Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

  The punnily titled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is a historical critique of the author of plays like Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, one of if not the most influential writer in the English language has been subject to a number of conspiracy theories. For example, perhaps Chrisopher Marlowe wasn’t actually murdered and his death was all a cover-up that allowed him to be spirited away to write plays under the pseudonym Shakespeare. James Shapiro’s thesis: these conspiracies are bogus. Shakespeare existed and wrote the plays we attribute to him. I’m sure we’ve all heard some conspiracies that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. I even remember that in our high school edition of Macbeth the marginalia suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote Act 3, Scene 3, and that is why there is an extra murderer that had never been introduced previously. Bunk, Shapiro would say.

Shapiro dismantles a number of common “clues” for Shakespeare’s inauthenticity throughout the book. For example, there’s the common belief that Shakespeare was uneducated because there is no record of Shakespeare attending school. Shapiro suggests, though, that Elizabethan England was not keeping records of the sort, but in fact plenty of people were educated, even if the attendance register is lost to history. The same goes for the argument that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly be as worldly as he presents in his texts. How could he possibly know about life in Italy, for example, if he never even left England? Well, Shapiro argues, often playwrights worked for play houses and were hired to write. The play houses would have their own collections of books that their writers would read and draw from—not that books were inaccessible in Elizabethan England; Shapiro points to some stats of how many book dealers existed. 

Shapiro works through a number of specific theories for alternate identities for Shakespeare that emerged in the years following his death, dismantling each one. He points to records that we do have (like lawsuits that bear Shakespeare’s name), the errors in peoples’ assumptions about Elizabethan writerly culture, famous frauds, and so on. Shapiro documents a fraud where one man wrote a wealth of extra missives, poems, and plays bearing Shakespeare’s name trying to convince others of a different Shakespeare. Even famous authors like Henry James and Mark Twain were Shakespeare skeptics, referring to “the author of the Shakespeare plays” rather than Shakespeare himself. Another prominent theory was that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—but to what end? Why conceal his identity?

Perhaps most compelling is the undercurrent of Contested Will. Beyond an exploration of who Shakespeare really was, the book presents some reasons that people might buy into conspiracies. In some ways, it’s far more broadly applicable than we might anticipate from the outset. For example, Shakespeare is presented as a unique force; he’s essentially a divine being in the world of literature. Thus, at one point in history, we see the debate rise up to challenge Shakespeare, Shapiro suggests, alongside other forms of divinity worship. At another time, we see the pushes for and against individualism. Scholars examined the idea of Homer being multiple rather than a singular writer; by extension, people then examined the works of Shakespeare as collaborations between a number of unidentified people, again dismantling his singular importance. Alternatively, scholars could not accept that the plays are anything but the work of a singular genius, but that we have identified the wrong person and that we now need to pull someone out from obscurity. We can’t have a Shakespeare that is an upper class figure; we need a scrappy everyday hero. Essentially, Shapiro’s argument is that political, religious, and social issues are the driving force of conspiratorial thinking. I actually hoped Shapiro would put a finer point on it and bring everything into a distinct framework, but the intimation is enough as a starting place.

One of the main arguments against Shakespeare’s identity is that he is so hard to pin down and find documentation of in his time. Shapiro, though, argues against that line of thinking. He notes how the spelling variants make it more challenging to find definitive record of Shakespeare. There was Shak-spar, Shakespear, Shakspar, or other variants before language got standardized in its spelling, so we can’t find or maybe have destroyed records with variations in spelling. One argument against Shakespeare is that people in his time weren’t talking about him—but Shapiro points out that they were. There are references to him as an employee of theatre companies, for example. Sure, he did collaborate on some plays (and Shapiro names the actual collaborators, which is pretty cool), but that was part of the process. Stories were commissioned and workshopped and shifted for different venues. Essentially, Shakespeare was known to others and we do have record of the man and the actors that he worked with.

Shapiro goes into some analysis, for example, of how specific roles may be written for specific actors. There is textual evidence for the specific people who were cast in particular parts. Shapiro also corrects the record on at least some of the order of the plays, which a number of anti-Shakespeare conspiracists got completely wrong in tracking to track Shakespeare’s development as an author and to pair his plays with autobiographical moments of their preferred candidates. (Sidenote: is it appropriate to call these conspiracy theorists Shakespeare birthers? It’s the same phenomenon, sort of.)

