(f) We have no record of Shakespeare's insuring that his children
could read, or of his horror that his daughter Judith (apparently)
could only sign her name with a mark.  Anti-Stratfordians simply
can't believe a Great Writer could allow any of his children to grow
up illiterate--or, for that matter, put up with an illiterate wife, as
his may have been.  The main problem with this is the obvious fact that
a person's ability to write poetry and plays is dependent only on his
own literacy, not that of anyone else.

A second problem with it is, of course, is that it takes all kinds,
something beyond the comprehension of anti-Stratfordians.  Given that
Shakespeare was a world-class writer, it does not automatically follow
that he thought literacy the most important quality possible.  In my
time, the world-class basketball player, Bill Russell, referred to his
profession as "grown-ups playing a child's game in their
underwear."  Shakespeare may even have abominated writing, but done
it anyway.

Absurd?  Maybe.  But not impossible.  There are numerous better
possible explanations: (1) his girls were resistant to formal education
(as he probably was); (2) he didn't believe in the education of
females; (3) his wife preferred that her daughters stay in the house
helping her than go to school; (4) his daughters lacked academic
ability; (5) Shakespeare hated school so much that he kept his
daughters from repeating his bad experiences; (6) his father or mother
or wife saw how badly Shakespeare turned out due to formal education
(he became a disreputable actor) and did all they could to prevent the
same kind of thing from happening to his daughters; (7) the preliminary
dame schools where writing was taught would not admit the girls because
of their father's profession; (8) Shakespeare had a weird idea of
proper education, thinking he could do better with his girls than a
school could by simply reading the Bible to them, and he was wrong; (9)
the girls loved school but misbehaved so much at home that Anne kept
them away from school as punishment; (10) the girls feared that if they
learned to read and write, boys would be afraid of them, so they
didn't.

How plausible are any of these excuses?  That's immaterial so long as
any of them is possible.  Once it is established, as it has been, that
all the direct evidence indicates that Shakespeare and only Shakespeare
wrote the works of Shakespeare, then the only way a
Shakespeare-rejector can overturn the case for Shakespeare is to show
how some lack of his would have made it impossible for him to have
written the plays attributed to him.  That's what looneations are all
about.  The weakness with them is that to refute them one need not
disprove the existence of any lack, only show that there is at least
one possible way he could have become a writer in spite of it.

Ironically, in this case, and in many others, one can, if not disprove
the lack alleged, but give strong evidence that it is imaginary, for we
have documentary evidence that Shakespeare's daughter that Susannah
could sign her name, so very probably was literate.  Particularly, as
she managed to entice a widely-respected doctor, some of whose
case-studies were posthumously published, to marry her, and was said on
her gravestone to be especially wise.  Shakespeare's other daughter
signed one document with a mark, but many women (and men) of the time
who could read and write sometimes signed with marks, so this is not
conclusive evidence that she was illiterate.

(g) The item missing from Shakespeare's life that I think
anti-Stratfordians are silliest about is
Properly-Extended-Commitment-to-His-Art.  They know this is missing
from his life because he retired from his career and London around
1611--when he was only 47 and at the height of his career!
Furthermore,  what in Stratford-upon-Avon cou1d possibly have drawn
such a man back from the splendors of London?!  If he was really
Shakespeare the poet, he could never have done that!

First off, I wouldn't say Shakespeare was "at the height of his
career" in 1611; I'd say the height was a few years earlier.  As to
why Shakespeare retired (if he entirely did), why not?  He may have
been getting tired of the grind of acting and writing, and had enough
money to retire to Stratford, so he did-although he continued to keep
his hand in, collaborating on at least two plays with his replacement
in the King's Men, John Fletcher.  Several of Shakespeare's
contemporary playwrights really did retire at the heights of their
careers.  John Marston did it in 1608, at the age of 32, when he was
one of the most popular playwrights in England, to become a preacher in
the country.  Francis Beaumont also retired at the height of his
popularity, at the age of 29 or 30, in order to marry an heiress.  In
other times, Rimbaud stopped writing in his early twenties, Rossini
stopped composing for decades while still young although the leading
composer of opera in Italy at the time, other artists have left their
art for temporarily or permanently (J.D. Salinger, author of The
Catcher in the Rye, is-so far as we know-another instance, and
Joseph Heller, author of Catch Twenty-Two, was dry for many years).
As for retiring to the country, what's odd about that?  Particularly

considering the town he retired to might have had a nostalgic value for
him, and was where his wife and many long-time friends lived.

(3) Looneations of Class

Of much more importance to the anti-Stratfordians than the previous two
kinds of looneations are the looneations of class.  The rejectors
simply can't marry the Bard's middle-class origins, which they
frequently term "lower-class," with his having become a world-class
writer.  They find three principal looneations of class in his
biography:

(h) Shakespeare's coming from the wrong kind of people and the wrong
place, being the son of middle-class illiterate parents born ninety
miles from the big city. Such a person not only could not have written
sophisticated poems and plays, he
couldn't even have made it as an actor because of Warwickshire accent
and dialect!
As though no one can overcome a manner of speech he was born to,
particularly a man who became an actor.  Regarding the sophisticated
literary output, surely the
poetry of Keats, to take just one example, shows that it is possible
for a commoner to write elegant poetry.  Indeed, almost all of the
English-speaking world's best literature was written by comoners,
many of them not originally from big cities.

