I am not what I am

In Contested Will – Who wrote Shakespeare? (2010), James Shapiro  sensationally concludes that a fellow named William Shakespeare, the glover’s son of Stratford, wrote the plays and poems that bear his name.  Well then.

There must be many like me, who are “Stratfordians” on trust, who’d much rather pick up one of the plays than a book claiming it was written by someone else.  They prefer to keep the background noise of the authorship question muffled away.

But I’m glad I read this book.  It’s helped me better understand why the question arose in the first place, and how flimsy and fantastical are the rival claims for the likes of Bacon, Oxford and Marlowe. 

How dispiriting it must have been for the early bardologists to find so little documentary evidence of the man behind the works. And what they did find was so prosaic - all about malt and money lending - that one enthusiast was driven to forge a few documents of his own:  a letter from the Queen herself; a signed manuscript of King Lear.  Papers which were believed for a time by men who frankly wanted to believe.

Inevitably, admirers began to look for the man in the works, and it’s been downhill ever since. George Steevens did his bit (“that Shakespeare has written with the utmost power on the subject of jealousy is no proof that he ever felt it”) but the sluice gates opened by Edmond Malone in the late 18^th century would not be shut.  Certainly not by the romantics of the 19^th or the biographiles of the modern age who, as Shapiro tells us, are now more likely to pick up a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Life than a copy of her Ariel.  

And if it follows that the man behind such towering works most likely lived and felt what he wrote, well doesn’t it follow that there might be another man, a more rounded, worldly and courtly man who penned them? Someone like Edward de Vere, perhaps, whose death in 1604 before many of the plays were even staged can be explained away quite plausibly.  

After all, look again at the few known biographical facts of the man Shakespeare, which suggest a “cautious calculating man” of “uniform mediocrity” who was “intent only on money-making” (as if a few scraps of a life can expose so much). Well why not?

It's all a bit demoralising.  It's as if the First Folio was never issued, and all the warm published praises of his contemporaries had fallen into the thin air he invented.  

“Let us ... on your imaginary forces work,” says the Chorus at the beginning of Henry V, mindful that the newly built cockpit of the Globe could never hold the vasty fields of France. “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.”

And in the end Shapiro aptly reminds us of the meaning of imagination.  Imagination begins where experience ends.  The greatest writers leave us astounded by the ways they have of piecing out their thoughts, rather than their experiences. 

Isn’t it vital that mere words alone should be all the tools needed to “shape” things unknown?