Shakespeare in the Blogosphere
This will be the first of several reports on "Shakespeare in the Blogosphere." There are so many new comments on the authorship question popping up all over the blogosphere that it’s impossible to do justice to them in one brief account.
Let’s start with the most intelligently polemical of recent authorship commentary.
NPR inspired Bardiac, self described as a "feminist, female Shakespearean," to take up the baton on behalf of orthodox Shaksperotics (to use Gary Taylor’s amusing term for the study of Shakespeare by the Pros). All of the usual arguments seem to be rehearsed by Bardiac, whose acquaintance with the authorship question (as distinct from her undoubted but more generic expertise in her field of professional specialization) seems to be of about seven minutes’ duration.
Bardiac examines at length all the reasons why the anti-Stratfordians are wrong (and class snobs too boot!) and the authorship question is nonsense. It is hardly newsworthy to attempt a detailed rebuttal to the many misconceptions on which Bardiac’s analysis is based. She seems to be unaware, for example, that Oxfordians have for decades written about Francis Meres (Charlton Ogburn begins his 1984 Mysterious William Shakespeare by acknowledging and commenting on the significance of Meres’ publication!) and the other sources of traditional attribution that she cites as definitive.
That someone writing under the name of "Shakespeare" was by 1598 well known enough in London to inspire commentary such as that found in Meres’ Palladis Tamia or, somewhat later, in C.W.’s Polimanteia, is hardly surprising but is certainly not probative of the real question of who this literary figure actually was.
Consider, as Bardiac does not, the possible interpretations of Mere’s testimony. Either the orthodox story is true, or Meres may have known the real author and chosen to go along with the charade, or he may have been in the dark beyond having seen the name on the two narrative poems and having hearsay knowledge of other works written by the same author, and therefore may have unwittingly perpetuated a falsehood.
In no way, in other words, does Meres’ testimony go to the heart of the anti-Stratfordian critique or invalidate the anti-Stratfordian perspective.
While it may require very little intellectual energy to reply that the later two scenarios invoke a "conspiracy" theory, serious students of the Elizabethan age — who know that it was an age of conspiracies of all sorts, as reflected in part by the prominence of the conspiracy theme in Shakespeare’s plays and in part by the historical record itself — will not be readily deflected by such an essentially ad hominem response.
Thus, while it is heartening to see someone of Bardiac’s obvious intelligence, capability, and professional training entering into the authorship fray, one can only hope that at some point she’ll make a more sustained effort to inform herself about the actual merits of the Oxfordian case (as presented, for example, in its classic form by J.Thomas Looney, or more recently by Charlton Ogburn or Mark Anderson), rather than shadowboxing with NPR’s seven-minute synopsis (however elegant) of thousands of pages of testimony and analysis.
More Anon.