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.
6 Responses
I know quite normal, educated, mentally healthy people who believe sincerely that they never went to the moon.
We have a tourist attraction in South Florida called Coral Castle, a bunch of limestone buildings, statues, etc., built by a man working alone back in the 1920s. Now, you can find people on the Internet claiming he had some sort of extraterrestrial help. They said no one saw him build anything. My dad’s family came here in 1919, and he told me the guy worked at night when it was cool.
Thank you for including Wodehouse in your list. I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of the top 100 most important authors of all time and divide them up by which ones went to college and which ones didn’t. You aren’t going to like some of the people they put on the list. However, surprisingly, about 70% went to college.
ποΈ Top 100 Most Important Authors of All Time
(π = went to college / π« = did not go to college)
Aeschylus β π« (Educated in aristocratic Athens, no formal college existed)
Aesop β π« (Legendary figure; no record of formal education)
Albert Camus β π (University of Algiers)
Aldous Huxley β π (Balliol College, Oxford)
Alexandre Dumas β π« (No formal college, tutored; later worked as a scribe)
AnaΓ―s Nin β π (Studied psychoanalysis; attended college courses in Paris and New York)
Anne Frank β π« (Died at age 15, never reached college age)
Anton Chekhov β π (Moscow State University, medical degree)
Aristotle β π (Studied at Platoβs Academy)
Arthur Conan Doyle β π (University of Edinburgh Medical School)
Boccaccio β π (Studied canon law at University of Naples)
Boris Pasternak β π (Moscow Conservatory, then philosophy at Marburg University)
Bram Stoker β π (Trinity College Dublin)
Charles Baudelaire β π (Studied law, though did not complete)
Charles Dickens β π« (No formal college; began work at age 12 due to family debt)
Charlotte BrontΓ« β π« (No university; self-educated and attended boarding schools)
Chinua Achebe β π (University College Ibadan)
Dante Alighieri β π« (Educated, but no university; early universities not yet widespread)
Daniel Defoe β π (Newington Green Dissenting Academy)
D.H. Lawrence β π (University College Nottingham)
Edgar Allan Poe β π (University of Virginia, but dropped out)
Edith Wharton β π« (No formal education; privately tutored)
Emily BrontΓ« β π« (No college; some study in Brussels and boarding schools)
Emily Dickinson β π (Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, left after one year)
Ernest Hemingway β π« (Did not attend college; became a journalist)
Euripides β π« (Educated in Athens, but no formal universities)
F. Scott Fitzgerald β π (Princeton University, but did not graduate)
Franz Kafka β π (University of Prague, law degree)
Fyodor Dostoevsky β π (Military Engineering Academy, St. Petersburg)
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez β π (Studied law at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, did not finish)
Galileo Galilei β π (University of Pisa)
George Eliot β π (Privately educated; self-taught extensively, not formally enrolled)
George Orwell β π« (Did not attend college; joined imperial police in Burma)
Geoffrey Chaucer β π« (No college; educated at court, fluent in several languages)
Goethe β π (University of Leipzig and University of Strasbourg)
Gustave Flaubert β π (University of Paris, law)
HalldΓ³r Laxness β π (Benedictine monastery in Luxembourg; some university study)
Hans Christian Andersen β π« (Little formal education)
Haruki Murakami β π (Waseda University)
Henry David Thoreau β π (Harvard University)
Henry James β π (Harvard Law School briefly; mostly privately educated)
Hermann Hesse β π« (Did not attend university; worked in bookstores and wrote)
Homer β π« (Legendary poet; predates formal institutions)
HonorΓ© de Balzac β π (University of Paris, law)
Isabel Allende β π (University of Chile)
Italo Calvino β π (University of Turin, literature)
Ivan Turgenev β π (University of Moscow and University of Berlin)
James Baldwin β π« (Did not attend college; self-educated, supported by fellowships)
James Joyce β π (University College Dublin)
Jane Austen β π« (Privately educated at home)
Jean-Paul Sartre β π (Γcole Normale SupΓ©rieure, Paris)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau β π« (No formal higher education)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe β π (Law at Leipzig and Strasbourg)
John Milton β π (Christ’s College, Cambridge)
John Steinbeck β π (Stanford University, no degree)
Jorge Luis Borges β π (University of Geneva)
Joseph Conrad β π« (Maritime training, no university)
