The reviewer’s hostility, distortions, and arrogance speaks for itself. He starts with a bang: « here’s what we KNOW about Shakespeare… » which instantly demonstrates that we don’t know much of anything. But the primary argument for doubt about the Stratfordian consist of questions about the plays that the reviewer doesn’t even mention: eg, the fact that they betray an intricate knowledge of French history, Italian culture and geography, Greek tragic literature including Aeschylus, the subtleties of English law, the psychology of monarchy and Elizabethan court life, sophisticated philosophical themes, etc. None of which a bumpkin nobody actor in Stratford, who never travelled to the continent, who left zero traces of having been a writer, such as a library, or a literary correspondence, or a will that had to do with his literary career, or even an obituary BY ANYONE. Much lesser poets and playwrights of the time were celebrated and lamented and interred at Westminister Abbey with great notoriety, while English society utterly failed to notice Shakesepeare’s death. That’s weird.
But anyone who doubts The Shakespeare Gravy Train is a « truther , » and thus on par with those who claim that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the US Government.
Whereas Winkler tells a long history of respectable skepticism about the man Shakespeare, from Samuel Johnson to Emerson to Mark Twain to Henry James and a Supreme Court justice (can’t remember the name), the reviewer compares Winkler’s « trutherism » to the usual punching bags:
And this is why trutherism is so pernicious. While doubting Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t nearly as dangerous as climate change denial, or anti-vax beliefs, or questioning Obama’s citizenship, the rhetoric and strategies of all of these forms of trutherism are quite similar: Question the qualifications of the authorities. State some assertions we can all agree with, like “We don’t know much about the life of Shakespeare,” or “Some people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 die from the disease.” Ask an escalating series of questions about the consensus view, shifting ground whenever you would lose the point being debated. Deploy shaky evidence that requires tendentious interpretation. Claim that evidence that disproves your theory in fact supports it. Needle those in power who refuse to engage with you. Use the contempt with which your position is treated as evidence that you must be on to something. Whenever possible, fall back on saying you’re just asking questions.
Pernicious. Dangerous. Rhetoric. Contempt.
But he gives the game away by accusing Winkler of having a « theory, » when in fact the whole point of the book is simply to question the dominant theory that the plays were written by the uneducated, unaccomplished, unknown, untraveled nobody from Stratford.
For the reviewer, it’s wrong to « needle those in power who refuse to engage with you. » And a rational person should respect and honor the « contempt » with which they are treated when they ask the wrong questions. Winkler must be doing something far more « pernicious » than « just asking questions. » Curiosity is dangerous.
Trutherism abuses the liberal public sphere by using the values of liberal discourse—rational hearing of evidence, open-mindedness, fair-minded skepticism about one’s own certainties, etc.—against it. Once the opposition tires of this treatment and refuses to engage in debate any longer, the truther can then declare victory, and paint the opposition as religious fanatics who are closed-minded and scared of facing the truth.
Spare me.
This is the kind of garbage we hear from a Bart Ehrman, who compares doubters of the utterly unknown and unproven JESUS OF HISTORY to Nazis. These fucking people are a tenured elite of experts who exchange flattery with the media, publish bestsellers, go on all the documentaries, etc. and then have the nerve to cloak themselves in the sanctimonious mantle of « the liberal public sphere .»
The Stratfordian absolutists that Winkler interviews—far from « refusing to engage in debate any longer » with trolls and cretins like Henry James— never even condescend to begin a debate, because they know that their « evidence » is for shit. This dude — who apparently has a Slate Podcast about The Bard — would not have written such a vituperative review of a calm book about the history of literature, unless he had an axe to grind. But the only dirt on Winkler, a journalist, he can come up with is that she must be like those damn pernicious trolls online who want to destroy the values of liberalism.
The review ends tellingly, by changing the subject in such a way as to show that his own conservative dogma isn’t even something he, or anyone, particularly cares to defend anymore—
Winkler is flummoxed to meet a Shakespeare scholar [Marjorie Garbor] who does not care about authorship, but most Shakespeare scholars are not particularly focused on the authorship question. It has been asked and answered. Sure, the most famous authorities love churning out their biographies, but most of the field remains focused on the far richer subject of Shakespeare’s work and its relationship to the world in which he lived. That area of study is nearly infinite in depth, and boundless in its rewards. The plays remain complex, confounding, impossible achievements (and, let’s be honest, some clunkers). They are a great gift to the world, waiting for each generation to receive it. Their author has, whether by design or by accident, been reduced to a shadow lurking behind the work. Unless some new evidence arises, let us leave him there, offstage in the dark, and focus on what really matters.
The doubters aren’t wrong; they’re just irritating as hell. (But also dangerous and pernicious? To whose interests?) We should all just focus on the plays. (Of course Winkler loves the plays just like every skeptic who ever raised the topic.)