Eric the Blue

The Guthrie is currently performing Macbeth, and I’ve thought about standing in line for a rush ticket one of these evenings. If I don’t get in, I could always have an over-priced drink before heading home. That would be a pretty big night for me!

Macbeth is by a wide margin the shortest of Shakespeare’s great tragedies–I’m considering Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear to be the other members of that group–and it’s been speculated that part of the play Shakespeare wrote must have been lost. A better theory is that it was going to be performed at court, and James I was known to have a short attention span. Me likewise, especially when sitting with my chin too close to my knees, which is why I might see the tightly constructed Macbeth. Every inch a king.

I’ve been reading around in all the supplementary material supplied by my Signet classic paperback of Macbeth, and I see that the editor, Sylvan Barnet, takes up the theory that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him. It was pleasant for me, a mere hobbyist, to see a renowned scholar say precisely what I’ve long thought to myself: that the appeal of the theory is essentially a snob appeal, since it arises from the notion that a bumpkin from the provinces could not have been the genius who wrote these works. Thus the proposed alternative authors are all university educated, or titled, or both. It reminds me that Melville said the sea was his Harvard and his Yale. No one thinks Moby Dick was written by the Ivy-educated son of an industrialist.

Of course, Shakespeare lived longer ago, comparatively little is known about his life, and as a result there is room for invention. Or, at least, there was room for invention after more than 150 years had passed: Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have thought the idea of a different author odd, since they were in a position to know. The numerous contemporary references that take for granted that the playwright was William Shakespeare–which include Greene’s insult, Francis Meres’s assessment, Ben Jonson’s poetic tribute, and the preface to the First Folio by Shakespeare’s theater colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell–could not have been regarded as strands of an intricate conspiracy until Shakespeare had been long dead.

Times change, and in 150 years a few people began to think it suspicious that so little was known about the life of a man possessing Shakespeare’s cultural status. But there’s a reason the Globe Theater was across the Thames from Westminster, in the district of bear baiting pits and other dubious entertainments. Shakespeare made a good living, but the prestige that sparks interest in biography came later. I remember being enrolled in Introduction to Shakespeare, and so was in attendance for the first lecture, on Shakespeare’s life and times, how the female parts were played by prepubescent boys, all of that, when during question time a student asked whether in Elizabethan England actors were cultural icons like they are today. This was in winter quarter, 1980, Reagan had just taken office, and the teacher, Lonnie Durham, said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Why, if Shakespeare could have known that one day an associate of his, a mere actor, could have risen to become the leader of a great and powerful nation, he would have been astonished and mortified.”