Jules Verne β π (Law studies in Paris)
Karl Marx β π (University of Bonn, then University of Berlin)
Kurt Vonnegut β π (University of Chicago; also studied at Cornell and Carnegie)
Laozi β π« (Ancient sage, no historical college)
Leo Tolstoy β π (Kazan University, dropped out)
Lewis Carroll β π (Christ Church, Oxford)
Louisa May Alcott β π« (No formal college; self-taught and worked to support family)
Marcel Proust β π (University of Paris)
Mark Twain β π« (Left school at 12; entirely self-educated)
Mary Shelley β π« (No formal college; educated by father and husbandβs literary circle)
Miguel de Cervantes β π« (No known college education)
MoliΓ¨re β π (CollΓ¨ge de Clermont in Paris, law degree)
Nathaniel Hawthorne β π (Bowdoin College)
Natsume SΕseki β π (Tokyo Imperial University)
NiccolΓ² Machiavelli β π (University-educated, though specifics sparse)
Oscar Wilde β π (Magdalen College, Oxford)
Ovid β π (Studied rhetoric in Rome)
Pablo Neruda β π (University of Chile)
Plato β π (Student of Socrates; founded the Academy in Athens)
Ralph Waldo Emerson β π (Harvard University)
Ray Bradbury β π« (Did not attend college; self-educated at public library)
Rainer Maria Rilke β π (University of Prague and Munich)
RenΓ© Descartes β π (University of Poitiers; Jesuit education)
Robert Frost β π (Attended Dartmouth and Harvard, no degree)
Rumi β π (Theological and Sufi education; equivalent to higher education of time)
Salman Rushdie β π (Kingβs College, Cambridge)
Samuel Beckett β π (Trinity College Dublin)
Samuel Johnson β π (Oxford University, left without degree)
Sappho β π« (No formal education institutions existed for women)
Seneca β π (Educated in Rome by prominent Stoics)
Shakespeare β π« (Grammar school education; no college)
Simone de Beauvoir β π (Sorbonne and Γcole Normale SupΓ©rieure)
SΓΈren Kierkegaard β π (University of Copenhagen)
Sophocles β π« (Educated in Athens; no universities)
Stephen King β π (University of Maine)
Sun Tzu β π« (Ancient general; no formal education institutions)
Sylvia Plath β π (Smith College, Fulbright to Cambridge)
T.S. Eliot β π (Harvard, then Oxford)
Toni Morrison β π (Howard University, then Cornell)
Ursula K. Le Guin β π (Radcliffe College, then Columbia)
Virginia Woolf β π« (No college; self-taught through fatherβs library)
Voltaire β π (Jesuit college in Paris; some legal studies)
William Faulkner β π (University of Mississippi, left without degree)
π Summary:
Hi Robert- Thanks for reading and leaving fun comments.
Hmm. Toni Morrison and Stephen “haunted toaster” King on a list of authors that includes Goethe and Dostoevsky. Chat GPT should leave the humor to guys like me, who know how to do it.
Without a close inspection, I can safely estimate that at least 50% of the “went to college” brigade in the list dropped out after about fifteen minutes. And the other 50% don’t belong on the list. I’m also guessing that lots of them are mistakenly listed because they taught at colleges, not because they were educated at them. IE: Vonnegut.
As far as landing on the moon, believing outre things for the little thrill people get from “secret knowledge” is a luxury good. But believing bosh is cheap, all things considered.
You mentioned Jack London as not having a degree. His Martin Eden is a detailed presentation of your blog post. In it, he makes the comment, βToo much is written by the men who canβt write about the men who do write.” You & he would enjoy a great conversation.
Hi Emil- I like Jack London a lot, but I’ve never read that book. I will now.
An intellectual could never have written To Build a Fire. Literally impossible.
I wrote a short, obtuse meditation on the subject in The Devil’s in the Cows you might remember: The Writer.
Anais Nin? Tennessee Williams? Charles Bukowski? William Faulkner? Please, do not let a writer’s passport win admission to any list of great writers. I also lift the eyebrow of scorn against anyone nominating Plath (read Elizabeth Bishop instead), Stephen King (Gene Wolfe is to be preferred), or Kurt Vonnegut (emptied out by the time he finished “Slaughterhouse-Five”) If you insist on an American name to put beside the likes of PG Wodehouse, then let it be that of O. Henry (pbuh).
Hi Gerry- Thanks for reading and commenting.
O Henry is a great addition to the first list. I don’t think he even finished high school. My wife reads his shorts stories by the carload. Interesting fellow in his own right. His life was a wild story on its own. He invented the term “banana republic,” which is one of those things that becomes universally understood, but no one remembers where it came from.