One of the most compelling literary arguments Shapiro makes in the book is against biographical criticism. It was interesting to see how previous conspiracists read and misread the plays to match their theories of who Shakespeare was (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for example). They would match the characters with real world figures and ensure that each aligned. These biographical readings, Shapiro and other new critics would suggest, fail to do justice to the actual content or logic of the plays. There’s actually a compelling anecdote where Shapiro discusses Helen Keller’s literary career. She is of course known for her life story. What I did not know is that she wrote fiction, too, and Shapiro documents how Keller was frustrated by the fact that nobody was interested in her fiction because her life overshadowed her work. People longed for more autobiographical fiction. Shapiro shows the way in which our society became more invested in an individual talent and why that led to autobiographical criticism and, moreover, demanded a specific identity for Shakespeare.

The book was pretty illuminating. I think it could have been used a little bit more of a push to lock down the frameworks for conspiratorial thinking that Shapiro exposes through case studies. The case studies are effective for showing errors in thinking and gives Shapiro an opportunity to correct the record and challenge the gaps in our own knowledge about the era and about Shakespeare the man. I’m not an expert, but I am persuaded.

Happy reading!

Eating Salad Drunk edited by Gabe Henry

  Sometimes we just need something light. Eating Salad Drunk suits that purpose; it’s a collection of haiku poems by a smattering of comedians and edited by Gabe Henry. The book includes comedians like Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Colin Mochrie, Bob Odenkirk, Margaret Cho, and more. The haiku works well for comedians because in allows them to essentially share a bunch of one-liner jokes in 17 syllables. There are some great jokes and absurd moments, and some poems that teeter on the edge of actually expressing wisdom.

One thing that’s pretty neat is that the introduction to the book gives a brief history of the haiku form. My perception of haiku is that they are typically about the serenity of nature and the distillation of a profound feeling. Henry points out, though, that there’s a bawdy and bodily quality to a number of early haiku poems. One of the earliest haiku, Henry notes, is by Yamazaki Sōkan: “Even at the time / When my father lay dying / I still kept farting” (XVII). For a comedy book, teaching me something new about the genre is pretty cool.

As a collection, there’s some nice variety in the topics and approaches of the comedian-poets. The poems are grouped, sometimes loosely, under the categories of screen time, food, friends & family, modern romance, struggles, nature calls, entertainment, words of wisdom, and self love & loathing. Several of the comedian-poets have entries in multiple of the categories, and I’m curious how the collection might have looked different if it were arranged by comedian rather than by subject matter. I wonder if it would help to get a better grasp of each comedian’s “voice” or if it would push comedians into some unfamiliar territory in their work.

The book is fun and light. I don’t have much “deep” commentary for the poems, but I will share some of my favourites, which often seem to involve either wordplay or absurdity. The way that the poems subvert expectations are just the best. Without further ado, have a gander at some of my favourites from Eating Salad Drunk:

From Aparna Nancherla:

Got to the end of
The internet. Turns out I

Was dead the whole time. (25)

Framing the internet like a novel with a twist ending has done before (SimpsonsDidIt.gif), but it has a definite charm that the twist ending is solipsistic in nature and also has the double meaning that you were dead the whole time you were surfing.

From George Wallace, with a focus on wordplay:

I’ll eat a skirt steak
While wearing a pair of pants.
I don’t give a shit. (42)

Also in the wordplay file from Myq Kaplan, who gets several entries in the collection:

Cafeteria.

Café plus bacteria?
I will eat at home. (47)

Probably the food poem that got the biggest laugh-out-loud reaction from me due to its absurdity and playfulness:

Oh, Fruit by the Foot.
You flout the metric system.

In a tasty way. (53)

That piece by Jo Firestone and Mike Dicenzo is such a joyful spin. The word “flout” is just perfectly elevated for such a stupid little poem.

Some poems are rooted in the human experience and its own silliness and absurdity. There’s a fair amount that fails to land for me when discussing social media, but Liz Magee has a great joke here about our social bonds:

Happy birthday, friend!
Posted a pic where I look
Great and you look fine. (68)

That is a finely crafted, elegant joke that works for its concept but also the voice. I can just imagine the way a comedian might present the word “fine.”

Drawing on some of Henry’s observations on the lewdness of early haiku, there are a few relationship poems that are risqué but have that same kind of wordplay and cutting humour, as seen in the following poems by Jes Tom and Kelly Bachman respectively:

A “tight five” is a
Stand-up set, or a new name
For fisting. You choose. (93)

My ex eats ass now.
Somehow that hurts way more than
All of his success. (93)

Or even Myq Kaplan’s silly:

Necrophilia
Is not what I thought it was.
I like sex with necks. (96).

So ridiculous and absurd but for that reason irresistible.

Some of the poems are also a little bit sad or stand out as more traditionally poetic through, for example, anthropomorphism, as in Laura Silverman’s piece:

Three in the morning
Refrigerator’s humming.
Must not know the words. (57).

