Our cultural moment seems bent on not letting the good be. Instead, we must either bash past greatness or reconfigure it to suit our present fancies.
This often repeated act again has come for the English language‘s greatest playwright, William Shakespeare. It reveals anew some of our culture‘s current artistic stagnation.
Novelist Jodi Picoult argues in a new book that Shakespeare did not write the great plays we attribute to him. Instead, Picoult says, a woman named Emilia Bassano (1569-1645) composed at least some of the great works for the Elizabethan stage. Bassano published a selection of poetry in 1611, making her one of the earliest English female authors to publish under her own name.
Picoult claims Bassano started earlier but that social and political barriers for women demanded she write her Shakespearean contributions under a different, generically male name.
The evidence is underwhelming. To start, Picoult cannot fathom that a man would write such strong female characters, such as Beatrice and Portia. The sound minds, wry wits, and stout hearts of women portrayed in so many of these plays simply must have been penned by a woman seeking to combat sex stereotypes and limitations, she claims.
This line of reasoning also includes a combination of biographical information. Bassano was forced to become a mistress at 13, the same age as the character Juliet. Moreover, the William Shakespeare thought to have written the plays did not educate his own daughters, making even more baffling the fine female roles found in Shakespeare’s works.
In the end, Picoult’s arguments for this position reveal a view that underestimates the possibilities of human creativity. The creation of art need not be tied closely to the author’s autobiography. Instead, great art often can transcend such limitations. The artist can see the universal in human nature as expressed in a variety of particular human traits and situations.
Shakespeare’s brilliance lay in that his characters and stories, taken together, display what it means to be human with breathtaking beauty and fullness. Read every play and poem, and you will find yourself and those you know several times over. Dwell on their plots, and you will find images of your own life. These likenesses of reality are comic and tragic, silly and profound.
Thus, Shakespeare’s strong female characters are not evidence against his authorship but point toward his mastery of the storytelling art. Even his biography doesn’t dispel this point, as men are capable of telling stories more noble and true than their personal lives realized.
We can learn a political lesson here as well as an artistic one. Our time suffers from a lack of political imagination similar to the one that makes us doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. We seem to think human greatness is either a thing of the past or mistake shallow hubris for it. Our country has suffered for it. Our Constitution, so brilliant in its institutional structure, still needs wise leaders and virtuous citizens acting within it who can perceive the good and desire its accomplishment.
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Thus, America today needs statesmanship that sees both the permanent, universal truths of human existence and the needs of the current moment. Shakespeare provides a model for such thinking in his political plays, especially those focused on English kings and on ancient Rome. Our own past does as well in our Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
We should spend less time questioning who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and more time relearning the truths in them. And we should ask what this moment in our history demands of us, especially how we can see beyond particular blind spots or assumptions to make our country better.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
