Harold Bloom, the noted literary critic, made his greatest critical innovation with the anxiety of influence, claiming that originality in poetry is the product of a struggle with the potentially overwhelming influence of predecessor poets. Victory in that struggle requires a creative misunderstanding of the predecessor, a misprision that opens up space for the new poet to correct the master's supposed mistakes or insufficiencies with her own work.
It's not theory for all seasons, or for all poets. It is of questionable use in approaching the extraordinary originality of Emily Dickinson, for example, or her relationship with her influences. But it is a handy go-to when confronted with the neurotic fantasies that have afflicted writers struggling with the overweening influence of the greatest poets.
Which brings me to a recent article by Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic, "Was Shakespeare a Woman?"
Winkler puts forth a novel candidate for the "true" author of Shakespeare's plays: Emilia Bassano (married surname: Lanier), daughter of a Venetian court musician and the first published female poet in Renaissance-era England. A fascinating figure, she has previously been suggested as a possible candidate for the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets, as the inspiration for various characters named Emilia in Shakespeare's plays (e.g., Iago's outspoken wife), and was recently the subject of a modern playperformed at London's Globe.
Why go further, and say she might have been Shakespeare himself? From reading Winkler's article, one might assume that there was a lively scholarly debate ongoing about whether Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. In that context, it would make some sense to suggest Bassano as a possibility who had been overlooked for sexist reasons.
But this is not the case. There is no reputable scholarly argument about the subject, not only because the theories behind alternative authorship are so easily exposed as outlandish or absurd, but because there are no problems or inconsistencies that would prevent one from following Occam's Razor and concluding that Shakespeare was ... Shakespeare. Given the inherent limitations of literary scholarship and the relatively insignificant stakes, it'd be unfair to compare the authorship controversialists to scientific frauds like the anti-vaccination movement, or to historiographic travesties like the Holocaust revisionists. But their methods are similar in that they begin with a preordained conclusion and cherry-pick evidence to build a highly tendentious "case" against plainly established facts.
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