There’s something mournful about that, but also endearing that this poor fridge is presented in its ignorance of the words. Kyle Ayers also personifies Netflix in an odd way:

When I die, someone
Scroll through my Netflix for me.
It likes the scrolling. (24)

Similarly, there’s a funny but dark poem by Aparna Nancherla that goes as follows:

Accidentally

FaceTimed my doctor’s office.
The call was declined. (5)

Or the sad response to capitalism we see in Sierra Katow:

The dogs I follow
On Instagram have better
Lives than most of us. (7)

I imagine lots of people would find a number of poems in the collection relatable, especially with respect to office culture and dating culture. Kyle Ayers writes, for example,

“Per my last email”
Is just me being polite.
Fuckin REPLY NOW. (10)

And the disconnect in communication of situationships, for example, as presented by Karen Chee:

“Sorry, just saw this!”
He says, and I believe him
Because I want to. (10)

Overall, there are a lot of fun poems and silly jokes told in a precise and concise format. Not all of them land or resonate, but there are enough in here that elicit a chuckle to make the book a fun hour long venture.

And that’s my tight five. Happy reading!

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash

  She Who Remains is a book of in-betweens and dualities that begins my journey into reading this year’s shortlist for the International Booker Prize and Rene Karabash touches on something interesting and special. For a book so short, it also offers a surprising number of twists that make it an emotional, enriching experience.

For the power of She Who Remains to land, it requires some cultural context. The book’s conflict is rooted in the Kanun of Lekё Dukagjini, which is a set of informal laws and traditions passed down orally with roots in Northern Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among the practices of Kanun are blood feuds and blood taxes. One example relevant to She Who Remains is that when a woman gets married, her father makes a gift to her husband that includes, among other things, a single bullet—if, on their wedding night, the husband finds his wife to be impure, he uses that bullet to kill her. If you wrong another family, they may send a messenger to initiate a blood feud and they are allowed to kill someone from your family—a short stay of 24 hours, or a long stay of about a month, may be requested, but is rarely provided. After an indeterminate amount of time, you are then able to enact your own revenge. Absolutely critical to She Who Remains, though, is the concept of a “sworn virgin.” According to custom, pure women are able to take the oath to become a sworn virgin. After taking the oath, sworn virgins are then considered men and are afforded the privileges of men that women are not able to access. 

Rene Karabash’s novel explores these concepts structured like a structured collage of pieces. We start with a description of what a sworn virgin is and then Karabash provides a poem about a girl in her mother’s womb hearing her dad praying for a boy and the unborn girl strangling herself with her umbilical cord. The book then provides an excerpt from the Bible recounting Cain’s murder of Abel. Following that, the story ‘begins’ with a flashforward of a man being murdered: the narrator’s father. He is given a courteous greeting before he is shot and killed according to Kanun decrees. Then we flash back to Bejika, the narrator, giving her oath to become a sworn virgin and, by extension, to live as a man, Matija.

I wish there was a simple way to tell this story.

There’s not; it’s a layered, complex remix of moments. There’s a subtle frame narrative at play where Bejika is talking to a journalist (it’s later revealed that Bejika is the last living sworn virgin), but it’s subtle enough that we as audience get to be aligned with the journalist and we get brought along in the misinformation and misremembering of our unreliable narrator.

Karabash’s fragmentary style for the narration plays into some wonderful ambiguity. For instance, after Bejika undertakes the oath, the narration reads: “I exit the change and for the very first time I feel // I walk home” (19). Karabash builds up our expectation for her to express what she feels, but before we hear an actual emotion she cuts off, which makes it seem like it’s the first time she feels anything. There are also moments when it’s unclear who is speaking, aligning them in an interesting and unpredictable way—maybe implicating them together would be the better word choice here.

The plot of the book is finely wrought and elicited from me several gasps. There are phrases and scenes that repeat, and upon their repetition they recontextualize moments in surprising ways. In effect, it meant I got to have my heart broken more than once from the same moment. For example, it has been arranged that Bekija marry a man she is not interested in. She instead takes the sworn virgin oath to escape and it’s heartbreaking because it means that a blood feud will start: the man’s family will seek revenge for the betrothal betrayal. Bejika is given a black armband and she must choose who will wear it and become the target of the murder. Will she give it to her father or her brother? It’s a painful choice, especially because she chooses unexpectedly. She picks her younger brother, whom she’d spent so much time protecting.

