A couple of weeks ago, the fine people at Lithub ran a book excerpt by Elizabeth Winkler that defended the sanity of people who deny that William Shakespeare the actor and merchant from Stratford-on-Avon, wrote all of his plays. This is an old controversy, one that mainstream Shakespeare scholars tend to view as crackpot, but it’s also one that won’t go away, as there will always be gaps in the historic record that will allow people to find or invent other narratives.
As we approach the 500th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio of plays, Winkler delights in the mystery over who Shakespeare is and she cites very smart people, like Vladimir Nabokov, who have indulged in Shakespeare skepticism. A chief argument, recycled many times over the years, is that Shakespeare’s erudition and vast array of references to science, philosophy and ancient literature, imply a noble education:
“Shakespeare is a mystery that scholars cannot explain. “Shakespeare’s knowledge of classics and philosophy has always puzzled his biographers,” admitted the scholar E.K. Chambers. “A few years at the Stratford Grammar School do not explain it.” Others have tried to resolve the puzzle by downplaying Shakespeare’s erudition. The plays merely “looked learned,” especially “to the less literate public,” insisted Harvard’s Alfred Harbage.
But the plays have sent scholars writing whole books on the law in Shakespeare, medicine in Shakespeare, theology in Shakespeare. Shakespeare and astronomy. Shakespeare and music. Shakespeare and Italy. Shakespeare and the French language. “The creative artist absorbs information from the surrounding air,” Harbage assured his readers, floating a theory of education by osmosis. Throwing up his hands, Samuel Schoenbaum, one of the 20th-century’s leading Shakespeare scholars, resolved the conundrum by explaining that “Shakespeare was superhuman,” an explanation that is, of course, no explanation at all.”
But there is an explanation for how a writer like Shakespeare may have combined a vast set of intellectual references into transcendent art without the benefit of private tutors within stone castle walls — perhaps Shakespeare was the original middlebrow and more a journalist than a scholar.
The clue here is in Winkler’s observation: “But the plays have sent scholars writing whole books on the law in Shakespeare, medicine in Shakespeare, theology in Shakespeare.” This immediately reminded my Middlebrow brain that whole books have also been written, and widely sold, about philosophy in Stars Wars and Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons, and Winnie the Pooh. Middlebrow entertainments, like Shakespeare’s plays, often contain rich enough material for scholars and interested writers to explore. Good stories contain good ideas that inspire thought and response, no matter how the author was educated.
Good writers, meanwhile, need only a general understanding of these ideas to put them to good use. Shakespeare, in many cases, borrowed plots from mythology or from Plutarch, and overlayed his own ideas and experiences on top of them. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who dropped out of Princeton in 1915, based The Great Gatsby partly on the story of Trimalchio from The Satyricon by Roman author Petronius. The author only needs to know enough about these classic works to use them as a jumping off point for their own art.
In terms of productive output and range, Woody Allen might be the closest modern corollary to Shakespeare. His films and prose are full of references to philosophy, literature and music. But, a college drop-out like Fitzgerald, Allen learned all of this while working in the writer’s rooms for early television, performing stand-up comedy and, eventually, writing his own screenplays and humorous fiction. He’s no scholar, but he knows enough to make subjects like existentialism or Gustav Mahler’s symphonies interesting to his characters.
It just seems that from contemporary examples, we can conclude that Shakespeare did not need a nobleman’s upbringing to incorporate classical references into his plays, he merely needed to know enough about the ideas to use them to augment his stories.
These ideas, in any event, don’t come from the ether, they come from the grist of life. Young Hamlet faces a crisis where he must take decisive action despite having imperfect information; Elderly King Lear doubts his family’s loyalty as he faces oblivion; a royal wedding is disrupted and a community thrown into chaos when unseen faeries go to war with each other over the fate of a changeling boy, throwing the indifference of nature and hidden truths around us. None of those scenarios require an academic understanding of philosophy to become the root of drama because these are the things humans contend with every day. But a writer with even a superficial understanding of the concepts might well superimpose a layer of understanding that will elevate the entire endeavor.
In an increasingly specialized economy, writers and artists occupy a strange space, as those pursuits reward a generalist understanding of the world. But it is very hard, judging only by the work, to determine when an artist has become a specialist or is an able dilettante. I suggest that Shakespeare knew enough about a great many things to make people wonder, hundreds of years later, how he possibly could have known it all. But that’s what good writers do, every day.