“The idea that William Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture…Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?”

— Stephen Greenblatt

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Have you been following LoCO comments lately — especially following stories about the protests and subsequent “hard closure” at CPH? While many are sensitive and reasoned, the majority seem to be purely kneejerk, insults empty of content. Reminding me, oddly enough, of why I spent several weeks earlier this year researching and writing about the Shakespeare authorship question.

When I was asked why I was bothering with it, if memory serves, I first became intrigued by the question of “Who wrote Shakespeare?” about 20 years ago, on reading the letter excerpted above, published in The New York Times, from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. Until then, I suppose I’d been vaguely aware there was some controversy whether a wool-merchant William Shakspere (as his name appears multiple times in contemporary records in England’s Stratford-on-Avon) could have written the plays and sonnets attributed to someone using the name William Shakespeare or Shake-speare (hyphened, as the name appears on many title pages).

I got to wondering why a Pulitzer Prize-winning author would stoop to comparing people who question the authorship of centuries-old poems and plays with — get this! — Holocaust deniers. I could only suppose Greenblatt — a really good author, most recently of The Swerve (which I highly recommend) — was slinging abuse around because his arguments were too feeble to cite. (As Hamlet’s Mom put it, commenting on a ham actress, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”)

So his intemperate letter was the inspiration to do my own research, back then and more recently. I soon learned that this sort of vitriol was regularly heaped on those who doubted that the man from Stratford (who could barely write his own name—see his signatures) could have authored some of the finest writing in the English language. For instance, a recent book by Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies) — which questions the authorship while trying to understand the stubbornness of most university English departments (which won’t even allow discussion of the matter!) — garnered such reviews as “wrong-headed,” “widespread disinformation” (The Spectator); “pernicious,” “trutherism” (Slate); and “a farrago of wounded pride” (The Times). That paper’s lead writer, Oliver Kamm, later wrote that to question Shakespeare’s authorship is also to promote ”a spurious antisemitic conspiracy theory.” (Antisemetic???) Meanwhile, Britain’s leading Shakespeare scholar, Sir Stanley Wells, is on record as saying it’s immoral to question the authorship, declaring that the world’s two leading Shakespearean actors, Sirs Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, were “bonkers” for entertaining such heresy! (Immoral???)

Such invective only strengthens the counter argument: That it’s inconceivable (shades of Wallace Shawn) that a businessman from an English provincial town could, in the late 1500s, have amassed sufficient knowledge of the law, astronomy, philosophy, falconry, warfare, the geography of northern Italy, fluency in French, Italian and Latin (some of the writer’s sources hadn’t been translated into English at the time) as to write such immortal works as Hamlet, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and all the rest. Not to mention the sonnets. Nearly a million words in all. In response, “Stratfordians,” hewing to orthodoxy, say that he was just a genius, before responding with mud-slinging. (Perhaps one can be born a genius, like Christopher Marlowe, but knowledge has to be acquired.)

As I say, I think about this “reversion to insults” when reading uncouth and/or fatuous comments on LoCO. So often, in the ten years I’ve been writing GOU, I see commentators reverting to abusive language, cheap shots, snarkiness and empty insults in lieu of actually debating, turning what could be opportunities to learn from each other in our small coastal community by engaging.