Alas, poor Will — or gooble gobble, one of us!

This is not what they say, but this is what they MEAN. And it’s part of the reason that this makes me so hot under the collar. Quite frankly, PERSONALY, I couldn’t care less if there ever WAS a man named William Shakespeare, much less who used that name and why. The plays are their own miracle and their own contained universe. But I do care and care PASSIONATELY about this sort of stupidity. It’s not just elitist stupidity — oh, no — that I could even tolerate. It’s stupidity that denies the existence of human individuality and the occasional, erratic, spark of genius. It is also, in many many ways unfathomably stupid about history. 

(To begin with and before I start on the rant — let me point out that people I admire, like Mark Twain and Jim Baen believed this stuff. That’s fine. If you look at what those two people believed in toto both of them believed a lot of things that make you go “Oh, my Lord, no. ” I’m not going to go into Mr. Baen’s beliefs partly because I have them only second or third hand and he was always perfectly reasonable to me. Twain, however — if you want to get the full grasp of this genius’ — and this is not ironical, he WAS a genius — handle on history, read his school-marmish/puritan Joan of Arc. In my experience both Mark Twain and Jim Baen and another half dozen people I can think of, fall under the genius exception themselves. Geniuses can believe any amount of twaddle, because they’re so exceptional themselves they’re used to thinking something COMPLETELY different from the common herd. So. . . for them, the counterintuitive becomes normal and outside their area of specific knowledge they can be very. . . uh. . . odd. Which I think leads to the association of genius and madness in stereotype. Now that’s disposed of, let’s continue to the argument itself. )

First, lets now and for all time dispose of the “Shakespeare was a peasant from an illiterate household. ” Shakespeare was the son of what we would consider upper middle class — a skilled craftsman and for a time an officer of the town’s government. It is highly unlikely that Shakespeare’s father wasn’t literate. His mother perhaps — but that’s harder to determine because in those days it was considered “fast” for a woman to read and write, so they made a “mark” on official documents, even if they could indeed write. 

I don’t have time to go haring off after references, since I’m trying to finish Soul of Fire which is long overdue at Bantam due to my health issues — and my Shakespeare books are in the library at the end of the hall, a room I can’t enter without staying there for at least three hours — but I’m sure they’re not that hard to hunt down. Take me on faith for now, and if you need references I promise to have them for you within the month. 

So. . . “From an illiterate household. ” I will grant you there were probably many, many illiterate people in Elizabethan England. There are many functionally illiterate people now. However, Elizabethan England was NOT the middle ages. The printing press had been invented. People wrote letters to friends and business contracts and were ALMOST as overlawyered as we, ourselves are. Printers and booksellers had a booming business of pamphlets and stories, poems and plays. Without television or radio or any other distractions, people used the printed word as entertainment, solace and distraction. You find printed stuff everywhere, from the libraries of the very rich, to the homes of the relatively poor.

 I’d like to point out right here and for the record that Christopher Marlowe’s father had a printed bible in his house when he died. AND he was “just a shoemaker. ” (He didn’t however have any of his son’s plays or poems. More on that later. ) One of my reference books on Elizabethan England — and again, I’ll have to look for it later — swears that the ratio of literacy was about the same it is now and the range of people who read for pleasure about the same, too. Besides, ALL the playwrights from that time that we give half a figgin about were sons of the middle class. Shakespeare and Marlowe both were — exactly alike — sons of craftsmen. Yes, Marlowe went to Cambridge as a scholarship boy. It don’t mean nothing. The fact he could qualify to Cambridge and earn the scholarship as a son of the middle class tells us there were means for people to learn not just reading but Latin and Greek too at that social level. It is no more astonishing that he should have become learned than that Shakespeare should have written the plays. And no less. Green was a son of the middle class, too. And there are half a dozen others who — without attaining Shakespeare’s stature, or even Kit’s — are still remembered by name and fragments of plays. ALL sons of the middle class. Often disowned by their families. Theater in those days was NOT an intellectual endeavor. It was entertainment produced by the middle class for the middle class. Consumable, fungible entertainment, at that. 

