Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin makes an extended case for the Oxfordian answer to the Shakespeare authorship question. Or what passes for a case anyway. Mostly this great hater of democracy and populism just demagogues for his presumedly puerile audience, labeling Shakespeare—as in the actual Will from Stratford—a “rentboy” and an “illiterate Ghanian immigrant.” His clever idea is to set up the Stratford thesis as an anticipation of today’s diversity-and-equity critique of the canon.
Then he assails a straw man, the supposed Stratfordian belief that Shakespeare was a “democrat,” which nobody believes. Shakespeare fully expresses his view of “people power” in Julius Caesar’s popular sparagmos of Cinna the Poet. And if Julius Caesar held the early American stage and then became the staple American high school text, it was because the drama celebrates not democracy, which Shakespeare didn’t distinguish from resentful and fanatic mob violence, but republicanism in the tragic figure of Brutus.
As for Shakespeare’s overall politics, well, it’s always hard to say with a dramatist, who stages conflicts rather than enumerating theses, and this chameleon poet makes it harder than most. Yarvin quotes every reactionary’s favorite passage, Ulysses’s hymn to degree from Troilus and Cressida, but this is the utterance of a single dramatic character. Rosenkrantz—a sycophantic idiot—argues the same case in Hamlet while kissing Claudius’s ring. By contrast, that play’s hero pronounces what I suspect to be closer to the poet’s own political credo: “The king is a thing of nothing.”
In my reading, Shakespeare is a political nihilist, placing his faith in no institution and no ambitious men. He’s lyrical, where he is lyrical, only about love and private life and nature: precisely the quasi-anarchist (not democratic) anti-politics I find throughout modernity in writers who hail from the lower middle class—Yarvin, like a Marxoid polemicist, abuses the bard with this label too—from Keats to Dickens to Joyce (see my essay on Les Murray for a longer explanation).
But the strongest argument against Oxford’s claim is literary. Does de Vere’s da-dum da-dum doggerel really “rock” like Shakespeare? I count only one potential metrical inversion: in the first foot of the first line, “is” may be stressed for interrogatory emphasis, mainly because the line is short a syllable. But even if you read all the interrogatives as stressed, which you don’t have to, that’s hardly a poetically surprising reversal. Otherwise, the thing tick-tocks robotically like a metronome. Similarly, “the way he plays with the caesura”—what way? The caesura is precisely where we’d expect it to be in each line, not least because Oxford punctuates six of the 10 lines right in the middle, between two balanced sets of iambic feet. I can only conclude that Yarvin relies on an audience ignorant of his subject.
Ulysses’s speech, by contrast, is in Shakespeare’s general style, or at least his mature style, gnarled and enjambed, bristling less with neat Metaphysical paradoxes than with a careering rush of concrete and mingled tropes. Here is play with the caesura, sound mimicking sense: “And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets...” Likewise, I recall that Frank Kermode thought hendiadys the Shakespearean rhetorical signature, sign of his copiousness and bounty: “Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states.”
A more sophisticated reactionary would say that this apparently disordered and undisciplined style is just what we’d expect from a half-educated rube off the farm who could only read the classics in translation. But what do I know? I myself am just a scion of the anarchic lower middle class, while Yarvin, as he likes to remind us, is a descendant of that very oligarchic bureaucracy from which he promises, eventually, to deliver us.
