Tuning Forks in Urine

LUCIO. If I could speak so wisely under an arrest, I would send for certain of my creditors; and yet, to say the truth, I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment. --Measure for Measure

I first became aware of the controversy over Shakespearean authorship in high school, and initially felt sympathetic to the Stratfordian charge against the Earl of Oxford proponents, namely, claiming that Shakespeare could not have written his plays was *elitist,* but the debate itself is basically what I like to call a false dichotomy, Derek Jacobi's quite sensual stature as a grand thespian notwithstanding. Active research scholars point to the lack of evidence that William was a writer, and that the Earl had an extensive humanist training, knew the theater, and the Globe burnt down, taking its evidence with it. However, an examination of the plays themselves illustrate that whoever wrote them had a scatological range surpassing Chaucer's, and some are difficult to produce onstage. Characters like Lucio populate nearly all of Shakespeare's stories, a rambunctious threat to the not so very established order under the monarchies of Europe. A clever opportunist, if William was that, a bourgeoisie with a streak of ruthlessness, could have certainly written these works. The evidence is in the thriving discontent, in Shylock's mercantile parsimony, in the dynamic gouging out of Glouchester's eyes as Lear wails across the stage. The 17th Earl of Oxford may have had the culture, but he was a courtier of privilege.

Beyond this, the issue is a hopeless distraction. If Shakespeare wasn't his own author, someone must have known the truth, and those persons never made any testament, one way or the other. Jacobi and the Oxfordians are in love with a theory, perhaps buttressed by metadata, perhaps not, but Shakespeare by necessity must have been a man akin to the fictional Nicholas le Floch, a chameleon with the ability to navigate diverse social strata. Would that be an Earl, or a managerial businessman who had a mean streak? Who would be more likely to create a commercial success, rescued later under the auspices of the Romantic movement authors?

Writing, researching, these are indeed more isolating activities than producing a play, or films based on a play, but once a writer creates a work, ownership instantly becomes diffuse, no matter how arcane copyright laws are. I opt for William Shakespeare. Why? Because I'm the great granddaughter of a Roman cobber with just enough education, just enough mingling between the middle class and the indigent-- if indeed we aren't all headed for an economic meltdown that will quake like magenta-- to harbor bitter pretensions toward grandeur, beholden to developers like Ev Williams on the one hand, for my power did indeed ripple outward, but also marginalized by their science, on the other. I hate being cut by outlets like OZY simply because I did not act in the appropriate time frame. One in their number put me on an intriguing journalist list in 2014, but is this truly supporting me as a peer? I reference this same cut by New Mobility after I worked so hard for them to challenge the orthodoxy, and I was, in 2004, still vainly trying to hold onto a sense of family in the disabled community. I had not raised my voice about any sort of betrayal, but the editor, Tim Gilmer, couldn't take the time to send me an email before he cut me off from his contributor list? It hurts. I do not know how to trust any process anymore.