Shakespeare and False Assumptions

Yesterday while reading coverage of the voting in Iraq I came across a single remark that rang a flat where no flat note was called for. Unfortunately, I can't find it again. An Iraqi voter spoke eloquently about the elections and the new era dawning in his country. It was a beautifully phrased comment, and the blogger quoting him rang the sour note by saying something like, "And he's just a mechanic...." As though blue collar laborors never have poetic thoughts or think about the deep philosophical questions of life.

Our culture makes certain assumptions about education and where it comes from. For instance, a few weeks ago I ran across a reference to a blog supporting the idea that it's not wrong to send your girls to college. In homeschooling circles there are some who object to it under any circumstances. Obviously, we have a girl in college, so I thought it sounded like a blog I would be interested in. But I found this front page statement about why every girl should go to college very off-putting: "Everyone benefits when a person, male or female, is educated."

Well, yes- but college is not the only way to achieve an education, and it isn't even necessarily the best way. The HG has found most of her classes rather mindnumbingly lacking in genuine educational value. Assuming that somebody without a college degree is uneducated is, frankly, the assumption of a mind that cries out for real, genuine education.

Theodore Dalrymple writes an article that touches on this line of thought, and since he addresses it through a discussion of Shakespearian scholarship, I found it doubly interesting. Dalrymple begins:

There are two William Shakespeares. The first is the man born in Stratford, who never seemed to spell his name the same way twice, who was deeply interested in minor financial transactions and the accumulation of property, and who left his wife his second-best bed; the other is the man who left the world the greatest literary legacy ever known. A considerable body of scholarship, the work principally of enthusiastic and learned amateurs, seeks to establish that William Shakespeare in the first sense was not William Shakespeare in the second sense.

I do not wish to enter this controversy, in part because of sheer cowardice....
...However, one argument in the controversy interests me, common to all those who oppose the Stratfordians (as the Baconians, Oxfordians, and Marlovians somewhat derisively call those who believe that the two Shakespeares were one): that the plays’ author was so understanding of every aspect of human nature, and so intimately knowledgeable about so many fields of human endeavor—as well as about all the strata of the society in which he lived, including the highest—that he could not have been a mere grammar-school boy from Stratford. The author must have had much more formal education than that [emphasis added].

I've experienced some of this educational bigotry first-hand, and I believe I've mentioned it here before. Our Cherub is multiply handicapped; she is profoundly retarded, and has Cerebral Palsy. For a few years I found it necessary to write a rather formal IEP (Individual Educational Plan) for her. Every time I needed to share it with a professional, the very first question I have been asked is "Who helped you write this?" Nobody helped me. I wrote it myself, using an old IEP as a model for formatting. The content is my own. The professionals are often not satisfied with this, and will press me for more- 'Yes, you wrote it, but who assisted you? Who told you how to do this? Who explained the process to you? Do you have a degree in special Ed? Then who helped you?'

That's a minor example, and really I find it more amusing than irritating (It isn't flattering. To be flattering flattered, I'd have to agree it is hard to figure out what your own child needs to know and how you want to teach it to her).

Let us return to Shakespeare. One of the methods scholars use to prove that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare is precisely the same method those professionals use to conclude I could not be the author of the IEP I wrote. They believe that Shakespeare simply knew too much to be Shakespeare, so he must have had more education than the Shakespeare history has passed down to us.

Many scholars have noted how acurate Shakespeare's medical observations are, for instance. Shakespeare's son in law was a doctor, but he didn't marry into the family until numerous plays were already written. Shakespeare's son did write a book about medicine, and Dalrymple gives us a sample of it. It's quackery, pure and simple, but it's quackery supported completely by the medical establishment of the Elizabethan era, which relied heavily on Galen's theories of humours.
IN concluding his excellent essay, Dalrymple points out the broader implications such assumptions have for our society:

Shakespeare was, of course, conversant with Galen’s theory of humors. This no more means that he must have had a university training in medicine than that a modern man who has heard of the germ theory of disease must be a microbiologist. But Shakespeare was not in thrall to Galenism as was his son-in-law: in other words, it was precisely his lack of university training that permitted him to be so acute an observer. While he needed a sophisticated basic education to be Shakespeare, the author of the plays,

a university training, at least with regard to medicine, would have diminished rather than enhanced his work.

A contemporary medical man can learn something from Shakespeare; he can learn nothing from Hall. As Orwell pointed out, it takes effort and determination to see what is in front of one’s face. Among the efforts required is the discarding of the lenses of excessive or bogus theorizing. When it comes to our attempts to understand the phenomena of our own society, I cannot help but wonder how many of us are in the grip of theories that are the equivalent of Hall’s Galenical theory, and whether as a result we do not prescribe the legislative equivalents of human skull, mummy dust, and jaw of pike.

As to why people adopt theories that conflict with the most minimal honest reflection, I will quote T. S. Eliot, who, while not always right, was right about this:

Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t want to do harm—but the harm does not interest them . . . or they do not see it . . . because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
Eliot might have added: the endless struggle to look well in the eyes of their fellow intellectuals and the fear of losing caste. But as a result of their efforts, as Orwell also famously said, “We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

Emphasis added. It's a lovely read.

Updated to correct two or three typographical errors.