Skip to main content

Handley says anti-Strat position is "irrefutable" -- Beauclerk? not so much

Reviewer Garrett Handley skewers Charles Beauclerk for his presumption in Handley's review of Beauclerk's Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom: the True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth (Grove Press, 2010). Handley's review "The Ass Made Proud" , is published in the August 2010 issue of Open Letters Monthly: an Arts and Literature Review.

Handley says the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint is valid, but Beauclerk -- like many other anti-Stratfordians -- refuses to quit while he's ahead:
What [Beauclerk is] saying is simple and (at least at the beginning) irrefutable: the sheer amount of specialized learning and epitomized world-experience in Shakespeare’s plays is not just vast but extraordinarily so.
The basic articulation of his point is this: lacking any autographed copies, it’s a much, much greater leap to attribute those plays to somebody like William Shakespeare than it is to attribute them to somebody else. If you do as Beauclerk asks, if you divest your estimate of all tradition and received opinion and simply match the works to the man, if you pretend for a moment that there is no contemporary evidence that seems to link a man named William Shakespeare to the works we know under his name, the matter couldn’t really be much clearer. As Mark Twain pointed out a century ago, there’s no evidence the man from Stratford ever read a book, much less owned one – and there’s much evidence of posthumous tampering with his reputation. Occam’s Razor leaves the man from Stratford in ribbons.
If the anti-Stratfordians – if any anti-Stratfordian – stopped right there, they would stand on firm ground. If they stopped right there, all they’d have to explain are a few apparent factual discrepancies, if that (the dates traditionally given for some dozen plays, for instance, fall after the death-date of the Earl of Oxford). But they never stop right there.
Beauclerk certainly doesn’t. His mental exercise is perfectly telling: if we were told that a pipe-fitter’s son with a grammar school education and some rental properties to his name was also the author of the collected works of Lionel Trilling – if we were told to believe it simply on the basis of tradition and a few scraps of ambiguous corroboration (did Trilling once mention pipe-fitting in an essay? Or perhaps a contemporary satirist made a jeer about an author ‘trilling’ a new song?), we would quite rightly refuse. We would say, “Look, I’m not a snob, but the plain fact is, that guy couldn’t have written the works in question … he didn’t know any of the matter involved, didn’t speak or read any of the languages quoted, hadn’t – and couldn’t – read any of the hundreds of books quoted and paraphrased, hadn’t met any of the people or the kind of people described, and most importantly, hadn’t achieved the breadth of mind that a lifetime of rigorous scholarship – and world citizenship – can impart.” And we’d be right to say it. Beauclerk says it, and he’s quite convincing. The problem is, he says a lot more.
 The entire review is available on the web at: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-ass-made-proud/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Was King Richard III a Control Freak? Science News ... from universities, journals, and other research organizations   Mar. 4, 2013 — University of Leicester psychologists believe Richard III was not a psychopath -- but he may have had control freak tendencies. University of Leicester psychologists have made an analysis of Richard III's character -- aiming to get to the man behind the bones. Professor Mark Lansdale, Head of the University's School of Psychology, and forensic psychologist Dr Julian Boon have put together a psychological analysis of Richard III based on the consensus among historians relating to Richard's experiences and actions. They found that, while there was no evidence for Shakespeare's depiction of Richard III as a psychopath, he may have had "intolerance to uncertainty syndrome" -- which may have manifested in control freak tendencies. The academics presented their findings on Saturday, March 2 at the University

What's a popp'rin' pear?

James Wheaton reported yesterday in the Jackson Citizen Patriot that the Michigan Shakespeare Festival high school tour of Romeo and Juliet was criticized for inappropriate content -- " So me take issue with sexual innuendoes in Michigan Shakespeare Festival’s High School Tour performances of ‘Romeo & Juliet’" : Western [High School] parent Rosie Crowley said she was upset when she heard students laughing about sexual content in the play afterwards. Her son didn’t attend the performance Tuesday because of another commitment, she said.  “I think the theater company should have left out any references that were rated R,” Crowley said. “I would say that I’ve read Shakespeare, and what I was told from the students, I’ve never read anything that bad.”  She said she objected to scenes that involved pelvic thrusting and breast touching and to a line in which Mercutio makes suggestive comments to Romeo after looking up the skirt of a female. The problem with cutting out the naug

Winkler lights the match

by Linda Theil When asked by an interviewer why all the experts disagree with her on the legitimacy of the Shakespeare authorship question, journalist and author Elizabeth Winkler  calmly replied, "You've asked the wrong experts." * With that simple declaration Winkler exploded the topic of Shakespearean authorship forever. Anti-Stratfordians need no smoking gun, no convincing narrative, no reason who, how, when, or why because within the works lies the unassailable argument: Shakespeare's knowledge. Ask the lawyers. Ask the psychologists. Ask the librarians. Ask the historians. Ask the dramaturges. Ask the mathematicians. Ask the Greek scholars. Ask the physicists. Ask the astronomers. Ask the courtiers. Ask the bibliophiles. Ask the Italians. Ask the French. Ask the Russians. Ask the English. Ask everyone. Current academic agreement on a bevy of Shakespearean collaborators springs from an unspoken awareness of how much assistance the Stratfordian presumptive would h