Shakespeare fallacies

I posted a comment a fortnight ago on the diaries of the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. It took particular issue with an argument by Stephen Pollard that knowing biographical details of a composer may be valuable in helping us interpret the art. I maintain that knowing about an artist's life may tell us something about the stimulus to his work, but it tells us nothing about the art itself. To interpret a symphony, novel, painting or other work we have only the material the artist has given us. It is a fallacy - the "Intentional Fallacy" - to suppose that extraneous information about an artist's intentions yields insights into the art itself.

The Times carries today an instance of a fallacy that is almost the exact reverse of the one that invokes biographical details to interpret an artist's work:

SHAKESPEARE must have travelled in Italy, according to research that challenges claims that his plays set in that country are littered with mistakes.

Scholars have long criticised the plays as being flawed in their geographic and cultural details. However, research from America claims that the author of 13 plays set in Italy, including Romeo and Juliet, had an intimate knowledge of the geography, politics, people and customs of the country, which could not have been picked up secondhand from books or tavern gossip.

The author referred to, Richard Roe, is described as a "retired lawyer and Shakespeare scholar from Pasadena, California", whose conclusion is derived from "decades of research".

It is conceivable that a work of art might yield reliable information about historical events. Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Troy, sought to establish the reliability of Homer's Illiad on that principle. But it is a fallacy to infer from a work of art biographical details of the artist that are otherwise unknown. More than any other writer in English, Shakespeare is vulnerable to this treatment, first because of his literary stature and secondly because of the paucity of biographical information we have about him. Art is the work of imagination. The reference in King Lear to "these late eclipses in the sun" doesn't allow us to infer that the play was written shortly after a lunar eclipse. Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining an eclipse without having to be prompted by seeing one.

I choose that example deliberately, because the most extreme advocates of this bogus pseudo-biographical approach to literature do in fact argue it. They are the cranks who believe that the works of Shakespeare display such breeding and knowledge that they could not have been written by the actor from Stratford and must have been written instead by a nobleman using a nom de plume. The most favoured candidate among these conspiracy theorists (which is what they are) is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As de Vere died some years before the usual dating of Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, his enthusiasts try to establish an alternative chronology for the writing of the plays. If they can find an eclipse visible from England in the late 16th century, then - ergo - they find the approximate date for the writing of King Lear. The kindest thing one can say is that this is a monument to misplaced ingenuity.

I haven't read Mr Roe's work, which I believe is as yet unpublished. But I am mightily suspicious that he is presenting his thesis - as the Times report doesn't disclose - under the auspices of an organisation called the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, a venerable body concerned to "seek, and if possible establish, the truth concerning the authorship of Shakespeare's plays and poems". (The snobs - I prefer this term to their favoured titles of "Oxfordians" or "Baconians" - take a supposed intimate knowledge of Italy as evidence that the plays must have been written by a well travelled nobleman or high official rather than a jobbing actor.)

The amateur who labours while scorned by orthodox scholarship is occasionally vindicated, but more often he is scorned for justifiable reasons. I will make an educated guess that this particular retired lawyer will nowhere in his research deal with the conundrum that Old Gobbo, in The Merchant of Venice, has a horse - in Venice - and that Milan is described in The Two Gentlemen of Verona as a port city. Shakespeare was notoriously hazy about his historical and geographical details. As the author of one study of Shakespeare and Italy, Murray J. Levith (Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays, 1989, p. 90) has noted:

One doesn't always ask Shakespeare for perfectly credible plots, and one needn't ask him for perfectly accurate settings. After all, any dramatist's stock-in-trade is to create believable illusions, sometimes from minimal suggestion.... It doesn't really matter if Shakespeare's Italy was 'discovered', if Shakespeare was an Italian traveller. If he were, though, we haven't been able to find his footprints.

Nor, I predict, has the lawyer from Pasadena.

UPDATE: What a howler. In citing the "late eclipses in the sun" referred to by Shakespeare, I did it from memory and initially published this post with the wrong reference, indeed the wrong tragedy altogether. The line comes from King Lear, of course, and is spoken by Gloucester in the second scene of the first act. I have corrected this monumental error. My point that advocates of the notion that the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare use this and other references to establish an alternative chronology for the plays is however correct. The founding text of this crank notion, entitled (note the inverted commas) "Shakespeare" Identified, was published in 1920, and the wonder of technology now allows users of the Internet to read it. The author was a Gateshead schoolmaster whose name was - joy of joys - J. Thomas Looney. Apparently Looney resisted entreaties to write under a pseudonym. (He insisted his was a distinguished old Manx name that should be pronounced 'Loney'.) I don't recommend you read this farrago of nonsense, but the preface does nicely indicate the way the monomaniac thinks. Looney states:

THE solution to the Shakespeare problem, which it is the purpose of the following pages to unfold, was worked out whilst the Great European War was in progress; and my wish was to give the matter full publicity immediately upon the cessation of hostilities. As this was found to be impracticable, steps had to be taken, both to ensure that the results achieved should not be lost, and also to safeguard what I believed to be my priority of discovery. With these objects, an announcement of the mere fact of the discovery, omitting all details, was made in November, 1918, to Sir Frederick Kenyon, Librarian of the British Museum, and he very readily undertook to receive, unofficially, a sealed envelope containing a statement on the subject. As more than a year has passed since the deposition was made, and as no one else has come forward with the same solution, the question of priority is not likely now to arise, and therefore, with the publication of the present work, the purpose of the deposited document naturally lapses.

Looney was seriously worried that someone would come up with the theory that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare before he did. He should have been reassured that in the annals of crankery, his name lives still.