I have written pretty extensively on conspiracy theories ( "False Flag Theories and 9/11", "Faulty Logic", "Mumia, the DaVinci Code, Full Body Scans, and Loose Change - How Conspiracy Theories Arise", "Conspiracy Theory Enters the Mainstream", "Can Hawaiians Travel Overseas?", "Maybe Obama Was Born in Gulf Breeze, Florida", "Katrina and BP", "I Have To Laugh", "Conspiracy Theories -- The Exceptions", "Amusing "Truths""). Among the other topics I have examined is the question why people feel the need to embrace these theories, even when they appear even less plausible than the accepted explanation. Tonight, while reading several academic rebuttals of the absurd premise behind the upcoming movie "Anonymous" (that Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford), I found one paragraph which fits perfectly with my own thoughts on the subject:

How wonderful it must be, though, to feel, as one reads Shakespeare’s plays, that one is privy to such a dynastic secret! That one is among that persecuted minority fully in touch with a tormented, unacknowledged, aristocratic genius somehow robbed of his place on the throne! Given the choice between identifying with that fiction-enhanced version of the Earl of Oxford, and with a successful man of the theatre from the Midlands, which would you choose? The powerful, self-aggrandizing emotional appeal of an archetypal romantic daydream? Or the richly-documented, if more prosaic, obvious historical truth? I for one am very grateful to Roland Emmerich for perfectly underlining the very genre and character of what is called the Oxfordian case. It is no less, and certainly no more, than an absolutely terrific plot for a B-movie.

Does that not sound remarkably similar to my own argument from "The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories"

Everyone wants to be an expert. Or almost everyone. People do not like to think of themselves as mundane.And in the past, it was relatively easy. When one's circle of friends was limited to a few dozen, he could memorize baseball statistics or learn all the lyrics to every song by Wham and become a local expert. He could find some trivial area and feel he was the best at something. But now, with the internet, he finds himself competing with hundreds or thousands who have taken a similar route to fame. Where previously geography and lack of interest insulated him from competition, now he finds himself challenged constantly.

And that is where the conspiracy theory comes in. It allows every aspiring expert an endless means of achieving distinction. With lax standards of proof, it  allows even those with limited knowledge to put on a veneer of authority, and every new theory is eagerly absorbed by a legion of other theorists. Where before there was an objective measure of one's success, in the realm of conspiracy theories, there is no standard of proof, every theory is accepted, and the only measure of success is the popularity of a theory. And even if one should prove unpopular, he can gain some measure of comfort from believing that he is rejected precisely because he got "too close".

In short, conspiracy theories are the manifestation of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes. While many do still turn to them to find a comforting explanation for everything that happens, many others turn tot hem to find validation. To find approval from others by turning out the most outlandish explanations possible. And since the internet makes entry costs almost zero, a field previously limited to a few lunatics with mimeograph machines has now opened up to the public at large. And with the explosion of theorists, so too has the audience expanded. So where one could reach an audience of dozens, the new conspiracy theorist can now reach thousands, and so the appeal is greater than before.

(There is an interesting follow up to this thought in my post "Something of a Paradox")

And "The Power of Myth on the Internet":

This has the feel of one of those stories people love to toss around to show they have some secret "inside" knowledge. Like the plague story of "Ring Around the Rosie" or that ludicrous "mother plucker" email that made the rounds (and its predecessor in the claim that Agincourt inspired the middle finger, or two finger, gesture). There are dozens of such tales, and not one of them has the slightest bit of historical truth behind it. Unfortunately, the internet has allowed them to spread beyond the "secret knowledge" of a small group of the misinformed, and they now form a body of dubious "common knowledge", no more correct for being widespread.

As well as "Roman Legions, Hopscotch, Killer Gays, "Got AIDS Yet", WMDs and a "Damn Piece of Paper"":

I explain in the original post the many reasons I think this theory is false, so I won't go into them here. What I will mention, as it is relevant for this post, is that this article shows a very important mechanism. With the birth of the internet, we see the perfection of the absurd "mythical explanation". We had them before, absurd explanations that spread by word of mouth. That "mother plucker" tale, or the story about the middle finger or two finger obscene gesture coming from Agincourt, or a few other nonsensical explanations that were nonetheless quite popular. But, with the internet, we have a medium which allows such explanations to spread with alarming speed. And so, when a story arises, which either explains a question which has plagued many, or provides a tale many find pleasing, or maybe both, it not only spreads across the globe in an instant, the many recording devices of the internet, especially Wikipedia, not only perpetuate it, but give it credibility it never deserved. And as a result we find absurdities such as educators taking seriously tales of hopscotch playing legionnaires, simply because nominally authoritative internet sources take them seriously.

