“Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?”
—R.W. Emerson

Story-telling is a feature of all societies. If the world is to make sense, if we are to live together in families, cities, nations, if we are to do our daily work, if life is to be livable at all, we must tell each other stories. “How do you explain that?” someone asks, and in reply someone else tells him a story. In modern times, that is when the trouble starts. A doctor I knew used to say as he peered down one’s throat, “I don’t like the story,” and whenever he said that one knew there were difficulties ahead.

For the last 500 years, scholars and scientists who “didn’t like the story” have been discarding or revising a great many of them. The wonderful fiction of the Ptolemaic universe was one of the first to go, followed shortly after by King Arthur and his knights. Nor is the process about to stop. The biologist Julian Huxley said he did not need God in the laboratory, and even as I write scholars and scientists are changing stories as their research proceeds.

It can be an unsettling business when one of our favorite stories goes. The Einsteinian universe is a lonely place even if it is navigable by camera-bearing spaceprobes. It does not always comfort people to be told that the laboratory is a place of discovery. They may use the discoveries happily enough, but that does not stop them agreeing with the poet X.J. Kennedy when he sings, “Somebody stole my myths. Took all their gist and piths.”

Even literary scholars have contributed their mite of disenchantment. Shakespeare was once the hero of a good story, a literary Dick Whittington. Starting life as a virtual juvenile delinquent, so the story went, he found his way to London, and got a job holding horses outside the theater. Soon he had his own business. Then he migrated inside the theater, became an actor of bit parts, and started tinkering with other men’s plays. In no time at all a colossal genius manifested itself; he made a pile of money, became a gentlemen, bought the biggest house in his home town, and lived happily ever after.

That was a story people could use. It showed how the most unpromising goose could prove a swan, and how a grateful nation should reward ability. In its time, the story even had a touch of the marvelous. Shakespeare having appeared, socially speaking, from nowhere. Then the scholars dismantled the story, piece by piece. Shakespeare neither poached deer nor held horses. His father was the mayor of his town and a justice of the peace. His mother was an heiress in a modest way. He did not tinker with other people’s plays; he wrote his own, building on the techniques of contemporaries like Lyly and Marlowe. True, he made money and bought a big house, but he also invested in unpoetic things like tithes and malt. As for living happily ever after, his last days in Stratford were embittered by scandal in his family. In short, Shakespeare was no Dick Whittington. He was the ambitious eldest son of prosperous burgher parents, and about as interesting as another famous burgher artist, J.S. Bach, if less respectable by burgher standards. Shorn of legend, Shakespeare’s life does not make a romantic effect. Insofar as it has a moral, it is that middle-class ambition, work, and thrift have scored again.

Not surprisingly, quite a lot of people dislike this new, documentable story, even resent it, and find themselves impelled to offer an alternative. Joseph Sobran is one of them, even though one would expect a conservative writer to have a soft spot for the scholars’ entrepreneurial Shakespeare. “So severe is Schoenbaum,” he writes, speaking of S. Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, “in rejecting all the unproven legends about the playwright that he leaves Shakespeare a mere specter. . . . From Schoenbaum it would seem a short step to doubting the whole standard account of Shakespeare.”

So Mr. Sobran takes that momentous step into an undocumented void, and offers an alternative. According to the record, he says—having disqualified for his purposes all records of Shakespeare’s literary activity—Shakespeare was barely literate; he was “a shrewd, tough businessman with some rough edges,” a man of modest origins from a provincial town, who made money in the London theater, but about whom otherwise not much is known. Ergo, or argal, as the gravedigger in Hamlet would say, the writer must have been a different person who concealed himself behind the businessman’s name. Casting about for candidates for the lead in this story of conspiracy and concealment, other people besides Mr. Sobran have come up with a surprising number of names, including Queen Elizabeth I herself. Mr. Sobran’s favorite, though, is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Oxford was a well-educated, well-traveled literary aristocrat who wrote some poems which survive, and some comedies which do not. Like others of his class, he employed actors, and according to his father-in-law. Lord Burghley, he liked to hang around the theaters and associate with unseemly people like writers and players. Burghley had other reasons for worry, too. Even from Mr. Sobran’s admiring account Oxford appears to have been a rather silly man—not that this disqualifies him, I suppose, as a writer. Being a nobleman he would not want to appear in print under his own name, so he borrowed Shakespeare’s.

And there it is, a romantic story outlined to replace the scholarly one. To finish it, all one needs to do is redate nearly all Shakespeare’s plays (since Oxford died in 1604), rewrite Elizabethan theater history, and explain why someone like Ben Jonson kept on talking about Shakespeare as if he knew him.

