literary history the author's didn't have college education but if it when they did it was not what we think of as a college education Oxford and Cambridge during Shakespeare's lifetime and well before and well beyond we're basically there to train ministers you had to know Latin to be able to read the Vulgate translation of Bible you had to know some Greek to be able to read the New Testament and insofar as there was a curriculum at Oxford it was a curriculum in the classics in that sense but Shakespeare might well have been taught by an Oxford graduate in the Stratford Grammar School and that's how we would have learned his life as Greek but as to what else happened they were basically social institutions now take Christopher Marlowe who did go to Cambridge there's this strange fact about Christopher Marlowe that he doesn't seem to spend much time at Cambridge and a tea that when it came to greet time Cambridge refused to grant him his degree and the Privy Council Elizabeth Privy Council had to intervene to order Cambridge to give Marlowe his degree because he was on her majesty's service and if you're thinking James Bond here you were correct no one knows for sure but the theory is that Marlowe had traveled to the continent to spy on Catholic refugees who were a problem for Elizabeth's regime and he may have been mixing among these refugees to find out if any plots for going on against Elizabeth that's the best theory of why he was absent from class but it gives you some idea what kind of education was he getting and you you see that as well I mean just to jump ahead to the year of Oxford here there's another reason people offer him so who's a big candidate in this world besides bacon the other big Canada to will discuss but people as the Earl of Oxford enrolled at Cambridge when he was eight years old now that seems prodigious to us now what an intellectual prodigy and my he he must have had 1600 SAT scores well it's just such an anachronistic view of what it goes to I wasn't meant to go to Oxford it was there it's like a finishing school forum and here's the joke there's no record of his ever getting a BA from a from Cambridge he has mas from came honorary mas from Cambridge and Oxford and so this notion that he was this brilliant student who got this great education at Cambridge and Oxford and you will see it quoted again and again that he had mas from Oxford Cambridge now let me ask you something how hard do you think it would be the Earl of Oxford to get an honorary degree from Oxford but he's this big shot right yes he was politically it was the second oldest aristocratic family in England and if he hadn't screwed up his whole life he would have been a close counsellor of Queen Elizabeth but you know what honorary degrees are like today they are here's a degree write us a check I mean we even today you can observe a certain corruption in academic life that particularly honorary degrees are not necessarily a reflection of some kind of intellectual brilliance so I mean we're told Oh Oxford most of rid the place can see it ma is from Oxford and Cambridge but you know again take for the Earl of Oxford to get a degree for how much of this is about bacon or Oxford I guess and dill your Bacon's case it's sort of about bacon but and how much of its about it can't be Shakespeare oh is this commoner yeah he's a play he's an actor yes I would talk a little bit about that I mean they don't like the idea of some guy who's just comes from Stanford from Stanford why would that work terrible it comes to London and just becomes a I guess part of MOOCs partly a business and owner and partly yes play or another you know very interesting very interesting aspect to it is the anti commercial spirit which is so characteristic of Victorian England the the English class system that you see in Jane Austen where you can't marry a man because he made his money by trade and and so a lot of it was the anti commercial spirit now starting in the late 18th century there was a great effort to uncover biographical documents about Shakespeare people wanted to know more about him they were fascinated by him they want to understand so there was this great if we don't have any letters by him we don't have a diary from him surely we can find something that shows his real now the result against Shapiro shows this in his book was forgeries people started this in the market works the market works yes this guy I think it's William Henry Ireland Ford the diary by Shakespeare letters from Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton impact forth the manuscript of King Lear uh-oh we don't notice Maxwell I found eventually forced to play Vortigern he found a lost played by Shakespeare unfortunately staged it and the audience broke out and laughter it was so bad that was the end of that but there was this desperate effort to find some science and they found them and what they found that Shakespeare in addition to be a successful commercial playwright traded in real estate he'd loan money and he was involved in the malt trade that was big business in in Stratford and he was actually Hughes dove and grossing at one point it gives you an idea of how mercantilist