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Arrogance, thy name is Anne.
I've been fawning over Ben Goldacre of late. He's the British scientist who forced Gillian McKeith to stop calling herself Dr. as it was false. He's the one who has taken on homeopathy and big pharma and I adore him. He constantly presses the reader -- look at the study, read it properly. Are the people presenting you with 'facts' full of bias?
This fucking woman. She drives me up the wall, and not merely for splintering my dearest fandom, not merely for dragging canon over the coals of crap. She comes out with the most stupid, simplistic shit that I get so angry. There was the time someone asked her why she came out with anti-abortion rhetoric in one of her later novels when she's all for womens' rights and she was all, 'but the facts I stated were true.' There was the idiotic 'the French don't respect freedom the way Americans do' (what?) and now this.
I dislike anti-Stratfordians, and probably not for the reasons you think. It's the inherent class bias -- that's always the thought behind it! A working-class man couldn't possibly have written such imaginative, beautiful, moving things. How could he have ever known these places without travelling? (Because he didn't make any geographic mistakes like canals in Verona, and none of us have ever written about cities we haven't yet visited, have we?) It had to have been a royal figure! It had to have been a rich man, for imagination is the sole domain of the rich and powerful. Obviously, he was some bumpkin picked by De Vere to capitalise on the plays and become a very, very rich, very revered man in his own lifetime. I await Vincent Van Gogh's unmasking as Emperor Franz Josef.
But it's more than that. It's this woman. Look at the arrogance of what she says! She has studied it 'in depth', which as we all know can mean anything from Rice truly doing a great bit of research for 18th-century Lestat or making hideous, ridiculous mistakes about modern British people and our culture. She maintains throughout her Facebook page that she has taken the time to study all this, and dissenters are really stupid, and Kenneth Branagh will totally make a film about how Shakespeare was a fraud and we're all wrong, because studying literature and loving literature, much less studying authorship can never grant us the same authority as being a published fiction writer.
A pox on her!
I read a really interesting article and debate in the Guardian a few days ago where several academics who have studied Shakespeare and the issue of whom he truly was for years argued about this. Here I will demonstrate bias myself (Ben Goldacre is side-eyeing me right now) but the academics convinced me more than ever that he was the author of the plays. As one pointed out, we have less evidence that Marlowe was the author of his own work, yet we don't dispute his authorship really, do we?
But Queen Anne has made her increasingly annoying, pig-headed mind up. IShe has pronounced herself expert, as she always, always does on issues she obviously knows very little about. She has a secret door right into sixteenth-century England and her many dorky fans are following, as if she's some tacky jewellery-clad Prophet. Ugh! How did I ever fanworship this clown?
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Oh wait, the film is called 'Anonymous'. Okay, I get it now!
Oh. I wish I didn't get it. :(
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Yeah. She's annoying.
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She's probably not quite famous enough for them anymore though.
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I felt incredibly tempted to argue with her (and it doesn't take much; De Vere's fricking birth/death dates don't even match the times when some of Shakespeare's plays were written; HOW ARE SO MANY SUPPOSEDLY SENSIBLE PEOPLE MISSING THIS HUGELY IMPORTANT FACT?) but I knew that way lies madness, so I just directed her to James Shapiro's "Contested Will" and went away to take deep breaths.
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My favourite bit is her repetition about her wanting Kenneth Branagh - whom she insists is an Oxfordian - to make a film about de Vere because he'll prove it.
1. Being an actor who played Hamlet does not make you an expert.
2. Don't you feel she fetishises British people in a weird way with this stuff?
3. HE'S NOT AN OXFORDIAN:
An authoritative source [for Branagh confirms that he has always believed, and still does, that "the plays of Shakespeare were written by the man from Stratford, of the same name." Mr. Branagh is fascinated by the alternative theories, but he is "a Stratfordian through and through and expects to remain so."
That's the very first result if you Google 'Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare authorship.' So much for Anne's ~intensive research.
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2. Good point. There's a definite emotional thing where "A Brit I admire and who has strong cultural links to Shakespeare" has sway. It's one of the reasons I find Jacobi's position so frustrating; he's (amongst others) Lear to theatregoers and that sadly does have more pull with some people than simple fact.
3. Excellent. We're a skeptical lot, you know... :P Of course this is partisan nonsense on my part. The difference is, I can see it for what it is. For all I know, Liam Neeson or Stephen Rea or somebody will come out as an Oxfordian and then I'll be able to rail about the stubborn illogic of my countrymen. So we're back to "let's all try to think properly".
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Agreed on Jacobi. It's insane. Look, playing a character fantastically is brilliant. Well done. But it does not make you a historian, or a Shakespeare scholar. I really enjoyed playing the town crier in our school play. It doesn't make me an expert on campology.
So, so agreed on point 3. You know, I am a French Revolution geek. I can go on and on about it for hours (I have) but I can't even pretend to be anywhere near an expert on what happened, and why, and the far-reaching consequences. I can't even make my mind up about Robespierre! I'm always sceptical of self-proclaimed experts when they're just amateur admirers with an agenda.
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