Second of all, let’s dispose now and for all of the idea that Shakespeare was realy Oxford or Marlowe or what have you. (One of the loonier ideas floated was that he was Queen Elizabeth. ) I can’t stop you believing this if you do — I can’t stop you believing the sky is made of green cheese either. To quote Mr. Marlowe “What we behold is censur’d by our eies. ” But go and read Marlowe — who had serious issues understanding what made people tick or seeing anything redeemable in anyone — and then go read Oxford — who was a victim of “very good” education — and tell me that Marlowe could write Shakespeare without a road to damascus experience that, in effect, changed him into something wholly different; or that Oxford could write Shakespeare without his own mind telling him it was too crude by half and what you really needed was a more mannered approach. Piffle. And pish tosh, too. “once you eliminate the impossible, the remaining solution however unlikely. . . ” or words to that effect. In this case, Occam’s razor will serve. You can believe Kit Marlowe lived past his supposed death and changed personality so completely he could be Shakespeare — and no doubt is still flipping burgers somewhere in a joint owned by Morrison and Presley — or you can believe Will was a son of the middle class, a little more talented than most, who made good in London as did others of his generation. 

The current bit of nonsense above seems to hinge mostly on the fact that the plays are too good to belong to that peasant with mud on his boots. An argument that offends me and irks me. Its innanity should be self evident when one of the people suggests the plays are too good to be written by a single individual. Works of such towering genius have to be collaborations. Yes, yes, this makes perfect sense. ALL the works of genius of humankind are, after all, created by committee. Look up Da Vinci; Mozart;Einstein. ALL really groups of people who just chose to pass as a single person. After all such works could not possibly be created by a single person. And look at everything groups have achieved. Say, Microsoft Windows Vista. CLEARLY group work is far superior to any personal endeavor. How could you doubt it? 

This should be enough to expose the intellect of the person making this claim. If you need more, there’s this absolute gem: “It argues there are few connections between Shakespeare’s life and his alleged works, but they do show a strong familiarity with the lives of the upper classes and a confident grasp of obscure details from places like Italy.” Oh, yes, indeed. Because there were NO pamphlets for sale at the time with stories about all these lands. There were ABSOLUTELY no pamphlets circulating with, say, the story of Romeo and Juliet. NONE. (coff) No, no, Elizabethans existed in a vaccum. As for Shakespeare’s confident grasp of obscure details, suffice it to say his knowledge of geography was much like my older son’s who until recently thought California was a city in the great state of Chicago. 

And do I REALLY need to explain why his will isn’t written in the style of his plays? Must we go into the fact that I doubt Mr. King’s will features a sentient car or a psychotic psychic teen? And I doubt J. K. Rowling is planning to store her will in Gingrots? 

As for making no reference to the plays — there was no copyright in Shakespeare’s day. You got paid for the play when you delivered it. And then you got paid for it again — a MUCH smaller amount — when you allowed someone to print the “accurate” version of your play. By that time several hastilly written copies would already be circulating, copied down by someone who sat through the play. This is — to me — one of those infuriating mistakes. The “It’s this way now, so it was always this way. We have copyright, so that’s the natural law of mankind. ” No. It’s not. Get over it. 

If you need more detailed ranting and rambling — even if the plays were by then famous, play writing was — like acting in the Victorian period, for women — something that could make you famous and rich but which was “not quite respectable. ” Shakespeare kept his wild ways — play writing — in London. At home, for the sake of the family he and his wife were raising, he acted the good father and the solid bourgeois. Remember these plays were about murder, adultery and other such things. Titilating, but not CLEAN. They were not the literary things our reverence for them tends to make them. So much for that. 

Smart people, with no knowledge of Elizabethan England specifically make other arguments — among them that there is no such person as “Shakespeare. ” We do, however, have a record of his baptism, of his schooling, of his lodging in London, of his membership in the King’s Men, etc, etc. Shakespeare is, in fact, one of the better documented lives from Elizabethan England. Which, by the way, isn’t saying much. Even though Elizabethans kept fairly decent records as they were, in the centuries intervening, fires, war, revolutions, etc have put paid to a lot of their repositories. So, how can these people say he’s not documented at all? Well — it all hinges on Elizabethan’s approach to spelling, which would be completely understood by any teenager who uses AIM. “If it can be understood and sounds roughly the same, just spell it like that.”  So, yeah, Mr. Shakespeare makes an appearance as a variety of names including — I think, not sure though, since this is how my mom spells it in joking and it’s therefore stuck in my mind — Shogspierre. 

