Should I Be Flattered?
by Bryan H. Wildenthal (July 29, 2023)
(See Copyright & Permissions Note on Vita & Contact page.)
It seems the more truculent defenders of the traditional theory of Shakespeare authorship are paying much closer attention to skeptical arguments than most of us would have guessed.
I’ve never had a Facebook account and generally avoid social media like the plague (I’m a bit old-fashioned that way), but a San Diego friend alerted me that on July 28 several people associated with the hilariously well-named “Oxfraud” website were in a tither over my essay on Elizabeth Winkler’s book posted barely a week earlier.
And here I was (LOL) feeling some trouble getting even friends and family to plow through my confessedly nerdy deep-dive into the unhinged reactions to Winkler’s book!
Does this suggest a certain fragile anxiety among defenders of the traditional theory? As discussed in my July 20 essay, they seem deeply rattled by Winkler and her success in shaking up the authorship conversation and getting it mainstream attention.
If you feel like dipping your toe, here’s the Oxfraud link. Be warned: It’s toxic. As an antidote, see the delightful new website “Oxfraudfraud.”
(Update: Very apropos to “Oxfraud,” see my August 22 post on “Bullying in the Shakespeare Authorship Debate.”)
Who would have thought Oliver Kamm, famous columnist for the prestigious Times of London, would so quickly go after my new and obscure little blog half a world away in San Diego? I must thank Kamm for linking to my essay, though it doesn’t seem he or his fellow Oxfraudsters got very far into it.
I appreciate that Kamm’s July 28 response so nicely corroborates a point made on pages 6–7 (referring to the PDF version of my essay): that he specializes in nasty, personal, ad hominem attacks. (For example, comparing those who disagree with him on arcane issues of literary history to Holocaust deniers. Do I really need to point out yet again how disgusting and disrespectful that is to Holocaust victims and survivors above all?)
The sum total of Kamm’s reaction to my essay — suggesting he lacks any rational fact-based or logical responses — is to assail the past misfortunes of the small independent law school I served as a full-time faculty member for many years.
Which is relevant to my views on Shakespeare … exactly … how?
The school is actually doing OK these days (thanks for asking), in what remains a difficult environment for so many smaller educational institutions. I’m looking forward to teaching there again in Spring 2024.
Given Kamm’s evident Trumpian zest for kicking institutions and people when they’re down, I’m surprised he’s not boasting that his megaphone is so much bigger than mine (as it surely is).
I guess he thinks this charming attitude helps him (and his amen chorus) evade the actual substance of my essay or the fact that I’m not easily dismissed as a kook — an honors graduate of Stanford with a long record of scholarly publications in leading law reviews, one relied upon in not one but two major U.S. Supreme Court decisions and another which led to revisions in the leading treatise in its field (see generally my vita).
My scholarly work evidently appeals to lawyers, judges, and fellow scholars across many ideological divides … like the authorship question itself, as discussed in my “Snobbery Slander” essay which also deals with Kamm and the kind of attacks in which he takes obvious glee.
While Kamm’s own attack on my July 20 essay is curiously content-free, I do feel compelled to respond to some specific comments by three of Kamm’s chorus.
Tom Reedy says I “writ[e] so badly that it’s hard to get through [the essay]. I bailed halfway through the second section.” Is this supposed to hurt my feelings or something? Bailing out on the argument doesn’t suggest much confidence in your side of it.
Maybe it’s the nitpicking lawyer and law professor in me, but good luck winning a court case like this: “Your Honor, the other side’s argument is so badly written I’m just going to bail out on responding to it.”
Did Philip Buchan similarly “bail out” after reading my comment (page 1, third paragraph) that the “modern form” of the authorship debate “began … almost two centuries ago” (in the 1850s)?
Either that or Buchan is deliberately and dishonestly misrepresenting what I actually say, as he falsely claims inconsistency in my criticism of those (like Professor James Shapiro) who deny the indisputable documented existence of published early doubts during Shakespeare’s own time. (I’ve clarified the third paragraph for Oxfraudsters and others too lazy to read further.)
