David Kathman and the
“Historical Record”
A Reply to David Kathman’s
Selective
Critique
by Joseph Sobran
David
Kathman, editor of a
website on the
Shakespeare authorship question, offers many criticisms of those who
deny that William of Stratford was the Bard, reserving special scorn for
those of us who think the real Bard was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He
calls me a “non-scholar,” in contrast to the genuine
“scholars” who hold the traditional view.
Some of Kathman’s specific
criticisms of Oxfordians (including me) are warranted. He is an able and
well-informed advocate for William and he is skillful at catching his
opponents’ factual errors and overstatements.
Unfortunately, Kathman himself
writes not like a scholar, but like a lawyer; his goal is not truth, but
victory. Far from writing with impartial detachment, he spares his own
“side” the scathing criticisms he inflicts on Oxfordians. He
treats the Oxfordian Charlton Ogburn as a fool, but overlooks the egregious
vulnerabilities of the eccentric Stratfordian Alan Nelson, since Nelson is
on his “side.” Kathman seems to feel that the Stratfordian
“side” can’t afford to make the slightest concession to
the heretics. He won’t allow that any Oxfordian has ever raised a
legitimate objection or found a real weakness in Stratfordian
scholarship.
Though Oxfordians obviously reject
the authority of academic Shakespeare scholars, Kathman constantly
appeals to the shared opinions of those scholars as if this could decide the
authorship controversy: he assures us that “the majority of
Shakespeare scholars today doubt” one proposition, another is
“not very widely accepted today among Shakespeare
scholars,” a third is “shared by essentially all Shakespeare
scholars you could ask,” “most scholars today believe”
yet another, “the majority of Shakespeare scholars today
doubt” a fifth, and so on.
Kathman is intelligent enough to
realize that citing Stratfordian scholars to prove the Stratfordian
position is circular reasoning, but he is eager to show that the traditional
view is held by all the Best People. Being more partisan than scholar, he
seeks a polemical victory in discrediting those he considers his opponents.
Never does he give an Oxfordian credit for making a sound point; never
does he criticize a fellow Stratfordian for fatuity. He maintains a loyal
silence even when Nelson, trying to explain why the poet of the Sonnets
seems much older than the youth, absurdly surmises that William
“felt old” because he was “prematurely
balding.”
But Kathman reveals an even more
serious flaw. Consider his positive case for William’s authorship,
in his own words:
How do we know that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? We know
because the historical record tells us so, strongly and
unequivocally.... The most obvious evidence that William
Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him is that
everyone at the time said he did.... All the historical
evidence ties William Shakespeare of Stratford to the plays bearing
his name.... [The] evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship is abundant
and wide-ranging for the era in which he lived, much
more abundant than the comparable evidence for most other
contemporary playwrights.... It’s true that no one single document
states categorically that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon
wrote Hamlet and King Lear, but then no such
document exists for any other playwright of the time either.... [There] is
no
indication in the historical record that anybody ever
suspected [“Shakespeare”] of being a pseudonym or
said that anybody other than William Shakespeare was the author....
No Elizabethan ever suggested that
Shakespeare’s plays and poems were written by someone else, or
that Shakespeare the player was not Shakespeare the author, or that
Shakespeare the Globe-sharer was not Shakespeare of Stratford.... [His]
contemporaries knew who he was, and there was never
any doubt in the minds of those who knew him....
[No] person of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras ever
doubted the attribution [of these works to William.]” (My
emphases.)
This argument displays a hopelessly
naive view of history and the “historical record.” Kathman is
really telling us only what we already know and what no Oxfordian doubts:
that William was identified as the Bard in his own time and that no record
of anyone denying this has survived. But this means much less than he
wants it to mean.
Anyone who has ever investigated any
historical problem knows how fragmentary and ambiguous our records of
the past are. Witnesses may lie, be deceived, exaggerate, fudge, repeat
hearsay, shield their friends, or inflate their own certainty. They may
even collude to conceal the truth.
Moreover, our records of the past are
a minute fraction of the full, irretrievable reality of the past. As C.S.
Lewis once put it, we may think of the past as a huge library that has
burned down, and of recorded history as a single line in a single book that
happened to survive the fire. That is roughly the proportion between the
past and what we actually know of it.
It’s ingenuous to suppose that
the “historical record” is complete, reliable, unambiguous,
and transparent. “But what will history say?” asks Major
Swindon in Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s
Disciple; to which General Burgoyne replies: “History, sir,
will tell lies, as usual.” We needn’t be quite as cynical as
Burgoyne; but Swindon’s question certainly represents a common
assumption that “history” speaks with simple finality and
utters verdicts beyond appeal, rather like a documentary narrated by
Walter Cronkite.
