Each fresh assertion that so-and-so-other-than-Shakespeare wrote the plays (and sonnets) provokes mild eye rolling from me. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than pondering that question, much less writing a magazine article or - heavens! - a book on the subject. James Shapiro and Michael Posner obviously disagree with me, the latter actually arguing that a Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier, wrote Shakespeare's works (I hardly know whether to kvell or cry at that theory).
If one is so maddeningly insistent on uncovering literary fraud, however, Walt Whitman strikes me as a vastly superior target to Shakespeare. As Christopher Benfey writes in his recent piece in The New York Review of Books, "Well into his thirties, Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent or temperament."
Benfey makes this comment in the course of reviewing two books, Three American Poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, by William C. Spengemann, and On Whitman, by C.K. Williams, both of which argue strenuously that Leaves of Grass sprang as unexpectedly and unbelievably from Whitman's head as Athena did from Zeus's.
Here's Spengemann:
[N]o amount of information regarding such matters [as upbringing, early experiences, habits, sexual inclination, and the like] will account for the unforegrounded appearance of Leaves in 1855, the form those poems take, or the appeal they have held for poets and readers of other times, other places.
(second alteration in original). Williams is even more baroque:
It's as though [Whitman's] actual physical brain went through some incredible mutation, as though - a little science fiction, why not? - aliens had transported him up to their spaceship and put him down again with a new mind, a new poetry aparatus. It is really that crazy.
My first thought on reading these perspectives was, Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct: and the simplest explanation is not that Walt Whitman's brain was replaced by aliens, but that somebody else wrote the poems.
My suspicions grew as Benfey quoted from Williams's observations about the waning of Whitman's talent. Shortly after Whitman published his unprecedented Leaves of Grass, he "lost the connection to his music," Williams claims, a condition that lead Whitman to ever-more-desperate attempts at "sounding like himself" in his later poetry.
Sounding like himself? Isn't this a case for finding out who really wrote Leaves of Grass? More probable by far is the likelihood that Whitman had a falling out with the true author of Leaves and no longer had access to poems he could pass off as his own . . . right? Whitman himself apparently endorsed the theory that Shakespeare didn't write the works attributed to him - an attempt by Whitman to distract attention from his own literary plagiarism, no? And what about the fact that Whitman claims to have fathered six children without ever getting married? Shouldn't Whitman scholars be devoting more effort to researching whether one of Whitman's loved-and-left baby mamas was actually the author of Leaves of Grass? One doesn't have to troll very far through nineteenth century verse to find a weirdo woman poet with a mysterious relationship to an unidentified "master," a poetess who had withdrawn from the world for unexplained reasons (the trauma of out-of-wedlock birth perhaps): I speak, of course, of Emily Dickinson.
When the book arguing that Leaves of Grass is actually the work of Emily Dickinson, and that the cause of her seclusion was her seduction and abandonment by feckless Walter Whitman, I promise I won't roll my eyes. I expect a cut of the royalties.
(Cartoon punchline is "In fact, the work's been so good that we question whether it's Will's own"; from The New Yorker, June 14 and 21, 2010 issue)
Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Bubbalah, you're so beautiful, nobody would ever believe it without seeing you!
Though yet, Heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
Not that your gorgeousness is as anything to your intelligence and wit, so what's the point in talking about it anyway?
If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, this poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.
I say anything even a little bit accurate about you, and Masha Finklebaum accuses me of exaggerating your merits, but what can you expect of a woman whose own daughter has been on J-Date for a decade without meeting anyone?
So should my papers, yellow'd with their age, Be scorn'd, like old men of less truth than tongue;
It's not that I mind the gossip mill at the Maazel-Tovel You're Rich Enough for Assisted Living facility in Short Hills . . .
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage, And stretched metre of an antique song:
. . . but when Masha says there's as much truth in what I say about you as in an Isaac Babel story, it gives me tzuris.
But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice;-in it, and in my rhyme.
So, nu? When are you going to give me grandchildren?
My New Yorker reading is irregular these days. The magazine has gone downhill (in my opinion) and, since I've gone across the hill and around the bend in the river - to India or Kenya or wherever - the issues sometimes take months to find me. (Yes, I do occasionally read it online, but I dislike The New Yorker's online edition.) All of which is to say, I just got around to reading a Hilton Als' review from last October, and not withstanding its vintage, I'm going to weigh in and comment.
Als was reviewing Peter Sellars' production of Othello, starring John Ortiz as the title character and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago. In a provocative move, Sellars' cast a Latino (Ortiz) as Othello, rather than casting a black actor (or even more traditionally, a white-actor-in-blackface). Als didn't think much of this choice:
Shakespeare's music . . . is not distinct from his narratives or from the actors' behavior; we need to both see and hear his characters' intentions. Which means, unavoidably, that Othello must be black.
Considering that, earlier in his review, Als quotes the Shakespeare scholar Daniel Vitkus saying that, in 1604, when Othello was written, "black skin color was understood . . . primarily with symbolic logic," Als has made a pretty dense pronouncement.
In fact, Othello wasn't black. He was a Moor - a man originally of North African origin. North Africans don't look like what Americans typically identify as "black." ("Black" in this sense usually indicates a person from - or with ancestors from - sub-Saharan Africa.) Often, the skin tone of North Africans is consistent with that of people from the Middle East or, say, Latin America.
Othello's many references to Othello's blackness were not, in their original intent, entirely literal. As Vitkus suggests, the references are symbolic. When Desdemona's father, Brabantio, complains about "an old black ram . . . tupping . . . [his] white ewe," "black" is not so much a description of Othello's skin, as it is of his soul. Brabantio thinks Othello is evil.
This Elizabethan use of "black" finds echoes in the way Americans used to classify people as "black" according to the "one drop" rule. People who could pass for white (e.g., Homer Plessy, of Plessy v. Ferguson fame, or Anatole Broyard) would have been labeled "black" under this definition.
To understand these mindsets of the past - the Elizabethan pseudo-spiritual, and the American pseudo-genetic - we must witness what actually happened: white people calling someone "black" who, to our eyes, isn't. Sellars' casting gave audiences that experience.
If Als had his way, audiences would be limited to an interpretation of Othello that is narrow, ahistorical and unimaginative. Als' critique self-righteously insists that the provincialism of current thinking is exclusively correct. For all the harm Als' perspective does to Othello, reducing and diminishing the character, I can only think that Iago would approve.
(Image of Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz from The New York Times)
Each fresh assertion that so-and-so-other-than-Shakespeare wrote the plays (and sonnets) provokes mild eye rolling from me. I can't think of a bigger waste of time than pondering that question, much less writing a magazine article or - heavens! - a book on the subject. James Shapiro and Michael Posner obviously disagree with me, the latter actually arguing that a Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier, wrote Shakespeare's works (I hardly know whether to kvell or cry at that theory).
