Today’s Shakespeare News is that Roland Emmerich—yes, Roland Emmerich—is directing a movie about the man who wrote all those plays. No, not William Shakespeare. That would be too easy.\n
See, here’s the thing: it’s not like I care very much who wrote the plays. I tend to think it was William Shakespeare, because, you know, he said he did, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he didn’t in the contemporary record. But I don’t care<\/i> very much, and if it turned out that it was someone else, well, it doesn’t change the text at all, so that’s OK. But really, the reason why I tend to think that William Shakespeare wrote the plays is because almost everybody who writes trying to persuade people that it was someone else is a dickish snob.\n
I don’t mean that it’s impossible to believe that W.S. was a front without being a dickish snob. It’s certainly possible. And I suppose it’s even possible to care about it enough to try to talk people out of their belief in the Stratford fellow without being a dickish snob. I haven’t seen it happen, though.\n
And I have to say that I don’t expect it to. Part of that is simply that I find it a bit dickish just to keep hocking about the whole thing, trying to persuade me that I am Wrong Wrong Wrong; I try to keep an open mind about things, but I do get defensive when attacked. And a lot of the writing on the topic that I have read (or skimmed, or began and given up on, more likely) seems like an attack on the deluded fools who are so simple to believe that William Shakespeare—a nothing from nowhere, practically a peasant—wrote those plays. And more than that, an attack on the poor deluded fools who believe that they enjoy the plays without grasping the True Key of Understanding. In all honesty, if it isn’t possible to enjoy them properly without knowing who wrote them, then the pseudonymity of authorship implies to me that they plays aren’t very good, and that we shouldn’t care about them at all. But of course lots of people have enjoyed the plays just fine whilst believing they were written by William Shakespeare, going back to their first productions when presumably the whole audiences were taken in (except the Queen, of course, and other select aristos).\n
That’s the snobbish part, of course. Not just that there’s the classic snobbery of locating all positive attributes in the hereditary aristocracy, although that is very prominent in Anti-Stratfordists. But there’s another kind of snobbishness, the inner-ring delight in having Special Knowledge, being among the elect who are In On It. They transfer that delight to an inner ring in Elizabeth’s court, duping the groundlings who didn’t get all the political undertones. That’s pretty dickish, too. I do get the inner-ring temptation, of course, and it’s a powerful one, but the right thing to do is resist it, not promote it.\n