Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- General introduction
- Part I Sceptics
- Part II Shakespeare as author
- Part III A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
- 14 ‘This palpable device’: Authorship and conspiracy in Shakespeare's life
- 15 Amateurs and professionals: Regendering Bacon
- 16 Fictional treatments of Shakespeare's authorship
- 17 The ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’
- 18 ‘There won't be puppets, will there?’: ‘Heroic’ authorship and the cultural politics of Anonymous
- 19 ‘The Shakespeare establishment’ and the Shakespeare authorship discussion
- Afterword
- A selected reading list
- Notes
- Index
14 - ‘This palpable device’: Authorship and conspiracy in Shakespeare's life
from Part III - A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Content
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- General introduction
- Part I Sceptics
- Part II Shakespeare as author
- Part III A cultural phenomenon: Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
- 14 ‘This palpable device’: Authorship and conspiracy in Shakespeare's life
- 15 Amateurs and professionals: Regendering Bacon
- 16 Fictional treatments of Shakespeare's authorship
- 17 The ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’
- 18 ‘There won't be puppets, will there?’: ‘Heroic’ authorship and the cultural politics of Anonymous
- 19 ‘The Shakespeare establishment’ and the Shakespeare authorship discussion
- Afterword
- A selected reading list
- Notes
- Index
Summary
We humans tend to marry, date, befriend and talk with people who already agree with us, and hence are less likely to say, ‘Wait a minute – that's just not true.’
Delia Bacon, we are told, went mad. John Thomas Looney's name can be mispronounced to chime with an insult to mad people. Mockery of mental illness is an unusual accompaniment to serious intellectual discussion. Its persistent background in the authorship debate, together with the anger and name-calling that also accompany it, suggests that more than the facts of the case are at issue. The emotion that often accompanies discussion of Shakespeare's life seems to involve more than the pathology of individual adherents to one side or another. It seems rather to travel along the boundary between the life and the plays, between the recurring stories that make emotional sense of the world and the systems of codified knowledge that carry the authority of truth. The tension between knowledge and emotion that this debate reveals can be explained in social and historical terms. However, its recurrence across two centuries suggests that psychology may also provide an explanatory model, not only for the authorship debate but for the many occasions when the evidence for a case does not meet the emotional demands that it makes on its proponents. Emotional reaction to public issues is often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’, especially by those who do not share it, but an attempt to understand the structure of conspiracy as a narrative and as a set of emotions might illuminate the psychological work that it performs.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare beyond DoubtEvidence, Argument, Controversy, pp. 163 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013