Apologies to a conspiracist…

….I brusquely replied to an Oxfordian the other day, and i’m sorry for it. Not because I know the man, but because it diminishes a man to insult before introducing himself to his opponent.

Unless he wishes to make an enemy of that man. And I do not. So i shall use this blog to explain why I am not a conspiracist. (Are they racist)?

I would advise looking at the Orthodox evidence in toto, before embarking on the voyage of singularity conspiracy offers.

I am forced to call myself an Orthodox scholar, when I merely love Shakespeare’s language.

Who can convince you to do that? And once convinced why would i subject myself to the pronouncements of orthodox scholars to accept this schmuck from Stratford’s biography.

I made up my own mind on this subject. There is nothing to prove he didn’t write the plays. And for him be the actor and boring family burgher from Stratford. The meagre evidence we have supports it and as boring as that may be, it is what it is.

I say look to his friends. He had good friends. And to say, he was not he, is a slur on them and a commentary on their complicit or pretended friendship. Why then would they continue friendship with someone they knew was a liar and cheat?

He was friends with the most popular actor in Elizabethan times, Richard Burbage.

He was friends with Ben Jonson, who was the first Elizabethan Playwright to publish a Folio of his works. It was printed in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death.

He was friends with Michael Drayton, who was also a Warwickshire man and fellow poet. Drayton’s career was as a poet for Patronage. His Sonnet series, like Shakespeare’s, took him over 20 years to finish.

He was friends with John Heminges and Henry Condell. who at the end of their careers took the trouble to collect their colleague’s plays before they were lost to time. The result is the remarkable First Folio, a book for William’s memory.

Orthodox viewpoint

A writer writing for profit in private and public arenas. He didn’t collect his writings, and saw only his poems into print as Quartos.

The Theatre Company owned the final written Play and copied from it as necessary. The writer was paid for his labour and that was it. If he kept copies of his foul papers or a fair one there are none extant.

None. Ask the Oxfordians, Marlovians et al to produce anything like a Shakespeare play in their candidates hand and they can’t. You’d think such a treasure would have been kept under lock and key? And preserved in manuscript to prove to future generations that this was he?

Plays were kept locked in a chest in the Playhouses and when these thatch-roofed, wooden structures burned, the plays were lost. As happened to the Fortune in 1619.

His Q1609 Sonnets promise immortality through his verse, yet the writer never took any steps to ensure those works lasted longer than his death. We don’t know his views on writing for posterity.

Don’t forget every other contemporary author writing for the same ends was operating under the same set of rules, external to his or her writing. (Yes, there are some female candidates for Shakespeare)!

Basically no playwrights expected their work to last. But to boast of it doing so is a tradition that stretches back hundreds of years in the time he is writing. These authors of antiquity were the reason they were writing.

And printing of authors was the gutterpress and internet of the day. A new technology being exploited by the practitioners of that technology. The writers were a necessary evil and shared little in the profits, if any were to be made.

I am ready to admit in an instant I am wrong on the biographical aspect of Shakespeare, if convincing evidence is provided.

Until then I will continue to delve into all aspects of Early Modern History always thinking how DID he do it? If I have to create circumstances and relationships, I (or anyone) have no way to prove or disprove, then I have entered the world of fiction.

But it’s not just them. When an orthodox scholar fills in the Orthodox biography with his own conjectures of what Shakespeare felt or smelt, it is likewise pure fantasy.

I’ve been told shakespeare was addicted to tobacco, hemp, cocaine, nutmeg. I say present me the knowledge you have and I’ll decide if it’s a certainty or not.

Compare his with Samuel Johnson’s life a century later. That of an unknown ‘genius’ intellectual off to seek his fortune in London. Samuel just barely kept his head above water.

And this dictionary maker Johnson was a Stratfordian. Witness his ‘Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth’ about the timing of Macbeth’s creation coinciding with King James’ interest in Demonology and ascension to the throne in 1604. The year Oxford died.

Shakespeare’s career made him a Gentleman and land owner, as well occupying the biggest house in Stratford. Bought and paid for with moneys earned in the theatre business.

The world of printing in London was heavily watched by the government. There was an anarchic press, but mortal consequence if you were caught. Still they printed a lot.

There was also a Scottish arm of the Early Modern printing industry not governed by Elizabeth. Richard Field worked for and finally took over his master Thomas Vautrollier’s Press. Vautrollier owned 2 presses in Edinburgh.

I think this a valuable avenue to explore for Shakespeare’s access to the source books he did use. And I don’t believe as some editors do that we know everything about Shakespeare’s biography.

