Shakespeare in Love - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders Our Attachment to Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

The reluctant son is once again reading Romeo and Juliet.  He read it in sixth grade and really liked it.  I, woefully inadequate parent that I am, delighted by his interest, shared a related drama of mine, Shakespeare in Love.  Oops.  I remembered the explicit sex scenes too late, and what was to have been a nice father son shared adventure turned into a developmentally inappropriate moment to be muddled through.  Muddle through it we did, and now that the reluctant son is in High School, has been bombarded by sex on broadcast and other TV, and is reading Romeo and Juliet again, I thought it worth repeating the experiment.  And the results were much better this time around.

But I was watching the film with another context in mind as well.  I have just finished reading (actually re-reading) and posting about the hypothesis that the plays of Shakespeare are not written by the man from Stratford, a tradesman and sometime actor Will Shakspeare, but instead by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a nobleman whose life and perspective eerily parallels the plays of Shakespeare, but whose identity would have had to be kept secret, hidden behind the witty nom de plume "Shake - Spear", because it would be unseemly and politically unwise to have the words of the poet tied to a peer of the realm.

I remembered that Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman's imagined, anachronistic, delightful movie was written from the perspective that Shakespeare was from Stratford and I watched it to better understand our attachment to that hypothesis - one that is apparently endemic among scholars.  A fellow analyst, who read the blog on de Vere, Rick Waugaman, kindly sent me a preprint of his book review about to appear in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in the article he cites a study noting that 82% of academics believe the Stratfordian hypothesis.  Why is there such allegiance to it when so many good thinkers; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Sigmund Freud among them, have long questioned it?   Why are we so attached to it when emerging scholarship is tying it to new figures, particularly de Vere?

Shakespeare in Love features Joseph Fiennes as a young Shakespeare, in love with Viola de Lessups (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), a beautiful woman in love with poetry and the theater, whose rich father has bought her a noble but penniless husband, Lord Wessex (played by Colin Firth) who will make her offspring royal.  Actually, in very Shakespearean manner, Shakespeare confides his love for Viola to her as she pretends to be Richard Kent, a pretense that she has taken on to play the part of Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, which is to contain much comedy and a bit with a dog.

The power of this film, though, resides in the development of Shakespeare's play.  He lives and writes about what he is living, and the drama of his life becomes the text of the play.  He is not the Great Playwright, Shakespeare, but Will, who drinks and plays the owner of one playhouse off against the other, promising them both the same play and hustling to stay one step ahead of their wish to get words from him.  He is in awe of Christopher Marlowe, gratefully accepts advice from him, and is mortified when he fears that he has, though impersonation, caused his death.  We identify with his quick wit and with his joie de vivre.  We feel, as commoners, the constraint and unfairness that divides him from the woman that he loves - as Romeo is divided - not from Ethel, thank God (and Christopher Marlowe, who suggests the name change), but from Juliet, by the war between their families and his own part in it.

At some point, and I don't have the reference, a writer proposed that one reason the Stratfordian hypothesis has retained its strength is that it was used by the British to support the position that public schooling should be offered to all.  Shakespeare, a commoner from Stratford, after all, had written the greatest plays in history.  Who among us could not be the next Shakespeare?  And I think this is a very powerful argument.  An argument that allows us to identify with Shakespeare.  To imagine ourselves Shakespeare, to share in his glory, indeed to be Shakespeare...  For who among us is not?

Every night we dream complicated dreams with characters who are familiar but unknown.  They engage in activity that can seem chaotic but, especially if we listen to our dreams, if we analyze them, they are not just sensible, but useful, and sometimes delightful, even brilliant narratives emerge.  We are complex people filled with ingenuity, humor, deep and powerful feelings, and ideas that are unique.  Nelson Mandela, whose passing this week is a great loss, rightly pointed out that we fear (but I would add hope to achieve) our potential.  And Shakespeare did it.  He articulated the complicated thing that it is to be human.  He did this within characters - in their soliloquies, and between them - in the drama that plays out when our lives are on the line, but also in the comedy that ensues when we play with each other.  He tapped into what it is to be human and makes that come alive in us - our own sense of humanity - when we participate in his plays by watching them.

