by Bryan H. Wildenthal (August 28, 2023)
(See Copyright & Permissions Note on Vita & Contact page.)
Since my August 22 post mentioned the issue of online bullying in the context of the Shakespeare authorship debate — and related ad hominem attacks, mockery, personal denigration, and slander — this seems a good time to republish a short essay I posted online five years ago and then incorporated into my 2019 book, Early Shakespeare Authorship Doubts (pp. 342–45).
The essay focuses on a particular incident in 2016 — which needs to be far better known — when Columbia University Professor James Shapiro, a widely hailed Shakespeare expert, publicly boasted on a nationally syndicated radio show of his practice, intent, or desire to bully and threaten any student of his who dared to pose even a “question” suggesting doubt about the identity of the primary author of the Shakespearean works.
Below is the text of the 2018 essay (with some minor edits and reformatting), followed by my 2023 Update.
Shapiro “On the Media”: Name-Calling and Bullying Students and Doubters
For far too long when it comes to the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), orthodox academics, whatever their motivations, have largely avoided the simple duty that any serious scholar has: to engage forthrightly with the evidence. Instead, such scholars, when they deign to mention the SAQ at all, have focused almost entirely on trying to denigrate or psychoanalyze authorship doubters.
In its most insulting and ridiculous forms, this has involved suggestions of snobbery, mental illness, and even comparisons to Holocaust denial (see, e.g., Edmondson & Wells 2011; Shahan, SAC Letters to SBT & RSC, 2010–15; Wildenthal, “Rollett and Shapiro,” 2016; see also my 2019 “Snobbery Slander” essay).
A milder approach — almost more maddeningly smug and condescending — has been to deploy a fog of fashionable academic jargon to dismiss authorship doubt as a purely contingent product of modern times and cultural preoccupations. For typical examples, see Shapiro’s 2010 book and many of the essays in the 2013 book edited by Edmondson & Wells.
Somehow, from the orthodox perspective, it is never about the simple factual and historical issue at the heart of the SAQ:
Does the available evidence, fully considered in context, raise reasonable questions about who actually wrote these particular works of literature?
Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University, as so often, illustrates the problem all too well. He spoke at length about the SAQ in a December 2016 interview with Brooke Gladstone on her public radio show On the Media (“Our Shakespeare, Ourselves“; On the Media is produced by New York City’s WNYC and syndicated on numerous stations nationwide).
Shapiro’s opinions are well known, but one might have hoped Gladstone, a respected journalist, would try to be a bit more fair. Sadly, while she claimed “we won’t fix on resolving [the authorship] question,” Gladstone joined Shapiro in scornfully dismissing skeptics with the nonsensical epithet “Shakespeare deniers” (once by Gladstone, three times by Shapiro).
The term “Shakespeare denier” appears designed to invoke a spurious and offensive comparison with Holocaust deniers. See my 2016 essay discussing the blatant comparisons to Holocaust denial by Professor Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University and Professor Gary Taylor of Florida State University — along with Shapiro’s weak and disingenuous attempt to distance himself from such reckless and outrageous comparisons.
Both Shapiro and Gladstone embraced the stock meme — which I pointed out as blatantly false in my talk at the SOF Annual Conference in Chicago in October 2017 — that authorship doubts did not arise before the mid-19th century.
While they briefly acknowledged a few anti-Stratfordian arguments, both made clear they were “far more interested,” “not [in] what people thought, but why they thought it” (first quotation by Gladstone, second by Shapiro; my emphases). Gladstone led into Shapiro’s statement by saying: “[W]e won’t fix on resolving [the authorship] question. We’re far more interested in the way that war has been waged across centuries.” This was consistent with the primary focus of Shapiro’s 2010 book, in which he mainly analyzed the SAQ as a cultural phenomenon, making little effort to engage its merits.
And why do doubters doubt, in Shapiro’s condescending psychoanalytical imagination?
First, he unsubtly suggested it is a mere infantile obsession, mockingly imitating the childish voice of an apparently well-informed fourth-grader, at a school he visited, who dared to ask him an authorship-doubt question.
Shapiro then suggested he felt inhibited from bullying that innocent young questioner into silence, “like I do in my Columbia classrooms, and say, that’s rubbish and I’ll fail you if you ask that question again.”
We must assume, I suppose, giving Shapiro the benefit of the doubt, that this was sarcastic humor. But his offhand comment, even if a joke, is revealing about the level of orthodox conformity that chills any discussion of the SAQ in academia.
Would even an adult student hearing this, who perhaps hoped to obtain Shapiro’s coveted support as a mentor, or his supervision of a thesis, feel free to openly express authorship doubts?
Threats of ridicule, leave aside a failing grade, are a very effective social sanction. In fact, like name-calling, they constitute a form of psychological bullying.
Most authorship doubters among Shapiro’s students probably stay fearfully closeted, afraid to even broach the subject in class.
Does he truly feel comfortable about that?
What is it about the SAQ that reduces even leading public intellectuals, even professors at our finest universities, to this kind of irrational fever?
As a career teacher myself, I find it deeply troubling. The very idea of ridiculing and shutting down students in the classroom this way is appalling. It offends and violates the ideals that attracted me to teaching in the first place. It is an arrogant abuse of power, pure and simple.
Shapiro went on to mention what he conceded were “some of the smartest people” in the history of authorship doubt: “Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Helen Keller, it’s a long list.”
