What links Shakespeare and the McCanns?

Chichester. The weekend. Enter that lovely man Sir Derek Jacobi, the actor-manager and playwright Mark Rylance and the 300 signatories of the “declaration of reasonable doubt” into whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. These doubters include professors of literature, a bulse of distinguished thespians and – pressed into posthumous service – past geniuses such as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud.

In evidential terms, say these querying anti-Stratfordians, there are too many anomalies and unanswered questions. Such as (take a breath): “not one play, not one poem, not one letter in (his) own hand has ever been found”; he signed his name badly and in shaky writing; his will “contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase”. And lots more in the same vein.

All these things are true. But they contend with some awkward confirmations of the essential truth of William Shakespeare of Stratford having been an actor-playwright at theatres where his plays were produced, and being attributed with authorship of the plays we associate with him. No one in the 17th century doubted his authorship, and contemporaries regarded him as a great poet. And an elaborate hoax or fraud would have to have been perpetrated over two decades by someone seeking to disguise authorship of plays that were popular but not seditious.

Fundamentally, anti-Stratfordianism comes down to one proposition: Shakespeare was too low-class to have been a literary genius. By contrast Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, “received an education incomparable among his peers, exactly the kind one would expect of the writer who was destined to become Shakespeare”. Though, problematically, he was dead at the time of the first production of all of Shakespeare’s later plays.

What is this about? Some of it is just funning, as the Americans say. And some of it may be a desire to be seen. But a lot seems to spring from a desire – possibly unconscious – to pull the supreme poet down from his tower. This is the only way I can explain the unscrupulous use, by good people, of scepticism and doubt. Freud and Twain, as it happens, were also the sons of provincial merchants.

A day or so before the Chichester Doubt-In, the Government announced that it would not be holding an independent inquiry into the 7/7 bombings, despite the campaign mounted by a group comprising several survivors and some of those bereaved in 2005. This group is now to seek a judicial review of the Government’s decision.

There is a straightforward problem here. We know who did it. We know why they did it, because they told us. We know how they did it. We know, from court testimony, that some of the bombers were in contact with people who were under security surveillance, but were not considered to be a threat themselves. We know that this judgment was wrong. But it is a huge leap from this to the idea that an inquiry would, in the words of a representative, “help prevent innocent people from suffering the fate of all those who were caught up in the awful events of that day”.

Let me pose the obvious objection. Suppose that extra surveillance had been placed on a 7/7 bomber – surveillance that had to be taken off another target. And suppose that the second target had been successful in an attack. So there seems to be magical thinking going on here – if only (with hindsight) X had happened, then disaster would have been averted.

Had the call for an inquiry not come from “victims” then I don’t think it would have lasted five minutes. Six of those bereaved (52 died) and 18 survivors (out of several dozen) have put their names to the campaign, though others may well support it. But it could equally be that a majority of “victims” have made no such demand.

The Greater London Assembly passed a motion in May supporting the call for an inquiry “to ensure that public confidence is retained within the security services”. This seems a poor reason to me, and it emphasises that several agendas are being followed here. One of the most public campaigners has said that her problem “is with the government cover-up that happened after the bombings”. Another that an inquiry should “raise questions” about the Government’s foreign policy. David Davis, before the summer, argued for “an independent inquiry into the attacks of July 7 and 21, and their implications for our security strategy” for a whole series of strenuously yoked-together issues.

Presumably we’d now have to have another inquiry into the Glasgow and Haymarket bombs. Or do we inquire only into attacks that succeed? Motivations here seem to me to be varied. Some victims may well be seeking “closure”. Some, I am afraid, may be seeking the absolute opposite. Others are on the bandwagon. Yet we have no idea what the opportunity cost of an inquiry would be in terms of time better spent stopping the next Mohammad Sidique Khan.

So in Chichester we have people pursuing a harmless waste of time, in the courts what might turn out to be a harmful waste of time, and in Leicestershire, the Algarve, a thousand newsrooms and a million homes we have had tens of millions of us pursuing a couple of whose innocence or guilt we have no idea.

Some of the “anomalies” in the case effectively being made against the McCanns were well summarised yesterday by our man in Praia da Luz: Portuguese police are reported to find it suspicious that Kate McCann immediately believed that more than one person had taken her daughter; there is confusion about when members of the party arrived at the tapas restaurant; there is a conflict on how much was drunk that evening; why did Madeleine’s sister and brother sleep through the events? Other papers had even more stuff concerning sniffer dogs and blood traces, all of which were essentially being adduced to support the following insinuated proposition: that Mrs McCann, a mad anaesthetist, had got drunk, oversedated her daughter, accidentally killing her, and along with her husband had covered up the death and, despite being watched continuously, spirited the body away.

Of course, the McCanns have many supporters. But some of us scribblers are well aware that there is also a large and punitive section of the public that has never liked the McCanns. They don’t like their looks, their class, their eloquence. And now the air is full of “I thought they were too good to be true”.

It’s all rubbish. There are always anomalies that can be exploited, sometimes for unconscious reasons. But Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you can never stop misjudgments being made when tackling terrorists, and no one (bar the abductor or killer and perhaps the police) has the slightest notion what happened to Madeleine McCann.

Comments

[David Duff]

I can only offer a rather tedious, not to say, sycophantic comment to the effect that I agree absolutely and wholeheartedly with you on all three topics.

Many years ago Caroline Spurgeon's book, analysing Shakespeare's imagery and coming to the conclusion that it was much more likely to have sprung from a middle-class country boy than an aristo, convinced me beyond any doubt.

My caustic battles with Rachel North, one of the main instigators behind the demands for an inquiry into the tube bombings, have brought down all sorts of 'ag' on my poor, innocent head!

As for the McCann's, I would add one more of their characteristics guaranteed to produce 'merde' from the mob, that is, their very old-fashioned, British habit of keeping their grief private, thus depriving the masses of the vicarious thrill they obtain from seeing emotions placed on display.

Thank you for your excellent good sense.

[Prentia Clove]

Bit late to the party - but...

Agree with you on Shakespeare and 7/7. Also agree that we have not the foggiest idea whether the McCanns were involved with the dissappearance of their daughter. Personally, I find it hard to credit that they would go to such lengths to cover up an accidental death.

What makes me not really care about them (that does not mean I do not care about the fate of their daughter) is that they were very quick in manipulating the media into a frenzy of speculation and coverage when it apparently served their purposes (got them to see the Pope - maybe he knows where she is) but they failed to understand that with nothing substantial to report the media will always turn on the nearest available target - in this case the McCanns. And now we have to put up with them whinging about it.