Looneations of formal education

(k) The first has to do with the paucity of his formal education.  The
anti-Stratfordians are close to unanimous in believing that no writer
of Shakespeare's brilliance could have reached the level he did
without a university education.  And it is a fact that we have no
record of his attending a grammar school, a University or the Inns of
Court, or even of his having been a page or the like in the household
of a great family where he could have received an education, as Michael
Drayton did.
On the other hand, it is near-definite that Shakespeare got a good
grammar school education, for there was a grammar school in his
hometown a block or so from his home that he could have attended for
free, and there is little reason to believe he didn't.
Unfortunately, all its attendance records have been lost (as have all
those of almost every other such school of the times).  That his
Stratford friends were all literate, that he could sign his name, and
became an actor, and such evidence as his monument's speaking of
"all he hath writt" puts his literacy beyond reasonable doubt, and
makes it hard to claim he had no formal education, at all-though
that, too, is possible.

But, argue the anti-Stratfordians, a mere grammar school education
would not have been enough.  Notwithstanding the example of Ben Jonson
showing how erudite and learned a collegeless playwright could be back
then, and the examples of less erudite but certainly effective
playwrights of the time as Kyd, Dekker, Drayton, Chapman, Mundy,
Chettle, Webster, Heywood, Fletcher . . .  In recent times, Tom
Stoppard became a world-class playwright without more than high school
as did Bernard Shaw before him.  Other world-class writers in English
who had little or no formal education include Thomas Hardy, Charles
Dickens, Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, Hemingway, Blake, Burns, Dylan Thomas
. . .  Leonardo had no college, either, nor did Edison, Faraday,
Herbert Spencer . . .

What about the necessary literary apprenticeship, the
anti-Stratfordians continue.  Even a genius has to acquire knowledge
and skills, yet there is no evidence of any literary
"apprenticeship"-no early, immature works such as we find for
example with Mozart. Even the early plays, supposedly written in the
late 1580s, show a maturity which one would not expect to find in
someone only in his middle twenties.

Also, there is no way he would have had time to learn play-making, they
say.  Simply looking at the practicalities make it very unlikely that
Shakespeare was the author.  If, as the scholars purport, he left
Stratford around 1587 at the age of 22 to go to London to become an
actor, he would have had very little time for anything else while he
was making his living as an actor and learning the trade of acting; yet
at the same time he would have had to educate himself in the various
subjects referred to in the "Shakespeare" plays as well as keeping
an eye on his grain business in Stratford, a four-day journey away.

All this is absurd.  Early Shakespearean plays like Titus Andronicus
and the ones in the Henry VI cycle show no particular maturity.  And he
would have had plenty of time as an actor to learn a great deal about
plays.  If he could read, and it is to be assumed that he could, he
would have had books to learn from, as well.  The matter is subjective,
of course, but I think many would agree that no training could have
better fit Shakespeare to become a playwright than the on-the-job
training he got in his early years as an actor.  (The documentary
evidence that he was an actor by 1592 strongly suggests he must have
been one for a few years or more by then. We can't be absolutely sure
when he became an actor, for we have almost no records on him from his
twenties.  Jonson's case is similar, so this is nothing to wonder
about; why should a beginner in any field leave behind many records of
his apprenticeship, anyway--especially one of Shakespeare's time?)

Shakespeare would certainly have had time to learn to write while being
an actor, acting not being a full-time profession.  Obviously, once he
showed any talent for it-by writing a scene, or even a few lines of
dialogue, it follows that his company would have found time for him to
write.  In any case, any biography of a world-class writer will tell
you that writers somehow always find enough time to write.  The baloney
about his need to run his grain business, by the way, is without
foundation.  His household in Stratford stored grain like the majority
of households in the town, and there's no reason his father
couldn't have looked after it for him, or a brother, or his wife.  It
would have been the equivalent of a four-times-a-year garage sale.  As
for his need to educate himself, since he would have needed no more
knowledge to have written the plays than the kind anyone not a
rigidnik, as we shall later see, absorbs automatically through simple
life experience, talking to others, and haphazard reading, he would not
have needed extra time to do this.  Nor is there any reason to believe
he would have made many trips back to Stratford while acting.  Even if
he had, he could have used the travel time to think out his plots,
etc., as many writers have been known to do.

