Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin makes an extended case for the Oxfordian answer to the Shakespeare authorship question. Or what passes for a case anyway. Mostly this great hater of democracy and populism just demagogues for his presumedly puerile audience, labeling Shakespeareâas in the actual Will from Stratfordâa ârentboyâ and an âilliterate Ghanian immigrant.â His clever idea is to set up the Stratford thesis as an anticipation of todayâs diversity-and-equity critique of the canon.
Then he assails a straw man, the supposed Stratfordian belief that Shakespeare was a âdemocrat,â which nobody believes. Shakespeare fully expresses his view of âpeople powerâ in Julius Caesarâs popular sparagmos of Cinna the Poet. And if Julius Caesar held the early American stage and then became the staple American high school text, it was because the drama celebrates not democracy, which Shakespeare didnât distinguish from resentful and fanatic mob violence, but republicanism in the tragic figure of Brutus.Â
As for Shakespeareâs overall politics, well, itâs always hard to say with a dramatist, who stages conflicts rather than enumerating theses, and this chameleon poet makes it harder than most. Yarvin quotes every reactionaryâs favorite passage, Ulyssesâs hymn to degree from Troilus and Cressida, but this is the utterance of a single dramatic character. Rosenkrantzâa sycophantic idiotâargues the same case in Hamlet while kissing Claudiusâs ring. By contrast, that playâs hero pronounces what I suspect to be closer to the poetâs own political credo: âThe king is a thing of nothing.âÂ
In my reading, Shakespeare is a political nihilist, placing his faith in no institution and no ambitious men. Heâs lyrical, where he is lyrical, only about love and private life and nature: precisely the quasi-anarchist (not democratic) anti-politics I find throughout modernity in writers who hail from the lower middle classâYarvin, like a Marxoid polemicist, abuses the bard with this label tooâfrom Keats to Dickens to Joyce (see my essay on Les Murray for a longer explanation).Â
But the strongest argument against Oxfordâs claim is literary. Does de Vereâs da-dum da-dum doggerel really ârockâ like Shakespeare? I count only one potential metrical inversion: in the first foot of the first line, âisâ may be stressed for interrogatory emphasis, mainly because the line is short a syllable. But even if you read all the interrogatives as stressed, which you donât have to, thatâs hardly a poetically surprising reversal. Otherwise, the thing tick-tocks robotically like a metronome. Similarly, âthe way he plays with the caesuraââwhat way? The caesura is precisely where weâd expect it to be in each line, not least because Oxford punctuates six of the 10 lines right in the middle, between two balanced sets of iambic feet. I can only conclude that Yarvin relies on an audience ignorant of his subject.
Ulyssesâs speech, by contrast, is in Shakespeareâs general style, or at least his mature style, gnarled and enjambed, bristling less with neat Metaphysical paradoxes than with a careering rush of concrete and mingled tropes. Here is play with the caesura, sound mimicking sense: âAnd, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets...â Likewise, I recall that Frank Kermode thought hendiadys the Shakespearean rhetorical signature, sign of his copiousness and bounty: âDivert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states.âÂ
A more sophisticated reactionary would say that this apparently disordered and undisciplined style is just what weâd expect from a half-educated rube off the farm who could only read the classics in translation. But what do I know? I myself am just a scion of the anarchic lower middle class, while Yarvin, as he likes to remind us, is a descendant of that very oligarchic bureaucracy from which he promises, eventually, to deliver us.












