History, Faith and the Real William Shakespeare
There are some parallels with the quest for the historical Shakespeare and the quest for the true historical faith.
If Buddha never existed it would not make any difference to Buddhists since the ideas of Buddhism don't depend on anything that may or may not have happened in history. It's not a historical religion. One might really think of it as a philosophical religion, if that.
But a historical religion that demands belief is something entirely different. I've tried many times to express this fact but let me try again, this time with the example of William Shakespeare. Who was he? There is a great amount of doubt about who he actually was:
This expresses the problem of affirming a controversial historical question. We can never know the answer with complete certainty. There will always be doubt. And if someone could evaluate similar claims and compare them he might even be able to calculate the odds that all of these theories might be wrong. That is, we must also ask how many times new evidence surfaced that changed what historians think about a particular question. Plenty of times. It happens almost every week on some question scholars thought they had answered once and for all. So there is always the possibility this might happen with regard to the questions about Shakespeare. Again there is room for plenty of doubt.
Now let's compare this to questions of faith, okay? The similarities are obvious. Believers must take a stand on the historical evidence. But most all of them are not scholars on this evidence so it depends on which one they read. And the scholars know the problems with their own arguments better than most others [That's why it's usually the case that the greater the scholarship then the less dogmatic one becomes]. Also, believers cannot be certain they are right from the historical evidence. Another theory might come forth with better evidence for it to replace what they believe. Agreed?
But there are several important differences. With regard to Shakespeare there are only a handful of theories which are hotly debated. With regard to religious faiths there are a myriad of them hotly debated on every religious forum on the web. This makes it even more unlikely that any single one of them is the only correct one (I'm talking epistemologically here).
Another major difference has to do with miracles. With regard to Shakespeare there is no need to believe that anything miraculous happened in his life. With regard to any historical religion there is. But such a belief falls prey the Lessing's Broad Ugly Ditch. When combined with what David Hume pointed out a long time ago, there would be no reason to believe that a miracle took place in the past (especially the distant past) even if it happened!
Then too there is the question of what importance to place on having the correct answer. With regard to Shakespeare the only importance seems to be the reputation of the scholars who make their cases and/or the families involved who might want to claim that Shakespeare was their distant relative (along with any royalties). But with regard to religious faith believers must accept with their whole heart that they and they alone have the correct answer to the question. That's what's demand of them by their faith. 100% belief. They are to live their whole lives as if they are 100% correct on matters of history. It pleases their God, ya see. Because of their faith, God will reward them here on earth and later in heaven. People who get the answers to these historical questions wrong are sent to hell, we're told. But based upon what we know from historical studies of controversial claims it is quite simply ignorant of a God to ask of human beings situated in time and place to believe with such a degree of assurance. And it is barbaric of God to send people to hell if they get a historical question wrong!
Do you see my point yet?
If Buddha never existed it would not make any difference to Buddhists since the ideas of Buddhism don't depend on anything that may or may not have happened in history. It's not a historical religion. One might really think of it as a philosophical religion, if that.
But a historical religion that demands belief is something entirely different. I've tried many times to express this fact but let me try again, this time with the example of William Shakespeare. Who was he? There is a great amount of doubt about who he actually was:
The Shakespeare authorship question is the ongoing debate, first recorded in the early 18th century, about whether the works attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were actually written by another writer, or a group of writers. Among the numerous candidates that have been proposed, major claimants have included Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley (6th Earl of Derby), and Edward de Vere (17th Earl of Oxford), who, since first being proposed in the 1920s, has remained the most prevalent alternate authorship candidate. Link.The answer to the question of who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare depends on which scholar you read and accept. Different scholars on this question will place different probabilities to their own suppositions. And if you happen to be a scholar on Shakespeare then you know the problems with your own theory better than most others.
This expresses the problem of affirming a controversial historical question. We can never know the answer with complete certainty. There will always be doubt. And if someone could evaluate similar claims and compare them he might even be able to calculate the odds that all of these theories might be wrong. That is, we must also ask how many times new evidence surfaced that changed what historians think about a particular question. Plenty of times. It happens almost every week on some question scholars thought they had answered once and for all. So there is always the possibility this might happen with regard to the questions about Shakespeare. Again there is room for plenty of doubt.
