Falstaff, the Fellowship, Waugh-Bate, etc.: The Bystander #1

The Colonel pulled up his favorite chair and settled in.  Actually, it is the only other chair in the apartment.  I rarely entertain.

“I see you’ve included periodic overviews in your new book.  Don’t you think that is just a little patronizing?”

I could not help but smile.  I never can help smiling when the Colonel stops in.  I nodded toward the cup in his hand.  “Earl Grey?”

“Of course.  Caffeinated.  The ex sent me an early tin for Christmas.”  He slowly shook his head.  A gesture to prepare me for the worst.  “Decaf.”

“Did you expect her to change?”

“She delights in imagining what it does to me.  I will give it to the Salvation Army this year, I think.”

“Not everyone is the Colonel,” I said.

He stared into his cup looking for what my meaning could be.

“The overviews.  This is the 21^st century.  I’m all but guaranteeing commercial failure writing about Shakespeare to begin with.  I’m told the books can be difficult to follow for those with no background.  It has been suggested that I help the reader more.”

“By the Shakespeare Brethren?”

“The Fellowship?  No.  They still pretty much spend their time talking about how Mark Twain was an authorship skeptic and what the key is to this or that cipher.”

“And slut-shaming Queen Elizabeth.”

“Goes without saying.”  I rose to go to the kitchenette and heat my coffee in the microwave.

The Colonel raised his voice as I walked away.  “You include footnotes and bibliographies.  Isn’t that enough?”

“You and I are among the last of a dying breed, I’m afraid.  There are no notes or bibliographies on the Discovery Channel.”

I received a quizzical look by way of reply.

“The Academics are busy arranging two classes a week punctuated with tax-free inbreeding conferences.  The amateur Fellows are crying foul and trying to manage exactly the same arrangements for themselves on the cheap.  I’m left trawling for unaffiliated curious minds or those heterodox types that aren’t perfectly bought in.  Much the same waters, that is to say, that the Discovery Channel and Ken Burns are fishing.”

“But what will people in any of these categories really know for their ersatz efforts?”

“I can’t see that they care.  Not enough to change, anyway.”

The Colonel raised his cup in a toast.  “To the last of the gentleman scholars.”

Returning to my computer workstation, I raised my reheated, day old coffee.  “To the last of the gentleman scholars.”

“I did watch that Waugh-Bate YouTube thing you mentioned.  Useless generalities vs. precise errors: an interesting premise.”

“I thought you might like it.”

“Bate being something of a fourth form prize holder, you might think he would care that he misrepresented Dryden and was outright wrong about Capulet and the kitchen staff.  Surely he didn’t come up with it off the top of his head.  He was reading his opening statement from a text.”

“I must admit, he had me convinced.”

The Colonel was taken aback.  “Of his ridiculous claims?” 

“Of course not.  He had me convinced that he might be poorly enough educated in certain key matters that he could sincerely believe that what he was saying was true.” 

“Capulet was chastised by his wife and Juliet’s nurse for sticking his nose in women’s business where it did not rightfully belong.  That was precisely the division of the household activities common among the upper classes both in England and Italy during the Elizabethan Era.  He was merely passing through the kitchen, as any husband might who was anxious that the preparations for the big party go well, and dallying more than the ladies felt was proper.”

“Shakespeare would hardly have been a great playwright," I added, "or a presumptive nobleman, if he wrote every character strictly to type.  That he knew that a nobleman was a human being given to individual foibles, to playful infractions, rather than an automaton strictly obedient to every social rule of his class, at every moment, means he knew more about noblemen in their private moments than was likely for a grain dealer.”

“Also, it seems that the Stratford man had never been to Elsinor Castle and Edward de Vere had never been to Elsinor Castle, therefore the Stratford man had to have written Hamlet.”  The Colonel seasoned his incredulity with the cross-eyed face which he does to remarkable comic effect.

“At any rate, it hardly mattered so long as Bate sounded like he was citing a devastating fact in his favor.  We live in the era of the soundbite.  Fact checks come long after the attention has wandered elsewhere, if they come at all.”

“What with the advent of the Stuarts, and their European tastes, pretty much everything changed about the way the nobility acted and spoke.  That being the case, Fletcher was bound to please the post-Restoration ear more than Shakespeare who they thought was a terribly talented Neanderthal.  Has the Fellowship followed up?”

“Not enough drama to attract them, I suspect.  Much more interesting to overlay a Shakespeare title page with a geometrical matrix and see what pops up.”

“By Dryden’s time educated conversation and social mores were completely changed (although he cast no aspersions whatsoever on Shakespeare’s portrayal of relationships between servants and masters).  So then, he is saying that Shakespeare’s noble characters spoke like those of an earlier age and sounded false in the ear of the Restoration theatergoer.  We’re talking some serious low-hanging fruit here.  It’s not like there wouldn’t be time to chase ciphers after the work was done.”

“They are natural talents and must go where their inspiration takes them.”

“I can certainly see your point.  It seems like there is no end of natural talents these days.  We must be onto something.”

“The Fellowship is all in a panic about Bate’s comments on computer analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, though.  He even pronounces the phrase ‘mathematical precision’ with unquestionable precision.”

“That reminds me.  My computer is getting pretty slow again.”

“I’ll see when I can schedule you in.  Have you bought the RAM expansion boards I recommended?”

“I’ve been busy reading your Falstaff book.”

“I only just published it earlier this week.”

“Before that I was preparing.  Your books require a period of attention training.  You know: all those footnotes and bibliographies and everything.”

“Soon I won’t be able to keep you on the Internet without installing the boards.”

“You’ve been putting a lot of time into understanding those analysis programs yourself, haven’t you?  By the sound of it, you haven’t found them a particularly daunting problem.  Why don’t you write a book about it?  I bet they’d buy a bunch of them.”

“Like they’re buying the book about  Churchyard being the model for Falstaff, you mean?”

“I’m sure they’ll pass the information around."  There was a savage twinkle in the Colonel's eye as he spoke.  "You should be proud of your accomplishment.”

“Yuh, right.”

“Still no reviews, I notice.  Who was the beauty who wrote that your research on the Elizabeth portrait book was exemplary and then gave you a 3-star rating, by the way?”

I only raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips.

“Well, I have to go get some pizza for the football game.  I’ll bring you a couple of slices.”

“No mushrooms.”

“What I don’t go through for the Shakespeare Authorship Question.”

“I won’t turn my nose up if they arrive together with garlic bread.”

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