Reading a Verdict into the Plays

The plays do contain the material the charge points to. There is jingoism in the history cycle and slaughter treated as glory. There is casual cruelty, bawdy that shades into the ugly, and speeches of real contempt for women, some of them unforgettable. Anyone who says the canon is uniformly humane has not read it either. The question is not whether the lines exist. The question is what a reader is entitled to conclude from them.

The lines exist, and so does the rest.

The Shakespeare canon runs to roughly 900,000 words across some thirty-eight plays and the poems, written over more than two decades, in every genre the age offered, and populated by kings, murderers, fools, saints, tyrants and their victims, each given language to fit. A body of writing that large and that various will yield a confirming quotation for almost any thesis a reader carries into it. Assemble the passages that damn and you have a case for a vile author. Assemble the passages that ennoble and you have a case for a humane one. Both files are thick, but a thick file of selected passages is still a selection, not the canon.

This is the same error the rest of this site is built to expose, turned from biography to morality. An authorship advocate gathers the parallels between a candidate’s life and the works, presents the collection, and mistakes its length for proof; the missing step is the denominator, the count of how many parallels any comparably placed person would produce under the same search. The moral prosecutor does the identical thing. He gathers the passages that fit his verdict and never asks how much of the text points the other way. A reading assembled by selection tells you what the reader went looking for, not what the plays are.

The damning line can always be found; the test is whether the verdict survives the rest of the text.

Running the test

It does not survive, and the plays themselves supply the counter-weight, usually in the same works.

War. The Chorus of Henry V glorifies; the play does not leave it there. On the night before Agincourt the common soldier Michael Williams tells the disguised king to his face that if the cause is bad the king has a heavy reckoning to answer for. The order to cut the prisoners’ throats stands unsoftened. Falstaff, on the battlefield, reduces the whole apparatus of martial honour to a syllable: “What is honour? A word.” Thersites watches the Trojan war and sums it up as “wars and lechery.” A canon that meant to sell war would not keep handing the argument against it to the men counting the cost.

Women. The misogynist speeches are real, and so is the fact that the moral intelligence of play after play is carried by a woman: Rosalind, Beatrice, Portia, Viola, Isabella, Cordelia, Hermione, Paulina. In Othello, against a plot driven by men’s fantasies about women, Emilia answers the charge outright, that wives “have sense like them” and err as their husbands do. The Taming of the Shrew is framed by an induction and argued against inside its own action. A writer who hated women wrote most of the parts worth playing for them.

Rank and spirit. The charge of elitism meets a canon whose servants, fools and gravediggers routinely see more than the great men above them, and one that puts into the mouth of a king on a bare heath the discovery of “poor naked wretches” and the command “Take physic, pomp.” The charge of spiritual emptiness meets Measure for Measure, the providence Hamlet finds in the fall of a sparrow, and the late romances, whose whole design is loss, penitence and something that looks very like resurrection. As for “false history”: the history plays are drama, not chronicle. They compress and shape their sources, which is what the genre does and has always done. Reading them as failed reportage mistakes the kind of thing they are.

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And what it has to do with the authorship question

Nothing, which is the point worth making last. Whether the plays are admirable or contemptible is a real question, and people are entitled to argue it. It is simply a different question from who wrote them. This site scores authorship on documents, not on the merit or the morality of the works, and no verdict on their quality, in either direction, moves a candidate up or down. An author is established by a primary source connecting a named person to the writing, not by a reader’s approval or disgust.

So the denunciation fails twice. It settles nothing about the authorship, because moral judgment is not evidence of authorship. And it settles nothing about the plays, because a verdict reached by keeping the passages that fit and discarding the rest is not a reading of the canon; it is a reading of the prosecutor. The plays contain all of it, the cruelty and the tenderness, the war-fever and the revulsion from war, the misogyny spoken and the misogyny answered. Keeping only one side is the tell.

For the same error in its more common form, applied to a candidate’s biography rather than to the plays’ morals, see Of Course It Was Him/Her and The Mirror Problem.