Buchan claims my comment concedes such doubts began “exactly when Shapiro claimed [they] began” (“two centuries ago”). But on page 6 (too much, I guess, to expect Oxfraudsters to read five more pages), I stated (emphasis added here):
“Dozens of indications of doubt were published in the years before the credited author’s death in 1616 — which was greeted by deafening silence that year. These include five separate publications — not least the 1609 Sonnets dedication reference to the ‘ever-living’ (i.e. deceased) poet — implying that the true author died years earlier (which would explain the peculiar silence in 1616). Still more doubts were raised in the decades following 1616. Yet more were expressed during the 1700s, all long before the modern authorship debate began in the 1850s.”
The “modern authorship debate,” as even Oxfraudsters are well aware, refers to the systematic development and publication of alternative authorship theories like those pressed by the Baconians starting in the 1850s or the Oxfordians in 1920. That is obviously distinct from when doubts were first raised and expressed.
In another knowingly dishonest claim (the concise three-letter word is “lie”), Ben Montanto says my essay doesn’t provide “any supporting evidence” and criticizes my “lack of references.”
Montanto can’t claim Reedy’s explicit (or Buchan’s possible) excuse of not reading past the first page or two. At the very outset, the essay explicitly links to a “source memorandum” (25 pages long), “[f]or documentation,” providing an exhaustive list of references documenting every single reasonably debatable point in the 22-page essay.
The essay itself gets into a factual discussion of the evidence — more detailed on these points than any of the three negative reviews of Winkler to which I respond — on the Davies of Hereford poems (pp. 8–9) and the Parnassus plays (pp. 10–11).
I laughingly note that people reading advance drafts of the essay unanimously told me it had too many factual details! My response was to predict (accurately, we now see) that it would be attacked for any perceived failure to thoroughly document all key points.
If you want to challenge any of my specifics, please go ahead. It’s so hard to get Stratfordians to actually debate or discuss any relevant facts about authorship, we’re honestly grateful for the rare occasions they take a break from their numbingly repetitive ad hominem slurs.
It sure is hard to debate people who boast about not even reading what you write — or just lie about it.
Dipping a bit deeper into the murky Oxfraud waters, I see a comment posted July 22 by the aforementioned Tom Reedy — not responding to my essay (as best I can tell) but generally mocking the idea that Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) might have been the real author “Shakespeare.”
Reedy asserts that: (1) Oxford “never set foot in a public theatre” and (2) “there [was] not even the slightest rumor [during his time] that [Oxford] ever wrote under an alias.” (He tacks these two claims to the end of a bizarre anecdote about farting. I kid you not. You’ll have to ask him to explain. I’m not going there. Ohh … kay ….)
As to Reedy’s claim 1:
I have no idea what time-traveling omniscience enables him to know Oxford “never set foot in a public theatre.” Known facts about Oxford include that: (1) he personally rented the private Blackfriars theatre in the 1580s, (2) he sponsored troupes of players at various times (as his own father did when he was a boy), (3) he employed playwrights as his private secretaries (perhaps to assist with his own writing?), and (4) his own contemporaries repeatedly hailed him as a fine playwright even though we have no surviving plays under his own name.
The queen herself did not attend plays in public theatres. But is Reedy claiming aristocrats like Oxford never did either? The Wikipedia page on Henry Wriothesley (Earl of Southampton) quotes a 1599 letter discussed in standard orthodox scholarly works, stating that he and another nobleman were skipping out on attendance at the royal court to “pass away the time in London merely in going to plays every day.” Another well-known 1599 letter (quoted in Winkler’s book, p. 183) states that Oxford’s own son-in-law (William Stanley, Earl of Derby) was “busied only in penning comedies for the common players.” Did he collaborate with his father-in-law? We don’t have any surviving plays under Derby’s name either.
Given Oxford’s obvious lifelong exposure to and interest in theatre, it seems hardly a stretch, indeed a very reasonable inference, that he also may have frequently attended public theatres — and indeed may have penned plays for them.
