Yep, the biggest denier I know is very conservative. Not sure why that’s the correlation.
Joe Sobran was immensely conservative – he used to be one of a panel of six radio pundits, delivering short political addresses for the radio, and he was the guy on the extreme right.
The only other guy I know in person (as opposed to all y’all SDMB pen-pals) who is an Oxfordian is sort of an old-fashioned Bob Dole conservative.
And yet I’m immensely liberal…and here I am, at least in the “Damned if I Know” column of the matter. As much as I detest Joe Sobran’s politics, his book on Shakespeare was convincing.
I can’t figure a reason why the matter should have a liberal/conservative correlation. It doesn’t seem relevant. Conservatives aren’t really “royalists” or supporters of the nobility. (And de Vere wasn’t a really good role-model for them: he was too flighty, independent, headstrong, a spendthrift and wastrel, and of shaky loyalty to the Queen. He isn’t a guy I’d want as the leader of my political faction!)
That liberal/conservative correlation has been noticed before: In QI on the show about The Immortal Bard:
As Stephen Fry and the panelists report, it is mostly a result of elitism and IMHO mostly coming from people that do not like to believe that a commoner could know about or reach levels that “should” only be reached by the upper classes.
A good reply to that came from David Mitchell on the show too:
“Is not like if the best novels are written now by the Duke of Westminster” Indeed, guys from the middle classes back then could learn enough to become one of the greatest.
I dont believe there is a correlation between political views and believing Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. There may have been a correlation in the past but not so much now. Generally Baconians have been from a vaguely leftist republican position, Oxfordians conservative. At least thats the view of James Shapiro. This is probably not so much the case nowadays. Marlovians I would broadly and uneasily categorise as Romantics.
One of the things that bothers me about this line of argumentation, beyond the more coherent point that biographical parallelism is profoundly shaky ground for the ascription of fictional writing, is that it works really about the same for Shakespeare himself. Just glancing through the first couple of pages of Peter Ackroyd’s biography–Shakespeare–I can find dozens of parallels between the things that are mentioned in the plays and the things Shakespeare would have known: as Ackroyd points out, Shakespeare knows his stuff about village life, the popular names of all kinds of weeds and other plants. To the north of Stratford, as Ackroyd points out, Arden Forest lay, and this comes up in the plays as well. And really, I’m just talking about the first 20 pages or so. So I see your “Oxford knew Italy!,” and raise you a “But Shakespeare knew words for weeds!” and ask you whether you would be willing to grant that Oxford could learn Warwickshire words for weeds but Shakespeare couldn’t pick up (one of the many, many) books about Italy?
So, in other words: biographical ascription depends on the cherry-picking of things which the cherry-picker insists require personal knowledge of (even if that knowledge, as in Shakespearian Italy, looks very shaky), while ignoring other things or claiming that those things you can learn from a book.
Logically and ethically, you’re back to square one, having to find a convincing reason in the first place why we should be looking at anybody but Shakespeare when the question comes to who wrote the plays–which always boils down to this idea that some things are impossible for anybody to write about without personal knowledge of them, a standard that I doubt the Shakespeare doubters would hold anybody else to, because it’s nonsense.
Nothing will stop it of course. That’s the nature of conspiracy theories. Hell, if Oxford’s diary was discovered with an entry saying “Met that Will Shakespeare chap and told him how I wish I could write plays like him,” the diehards would find some way to wave it away.
Could you be more specific? Here are my counterpoints, off the top of my head.
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Everybody set comedies in Italy.
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How did de Vere’s tour of Italy mirror Shakespeare’s settings?
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Shakespeare’s plays set in Italy reveal he was pretty ignorant of it. Ben Jonson, lowly soldier turned playwright, could identify San Marco plaza in Venice. Shakespeare never included a specific detail about Venice, Verona, Padua, or Rome. The best he does is that Milan and Verona are sufficiently close to each other that Two Gentlemen of Verona is plausible. He placed a place called “Belmont” on the coast near Venice. Would de Vere have placed a fictional French sounding town near Venice?
I agree with GIGObuster’s post. I’d expand on that to say that there does seem to be a correlation between political conservatism and support for the hierarchical status quo. A conservative is likely to believe in the just-world hypothesis*: that things are the way they are because this is inherently the right way for things to be (and that some force exists to support “the natural order.”) Thus a baby born poor deserves to be poor, and a baby born to wealth deserves that wealth, because of inborn traits each possesses.