Now let's compare this to questions of faith, okay? The similarities are obvious. Believers must take a stand on the historical evidence. But most all of them are not scholars on this evidence so it depends on which one they read. And the scholars know the problems with their own arguments better than most others [That's why it's usually the case that the greater the scholarship then the less dogmatic one becomes]. Also, believers cannot be certain they are right from the historical evidence. Another theory might come forth with better evidence for it to replace what they believe. Agreed?
But there are several important differences. With regard to Shakespeare there are only a handful of theories which are hotly debated. With regard to religious faiths there are a myriad of them hotly debated on every religious forum on the web. This makes it even more unlikely that any single one of them is the only correct one (I'm talking epistemologically here).
Another major difference has to do with miracles. With regard to Shakespeare there is no need to believe that anything miraculous happened in his life. With regard to any historical religion there is. But such a belief falls prey the Lessing's Broad Ugly Ditch. When combined with what David Hume pointed out a long time ago, there would be no reason to believe that a miracle took place in the past (especially the distant past) even if it happened!
Then too there is the question of what importance to place on having the correct answer. With regard to Shakespeare the only importance seems to be the reputation of the scholars who make their cases and/or the families involved who might want to claim that Shakespeare was their distant relative (along with any royalties). But with regard to religious faith believers must accept with their whole heart that they and they alone have the correct answer to the question. That's what's demand of them by their faith. 100% belief. They are to live their whole lives as if they are 100% correct on matters of history. It pleases their God, ya see. Because of their faith, God will reward them here on earth and later in heaven. People who get the answers to these historical questions wrong are sent to hell, we're told. But based upon what we know from historical studies of controversial claims it is quite simply ignorant of a God to ask of human beings situated in time and place to believe with such a degree of assurance. And it is barbaric of God to send people to hell if they get a historical question wrong!
Do you see my point yet?
22 comments:
John, as far as I understand, authorship doubters in the field of Shakespeare study are clearly on the fringe, especially considering handwriting evidence and all of the evidence under the "mainstream" view.
Maybe we could parallel authorship doubters and the "Jesus Project"?
I'm beginning to think that that type of reasoning is an exercise in explaining away evidence rather than dealing with it. So why should the mainstream be tossed back and forth by fringe scholars?
I think the analogy is valid, but it seems to work in the other direction. Just because some people can doubt an event doesn't challenge the event's actually occurring. Do I need to cite all of the 9/11 conspiracies or "Obama is the Anti-Christ" junk floating around today?
Brad,
I think you missed the point. Its not about shakespeare, its about the fact that scholarship about Jesus and christian theology is blowing in the wind for lack of strong evidence.
One thing Shakespeare has that Jesus doesn't is that he supposedly wrote something. Also, statistical analysis can be done looking for phrasing and terms that make get you close to determining if the same person wrote two different works.
This type of thing was done to determine the most likely author of 12 of the "the federalist papers"
I was having this same discussion last night when a seminarian friend got my Irish up by claiming the US is a "Judeo-Christian" nation. Our debate quickly reached the point of contention regarding the historicity of scripture. I am firmly in the camp that says the critical-historical method shows that the bible is a hodge-podge of ancient myth and has nothing to do with accurate historical description. He argued that there are more valid cross-references to prove Christ than there are to prove Homer wrote what he wrote. I replied, "Fine, nobody claims Homer is the absolute truth of the universe." He couldn't respond beyond that.
Well, Lee, that may be right, but I think the evidence is a lot clearer for Jesus than people on the interwebs realize.
As far as I can tell, the main strategy of Jesus mythers is to cast doubt on the authenticity of every piece of evidence we have. It's a pretty lengthy list, but there is work out there trying to discredit all of it. So they wind up accusing everyone in the ancient world of credulity, from the evangelists to Paul to Tacitus, Papias, Josephus, Thallus, Clement, etc. That's why I say it's an exercise in explaining away evidence.
