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Authorship, schmauthorship: First Folio is the real Bard story
(by David Linzee - May 18, 2009)
One of the many things I like about Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, which opens its season May 22, is that it doesn’t put an asterisk on the Shakespeare. There’s no footnote saying, “Or Bacon, or Marlowe, or whoever may have written Shakespeare’s plays.”
The authorship controversy is one of the greatest time-wasters among conspiracy theories, and that’s saying something. I commend our festival’s indifference to the silliness. Not everyone has shown such good sense; Shakespeare’s Globe in London, for instance, has an exhibit devoted to alternate authors.
That’s not all. Among those who have given respectful coverage to the controversy are the Smithsonian Institution, PBS, Harper’s magazine and the New York Times. That list is courtesy of Bill Bryson, who, in his 2007 biography Shakespeare: the World as Stage, does the public service of thoroughly demolishing the other candidates and establishing beyond a reasonable doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Not that I’m expecting the controversy to end. Conspiracy-mongers need conspiracies to demonstrate their own cleverness, and nothing will stop them. Those who advocate Francis Bacon, for instance, are undeterred by the fact that he himself never claimed that he wrote any of Shakespeare’s plays; he did write that he despised theater.
Similarly, champions of Christopher Marlowe are untroubled by the fact that he died in 1593, before most of Shakespeare’s plays appeared. They just spin some more conspiracy, about how he faked his death and escaped to Italy.
What disqualifies “the Stratford man,” as the conspiracy-mongers call Shakespeare, from writing the plays? The main reason, in the eyes of many of them, is that he was a hayseed from Stratford. More credible to them is the Earl of Oxford. Having an aristocratic title and a master’s degree qualifies a man to write Hamlet, in the view of these snobs.
What keeps the authorship controversy roiling is its bogus appeal to our sense of justice. It invites us to take away the title of English Lit’s Greatest Genius from the Stratford bumpkin and bestow it on some victim who has been languishing in obscurity for centuries. Who could fail to get excited about such an enterprise?
Certainly not me. Though I am moved only to deplore it, decades of journalistic habit forced me to lead with it — even though I have another Shakespearean subject to write about today, and this one actually matters.
Let me start again, with a visit I made a couple of weeks ago to St. Mary Aldermanbury, Shakespeare’s parish church.
It wasn’t a long trip. St. Mary Aldermanbury stands in Fulton, Mo. It burned down in the fire of London and was rebuilt by Christopher Wren, only to be bombed out in World War II. The rubble was transported to Fulton and reassembled. In a corner of this beautiful church, you’ll find a statue of Shakespeare and in the museum below, a tribute to two fellow parishioners and friends of his, John Heminges and Henry Condell.
The names may ring a faint bell with you, if like me you were an English major in college. Or they may be completely unfamiliar. Remember them.
They were members of Shakespeare’s acting company. Several years after his death, they edited his plays and published them in one volume, which we now call the First Folio. The story of the First Folio is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the authorship controversy.
For instance, the motives of the figures in the authorship controversy are obscure and self-serving, while the motives of Heminges and Condell are transparent and generous. They thought Shakespeare’s play should be preserved for future readers, so they acted against their own financial interest. In those days there was no copyright; theater companies jealously guarded their scripts, because if a rival company got hold of them, they could produce the plays without paying royalties.
Another contrast is that the authorship controversy doesn’t really matter, while the First Folio matters a lot. It would make no real difference to most playgoers today if some other name was on the playbill; the play would be the same.
But it would make a great deal of difference to us, the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis audience, if we didn’t have the First Folio. We would be seeing this year’s play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in an inferior version. We would not have seen such recent productions as The Tempest, As You Like It, Julius Caesar or Macbeth. They are only in the First Folio. In fact, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays would have been lost to us, so we may not have even bothered to hold a Shakespeare festival.
I suppose we just have to put it down to the perversity of human nature that the authorship controversy is better known than the First Folio story. We get all worked up about the possibility that somebody is trying to put one over on us. But if somebody does us a big favor, we take it for granted. Let’s defy our nature for once: next week, as you picnic before Merry Wives, lift a glass to Heminges and Condell — in Bryson’s words, “the greatest literary heroes of all time.”
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