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6/26/09 10:40 AMHeretic’s Foundation VI: Supreme Court Pricks Shakespeare Bubble « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 1 of 6http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2648
 
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Heretic’s Foundation VI: Supreme Court Pricks ShakespeareBubble
Friday, June 26, 2009Bylines
 By John Hudsondarkladyplayers@aol.comSpecial to the Clyde Fitch Report 
In the May 3 Sunday Express, actor Kenneth Branagh was quoted as saying: “If someone could findconclusive proof that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the plays then it would cause a seismic shock — notleast to the economy of Stratford-upon-Avon.” Significantly, the original article has been removed from theExpress’ website and “repudiated,” but such a shock is precisely what is happening. Like the bubbles in thefinancial and housing markets, the Shakespeare industry, one of the major foundations of the moderntheater, is turning out to have been a bubble built on false assumptions. And we are just beginning to feelthe 400-year-old shock waves.In 1987, at a moot court convened at the American University in Washington, D.C., three justices of theU.S. Supreme Court — Harry Blackmun, William Brennan and John Paul Stevens —ruled that the authorof the Shakespearean plays was no one other than William Shakespeare. In 1993, a less starry but no less
 
6/26/09 10:40 AMHeretic’s Foundation VI: Supreme Court Pricks Shakespeare Bubble « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 2 of 6http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2648
intriguing moot court was held, this time under the aegis of the Boston Bar Association, with a real federal judge presiding, plus expert witnesses and major trial lawyers of counsel. A 14-member jury “composed of school headmasters, library directors, lawyers, academics, judges, a journalist and a psychiatrist”found fourballots for the Earl of Oxford and 10 for William Shakespeare. Now, according tothis storyin the April 17 Wall Street Journal, Justice Stevens, who is still on the high court, has had a change of heart:…he believes the works ascribed to William Shakespeare actually were written by the 17th earlof Oxford, Edward de Vere. Several justices across the court’s ideological spectrum say he maybe right.This puts much of the court squarely outside mainstream academic opinion, which equatesdenial of Shakespeare’s authorship with the Flat Earth Society.…“Right after the argument, both Harry and I got more interested in it,” Justice Stevens says.In a visit to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, Justice Stevens observed that thepurported playwright left no books, nor letters or other records of a literary presence.“Where are the books? You can’t be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in yourhome,” Justice Stevens says. “He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, henever was shown to be present at any major event — the coronation of James or any of thatstuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.”Some parts of Justice Stevens’ review of the evidence are simply inaccurate. There is, for example, onesurviving and unsent letter to Shakespeare from fellow Stratfordian Richard Quiney dated October 1598,asking for help in arranging a loan of money. Shakespeare was also among the thousand royal servants whoreceived scarlet cloth on the occasion of King James’ procession through the streets of London on March 15,1604, although scholars are divided on whether any of the players took part in the procession or simplycheered from the side. But Stevens is correct in his major point: there is no literary, biographical or socialcontext linking the plays to Mr Shagspere, as he was originally called.This is serious stuff, which is why it landed on the front page of the
 Journal 
. Indeed, the biography of theman from Stratford does not explain how he could have developed the extraordinary areas of knowledgedemonstrated by the playwright. Our understanding of a playwright’s biography can often help explain aplay’s meaning and inform the way in which it could or should be performed. Yet Shakespeare’s biographyfails to explain, for instance, why plays were crafted about Venice, Moors and Jews. There are many morequestions in addition:Why are there such strong female characters?Why do so many of them dress up as men?Why does the author use as sources books written for young women?Why does the author parody Court entertainments that go wrong?Why did the author switch from writing history plays about the Tudors to writing Italian marriagecomedies around 1592?Why do several plays parody a “William” character as a fool?Why do these plays use over 2,000 musical references, and 300 technical musical terms, making them300 more musical than plays written by other English playwrights? Since music cannot be learnt frombooks, what unique musical community in the author’s biography and circumstances explains thisunique knowledge?Why do they contain more falconry imagery than any other contemporary English plays?
 
6/26/09 10:40 AMHeretic’s Foundation VI: Supreme Court Pricks Shakespeare Bubble « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 3 of 6http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2648
Why do these plays containreferences to the Talmud, the Mishnah and the Zohar,a few words of spoken Hebrew, and numerous Hebrew puns at a time when it was illegal to be a Jew and there wereperhaps 200 hidden Jews in England?Why do these plays employ such a complicatedmulti-layered compositional styleakin to Renaissancepolyphony and the composition of the Torah?Why do these plays sport so many Biblical references and allusions —some 3,000 in all?
 
The questions go on and on concerning nearly every aspect of the plays. In his wonderful book
 DeadlyThought 
, Jan Blits revealed that
 Hamlet 
uses achiastic ring structure, or symmetric order, that is unlike anyother in English Renaissance literature. Why?Such questioning is not new. In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft recorded that theatrical rumors in circulationwere among those “anciently conversant with the stage” and that
Titus Andronicus
was “not originally” Mr.Shakespeare’s but was “brought by a private author to be acted.” Similarly, in his diary,
Timber; or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter
,Ben Jonson notedthat Shakespeare was to be “most faulted”because he gave unblotted copies of the scripts to the admiring actors, who in their “ignorance” believedthem to be his originals. Recently, aShakespearean Authorship Coalitionhas been formed to speak for thosewith “reasonable doubt” about who penned the plays. Even the general public is beginning to find traditionalexplanations inadequate, if not outright incredible. Last August, a study in the U.K. indicated that only 57%of the population now believes Shakespeare wrote the Shakespearean plays.Yet the case for the leading alternative candidate, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, does not holdup, either. First off, he died in 1604, so unless he wrote from beyond the grave, de Vere could not havewritten
 Macbeth
, a play that contains multiple references to theGunpowder Plotof November 1605. Neitherde Vere nor Shakespeare himself could haveadded the 163 extra lines to the Quarto of 
Othello
between1622, when it was published, and 1623, when the revised version appeared in the First Folio. Neither deVere nor Shakespeare could written the lines in
 Measure for Measure
that draw upon anOctober 1621broadsheet about a treaty with the King of Hungary.With the authorship of the Shakespearean plays in doubt, one may therefore assert that contemporaryperformances of the plays are badly distorted from their original intentions. Rather than being seen as highlycrafted, scholarly, literary creations, the conception that the plays were written by an untrained, artlesscountryman who received his words through divine inspiration has encouraged directors to merely treat theplays as a slice of life. This has serious consequences. I agree with Professor Jonathan Bate, who says
 
in hisbook,
The Genius of Shakespeare
, that this conception
 
“altered the entire course of Western art” and in amost adverse way.I would argue, moreover, that this concept has helped create a culture in which fact and fiction are blurred— shades of events as up-to-the-minute and as devastating as the Iraq war and the financial crisis. On stage,it encouraged actors and directors to approach a literary character like Henry V as if he were a real personpossessing real emotions. This is a distortion when the character on a page is, in fact, a careful literaryconstruction, one based on selected information that is then condensed, structured and used to conveyallusive allegorical meanings. This is why Henry V behaves in the play rather differently from the real king,who was neither compared to Alexander the Great nor known to have walked anonymously among histroops on the eve of battle. Cleverly, the playwright borrows that piece of detail from the account given inPlutarch’s
 Lives
in order to create a literary parallel to Alexander. Henry V is simply a literary fiction who,unlike a real king, speaks in iambic pentameter. Whereas modern video technology makes actors appearmore real than life, the Elizabethan thrust stage would have made them less real than life.
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