Shakespeare, Childlike Faith, and the Social Construction of Reality: Part One

A movie came out last fall that caused a stir in the literary world.  The premise of Anonymous suggests that the 38 plays and 154 sonnets that are generally credited to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, England were actually written by a man of the gentry known as Lord Oxford.  This is not a new idea; in fact, it’s at least a century old.  Scholars have long noticed reasons to question Shakespeare’s authorship and have found connections with Oxford and others.

Among these revolutionaries who straddle the fence that sections off a possibility that is dangerous to the way we view history, there are of course the stalwarts who refuse to go near the fence—that is, if they even acknowledge the existence of land on the other side.  These folks would never stoop to entertain the idea that Hamlet’s struggle to be or not to be could have come from anyone but the beloved Bard, that someone else was comparing a lover to a summer’s day.

Here’s the funny thing about it all:  four hundred years after Shakespeare breathed his last, it no longer matters who wrote all those classics.  It doesn’t matter because the world, as a whole, accepts Shakespeare as the author.  There are no conclusive documents one way or the other, so we don’t have any overwhelming reason to question it, and thus, we accept it as truth.  Even if Lord Oxford, or Lord Vader for that matter, was the real author, our reality counters the reality that existed at the turn of the seventeenth century.  Our society has decided to give Shakespeare the credit.  So, for all intents and purposes of today, William Shakespeare wrote everything that we say he wrote.

Put your thinking cap on; I’m getting meta up in here.  If I make a choice on the basis that something I believe happened sometime in the past, that event is just real as all of the things that actually occurred.  One’s understanding of reality doesn’t require every part, or even any part, of that understanding to have existed in time and space.  My acceptance of fiction as reality creates a reality within that fiction.

Let’s take a step back.  Children are the best example I can think of to illustrate this cognitive whirlwind.  Kids understand the world as they experience it.  A kid who has grown up in Ecuador and never left her country understands the world as an immensely hot place.  And she’s right.  But another kid who’s never strayed from his home in Greenland would disagree.  It’s freezing out in this world!  And he’s right too.  They both are.  They both know truth as it exists within their realities.  They both live their lives in a way that reflects those truths.  She doesn’t wear a whole lot, while he bundles up to get the mail.  They’re both right.

We’ve seen good in this this, and we’ve seen bad.  Every person who has made a lasting difference on the world has had to exist within a reality that she or he has decided is true.  If Gandhi’s advice was to be the change we want to see, we have to first live in that change.  In Mother Theresa’s reality, no one, not even people bursting with infected puss, should be exempt from love.  It didn’t matter at all to her that most others don’t live in that kind of world; she lived her life in the reality that she saw.  And she was right.

Unfortunately, those with less-than-pure motives also have this world-shaping power.  In the reality of the Crusaders of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the cross was a symbol of violence towards those who had not accepted their brand of Christianity.  It didn’t matter at all to them that their religion’s founder preached loving one’s enemies; they lived their lives in their own reality.

Our perceived reality is truth to us.  It molds our lives and becomes our tangible reality.  So what reality do we live in?  And what world will we choose to make a reality?