Episode 1 of Anderson’s podcast is an excellent nutshell summary of the anti-Stratfordian argument. It also sets the stage for Anderson’s Oxfordian argument, which is developed in both his book and in subsequent editions of his podcast. (The entire podcast series is nine episodes long.)

Anderson also has a blog in which he presents the latest developments in the Shake-speare debate. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for the blog as well as to the podcast. In one blog entry he mentions a performance by my new podcast friends the Reduced Shakespeare Company.

This past year I came to a Shakespearean crisis point. Or perhaps I should say a Shake-spearean crisis point. That hyphen in Shake-speare is deliberate. I have come to believe with very strong conviction that Shake-speare was a penname, and that the actor guy from Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a word of those plays.

I’ve had serious doubts about the authorship of the plays by the Stratford guy for many years. Although Stratfordian scholars argue with amazing vehemence that William of Stratford was the author of all those plays, even they have to concede that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything more than his name in his own handwriting. I don’t think this observation is an anti-working-class judgment or snobbery or anything. There just isn’t any sample anywhere of his own writing–no notes, no letters, no diary entries, nothing. Just his signature on his will and a couple other legal documents.

Last spring I picked up a book in my local Barnes and Noble while waiting to be seated in a restaurant. It was “Shakespeare” by Another Name, written by Mark Anderson. This is a biography of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is considered by many anti-Stratfordians to be the true author of the works. In this remarkable book, Anderson shows a great number of parallels between de Vere’s life and the details of Shakespeare’s plays.

It is Anderson’s contention that these connections are so strong they cannot be ignored. He makes a very convincing case. As Orson Welles once said, “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away.” After reading Anderson’s book, I completely understand Welles’s point. The Italian cities mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are those known to have been visited by de Vere in 1575 and 1576.

I’m now in the middle of my second, deliberately more skeptical reading of “Shakespeare” by Another Name. This time I am being very careful to ignore, or at least devalue, any assertions made in the subjunctive mood. For example, in chapter 2, Anderson describes Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge University in 1564. He mentions the entertainment that might have been enjoyed by the queen:

A troupe of players from the university, however, followed the queen’s train. De Vere, who probably departed Cambridge with Elizabeth, would have watched as these presumptuous undergraduates overtook the massive convoy of horses and carts. The players begged Elizabeth to let them perform just one masque. After some pleading, she finally consented.

When Anderson uses constructions such as “de Vere…would have watched…”, it feels like pure speculation. But even skipping past all these “what if” passages, the concincidences are indeed very funny.

The debate about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare (or Shake-speare, which Anderson and other Oxfordians posit as a pseudonym for de Vere) has been going on for a couple centuries at least. I’m only just now getting into it. The thing I find most surprising is the heat and blind passion of the defenders of the Stratfordian position. Their strongest argument seems to be that William of Stratford must have written the plays because his name is on them. In other words, they don’t even admit that a publication could ever appear under a penname or the name of a frontman. (Anybody who knows about Hollywood in the 1950s knows that authors use frontmen quite often.)

The next most common critique of the Stratfordians against the Oxfordians is that they are stupid. Or at least lazy. For example, David Kathman, in a 1999 letter to Harper’s magazine, accuses Oxfordians of engagement in conspiracy theory, of pursuing pseudo-science and of observing a double standard with regard to Oxford and William Shakespeare. Sometimes, as on the Stromata blog, they seem to resort to simple name-calling. (Because Roger Strittmatter’s Ph.D. dissertation has a very long title, as dissertations usually do, Stromata calls it “ponderous.”)

What the Stratfordians are unable to convince me of, though, is that William of Stratford absolutely has to be the person who wrote the plays, and that no one else could have done it. The basic incongruence is just so strong. Where is anything else the man wrote, other than the core canon of English literature? Where are the letters? Where are the notes? What of William of Stratford’s own life is reflected in these works? Why does the First Folio seem to appear out of nowhere, with William Shakespeare’s name on it?

I think the reason this matters so much to me is that after reading Anderson’s book and other resources, and after thinking about the question for several months, I want to know that the plays and poems were written by a real human being. I want to know that they reflect the personal experience of a person with a life story. I don’t want to keep accepting that William of Stratford, human history’s epitome of accidental and natural genius, received these works from Heaven above just as the New Testament authors received the Word of God.

Come to think of it, the standard Stratfordian point of view does seem somewhat like a religion. Perhaps in this day and age when even religious Christians can begin to think about the real life of Jesus of Nazareth, students of English literature can start to think about the real life of the author of the Shake-speare plays.

Last week, when I attended The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre, I found myself squirming in my seat, feeling like a heretic or a traitor for even entertaining these Oxfordian thoughts. Weird.

According to the report, Brown was called as a witness in a lawsuit brought against his publisher (not Brown himself) by a couple of writers who claim he lifted the structure of his story from their non-fiction work. He finds their claim “absurd” and says he drafted the outline himself in 2001 in his parents’ laundry room.

I cannot tell from this report what the merits of the case might be. I observe, simply, that plagiarism is a lazy tactic often used by lazy and unoriginal writers. I have observed this in my 20 years of college and high-school teaching.

And, of course, I’ve earlier argued that The Da Vinci Code is a very lazily written book. I’m not saying he lifted the plot from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s work–I have no idea one way or another. I’m just saying I would not be at all surprised if that turned out to be the case.

The Post Style-section article, by Kevin Sullivan, has the rather sarcastic and bemused tone of so many Style-section pieces, and seems to assume that Brown is the victim of money-grubbing star chasers. I guess this is to be expected, since Brown and DVC are the flavor-of-the-week (flavor-of-the-decade?).

Too bad. It would have been much more interesting to read a bit more about the merits of the case, rather than Brown’s “exasperated” answers to “a line of questioning as compelling and clear as a toaster warranty.” Kevin Sullivan describes the attorneys and the judge as “[wearing] … august black robe[s] and … white wig[s] with Shirley Temple curls.” Yeah, well, it’s a British court. They’ve dressed like that for centuries, Kevin.

Sullivan must not have observed many trials. Legal inquiry, to someone outside of a case, is usually stultifying. That doesn’t, however, make it invalid.

Categories: religion, books, law

The book’s been out for a couple years now. I bought it with fascination after Christmas 2003, right at the beginning of the time when it became a phenomenon.

I was appalled. Not because I am a conservative Christian (I’m not), but because it was so horribly, stupidly written.

Any “mystery novel” whose protagonists are much more clueless than I am as a reader is a failed “mystery.” When I could see what was coming three pages before the characters in the story, I felt really disappointed. It was like learning the secret of a magic trick: “Is that all there is?”

The most egregious stupidity, I think, is probably the “mystery” of the code writing–the point when the main guy (whose name I’ve forgotten) makes the stunning discovery that something is written in a “secret code.” Duh. Hold the book up to the mirror. Most eighth-grade kids learn something about DaVinci and mirror writing.

In the NY Times on February 9 there’s a piece by Laurie Goodstein about the film company’s setting up a website for critics of the film to vent. The site seems intended for those conservative Christians who can’t abide the feminist theology that underlies the story.

I was actually fascinated by the feminist theology and the notion of Jesus of Nazareth having a wife. What galled me was Dan Brown’s ham-handed and glib way of presenting this notion in fiction. Somebody should have done a better job with this. Oh well. Brown’s laughing all the way the bank now.

Too bad. It’s a shame such a lousy book has become such a favorite of the theological left.

Categories: religion, books