The narrative poem at the start of the book, I assumed, was a standalone piece that accompanied the work thematically, but it also seems to parallel, literally, events in the book. Bejika seems to recall from the womb her dad talking about wanting a boy. Indeed, her mother was pregnant with twins but lost her would-be brother. Despite this sorrow for her parents, her father actually seems quite good to her and sees her as the favourite, even after her younger brother is miraculously born. He treats Bejika like a boy and allows her to do things that promote their special bond. When her brother Sále is born, though, there’s a tragic tension to their dynamic. Sále is presented as a tiny menace; we’re given a poem about him crushing walnuts with a rock, “he fills his mouth and leaves no room for another walnut / the walnuts have not yet ripened and they dye his hands black / their green skins shatter under the rock / green water sprays Sále’s legs / darkened his skin where the specks land” (35). He is initially presented as an impatient young man who refuses to wait for walnuts to ripen. There’s something vaguely ominous in the image of him crushing these so indiscriminately and darkening himself. This is also presented alongside the image of Murash (Bejika’s betrothed) popping his head over the fence, and the juxtaposition feels oddly resonant. The daughter Bejika is the golden son and Sále is never boyish enough to be their father’s boy. Bejika even tries to defend him. In one moment, she kills a rabbit and gives the credit to Sále. The boy is publicly praised publicly, briefly, before being horribly reprimanded in private. The unfairness of the family dynamically, tragic as it is, is wrought beautifully, but is all that more painful when Bejika selects her brother as the target for the blood tax her family owes.

But of course, the strength of She Who Remains is in its layering. What initially appears as a preference not to marry the man selected for her is imbued with new significance after the fact. Bejika recounts her rape prior to the wedding. She’s late in milking cows when a man enters:

“I can feel his breath on me, he’s drunk milk before he’s come here, the village whispers that at dusk he enters the goat barn and drinks milk straight from the goats’ teats, there’s other things they say about him but I don’t want to know, Kuka is now right next to me, he stands over me like a stone pillar, I’m a moth, nailed to a brick wall by the pins of his eyes, his eyes don’t glow in the dark because coals glow only when you’ve set them on fire, his eyes are black as though they’ve been gouged out, or the person behind them has been

Kuka, don’t, let go of me” (55).

I find the description powerful—not so much the metaphor of being a moth nailed to a brick wall, but more about is eyes not glowing because they’ve not been set on fire. You can also see what I mean about the dialogue. Without quotation marks, we can infer who is speaking (or maybe thinking). There’s also the critical comma after “don’t” that shows thoughtful craftsmanship over the sentence. It could easily transform into “don’t let go of me” without that comma, but I’m going to let that hang there for a moment. In recounting her rape, Bejika’s thoughts and dialogue are ambiguously presented:

“go play with the other boys on the hill, I saw them on my way here, they’re still
there, playing tipcat, I’ll go home and won’t tell anyone that you were here

I shouldn’t have said that, Kua’s strong arms encircle my waist and we plunge toward the copper milk buckets, we fall and the buckets clang like church bells, the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud, the buckets ring to the beat of the rider, ding ding ding ding then faster ding ding ding ding.” (55)

What might have started in the imagination becomes real; she acknowledges that she said the piece about going to play with the other boys aloud and that it had consequences for her. There’s a haunting “ding ding ding ding” of the buckets, which echoes through the novel, and the scene transforms into one of marriage: “the milk buckets are our wedding buckets, my dress swims in pulp of milk and mud” (55). Evoking the wedding imbues the scene with a deeper, layered terror. You realize that not only has she been raped, but that this rape renders her ‘impure’ for her fiance, who, upon discovering that she is not a virgin, is equipped to kill her. Indeed, Bejika dreams that very scenario on the eve of her oath.

The scene is heartbreaking on multiple levels, and it becomes heartbreaking in a different way later in the book. Outside of the frame narrative, Bejika is receiving letters from her brother Sále. It’s clear from context that she has not replied to him (and only later is it revealed that she didn’t respond because she can’t read). Sále perpetually alludes to some deeper understanding, planting doubts in the reader as to the course of events.

Spoilers to follow.

The scene of the Bejika’s rape that prompted all this sorrow—her brother running away, her father’s murder, her living as a sworn virgin—in fact, is a story she has told the journalist. Sále’s letters allude to the unspoken truth of that night. At several moments, Bejika recounts a childhood friend with whom she read books but then lost contact. She and Dhana were close, so much so that whispers circulated around them—why are they reading books? Was she never taught to read? It’s revealed that those whispers were something more and that is what happened in the barn that night. Seemingly because of the suspicion, Dhana is being taken away and on the eve of her departure she meets Bejika in the barn. Bejika remembers the scene as follows:

“Dhana kisses my eyes, kisses my mouth, then she stops and buries her face in my hair, I’m leaving, I already know what this is, this is the end of the world, I still remember her salty kisses and the small hole in the wall I’d never seen before, when Dhana cried out loud, I’ll find you, the last of the daylight drained away from it, and the moment we left the dairy, eternal night would come for the both of us” (111).

