Colin McEnroe Show: Who Was Shakespeare?
Could he really have been Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford?
Shakespeare is back on television in a big way. You can't watch commercial TV for 45 minutes without seeing an ad for the movie "Anonymous," opening Friday and advancing the argument that Shakespeare's plays were not written by the Stratford commoner but by a British nobleman.
The debate has been raging for many decades now, and the people in the argument tend not to stay very calm about it.
Stratfordians -- who believe Shakespeare was Shakespeare -- often paint Oxfordians as snobs and dilettantes who don't know what they're talking about. Oxfordians say that Stratfordians are afraid to jeopardize their standing in academia by asking hard questions.
I hear, in the argument, faint echoes of the 9/11 Truthers, although the politics are very different. Oxfordians, like the Truthers, tend to be tinkerers poking holes in the Establishment version.
You'll hear from both sides in this interview.
Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.
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Response to Email from Jim
The email from Jim highlights one of the occupational hazards of being a 21st century "Shakespeare professor." Professor Tonkin, whom Wikipedia identifies as an expert in Esperanto, is not untypical of those whom the media calls upon to defend the traditional view of Shakespearean authorship.
As a group, these are perhaps best characterized (naturally there may be exceptions) as experts whose professional training consists of being taught to look into the wrong end of the telescope and sagely concur with the standers-by that "there's nothing there." The public reasonably expects them to behave with the dignity appropriate to their professional station, but they cannot. They're supposed to be experts, but they're not. Thousands of "non-experts" like Ms. Quealy who turned the telescope the other way round and looked through the intended end know more than they. That's why so many neutral listeners, like Jim, find themselves increasingly alienated from a belief they once regarded, like Professor Tonkin, as axiomatic. They know that anyone who holds a secure debating position doesn't have to behave like that, and wouldn't. Tonkin's side has been told this more than once over the last thirty years. Why are they so ineducable?
* Having once spent a three
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Having once spent a three day conference with David Kathman in LA amicably(as I misguidedly thought at the time) discussing Shakespeare Authorship,I can report first hand that David's debating tactics have neither changed, nor improved, during the last ten years.Like the Bourbons he never forgets anything and never learns anything.
First of all,watch out for Dave's slippery usage of the word "evidence". Dave is well aware(I've pointed it out to him several times) that in the 1960's the Stratford Birth Trust brought a despicable lawsuit to appropriate the estate of a deceased widow.The lady had left a bequest with which to search for further evidence regarding the authorship of Shakespeare and the Stratford Trust wanted her dough because "there was and never would be any contrary evidence".They went into court and got their pants kicked.The English Court ruled absolutely that the Shakespeare case was full of doubt and that verdict still stands. It remains the only verdict ever given in a court of law.
A mock trial was held in the USA in the 1980's. I am the fortunate owner of a copy of the full briefs filed by both sides.Some of the most prestigious members of the US Federal Bar appeared on each side and the anti-Strats scored a major victory.The Stratfordians had been irresponsibly claiming for nearly a hundred years that a contemporary play manuscript,"Sir Thomas More" was in the handwriting of William Shakspere.It got to Supreme (moot) Court and their own lawyers withdrew the "evidence" as being forensically worthless.Kathman still had it posted at his Shakespeare Authorship site twenty-five years years later without the slightest indication that the Strats had been able to find exactly one forensic expert since 1916 who was willing to swear this thing was genuine! That's Dave's definition of convincing evidence.
The Supreme Court case was pled before the three most left wing justices then on the court and the Oxfordians lost the first round with Justice Stephens dissenting in part.However all three later reversed themselves on further consideration of the evidence and several further Supreme Court Justices have since chipped in to the same effect.The Strats may have fooled some of the judges for a little of the time.But they failed to fool even one judge all of the time
Outside of,may be, the old Soviet Union,Mao's China,or Castro's Cuba there is absolutely no chance that Kathman,Shapiro and their partners in intellectual brain washing at Wickepedia can ever find a judge who will rule that their case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
And when is the last time Dave read the preface to Robert Greene's "Farewell to Follie" written circa 1588-1589 though first published in the early eighties ? Greene specifically states that some bumpkin who can scarcely write his name with out the aid of the parish clerk at St-Giles-outside-Cripplegate is about to be made "the father of interludes" and ,due to the front man's near illiteracy,a forthcoming publication of the same will be an absolute mess.
We know one of the "interludes"(thanks to RG's quotations from the manuscript) was a play
called "Faire Em". It eventually appeared anonymously without the purported frontman's name as RG had blown their cover in advance. And,the play later turned up in the library of King Charles with a manuscript attribution to William Shakespeare.The other" interludes" to which Greene referred have yet to be identified.So it wasn't that hard to pull off an Elizabethan authorship hoax if you set your mind to it.
Even Greene (who had the full nitty gritty) was careful not give the real author's name.
I've pointed this out(along with many similar contemporary references) on many occasions but he goes right on claiming that are no contemporary witnesses casting doubt on Will's authorship.It was in dispute from Day One.
Dating the plays? Simple. Date "King John", which has the lowest percentage of double-endings in the Canon ,1590,(as did Honigmann,probably the greatest Stratfordian scholar in the 20th century) and allow for the author writing 2 plays a year(the standard Stratfordian assumption) and you end up with a terminus of mid-1606. Date "King John" 1588 as many Oxfordians did long before Dr. Honigmann wrote and you will end up with the terminus of mid-1604 exactly coincident with the death of Edward de Vere and with the publication of the revised "Hamlet" edition.
If anyone here wants a reliable guide to the Shakespeare Authorship debate(and a fun read),I suggest they try "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" by Jon Michel(which is dedicated to me) and take it from there
EMAIL FROM JIM:
I don't know if Humphrey Tonkin is a pompous and condescending gasbag, but he certainly came across as one during your Wednesday broadcast.
He frequently interrupted Ms. Quealy (particularly as she was beginning to rebuff his arguments) as though he was on a cable TV shout-fest. I'm neutral on the true authorship of the plays but think it's a fascinating topic and was looking forward to hearing a balanced conversation. Instead, it appeared Prof. Tonkin thought he was there to conduct a deposition of a hostile witness.
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