The Picture of Nobody: Shakespeare’s anti-authorship

Richard Wilson

doi:10.21825/aj.v3i1.1067

Abstract

"The Picture of Nobody" posits that Shakespeare's birth as an author in print was “aborted” by strategies of absence that avoided institutionalized forms of authorial representation. Wilson argues that these possibly deliberate acts of evasion and self-concealment are linked to early modern problems of social class and to Shakespeare's ambition to become "a subject without an identity".

Highlights

Contributor: Richard Wilson is the Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kingston University, London. His books include Will Power, Secret Shakespeare, and Shakespeare in French Theory. He is the author of numerous articles in academic journals, and is on the editorial board of the journal Shakespeare
Critics like to read into Prospero’s vision of ‘nibbling sheep and flat meads thatched with stover’ (Tempest, 4,1,62-3) ‘Shakespeare’s figurative return home’
Shakespeare’s last words seem to speak of a profound failure. In his critique of speech act theory Jacques Derrida opened a new itinerary for criticism by connecting art precisely with the experience of failure or ineptitude, and with the counter-intuitive idea that what is most powerful is ‘often the most disarming feebleness’; so as a sign of the queer power of weakness, we might perhaps consider Shakespeare’s reported statement that ‘I was not able to bear the enclosing’ as what Roland Barthes termed a biographeme: that quantum of truth that embodies a life’s work.[7]

Summary

Bare life

At the end, ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’ as he ‘babbled of green fields’ (Henry V, 2,3,15). If the refusal to participate in civic life was what the Greeks termed idiocy, Shakespeare was the greatest ‘militant idiot’, enthuses Bate.[22] The insistence here that an autonomous and autotelic literature grounded in private property is non-political calls to mind Baudelaire’s characterisation of ‘art-for-art’ssake’ as a ‘puerile utopia’.23 It reinforces Hawkes’ point that the really pressing question prompted by the steely self-containment portrayed in Bingo is not the naïve one about how a man who wrote such plays about the tragedy of sovereign self-centredness could ‘behave as he did in the face of suffering humanity. The hospitable name of Welcombe was a misnomer for the frosty scene of Shakespeare’s own farewell

Silence in court

Our humble author

With printless foot