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Shakespeare is an author: an essentialist view.

Article Excerpt
For me, no other choice was possible.

--Louis, the Vampire

IF I WERE TO SAY "Shakespeare is the author of all thirty-seven plays in the collected edition known as the First Folio," what question would I be answering? Every now and then, when I tell someone at a social gathering perhaps, or on an airplane, that I am a professor of English who works on Shakespeare, the one question I can count on being asked is this: "Did Shakespeare write all those plays or was it really somebody else?" When I say, "Yes, Shakespeare really was the author," they often look disappointed or sometimes even suspicious. "Just as I thought," their looks imply, "here's another academic involved in a big cover-up." Being asked to talk about Shakespearean authorship is not the worst thing that ever happened to me on a plane, but that's another story. (1) Although I groan inwardly when someone asks me this question, I must admit that their curiosity is perfectly intelligible: they wonder if some person other than Shakespeare might have written these plays. I believe my boring, academically responsible answer to this question is right, but it has the additional virtue in this context of being fallible. (2) It is logically possible that some amazing discovery might be made that would conclusively show that someone else wrote the plays--Emilia Lanier, maybe, or Mary Sidney. This has not actually happened, but it could. (3)

There is, however, an altogether different question that my statement would be responding to, which is not asking if Shakespeare is the author, but rather if Shakespeare is an author at all. It has been suggested by a number of prominent Shakespeare scholars that these plays don't really have an "author," or more precisely that "authorship" is a misleading way to characterize their coming into existence as texts. When I'm stuck on that airplane with someone who thinks it was the Duke of Sussex who wrote those plays I feel doubly frustrated because I think their ideas are wrong, even though I can definitely make logical sense out of their concerns. When one of my colleagues wants to convince me that Shakespeare is not an author, I'm just baffled. (4) What's the argument? Do they mean that Shakespeare's Works are a pastiche of textual bits and pieces created by many different anonymous people and then later printed with a false attribution as the work of one person? Or do they mean that the term "author" should only apply to some precisely specified subset of all the people who write things? In that case what would be the constraints that would distinguish the special case of an "author" from the general case of all other writers and why should Shakespeare be excluded?

Actually, skepticism about the conventional view of Shakespeare as an author is not primarily motivated by an alternative theory to explain the existence of Shakespeare's Works. There is a deeper uneasiness about the very idea, a vague sense that any belief in an author but especially in Shakespeare amounts to a superstition. The notion of an author is a phantom, an "impoverished" concept that should be abandoned in favor of research on the "material conditions" of textual production or the history of the book. (5) Stanley Cavell calls this view iconoclasm. (6) Like Cavell I would agree that idolatry, superstition, ideological delusion, langage de bois are all bad, but I wonder if thinking Shakespeare is an author counts as any of these things. My own doubts are compounded by the way my skeptical colleagues like to insist on the "historicity" of the texts, appealing to all sorts of knowledge about intellectual property rights, literary patronage, theatrical performances, collaboration, bibliographical description, the history...