The Taming of the Scrooge

The intertunnel is a machine for staking out ridiculous intellectual real estate. Once it’s out there, you fortify it with references from lamebrain frontrunning fellow travelers. Eventually, the silliest ideas get their low-grade ore heat-treated with the online coke of hyperlinks, and the resultant ersatz intellectual tin gets galvanized into the interwebs’ official opinion.

Many of these Instagramhole attempts fall short, of course. But eventually, the intertunnel will probably decide that Herman’s Hermits were more important than The Beatles, because reasons (see footnotes). But I warn you: It’s a short trip from the moon landings were fake, to the Earth is flat, marching mercilessly to the queue at the Time Masheen.

But this aggression must not stand. Across this line, you do not cross. No, you psodoku-intellectuals, Skakespeare was a real person and he wrote all those plays, sonnets, songs, and shopping lists with his name at the bottom. And your reasoning for why he couldn’t have done so betrays your lack of intelligence, not his, along with your lack of imagination.

Exhibit A, B, and C in this cavalcade of middlebrow research is that it would be impossible for Wild Bill to have written all that stuff simply because he never went to college. Of all the clubfooted intellectual meanderings about the topic, that one is my favorite. This is always the approach for people who go to college, and think that their sheepskin from directional state U. proves their intellectual bona fides over a glover’s son like Billy the Kid Shakespeare. If they went to the poison Ivy League, where even less is learned about anything important than at West Dakota State (commuter), they’ll be twice as opinionated. Shakespeare couldn’t have done it, because I went to PrinceYalevard on the Gold Coast, and I can’t do it. Q.E.D.

By the way, have any of you inteprid internaut iconoclasts ever looked up what got taught in the grammar school that Shakespeare attended? I did. It doesn’t look much like the current tennis balls on the chair legs, finger painting and blocks education everyone’s getting now: Grammar School for Shakespeare (PDF).

Look, I don’t know how to break it to you people, but it’s much more accurate to say that no truly important writer ever finished highbrow college. You think all of them must have, because you read comic books and science fiction pabulum and mistake them for Remembrance of Things Past. And by the way, Proust did pretty well for a guy clutching a high school diploma.

You know, there really have been only a handful of really important writers. I’m leaving off technical subjects here. People style very minor writers, even hacks who write the same horrible horror story over and over, as geniuses. You can usually assess their bona fides to judge a genius by the way they spell it: genious.

Geniuses aren’t thick on the ground. They’re vanishingly rare in the publishing world, even back when the only publishing house was Gutenberg’s. So, off the top of my head, here’s a list of the most trenchant, accomplished writers ever to tread the earth. Well, the earth outside of high-toned universities, anyway. Not one of them finished college (university, if you’re British).

• Cervantes
• Chaucer
• Shakespeare
• Twain
• Hemingway
• Wodehouse
• Tolstoy
• Faulkner
• Kafka
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Jack London
• Tennessee Williams
• Charles Motherloving Dickens, people

The best of those writers didn’t even finish high school, by the way.

Let’s veer towards the more purely entertainment lane on the important writer highway. How about:

• Alexandre Dumas
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Ray Bradbury

If you think I’m a stick in the mud with my reading list, I’ll throw in Camus and Bukowski, too. Dylan Thomas ring a bell, anyone? Happy now, poindexters?

The other “evidence” about Shakespeare being a drooling imbecile who couldn’t possible have written anything of note is mostly teased out of misunderstood “evidence,” coincidentally uncovered by drooling imbeciles who couldn’t possible write anything of note. I give you: Sir Francis Bacon wrote all that stuff, and gave it to Shakespeare, because reasons.

I could delve deep into the very shallow, but still somehow murky waters of this line of reasoning, but you can do your own research if you like. I’ll leave you with one glaring fact:. Sir Francis Bacon was a bright guy, and notable in his day. The most notable thing he was notable for, notably, was not being able to finish anything he started. That’s not the C.V. I look for when I’m beating the bushes for a ghostwriter to surreptitiously compose 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and a bunch of long and short form poems. And then, you know, being anxious to give them away.

It’s all pretty silly. Shakespeare’s life was about as well-documented as a playwright could have been back then. We worship guys that write the bulk of the series of Branded nowadays, but theater people were mostly considered equal to nightsoil collectors back in the day. Plenty of notable contemporaries of the Bard acknowledged his greatness in real time, however. And if you know anything about the egos of writers, such praise comes out like molars. They wouldn’t have offered it to a fraud.

So you can watch the most comically misnamed movie of all time, All Is True, and learn that Shakespeare was gayer than Liberace’s Christmas Tree and his daughter had all the writing chops. You can read any number of books currently clogging the aisle arteries of Barnes & Noble, breathlessly conjecturing about who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I mentioned “breathlessly,” because the readers no doubt will get exhausted while reading them with their lips moving.

I can’t wait until all these new fantasias about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays make it all the way through the interweb’s alimentary canal, and the iPhone Time Masheen reports that Robbie Shakespeare was a bass player in Geoffrey “Flying” Chaucer’s jam band, and was famous for writing The Taming of the Scrooge.