Shakespeare Lied, Gilbert gets deep

01 Oct 2024 -

Sky Gilbert’s new book, Shakespeare Lied, suggests, among other things, that Shakespeare was actually a man named Edward de Vere. “Since I believe that de Vere was Shakespeare, this puts me outside of a lot of traditional Shakespeare scholarship,” Gilbert declared via email. “Those traditional scholars are terrified of us (because they really can’t defend the ‘man from Stratford’ as a candidate for Shakespeare) and they are getting more virulent comparing us to Holocaust deniers now. I don’t believe that only an upper class man could have written Hamlet, but I do believe that only a highly educated man fluent in many languages … could do so.”

So right away, we know that this book is not comparable to Gilbert’s delightful plays about drag queens or historical queers. It is relatively deep. “This is not strictly a scholarly book, but not strictly a non-scholarly one, which puts it in a strange category,” he told me.

The impetus came from Gilbert’s role as a professor at the University of Guelph. “Shakespeare’s work often seems today to be written in another language … It is pure fiction, fantastical fantasy. For many young people - trained to nurture and respect their left brain function - this is a stumbling block … Recently, when teaching Hamlet to a first year university class, I asked students, ‘Is Hamlet mad?’ The response was, ‘It is not right to question whether or not Hamlet is mad. If people self-identify as having a mental illness, we must respect that and not challenge him.’” One can only hope he failed those stupid little shits. The point is, Shakespeare, or de Vere, or whoever wrote the plays, was a dramatist, dealing with grand themes, and creating iconic characters. As a writer, he did not seek the truth by telling the truth, but rather by creating ‘the lie that tells the truth.'

“I generally agree with many of the ideas promoted by social justice warriors,” Gilbert stated. “However, they are bringing tools of analysis that belong in a science lab or a university lecture hall into a theatre. Art cannot - should not - be analyzed in this way. For if the job of the artist is only to decorate ideas prettily in order to entice us into believing them, then art is merely education - or worse yet, propaganda.” 

Shakespeare Lied is Gilbert’s second book about Shakespeare, the first being 2019’s  Shakespeare Beyond Science. He is now working on a third book, called Shakespeare’s Effeminacy “It will be very radical. I don’t claim that Shakespeare was gay but that he was at the forefront of radical sexuality and feminism for his time.” I enjoyed reading Dr Gilbert’s new book. One might agree that even at his most high-minded and analytical, he is most certainly never, ever boring.