Devil's Advocate- The Case Against Shakespeare

Shakespeare's reputation as the greatest writer in English, and even World, literature is one of those things that don't get questioned. It's simply accepted as true in the same way that The Beatles are unsurpassable as the greatest ever pop act although I notice that some critics have recently listened to Sgt. Pepper and suddenly it is not coming top of all the Greatest Album of All Time lists. In fact it's a bit of a mess of styles and ideas, it doesn't include many of their best songs and it's not actually in the Top 10 Beatles Albums in all honesty. So, perhaps it is time for further re-evaluation of long held critical certainties.

Shakesopeare's Sonnets- a sequence of 154 apparently semi-autobiographical poems- are held up as a paragon example of English poetry, the height of the Golden Age of great English writing. However, not every critic has admired these 'sugar'd sonnets' and on closer inspection one can find them a little bit sickly in their obsequiousness, the hyperbole of their devotion and their forlorn lovesickness. If it wasn't for the foregoing reputation of the author and a few memorable lines, we might have taken them for the adolescent indulgences of just another lovesick Elizabethan.

The outline of the career in the theatre isn't quite so impressive, either, if seen without the preconceived idea that these are the finest plays in the language or any other language. He begins with some appalling distortions of history, playing tricks with time, telling one-sided stories with warped sympathies to support whichever faction at court he wanted to please; he continues by writing some derivative comedies that nobody thinks are funny, mostly dependent on mistaken identity, identical twins and cross-dressing; he only ever once thinks up his own plot (in The Merry Wives of Windsor) and otherwise just adapts the work of others; his masterpiece Hamlet is 'melodramatic' as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, and ends in carnage more bloodthirsty than a modern horror film, while Lear is a statement in futility and Timon of misanthropy. The Taming of the Shrew is presumably sexist while The Merchant of Venice is racist and the last plays of reconciliation depend on the most unlikely workings of magic for their fantastical endings, the sudden return to optimism and happy endings possibly due to colloaboration with the younger writer, Beaumont.

But that just his work. His life didn't provide any more edifying a spectacle. Leaving his wife behind in Stratford with a young daughter and recently born twins, he goes to London in search of a theatrical career and builds up a lurid catalogue of romantic liaisons with a wide range of nobility, actresses, prostitutes and other people's wives without necessarily any peference for gender or cleanliness. Spending most of his adult life in the fleshpots of London, he never brings his family down from Stratford to ruin the good time he's having and those good times are only the ones that anecdotes have brought down to us and we thus think we know about.

So, that's Shakespeare for you, the beautifully tempered, soft-lipped humanist that bewitched the next 400 years with his lovely sonnets and the plays that looked into the depths of the human heart. But, still, nobody's perfect.