I am surprized to realize that I have never put anything on my website about the Shakespeare authorship controversy.

Well, there are many subjects in which I am interested yet to which I have not devoted a webpage.

Possibly part of my reluctance is that the whole controversy is a case in point of my favorite aphorism (favorite because I coined it) which is that when there are only two sides to an issue they are usually both wrong.

Unfortunately, people usually take an interest in the authorship question because they want to prove that a) William Shakespeare of Stratford didn�t write the plays, and that, instead, (fill in the candidate) did write them, or b) William Shakespeare of Stratford not only wrote the plays but, even if we did not have the tradition that he wrote them and had to discover the author from scratch, one could prove that Will of Stratford wrote them.

Both positions are nonsense in that the Bard's trail is old and cold so that, without the tradition, we would not be able to support any candidate; in this light, Will suffers, but so do all of his rivals. There is so much that we can never know about the author of the Shakespeare works (of the works themselves, more anon). As someone once said, if writing the Shakespeare works were a crime and we had to presume innocence without a preponderance of evidence against him, then the man from Stratford would have to be found innocent.

It is widely�and only sometimes unjustly�presumed that many anti-Stratfordians (those who deny the Stratford man�s authorship) are fanatical, unreasonable, and eager to see evidence where there is none; that they can be unneccessarily vituperative toward their oppents and even toward the Stratford man himself. (The magnificent exception is Joseph Sobran who, in his essay Alias Shakespeare regards William Shakespere of Stratford as a human being worthy of sympathy and a man interestingly emblematic of his times even if he never wrote a word his whole life.)

It is rarely recognized, though, that many Stratfordians (those who uphold the Stratford man�s authorship) can be fanatical, unreasonable, vituperative and all of the rest. Too many of these Stratfordians hide behind the notion that believing in Stratfordian authorship makes them �mainstream,� even though they harbor the notion that if they had to start over without the tradition, they could prove Will�s authorship from the existing evidence. Nothing, not even anti-Stratfordianism, could be more crackpot than this. Genuinely mainstream Shakespeare scholars should be more apt to assume that the Stratford man wrote the works attributed to him without getting wrapped up in trying to prove it.

People who write pro-Stratfordian works are apt to be just as eager as the antis to ignore inconvenient evidence and to find favorable evidence where it does not exist. Shakespeare biographies rightly drive the antis up the wall. Most of the speculations about the connections between Shakespeare's life and the works make a hash out of the actual meaning of the works and render them less understandable rather than more so. So eager are his biographers to find knew tidbits about Shakespeare, that they turn speculations into facts and even attribute to Shakespeare's life biographical details that belong to the lives of other persons. A couple of examples should suffice.

When the second edition of the first attempt at a biography of Shakespeare was republished after the biographer's death, the editor found a manuscript note not printed in the first edition. It seemed to have Shakespeare living in Showditch and refusing to go carousing by inventing(?) a toothache. Though this tidbit appears in the second edition, it probably was ommitted from the first precisely because it had nothing to do with Shakespeare but referred instead to the biographer's informant, William Beeson, an actor who, at age three or four, had sat on Shakespeare's knee (but who was in his eighties at the time he was interviewed). Such hunger for information about Shakespeare, no matter how doubtful its provenance, has characterized Shakespeare biographies ever afterward.

The playwright Robert Green once referred to an "upstart crow" [Elizabethan slang for an actor] who "bombasts" on the stage as if he were as good a playwright as Green. This is often assumed by Stratfordians to be a slur against a fellow playwright, pressumedly Shakespeare; yet there is no evidence for such an identification. Not only did Green not say who he was talking about, but the telling detail is his reference to the onstage utterances of this "crow." It is more likely from this context that Green is complaining about an actor who, in performing a play by Green, keeps ad libbing--as if he knew better than the playwright how to write dialogue. Now, this evidence neither proves nor disproves anything, but the Stratfordians think that it proves their case for no other reason than that they want it to prove what they already believe. (To their credit, the antis simply point out that the passage is practically meaningless; they don't seem to think it proves that someone else wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.)

There are very few records of the Stratford man: No records of his having been recognized as a literary man during his lifetime, no certainty that his plays relate to events in his life, or to his children, marriage, or court troubles (among the few records of him are mentions not only of property ownership but participation in law suits). There is even little certainty about connections between his works and the news of the day. We do not even know exactly when most of the works were written; so many of the supposed parallels to current events are guesses at best. Even if the man from Stratford is the author of the works, there is no evidence of how the works relate to his life because we know too little about his life.

So what is the value of the authorship controversy if not to determine once and for all whether the Shakespeare works were penned by the man from Stratford or by someone else?

