{"id":2594,"date":"2017-04-24T07:16:07","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T11:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=2594"},"modified":"2017-04-25T11:22:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T15:22:33","slug":"crackpot-thinkers-and-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/crackpot-thinkers-and-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Was Shakespeare Shady?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Recent studies<\/span><\/a> show that conspiracy theories are highly democratic. These loony beliefs \u201ccut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.\u201d So despite all the evidence, there are people who maintain that President Obama wasn\u2019t born in the U.S., and just as tendentiously, there are people of all kinds who fervently believe that Shakespeare didn\u2019t write his plays.<\/span><\/div>\n
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They\u2019ll present a blizzard of proofs that melt\u00a0 under close inspection and have suggested <\/span>dozens<\/em> of candidates as the \u201ctrue author\u201d over the last 150 years including Ben Jonson, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Philip Sydney, The Freemasons, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, The Rosicrucians, a whole assortment of nobles, poets and playwrights\u2014and even Queen Elizabeth.There are many ferocious arguments and they start with a bogus negative. The Refuseniks simply cannot believe that someone who wasn\u2019t upper class and a world traveler could have been a brilliant writer. This shows a gross misunderstanding of the creative mind and contemptuous snobbery. What about Jane Austen, the Bront\u00ebs, James Joyce, and Dickens?
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The\u00a0 Shakespeare Deniers make lots of flimsy claims, as well as assertions that are anachronistic. These might look solid at first glance, convincing people who don\u2019t know the period Shakespeare wrote in. Deep-fried Doubters want you to believe that there have <\/span>always<\/span> been suspicions about \u201cauthorship,\u201d but that\u2019s completely false.\u00a0 Nobody in Shakespeare\u2019s time and for years afterwards every doubted that he wrote the plays. The \u201ccontroversy\u201d started in the middle of the 19th century.<\/span><\/p>\n

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And one of the main \u201cproofs\u201d that he didn\u2019t write the plays is this: we don\u2019t have any of his manuscripts or his handwriting. Well, guess what? That doesn\u2019t mean anything at all. University of Chicago\u2019s David Bevington, a Professor of English, <\/span>notes that <\/span><\/a>\u201cthe lack of manuscripts, of handwriting samples . . . are what one would expect of a playwright of the period, even the most famous. We don\u2019t read and preserve movie scripts today, and often do not even know who wrote a movie we particularly like. Play scripts were like that in the Renaissance. They existed to enable an acting company to put on a play. The wonder is that so many of Shakespeare\u2019s plays were published at all. We have no manuscripts of plays by Marlowe or Jonson or Webster, even though some of their plays rival Shakespeare’s in their literary and dramatic qualities.”<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The Nonbelievers also argue that Shakespeare was barely mentioned in his own time. But that\u2019s simply not true if you bother to read that great Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro\u2019s book <\/span>Contested Will<\/span><\/a>. <\/span>There was solid contemporary commentary about Shakespeare. People who claim otherwise are discounting inconvenient evidence that shakes and topples their conspiratorial Tower of Babel.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Shapiro dives deeply and amusingly into the slumgullion of falsehoods and half-truths cooked up with rabid intensity by a thriving industry that can easily convince the gullible and the uninformed.\u00a0 But let\u2019s face it: going against the settled truth of a few centuries is a good way to gain notoriety and generate headlines. A few years ago, the widely distributed magazine Reform Judaism<\/em> devoted a badly edited cover story<\/a> to proving Shakespeare was actually an obscure Jewish woman poet. It ignored the highly inconvenient fact that she wasn\u2019t really Jewish because Jewish descent has traditionally been matrilineal <\/a>and her mother was not a Jew. It also side-stepped her authorship of a viciously anti-Semitic poem that\u2019s a stone dud and shows nothing like the artistry of his plays whatsoever. But hey, why let any of that that get in the way of a good, sexy theory? I\u2019m surprised the story didn\u2019t throw in Queen Elizabeth and the whole Tudor court as secret Jews for extra points. That could have been the real reason Spain sent the Armada….<\/span><\/div>\n
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It\u2019s probably exciting to uncover a \u201csecret,\u201d to feel like a hero, to connect disparate dots as if the fate of the world depended on your dazzling acumen. It likely gives people a sense of power and control, and can make any life seem like a Dan Brown thriller. And as in The X Files<\/em>, these people see, to desperately want to believe\u2014for reasons of their own\u2014that <\/span>the truth is out there. <\/span>So Shakespeare Skeptics and the legion of cranks who think our moon landing was faked might have <\/span>more in common<\/span><\/a> than you’d think. <\/span><\/div>\n
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Lev Raphael is the author of The Edith Wharton Murders<\/a> and many other books in genres from memoir to writer\u2019s guide.<\/strong><\/div>\n
This blog was adapted from an article in Bibliobuffet.<\/a><\/strong>
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Recent studies show that conspiracy theories are highly democratic. These loony beliefs \u201ccut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status.\u201d So despite all the evidence, there are people who maintain that President Obama wasn\u2019t born in the U.S., and just as tendentiously, there are people of all kinds who fervently … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[541],"tags":[844,854,847,849,641,856,640,853,848,845,548,846,857,851,850,852,855],"class_list":["post-2594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shakespeare","tag-authorship","tag-ben-jonson","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-conspiracy-thinking","tag-contested-will","tag-dan-brown","tag-james-shapiro","tag-marlowe","tag-moon-landing","tag-queeen-elizabeth","tag-shakespeare","tag-shakespeare-plays","tag-the-x-files","tag-tudor-drama","tag-tudor-england","tag-tudor-plays","tag-webster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2594"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}