Douglas Mercer
January 19 2025
Lots of rot is peddled these days about the provenance of the plays of Shakespeare, every Lord So and So or Lady How Do You Call Her seems to have written them by any other name. The most recent popular one is that he was a dolt and a cipher who some mad wild and unknown genius used as a front man for publication, the latest version of which comes from a female writer who tosses an Italian noble woman’s name in the ring but she could not take the palm because as Virginia Woolf told us you know what happened to Shakespeare’s sister. And for a long time of course Shakespeare has been the go to punching bag for all feminist and anti-colonial theories, just as when you found out that Germaine Greer was penning a biography of Anne Hathaway you knew it was the time for the bard to cover his balls, the Swan Of Avon being the Ultimate Dead White Male of fantasy, and as such he can’t catch an even break. And in the vein of by any other name all the noblemen supposedly wrote it but, well, they couldn’t take the glory, because such traffic as playing was beneath the dignity of a Lord. They say that maybe the Queen wrote it, or Marlowe survived his scrape with that fatal dagger, or maybe Francis Bacon took time off from being a pompous and pretentious fool to pen love songs so wonderful even the denizens of heaven were rendered woozy. So maybe it was Lord What Not who gave us the works of Wilhelm Meister, or some unknown poet who hid his name in acrostics in the plays. The problem people have with Shakespeare writing the plays, aside from the hypnosis of the torrential and never ending stream of searingly beautiful poetry and prose, is that he seems to have some kind of cybernetic force field like a nimbus or aura around him, an akashic record always spinning in his head, that he has a universal and encyclopedic knowledge of all domains and fields, botany, law, statecraft, heraldry, masque etiquette, navigation, celestial spheres, and all the rest. How did the skinner’s son from Stratford come by this polymathic information? Did the Little People or the Gentry clue him in? Did some spacecraft run out of gas and the survivors impart the wisdom? After all they say that the Tempest was the first foray into science fiction as if the Island called Bermuda was subject to some weird energy of the earth, Hakluyt said it was what took the Sea Venture down, turned it into what was rich and strange. But the key to it all is that when we think of Elizabethan London with its Donne, Raleigh, Percy, the Queen, Coke, Bacon, Essex, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, Nashe, Webster, Marlowe, Jonson, Sydney, Spenser (and Shakespeare), a group which makes ancient Athens look like fumbling theatrical mechanicals and amateurs, we tend to think this fatal fruit must be the doings in some vast metropolis. But the truth is that in 1600 London had some 200,000 people, it was a small settlement on an obscure river, on the fringe of Europe which itself was the fringe of Asia. You then have forget about 90 percent of the groundlings and the general, to whom all this was connoisseur’s caviar, and recall the fact that for 20 odd years he was employed by the Queen and then the King and you have about 5000 people in a community where everyone was on a first name basis. They say that Shakespeare was not a company keeper, that when the Roaring Boys went down to the Lion for a pint and a toss, and to talk up the serving wenches, he would invariably beg off and say he was in pain. So he knew all about the sweet sessions of silent thought and the remembrance of things past, he had his great reckonings and his infinite riches in his little rooms in Shoreditch or on Silver Street, or wherever he was happening to hang his hat. But if there is one thing we can all agree with it is that if you happened to catch him on an odd night out at the Mermaid with his tongue loosened you wanted to plant yourself right next to him for as long as you could and buy him as many beers as he needed and tell him whatever it was that he was smoking to keep on smoking it, for they all say that he had a way with words. And surely those nobles and court figures who knew all about the seacoast of Bohemia and the straits of Verona, and the ins and outs and intrigues of Paris, and the weird pataphysicists and necromancers who studied flowers and chemicals, and the cartographers who quizzed the survivors of Roanoke, when they met him they felt the same way, this was a man who was worth talking to, and they told him what they knew and felt they got much the better end of the bargain. That and the evidence that he was often seen at St Paul’s buying up book after book with his large purse when he was not hoarding grain back home in the sticks. And scholars tell us that 90 percent of the quotes he uses come from the first 10 percent of the books he read which tells us his habit was to skim the first few pages, get bored, see he had all he needed, toss it in the lime pit, and move on to the next one to which he would give the same treatment until he ran out and had to gather up his ducats and head back to the stalls to see what they were selling. And the thing that is so marvelous about the human brain when it is working correctly is that it can glean just a small bit of information about a situation and instantly find the gestalt and extrapolate the rest by putting two and two together, for great nature supplies the rest, fills in the blank spots so speak, and so creates a powerful system which is flexible enough to take in ever new and increasing information but not wilt because of it. And that is how he came to know everything, how he remembered everything, how he foretold everything, the prologues to the omens coming on gulled his intelligence nightly, and why he knew in his Romances that the unfolding drama needed to be cut off by mechanical objects descending from the sky like a god; and how at the finale all the statues come to life, about supernatural solicitings which find out which grains will grow and which will not, about jumping the life to come and about summoning spirits, and about the catastrophes and heels of pastime when everything is out; and most importantly how we are really just children of some kind, but it is imperative that we bear ourselves like the time when the Grand Decider cures the pleurisy of the earth with blood, for he was the god's spy; and the white swan is always at its most beautiful when it sings its last. It’s all there in the plays, should anyone care to take look.
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Notes:
Now on the beak, now in the waist
The deck, in every cabin
I flamed amazement
Sometimes I’d divide
And burn in many places
On the topmast, the yards
And boresprit, would I flame distinctly
Then meet and join
