NBA winner Jesmyn Ward.

With tears of joy and lots of liquor, New York publishing gathered at Cipriani Wall Street last night for the National Book Awards. This year’s host was actor John Lithgow, who recently published a memoir (Drama: An Actor’s Education) and performed his role with just the right amount of self-deprecation.

It was not as bad as 1999, when attendees of the PEN American Gala had to cross a picket line to get into Cipriani Midtown, but there were a few jokes about the celebration’s short distance from Zuccotti Park.

“My wife said we were going to Citarella for dinner,” joked a sheepish Michael Moore to The Observer. “Wait, we’re going by the stock exchange! Holy shit!” He said he would be returning to the neighborhood tomorrow for events surrounding the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

“I thought I would point out, since nobody else has, that we are Occupying Wall Street,” said the poet Ann Lauterbach in her introduction to the poet John Ashbery, who was accepting a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Attendees clapped for the unlikely vision of John Lithgow placing a medal around John Ashbery’s neck.

Mr. Ashbery’s acceptance speech was an uplifting survey of his literary career, starting with his discovery of Modernism as a young man and his thoughts on those who have found him a difficult poet.

“As long as I’ve been publishing poetry it has been seen as difficult and private though I never meant for it to be,” he said. “I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.”

“To have been included in the same press release as John Ashbery just seems wrong,” said Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Miami bookstore Books & Books, upon acceptance of his award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

After attendees ate plates of rack of lamb and mingled, the exciting part of the awards began. First up was the award for Young People’s Literature, a slight sore spot for the National Book Foundation. When finalists were named for the award last month, Lauren Myracle’s Shine was announced instead of the book judges had actually chosen, Franny Billingsley’s Chime. Ms. Myracle had to give up her reward, apologies were made, and the whole embarrassing affair was quickly glossed over.

“It was a bad year for muffled phone conversations with disastrous consequences,” said National Book Award Judge Marc Aronson, referring to the whole sordid episode as an “oral malfunction.” The award went to Thanhha Lai for her book Inside Out & Back Again.

Mr. Ashbery’s speech set the bar high, but the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Nikky Finney, soon matched it. Ms. Finney won for her collection Head Off & Split. Through tears she recalled in her acceptance the history of slaves who were punished for reading and writing.

“If my name is ever called out, I promised my girl poet self, so too would I call out theirs,” she read, exiting the stage to a standing ovation.

“That was the best acceptance speech I’ve ever heard from anyone in my entire life,” said Mr. Lithgow.

Stephen Greenblatt won the award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How We Became Modern. Also choking up, he thanked the poet Lucretius, who lived 2000 years ago, Poggio Bracciolini, a fourteenth-century Italian scholar, and W.W. Norton, for its willingness to publish a book about the “discovery of an ancient poem by a Renaissance humanist.”

The final award, for fiction, went to Jesmyn Ward, for her novel Salvage the Bones. She cried too, recalling in an emotional speech how she started to write in her 20s following the death of her brother. After the ceremony ended we found Ms. Ward and asked her if she had been optimistic about her prospects before the ceremony.

“I tried not to have any expectations,” she said. “I was planning to be overjoyed for whoever won. It was a total shock.”

But her editor, Bloomsbury USA’s Kathy Belden, had secret hopes.

“I guess publishing books that don’t have huge markets for 25 years I don’t always go in with high expectations and I go in with a love for the books,” said Ms. Belden. “And yet this time when she was nominated I thought she could win.”

After the ceremony, Cipriani opened its doors to the riff-raff—junior editors, young agents, reporters, literary party stalwart Jon-Jon Goulian—who made their way to a second floor balcony for pigs-in-a-blanket, sliders, dancing and more cocktails. Amazon Publishing head Larry Kirshbaum, whose company had a table at the awards for the first time this year, was seen shaking it on the dance floor. Later we encountered him at the coat check with a copy of non-fiction finalist Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution under his arm.

As The Observer left the ceremony, we were stopped by a group on the steps in formalwear smoking cigars, including fiction finalist Téa Obreht and Random House editor Noah Eaker. The stogies might have been for consolation rather than celebration, but they still wanted their photo taken.

