From Joseph Bottum’s contribution to the latest “Public Square” section of First Things:
There are three infallible signs of the crank ? that oddball, goofball sort of person who mutters, as he walks along, about how he’s grasped the key to everything. The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.
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[T]here are plenty of recent examples ? and to their ranks we can now add the Supreme Court’s John Paul Stevens. “In a visit to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, Justice Stevens observed that the purported playwright left no books, nor letters or other records of a literary presence,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “‘Where are the books? You can’t be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home,'” Justice Stevens says. ‘He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event ? the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.'”
“Oh my,” as Coppelia Kahn, president of the Shakespeare Association of America, replied when told about that “beyond a reasonable doubt” stuff. Justice Stevens apparently holds the Oxfordian thesis ? the view that Shakespeare was just too lower class to write the plays, and the true author must therefore have been the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
As it happens, de Vere died in 1604, before the appearance of King Lear, The Tempest, and other plays. But when has the simple fact of death even gotten in the way of a good theory? No news yet on Stevens’ views about silver coinage and the ten lost tribes, but the day after the Wall Street Journal told us about Stevens, CNN ran a story about the nutrient-rich seed of the Maya tree in Guatemala, which, we are informed, “can be prepared to taste like mashed potatoes, chocolate, or coffee.” The headline, however, seemed to promise more: “Forgotten Nut Changes Lives.”
Perhaps Justice Stevens’ views are simply one of those “sweet mysteries of life,” like the one that enabled him to see no constitutional roadblock to cities and towns seizing private property from one owner and giving it to another private owner for purposes of boosting the local tax base.
As for bizarre ideas about Shakespeare, it’s a topic Carolina Journal Radio discussed in 2007 with N.C. State Professor R.V. Young, now the editor of Modern Age. Click play below to view a clip from that interview.