From this viewpoint, people born poor or even middle class (like William Shakespeare) simply have less to offer the world, and it’s unlikely that they could make any notable contribution to the world’s store of admirable productions. It follows that any such contribution (in this case the works of Shakespeare) could only have sprung from someone placed by the Natural Order at the top of the social/economic hierarchy–e.g., a Peer of the Realm.
*To some extent, belief that ‘people get what they deserve’ is probably common in the thought processes of all humans, because that belief lets us put aside the copious evidence that random events can do us harm. We experience a comforting sense of being in control when we can pretend to ourselves that instead of being at the mercy of chance, we are being cared for by some supernatural force which will ensure justice and fairness. All of us may be prey to this sort of delusion, but some seem more likely to embrace the ‘people get what they deserve’ theory; this has been studied intensively by trial lawyers and associated professions, because it has a lot to do with how juries make decisions.
Here’s a citation for a paper, “Perceptions of risk and the buffering hypothesis: The role of just world beliefs and right-wing authoritarianism,” that’s on point:
I think the Oxford position is pretty dumb, all told. Beyond the academic nitty-gritty, there are some big, fluffy reasons why I think it’s a stupid position:
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I don’t believe that no one would give him credit after his death. I don’t believe that no record in the form of letters from/to friends, etc., would survive. I also find it rather implausible that he would never be outed in his lifetime, either.
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I think Oxfordians like being “fans” of Oxford as the playwright, so they try to buy a whole package of him as author. I.e., “Statford didn’t write them. Who did? Oxford wrote all of them!” Not so fast. If it’s that easy to call into question the authorship of the plays for Stratford, then it should be equally easy for Oxford. Thus, even if we grant that certain of the plays, etc., show evidence that they reflect the life of Oxford, it doesn’t follow that he wrote all of the plays attributed to Stratford or all of the words in any single play. He may have had one or more collaborators. For all we know, every single play was written by committee.
Oxfordians think they can do a neat and clean switch from Stratford to their favorite. I don’t buy it for a second.
On the topic of the conspiracy-loving mentality, I think the common factors are these:
- Bad epistemology about what constitutes evidence of fact relevant to the past. The bad epistemology tends to overcomplicate things.
For example, William Shakespeare’s name is on the title page of the folio. No one doubted his authorship for 250 years after his death.–Noooo, I don’t believe it! Obama was born in Hawaii. Here’s the birth certificate.—Noooo, I don’t believe it!
- Picking and choosing what to disbelieve. They don’t bother to doubt something boring; it’s always something momentous. This is understandable thus far. What’s problematic is that they believe that such a conspiracy only succeeded in these specific instances; they do not extrapolate the consequences of that success to reality as a whole.
For example, if it were really true that the Moon Hoax was perpetrated, then our entire view of reality would have to change. Anything could be a lie; anything could be faked. Some conspiracy theorists do seem to go off this deep end and attribute everything we experience to the control of malevolent entities (cf. David Ickes).
By the way, I think lumping climate change denial in with the other conspiracies is unfair and incorrect. Most people who are labeled “denialists” hold much more subtle positions, and the label amounts to a straw man, a convenient invalidation. Further, “denialists” are not denying (as the conspiracy theorists almost always do) black and white facts of history (we landed on the moon) or proposing absurdities (reptilian overlords). They are taking issue with very complex science or the recommendations based on this science.
My stance on climate change is that those running the models may or may not be right, but they do not propose recommendations based on a cost-benefit analysis (or at least, through the political process, those recommendations do not reach the people). Rather, the emphasis seems to be on shaming opponents for disagreeing, i.e., using it as a political issue without real hope for change ("Those dirty conservatives opposing climate change–they’re destroying the planet!). That does no one any good. And I say this as a very left-leaning person. (One thing I did hear recently was a proposal for alternative energy that would take care of climate change and actually save money in the process. That sounded like a win-win to me, and I’m totally for something like that.)
now why put that bit about climate change into this discussion?
My impression has been that in reality they never seem to drop a lot of the discredited information, and I have found that their “subtle” positions don’t mean much when they elect one kind of representative to congress.
Anyone demanding that from the scientists that deal with models is demanding something outside their scope. And the evidence is more in favor of them than against. In any case, proper economic experts like Nordhaus (that became president-elect of the AEA) already did cost benefit analysis and the advice is just the same as when he advised the scientists that consulted experts like him. It is better economically to deal with the issue now rather than waisting a lot more (much more) down the road.