Deepening our knowledge of his times and who was connected to whom is a fascinating subject. Asking me to accept one person or a group of others who duped history for the vaguest of reasons is not.

Now to his counterfeit presentment.

Conspiracy viewpoint

A hidden genius writing Shakespeare, then hiding the fact in his writing through anagrams and crytograms for people to discover after his death to see how brilliant and misunderstood he was.

The old ‘You thought I was only this, but I am actually this and you never knew’ ploy. For me, this way madness lies!

Most, if not any conspiracy theorists are highly intelligent, educated and powerful people. However they raise far more questions than the many questions involved in just accepting that it was Shakespeare who wrote the plays and we have them. So, basta! Klaar!

Merely casting doubt on the Stratfordian Shakespeare nullifies him in favour of ANY other candidate.

And there are far too many of them, as in nehitd (not enough hours in the day), to do them all justice in evaluating their merits or defaults.

There are over a hundred different candidates and they fall into two categories: The groupists and the single candidates. The most well-known on the internet anno 2009 are Oxford. Marlowe and Bacon. With Henry Neville trailing by miles. Will the dark horse make it to the post?

However my orthodox candidate needs no introduction.

He is there in the thick of it:
Public Theatre, Printing, Court Theatre, smack dab in the middle of the web that encompasses his field of work.

‘Any writing or acting or selling of said work can be had here. I have time on my hands, my family is back in Stratford on Avon, no kids. I can afford candles. I don’t need to be an Earl to know how an Earl might feel, nor a hangman. There are documents and tales enough to serve as mere sources’.

What is a source?

A source is a tangible piece of evidence that can then be interpreted. I cannot verify an abstract source no matter how trustworthy or intelligent you are in all other things.

But the conspiracists like Shakespeare himself can change it for the times; and add to it, or subtract from it, as they wish, and call it evidence.

If I start making stuff up in a criminal or civil court i would be held in contempt. Yet many chief justices are convinced it was someone other than Shakespeare. Then again a whole bigger bunch of chief justices do not. Does the one outweigh the other?

Several prominent actors believe it wasn’t Shakespeare. And a whole bigger bunch of actors believe it is Shakespeare of Stratford or don’t ‘gaf‘ ! (first word of acronym (amended from anagram finally) is ‘give’). ..

The main problem for conspiracy theorists is that their candidates often demand special circumstances by the fact that he died too soon or late. Or they had an established career of their own, PLUS being the world’s most clebrated author on the QT.

Even though Shakespeare’s fame is a combination of a printing war in the 1700’s, support by leading superstar actors of the 18thC stages, and a cultural hegemony of an Empire building school curriculum throughout the 19thC. And a backlash against traditional readings of his work by theorists of the late 20thC.

All the above are skipped over by conspiracists who expect you to know and accept the prescient lives of dominant worthies who had predicted just such a fame would happen.

It is partly an accident of history that Shakespeare is as famous as he is. Nobody in his time could ever have predicted the impact he would have on the world’s literature.

Despite the acknowledgement that he did collaborate on his early works and his later works before retirement. He had a craft to learn and pass on.

Surely one man alone could accomplish much easier, this task of writing plays and poetry?

Such a man would need time to reflect and meditate and study as well as write.

If he had a job with a theatre company that produced his plays it would be better.

If he knew a printer that might, as a favour, publish his first attempt at commercial narrative poetry, that would help too.

If he knew and associated in the Mermaid Tavern on a friday with other wits of his time, it might provide him somewhere to unwind after being alone with his words.

Let’s never forget that he was one of hundreds of scribblers for the theatre and the press. Only he got all the breaks. He followed his own career path, not knowing what it held in store.

If a conspiracy demands the plays be dated earlier than accepted by Historians ie not only Shakespeareans. Then special circumstances have to be allowed for that to happen.

And to continue so on down to where the imagined and historical merge in support of the only the obvious conclusion that their candidate is the candidate.

Then dear readers i feel like i am being coerced. My freedom of choice is being limited, even though my field of knowledge is being widened by their research.

And yet this same argument pours from the mouths of the conspiracists who feel stifled by an unfulfilling biography. We are after all looking for the same thing.

What remains is that there is nothing in the conspiracists’ theories that changes a modern reader’s enjoyment of Shakespeare’s Plays and poems. Accepting a theory as true and appreciating the plays more because of it is as subjective as you can get. If it works for you, good.

I suppose if i just go agnostic on the biography and avoid the chatrooms where these things are discussed and stick to reading the plays I’ll be alright…
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