To Be, Or Not To Be

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, gave us an immortal body of work. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon to a Catholic family (an outlawed affiliation at the time), married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and had three children, and wrote 38 plays, 124 sonnets, and some odd bits between 1589 and 1613. We don't know much more about him, and of some of what I have said we are not certain.

Historical criticism, a movement with its beginnings in the Protestant Reformation, gave us the tools to study the Bible not so much as if it were the literal truth, but as if it were the truest document human beings could write, edit, and collect. The idea of studying texts this way was eventually applied to secular works. So, by the mid-1800s, the question arose: did Shakespeare write these plays and poems? Or did somebody else?

Instead of assuming that Shakespeare, among the most creative geniuses the world has ever known, revised his manuscripts on the fly and did not necessarily keep track of all of his emendations as well as he might, Joseph C. Hart, in the Romance of Yachting, 1848, put forth the notion that several authors had worked on the manuscripts we have. I am belittling his case by my language, but the idea gained ground and a group of scholars still believes we should look at Shakespeare's authorship this way.

We have even had a movie about this lately, Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich, performed by Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, and others, Columbia Pictures, 2011, Film), in which Edward De Vere, one of the top contenders for Shakespeare's slot in the alternate-Shakespeare view, is proposed.

What do I think about all this? Well, of course, I have already given you a hint, but my idea is that we have no real evidence to support this theory. For introducing this problem, the alternate-Shakespeare scholars should be locked up in their offices all day with nothing to read but gossip magazines.

As far as I am concerned, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet, William Shakespeare, edited by G. R. Hibbard [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]), and this and his other works will continue to delight us from opening night to the present day to the "Conscience of the King" (Season 1, Episode 13, Star Trek, Desilu Productions, December 8, 1966, Television), star date 2817.6, and beyond.

The Wicker Cage

Suppose I am a prisoner of war being held by the Viet Cong. I have nothing to do. I have little to eat or drink. Worst of all, I have nothing to read. A little dramatic? Maybe. But as a word nerd I feel the need to plan for times like these.

When I was in grade school and high school, my teachers, who had had to memorize and perform set pieces like Chaucer's prologue, "whan that aprille with his shores soote," Shakespeare's Hamlet's speech "to be or not to be," or the last nine lines of Bryant's "Thanatopsis,"made an important change in American pedagogy, one of several changes which, to my mind, have not been for the better.

Students were no longer required to memorize famous passages.

Why? I don't know. Memorizing a famous passage is not easy and reciting it in front of people, at least for me, harder still. (Is it my turn yet? Oh, God, do I go now?) Maybe my teachers experienced this same kind of performance anxiety.

They also seemed to think that memorization was not a challenging mental activity. A parrot could do as much.

And they already had the shards of our civilization knocking around in their pockets and nobody was sure which ones were important and which ones were not and maybe it was time to let all that go.

But memorization is good practice, and of a different kind than other kinds of learning. (Give it a try, if you don't believe me.) As Sherlock says in "The Long Fuse" (Season 1, Episode 8, November 29, 2012, Elementary, CBS, Television) "The brain is a muscle, Watson, and needs to be exercised regularly, lest it turn flabby."

And the passages you learn by heart when you are young, will, if you are fortunate, stay with you. Or, as I have done with a scant few, can possibly be recovered if you study them again. Then you will have a little piece of beauty to take out and admire from time to time. For those times you find yourself suspended in a wicker cage in the middle of a jungle with nothing to read.