Kathman likewise assumes that the
“historical record” is exhaustive when he assures us that
“everyone” in Elizabethan England thought one thing, or that
“nobody” — “ever”! — doubted another.
How can he, or anyone else, possibly know this?
Just for openers, most gossip that
contradicts the official version of events is never recorded. We have no
way of knowing what was really in the “minds” of
“all” Elizabethans, or even “all” of
William’s acquaintances; we can only guess at what they
“ever suspected.” And it may be that we have better
testimony of William’s authorship than of, say, Thomas
Kyd’s; but that doesn’t mean that the testimony for either is
sufficient, let alone incontrovertible. It’s even possible that the
meager testimony for Kyd is sounder than the more abundant testimony for
William; volume isn’t decisive.
Kathman writes as if the
“historical record” were a neat set of notarized statements,
scrupulously set down for posterity. In actual fact, it’s a bizarre
miscellany of things, many of which were recorded less by design than by
accident. It permits boundless variety of interpretation and fairly little in
the way of certainty. And, of course, we never know how much is missing
from the record.
Aristotle cautions us against
demanding more certitude than the nature of the subject admits; there is
no mathematical exactitude in history. The Anglican bishop Richard
Whately summed it up in a profound aphorism: “He who is unaware
of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.” When a man
presumes to say what “everyone” thought, in any period, he
calls his own judgment into question. Such grandiose claims are anything
but “scholarly.”
Notice that Kathman tacitly rules out
the Bard’s works as part of the “historical record”
— even for purposes of determining the Bard’s identity! He
parenthetically admits that he thinks the Sonnets refer to real people and
events, but he leaves it at that. He doesn’t treat the Sonnets as
pertinent “evidence” for the question of authorship, though
the poet writes in the first person and seems to make some intimate
disclosures about himself. After all, it says “Shakespeare”
wrote them, doesn’t it? What more proof do we need? For Kathman
the title page of the Sonnets counts as the “historical
record,” but the Sonnets themselves don’t! What the poet says
about himself actually seems to count for less, in his mind, than what the
Folio tributes say about him.
I, on the other hand, think the Sonnets
give us some of the most crucial evidence we have, and I think they point
to Oxford. Kathman calls my reading of the Sonnets
“subjective”; in fact he is addicted to the word
subjective, like a first-year philosophy student who has
just added it to his vocabulary and snatches every opportunity to use it.
(He also repeats the phrase notoriously subjective several
times.)
It’s not clear what he means by
this, except that to his way of thinking the “subjective” is
the polar opposite of the “historical record.” Allow me to
expose the inner workings of my subjectivity.
The poet of the Sonnets says that he
is “old,” and he calls the youth a “youth,” to
whom he is as a “decrepit father”; from such details I infer
that the poet is a generation older than the youth, just as Oxford was a
generation older than the Earl of Southampton. The poet says he is
“lame,” the same word Oxford several times used to describe
himself. The poet constantly laments his “disgrace,”
“shames,” “blots,” “vulgar scandal,”
et cetera; Oxford led a scandalous life and fell into disgrace. The poet
uses fifty of the same legal terms we find in Oxford’s letters, as
well as many of the specific words, images, and themes Oxford uses in his
1573 letter to Thomas Bedingfield. The poet hopes his “name”
will be “buried” and “forgotten,” which accords
perfectly with Oxford’s authorship but is baffling if we posit
William’s. The poet, with his “two loves,” male and
female, seems to be bisexual; Oxford not only had an amour resulting in a
bastard son, but was accused of “buggering boys.”
These are only a few of the reasons
the Sonnets provide for thinking Oxford was the poet. There is another one,
of course. Kathman quibbles over whether the youth was really
Southampton (“the majority of Shakespeare scholars today,”
he says characteristically, “doubt very much that Southampton was
the youth of the Sonnets”), but many Stratfordian scholars have
accepted the identification, without reference to Oxford. And as it
happens, the girl Southampton was being pressed, against his will, to
marry at about the time the Sonnets were written (Kathman quibbles
about their dates too) was none other than Oxford’s eldest daughter,
Elizabeth de Vere. The poet urges the reluctant youth to marry and beget
an heir “for love of me,” a plea which, coming from anyone
but the prospective father-in-law, would be hard to explain.
Each of these details may be more or
less debatable; but together they cohere and have explanatory power. I
don’t claim to have proved my case beyond any doubt, as Kathman
says the “historical record” proves William’s
authorship; I say only that, given the indications we have, it seems more
reasonable and probable than any other explanation of the same facts and
resolves many persistent puzzles about the Sonnets.
We may note in passing that all three
of the dedicatees of the Bard’s works — the earls of
Southampton, Pembroke, and Montgomery — had been Oxford’s
prospective sons-in-law. This remarkable coincidence is lost on the
Stratfordian scholars, including Kathman.