But here's the kicker, in scholarship proper, there's only a couple who actually hold to this. It seems tenuous because we read everything from online sources, but, as far as I can tell, Robert Price is the only real strong proponent of this methodology. So if I've looked at the evidence and if the majority of scholars agree with the orthodox view, why do we have to evidentially pander to a fringe reading of the evidence?
Let's just leave out the question of the resurrection right now, and focus on the "historical" Jesus. I think it is a demonstrated fact that Jesus of Nazareth lived, died by crucifixion under Pilate, and his followers preached His resurrection. The fact that Price holds to his theories doesn't change the actual evidence nor does it change the majority reading of the evidence.
It just all smacks of every type of conspiracy I've seen. It complains about all of the evidence we don't have, rather than looking at what we do.
Brad,
Please reconcile Tacitus' mistaking Pilate as a prefect before you make his take absolutely verifiable.
Also, please provide the lost copy of Papias' Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord before you go and stand on him.
Help us out and ensure that the Jesus passages in Josephus weren't a later interpolation.
Also, how certain can you be that Thallus wrote during the 207th Olympiad or was it the 217th or the 167th? You need to provide demonstrative verification for the 207th if you want me to come close to believing this source as anything more than Christian wishful thinking of an Armenian myth.
And just because Clement adopted a well worn theology and wrote about it in 96 AD doesn't mean much except that the human psyche will do what it takes to formalize the imaginary.
I love how apologists rattle off a list of names as if the number of a sample is verification. You also have to take into consideration the hygiene of the sample if you want to trust it.
Nice try Brad.
Chuck, you've provided a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's like a defense lawyer trying to discredit a witness for the prosecution. But instead of hitting on the one key witness the prosecution has, you have to try to wipe away all of the evidence, calling into question everyone's competency and motives, even mine, just piecing things together 2000 years later (not saying you did, but that is part of the overall plan that I see used).
Honestly, what difference does it make to historical inquiry that (or if) Tacitus made a mistake in Pilate's official title? It is a red herring. Of course, Jesus mythers have said a lot of "meaner" things about Tacitus. BTW, my personal favorite is claiming that Tacitus' references are interpolations, and that it was so skilled that the editor copied Tacitus' tone and style perfectly.
Now as for Josephus, we all know there is Christian interpolation in the TF, but it isn't all of it, because we even have it cross-referenced. And that wasn't the only time Josephus mentioned something related to Jesus. Again, charges of interpolation are obfuscation.
You complain that we don't have Papias' writings, but that doesn't deal with the evidence we have. The same goes for Thallus. Just throwing out possibilities doesn't really deal with the evidence.
And once again, with Clement, the best answer is to dismiss it out of hand rather than try to come up with a coherent theory of Christian origins.
There is more that could be mentioned, but the main piece of evidence is the corpus of the NT, and when used as an historical source it is overwhelming. Now I'm not saying that there is not room for doubt, the resurrection is something bold and different from our experience. But Jesus' ministry, death under Pilate, and the apostles proclamation are absolutely unavoidable when one actually deals with the evidence. Every account of Christian origins must deal with this, irrespective of current internet fads or whatever influence Robert Price still has.
Brad, you've been challenged with specific problems about specific pieces of evidence. Your main reply is to assert that it is nothing but lawyerish tactics.
Well, sorry, it's just not. If a particular historical claim is weakly supported, then pointing that out is good scholarship, not weaseling.
I don't see anybody here trying to "explain away" Jesus. I see genuine efforts to see what can be said about him and with what degree of certainty those things can be said.
Your attacks against the style of the argument fundamentally fail to grasp its substance.
Brad,
You said, "There is more that could be mentioned, but the main piece of evidence is the corpus of the NT, and when used as an historical source it is overwhelming."
Yet the four gospels can't even agree on the events they present.
I want my authoratative truths to be non-contradicting. I guess the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" doesn't demand that.
Chuck, I'm not arguing for inerrancy. I'm just trying to argue for the basic truths that are undeniable historically. We have about 15 different sources mentioning the events I detailed earlier. To deny those facts you would, in my mind, have to cast aspersions on every single one of those sources and come up with a theory on how this diverse body of literature came into being. Complaining of Tacitus' terminology does nothing to refute the actual historical evidence of his account.
