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So here’s the letter I am NOT going to send to the teacher.

Dear Ms. once-published poet:

Regarding your attempt to have my son, Robert, discourse on the subject of his personal culture, we find ourselves somewhat perplexed, not to say dumbfounded on how he is to comply with this.  Looking “culture” up on dictionary.com, I found the following definitions of the word:

1.	the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.

Robert really has never concerned himself with arts, letters or scholarly pursuits — he sold his soul to rock and roll and his heart to science fiction — and  if you think he has manners, it must be because you haven’t seen him demolish the greater part of the turkey on thanksgiving.  Therefore, I should warn you that this boy ain’t got no culture.

2.	that which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc.

Again, as reference to HIS particular culture, please see above above.  We are doing the best we can to civilize both boys, but let’s face it, as teenage males, they’re just past caveman stage in that they have learned to walk upright and have mastered fire (though I still wouldn’t trust them with this too far because of what happened to the hamburger patty and the toaster oven.  Details too gruesome to share.)  We hope eventually they will be excellent in arts and manners, but we aren’t waiting with sandwiches by the phone.

3.	a particular form or stage of civilization, as that of a certain nation or period: Greek culture.

Despite the vast quantities of food consumed by our sons, and Robert’s tendency to refer to his brother as Fidel Comix, dictator of Ericba, (mostly because no comics are allowed to escape Eric’s room.  Not even in inner tubes) Robert is not, to the best of our understanding an independent nation.  In fact, he hasn’t even attempted pseudo-independence declarations along the lines of “you’re not the boss of me.” (Mostly because he’s very afraid the retort would be “well, then.  I’m not the laundress of you, either.”)

4.	development or improvement of the mind by education or training.

 
While this would be an admirable topic for a twenty minute speech, Robert is absolutely convinced this is not what you mean.  Please advise?  He will be happy to discourse for twenty minutes — or indeed hours — about the how-to-write books he’s devoured and the sf he’s read.

5.	the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group: the youth culture; the drug culture.

Again, despite the fact that Robert is a larval writer, equipped with several characters-in-head, he doesn’t appear to be a group of any kind.  Of course, if he keeps hitting the hamburgers, this might change.  Or at least he might acquire his own zip code.  Would that make him a culture?

6.	Anthropology. the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.

The culture he’s been brought up in is US, western, twenty first century, perhaps fitting best within the geek group.  It is not uniquely his.  If this is what you meant, why didn’t you ask for a discussion of “local culture”; “school culture”; “middle class, US culture” or whatever?  There isn’t a Robert Culture.  (Though it makes a neat name for a rock band.)

7.	Biology. a. the cultivation of microorganisms, as bacteria, or of tissues, for scientific study, medicinal use, etc. b. the product or growth resulting from such cultivation.

Here you might possibly have something.  At least if you assume Robert is a typical teen — which he isn’t.  Yeah, there was the incident of the socks, once, but by and large his room is clean.  He even makes his bed — with hospital corners — every morning before going to school.  So, if you want this type of culture, I recommend Eric, who is forever bringing plastic cups full of milk to his room and then forgetting them.  Just give us some time to get the microscope out (yeah, like you don’t have a microscope at home, too) and let Robert talk about ERIC’s culture.  That should make for an interesting talk.

8.	the act or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage.

9.	the raising of plants or animals, esp. with a view to their improvement.

10.	the product or growth resulting from such cultivation.

–verb (used with object)

11.	to subject to culture; cultivate.

Robert once grew a Mango plant.  However, he had to go on vacation and I watered it, resulting in its turning black and mildewy.  I do that to other people’s culture.

12.	Biology. a. to grow (microorganisms, tissues, etc.) in or on a controlled or defined medium. b. to introduce (living material) into a culture medium.

While Robert can be considered an interesting living material introduced into a culture medium, we’re not sure what approach you wish him to take to speak on this.  Would it be speaking of himself as a living organism?  Or would you rather he expounds at length on his incursions into the SF/F community culture?  He is writing a story about a pirate who reproduces by mitosis with the result that he’s always stealing his own treasure…  Then there’s the space opera about the millionaire, his 100 bio-engineered trophe wives, a bio-engineered mentally improved winged cat and an intelligent toaster.  (the cat and the toaster kidnap one of the millionaire’s wives to demand rights for all sentients.  But that’s just the beginning.)

Of course you don’t mean any of the above.  What you do in fact wish is for Robert to speak about his ancestors, and preferrably make it as interesting as possible.  You are in fact convinced that the ancestry makes the person.  Robert knows how to ace this assignment, and so do I.  All he has to do is speak for as short a time as possible about his father’s puritan ancestors who settled in New England and for as long as possible on the people you’d think are exotic — my ancestors.  If he can manage to throw in a hint of oppression (Unlikely as it might be.  My branch of Almeidas aren’t generally scared.  We’re the people other people are scared of) and hard luck, you’ll be putty in his hands.

Yes, Robert understands this, and so do I.  And he’ll play the game for points and grades, as I did in my time.

But just once I wish we could talk to you — really talk — and examine those assumptions you are imposing on the children.  You are teaching a gifted class.  Why would you assume that each person has an individual “culture” which is genetically determined?  And why would you want to indocrinate the children in this horribly limiting idea?  Is your vision of the perfect world the middle ages, where the son of a cobbler must grow up to be a cobbler?

I’m not innocent or naive.  I know that the dead hand of the past weighs upon all of us more than we’d like it.  The understanding that we are creatures of our genes and our ancestors’ ice age — or before — adaptations to a long vanished environment (my friend Dave Freer sent me an article the other day about how people see ANIMAL shapes clearer than other shapes, for ex) is with me always, yes.  I am also aware that the very language, which informs our thoughts, is the product of generations of accretion and erosion and carries within it the scars of long-forgotten traumas (in the region of Portugal I come from, slang for pig and blond is the same word — Russo — and the Rus tribe of Vikings raided that coast extensively.  You figure it.)  I’m even more aware — for various reasons — that a trauma can take several generations to work itself through a family.  My friend Charles thinks this is the origin of the biblical “sins of the father” and seven generations thing.  He says in psychology it’s believed a major trauma takes seven generations to resolve itself in a family tree.  I don’t know.  I haven’t had time to fact-check him.  But he’s usually right in these factoids.

BUT all this you could say is the result of the human condition and the civilization we are immersed in.  It does not result in individual cultures.  Nor does it mean that an individual can’t transcend his place of birth and its culture, change it all together, and stretch wings  towards the distant skies (and hopefully the distant stars).

When I was a child in Portugal bubble gum came in one flavor.  Tutti Fruti.  It was a vaguely sweet flavor that made a nod to banana and cherry and who knows what else.  A flavor that didn’t linger and made no particular impression.  Each piece of gum tasted exactly like every other.  They came off the machine that way.   Children are not bubble gum.  And they aren’t all tutti fruti.  It is pernicious, wrong and possibly immoral to teach them that they’re stuck with the language, habits and beliefs of their parents, or even of the wider group they were born into — let alone the language, habits and beliefs of their distant ancestors.

By all means, have the children talk about themselves and even about what makes them unique.  But don’t saddle them with the idea this is a “culture” and therefore immutable.

Please, think about what you are doing, and allow the children to be what they need to be — tuti fruti, perhaps, some of them, but also mint and green apple, and the occasional, wild bit of cinnamon.

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