Chiefly, what should concern us most about the Shakespeare works is not who wrote them but, rather, that our understanding and appreciation of the them is being threatened as time goes by and the English language changes. As English-speaking people, we are losing our ability to fully enjoy Shakespeare as our forebears once did. There are many discoveries made by the anti-Stratfordians that bear on the matter of our ability to comprehend Shakespeare. These should not be suppressed just to uphold the "mainstream" authorship theory but should instead be examined for the light they shed on interpretation of the Bard's works.

There is something ahistorical about the way we look at Shakespeare as a playwright even though his contemporaries looked at him as a poet. If you asked an educated Englishman of the 1590s for his opinion of Shakespeare, he would have cited--probably enthusiastically--the poem "Venus and Adonis" but would not mentioned any play. Plays were considered low if enjoyable entertainments. Shakespeare's reputation as a playwright rather than a poet came centuries later. When we speak of the Shakespeare plays as if they were his only works, we are missing the big picture. Today, we have no conception of how Shakespeare's contemporaries regarded him, or what they knew, or whether they thought about him as a person at all. (There is no record of anyone referring the poet-playwright by the given name "William" before the 1630s!)

It is more the fault of the Stratfordians than the antis that the authorship controversy has had an adverse effect on the understanding of Shakespeare. In the nineteenth century, anti-Stratfordians, especially those championing Francis Bacon as their candidate, pointed out that the author of the Shakespeare works uses legal metaphors more readily than any other kind. Was the author, like Francis Bacon, a lawyer? If so, the man from Stratford would seem an unlikely candidate since he was not a lawyer.

At first, Stratfordians responded by saying, well, maybe he did study law or maybe he clerked for a lawyer. For various reasons, however, most Stratfordians realized by 1900 that it was highly unlikely and probably impossible for Shakespeare of Stratford to have had any kind of legal training, even as a clerk. At this point, the Stratfordians took their most outrageous turn toward crankery: they completely denied that Shakespeare displays any particular legal knowledge or facility in his works.

To see how outrageous this is, just read the opening scene of "Hamlet" wherein Horatio and Francisco meet and discuss a recent war between two kings; only, by the time they have finished describing the war, it sounds more as if one king sued the other in court rather than on the field of battle--that is, if the reader can follow the dialogue at all, since it's language is both legalistic and archaic. How can we teach the next generation how to enjoy Shakespeare if we insist that his language is accessible when it is not? How can we ignore his use of inscrutable legalisms when his work is rife with them?

There are, by the way, at least five types of Shakespeare vocabulary and grammar problems relating to comprehension, and these all bedevil students yet are not equally addressed by educators because of the inhibiting influence of fanatical Stratfordians upon Shakespeare scholarship.

1) Archaicisms. Shakespeare uses words like "contumely" and "niggardly" that are no longer used except by educated people who almost certainly learned them from Shakespeare. Most Shakespeare texts do have footnotes that explain these words, but, obviously, these is not getting through to everyone. (There was a case a few years ago where a white man used the word "niggardly" in front of a black audience and lost his job--even though the word means "stingy" and has no relationship to the racial epithet for which it can be mistaken by those who have been miseducated in our schools.) More unfamiliar and off-putting are the grammatical constructions used by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with adjectives often indistinguishable from adverbs, the use of archaic verb conjugations, the familiar form of the second person pronoun, etc.

2) Britishisms. These are less a problem for students in the United Kingdom, but they do give American students pause. For example, when Fallstaff says "snuff it," British students still readily understand that he means "die," while this must be explained to American students. Even though, many Shakespeare texts are not shy to footnote these terms, the persistent lack of understanding among students is troubling.

3) Legalisms. As I already pointed out, Shakespeare tends to use these without concern for his audiences unfamiliarity with the law. I suspect that much or at least some of this went over the heads of many in his original audience. Still, in order to grasp Shakespeare, we need to acknowledge that obscure legalisms are part of Shakespeare's lingusitic armamentarium, and yet the Stratfordians have told us that the legalisms in Shakespeare do not exist and that we are not permitted to acknowledge them. One Stratfordian, writing nearly a century ago, tried to underplay the admitted appearance of legal terms in Shakespeare by quoting a monologue from a Ben Jonson play in which a character recited a list of legal terms. You see, the Stratfordian argued, Jonson lists legal terms, too, and no one says that Jonson was a lawyer. This misses the point: Shakespeare does not merely list legal terms, he employs them in a context--and often in a complex metaphorical context that shows that he not only understood the legal terms but readily saw them as analogous to non-legal matters.

4) Italianisms. Shakespeare loved Italy and all things Italian. Incredibly, this is another major area where the Stratfordians are in denial. Ernesto Grillo, an Italian scholar writing in the 1940s, seems to have known nothing about the Stratfordian denial, but he had read Shakespeare and saw in him someone who had an intimate knowledge of Italy. It is not just that Shakespeare used Italian and classical Greco-Roman stories as the basis for many of his plays, it is also the way that Shakespeare describes Italian geography and architecture, refers to stereotypes associated with particular cities and regions of Italy, and even uses Italian words and phrases.