Earlier this month, invocations of creationism and Holocaust denial were injected into the debate by no less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-seller Will in the World. On Sept. 4, The Times published his letter to the editor responding to the most recent (Aug. 30) piece by The Times’ default Shakespeare correspondent William S. Niederkorn, an editor in the cultural department.

Mr. Niederkorn’s coverage has drawn criticism from an array of Shakespeare scholars in the past for a pronounced, tendentious focus on the conspiracy theory that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was a secretive mystery man who used William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as a front.

If you read his coverage over the past three and a half years, you would be led to believe that this was the most compelling issue in Shakespearean scholarship.

What set Mr. Greenblatt off about Mr. Niederkorn’s recent “Essay” was his concluding rhetorical question: “What if authorship studies were made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum?”

As Mr. Greenblatt put it in his Letter to the Editor:

“The idea that William Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the ‘authorship controversy’ be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that ‘intelligent design’ be taught alongside evolution.

“In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time.

“The demand seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?”

Holocaust denial! As the author of a critique of unfounded Hitler “explanations,” including Holocaust denial, and of a forthcoming book (sometime in the fall of 2006) on what I would call real Shakespearean controversies—about the plays and poems, not the name of their author—I would suggest that “Shakespeare denial” (or “Shakespearean creationism”: the creation of alternate Shakespeares) doesn’t amount to the hateful folly of Holocaust denial. But I think Mr. Greenblatt is making a point about the relativism that giving equal time to “both sides” of the “authorship controversy” entails.

What if, for instance, over the course of three and a half years (the length of Mr. Niederkorn’s Shakespeare tenure), the Times aerospace correspondent had given “equal time” (or more) to those who believe that the moon landings were a staged hoax, say? Many people believe it to be true, after all (48,000 Google hits for “moon landing hoax”). Should the moon-landing hoax theory be taught in schools alongside astrophysics?

Other scholars have expressed concern, embarrassment and anger that the paper of record appears to have given its imprimatur to the belief that the authorship controversy is the central Shakespearean question.

But I think another appropriate emotion might be deep sadness. At a time when schools and colleges everywhere are dropping their requirements that students read any of Shakespeare’s works, we are now told it’s important they take away from whatever time they do have to read the greatest writer in the language in order to focus on fringe beliefs about the secret identity of the author.

I should say that this is not the only view advanced in The Times. I’ve written about the state of Shakespearean scholarship for the Book Review and about productions for Arts & Leisure without ever being asked by any editor whether I was sure who wrote the plays. And the “authorship controversy” doesn’t feature in Ben Brantley’s superbly informed reviews of Shakespearean productions. I have a feeling that many literate Times people are a bit embarrassed by what’s happened with its Shakespeare coverage.

But the fact that continuing coverage of developments in Shakespeare studies has been the province of someone who places the “authorship controversy” at the center of focus has the effect of giving credibility to a conspiracy theory that lacks any positive evidence: any record of any witness, at any time, ever alluding to it. (Were all the witnesses shot or silenced, like the 22 gunmen on the “grassy knoll” in Dallas?)

Another problem with this kind of coverage is that the genuinely consequential controversies in the field are not covered at all. The still-unresolved debate over how to deal with variations in the two versions of King Lear and the three texts of Hamlet, for instance, has profound implications for how these foundational works of Western culture are construed. No coverage of the debate about Lukas Erne’s recent thesis (in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist): whether Shakespeare took the printed texts of his work seriously, or whether he just dashed them off for the stage à la Shakespeare in Love—another argument with important and practical consequences for how we read and stage the plays. Or the debate that Frank Kermode initiated over the difficulty of Shakespeare’s “late language”: deliberately complicated or (in places) carelessly opaque.

These are the kinds of things serious scholars care about and educated readers deserve to know about. Apparently none of these rich debates about Shakespeare’s actual work have been of much interest to Mr. Niederkorn.

Instead, for nearly four years, important developments in Shakespeare studies have been looked at through the lens of the supposedly central “authorship controversy.” One can see, for instance, the way this agenda was pushed into the coverage of the claim that a 1612 “Funeral Elegy” was written by Shakespeare.