So Rob, the reason I don't have to answer those objections is because they aren't material objections to the events under consideration. It's like the famous glove that acquitted OJ. One seemingly recalcitrant fact that somehow overturns a wealth of evidence.
And Chuck, back to the Gospels. I don't know what your theology of inspiration was, but it doesn't matter for historical inquiry. All the Gospels agree that: Jesus lived, had a ministry, performed miracles, died on a cross under Pilate, and rose on the 3rd day. Those are the events in question.
BTW, just as a side note, Chuck. I know it's probably too late for this now, but I want to apologize for some more abrasive Christians who have drunk the Republican/Conservative Kool-aid and mixed their religion with politics. It annoys me, too, and I just think that you left too quickly. But you have to be honest with yourself, and I can only respect that.
Brad,
No need to apologize for the neo-cons and theocrats. They did motivate much of my deconversion but, I don't blame you. I still attend church with my wife (I like the people) and still count many Christians as friends.
I think we honestly disagree on Tacitus' misstatement. To me, it is evidence that he didn't write what people claim he did. Someone in his position would arguably never make such a glaring error.
The gospels agreement on the climax events to the story doesn't surprise me. They were using one another as source material. It would be interesting to compare ALL of the early Gospel accounts and see how disparate the events were transmitted. We are left with the four gospels out of the many possible gospels that met agreement through much haggling and coercion.
Brad, where are you coming from? Are you saying that extra-biblical sources should or should not be taken into account when constructing the historical Jesus?
From your statements, it's not clear.
And again, your vague accusations of "lawyerism" really fail to grasp with the honest efforts of New Testament historians to grapple fairly with all evidence available.
And for the love of gawd, let's not resort to these arguments by majority. You sound like Craig when he talks about "the vast majority of scholars agree with X!"
Brad, are you a Mormon? There are millions of them you know, all believers in a mythology started less than two hundred years ago.
And it must be the one true religion by your reasoning. After all, we know Joseph Smith was real so the golden plates of Moroni must be true too, right?
Do you catch my drift yet?
There are two perfectly good reasons why God has revealed himself through history.
1. history reveals personality and God is the ultimate person. All the fancy philosophical "means" to get to God have been overemphasized and have resulted in a God who is just about abstracted to death to the point where he is no worldly good. Our God can only be known through his action in the world.
2. history requires that we connect with the community that gave us that gave us that history and God's goal is not just to restore a relationship between him and us but between us and ourselves. So this fits very well with God's means of working through creation. And if that requires trust (since the acceptance of historical info requires trust) then so be it. And that is not a negative to the task of restoring community. Love and community necessarily entails trust and risk.
So for this blog topic to point out that that there is a risk, well, obviously that is the case since trust involves acting with confidence in light of risk.
Rob R.
All information risk is not the same and the information risk probability can be diminished based on the hygiene of given information. When dealing with areas of faith, my bias is to doubt defenders of that faith at a greater rate than professionals applying uniform methodological standards. Defenders of the faith have a presupposed bias when weighing evidence which is rooted in their a priori assertions to divinity.
Brad,
On Tate's Creek Christian Church's website page titled "What We Believe," the first statement is
The Bible to be divinely inspired, inerrant, and our only authority for faith and the Christian life. (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
You said in one of your comments to Chuck,
Chuck, I'm not arguing for inerrancy. I'm just trying to argue for the basic truths that are undeniable historically.
Here, you may not be actively arguing for inerrancy, but you have committed yourself to it, even though we know that much of it is verifiably false and its moral teachings leave much to be desired. I'm sure that while you utter words suggesting your commitment to the Bible's inerrancy, you live your life as though you don't believe it and you teach those Tate's Creek middle school students to live like they don't believe it either. You don't kill adulterers or those who work on the sabbath...you don't abandon your families or hate them to follow Jesus...etc, etc., and, being a sane, moral person you don't teach others to do those things.
You've committed to Biblical inerrancy, but observably you fail to adhere to or to faithfully promulgate its teachings and commands. So, right this minute, not some distant time past, we see that what is being said about and committed to in Christianity, does not correspond with what the words of the Bible say. Brad, you are in-the-flesh proof that no one can know what it means to be Christian - or at least to brandish the label - today.