In "Twelfth Night," the character Malvolio uses the phrase "the Lady of the Strachy." Now, if you look this line up in a good annotated text, the editor will probably footnote this phrase with an explanation that its meaning is obscure but that it probably refers to some topical issue of the day that is now forgotten.

Nice try, but Professor Grillo suggests that the whole line is a partially translated Italian proverb. In the play, Malvolio is a commoner with some money and an ambition to marry a noble woman who has fallen on hard times. He says that there is precedent for such a marriage: "The Lady of the Strachy has married the yeoman of the wardrobe." According to Grillo, this is not only very close to an old saying in Italy, but Shakespeare has not even translated one of the words, "stracci," into English. "Stracci" means rags; so the meaning of Malvolio's speech is, "The lady of the rags [that is, the woman who is poor but haughty] has married the yeoman of the wardrobe [that is, the common fellow who is in charge of all the clothes]." Suddenly the light must go on: Of course this is what Shakespeare meant! And it fits the context rendering Malvolio's speech perfectly understandable.

The problem for the Stratfordians is that Shakespeare of Stratford never went to Italy. He could only have known things about Italy from a distance. This distance would have made it as difficult (or more so) for him to have known about Italy as for him to have had intimate knowledge of common law. So the Stratfordians have taken their usual approach and have tried to deny that Shakespeare had any special knowledge of Italy.

There are many sad examples of this. In one instance, Stratfordians have combined the legal-knowledge denial with the Italian-knowledge denial. In "The Merchant of Venice" there is a famous courtroom scene in which the proceedings involve, among other things, a visiting jurist offering an opinion as a sort of friend of the court. Well, say the Stratfordians, it is obvious from this that Shakespeare never sat in an English courtroom because what he describes has never transpired in an English court. Very well, but "The Merchant of Venice" is set in Italy, not England. How does Shakespeare's knowledge of Italian courtrooms stack up? Very well, according to Grillo. Italian courts are completely different from English ones, and yet it seems that the author of "The Merchant of Venice" wrote as if he had sat in an Italian courtroom.

Stratfordians also claim that Shakespeare's placing of a sail-making industry in Bergamo, an inland city, in "Taming of the Shrew" is a gaff revealing Shakespeare's supposed ignorance of Italian geography. In fact, these English and American Stratfordians have never studied Italian history or geography well enough to know whether or not there was a sail-making industry in Bergamo or any inland town; they lazily looked on a map, saw that the city in question was land-locked, and assumed that they had discovered an error. These scholars knew, of course, that if they were called upon to choose a site for a sail-making factory, that they would put it on the coast near the sea. The bother is that their factory would probably fail because a businessman does not necessarily put a factory near his ultimate customers; instead, he puts it where he will have access to raw materials and skilled labor. Finally, when he wants to have access to a market, he will take good transportation over immediate access any day. This is why Shakespeare scholars are scholars and not businessmen. And, by the way, the Italian city of Bergamo was, indeed, known for sail-making in Shakespeare's day.

This raises another problem in understanding Shakespeare that bedevils modern scholars: In Shakespeare's day, no true English intellectual was ignorant about Italy. Remember that the Renaissance began in Italy about a century before it reached England. Educated Englishmen regarded Italy as a superior civilization to England. To know about Italian culture was nearly synonymous with being educated. Not so for ninteenth and twentieth century English and American Shakespeare scholars who can safely be innocent of all but the most sketchy knowledge of Italy.

Thus we have the paradox of Stratfordians, who claim to be defending Shakespeare, constantly assuming that they are more educated than he was, when in fact, they are not. Shakespeare knew more about Italy (and, of course, he would have known more about sixteenth-century Italy) than would nineteenth or twentieth century English professors. He would have known more about the law in England in his own period and how it was practiced than would more modern scholars. If anything, it matters less whether the authorial Shakespeare was the Stratford man or someone else than it does that we recognize the highly and widely educated person behind the works themselves. I would rather not address the question of the "real" name of the author, because this, I think, is fruitless, but, rather, I would address his identity as revealed by the works themselves.

What is needed if we are not to lose Shakespeare all together, is to stop listening to those who try to match the biography of the author of the works to the biography--or supposed biography--of the man from Stratford. We will never know for certain the whether the Stratford man or someone else was the author, but we can know for certain that he was not who his Stratfordian biographers think that he was; paradoxically, the more they have told us about him, the less we know. The plays and poems are the proper focus of Shakespeare scholarship; to understand the works on their own terms, for what they are, in their own contexts (as best they tell us their contexts), is to understand their author.