Back in June 2002, Professor Donald Foster conceded that he was wrong in attributing a dull and dutiful 578-line “Funeral Elegy” published in 1612 to Shakespeare (after three major publishers had included it in their editions of Shakespeare). Readers of The Times were told in Mr. Niederkorn’s reportage that a really important implication of this development was that it represented a major victory for the “Oxfordians,” that faction of the “anti-Stratfordians” who push Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as their secret Shakespeare.

Oxford, inconveniently for his supporters’ case that he wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays, died in 1604, before, most scholars agree, “Shakespeare” had written perhaps a dozen plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

The Oxfordians have had to rely on strained attempts to backdate those plays, and to claim that the Earl of Oxford somehow wrote them all before 1604 and that participants in his Shakespeare conspiracy doled them out for the next eight years or so.

If Shakespeare had written a funeral elegy about a man who died in 1612, it’s unlikely Oxford could have risen from his grave to do it. The retraction of the 1612 “Funeral Elegy” attribution to Shakespeare, Times readers were told by Mr. ­Niederkorn, meant another obstacle had been removed from the Oxfordian path! A substantial portion of the article on the “Funeral Elegy” retraction was devoted to its implications for the “authorship controversy,” and, as a result, Times readers were again given a mistaken impression of the centrality of the “authorship controversy.”

The Family Romance of the Shakespeare Deniers, Or, A Gap Is Different From a Void

The “Funeral Elegy” article prompted the first skirmish between Mr. Niederkorn and Mr. Greenblatt. What particularly disturbed the latter was Mr. Niederkorn’s characterization of the controversy as one between “Stratfordians” (believers that Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the plays) and “anti-Stratfordians” (believers that it was Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford or even Queen Elizabeth).

Mr. Greenblatt objected to this as a tendentious rhetorical trick. Or as he put it in a letter to The Times then: “The so-called Oxfordians, who push the de Vere theory, have answers, of course—just as the adherents of the Ptolemaic system [those who believed the sun revolved around the earth] had answers to Copernicus. It is unaccountable that you refer to those of us who believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays as ‘Stratfordians,’ as though there are two equally credible positions.”

It’s not that we know a lot about Shakespeare. As I wrote in a Publishers Weekly review of Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of Shakespeare recently: “At their worst [Shakespearean biographers] reshuffle old wives’ tales and pile supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards.”

Yes, there are gaps in the record of Shakespeare’s life 400 years ago. And, yes, biographers often overextend their imaginations trying to fill these gaps. They may never be filled in completely. But there is sufficient evidence to link “the Stratford man” (another rhetorical ploy of the “anti-Stratfordians”) to the plays—and I believe there is far more than necessary. A gap is different from a void. Existence of gaps does not license conspiracy-theory speculation without any positive evidence of a conspiracy.

And, in fact, the “anti-Stratfordian” case is based largely on what you might call “negative evidence”: The lack of any surviving letters written by Shakespeare, or reference to his books in his will. There are gaps in Hitler’s biography as well, important ones, but as I suggested in Explaining Hitler, these gaps don’t constitute positive evidence in favor of urban legends such as the one that claims Hitler was descended from a Rothschild. I called such stories “the family romance of the Hitler explainers,” after Freud’s characterization of the fantasy that one is secretly related to royalty or aristocracy.

In biography, the family romance is the wish to endow the apparently humble-born person who became a huge historical figure with secret exotic or noble parentage. The Earl of Oxford theory is the family romance of the Shakespeare deniers, Oxford a precursor of Rothschild.

The Oxford “evidence” I’ve seen is not persuasive. The fact that someone may have highlighted passages in a Bible that was once in the possession of Oxford and that these passages are alluded to in Shakespeare is not, I’m afraid, positive evidence that Oxford is Shakespeare; it may at best be evidence that Oxford read Shakespeare. But this is the kind of thing the Oxfordians get excited about—wishful thinking at best.

Who’s Got the Da Vinci Code?

But let’s look at the way Mr. Niederkorn frames the debate in his recent “Essay” on Shakespeare matters on Aug. 30, the one that prompted Mr. Greenblatt’s Holocaust-denial comparison.

This one was called, in a particularly strained headline: “The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas From the Traditional Camp.”