and pre-capitalist shakespeare's England was in Shakespeare was caught hoarding grain because he thought the price was gonna go up in other words just the way businessman behaved normal function on the market it was hoarding grain case there'd be an emergency and he'd make a lot of money but he'd feed people when they didn't have food to eat anyway good businessman will but they just didn't find what they wanted they wanted a love letter to Anne Hathaway they wanted letters to his mistress whoever she was they wanted something to show what a sweet guy he was and and all they found were largely documents from law cases where he's suing some guy for failure to pay debts and and you know it's pretty clear that he wanted to make money and he was the most successful playwright of his by the way one of the charges against him is there and there's not a single record of his being paid for a play the guy named Philip Henslow we discovered his diary he was a theater manager and we actually have these markings five pounds - William Rowley for additions to Doctor Faustus and this is a wonderful document because we can see what people were paid and how they were brought in brought in scrip doctors and so on and there's no such record for Shakespeare well it's a simple answer to that Shakespeare was the big one he was number one he had to put it in Hollywood terms a percentage of the gross in Hollywood terms Shakespeare had points so he was not paid the normal way for plays given a fixed fee he was a shareholder in what was first the Lord Chamberlain's Men and then the King's Men poured all over the globe theater and so on and he did make his money from simple payments he got a percentage of the profits and he was an actor - yes he was an actor so it's very much a man of the theater now here I just have this is actually the greatest moment in my scholarly life was a moment when Charlton Heston came to my rescue and you'll understand this miss something that happened in the Weekly Standard I was reviewing one of these ante Shakespeare books by Joseph brand called alias Shakespeare solving the greatest learner and mystery of all time and I had some fun and so Burns expense in this essay it's a long story but basically I called him a Marxist Joe Schobert was a very conservative writer and I knew I could get his goat by calling my Marx because he was claiming only an aristocrat could have written these plays a commoner couldn't read them ever written a man that's a Marxist class conscience position and I got some really nasty letters response one from sober and one from someone else but I was amazed when I opened up the may 19th 1997 issue the witness stand and Charlton Heston has written this long letter in my defense we were amazed to get it at the honest yes I was pre and I know if it came in by this is very early email this may have actually come in the mail yeah basically yeah and I did it son Charlton Heston Beverly Hills California but it's such a marvelous letter and it's so intelligent and so culture I just want to read two paragraphs from it bigger writers soberness read Shakespeare as academics do he treats him as a writer I know there he is on the page but that's not where he or his plays live Shakespeare leaps alive in air in a spoken sounders words only actors really understand this though audiences sense it subliminally in performance when you read acting the plays and rehearsal you make the changes in terms of the sound as much as the meaning that's what Shakespeare did as actor manager his plays looms so massively over all the other writing in the world because of a sublime gift but it was a poet players gift he created those men and women to live on the stage scene in light and sudden dark heard and cries and whispers exploring them there reveals more than a lifetime in the library cat and that's so eloquent and it's so correct the people have it all wrong the claim was how could an actor have written at his place well an actor's an awfully good candidate for having written the plays because they show an actor's sense and my theory would be Shakespeare's college education was the Globe Theatre actually it wasn't the globe because it wasn't built in later but Shakespeare lived at a time when apprenticeship was the real model of Education let's take Leonardo da Vinci a universal genius the other candidate for greatest mind of the Renaissance came from a provincial town curiously called Vinci and clear is that two words it's northeast of Florence and he came to Florence he didn't go to college earlier than Jake's burg yes yeah it is but here's another genius right one of the greatest painters of all time and how did he study painting he didn't go to the fine arts department of the University of Rome he went to parochial and he learned painting in the studio of Rocio there are some paintings where you know Rocio painted part of it da Vinci painted the other part and in general when you go to the Italian Renaissance painters they were all sons of middle-class businessmen of artisans frequently of Goldsmith's again Shakespeare was the son of a glove maker for that matter Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker and Ben Johnson was the sound of a bricklayer they all came out of these middle class backgrounds of artisan ship and we now think of literature as a Romantic self-expression again now the idea of expression or identity Shakespeare to live in a world of craftsmanship literature is craftsmanship painting was craftsmanship sculpture was craftsmanship how did you learn to be a sculptor like Michelangelo you went to a sculptor and learned the craft so as far as we can see Shakespeare came to London he saw that the theater was the fast lane for success he became an actor and worked his way up in this theater company and all the time he was learning by doing observing its London at that time was the greatest school of drama in the world and again is in some ways his dramas are not poetry they are dramas and his great skill is dramatic it's in the constructing of plots when you look at his earliest plays copy of errors the Henry the sixth plays they're already extremely dramatic the poetry is not as good as in the later plays it takes a while to learn that but he knows it's a dramatic scene and that's because he was observing Thomas Kyd and Robert Greene and and Christopher Marlowe and that was the best way he could learn to do it by apprentice in himself and Shapiro brings up this point that's very relevant to the authorship question namely the collaborative nature of plays and Shakespeare's day the the theories of bacon or Oxford they all assume that the way you write a play is go off into a study somewhere and write this perfect play in isolation solitary artists the solitary hours who then hands it over to Shakespeare who kind of makes it popular with a few dirty jokes and and so on now in recent decades increasingly people have come to recognize the collaborative nature of Shakespeare's art and here it's interesting it's his earliest and his latest plays that are collaborative the bulk of his career he was unusual among Elizabethan jacobean playwrights in that he could write great plays all by himself Marlowe for example was a great tragic writer but evidently not good at comedy and we think that the theatre companies brought in some of the guy mentioned William Roy who wrote the comic scenes in Doctor Faustus which do seem to be on a lower level than the tragic scenes Shakespeare could write comedy and tragedy he's actually very unusual in the history of drama in that respect although one of his contemporaries Thomas Milton was equally good at comedy and tragedy but it does seem at the beginning of his career Shakespeare had to work his way in he couldn't show up and say I'm William Shakespeare the greatest playwright ever etta proved himself so it does look that for example Titus Andronicus many people now that most people think it's a collaboration Green most recently people were claiming that one of the parts a hundred the six was written along with marleau their amis are based on stylistic rounds and other considerations it does look like early in his career he worked with other playwrights now how does that fit the Earl of Oxford theory how does it fit the Francis Bacon theory the whole premise of those theories is these guys were keeping themselves aloof the theory is that an aristocrat would be ashamed to be writing for the commercial theater and therefore concealed his authorship by passing it off on Shakespeare but how could he conceal his authorship if he was collaborating with another author now similarly at the end of his career Shakespeare started some more collaborations Pericles was written with a man named George Wilkins who undoubtedly wrote the first two acts of the play and above all Shakespeare started working with John Fletcher and he co-authored Henry the eighth two noble kinsmen and the lost play Cardini oh there is a lost play by Shakespeare we have overwhelming record said that that he wrote a play called cordini Oh with John Fletcher and it was taken from Cervantes Don Quixote so we've lost a terrible it really it's really a shame but anyway like something from Fort Hayes or something yes you know that it wouldn't actually really be a loss Purvi a sort of fake lost play yeah it's very comedy and some guy in the 18th century claimed to have a manuscript of it and rewrote it and so we have a play called the double falsehood by Lewis Thibault which claims to be an adaptation of it in any case what seems to be happening there is Shakespeare is training his successor and building up his reputation one puzzle about William Shakespeare's life is he appears to stop writing around six in ten sixteen eleven and he doesn't die till sixteen sixteen my own theory and some people share this is that he did deliberately retire from the stage in order to prepare a complete edition of his plays and none of his plays were ever published with his supervision it's a great problem with Shakespeare texts that he did not proofread them or even supervisor I believe he'd he decided he was gonna prepare additional unfortunately died age of fifty two before completing the task I think when you look at the plays several of them The Tempest and in Cleopatra and Coriolanus have such beautiful near-perfect text that I think Shakespeare