The problem with this view is that it does grossly ignore what is going on, while most of the people do think something must be done the powerful are twisting American politics by funding deniers into positions of government and pumping up discredited scientists.
And many times I pointed to Richard Alley (Republican Scientist) that reported how advantageous will be for society to change and use non polluting energy sources.
Most of the ones (and they are mostly conservatives) that claim to follow “subtle” positions just subtly move to other levels of denial, like disparaging the use of computer models and claiming that we should ignore the actual risk levels and wishfully think that we will get the low end of the rise in temperatures expected.
As the late Schneider showed, many subtle ones are trying to impugn science tools and conclusions reached decades ago, while the most unreasonable ones continue to impugn basic physics that were understood more than 100 years ago.
Anyhow, what is interesting to me here is how others have noticed the similarities of the denial of human induced climate change with the denial of Shakespeare.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/10/26/351046/are-shakespeare-deniers-like-climate-science-deniers/
A bit of a tangent…
Another difference between climate change denial and other conspiracy thinking is that the question of whether climate change is happening and to what degree is being answered in real time. The models predict a significant, measurable rise during our own lifetimes. My guess? I’m going with Murphy’s Law: there won’t be a huge change, and we will all be arguing about it for decades to come.
Obviously, about Shakespeare authorship, the Oxfordians will never be satisfied, and unless they get bored or we invent a device that allows us to look back in time, they will be making the same arguments 100 years from now…
Only that that ignores what took place in the 70’s, Murphy’s law fell on the deniers, indeed the rise in temperature from then has been significant and all other forcings do not explain it, only the increase in CO2 and other global warming gases does explain it properly.
As pointed before, the ones making the same arguments contrary to all the evidence will indeed continue 100 years from now, but it is the human induced climate change deniers who are the ones that will be in the same level as the Oxfordians. 100 years from now they will be treaded as flat earthers too.
And that should be it about that tangent thank you very much.
Getting back to Shakespeare, one has to notice that just like the climate scientists the Shakespeare scholars and historians are beginning to realize that not talking about the evidence and promoting their research leads to ignorance to fester.
Ok, I did say that that was enough of that tangent, but one has to notice here that it is funny (or sad, YMMV) that Al Gore has also been made fun in virtually the same way.
Well, time will tell with one issue, and time will not tell with the other.
The experts on both issues report that they had more than 100 years of research to come to the conclusions that they have today.
You are however much better than the “skeptics” that many times do fall for both conspiracy theories.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/11/12/dont-forget-shakespeare-denialism/
Climate change is so far off-topic in this thread that I’m giving both **Aeschines ** and GIGObuster warnings for derailing the thread – the former for raising the issue, and the latter for *knowing that it was off-topic * and engaging with him anyway.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
oh my bad
Sorry about that, I should not had replied about that other issue, I do have to explain that other posters had noticed earlier that the matter at hand does remain mired in CTs and early Exapno Mapcase made an excellent post about how the denial of Shakespeare as the writer fits many of the tropes from the followers of other conspiracy theories.
I’ve gotten hold of a copy of Mark Anderson’s book, because I figured, hey, why not give it a whirl. I’ve given the first couple pages a whirl, and now I’m fine with surrendering the field to the Oxfordians–because I think it’s just not going to be possible to convince a reader who falls for Anderson.
Here are the five reasons for claiming de Vere’s authorship that Anderson prefaces the entire book with: a) contemporaries gave away the game and already admitted Shakespeare was a fraud; b) de Vere’s Bible is annotated "uniquely in sync with the many idiosyncratic biblical references in Shakespeare; c) new Shakespeare works stopped being written in 1604; d) Italy in Shakespeare is like de Vere’s tour, although “ignorant critics” claim otherwise; e) the Shakespeare canon is autobiographical, and de Vere’s life fits it perfectly (I think: the points made here are not quite clear).
Let me start with the last: it’s not quite clear where Anderson draws the claim for the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare’s canon from, except by circular logic: because (he thinks) the plays fit Oxford’s life, it must be autobiographical, and then it’s clear it must be autobiographical of Oxford’s life, because it fits. Of course, as we noted multiple times, it a) doesn’t really fit, and it would be pointless to argue biographically even if it did and b) it fits Shakespeare’s life and knowledge just as well.
Italy we talked about, too. Anderson obviously relies here on Richard Roe’s Shakespeare Guide to Italy which purports to pinpoint the “real” locations of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve not been able to get a copy of this book, but the review here seems to tell the story: “Roe triangulates the place exactly by analyzing what the trumpet calls in the text signified, identifying the gate through which the soldiers would have entered and where they were heading, and locating the landmarks that Widow points out as she talks to Helen” in All’s Well That Ends Well. Well.
