Against Bean-Counters and Sun-Slappers

The mystery of who wrote Shakespeare

As usual, I’m late to the party.

A few months ago, people on Substack were arguing about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. There’s a whole conspiracy, it turns out.

I don’t know anything about these people or their theories. I don’t really care to find out, to be honest. It’s like someone telling you that Einstein's iconic hair was actually a wig, and you’re too lazy to look into the evidence they so carefully put together.

First of all, no. Second, who cares?

This is not really about refuting critics who, by the way, are decidedly not Shakespeare. 

But it did all get me thinking about what sort of person who would hope genius like that didn’t exist: It must have been written by this or that fellow from Oxford — Shakespeare, low class as he was, didn’t have access to the proper resources.

See, personally in my life, I see genius pour out of morons, and I also see people with gigantic educations babble on and on, signifying nothing but sound and fury. Genius is a spirit that humiliates us before it can channel through us to create something glorious. If it will even do that.

People who spend their lives scrutinizing the works of genius, learning how to dot I's, cross T's in dry ink, how to write a sonnet, and the exactitude of iambic pentameter, can't imagine that the boy from Stratford, not educated at Oxford, could possibly come up with the flash-blinding genius that was the works of Shakespeare.

If a commoner can waltz into the halls of the Western canon on a hunch, what does that say about them?

I imagine them, promising, bright, and studious (unlike me). Once, long ago, they strayed outside of the lines — dared to draw with a new color, but they were scolded by the grand priests of Academia. Do it right, and maybe you will be Shakespeare!

Well, they all failed. Everyone failed except for him.

But we have to allow for this sort of genius to exist – this sort of genius of morons, this Forrest Gump-like transcendence of being able to be at the right place at the right time. We have to be humbled by it. Despite all our efforts and striving, we have to allow for the fact that it just blazes forward, walks through walls, and transcends all rules and categories, and, yes, sometimes blesses us with its presence.

The bean-counters try to destroy the body of Shakespeare by saying, 200 years after he was dead, he couldn’t have written it. But, Shakespeare had contemporaries and rivals that would have loved to see his demise. They never seemed to notice anything astray. 

It's much harder for people to just accept that there is an idiot raucous force of genius.

Einstein said that knowledge is not that important, it's the mystery that's important. The man would literally dream about what would happen if cars traveling the speed of light turned their headlights on. A gray-haired boy. He would nap with ball bearings in his hand so that whenever he would fall into that dreamlike state, the ball bearings would fall into a pie tin and wake him up so that he could rush to write down that boyish flash of insight, and then work backwards from fuzzy dream to complex equation, which could hopefully illustrate something marvelous like general relativity. 

There is no way to satisfy the fear that genius will never possess us. 

There are only practices that might guide us down a road where we may encounter a spirit grander than us. And God help us when that day comes, that we do not ignore the spirit, because to us it would look like a filthy beggar, a shut-in woman with no friends, or a low-class boy from Stratford upon Avon.