had succeeded in preparing those they were among the last plays he wrote as if he was working back from what he'd written most recently and again unfortunate acts are published in the Edition that comes out in the folio yes yeah and and by the way you know another frequent argument is that Shakespeare's death went unrecognized in 1616 and it took seven years for his friends to bring out the first folio it would take editors forty years today to bring out that Edition and it's clear it was recognition of his genius that his friends and by the way there were eighteen plays that we would not otherwise have if it weren't from the First Folio is that right we don't have this the court owes yeah no well we wouldn't have drew the Caesar wouldn't have fellow his friends go to all the trouble of producing this so to speak I rotate it yeah yes compilation yes and and in which they they did what looks to as primitive now but some form of editing and again I think they had the paper papers and I think Shakespeare had made arrangements with them so Anna folio was an incredibly expensive volume it would cost an ordinary person more than a year's wages to buy that folio and so and in fact fortunate Ben Johnson had prepared a folio edition of his plays in 1616 and called them works which shocked people because plays were not supposed to be works opera they were not supposed to be fancy literary works they were the way we would regard a TV script now and fortunately Ben Jonson prepared the way for accepting the idea of a folio edition of Shakespeare's plays so again that's it shows you how narrow-minded and again a sense a current anachronistic this notion that there was no recognition of his death the first folio is the great monument to Shakespeare and it was presented as such in the first folio and Ben Johnson wrote this great in comeon to Shakespeare there so anyway this is what I keep saying that people are reading Shakespeare as if we were a mile north or for example there's a continuous complaint that he didn't leave the copyright of his works to his family in his will there was no authorial copyright until well into the 18th century in England there was publishing copyright the publisher held the copyrights and in Shakespeare's case his Theatre Company owned the plays he worked for this theatre company again as a stockholder but that was the great thing it meant to have Shakespeare writing for you that you had the exclusive use of his place so he did not own any copyrights he could pass on so we have all these theories that that the person who wrote these plays can't have been a man of the theater and that's so completely wrong that again and again what do you see about Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre so that for example in this case of John Fletcher Shakespeare's theatre company decided to open up a private theater they had been performing in the globe since around 1599 1600 but they got a chance to lease a theater called the Blackfriars it was an indoor theater their plan was cater to a smaller audience I think the Blackfriars sad about 600 people where's the globe to take 2,500 or 3,000 but they were gonna charge six times as much for a ticket and of course they could perform in the winter since it was indoors theater if you want to see what it looked like in Staunton Virginia there's a marvelous replica of it which has a and a local theatre company that performs Shakespeare there you can see what it was like to perform and the Blackfriars but it's very interesting that this was going to be a big move Afiya that we're gonna continue to perform the globe during the summers but still this was a big deal and there were all these signs that they prepared for it and one of the things they did was they knew they needed new playwrights a lot of the famous playwrights had died at this point Shakespeare was getting old and so they seemed to have little pond this guy John Fletcher and they were right because he eventually teamed up with a guy named Frances Bowmont whom they also brought in and bow-mounted Fletcher were the Gilbert and Sullivan of the 17th century their plays became more popular than Shakespeare's in the sixteen tens twenties thirties and right up to the Puritan shutting down the theater and at the time of the restoration in 1660 Shakespeare's plays arrived were revived but Beaumont Fletcher's plays arrived so Shakespeare and his company knew something they knew that this was the next Shakespeare now in larger terms he was not but he was a very successful player again especially FD team teamed up with Frances Bowmont and they hit upon a new kind of play that aristocratic audiences would like that called tragic comedies there's stories that have all this tragic material but they have a turn towards a comic ending something Shakespeare anticipated though well yes and Shakespeare comedies are often that way yes and then he wrote a number of tragic companies along with Fletcher including two noble kinsmen and and it does seem that Shakespeare changed his style and it definitely changes his style I read you a passage from Winter's Tale which is a good example of a lead Shakespeare play a tragic comedy and