Like the old riddle about who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb, my question about Shakespeare is a joke. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
There have been some who’ve doubted that he wrote so well, but I am not among them. Of the doubters, some have been accomplished, themselves (including Mark Twain, of all people).
Yet, most who doubt don’t doubt from deserved talent, but their lack of it: they cannot imagine that someone from a run-of-the-mill upbringing could have been so insightful. They assume that a poet and playwright would have to have been an aristocrat to know so much.
It’s false — although few will produce what Shakespeare did, there are countless brilliant people all around us, whose insights are not dependent on an established upbringing. Their happiness, and our strength and prosperity, depend on assuring that they have equal opportunity under law. They will never deserve — and we must never impose — restrictions to equal opportunity against them.
These restrictions come through law and, also, hidebound customs.
When some assert that Shakespeare could not have written so deeply of human nature because he lacked a prominent background, they’re assessing the wrong deficiency — it’s not that Shakespeare couldn’t understand and intuit without privilege, but that they, his skeptics, cannot do so. They think that because they’re dull, and needful of the lessons from privilege beaten into their thoughts, over and over, that Shakespeare must have been that way, too.
Skeptics like this think too little of Shakespeare, but also far too much of themselves.
They’re the sort who insist that their supposed wisdom comes from long tenure in a career. Something like this: My long experience with X, Y, and Z makes me uniquely insightful.
Well, perhaps: What did you accomplish at X, Y, and Z? Merely being there is insufficient — what did you do, and what can you now persuasively expound, having been there?
They may instead advance something like this: In my 25 years of experience as so-and-so, I am sure about what to do in all cases.
Well, perhaps. What if, however, someone’s wares have all been shoddy, inadequate products? Under those circumstances, a long-tenure is more rebuke than commendation.
The best insights don’t come from merely being in a place, but from asking questions of, and in, that place, and imagining places yet undiscovered
Those who are sure that talent resides only in a few, well-situated people, are not only wrong, but embarrassingly so.