There really is little more to be said. Conspiracy theory is unlikely to go away, whatever may happen to our culture. There will always be a fringe which delights in knowing "the real story". What I do hope to see change is the cultural environment which is so obsessed with sinister forces and secret machinations that such theories become mainstream. ("Conspiracy Theory Enters the Mainstream", "All Life in a Day, or, How Our Mistaken View of History Distorts Our Understanding of Events", "Catastrophic Thinking, The Political, Economic and Social Impact of Seeing History in the Superlative", "Misguided, Deceptive or Evil? ", "Three Versions of Evil and the Confusion They Cause", "Tyranny Without Tyrants") Somehow, our cultural immaturity has made us susceptible to such beliefs, ( "Cranky Old Man?", "Faux "Maturity"", "Pushing the Envelope", "I Blame the Romantics", "The Adoration of Youth", "In Defense of Standards", "Addenda to "In Defense of Standards"", "Deadly Cynicism", "Juvenile Intellectuals", "Trophy Spouses", "O Tempora! O Mores!, or, The High Cost of Supposed Freedom", "Self-Serving Cynicism and Our Cultural Immaturity") and I hope that, eventually, we find it in ourselves to grow up, move beyond such nonsense and return to an adult-run world where being hip, pursuing novelty for the sake of novelty, and espousing absurd conspiracy theories is no longer seen as the proper behavior of adults.

Again, as I said elsewhere, I am not holding my breath.

POSTSCRIPT

The quote above comes from three responses to the upcoming movie cited here, here and here. I reproduce all three below:

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I only have five minutes: sadly, I don’t have time to explain to the noble lord [Mr. Beauclerk] who has just spoken how a play can be a great play without being an autobiographical memoir instead. I’m just going to give a very quick sketch of how we got here.

Seventeenth century: everyone knows Shakespeare writes Shakespeare’s plays, some have seen him do it, he’s a popular public figure. Later on, neoclassicism happens: snootier commentators lament that every page of his work shows that he hadn’t been to university. He wasn’t very good at imitating posh conversation, he gave too much stage time to middle- and lower-class characters, he made silly mistakes about geography. But despite this vulgarity he was the greatest playwright ever. So far — no story.

Eighteenth century: nationalism happens. Shakespeare was now great not despite but because he had comparatively little foreign book-learning. He was a son of the British soil, a native genius, a sort of English Robert Burns: his plays came to him in visions from the fairies. Absurd popular biographies retail anecdotes in which Shakespeare does rustic folk-hero things such as stealing deer or drinking astonishing quantities of English beer.

Nineteenth century: Romanticism happens. Genius is now deemed divine and incompatible with recognition or respectability: really great artists are unacknowledged in their lifetimes, and they never write for money or work in show business. True literary geniuses are those whose writings put you in touch with a kindred soul, a better version of your inner self. What some Victorian think they know about William Shakespeare now isn’t good enough for what they feel about the glamorous imaginative realm of his plays.

So a pseudo-problem has now been invented: and along comes the pseudo-solution. An American called Delia Bacon feels that the plays champion modernity, democracy and scientific progress: she thinks (quite rightly) that they are too clever for the ignorant rustic of folklore to have written them. So she looks for a more congenial author, and in 1856 she chooses the lawyer and philosopher Francis Bacon. She spends the rest of her life going mad in an unsuccessful hunt for any evidence whatsoever to support this idea.

A story, at last. But, quibble many, *why* would Bacon hide his authorship of the greatest plays ever? And *how* could he have mobilized the most elaborate and completely successful cover-up in history in order to do so? This problem is solved in the 1890s by an Ohio dentist called Owen, who sexes-up the new conspiracy theory by recourse to an older, royal one. Ever since her lifetime, there have been sectarian smear-stories, inventive gossip and lurid historical fiction about Elizabeth I: at one time or another she has been frigid, promiscuous, a hermaphrodite and a man in drag, and she has had secret love-children, legitimate and otherwise, by almost everyone. Owen argues that the plays are full of secret codes stating that Francis Bacon was secretly the son of the Virgin Queen from a secret marriage to the Earl of Leicester. So Bacon was not only the Attorney General, but also the real Shakespeare and the rightful King of England into the bargain. It’s so obvious when someone points it out that you can’t imagine how you ever missed it.