(l) Shakespeare's lack of specialized knowledge, already touched on,
is another of the looneations that the anti-Stratfordians never tire of
bringing up.  According to them, the Stratford man didn't have the
knowledge of the law and other fields that he would have had to have
had to have written the Ouevre.  They can even get various experts to
back them up.  They have two problems, though.  First of all, for every
expert asserting Shakespeare's expertise in field X, our side can
find more than one to assert his lack of expertise in that field.
Second, the experts arguing for his specialized knowledge tend to
refute each other.  As the inimitable nut, John Michell tells us,
various "experts" have written books affirming that Shakespeare was
world-class in (1) the law, (2) sports of all kinds, especially of the
nobility, (3) Philosophy, classical and esoteric, (4) statecraft and
statesmanship, (5) Biblical scholarship, (6) English and European
History, (7) Classical literature and languages, (8) French, Italian
and Spanish languages, (9) Italian geography, (10) France and the court
of Navarre, (11) Danish terms and customs, (12) Horticulture and garden
design, (13) Wales and the Welsh, (14) Music and musical terms, (15)
painting and sculpture, (16) Mathematics (!), (17) Astronomy and
Astrology, (18) Natural history, (19) fishing, (20) Medicine and
physiology, (21) the military, (22) Heraldry, (23) Exploration and the
New World, (24) Navigation and seamanship, (25) printing, (26)
Folklore, (27) the theatre profession, (28) Cambridge University
hjargon, (29) Freemasonry, and (30) cryptography and spying.  Simple
question in response: how could he have become an authority in all of
these subjects?  The very fact that one goof is sure that he is an
expert in, say, medicine (on the basis of a passage listing a bunch of
diseases in Troilus and Cressida that he could have copied from a book
or gotten from his son-in-law) while another is just as sure that he
was a brilliant lawyer (based on his use of legal terms several authors
have shown playwrights of the time to have been widley familiar with)
tends strongly to suggest all were untrustworthy, each out to make his
hero a member of his own specialty.

I haven't space or time to say much on this topic except to point out
that anti-Stratfordians have a good deal of trouble citing passages in
Shakespeare's plays that indicate knowledge someone of
Shakespeare's background could not have picked up.  They also have
trouble understanding how creative writers absorb knowledge, and can
artfully make small knowledge to seem great knowledge by picking where
in a story to insert it (and by being able to use it out of
context-for instance, if I want a character in a play of mine to seem
an expert in geology, I need not master geology, only read up on one
small aspect of it and arrange a scene in which my character deals with
that aspect of it; the probability will be that I don't even have to
read up on geology but will have picked up a few facts that I can find
places in my play to insert to make it seem like my character is a
genuine geologist).

I frankly do not remember anything in Shakespeare that could be used to
further a student's knowledge of any particular subject, except the
history he got from others.  I wonder, too, that he says just about
nothing about the nitty-grit of writing.  Does that mean the author of
the Oeuvre was not a writer?

Here's a quick example of specialized knowledge Shakespeare is seen
to have by bardolators which is actually no big deal.  I believe all
other examples of his specialized knowledge can be dismissed similarly.

It is said that he had a great knowledge of falconry-more than a
commoner could have.  But, Gerald Lascelles, an expert on the history
of falconry, has said that the technical terms of falconry were
household words in Shakespeare's day.  The timeline at the PBS
website  (http://www.pbs.org/falconer/man) verifies this indirectly:
"1600 Falconry reaches its highest level in England and is governed
by strict rules- a king could fly a gyrfalcon; an earl would fly a
peregrine; a yeoman could have a goshawk; the sparrowhawk was reserved
for priests; and servants would have a kestrel," which indicates that
anyone could have been a falconer
and picked up as much information about the sport as Shakespeare's
plays evince.

(m) The last of the primary looneations has to do with Shakespeare's
geographical knowledge.  The Stratford man could not have been the
Author because it is widely accepted that whoever wrote the plays had a
detailed and first-hand knowledge of Italy whereas we have no record
that the Stratford man ever went abroad.  Of course, "no record"
does not mean "no travel."  And again, we have plenty of experts
sure he traveled against others sure he didn't.  Aside from that,
anti-Stratfordians are, as usual, hard put to cite evidence to support
their claim, in this case of Shakespeare's, wide travel.  Much of
what he says about Italy, for instance, is flat out wrong, and the rest
things he could have picked up from his reading or heard from others.
It cannot be stated too often, that the theatre was, and still is, the
most collaborative of all the arts.  Shakespeare was always surrounded
by actors and related professionals quite capable of giving him tips on
other lands, languages, professions.

With that, I am finished with the Primary Looneations the
anti-Stratfordians have used (until chapters where I will use them in
discussing the properties of anti-Strafordian mentalities), but there
are still the Secondary Looneations, some of them as important to the
anti-Stratfordians as any Primary Looneation.  It will take, I fear, a
whole nother chapter to do justice to them.

--Bob Grumman