It seems like we needn’t waste any time on the dating thing, but it’s worth exploring Anderson’s counterargument: essentially, it boils down to saying the Penguin editions in the 1970s and some early 19th century scholars felt like there was a chance Shakespeare had stopped writing before 1604. What Anderson does there is largely a “trees instead of woods” approach, selecting things he can quibble with instead of approaching the entirety of evidence for a dating. In fact, what is most annoying here and throughout the bits I’ve read is Anderson’s way of dismissing the “Stratfordian” scholarship—evidently either without having read it, or because he wants to mislead. Just checking my editions of *The Tempest *(Cambridge and Arden), I find measured analyses of the Strachey letter, for example, and the contextual dating for the play.
The Bible annotations follow a similar process of thinking, of course: they trace De Vere’s annotations onto Shakespearian verse; it’s faintly ridiculous, in fact. Again, this is not Anderson’s own scholarship, but someone else’s being referred, so the methods are not clear: but the “continued interest in a series of themes” which Anderson outlines himself is so thin that it beggars description. “Anointed kings” were of interest to Shakespeare and De Vere, because Shakespeare brought up the concept at least three times. In plays concerned with royalty.
Finally, and to conclude this long summary, the first point: Shakespeare was already revealed as a fraud by contemporaries. This part is the most telling, because it shows that Anderson clearly isn’t cut out to make this argument. He points, for example, at this poem:
To Our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake-speare
Some say (good Will), which I, in sport, do sing,
Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport,
Thou hadst been a companion for a King;
And been a King among the meaner sort.
Some others rail; but, rail as they think fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a reigning Wit:
And honesty thou sowst, which they do reap;
So, to increase their stock which they do keep.
And then suggests that “thou hadst been a companion for a king” is the give away: that them poem was “suggesting that Shake-speare was a courtier (“a companion for a king”)”. It barely bears pointing out that the poem says exactly the opposite: If you had not played the king in the theater, you would have/could have been the companion of a king. In other words, the poem is quite clear that Shakespeare wasn’t a courtier.
And this, I think, is the major problem: that the Oxfordian claim rests, simply, on bad scholarship. (The Italy Travelogue book was written by a retired lawyer, incidentally.) But the distinction between good scholarship and bad scholarship really isn’t easy to sell, or indeed to explain.
An excellent post. Thanks for doing the dirty work(reading Anderson’s entire book) that many of us baulk at.
I did have a link which refuted the claims made by Oxfordian’s that Oxford’s own bible annotations mirrored biblical passages in the Plays. I’ll try to find and post the link.
With regards to Anderson’s claim of a biographical link between Oxford’s life and the Plays. Perhaps he simply got this idea from Thomas Looney? Looney was the first proponent of Oxford as Shakespeare. Anderson may simply be repeating Looney’s idea of a biographical link.
Its worth pointing out that writing your “biography” into your own fictional writing was not widely done at this time.
Thanks! Just to note briefly, I’ve only read the section called “Argument” and the various sections explaining that section so far. I’ll need a bit more time to read the rest, if I manage. Also, I wanted to post the link to the review of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. This is from a Marlowe-was-Shakespeare site, but its quotes from the book are instructive, I think.
And I had meant to add another thing, which is not directly related to the Anderson but which I found while looking for a postable copy of the poem. Look at this anti-Shakespearian site. It suggests that “The deferential manner in which the author speaks of his subject, betrays to the reader that Will. Shake-speare was dead when the poem was written.” I’d like to point out here how the unscholarly method works. First, no reputable scholar would willingly base an argument on the “deferential manner” of a text: it’s hardly intersubjective, and in fact some elements just don’t bear this reading out at all (“in sport” it says–i.e., not entirely seriously, but not entirely mocking, either; and “good Will” seems rather familiar, too); second, if they were willing to say the poem is deferential, the jump to “and that’s why the subject’s dead” is a bit long–why is that the necessary (or even a possible) conclusion? And third, the poem is, again, clear that the poem says the exact opposite to what’s claimed: its subject is not dead: the lines starting from “Thou hast…” are in the present tense: You do not have a mocking, but a stately wit (a slightly clumsy paraphrase on my part, but the grammar is the important thing here). In simple terms: how are we to take the arguments of literary “scholars” who cannot even read a poem correctly?