Are the Sonnets
“fictions,” as some Stratfordians (though not Kathman)
suggest? Then why do they revolve around two characters who happen to
resemble the nonfictional earls of Oxford and Southampton so closely?
Alan Nelson argues fancifully that
if only we knew more about William,
we might see that he too matches the poet of the Sonnets; but he
doesn’t explain how this could possibly be, and anyway this
argument concedes that Oxford does seem to match the poet. Despite such
attempts to obscure it, the fact remains that the poet’s
self-portrait squares very well with what we know of Oxford, but not with
what we do, or could, know of William. And none of my critics, including
Kathman, have denied this. All of them avoid addressing the specifics of
the Sonnets that I have tried to call their attention to.
Kathman calls my argument that
Oxford and Southampton were lovers “sheer fantasy.” It
isn’t a fantasy at all, but an inference from three propositions,
each of which many people find plausible: Oxford was the poet,
Southampton was the youth, and the poet and the youth were lovers.
Kathman notes triumphantly that Oxford and Southampton make no mention
of each other in their letters; but this is one more case of his
wrong-headed assumption that the “historical record” is a
comprehensive record of the past. Only a few of the two earls’
letters have survived, and most of Oxford’s are addressed to his
father-in-law, Lord Burghley, the last man on earth he would risk exposing
such an amour to, especially considering that Southampton was
Burghley’s ward.
If the Sonnets helped William’s
case, I suspect Kathman and “the majority of Shakespeare
scholars” would insist on counting them as primary documents in
the “historical record.” But they are no help to William at all.
On the contrary, if we accept them as part of the “historical
record,” they create fatal difficulties for William’s
authorship. And of course the Stratfordian scholars don’t try to
prove his authorship from them. It can’t be done.
If the Sonnets do tell us about their
author, one can make a better case even for Francis Bacon’s
authorship than for William’s! After all, Bacon was a writer and
occasional poet, a nobleman, a public figure who fell into disgrace (though
long after the Sonnets were written), and a homosexual with a taste for
boys. No, the Sonnets are definitely not an asset to the Stratfordian
cause.
On the one occasion when I met
Kathman, I posed the following question:
“Let’s assume that
William was the Bard. But let’s suppose Oxford had been falsely
identified as the author, and everyone (including scholars) had accepted
this deceit for four centuries. What is it about these works that would
have convinced you that the real author was not Oxford, but was a
forgotten actor from Stratford?”
An interesting thought-experiment, I
think. I hoped Kathman would at least find it stimulating. But he had no
answer to it; how could he? His entire case for William boils down to
testimony; and aside from that testimony, there is no evidence for
William at all.
Every word the Bard wrote belongs to
the historical record; because each of those words is a tiny record of his
experience, whether it be the general experience of speaking English, the
literary experience of certain specific books, or the idiosyncratic
experiences of visiting specific sites in Italy or of being Lord
Burghley’s son-in-law. It would be surprising if such a distinctive
and exuberant literary personality should leave no traces of itself outside
the Bard’s works, as I think Oxford did and William did not. We may,
and should, examine this rich deposit of language for things that
individualize the author and set him apart from his contemporaries. But
this requires a subtler and more inclusive understanding of the historical
record than Kathman’s.
Whatever we make of the Sonnets,
they are certainly a legitimate, vital, and indispensable part of the
historical record. Even if we were to decide that the Bard was trying to
deceive the public (which I can’t believe) that very attempt would
tell us something about him. But Stratfordian scholars who want to
exclude the Sonnets from consideration are like lawyers who, realizing
that a certain document is damaging to their client, seek to have it ruled
inadmissible in court. They are seeking the suppression of evidence which
may be highly relevant, if not conclusive.
My own view is that the poet who
speaks in the Sonnets is the best of all witnesses for purposes of the
authorship question. And none of the Stratfordian scholars has given us
any reason to believe otherwise.
When Kathman says that
“everyone” said the Bard was “William
Shakespeare,” does he include the Bard himself in
“everyone”? Certainly the Bard signed that name to some of
his works. But he seems to tell a different story in his Sonnets,
particularly when he is addressing his young male love. And, again, he says
he wants his “name” to be “buried” and
“forgotten,” despite the fact that he expects his poetry to be
immortal. And if Oxford was the poet — “in disgrace,”
stained by “vulgar scandal,” and “vile esteemed”
— this is just what happened.
In that case, by passing off his poetry
as the work of “William Shakespeare,” and by inducing his
friends to sustain this pseudonym even after his death, it was Oxford
himself who forged what Kathman thinks of as the undubitable
“historical record”!
July 2000
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