Students of the coverage might notice that in the headline and throughout the story a new nomenclature has replaced “Stratfordian” and “anti-Stratfordian,” which are nowhere to be found. Now those who believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare are “the traditional camp” or the “traditionalists,” with the implicit hint of hidebound retro (if not reactionary) views, while those who believe that some other person wrote Shakespeare are said to be in the “unorthodox” camp. And we all know what we think of orthodoxy.

In any case, the thesis of the article was that “traditionalist” believers are so “eager for proof that Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” so desperate—virtually backed into a corner by the ever-strengthening arguments for the Earl of Oxford—that “fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.”

I have to say, having spent six years engaging with Shakespearean scholars on genuinely interesting questions, that this is a fantasy. Particularly if Mr. Niederkorn thinks “Shakespeare studies” consists mainly in trying to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

He cites a new book that asserts that Shakespeare (of Stratford) embedded a radical Catholic “code” into his works, as if the book were in the mainstream of Shakespeare scholarship, thereby, he thinks, discrediting mainstream scholarship. Please—I think we know who the Da Vinci Code types really are in this controversy: The history of “anti-Stratfordian” ­literature is chock-full of books bearing cryptograms.

And Mr. Niederkorn spotlights the decision by Oxford University Press to include in its new Complete Works of Shakespeare edition a play called Sir Thomas More, which some scholars believe contains part of a single scene by Shakespeare. I haven’t seen the Oxford University Press rationale (it could be contextual, for all I know), but merited or not, the decision is utterly irrelevant to the question of who wrote Hamlet.

But Mr. Niederkorn asserts that he is not a partisan, and when someone on the SHAKSPER discussion list called Mr. Niederkorn an “Oxfordian,” he replied to the list that “I am not an Oxfordian, nor a Stratfordian for that matter. I am just trying to keep an open mind and sort things out as well as I can.”

So admirably detached. Of course, in framing the debate that way—that neither one side nor the other has proven its case and that he’s just “sorting things out” between them—he makes it seem as if they were in fact virtually equivalent contenders. By saying you’re not sure one way or the other about the moon landing, that you’re just “sorting things out,” you give more credibility to the moon-landing hoax theory than it deserves (to say the least).

In addition, Mr. Niederkorn conducts a one-way argument with Stephen Greenblatt, quoting Mr. Greenblatt on some matter from his book and then interjecting, like a cross-examiner, “But wait a minute … ” and acting like he’s demolished Mr. Greenblatt’s argument when in fact he hasn’t.

For example, he takes Mr. Greenblatt’s conjectural belief that Shakespeare might have had secret Catholic leanings and then tries to turn them against him by saying, “But wait a minute. Isn’t the Shakespeare canon the cornerstone of secular English literature? How can a radical Catholic have written it in good conscience?”

He seems to have forgotten to reread Hamlet, which gives weight to the Catholic notion of purgatory (it’s where the ghost comes from), despite having been written during the reign of a Protestant theocracy that abolished belief in purgatory. And he seems to believe that “secular literature” is literature that has no reference to religion in it.

Despite Mr. Niederkorn’s claim of nonpartisanship, he certainly gives the impression to knowledgeable readers that he has a partisan agenda: I e-mailed the multifaceted scholar Thomas Pendleton, who co-edits the Shakespeare Newsletter, which is distributed to thousands of Shakespeare scholars and hundreds of libraries throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, asking for his assessment of Mr. Niederkorn’s Aug. 30 “Essay,” since Mr. Pendleton has followed the controversy more closely than I have and has written skeptically about various authorship arguments.

Here’s his reply:

“Niederkorn has no business being the Times’ Shakespeare man. He is obviously an anti-Stratfordian—whether or not that makes him an Oxfordian isn’t worth debating, although many of his arguments seem to come from Diana Price’s Oxfordian work. Thus he operates from a position that almost no professional, academic or scholarly student of Shakespeare takes seriously. There is no serious scholarly ‘debate’ on the question.

“The Stratfordian case isn’t ‘conjecture,’ as Niederkorn says. It’s based on documented evidence that is somewhere between abundant and overwhelming …. There’s plenty of direct testimony from contemporaries that the man from Stratford was the man who wrote the plays (Ben Jonson, Digges, etc.). If Niederkorn can’t tell the difference between this kind of evidence and the fact that Oxford, like Hamlet, was once captured by pirates, he’s not competent to discuss the subject.”