Clearly, whatever else the Bible might be, for Tate's Creek and its Middle School Minister, it is not "our only authority for faith and the Christian life."
Since your modern faith and modern Christian life do not reflect a belief in the words written in the Bible, Old or New Testament, why do you bother trying to defend the very poor evidence for an historical Jesus?
While all Christianities pick and choose the Bible bits they will pay attention to, and no Christians are actually Biblical literalists, some Christianities go so far as to disregard much or all of the Bible. Lots of Christianities throw out inherited sin, miracles, hell, divine Jesus, and some even dump a god. These, too, do not consider the Bible their "only authority for faith and the Christian life."
In a deeper historical sense, those "divinely inspired" clergymen who decided on what has become your twenty-first century Biblical canon, probably had faith and Christian lives that parallel yours relative to when they lived. Using such faith as they possessed they picked the books of the Bible, and, ever since, those professing Christian faith, including all of today's Christians, have ignored all but the parts they like, including those who ignore it entirely.
So, I fail to see what constitutes Christian "faith," how it can be defended, and why any historical evidence matters in the least since Christians, throughout their history, have just made of it whatever they've wanted it to be.
I wasn't even going to weigh in again, but Russ, I feel like you crossed a line here.
1. There is such a thing as assuming certain points for the sake of argument. I have little hope of convincing a committed atheist on this site of inerrancy, so I argue for the more measured "historical probability".
2. It's also unfair to commit me to a position based on a third party. I do happen to affirm inerrancy, (for canonical considerations and other reasons) so hopefully I won't serve as an "in the flesh" example of how to confuse what it means to be a Christian. You are the one defining terms, though.
3. My particular stance on an issue doesn't have anything to do with the actual argument. This, I thought, was obvious.
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it feels like a personal attack rather than a logical discussion, Russ.
OK, Chuck, let's look at Tacitus. What is the better explanation for the textual evidence?
As far as I can see, your interpolation theory requires a few more steps. You need to posit a Christian with access to the documents, with motive to edit them, who ingeniously finds an off-hand way of mentioning the historical figure of Jesus, then writes something disparaging about Christians rather than something positive, uses the same style and tone as Tacitus, and destroys any textual evidence or historical mentioning of the interpolation. It sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Completely un-falsifiable because the editor is an "expert" who anticipated all of our modern historical criteria.
What if it was just a mistake? Which is the simpler explanation that deals with the whole of the textual evidence?
But a Jesus myther doesn't just do this with Tacitus, but with every single piece of evidence we have. That's why Price is the only one in the academy who subscribes to it.
Rob,
I love it when skeptics dismiss scholarly opinion. I'm sure you don't care at all about biologists' consensus on evolution, or geologists' consensus on the age of the earth, or astronomers' consensus on the age of the universe. "Don't confuse me with the facts, please."
The issue is that NT historians are dealing with the evidence, all of it. Mythers are myopically focusing on certain texts without dealing with the entire corpus. So you take the NT as primary source because it is the oldest and most complete, and then you use extra-biblical sources to supplement the historical evidence in the NT. Now I understand that some historians exclude miracles on (methodological?) principle, but almost no one (Price and Carrier excepted) thinks that there is no historical core to Jesus of Nazareth.
This has been my point from the beginning of this thread, that we are giving a minority view precedence. It doesn't work in biology, astronomy, geology, physics, Shakespeare studies, or in NT historical studies.
Buster,
The Mormon card is another skeptic favorite of mine. But I don't feel like disparaging them, and just a little bit of looking into the actual claims of Mormonism and its theology will show that it isn't a valid analogy.
So how about my reasoning? Reading back over my original post, I'm having a hard time finding the argument that:
1. Jesus was a real historical person
2. Therefore, Christianity is the one true religion.
Of course, if that were my argument then it would be patently false, so if anyone does use that argument, then you can rightly attack them.
My argument is that Jesus was a historical person in spite of the fringe scholarship and internet psuedo-scholarship (of which I am certainly a part) which systematically dismisses the evidence rather than dealing with it.
