As you've probably heard, the release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate last week has basically sliced the number of "birthers" in half (according to a Washington Post poll). If only it were so easy to disprove one of the most durable conspiracy theories of all time: the idea that the William born to John Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 is not the dude who wrote some of the best plays in the history of the English language. This is commonly known as the "Shakespeare authorship question," but that implies that there's actually a legitimate question, which (at least among scholars of Shakespeare) there really isn't. Given recent trends in conspiracy naming, I think we should start calling the authorship skeptics "Barders" instead.
Barderism has been around a lot longer than birtherism, obviously, but the parallels between the two conspiracy theories are interesting. Like birthers, Barders come in multiple varieties. Some Barders believe there's not only solid evidence that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him, but that there is solid evidence that someone else did. (The "someone else" in question varies -- more than 50 people have been proposed as alternative authors, up to and including Queen Elizabeth. However, the most popular alternatives -- the Bill Ayerses of Barderism, if you will -- are Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; Francis Bacon; and Christopher Marlowe.) Some Barders, like Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, don't have a definite alternative in mind but maintain that "the evidence that (Shakespeare) was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt." And some Barders, including a former artistic director of the modern Globe, believe merely that enough doubt exists for scholars to stop dismissing the possibility and launch a serious investigation.
Sound familiar?
The reasoning behind Barderism should also ring a few bells for anyone familiar with the questions directed at various parts of President Obama's biography, from birth to his enrollment at Harvard Law School (supposedly the result of Affirmative Action Magic). This is because just as much of Obama-skepticism is motivated by the belief that a black dude could not possibly be legitimately qualified to edit the Harvard Law Review or become president of the United States, much of Barderism is motivated by the belief that a man from a small town without a university education couldn't possibly have written some of the best literature in the English language. Barders will frequently argue that the references to, say, falconry or court intrigue in Shakespeare's plays could only have been written by an aristocrat, or that no one would be able to write as intelligently about law as Shakespeare did without a degree from Cambridge or Oxford. The snobbery of this is pretty obvious -- it's as if the Barders had never heard of an autodidact before.
Just as the birthers' blindness has led them to demand proof of Obama's legitimacy beyond that demanded of any other president in history, Barders claim that there is no definitive evidence that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works. What this means is that they've dismissed the references to him by other writers of the time and are focusing on the fact that his life wasn't exhaustively documented in formal records. (As scholars have discovered more and more about Shakespeare's life over the last decade, this sort of argument has started to look sillier and sillier.) This, of course, is itself pretty classist -- we wouldn't be able to learn too much about most people who grew up in small towns to middle-class parents in the mid- to late 16th century. But it's also an absurdly high standard to clear for proving that someone was, in fact, who people said he was. Unless, of course, you don't believe that Someone Like Him could possibly amount to much in life.