The impoverishment of Mr. Niederkorn’s “authorship”-centered lens for looking at Shakespearean developments can be seen in his treatment of James Shapiro, author of the forthcoming 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Mr. Niederkorn taxes Mr. Shapiro with the hobbyhorse of the Oxfordians, the “problem” of Shakespeare’s reading, and implicitly characterizes his solution as one of the “fantasies” of the “traditional camp.”

In doing so, he overlooks the real questions raised in Mr. Shapiro’s analysis of the “revisions” of Hamlet (a subject I wrote about for The New Yorker three and a half years ago): which variations in the texts of Hamlet were the product of Shakespeare’s “considered second thoughts” (as the scholarly term of art has it), and which were accidents of transmission, misprints, cuts by theater managers, etc. Mr. Niederkorn’s readers are denied any investigation of such matters at the heart of Hamlet because he’s fixated on Oxfordian irrelevancies.

‘Fire and Brimstone’?

But let’s return to the “direct testimony” question, since this may be at the heart of one of Mr. Niederkorn’s mischaracterizations of the “debate” and the scholarship on “the traditional side” in his Aug. 30 article.

Buried in his piece is a mischaracterization of an essay by Brian Vickers (whom Mr. Niederkorn calls “the dean of Shakespeare scholars”) in the Times Literary Supplement (“Why Not Shakespeare?”, Aug. 17, 2005). Mr. Niederkorn calls the essay a “fire-and-brimstone academic sermon,” as if Mr. Vickers were railing in desperate, incendiary, inquisitional terms against the “anti-Stratfordians.”

In fact, I defy you to read Mr. Vickers’ essay and find the “fire and brimstone.” Instead, Mr. Vickers’ essay (Google it) is a sober, quietly devastating survey of the “authorship debate,” one that cites, by the way, a new book that Mr. Niederkorn somehow forgot to tell his Times readers about: The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea. I wonder why?

The most salient passage in Mr. Vickers’ essay—the one dealing with “direct testimony” to Shakespeare’s authorship (there is, of course, no direct testimony to anyone else’s authorship—none; zero), is this paragraph:

“We have a huge number of allusions [to Shakespeare], both laudatory and envious, from fellow-writers and others in the London theatre-world who knew him well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker); an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616, all of which identify him as both actor and author.”

It’s not fire and brimstone; it’s fact and evidence. It’s not fantasy and codes; it’s the names of real people who knew Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford, as the writer of the plays. In any case, should you need further proof on this question, I suggest you consult the authorship chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, or go to the Shakespeare authorship Web site (shakespeareauthorship.com) maintained by David Kathman and Terry Ross.

I think it’s time for everyone to go back to reading and rereading those plays. (There’s some good stuff in them.)

Again, what I feel is sadness. I think people should be allowed to conduct inquiries on whatever tangent they wish. Let William S. Niederkorn continue to pursue his hobbyhorse in The Times, just so long as he doesn’t do so under the pretense of detached objectivity. I just think it’s sad that there are people who—given the choice of how they spend their limited time on the planet—choose to spend it on this question, rather than read and reread and deepen their appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

They don’t know what they’re missing.

The records of Shakespeare’s life aren’t skimpy: There are deeds and court entries, real estate and town papers, his will, reports of performances of his plays, even an accepted example of his handwriting. From tributes in the original collection of his plays (the First Folio of 1623), assembled some seven years after his death, we know what his theatrical associates thought of him, and are certain of his contemporary celebrity. But there are no letters, no personal memories, no diary, no confessions or extended memoirs; nothing that explains the wonder of how this hick from a small town north of Oxford, without a university education, got to London to become the leading playwright of his day and managed to write the supreme masterpieces of English dramatic literature.

Then there are the soap-opera questions: Did he loathe his wife, Anne Hathaway? He spent most of their married life in London while she, back in Stratford, lived with his folks and raised the kids. In his will, he left her only the second-best bed; daughter Susanna got most everything else. Did he have more than a crush on the Earl of Southampton, who we presume is the young man his Sonnets are addressed to? And is this Dark Lady who came between them a poetic invention? Why did he retire? And did Gwyneth Paltrow really disguise herself as a boy to get the part of Juliet?