So, the greatest moment, the moment of most tension in the movie is when Romeo and Juliet has finally been written and has just been performed.  It has had its world premiere. The play has come to life as the result of a series of accidents, false starts, changes in character that are truly Shakespearean in their madcap happenstance - and the stuttering announcer has pronounced the last words in flawless English - and the birth of this great tragedy is received - with silence.  A silence that stretches to the point of breaking. And then a single clap brings forth applause and then rapturous sounds of joy.  We, with Shakespeare, with the entire troupe of actors, have wondered: Did they get it?  We knew they would, but feared they wouldn't... And, they did.  We have put it out there and they have received it.  We have communicated - one to another.  We to them.  And it is grand and glorious.

And we don't want to give up our ownership of that moment.  We don't want to believe that we couldn't have written, we couldn't have performed that play.  We believe that we could have.  We who come from boroughs and from hamlets and from common origins.  We don't want to hear that some well born, privileged man wrote this.  The idea that de Vere, a nobleman, crafted these plays goes against our democratic zeal, our sense of a meritocracy where our value will be recognized and rewarded regardless of rank. While we acknowledge the Stratford fellow's debt to a public school classical education, we want that to be all that we need.  In fact, to realize our ambitions, to let the world know the wonders that lie within us, we need to know many languages that will excite others - we need to know how to communicate emotionally, but also cognitively.  To weave a spell (as Stoppard and Norman, our everymen, have done in this movie), the tapestry must be as close to flawless as possible.  A failed detail may wake the dreamer from his or her sleep.  To have the privilege of expressing ourselves well - clearly and coherently - we need to have been afforded many prerequisite privileges.

The de Vere scholars make the case that the references in Shakespeare could have been accessed, in that age, only by those from the most privileged classes.  The knowledge of the law could not have been included but by a legal scholar.  The understanding of the nautical scenes comes from a sailor, and the idiosyncratic knowledge of Venice comes from the pen of a man who has sailed her streets.

Our romantic connection to Shakespeare of Stratford comes, I believe, from an anachronistic attachment to what we believe to be everyman - the everyman of a post industrial society.  But I think this identification may be misguided.  In fact, I think that it takes a great deal of privilege to produce Shakespeare's works- the privilege of education, travel, and, if it is de Vere, the privilege of being privy to the world of nobility and having multiple well schooled secretaries to read and perhaps co-write your work.  And I think we have built a society that affords similar privilege to many more people than had it in Shakespeare's day.  In fact, I think that the 'everyman' of today - the many privileged citizens of our industrialized and post-industrial nations, have privileges, Shakespeare, whoever he was - even if he was de Vere, could not have imagined.

It is ironic then that the myth of Shakespeare of Stratford has been used to support the importance of education.  Ironic because I fear that our clinging to it now may cause us to argue that everyman can do it; just provide him or her a tablet and an internet connection.  When in fact we need to communicate, many of us in many ways, with someone who is a potential Shakespeare.  To provide him or her not just information, but to teach him or her how to think, how to understand and articulate systems, and how to be in touch with his or her emotional world - we need to help him or her interpret, not just be moved by, the plays of Shakespeare.  And it is expensive to provide the kind of education that helps people to explore, engage, and then articulate what they discover.

The modern world seems allied against the expense of education - and it asks educators to justify the expense.  I'm not saying we shouldn't do that - we should.  But the value of education is much greater than the income of the educated. I am reminded of a Reader's Digest joke from many years ago.  The immigrant father, working in his small store, welcomes his son home from college where his son has learned accounting.  The son says, "Dad, you've got to come up with an accounting system to keep track of your profits and losses."  The father reaches under the counter and pulls out a cigar box.  He says "Son, what's in this cigar box is everything that I arrived with in this country.  Look around you.  Everything else is profit."

Our modern world with all of its wonders is all profit - the profit of learning and teaching each other and going out to explore more.  We need to keep doing that.  Including trying to figure out who Shakespeare really was, because knowing that, as Rick Waugaman maintains, will enrich our reading of our greatest author.  It may even help us clarify the value of providing the expensive education that we need in order to maintain our ascent as a civilization.  And we need to keep teaching our children, even if that sometimes leads us to blunder, because, sometimes, as in the case of the reluctant son and me, we get to witness the birth of a new world together.

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