1921: Times have changed. To one reader, the passionately right-wing Thomas Looney, Shakespeare’s plays don’t articulate a bourgeois desire for progress, but are the last great expression of proper feudal hierarchy. When Looney finds a poem that slightly resembles Venus and Adonis, published by a card-carrying Earl, he knows he has found the real author. When people point out that Oxford died in 1604, before, for example, the real-life shipwreck that informs The Tempest, Looney declares The Tempest a fake. To his credit, though, Looney is horrified when some disciples, carrying on where Owen left off, declare that Oxford and James I between them must have hushed up the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays because, if you read them properly, they are really all about how Oxford was Elizabeth I’s mother, and the Earl of Southampton was the secret love-child produced by the secret incestuous affair they somehow managed to have later on.

How wonderful it must be, though, to feel, as one reads Shakespeare’s plays, that one is privy to such a dynastic secret! That one is among that persecuted minority fully in touch with a tormented, unacknowledged, aristocratic genius somehow robbed of his place on the throne! Given the choice between identifying with that fiction-enhanced version of the Earl of Oxford, and with a successful man of the theatre from the Midlands, which would you choose? The powerful, self-aggrandizing emotional appeal of an archetypal romantic daydream? Or the richly-documented, if more prosaic, obvious historical truth? I for one am very grateful to Roland Emmerich for perfectly underlining the very genre and character of what is called the Oxfordian case. It is no less, and certainly no more, than an absolutely terrific plot for a B-movie.
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Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to explain in brief the grounds for my conviction that, give or take a few collaborations with other professional dramatists, the works currently attributed to William Shakespeare are the work of the townsman of Stratford-upon-Avon whose baptism on 26 April 1564 is recorded in the town’s parish registers and who is memorialized in the parish church with a bust and with tributary verses written in both Latin and English.

First, the publication evidence. During his lifetime many plays were attributed to William Shakespeare in the registers of the Stationers’ Company of London and on 37 title pages of first editions and reprints of published versions of these plays. The dedications to the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece bear the signature ‘William Shakespeare’, and the volume of Sonnets published in 1609 describes these poems as ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets, never before imprinted.’ That is the primary evidence.

Second is the evidence afforded by references in works surviving either in print or in manuscript. During his lifetime Shakespeare is mentioned by name as a writer, sometimes in general terms, at other times explicitly as the author of works now attributed to him, by writers including Henry Willobie, William Covell, Richard Barnfield, John Weever, Thomas Freeman, Anthony Scoloker, the anonymous author of the Parnassus plays (in which a character wants a portrait of him as a pin-up) , Henry Chettle, William Camden, William Barksted, Leonard Digges, and the dramatist John Webster. Most significantly in the current context, Francis Meres, in 1598, not merely named 12 plays as having been written by William Shakespeare but did so in the same paragraph as a separate allusion to the Earl of Oxford as a writer of comedies. The fact that the names of most of these writers are little known today does nothing to devalue their evidence. After Shakespeare’s death there are most conspicuously the remarks about him made by Ben Jonson in conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden.

There also exist numerous references to William Shakespeare as an actor and shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s Men including references to his having acted in plays by Ben Jonson.

These facts alone, I submit, are enough to demonstrate beyond doubt that, on evidence supplied by many of his contemporaries and in theatrical records, William Shakespeare was a poet, a dramatist, and an actor, and that works currently attributed to him were written by a man of that name.

Whether this man was the William Shakespeare baptized in Stratford in 1564 might seem to be of only secondary importance, but even so there is unimpeachable evidence that he was. First is the evidence supplied by the memorial verses on the monument to the man of Stratford which compare him to great figures of classical antiquity – Virgil, Nestor, and Socrates – which declare that he now inhabits Olympus, and which claim that ‘all that he hath writ / Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.’ Then there are the verses printed in the First Folio by Ben Jonson which allude to the author of the works in that volume as a ‘swan of Avon.’ Applied to a local wool or malt merchant, however successful, these terms might appear to be improbably hyperbolical. Lines in the Folio by Leonard Digges refer to its author’s ‘Stratford monument.’ An elegy on Shakespeare by William Basse first printed in 1633 links him with the dramatist Francis Beaumont and the poets Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer and refers to him as a ‘tragedian’, which could mean both an actor and a writer of tragedies. One of the numerous manuscripts of this elegy is headed ‘On Mr William Shakespeare he died in April 1616′ and in another ‘On William Shakespeare buried at Stratford-upon-Avon his town of nativity.’

