Shakespeare was Shakespeare

Ralph Smith sent me a copy of John Gross’ Commentary review of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Shapiro argues that the search for an alternative author to Will Shakespeare arises from the clash between the sublime poetic achievement and the humdrum, even rather distasteful, life.  For post-Romantics, an extraordinary poet had to be an extraordinary man:

“It was partly, as Shapiro argues, a product of the clash between two different ways of looking at Shakespeare. While the poet was increasingly regarded as a demigod—and even more so after the rise of the Romantics, with their messianic view of the value and importance of poetry itself—the biographical facts of Shakespeare’s life that were being brought to light by researchers seemed meager and mundane.  Where, in the humdrum life lived from 1564 to 1616, could scholars and critics locate the source of all that greatness? To decide that the plays and poems must have been written by someone else, someone more obviously extraordinary, was one way of resolving the discrepancy.”

Even so, denying Shakespeare authorship was a fairly radical solution.  But discovering alternative authors was in the air:

“Another factor must have been at work in making the idea of hidden authorship acceptable, and Shapiro fi nds it in the growth of the so-called Higher Criticism— the application of historical methods to the study of biblical texts that paved the way for the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss’s demystification of the gospels in The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835). ‘The shock waves of Strauss’s work,’ Shapiro writes, ‘soon threatened the lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths.’”

As evidence of this connection, Shapiro points to SM Schmucker’s 1848 essay on “Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare,” one of the earliest works of Shakespearean dubiety.  It outlined all the standard arguments against Shakespearean authorship, but Schmucker intended it as a satire of higher criticism.  Delia Bacon, a daughter of a Congregationalist minister who really disbelieved Shakespearean authorship, also borrowed some techniques from higher criticism: “Her initial essay on Shakespeare, Shapiro tells us, was ‘suffused with the language of the debates over the Higher Criticism and the life of Jesus.’ But he also concedes that she made no attempt to emulate the scholarly techniques of the Higher Critics: ‘She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate.’”