William or “Shakespeare”

Admittedly, I have not yet begun to read our latest play, Henry VIII, but I have just finished reading about it. That’s something, isn’t it? Before beginning each play, I like to read short introductions from the 1974 Riverside Shakespeare. It was from this edition that the professor of my college Shakespeare class taught, and he required us to read the introductions from it even if we used another version to read the plays. I greatly respected this professor – he couldn’t turn on the VCR to save his life, but he could quote from Dante’s Inferno in Italian – and thus I have adopted some of his procedures as I undertake this great project. The Riverside introductions are short but informative, providing dates, possible sources, and controversies surrounding the play in question, making them perfect for my serious-yet-casual reading.

The four-page introduction for Henry VIII, written by Herschel Baker, deals with the authorship controversy for nearly two pages. I won’t go into the details, but in short, some scholars think that Shakespeare wrote the entire play while others think that he co-authored the text, perhaps writing less than half of it. The headache I got from this discussion isn’t entirely new: we ran into the same issues when exploring Pericles, and others surely will puzzle us as well. With both of these plays, I faced not only the problem of authorship but also a problem about the problem of authorship. Part of me wanted to just throw the question aside and analyze the play on its own – I’ve always been somewhat partial to formalist criticism – but another part of me started panicking. What if Shakespeare didn’t write this? Can I really read this play the way I would another, certainly-authentic play? Does this play even matter if it isn’t Shakespeare? Does it make me snobbish if I answer that last question, “No”?

A few weeks into our club, I had a more encompassing crisis when I watched Anonymous for the first time. I struggle with historically-based movies, even those not as controversial as Anonymous, because I, like the good English major I am, suspend my disbelief and take everything as fact. Unlike ordinary movies, though, the knowledge that certain characters and places did exist makes it difficult for me to remind myself that I must end the suspension. In short, although I don’t agree with what the film proposes, it too inspired that panic in me.

This all leads into a philosophic quandary (literary philosophy, yes, but still philosophy). Suppose Shakespeare didn’t write this particular play or any of the plays that bear his name. Does it matter? Do we care at all about William Shakespeare the human being, or is he merely a handy tag? There have been times when I have forgotten that Shakespeare has a first name and think of him as a Homer or Moses, eternally singly-named. I have been to the town in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which he and his wife lived, and the reconstructed theater at which he acted, yet none of these locations influence the way I read Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For many people, I know, these things do matter. When I took that college class, the professor asked each of us what we were most interested in, and one student replied that she really wanted to know more about Shakespeare’s life. (The best friend whose name I can’t recall in Ten Things I Hate about You, while fictional, also leads me to believe that there are people out there who adore Shakespeare on a personal level.) For me, however, I’m not sure I do care. I know and appreciate Shakespeare through the situations, characters, ideas, and poetry of his plays, none of which need any support or life other than those plays. If it turns out William of Stratford didn’t write the words, the beauty of a certain phrase and the resonance of a particular theme remain the same for me. Historically speaking, if I’m interpreting an action or turn of phrase as a way to understand the past, as long as someone from that time period wrote the words, it doesn’t much matter who specifically. “Shakespeare” is more a category than a person.

Yet the question lingers in the periphery of my thoughts: how would our reading of Shakespeare change if we discovered our idea of Shakespeare wasn’t true?

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