And yes, speaking of infantile obsessions, Shapiro the amateur shrink went on to psychoanalyze Freud. How is chutzpah spelled again?
But why — why — did this long line of brilliant, diverse, and thoughtful people join what Shapiro called “this company of Shakespeare deniers”? Well, according to Shapiro, “for really complicated and very interesting and sometimes sad reasons” they just “had to deny his authorship.”
At that point, Gladstone interrupted to ask whether the SAQ might “start with the fact [that] there’s very little documentary evidence” for the Stratfordian theory.
By gosh, she might be on to something there. Could it be that people of this caliber might actually be affected by a reasoned assessment of facts?
But Gladstone promptly backed off, as Shapiro’s own students perhaps often feel compelled to do, when he kept talking right over her, recycling the stock Stratfordian claim that we allegedly have more relevant evidence about Shakespeare than most of his peers.
We don’t.
Note:
On the comparative evidence documenting the literary careers of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, see Diana Price’s book (2001, rev. 2012), ch. 8, pp. 112–58, ch. 17, pp. 296–307, and pp. 309–22 (“Appendix: Chart of Literary Paper Trails”); see also Price’s website and Shahan & Waugh (2013), ch. 3, pp. 41–45 (summarizing and providing a useful graphic of Price’s findings).
Sir Stanley Wells, the dean of orthodox Shakespearean scholars, has conceded that “despite the mass of evidence” available, “there is none [during the credited Stratfordian author’s life] that explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies” him as the author of the works of “Shakespeare.” This moment of admirable scholarly candor appears in the central essay by Wells in the 2013 Edmondson & Wells book, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (p. 81), the most systematic attempt to refute authorship doubts ever published.
What Price has documented — contrary to frequent false orthodox claims — is that this lack of evidence is not even remotely typical for that era. Surveying 24 other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors and examining ten categories of evidence, Price demonstrates that all are better documented as writers (usually far better) than the Stratford man, who draws a blank in all ten categories.
Professor Lukas Erne, an unusually candid and thoughtful Stratfordian scholar, supported Price’s basic point in an article predating her book by three years.
Erne noted: “With possibly no other English author is there a greater discrepancy between the scarcity of extant historical documents that reliably deal with the author’s life [much less, Erne might have added, his literary career] and the precision with which biographers have tried to trace his life.”
Erne observed that this “created a gap between how much” we really know about Shakespeare “and the inferences that can be drawn … with a reasonable degree of certainty. … Apocryphal stories have contributed their share ….” Erne (1998), pp. 438–39.
2023 Update
Leading academics do set a tone. (This observation appears in my 2019 “Snobbery Slander” essay.)
When famous and admired professors like Shapiro, Greenblatt, and Taylor use their access to media megaphones to engage in bullying and slanderous ad hominem attacks, it has a very big and unfortunate impact. (By the way, books by all three of these distinguished scholars are in my own personal library.)
As my 2019 essay notes, the Holocaust denial comparisons deployed by Greenblatt and Taylor, and various other slanders directed against authorship doubters by Shapiro and others, are repeated ad nauseum by online trolls.
When prominent cultural, media, and political figures indulge in bullying, personal attacks, and overheated discourse, it sends a powerful signal of permission and incitement to numerous others to do the same. This is a well-known and frequently observed phenomenon.
Shapiro’s mocking and threatening comments about students (even a fourth-grader!) were not an isolated outburst. They do not exist in a vacuum.
Less than three years later, in an article in The Atlantic (quoted and discussed in my 2019 essay and more recently in my July 10 post), Shapiro spewed repetitive epithets against skeptics of the traditional story of Shakespeare authorship. He insulted us as “fantasists,” “peddle[rs] [of] fiction,” inhabitants of “an alternate universe,” “conspiracy theorists,” and adherents of a “fringe movement.” He compared us to anti-Obama “birthers” and “anti-vaxxers.”
Name-calling is the well-known resort of those whose rational arguments, based on relevant facts, are less than convincing.
My July 29 post comments on the similarly toxic discourse on websites like “Oxfraud” — replete with nasty sneers, snarky and self-congratulatory high-fiving, and highly personalized putdowns. Anyone reading the comment threads following online articles or videos addressing the authorship issue, or on social media platforms (like the one formerly known as Twitter), is likely to witness the same type of thing.
My August 22 post (paraphrasing parts of it here) notes that this kind of bullying and mockery tends to feed on itself. Performative showing off to peer groups is a common factor.
As an authoritative website notes, bullying often occurs to “maintain” or “elevate … status in [a] peer group,” to “show … allegiance” and “fit in with [a] peer group,” or “to exclude others.”
In the context of Shakespeare authorship, a familiar aim of many defenders of the traditional view is to define and exclude doubters on an ad hominem basis. Regardless of the substance or merits of skeptics’ arguments or scholarly credentials, defenders will often not even read what they write and may even boast about that.
Doubters are deemed categorically undeserving to be part of any community of rational discourse. Rather, they are to be ritually scorned and humiliated — if possible silenced, but failing that, symbolically shunned.
And according to Professor Shapiro, if they are students who dare to express dissent in the classroom, they should be summarily flunked.
Instead of trying to psychoanalyze authorship doubters and why (as Shapiro imagines) we have some puzzling urge to “deny” Shakespeare’s authorship, defenders of the traditional view might more fruitfully look in the mirror and question their own belief perseverance on this subject.
The Skeptical Professor 