Willie the Shake

I just finished reading Bill Bryson's brief biography of Shakespeare, Shakespeare The World as Stage. The volume, an entry in the "Eminent Lives" series that is now appearing under the Harper and Atlas Books imprints, is a good, straightforward primer in Shakespeare's biography. Bryson writes clearly and entertainingly about what is known and unknown about Shakespeare the man and avoids the mountains of speculation and "he must haves" that litter most accounts.

Interestingly, Bryson has become enough of a celebrity writer that his moniker takes up more than three times the space on the cover than Shakespeare's. It's one of the few times in which the flea gets bigger billing than the dog.

My favorite part was the final chapter, in which Bryson calmly and systematically demolishes the notion that those plays and poems were written by anyone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, writer, actor, and businessman. In doing this, and in bringing his celebrity to bear on it, he has performed an important service to both the world of literature and the cause of sanity everywhere.

For here is the truth, and it is one of the truthiest truths that I can impart: The idea that someone, anyone, besides Shakespeare wrote those works is bunkum. If you've had that thought, cleanse it from your mind. There are no other "candidates." It is all an illusion, a pretentious and muddleheaded delusion. There was never even a whiff of this alleged conspiracy at the time, and the Englishman of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was as gossipy as a smalltown newspaper. Shakespeare was a major literary figure at the time, well known and written about. The idea that he was the beard for some nobleman (the most popular formulation) would have been all over in no time. Instead, the one item of gossip about Shakespeare we have from the time had to do with him outflanking Richard Burbage when the chance arose to consort with a young lady.

The notion that anyone but the son of a glover from a town in Warwickshire wrote those plays, poems, and dedications was popularized by a woman named Delia Bacon in the 19th Century. She ended her days in a looney bin, as should anyone else who propagates this tripe. The time has come to stamp out this fallacy and to come to appreciate how genius is just as, if not more, likely to occur among the masses as it is in the mansions.