(i) Shakespeare's being neither an aristocrat nor an intimate of
aristocrats.

According to J. Thomas Looney, Shakespeare did not have, nor could he
have made, the "exalted social and cultural connections" that the
narrative poems' publication indicated their author had to have had.
But all those poems show is that by his late twenties Shakespeare was
capable of writing two fairly standard, if well-done, long poems, and
getting them published, apparently with the financial help of one very
young nobleman, whom he buttered up in one introduction, and spoke with
friendliness of in a second.  All this implies is that somehow he made
the acquaintance of Southampton.  This is no big thing.  When the mere
actor Richard Burbage died, the Earl of Pembroke was said to have been
too disconsolate for a period to attend any plays.  Friendships could
develop then between talented commoners and the nobility.  In
Shakespeare's case, all that need have happened would have been for
someone to mention to Southampton that Will wrote well, and
Southampton's asking for a sample.

That we have no evidence indicating that Shakespeare knew an aristocrat
similarly means nothing to me.  Perhaps he felt uncomfortable with
aristocrats, and avoided them as much as possible once he was
established.  Particularly once Southampton got in trouble.  But
that's mere surmise and doesn't prove anything.  The bottom line is
that we can't assume anything about Shakespeare's circle of
acquaintances, for there's little evidence as to whom he knew and
didn't know.  Nor should there be.

Part of this looneation is Shakespeare's lack of the knowledge of
aristocrats he had to have had to have written the Ouevre.  Few if any
reputable scholars believe Shakespeare knew a lot about how aristocrats
acted, as aristocrats.  Most of what his plays indicate of their
behavior could have been lifted from Holinshed and other books.  But,
most obviously, there was a tradition already in force in the theatre
for how nobles should be depicted, and Shakespeare clearly followed it.
His nobles are no more "real" than any other characters of
playwrights who created stylized plays like his-unless you think
aristocrats spoke in blank verse and customarily made long, often
brilliant speechs with no ums and other pauses much less any errors, to
each other.  How, I might add, did actors know how to portray
aristocrats if they were not themselves aristocrats?  A final note: the
authority for much of what we know about Elizabethan and Jacobean
aristocrats, perhaps the very best, was a commoner named John
Chamberlain whose letters from 1597 to 1627 have been a treasure trove
as to what was going on at court then.  He went to Cambridge but got no
degree.  At some point, he pops up with friendships in court circles.
But his main source of information seems to have been St. Paul's
Cathedral where he went almost daily to get the latest news, and fresh
books.  Why could Shakespeare not have been similar?

Assuming his plays reflect a great deal of court knowledge, I several
times requested examples of data in the plays the only an aristocrat
could have known about from the anti-Stratfordians I argue with at
HLAS.  Only one item was ever produced.  A completely silly reference
to an eccentric who was made fun of at court in the eighties named
Monarcho.  The anti-Stratfordians' reasons for believing Shakespeare
could not have heard about this fellow unless he'd been an insider at
court during those years are so ridiculous, I will be discussing them
in some detail later on as an example of rigidnikal
Shakespeare-Rejection at its most insane.  All I will say about them
here, is that they did not seem very persuasive.

(j)  Closely related to the previous looneation is the belief of the
anti-Stratfordians that Shakespeare's being of the middle class would
bar him from having the aristocratic point-of-view manifest in the
plays.

This is the most favorite "argument" of several Oxfordians, which
is why I give it its own section.  It's pretty obvious why it is
popular with those who believe an aristocrat had to have written The
Oeuvre: it is so stupidly fuzzy that it is extremely hard to argue
against in few words, and who wants to spend an entire book trying to
refute it?  I'll do my best to quickly take care of it, but will not
spend many words on it.

First of all, who knows exactly what an aristocratic point of view is?
Even if it could be stated in such a way as to get just about
everyone's agreement on what it was, who is to say the plays express
it?  You can get one authority, and probably many more than one, to
argue for the plays' expressing any Outlook X or not-X that you want.
Some say they were Catholic, some Church of England, some some other
strand of Christianity, one of two even think they read Judaism in
them, and there are more than a few who think the religious view
expressed agnostic.

Ditto their political outlook, though most would agree that they seem
to back the status quo-strong central monarchy, etc.  But even if
they did, how do we know that was their authors' point of view,
politically, not that of individual characters, or of a given play?  It
is the only view that would have pretty much assured popularity and
minimal interference from the authorities, so why wouldn't a
playwright whose main interest was art, not politics, not have gone
along with it, even for a whole play or series of plays, in spite of
its not being his outlook?  What seems most certain to me is that
Shakespeare expresses many different points of view on every sort of
topic; that is a main reason he gotten and remained as popular as he
has.

Where, to make one last point, is it written that aristocrats all have
some unified, agreed-upon point of view, commoners another-and the
middle classes perhaps a third?  Where did comoners like Nietzsche,
Hitler, Mencken, even Shaw, and many others come up with their
decidedly elitist contempt for the herd?  And how was it that Lafayette
fought on the side of commoners for America?  How, finally, can we
possibly know what Shakespeare's private views on politics, religion
or anything else really were?  Sure, it would appear, from his life in
Stratford, that he was no radical, but how do we know that he was not
really a wild radical but practical enough to behave sensibly and go
along with a world he knew he couldn't change?

(4)  Looneations of Education

Of all the looneations, the anti-Stratfordians seem most upset by the
following three looneations of education:

--Bob Grumman