His early years—especially the mid-1580’s, with their paucity of records—have been the most worried over. Michael Wood’s recent book and television series, In Search of Shakespeare, found the bard-to-be skulking around the households of Stratford where stubborn Catholics (called "recusants," and among them distant relatives of Shakespeare’s wife) secretly performed their rites. A recent and too-frequently embraced theory is that, before marriage, he went to the north of England as a tutor in a Catholic household—a dangerous place to be in Elizabeth’s virulently Protestant England. Closer to home, a Jesuit-designed declaration of faith was found, in the mid–18th century, stuffed above the rafters of the Stratford birthplace, signed by father John Shakespeare (the original has been lost). Stephen Greenblatt covers this period at length in his new book on Shakespeare’s life, Will in the World. (Is the title meant to recall Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea —the world as Will Shakespeare and Idea?)

Any Shakespeare biographer has to invent, suppose, imagine, adjust emphases, intuit, mulch the plays for hints of autobiography. The results depend not on what merely sounds sensible but on what helps us most in contending with the plays themselves. In this game, as Mr. Greenblatt confesses, "[t]here is no way of achieving any certainty," and ingenuity does not usually triumph over common sense or likelihood. Nevertheless, Mr. Greenblatt gives his intention in the book’s subtitle: to tell us "How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare." How good are his guesses?

Mr. Greenblatt’s book has been excitedly anticipated because he’s among America’s most admired literary critics and educators, and his credentials include brilliant introductions to several of the plays in The Norton Shakespeare, of which he is the general editor. His eminence, though, comes from being a guiding light of the diverse school of literary criticism called "New Historicism," an approach described as "a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history." One aim of New Historicism was to free Shakespeare from Bardolatry, the glorifying bloat of traditional worship, and to release him from the bondage of pinheaded literary scholarship into the world. Not least, it gave young academics a packed new galaxy of thesis material.

Though Shakespeare has indeed been resuscitated (thanks also to gender studies, reception theory, semiotics and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo), we still want to know why these plays don’t flame away like nitrate film, why they persist in devastating and invigorating us.

Mr. Greenblatt’s way is not to bushwhack through the years of Shakespeare’s life, from 1564 to 1616: We have facts, documents and debunked legends enough in Samuel Schoenbaum’s scrupulous and essential William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1974) and in a straightforward recent biography by Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life. The grand ambition of Will in the World is to bridge the life and the work: "Shakespeare’s actual world gets into his work, but most often in a distorted, inverted, disguised, or reimagined form. The point is not to strip away the reimaginings, as if the life sources were somehow more interesting than the metamorphoses, but rather to enhance a sense of the wonder of Shakespeare’s creation." Since we can’t be certain about these "life sources," the ground is shaky for admiring the metamorphoses. Our sense of wonder must be reserved for Mr. Greenblatt’s own enhancements, and not necessarily Shakespeare’s.

The book is made up of episodic riffs, letting stages of Shakespeare’s life (education, first years in London, marriage, last plays and retirement) be an opportunity to ramble over the period’s social, artistic, religious and political impingements on the man, and then ferret out how these sneak into the plays. For instance, as Mr. Greenblatt sees it, the genesis of the character of Falstaff begins with Shakespeare’s entry into London’s tavern world of fellow playwrights, where he may have discerned the dramatic possibilities in a malicious, dissolute and fat rival named Robert Greene. This conjecture allows for an account of the social marginality of London theater, bear-baiting, prostitution and how these all work themselves most conspicuously into both parts of Henry IV, Measure for Measure and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Mr. Greenblatt’s earlier, much better book, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), explored the gap in the ritual mourning for the dead that was created by the expunging of the Catholic Purgatory by Protestant theology as a realm of the afterlife: In Elizabethan England, prayers for the deceased could no longer be directed there. In this book, Mr. Greenblatt proposes that, at the abbreviated funeral for Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, dead at the age of 11 in 1596, grandfather John, still attached to the old ways, asked his son William to have masses secretly recited. William refused, but Shakespeare’s unassuaged grief and the fear of his father’s imminent death (in 1601) became key ingredients in the making of the play Hamlet (c. 1600). With its logical skips, the theory hangs on John’s secret reverence for Catholic ritual and William’s sensitivity to ceremony.

