The Reactionary Utopian
                     March 22, 2007


THE SHAKESPEARE BIGOTS
by Joe Sobran

     We seldom know what our adversaries are doing behind 
our backs until it's too late, but sometimes, when we are 
fortunate, they expose themselves without realizing it.

     Writing in the WASHINGTON POST, Stanley Wells, doyen 
of Shakespeare scholars, asserts that there is 
"overwhelming evidence" that "William Shakespeare from 
Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems for which 
he is famous." To prove this, he devotes much of his 
argument to pointing out that those who disagree with it 
don't always agree with each other! Wells cites an 
American lawyer who expressed doubts about the 
Stratfordian's authorship in 1848. Then,

     "The [anti-Stratfordian] heresy grew in force in the 
following years, and since then at least 60 candidates, 
including Queen Elizabeth I, have been proposed as the 
'real' Shakespeare. In recent times the most popular have 
been [Francis] Bacon, playwright Christopher Marlowe, and 
Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, but the list 
increases year by year and has been extended recently 
with Sir Henry Neville and Lady Mary Sidney."

     Wells doesn't see how easily this trite argument 
could be turned around. A Baconian might with equal logic 
point out, "The anti-Baconians have never been able to 
agree; they have proposed over 60 candidates, including 
the Stratford man, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of 
Oxford, and even Queen Elizabeth I, and their list keeps 
growing every year."

     Any number can play this game. Hitler might have 
argued that the opponents of National Socialism were 
inconsistent: they included Bolsheviks, Christians, 
democrats, monarchists, libertarians, and so on. Or think 
how President Bush could use the same kind of reasoning 
against critics of the Iraq war, if he's not already 
doing it.

     According to Wells's way of thinking, the greater 
the number of people who disagree with you, and the more 
various their reasons and alternatives, the stronger your 
own position must be. Wells goes on: "It often seems as 
though the anti-Stratfordians don't really care who wrote 
the plays so long as he was a well-educated and 
well-traveled man (or, rarely, woman), preferably of 
aristocratic birth."

     No, Mr. Wells, I think I speak for everyone you want 
to ridicule: we care very much who wrote the plays, and 
it's far from a matter of mere pedigree or even 
education. The authorship question comes down to the 
individual characteristics of the author, many of which 
seem to be disclosed in his Sonnets. Do all those who 
reject the Stratford man have a duty to be unanimous?

     To most people nowdays, who barely think at all, 
"bigotry" means hating people of other races. But bigotry 
doesn't always mean that sort of hate, or indeed any sort 
of hate. More basically, it means a sort of stupidity: 
indignant bafflement that others can disagree with you, 
along with an inability to comprehend why they do and a 
refusal to deal with the reasons they actually give.

     The term may apply to any side in any argument -- to 
the liberal believer in evolution as well as to his 
fundamentalist opponent, and to the Stratfordian 
professor as well as to the anti-Stratfordian amateur 
(who has at least had to learn how his opponents really 
do think). The loose ascription of bigotry is itself a 
form of bigotry. I sometimes think "bigot" has become the 
real bigots' favorite word.

     Sorry, Mr. Wells, I can't accept responsibility for 
those who believe Queen Elizabeth I was the real 
Shakespeare. The Sonnets would seem to point to a man -- 
an aging man, by his own description "old," "in 
disgrace," "despised," "poor," "lame," despairing, 
worried about his "name," expecting and hoping to be 
"forgotten" after his death (though he also expects his 
poetry to have "immortal life"), probably bisexual.

     Why, it sounds very much like what is known of that 
Earl of Oxford, doesn't it? It doesn't quite seem to fit 
Bacon, Marlowe, Elizabeth I -- or the Stratford man. 
Maybe this is why so many of your colleagues dismiss 
those Sonnets as "fictions," useless to biographers -- 
and of course inadmissible evidence in the authorship 
debate.

     Yes, some anti-Stratfordians are outlandish. Does it 
follow that all anti-Stratfordianism, of every sort, is 
inherently outlandish? Only if the belief that some 
authors use pseudonyms -- and that "William Shakespeare" 
was a pen name -- is a bizarre conspiracy theory.

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