Joseph Sobran
 
Alias Shakespeare:
Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery Of All Time
 
Free Press, 311 pp., $ 25

It has always been difficult for ordinary mortals to cope with the genius of Shakespeare. How could anyone have come up with works of the magnitude of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth in the space of a few seasons writing for the London stage? Faced with such apparently superhuman creativity, many have groped for an explanation in the idea that the plays must have been written by someone other than the man born in Stratford in 1564 to whom they are traditionally credited. Two main objections are usually offered to this man's having authored the plays: 1) He seems to lack the education required to produce such profound works since he did not even have a college degree; 2) the Stratford man was a commoner, and the plays seem to be written by someone with intimate knowledge of the world of the nobility.

Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare is the latest contribution to the debate over who authored Shakespeare's plays. It presents the by-now familiar theory that the plays were really written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who, as a nobleman and a graduate of Cambridge University, had the qualifications the man from Stratford lacked. Unfortunately, Sobran adds little if anything to the authorship debate; his book is not based on any original research and is simply derived from evidence others have advanced on behalf of Oxford. The vulgar and pretentious subtitle of the book -- "Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time" -- makes it sound much more original than it is. In fact, the most one can say for Sobran is that he gives a lucid summary of arguments others have developed (but which, alas, Shakespeare scholars have long since refuted).

The central problem with all attempts to ascribe Shakespeare's works to someone else is their promise that they will thereby make the creation of the plays more comprehensible. But does having a college degree really make it any more likely that someone could write Hamlet? There is something embarrassingly bourgeois about this way of thinking, as if some 12-step program were available that leads to literary achievement of the highest order. Some of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights, like Christopher Marlowe, did have university degrees, but the fact is that many of the greatest authors in history never set foot in college. Geniuses are geniuses precisely because they do not play by the ordinary rules.

Consider a modern case, where we know the facts. Thomas Mann's great novel, Doctor Faustus, is loosely based on the career of Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone method of musical composition. Reading this book, with its intricate and elaborate analyses of imaginary and real musical compositions, one would think that Mann must have had a Ph.D. in musicology from one of Europe's finest institutions. In fact, like Shakespeare, Mann never really got beyond a high-school education (he did take a few courses at various institutions of higher learning in Munich), and he was not professionally trained in music at all. Careful research has revealed that whenever Mann needed a technical musicological passage, he simply consulted his friends, who helped him find what he wanted in textbooks and other sources. His description of twelve-tone composition is, for example, copied almost verbatim from Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music. The degree of specialized knowledge manifested in Doctor Faustus equals or surpasses anything in Shakespeare's plays, and yet in this case, where we can actually observe how Mann worked, we see that no formal education was required for him to give the impression of being extremely knowledgeable in an arcane field. He just had to find the right person from whom to plagiarize, as Shakespeare did with Plutarch.