What’s in a name?
It’s hard to argue with Shakespeare’s brilliance, but that doesn’t stop some people from trying.
Critics throughout the centuries have found reasons to sneer at Shakespeare. During the brief English commonwealth era in the mid-17th century, Shakespeare and all theater was banned in England as heretical and filled with “lascivious mirth and levity.” Even after the restoration of the monarchy and the return of Shakespeare to the stage, some of his critics viewed him as low-brow and crude. (That seems to be the opinion of the world renown literary student, Napoleon Bonaparte). Ironically, high schools to this day are filled with kids with the opposite opinion; they find him incomprehensible and boring, the insufferable twerps. Modern college English literature departments often dismiss him as dangerously unwoke and discouragingly of the West.
So it goes, and so it will continue. These criticisms are not new. Shakespeare himself wrote in Sonnet 59 about the absence of innovation in the world:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, lab’ring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child.
At least, I think that was written by Shakespeare, but some folks out there would say that I am delusional for believing so. In addition to all the usual attacks on Shakespeare, there is a bizarre and ongoing debate about whether he actually wrote the plays attributed to him.
This debate sometimes feels like a shouting match between different factions of cosplayers at a comics convention, but basically the argument goes like this: a provincial nobody like William Shakespeare without the full benefits of a university education was incapable of understanding court life, kings and queens, and the full breadth of philosophy found in the plays. Therefore, someone with a better pedigree (e.g. the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, or others) must have written them. The debate even has teams: the “Stratfordians,” who support our friend Will, and the “Oxfordians,” who are fans of the Earl. The Oxfordians seem to have a good public relations office: the Earl was portrayed as the true genius behind the plays in the 2011 movie, Anonymous; Shakespeare comes off as a bumbling, drunken oaf.
Hollywood aside, I find this debate beside the point. If the Oxfordians are right, perhaps you’ve been deluded since you were one of those insufferable twerps in high school. Perhaps you were misled about the name of the extraordinary artist who wrote these extraordinary plays. But somebody wrote them. Somebody is an extraordinary artist. The insights of the plays are no less relevant regardless of whether they sprang from the mind of William Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford or somebody else. Those insights matter a lot more than the name on the front of the book.
Moreover, the argument assumes that only someone aristocratic or well-credentialed could write a work as brilliant and insightful as, for example, Hamlet. In fact, nobody – elite or commoner - has that kind of brilliance, except for the person who actually wrote Hamlet. An earl isn’t any more likely to be a once-a-millennium genius than anyone else. Why, other than the elitism of the people involved, would the author of Hamlet have to be someone who shares the elitist background of the Oxfordians? Why couldn’t it be Will from Stratford?
There’s a leadership lesson in all this eccentricity. Often, as leaders, we are dazzled by someone with a title or a credential. That’s understandable: it’s a great shortcut to identifying talent. But a leader should also recognize that excellence comes in many forms and from many places. In A Memorable Honor, I hope that you will see that it can come from even a William Shakespeare, a glover’s son from an out-of-the-way town like Stratford, or an Abraham Lincoln, a frontier lawyer born in a log cabin in Kentucky. You may also find it in the most unlikely places among the people with whom you work.
Until next time.
Frank
P. S. If you haven’t done so, please add your name to the “Who Art Thou” link below to receive updates as we get closer to the September 15 publication of A Memorable Honor: Shakespeare, Lincoln and the Art of Leadership.
P.P.S. Come on. It was Will.