All information risk is not the same and the information risk probability can be diminished based on the hygiene of given information.
Presuming you are speaking of epistemic risk, I realize that. For one I fully agree that the epistemic risk of for example say scientific claims and epistemic claims. But there is no objective measure at what level of epistemic risk we should be skeptics and what level we should have faith. logic has a much lower epistemic risk than science, but that doesn't mean that we should withold faith in science and have only faith in logic.
Secondly, while the measurement of epistemic risk may be quantifiable in some areas, like with many (but certainly not all) of the claims of science, and can probably be given a calculated probability of their likelihood of truth. But for other claims, such statements about likelihood cannot actually be mathematically measured and are judged by subjective standards. Most of us would agree for example that the possibility of solipsism is very low, and yet, there is no way to measure this.
Furthermore, while some would say that lowering subjective risk is the only thing worth considering in giving our confidence in an alleged item of knowledge, there are other considerations to weigh the claim. There is existential import and existential risk. This is of course in a sense the ethical lynch pin of the whole project of epistemology (it gets to the heart of why we should pursue it). Most of us would agree that truth is worth knowing, but some possible truth claims out their do not support this. If nihilism is true, it doesn't matter what we believe whether we are Christians or atheists. The considerations of ethics provide a example of this as atheists insist against many Christian apologists that they two can be ethical and reasonably so. This is because most of us know that if atheism is inconsistent with morality, for most of us, the game would be up and atheism would have proven itself inhuman and worthless.
John Loftus also highlighted the existential considerations when he posted his blog on whether there can be valid emotional reasons for leaving Christianity.
When dealing with areas of faith, my bias is to doubt defenders of that faith at a greater rate than professionals applying uniform methodological standards.
There is more methodological uniformity in much of religious scholarship than many skeptics who aren't trained in religious scholarship know. But that they still aren't at the same level as scientists for example, that really isn't a problem since the subject matter no matter what position you take does not have the same level of agreement. The existential claims we'd like to make whether we are atheists or not do not have an agreed upon methodological approach.
Defenders of the faith have a presupposed bias when weighing evidence which is rooted in their a priori assertions to divinity.
I'll admit to bias. presupposition? Well, that's a relative term.
I posted this over at that "other blog that shall remain nameless":
JP, "A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are toss'd with" (to cite Henry IV, part I)
"For Jesus sake" (to cite a phrase from Shakespeare's tombstone) do you imagine John Loftus to be a Shakespeare mythicist certain Shakespeare never existed? One does not have to believe Shakespeare is a myth to acknowledge uncertainties about a host of matters pertaining to events in his life, actions, even beliefs. Shakespeare’s biography in THE NATIONAL DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY features the word ‘probably’ 46 times; ‘seems to’ 32 times; ‘may/might have’ 32; ‘perhaps’ 27; ‘possibly’, 25; ‘un/likely’ 19 times and so on. More than 200 words of speculation in England’s most prestigious sixty volume tome. That is over 200 guessing words with not one iota of proof. So... even if John Loftus is in error on the consensus of opinion concerning the authorship of some or all of Shakespeare's plays, doubts of other sorts remain. I know you hate "doubters" and don't believe in giving them a second chance, but if you know so much why don't you go rewrite THE NATIONAL DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY and fill in each of the lacunae all those other scholars acknowledge exist?
The consensus as I read it, concedes that Shakespeare did not attend college but learned a lot of stories, some historic, some mixed with legends, from books and well educated friends, and added/subtracted to such stories, creating more dramatic and interesting tales, often employing the names of people and places he'd learned about. He was in effect a creator of larger than life characters and enthralling plots based on histories, second hand stories, and legends. (Might not the authors of the Gospels have been doing something similar? I believe that's Loftus' basic view since he is not a Jesus mythicist, but argues that the stories about Jesus lay somewhere between history and myth.)
