Diatribune

I am very unhappy with Sir Derek Jacobi. He’s the actor, probably best known as star of the BBC series “I, Claudius”, who has officially signed on with a group tying to sell the idea that William Shakespeare did not write the plays of William Shakespeare. And before your eyes glaze over allow me to explain that Will Shakespeare was not that different then the average person today. His father was a successful politician, wealthy and well connected and probably stuck up as hell. As a teenager Will got his girlfriend pregnant and was forced to marry her, and then, in his early twenties, he ran out on her and their three daughters, and then made a nice living as an actor and 14th century sex symbol and who probably had many meaningless affairs, perhaps with members of both sexes, but who also continued to provide for his family at great economic sacrifice to himself. And just because he lived before the invention of the iPhone he is not considered relevant. Posh! Not relevant: a bisexual philander? They are always relevant in the liberal arts community! Listen, if he were alive today Will would be just at least as big as Kevin Federline, perhaps bigger because Will could write his own name without moving their lips.
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John Shakespeare, the father, was a landowner and politician, with a trophy wife and a coat of arms. As any good politician John liked to refer to himself as just a simple guy, a mere maker of gloves, in much the same way 350 years later Joe Kennedy liked to call himself a liquor importer instead of a bootlegger. But like old Joe, John was ambitious as hell. He served in almost every job in Stratford government, and as any good pre-capitalistic bourgeoisie his son got the best of everything. He was probably even educated in the King’s New School, a sort of junior college for civil service types. But young Will got sidelined by that thing that side lines most teenagers, sex. In 1582, at the age of 18, Will married Anne Hathaway and six months later she gave birth to their daughter. John must have been very disappointed. Then, three years later, Anne gave birth to twin girls. It was shortly thereafter that young Will ran away from home and joined a London’s theater company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. John must have been doubly pleased.
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Most people in London knew Will as an actor, but we know he wrote poetry because there is a 1593 copy of “Venus and Adonis” and a 1594 copy of “The Rape of Lucrene” with dedications signed ‘William Shakespeare”. “Even as the sun with purple-colored face – Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn – Rose-checked Adonis hied him to the chase; - Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn”. Okay, it’s not up to the standard of “Gimmie Some More”, but this was before the invention of white trash millionaires such as Brittney Spears.
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Doubters like Sir Jacobi like to point out that there are no copies of Will’s plays or poetry from the 1590’s with him listed as the author, but over a third of all the plays published at this time listed no author at all. Authorship had just been invented and they didn’t have all the ramifications worked out yet. It would be another over 400 years before the RIAA sued any college students for downloading music. But a 1598 book written by Francis Meres does mention twelve plays defiantly written by William Shakespeare, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Comedy of Errors, Love Labors Lost, King John, Titus and Adois, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV, and what must be a lost work, William Shakespeare’s The Matrix Redux”.

The usual argument given by the antistratfordians is that Will was the front man for a nobleman who could not publicly admit to being involved in the theatre, not because being theatrical back then was considered “gay”, because there was no “gay” before 1968, but because being theatrical was, periodically, illegal. The general feeling at the time was that human actors on stage were a degenerate form of amusement, where as the other great public entertainment of the time, bear baiting, was wholesome and family friendly. Just not toward the bear’s family.

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But Will’s plays were popular and profitable, with lots of violence and sex. Whoever wrote this stuff, this was not the average stuff. And the works have survived for 500 years because they are extraordinary and because in 1624, after Will’s death, Richard Burbridge, Will’s friend and fellow actor and fellow investor in the company, made sure the plays were preserved using the still novel invention of printing. Thank God he didn’t record them on Betamax.
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But why does Sir Jacobi think that a common jerk could not have written “To be or not to be, that is the question…” (Hamlet) or “Out damn spot. Out” (MacBeth), or “Oh, ye fen sucked fogs!”(King Lear)? Considering that everything attributed to Will was based on earlier works by classic authors like Plato and Plutarch, not to mention that most prolific writer in the ancient world, Ann Ominous, it is clear that Will knew the first rule of good writing; steal only from the best and steal often.