Some of this evidence, ladies and gentlemen, is posthumously derived. Anti-Stratfordians frequently dismiss all such evidence, using the phrase ‘in his lifetime’ as a mindless mantra, as if posthumously derived evidence were ipso facto inadmissible. But if we accepted only evidence derived from a subject’s lifetime we should not know, for example, how Christopher Marlowe died in Deptford, or of Charles Dickens’s relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, or how Anne Frank lived and died in hiding during the Second World War.

This and more, ladies and gentlemen, I submit, amounts to unimpeachable evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did indeed write the works attributed to him, and that attempts to deny this fly in the face of historical fact in favour of improbable – nay, impossible – fiction.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening we have been entertained by a post-modern cocktail of historical fact, and historical fiction.

First, the historical facts. From Stanley Wells we have heard about the positive evidence which in any court of law would be enough to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a writer, a share-holder in a theatre company, who was much written about by his contemporaries during his lifetime and just after his death. And from Michael Dobson we have begun to understand some of what has motivated people from 1856 onwards to turn those facts on their heads and into melodramatic fiction.

Roland Emmerich’s exciting new film is the latest expression of such fiction. Charles Beauclerc wants the greatest body of literary achievement the world has thus far known to be attributed to his ancestor, Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Alas, none of De Vere’s plays actually survive, though some poems, not without merit, do. And you’ve just heard William Leahy evoke moral arguments about Shakespeare’s private life. If the works are only to be read autobiographically, as the anti-Stratfordians would have us believe, then let us remember that in Sonnets 134, 135, 136 and 143, Shakespeare puns on his first name (Sonnet 136 even ends with ‘my name is Will’).

It’s an embarrassing fact, isn’t it, that the work of the (to date) 77 alternative candidates sounds different. Any actor will tell you that Christopher Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ is that of a different writer. Francis Bacon’s work – much of it in Latin – shows genius, but not that of a playwright. The suggestion that De Vere was able to release fourteen plays after his death in 1604 (including one co-authored with Thomas Middleton, another co-authored with George Wilkins, and three co-authored with John Fletcher) beggars belief. Perhaps there’s material here for a Hollywood sequel showing that Shakespeare’s collaborators were also the front men for aristocratic geniuses: Anonymous Too. All proponents of alternative candidates have to ignore authorship tests, because they can’t countenance the possibility of co-authorship. Allow one brick to be removed from the edifice of conspiratorial fundamentalism, and the entire wall collapses.

So, why create fictions about Shakespeare’s authorship? Actually, I do think an implicit snobbery is an important factor. Nearly all of the alternative candidates are aristocratic, university educated, or both. Their proponents look down on William Shakespeare as an uneducated commoner, a theory which ignores the high quality of Elizabethan grammar school education. With the snobbery comes iconoclasm, the desire to topple a reputation which far exceeds anyone else’s. The earliest reference to Shakespeare is a veiled and bitchy remark by Robert Greene which looks down on his presumption to be a writer and calls him a Jack of all trades. Some people are just jealous, and the spirit of Greene lives on. Roland Emmerich’s film depicts Shakespeare as an inarticulate actor, and De Vere as an isolated genius.

Shakespeare had an aristocratic patron, the Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of his two hugely successful narrative poems, printed by Shakespeare’s Stratford neighbour, Richard Field. The companies with which Shakespeare worked performed regularly at court for Elizabeth I and James I. But even this kind of social status – along with the coat of arms Shakespeare secured for his father in 1596, and later inherited – is not aristocratic enough for most of the anti-Shakespearians.

Shakespeare’s works reek of the theatre. There were thirty-seven separate Shakespeare play editions published in his life-time; twenty-seven of these bear his name on the title-page, those that don’t give the name of the companies of which Shakespeare was a shareholder and for which he wrote. These books are very revealing about a theatrical mind at work in the process of writing. Sometimes the names of the actors with whom Shakespeare worked appear in stage-directions and speech prefixes. This is the work of a man whose deep knowledge of the theatrical craft was acquired only by practical experience.

This work is not anonymous, still less is it by the Earl of Oxford, or Derby, or Rutland, or Daniel Defoe, or Mary Sidney, or Henry Neville, or even Queen Elizbeth I. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. His authorship was not even questioned until 1856. If he didn’t then we have to believe that thousands of people during his life-time – readers, publishers, printers, booksellers, actors, audience members, courtiers, and Stratford-upon-Avon residents who put a church monument to Shakespeare comparing him to Virgil and Socrates – were in on a terrible conspiracy. I think not.
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I know it is odd to have a postscript several times as long as the original post, but in this case the source material was too good not to reproduce.