the style becomes incredibly Baroque much harder to follow and yet audiences evidently could follow he changes his style and it changes the very substance of his plays it moves from tragedy to tragic comedy and again this is something that the Earl of Oxford of Francis Bacon would have known nothing about it's something that grows out of the theater world itself where Shakespeare's anticipating trends working with the youngest playwrights to keep the Kingsmen going and and get by the way he shows knowledge of the individual actors who were in his company there's a marvelous touch this that Shapiro points out that in some of Shakespeare's plays as they're published in his day in these quarters he sometimes puts the actor's name instead of the character's name he knows that will Kemp is playing Dogberry or he knows that will camp is playing - I'll global emmalin when he's writing it out it puts camp instead of gobo or drugged berry now we don't know this for sure which we don't have the manuscripts but in many cases these cortos were published for manuscripts there are certain signs that tell us whether they come from manuscripts or prompt Brooks or whether they've been as we say morally reconstructed by people just heard the plays and it now you don't know this if you read a model in addition most people don't realize is how reconstructed any modern edition of Shakespeare is they've all been edited no two are the same try it sometimes compared editors make different decisions and so no one's gonna leave will camp in the margin for the character in a modern edition they put in dog barrier they put in a gull Falstaff but again these are signs that Shakespeare was working with the actors themselves and only evidences points of the fact that the person who wrote these plays was an active part of the theater world and that's why it's very unlikely it's Francis Bacon but again it's amazing to see the contempt people in the 19th century have for actors it's a kind of political correctness that appears even in the 19th century as they did in Shakespeare's day actors had a bad reputation they were a suspect and so you don't how could an actor have written this place and it's Charlton Heston had actor points out it's precisely an actor that would have written these plays and we have many examples of accurate playwrights Moliere France would be another great example but you just have to look at the Sam Shepard in our day why Lashon so many people who were actors go on to become playwrights or vice versa so that's close by saying a word is very interesting about yes to the political piece like you mentioned yeah political correctness I'm a Victorian political correctness now we have identity politics political correctness that's that's is that that's really ultimately in a funny way what's behind the attempt to deny that Shakespeare Shakespeare I mean yes different areas we have different forms of orthodoxy or political correctness and we have a certain model of what an author should be and Shakespeare doesn't fit that and he's so great I suppose that if you have that model you need to apply it to if he exists independent of that Orthodox yes contrary to that orthodoxy it's a problem for the orthodoxy right if he can understand women as well as anyone does under that women is it isn't a woman that's a problem for a certain kind of feminism if he can understand aristocrats that's a problem for a certain kind of Victorian I guess that's why I mean that's why they're so and yes on intent on Shakespeare's supposed to other people it's yeah I think that's a good point that now again Shakespeare is the greatest author who ever lived certainly the greatest playwright and and so much greater than anybody else that he's a real challenge and part of the it is miraculous than any one person could have written these plays I like to say that if you create a list of the 20 greatest works of literature Shakespeare wrote about ten of them on the range Rome and comedy and tragedy it just it's extraordinary and it is simply is simply cannot be explained the joke of all this is people think they could explain it if it could just be a guy who went to college then he could have written the play as well a lot of people went to college they can't write Shakespeare because just be an aristocrat he could have written the place but in fact there's no way to explain it it's just one of the great miracles and again the Renaissance you know produce Raphael Leonardo and Michelangelo and they're not explainable either and so just it is the miracle of human genius but in Shakespeare's case it is the real challenge that he just breaks all the categories he you know Johnson famously said and that preparatory poem to the first folio was not of an age but for all time yeah and here we are still reading him and it is miraculous I mean we talked about this one we're talking about cannon formation in popular culture I mean Dante is incredibly great Milton is incredibly great but they're not read the way Shakespeare is or performed well they didn't right place but but you know Dante I guess in Italy people still read them but I don't think common people respond to Dante and they