To speak now solely of the plot of this story, there are some things wrong with it. First, it is supposed to be true. Scholarship requires true stories to be based on documentary evidence, and in this case there is none. The plot also requires its characters to behave strangely. Mr. Sobran’s Oxford, as writer of the Sonnets, has a homosexual affair with the Earl of Southampton; yet he devotes his first 17 sonnets to persuading his lover to marry his daughter. That’s a bit over the top, even for Oxford. And what about Ben Jonson, another conspirator? What was in his mind as he trotted about Britain, long after Shakespeare and Oxford were dead, and chatted to his hosts, often cattily, about his famous fellow-writer? Or what about Shakespeare himself, as he walked about London, and people he met said, “Oh Mr. Shakespeare, I do so like your poems.” What did he do? Stand there and grin? Mutter something about having to catch a wherry, and slink away? One place he could not slink away from was the stage, whether at the Globe or at court, where he acted with his fellow actors in the famous plays attributed to him.

Mr. Sobran gets upset, even angry, because Shakespeare scholars refuse, pointblank, to take this story seriously. He would rather be a crank, he says, “than belong to the mass of scholars, who, ever mindful of tenure, promotion, grants . . . and respectability, never deviate from scholarly consensus.” Here we can detect the outlines of vet another conspiratorial story, powered by a strong animus against professional story-spoilers. Its heroes arc independent-minded, even cranky amateurs confronted by a guild of professional hacks who spoil everything they touch.

This is another usable story, especially in America, where some child of nature is always proposing to reform the nation’s intellectual life on lines proposed by the fellow who wanted to hang the professors and burn the schools. Is it true? Some of the most respected Shakespeare scholars have been amateurs themselves. There are still independent scholars abroad. As for the professionals, they are a competitive lot, and, unlike the Oxfordians, by no means wedded to a consensus or a hypothesis. A scholar who had evidence that Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him would publish it, probably in the New York Times, and wait for the offers to come in.

There is nothing unusual about the fact that we know little about Shakespeare’s personal life. We know very little about any Tudor writer’s personal life, and especially the early part of it. Even so, as a result of the scholarship Mr. Sobran despises, more is known about Shakespeare than about most of his contemporaries, including the fact that he was a well-bred, gentlemanly sort of man; in those days people who called him “gentle Shakespeare” were not speaking loosely. No doubt people who spoke highly of him as a poet meant what they said, too. The only reason Mr. Sobran is ignorant of things like this is that in his alternate world they were said about someone else.

Every now and again, too, new details about Shakespeare, his family, and his works emerge, and find their way into the standard books. Nor is the scholars’ consensus all that consensual. Many scholars now argue, on documentary evidence, that Shakespeare’s family was Catholic, that he was well-connected on his mother’s side, and that his father was a good deal better off than has been thought.

Yet the most important thing we know about Shakespeare will always be the fact that he wrote those plays and poems. They are the reason we bother with the rest of his life at all, and the only working assumption one can make about the relationship between Shakespeare’s life and work is that he was the kind of person who produced it. It may be true in a general way that all literature is autobiographical; but although sheer human curiosity might tempt us to try, we cannot turn Shakespeare’s work back into his life without documentary help. Mr. Sobran is not alone in thinking that the character of Polonius is based on Lord Burghley; it is a pleasant speculation, but there is no reason to believe it is true. Similarly, Mr. Sobran thinks that the author of the plays must have visited Italy; but one cannot argue one’s way from literature to life like that. Fiction does not convert into fact, however true to life it seems to be. Besides, as things now stand, should we ever find out that the author of Othello had gone to Venice, it will be William Shakespeare who did the going.

One effect of Mr. Sobran’s attack on professors for wasting time and money in pursuit of Shakespeare is to misdirect his readers’ attention from the huge achievement of humanist scholarship in our time, including Shakespeare scholarship, which is, ironically enough, the recovery of the real, usable past. Scholarship is the reason why, to give an example, if Mr. Sobran enjoys Shakespeare’s plays, he can now plan to see a performance in a rebuilt Globe Theater on the banks of the Thames. In fact a reader who wants to experience the excitement and success of scholarly detection could do no better than read John Orrell’s The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe, a book in which one can follow a scholar as he elicits the form of a lost theater from recovered fact.

Mr. Sobran tells a story, but it strains credulity, and he has recovered no facts. His alternative past has its own kind of bizarre interest, but it is not true. 

 

[Alias Shakespeare, by Joseph Sobran (New York: The Free Press) 311 pp., $25.00]