"As for those who claim Shakespeare could not have written the plays because he never travelled (so how could he have written Othello, Merchant of Venice, etc.), nor had a formal education, they forget that with a few exceptions, none of the plays were original, but were taken from familiar stories and histories to which Shakespeare had access from his friends in college. When you read the originals, you will be surprised how much has been adapted for the plays, from the elaborate plot to even the names. Of course, Shakespeare added much to the stories.--To paraphrase Richard Abrams at the Skeptic blog of Michael Shermer
"Marlowe seems to have influenced Shakespeare's style especially early on, when both men were alive (Marlowe died in 1593, by which time Shakespeare had only written four or five plays.) In the 19th century it was a commonplace amongst the first rank of scholars to assign co-authorship of Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI trilogy (early plays) to Marlowe, based on a wealth of stylistic similarities. And one cannot read any of the good biographies without being told how Shakespeare began his career “emulating” or “imitating” Marlowe.--To paraphrase Daryl Pinksen at the Skeptic blog of Michael Shermer
To sum up Shakespeare's influences they included great classical authors (Ovid, Seneca, English historians like Holinshed). He also found nature an inspiration (for example, no other playwright mentions birds more than Shakespeare!), stories, ideas and books suggested by his friends who were more well educated, the playwriting style of Marlowe that he began emulating early on, the Geneva Bible (a Bible highly popular before the King James Bible was written under the command of King James, since there apparently were notes in the Geneva Bible with which the king and/or his court disagreed, so the king commanded the production of his own Bible). The book of the Bible that Shakespeare cited or alluded to most often is the book of Psalms, usually the translation in the Anglican Prayer Book--Leland Ryken, "Shakespeare and the Geneva Bible" entry at his blog
Continued in next blog post...
Continued from previous blog post
There remains disagreement as to what Shakespeare's religion was. Anglican? Puritan/Calvinist? Crypto or Closet Catholic? (There's lots to read on the subject of Shakespeare's religion due to the scarcity of his own personal writings on the topic and due to the era of conflict between Protestants and Catholics in which he lived. One interesting titbit I read, but haven't fact checked, is that Shakespeare's father was close friends with the father of the head conspirator in the "Gunpowder Plot" to blow the Protestant monarchy of Britain to smithereens. But search the web for the variety of discussions concerning that topic.) His plays present a variety of views and characters suffering both good and ill fortune, along with rollicking comedies, fairy tale figures, magic, the war bewteen the sexes, etc., that one may even note tinges of agnosticism in whatever faith he entertained. One can only say with certainty that Shakespeare revelled in the gamut of human experience, the joys and sorrows, the petty jealousies and hatreds, hopes and despairs, including everything from love to flirty frivolity, sexual puns, drunkeness, "adult" language (see the books, Shakespeare's Insults: Educating Your Wit, Shakespeare's Bawdy (Routledge Classics), and Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns)--oh yes, he also included lots of mention of birds, as already stated above.
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (MacBeth, Act V, Scene V) In contrast consider Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Of course that could refer to almost anything.)
In Shakespeare's early sonnets he wrote about his great love for a young man. We will never know for certain if this was love of a highly emotional but purely plantonic sort or mixed with sexual desire because we have such little information about Shakespeare's personal life. To find out more information on the subject, google up some scholarly analysis of sonnets 1, 2, 18, 44, 104, and 144.
But one thing we know for sure, he could write frivolous "adult" dialogue and puns, much of which is lost on today's reader due to lack of knowledge of Elizabethan slang, or, depending on the edition one consults such language has likely been deleted by later editors appalled at such speech. The process by which such phrases were removed was called Bowdlerization, named after Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), English editor of an expurgated edition of Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare died at the age of 52 on April 23, 1616. The cause of his death is unknown. He had been retired for several years. He was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Four weeks prior to his death he made his will. Some writers have wondered if this was a coincidence or if he knew he was dying, perhaps of typhoid, pneumonia, or a weakening of his body due to a life spent drinking (everyone drank back then, since water from wells was not much safer than risking health ailments from drink, but he was in the theater and probably offered more drinks than most people simply in appreciation.). A contemporary of Shakespeare was said to have reported the following: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard."
On Shakespeare's tomb is the message: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones”
P.S. Also, JP, speaking of another question related to "consensus" I seem to recall that you buck the consensus of the majority of the world's most highly educated biblical scholars who think "Mark" was the earliest written Gospel.
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