Furthermore, even many orthodox Stratfordian scholars now seem to increasingly agree with the longtime Oxfordian view that many Shakespearean works appear better suited for and were probably more often performed in private, aristocratic, or court venues — not unlike the very one we know Oxford personally rented in the 1580s.
It is pure chance that those two 1599 letters happen to survive from an era of which many if not most records are lost. We must inevitably fill the gaps with reasonable inferences from the known facts. The question is: What type of person, with what education, life experiences, perspectives, and opportunities for travel, could most reasonably and plausibly have written the works of “Shakespeare”?
As to Reedy’s claim 2 on whether there was even so much as a “rumor” during his time that Oxford “ever wrote under an alias,” this was explicitly suggested in the most famous work of literary criticism published during the Elizabethan era.
The Art of English Poesy (1589) (Whigham & Rebhorn scholarly ed. 2007) states (book 1, ch. 8, p. 112 & n. 56):
“I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably and suppressed it again [meaning ‘afterward’], or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it, as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned and to show himself amorous of any good art.”
The same publication, in a later but obviously related passage, makes explicitly clear that Oxford was one of those noble “gentlemen” of Queen Elizabeth’s royal “court” who were known for “writ[ing] commendably” and then afterward “suppress[ing]” what they wrote or “suffer[ing] it to be published without their own names to it.”
The later passage (book 1, ch. 31, p. 149, emphasis added here) specifically describes a “crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest. Of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford ….”
Reedy and most of his fellow Oxfraudsters are well aware of this book and what it says. How they contort themselves to rationalize away this evidence is for them to explain.
Despite all this, I stand by the courteous and generous comments in my 2019 book, Early Shakespeare Authorship Doubts.
See page 26 (n. 16): “Let me be clear about my respect for [Tom] Reedy, [David] Kathman, Terry Ross, and other independent Stratfordian scholars. That is demonstrated by this book’s repeated citations of their work (see the Bibliography), though I often do, to be sure, disagree quite strongly with many of their scholarly arguments.”
And see page 119 (n. 148) (emphasis in original): “I have the utmost respect for Stratfordian scholars, perhaps especially dedicated amateurs like [Terry] Ross, [David] Kathman, and [Tom] Reedy who are willing to engage the merits of the SAQ. I have made clear my respect and admiration for them and amateur scholars in general. ‘Amateur’ is not a pejorative term in my view. I wear it proudly in this field (though I am a professional legal scholar). Though sorely tempted, I do not stoop to their sweeping and regrettable name-calling, however much I criticize on the merits some particular arguments they make. Anti-Stratfordians ignore at their peril the often helpful scholarly work of Ross, Kathman, and Reedy.”
My book carefully notes the relevant credentials of such scholars, including (p. 26) that Kathman has “a doctorate in linguistics” and Reedy “a bachelor’s degree in English,” and that Ross (p. 119 n. 148) earned “master’s degrees in English literature and creative writing” (Winkler, by the way, also earned a master’s degree in English literature, from Stanford no less).
I will confess to being even more “sorely tempted” today to “stoop to their … name-calling,” but I won’t respond in kind. If they choose to continue going ad hominem (as they have for years), that’s on them.
Readers may draw their own conclusions.
The arguments of defenders of the traditional theory are often pathetically weak — and their personal attacks highly offensive. But I generally try to assume that in daily life, outside the puzzling weirdness of this debate, they’re nice and normal people.
Why this debate causes them to “lose it” so spectacularly is a question they need to ask and answer for themselves.
In striking contrast to the sour, unhappy, juvenile, and snarky tone of so many comments posted on “Oxfraud,” we skeptics enjoy the authorship question and take a calm and mature approach to it. Kamm is laughably mistaken if he thinks we’re “brood[ing]” about it.
And if you think we’re going to give up or go away, well (chuckle), don’t hold your breath. Why? Here’s a tip: We actually love Shakespeare — the works and the author, whoever that really is — perhaps more than most people. And we’re naively and genuinely fascinated by the history of that era.
The Skeptical Professor 