Contested Will by James Shapiro

Author:James Shapiro [James Shapiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258697
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick. How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenity and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

(1.3.101–8)

Lifting these words out of context, and italicising the lines that highlight his hierarchical views, Looney ignores how wily Ulysses mouths these pieties to manipulate his superior, the buffoonish Agamemnon, who has ample reason to want to hear degree and ‘due of birth’ defended so aggressively. In the 1940s, E. M. W. Tillyard would make this speech the centrepiece of a nostalgic and influential Elizabethan World Picture. But not even the conservative Tillyard goes as far as Looney, who was convinced that the ‘scene as a whole is a discussion of state policy, from the standpoint of one strongly imbued with aristocratic conceptions, and conscious of the decline of the feudal order upon which social life had hitherto rested’. Looney knew that the clock could not be turned back, ‘that we cannot, of course, go back to “Shakespeare’s” medievalism, but we shall need to incorporate into modern life what was best in the social order and social spirit of the Middle Ages’.

It wasn’t enough for Looney that the author of the plays held such views; he had to advocate them, use his plays to promote an explicit political agenda. This is where Oxford’s candidacy made so much sense and why Looney couldn’t just write a book arguing that a socially conservative Shakespeare of Stratford had written the plays. The true author had to be a man whose aristocratic lineage made him a natural leader, one who – if he had been properly recognised in his time – could have changed the world. Like Comte’s great teachings, ‘Shakespeare’s’ collected works were a textbook for both social and political reform: ‘How differently might the whole course of European history have unfolded,’ Looney laments, ‘if the policy of “Shakespeare” had prevailed instead of that of the politicians of his time.’

In pursuing this idea, Looney had to argue that the plays that Oxford wrote were sophisticated political allegories (he interpreted Henry the Fifth, for example, as Oxford’s attempt to urge a conciliatory rather than imperialist course in Elizabethan foreign policy). Underlying such claims are far-fetched assumptions about how and why the playwright went about creating his characters. For Looney, these dramatis personae weren’t creations of the writer’s fertile imagination; they were rather ‘living men and women, artistically modified and adjusted to fit them for the part they had to perform’. And many of them turn out to be well-known courtiers or privy councillors in the dramatist’s immediate orbit. Here, too, Looney was simply appropriating a topical methodology occasionally employed by mainstream Shakespeare scholars from Malone on down, though he took it to new extremes.

Enough incidents in Oxford’s life uncannily corresponded to events in the plays to support Looney’s claims that the plays were barely veiled autobiography. Like Hamlet, Oxford’s father died young and his mother remarried.

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