Tempest in a Slop Pot

Could The Tempest really be the work of Shakespeare, our Bard?

It is so awful in so many ways that, in Solomon’s opinion, there is no way this monstrosity could be anything more than a group effort that MAY possibly have had some minor posthumous input and contribution from the Great Man.

Solomon has never seen a serious challenge to the authorship of this play, but this comedy-fantasy-romance bears so little traces of a master’s hand that it is inconceivable that we should attribute it to the Master.

If the first-production date of 1611 is accurate, then this means that there is a seven years’ gap between the death of Edward de Vere, the real Shakespeare, and the appearance of this play. That there was so much time between his death and the first production of this play pretty much assures that there is little if any connection between The Tempest and Shakespeare.

In all respects, it seems like a vehicle created by and for a troupe of men to show off their favorite shtick; to give their work a whiff of respectability, they attributed it to Shakespeare, whom they may have worked with and whose work they certainly were familiar with. That they could get away with such a fraud seven years after his death, though, reinforces Solomon’s contention that the general public was unaware of who the real Shakespeare was. Think Clifford Irving fooling the world about Howard Hughes in OUR time, so such things are indeed possible.

Solomon was amused recently when he went through The Tempest with pen in hand to write down all the lines that he feels rise to the heights of Shakespearean greatness; then he compared his list to an Internet site that does the same. Solomon's list was less than half a handwritten page; theirs was just about every other line in the play. Obviously, we don’t agree. Someone here is very wrong, and it ain’t Solomon!

But more than a paucity of inspired language is the utter idiocy of the plot. If the name of “Shakespeare” were not associated with The Tempest, would anyone ever think this to be the work of a genius? The humor is sophomoric and cruel, the characters are one-dimensional, the plot hinges on magic and drunkenness and accidents. What’s to show genius here?

The Tempest is “proof” that Shakespeare created a successful hoax about his true identity that only insiders knew—and so his name was able to be exploited after his death. As far as the general public knew, he was still alive and writing. Solomon believes that anything after Macbeth is primarily, and probably wholly, someone else’s work.

The most connection that Shakespeare may have had to The Tempest, if there was any at all, was probably along the lines of a discarded sketch for an idea, some unused lines he may have tossed out, or some drunken ramblings in his later years remembered by acquaintances. His connection to what exists is undoubtedly tangential—and perhaps non-existent. Regardless, the work certainly bears neither his direct hand nor his imprimatur.

There’s nothing good, let alone classical, about The Tempest, and certainly no reason to treat it as if it is anything other than Jacobean ephemera. Those who refuse to acknowledge how obvious a forgery the thing is are of that type of people who pay outrageous sums for brand names--and refuse to see the “Made in China” tags on their Rolexes.