One of the things I find hillarious is that it never occurs to these people to doubt that Marlowe was Marlowe — this despite the fact that the man spelled his name as Marlin, Merlin, Marlown and an endless array of other names. He spelled other words like that too — in fact, he seemed to have my inability to spell a word the same way twice. Sometimes including “the” and “a”. 

And then there is the piece de resistance — there’s nothing in his life that explains these plays. And I have to tell you this argument has me stumped. It brings to mind this other writer — mind you, nowhere of Shakespeare’s stature or talent — who was born in Portugal, in a family that spoke no English — well, her grandfather spoke a little but it was workingman’s English picked up in South Africa during his years there. Pidgin more than anything else — an in which no one else — that we can find proof — read or commented or published science fiction or fantasy. 

In fact Portugal as far as that goes has a paucity of standard fantasy. Elves and gnomes and the like are not part of local tradition, which tends to be more Catholic in its approach to the fantastic. So HOW in the Heaven’s name could this person — or someone who purports to be her — appear in the US fifteen years later, writing SF/F with a strong Celtic flavor in idiomatic English? 

We have no record of this person’s schooling, either, or much of her existence. While someone with a name that might or might not have been her maiden name attended a college in Portugal, this is really hard to prove as the first name was different and a bunch of names in the middle were missing by the time she started writing.  I mean she calls herself Sarah Marques de Almeida. Someone with a similar name graduated from Stow High School as an exchange student, but, notably, her last name is missing. The rest of her birth name is there — Alice Maria da Silva Marques (they went by Spanish rules in cutting the graduation certificate!)  — but not the last name. So, it’s probably a coincidence. And while we’re at it, there is no record in the archives in Portugal of the marriage of this Alice Maria da Silva Marques de Almeida to anyone named Hoyt and no record of her having acquired citizenship or changed her name. NONE. Now, we know processes to do this are a bit cumbersome and cost money, but surely anyone would have gone through them? Other people at the time did. 

All of Alice’s family’s recorded correspondence and such things as relatives’ death announcements in paper refer to Alice, not Sarah. Clearly this person writing about something so different from her background and evincing knowledge she couldn’t have — let alone in a language not her own — is at worst an impostor and at best an artifact of our lack of knowledge of the times. It’s so unlikely as to be impossible, isn’t it? Particularly when you consider how well documented the twentieth century is. 

So. . . okay, I’ve had my fun. I’m no Shakespeare, more’s the pity, and it’s unlikely everyone will ever care to investigate my biography or to claim me.  BUT if they did the recorded parts are a nightmare of inconsistencies.  And CERTAINLY nothing in my background points to what I write.  Oh, there are links, but you’d have to know me personaly and closely to see them.  Something biographers don’t get, particularly several centuries later.

HOWEVER the reason this argument REALLY bothers me is the following: It excludes people from humanity. It divides humanity into groups and judges them according to the group they fall in.  How, you say? Well, I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the intellectual’s tendency to think in “us” fully human and “not us” who aren’t fully human. Part of this is because of course we understand each other and often not “the other. ” Part of it is because in general we rub elbows only with those like us — our tribe, if you will. But the other part — in our century, where we are sort of a little elite of knowledge if not of money — is that we tend to think of the “benighted” masses as inferior and unable to produce someone/something like us. Or, heaven forbid, better than us.  We are, in our own minds, the chosen few. There’s a tendency to identify with the nobility of old — whose education and writing — at least what survived — were often unimpeachable and whose lives were recorded for posterity. So, of course, Shakespeare must have been a nobleman.  Or at least have a Master’s from Cambridge.  

When I hear these arguments what I hear is the denying that an individual can be wildly different from his place of birth and origin. What I hear is that we’re affirming we’re better than “them”, a nobility of the pen. What I hear is that William Shakespeare couldn’t have been himself, but must have been in fact one just like us or, as was the expression when I was growing up “uma pessoa de bem” — roughly translated as ‘being good ton” (which was also used) — a nobleman by any other name. 

When in fact geniuses like him — or Da Vinci who was almost for sure the illegitimate son of an illiterate young woman — tend to be sudden startling occurrences emerging from the human race like lightening bolts to remind us that genetics and environment arent’ in fact everything — that there is in all of us a spark of the sublime. That humans are more than a sum of their parts.   And that people of great mind and talent can emerge