certainly don't to John Milton and there's so many cases like that and Shakespeare transcends all the categories in this sense that he also is still popular still the most popular playwright in the world and that's incredibly frustrating a lot of the people that challenge him like Mark Twain for example wrote a whole book all this Shakespeare dead trying to prove that Shakespeare was bacon they're just jealous they're just envious of Shakespeare and but but this point with critics is yeah in the 19th century you just have to look at someone like Matthew Arnold as a critic he is such a middle class view of the moral uprightness of literature and so how could this guy from Stratford have written these plays that after all deal with adultery so much in all sorts of forms of criminality but you know by the way Shakespeare should have been a criminal if he created Iago and all characters like that so they want to remake Shakespeare in their Victorian image and now in our days Shakespeare not only has to be a feminist but he has to be a woman because that's what they think is the epitome of human virtue and just a refusal to accept the fact that he was able to do what he was because he simply was a genius and beyond categories now I do I do think he was relatively learned increasingly think he read Aristotle for example certainly he'd read Machiavelli and by the way it's interesting you know I in some ways I I have no problem if someone other than William Shakespeare wrote these plays I don't do biographical criticism I'm interested in what the plays Express I would have a problem with bacon because Bacon's philosophy is the absolute opposite of Shakespeare's to put it in simple terms I believe Shakespeare was an ancient and bacon was a modern and you see it on the issue of Machiavelli that bacon was a deep Machiavellian and Shakespeare though he had read Machiavelli and understood Machiavelli he's ultimately anti Machiavelli and and you can see that in the contrast of his Risha the third and his Henry the fifth were Richard the third is impugn valiant and must be destroyed Henry the fifth is very Machiavellian but ultimately knows to conceal that he's you can say is the ultimate market value but he does understand that that you cannot simply pursue Machiavelli's low-minded view of human nature anyway we would talk forever about this stuff that's actually in Shakespeare's plays but I find it amusing that with all due respect to Delia bacon that she she thought that bacon had written these plays side from the fact he was so busy I mean he was writing volumes upon volumes of philosophy and history and he was also Solicitor General Attorney General and then very active political career so that's the interesting thing that yeah there's something mysterious about Shakespeare in terms of his own greatness and so people come forward with these alternatives and yet they are far more problematic in the case of the Earl of Oxford died in 1604 we can date Shakespeare's plays 216 10 or 11 and based on contemporary references for example Macbeth is based on as references to the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 so how how did the Earl of Oxford know the Gunpowder Plot against James versus got lot of people say well he left these plays and with instructions to add contemporary references to make him seem current in all cases with these alternatives and again bacon and Oxford most popular of the candidates they require a lot more explanation than admitting the shakespeare wrote them they're constantly having to build up the equivalent of epicycles and an astronomy to keep it to keep their theory going and at some point it's just I'd say no Shakespeare wrote these plays turns out it's harder to accept true genius and human excellence than to hold easy yes yes work around so this big way of putting it this has been a fascinating conversation I hope we've saved Shakespeare for Shakespeare and now we can go back to having more conversations about Shakespeare I'm looking forward to that I'm very interested in the tragedy comedy question because the Shakespearean comedies are so close to being tragedies and you can really see Vince um I think parallels in some cases between a tragedy and a comedy that he wrote and he shows you that how easily a version of Venice is good actually so we'll discuss them of the presumption that Shakespeare why Shakespeare yes Paul canter thank you for joining me today and thank you for joining us on conversations

Channel: Conversations with Bill Kristol

Views: 9,735

Rating: 3.7134502 out of 5

Keywords: William Shakespeare, Literature, University of Virginia, Shakespeare and Politics, The Shakespeare Authorship Question, William Kristol, Classics, English Literature, Francis Bacon, Edward De Vere, Emilia Bassano, Paul Cantor

Id: dMM_Un6W_mQ

Length: 80min 24sec (4824 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Pongo_abelii]

Perhaps this is off topic, but I always go back to my personal 'authorship question' ...

'Would Macbeth, or Hamlet, or RIII be somehow diminished in quality if I found out that the playwright was someone else?'

Until I can reasonably answer 'yes', I couldn't give a shit.