and then Marlovian Ros Barber’s own review of SBD.
If
the distinguished contributors to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt hope their
book will place the traditional author of Shakespeare’s canon where the title claims
and settle the Shakespeare authorship question for once and for all, they are
likely to be disappointed. In the hands of twenty-one eminent Shakespeare
scholars, the case for William Shakespeare of Stratford sounds plausible
enough, and will reassure the already convinced as well as those who would like
to be. But anyone versed in the primary material of the authorship question
will emerge essentially unsatisfied. Although a well-written, accessible
and interesting read, it is riddled with the common misunderstandings
that characterise this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ and contains factual errors
that suggest certain contributors haven’t done their homework. Nevertheless
it is full of fascinating information for initiate and expert alike, and (with
the exception of Paul Edmondson’s final chapter), reasonable in tone.
Though
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt aims to ‘bring fresh perspectives to an
intriguing cultural phenomenon’, it is in many ways a reprise of James
Shapiro’s Contested Will, side-stepping recent
scholarly work on the authorship question to focus extensively on examining the
‘pathology’ and psychology of Shakespeare skeptics.
Though
the belated entry of orthodox academics into this 156-year-old controversy is a
welcome development, there are two major problems with Shakespeare Beyond
Doubt. One is a blatant attempt to win the debate through
semantics. Throughout the book, the editors Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson
decree that those who don’t agree with them be described not with the
well-established term ‘anti-Stratfordian’, but with the hackle-raising
‘anti-Shakespearean’. Their justification is that ‘to deny Shakespeare of
Stratford’s connection to the work attributed to him is to deny the essence of,
in part, what made that work possible … Shakespeare was formed by both
Stratford-upon-Avon and London.’ Yet the contested connection between
Shakespeare of Stratford and the work attributed to him is the authorship
question. Were it supported by incontestable evidence (rather than such
fragile evidential scraps as the disputed Hand D in Thomas More) there would be
no need for their book. The term ‘anti-Shakespeareans’ is also fundamentally
inaccurate: the person Ben Jonson referred to in the First Folio as ‘the AUTHOR
William Shakespeare’ is esteemed as highly by those who question his identity
as by those who don’t.
But
the most significant failing of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is that it
attempts to support the orthodox position using evidence the sceptics do not
contest – that there was an author widely known as ‘William Shakespeare’ –
while failing to address recent scholarship. The most glaring omission
is Diana Price’s 2001 Shakespeare’s
Unorthodox Biography, the first book on the authorship
question to be published by an academic press. The authors cannot be
unaware of the most notable advancement in Shakespeare authorship studies in
the last fifteen years, and yet it is mentioned precisely nowhere. For
the second academic book on the subject to pretend that the first doesn’t exist
is disingenuous and unscholarly, and suggests orthodox scholars cannot answer
Price’s arguments. Richard Paul Roe’s 2011 The
Shakespeare Guide to Italy, the culmination of twenty years’
research which persuasively demonstrates Shakespeare’s first-hand knowledge of
Milan, Verona, Mantua, Venice, Padua, Lombardy, Florence, Pisa, and Sicily is
also notable by its absence, as is this author’s 2010 non-Stratfordian essay
published in the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Hardy Cook’s ‘Selected
Reading List’ is more of a ‘Selective Reading List’, and sidelines recent and
authoritative non-Stratfordian texts, highlighting early (19th Century) and
poorly-written ones.
Throughout
the volume, and despite significant developments in non-Stratfordian research
in the last decade, only arguments advanced prior to 1960 are acknowledged.
Paul Edmondson claims that those he perceives as his ‘antagonists’ ignore
evidence, yet himself presides over a volume of essays that demolishes straw
men while skillfully eliding the more challenging work of contemporary
researchers. Weighing this approach against the accepted principles of academic
argument, one must ask whether Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is genuinely a
work of scholarship, or simply a skilful piece of propaganda.
Written
on May 10th, 2013
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