November 20, 2011 — The New Yorker meets Monty Python’s Flying Circus meets the Shakespeare Authorship Question? Renowned comedian Eric Idle of the Monty Python troupe offers an undeniably funny (if misguided) take in the iconic magazine’s November 21 print issue (published online November 13, obviously in response to the October 2011 release of the Oxfordian film Anonymous).
“Shouts & Murmurs: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” by Eric Idle
“While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. …” (read more here).
Good stuff! Hey, we Oxfordians and other authorship doubters have a sense of humor! More so, we dare say, than the sometimes humorless defenders of the traditional legend. After all, the author we love is surely one of the funniest in human history — to say nothing of Ben Jonson’s slyly deceptive humor in the First Folio (which many Stratfordians, with high and righteous dudgeon, insist on reading with an obtusely straight face).
Lurking behind Idle’s clever riff, do we sense a profound anxiety among defenders of the Stratfordian faith? He rails on sarcastically about “evidence,” in barbs purportedly aimed at theories of authorship doubt but which apply inadvertently, with far more force, to the Stratfordian dogma itself:
“Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory…. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it.”
Hmm … indeed … we doubters would not be so rude as to say it’s “bollocks” to think the man from Stratford wrote plays and poems evidencing learning and experiences he had no plausible chance to obtain, and with which there’s hardly any evidence connecting him during his lifetime.
We will say it strains credulity. Kinda hard to keep a straight face, actually!
The late, great, Shakespearean scholar Samuel Schoenbaum (as staunchly Stratfordian as they come) did not find it a laughing matter. He confessed “despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record” (Shakespeare’s Lives, 1991, 568).
But hey, no need for “despair”! If you’re serious about “evidence” and want to explore the many holes and problems in the Stratfordian theory, and the intriguing answers provided by the Oxfordian theory, start here.
And enjoy a good laugh along with Ben Jonson while you’re at it![divider]
Note: Photo of Eric Idle by Tom E. Canavan (Creative Commons License).
[published Nov. 20, 2011, updated April 2021]
