16 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
DEPT.OFDISSENT
POETICJUSTICE
L
ast Tuesday, at the funeral for the
Supreme Court Justice John Paul
Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered
a eulogy. She concluded, “Justice Ste-
vens much appreciated the writings of
the literary genius known by the name
William Shakespeare, so I will end with
a line from the Bard fitting the prince
of a man Justice Stevens was: ‘Take him
for all in all, we shall not look upon his
like again.’” Ginsburg’s wording was
careful—it had to be, lest she mischar-
acterize her colleague’s views. Stevens
didn’t appreciate the writings of Shake-
speare; he appreciated the writings of
the individual known as Shakespeare.
Ginsburg’s “Hamlet” quote? Stevens,
known for his dissenting opinions (Bush
v. Gore, Citizens United v. F.E.C.), be-
lieved that it was probably written not
by Shakespeare, the commoner from
Stratford-upon-Avon, but by Edward
de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
A quick recap of the Oxfordian the-
ory, which was proposed in 1920, by a
schoolteacher named J. Thomas Loo-
ney: Shakespeare was the front man for
de Vere, an aristocrat who could not
publish under his own name. (Writers
were looked down on—sometimes
they were even tortured or killed.) This
explains why there were no books in
Shakespeare’s Stratford house and
why no letters written by Shakespeare
survive. (Some Oxfordians think that
Shakespeare was illiterate.) This ex-
plains why there is no evidence that
Stratford citizens recognized Shake-
speare as a writer during his lifetime.
And it explains why the plays are so
good, so complicated, so familiar with
the concerns of nobility and the geog-
raphy of Italy. (Shakespeare isn’t known
to have ever left England.)
Stevens began expressing his doubts
about the Bard of Avon in November
of 1987, at a moot-court hearing on the
topic “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” Ste-
vens and Justices William Brennan and
Harry Blackmun listened to arguments
in support of the Stratford man and
arguments in support of de Vere. Ste-
vens said, of the Stratford argument, “I
have lingering concerns about some of
the gaps in the evidence: the absence
of eulogies at the time in 1616 when
Shakespeare died.” He added, “You can’t
help but have these gnawing doubts
that this author may, perhaps, have been
someone else.” A few years later, in a
law-review article, he doubled down,
citing the theory that “Shakespeare
is a pseudonym for an exceptionally
well-educated person of noble birth
who was close to the English throne.”
Edward de Vere.
“The article was him coming out
as an Oxfordian,” Tom Regnier, a for-
mer president of the Shakespeare Ox-
ford Fellowship, said. The organiza-
tion, which has about four hundred
members—including the Shakespear-
ean actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Ry-
lance, who are honorary trustees—is
dedicated to researching the author-
ship question and evangelizing about
de Vere. In 2009, the group gave Ste-
vens its highest honor: naming him
Oxfordian of the Year.
Alex McNeil, the Oxfordian who was
tasked with notifying Stevens, didn’t
know how to contact a Supreme Court
Justice, so he mailed a letter to the Court.
Several weeks later, he received a response
from Stevens’s secretary: “Be here on
were left slack-jawed. (“What does that
say about Robert Mueller?” Tucker Carl-
son asked. “This isn’t a medical pro-
gram, so we’re not going to speculate.”)
Trump retweeted the clip.
There are questions worth explor-
ing about the Steele dossier, having to
do with, say, the transparency of cam-
paign spending. But they are not the
questions congressional Republicans
are asking. As in their prolonged hear-
ings into the attack on an American
diplomatic compound in Benghazi,
they are likely to twist any useful threads
into an unedifying tangle. This time,
though, the Republicans are engaging
in an even more dangerous delusion.
The pretense is that, as long as they
keep talking about mysterious profes-
sors and British spies, they aren’t ig-
noring the threat that Russia and other
foreign powers continue to pose to the
integrity of American elections. Hil-
lary Clinton is, once again, their ex-
cuse for inaction.
The urgency of focussing on elec-
tion security was one of Mueller’s key
messages. It was underscored a day later,
when the Senate Intelligence Commit-
tee released a report indicating that, in
2016, the Russian government likely
probed American voting systems in all
fifty states. (Many of the state systems
are known to be vulnerable.) The at-
tempts appear to have been mostly ex-
ploratory. They may go further, though,
in 2020, and Russia might not be the
only perpetrator. And yet, that same
day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc-
Connell killed legislation aimed at bol-
stering election security, saying that
Democrats were just looking for a “po-
litical benefit.”
It’s not clear that the Republican
Party can still conceive of a definition
of the country’s interests—or of itself—
that does not include support for Trump.
It was thus all the more striking, during
Mueller’s testimony, when certain Dem-
ocrats seemed to be speaking his lan-
guage—that of a straightforward officer
of the law. One such moment came
when Val Demings, of Florida, previ-
ously Orlando’s chief of police, asked
about the written responses that Trump
had submitted to Mueller, in lieu of sit-
ting for an interview with his investi-
gators. Was it true that Trump “simply
didn’t answer” many questions? Muel-
ler: “True.” Did he give answers that
“contradicted other evidence?” Mueller:
“Yes.” Could Mueller say that “the Pres-
ident was credible?” Mueller: “I can’t
answer that question.”
Was it fair to say, Demings con-
tinued, that the President’s answers
were not only inadequate but “showed
that he wasn’t always being truthful?”
Mueller: “I would say, generally.” That
exchange is almost a catechism for
keeping one’s bearings amid the tumult
of a truth-mocking Presidency. Such
a task won’t be easy in what is bound
to be a bitter election, when the con-
tested terms will include not only “un-
American” but a more essential one:
“American.”
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