Instead of being a scene of sorrow for the rape of a young girl, the story transforms with the new layer: it’s a story of a forbidden romance, an impossible love between two young girls. This recognition that it’s the end of their world, that this is their final meeting, is imbued with sorrow precisely because it is so close to joy. Throughout the scene and throughout the book, Bejika asks herself “am I dying or being born” and in this scene she asks “am I being born or am I being murdered in her arms” (111). Their love destroys them. For Bejika, this makes her impure; it is her death. Their love is the death of her father. When they part, Bejika touches “where the wet is” and it is wet with blood.

The revelation for the audience is sad, of course, but Karabash continues to layer the sadness. There’s the question of who is at fault in these circumstances. When Sále writes his letters, he alludes to the idea of forgiveness. We assume it is forgiveness for giving him the black armband, and that he is perhaps sorry for running away and leaving their dad to be killed. After Bejika narrates the real events in the dairy, Sále’s letter states that he “had the strong desire to hear the truth directly from you and for us to ask each other for forgiveness, but it seems I’m the one who has to ask for it first” (113). He says how he witnessed everything in the dairy: “You know how much I loved to follow you around, I even trailed you in secret sometimes” (113). He reveals that he peeked through a hole and watched and witnessed the whole thing. He bore witness. The two are bound together in guilt. 

That motif persists throughout the book. Later, it’s revealed that Dhana had written her a letter she couldn’t read. They reunite and the impossibility of their bond is, for a moment, overcome:

“Bekija, the woman who’s come off the bus cries out, the woman who’s headed to where my name means she who lives, she who remains alive, she who has saved herself, Bekija looks to the woman, then to the newborn calf, she cries, she smiles and she cries, the two cry and laugh together, Bekija gets up and goes to embrace the woman, the two stay holding each other for a long time, they say nothing, the calf finds its mother’s teat and begins to suckle noisily, a fly lands on its left ear, the cow keeps licking her child and it is precisely there, by this picture and in this moment that the two women feel immortality, they’ve discovered joy and in this joy there is love, and in the center of this love is the immeasurable, that, which is eternal, that, which cannot be called by name” (146).

This love transcends, but at what cost? Bejika has lived as a man for most of her life, her father was killed, her brother lost, and so on. It’s been a life of tragedy for her and in this moment, notably again centered around cows and the dairy, they “feel immortality.” Their reunion is undercut, still, by guilt. Dhana departs, leaving a letter behind. In that letter, she says, “It must be written for you and me to be eternally separated by something, and to shoulder the responsibility before God for every indirect murder we’ve committed” (137). The two feel more like star crossed lovers than Romeo and Juliet ever did, and recognizing that they’re both bound by their guilt is another tragic layer to the story, especially since the guilt originates from a system neither of them developed. Dhana comments on “that fairy-tale naivete where love exists outside of guilt and all else” (137). It’s a temporary reprieve from the eternal, “late at night and early in the morning, when the hands leave their clocks, and time is nothing but a detail, a blemish on the visage of a planet that, anytime [Dhana] gaze[s] into [Bejika’s] eyes, [she] makes [her] question whether it is even turning” (137). The letter goes on in a more sensual way recounting their reunion with a tender eroticism forever marred by their tragic pasts.

There’s yet another tragic element to the text revealed only when Bejika and Dhana reunite. Bejika develops a sudden sickness and needs to be hospitalized. It’s only then revealed that she’s lived another lie: when her mother bled out her twin, that wasn’t quite the truth. What happened was a fetus in fetu, where Bejika, as a baby, absorbed her other twin, but that twin continued to grow inside her. It’s a real thing, apparently, happening in one out of every 500, 000 sets of twins. There’s an irony here that undercuts Bejika’s own self-concept. For example, she always faulted herself for not being born a boy or strangling herself in the womb. Moreover, she converts to living as a man and lives most of her life as such, as though she was giving body to her lost twin. It also helps to account for the feeling she has that there’s someone inside her. She has always been dual and this symbolism gives voice to that.

I really loved this book. I felt it had so much to offer stylistically and emotionally. The concept is strong, the collaged and remixed structure enhances the novel’s power, and I thought it dealt with interesting themes in a complex way. It made me understand a little bit more about the world and pushed me to expand. I’m not sure what else I could ask for. So far, I think this is my frontrunner for my personal International Booker Prize readathon.

Happy reading!