This does, however, lead to a rare digression: an examination of a strictly technical playwriting matter, Shakespeare’s gradual discovery of the dramatic value of allowing an action to be based on an unexplained motivation (why does Hamlet pretend to be mad? What is Iago’s compulsive motivation?). Shakespeare learned to leave something crucial in the play unexplained. Mr. Greenblatt terms this "the principle of opacity" or "the radical excision of motive." Another strictly literary digression examines Shakespeare’s skill in recording hesitations, secret intentions, ambivalences in dialogue, "the hidden processes of interiority." Neither of these take him long to spell out, but they are not trivial, and the second might have something to do with what Harold Bloom has called Shakespeare’s invention of the human.

With these detours, he seems on the brink of relaxing into some account of artistic revolution, but they turn out to be dead ends. Mr. Greenblatt knows what’s absent here (absent because this book’s subject is Will in the world, not Will at his desk): how in these plays Shakespeare "fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions." He offers, rather, the kind of hoary tale such as Shakespeare leaving Stratford after being arrested for poaching (ultimately disproved, following Mr. Schoenbaum’s trail), which spurs him to this (which Mr. Greenblatt hastens to say is "only a metaphor"): "Throughout Shakespeare’s career as a playwright he was a brilliant poacher—deftly entering into territory marked out by others, taking for himself what he wanted, and walking away with his prize under the keeper’s nose."

With this sort of gassy guff, Mr. Greenblatt makes Shakespeare a kind of David Mamet tough guy with "a usurper’s knack for displaying as his own what he had plucked from others, an alarming ability to plunder, appropriate and absorb." The point is clearly important to Mr. Greenblatt—it repeats a formula from Hamlet in Purgatory, where we learn of Shakespeare’s "potent blend of opportunism and imaginative generosity, appropriation and moral revulsion."

Since the subject is always either conjectural or elusive ("his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints"), the playwright remains out of focus, and—worse for a book on how he became what he came—indistinct, blended gradually with the background: "He had embraced ordinariness, or ordinariness embraced him."

Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare, imaginatively alert to family ambitions and losses, religious and political undertones, veers toward the comfortably banal. (The last chapter is called "The Triumph of the Everyday.") How else to characterize two more telling celebrations of "the ordinary" in the final pages? Mr. Greenblatt toasts the creator of Lear and Leontes, of Cressida and Juliet, with this: "He never showed signs of boredom at the small talk, trivial pursuits and foolish games of ordinary people." He means the scene-changing blather of servants (as in Romeo and Juliet) and the dopey festival folk (as in The Winter’s Tale). And then, on retirement to the Stratford homestead: "What Shakespeare wanted was only what he could have in the most ordinary and natural way: the pleasure of living near his daughter and her husband and their child." He alludes only briefly to the other, less sentimentally comforting legend—Shakespeare succumbing to a fatal illness after a drunken London binge with old cronies.

It all depends, I guess, on the Shakespeare we prefer to believe in.

Robert Cornfield’s book on Shakespeare’s plays will be published next year by Bloomsbury.

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"The M.L.A. is about a different kind of performance anxiety," Ms. Holdstein said with a laugh.

Two days earlier, nearly 11,000 English literature and modern-language professors had descended on midtown Manhattan for the start of the Modern Language Association's annual conference, the place where intellectual superstars like Stanley Fish, Elaine Scarry and Kwame Anthony Appiah share hotel space with hundreds of desperate Ph.D.'s interviewing for a meager handful of jobs. The jittery orgy of power, insecurity and angst is the other academy's answer to the Cannes Film Festival, except that as these strivers fan across the city between standing-room-only panels, instead of Anita Ekberg emerging from a fountain, they strain to catch a glimpse of aging Harvard nymph Marjorie Garber emerging from Barneys.

The bacchanal of the bespectacled was back in New York for the first time in a decade, thrilling all those Ph.D.'s who had really planned to find jobs near the city, until the job market crashed and that tenure-track spot at Ball State started looking pretty appealing.

But this year, as the stratified masses of academic hot shots and wannabes made their reservations at Esca (or Pasta La Vista) and scored tickets to La Bohème (or The Lord of the Rings ), even an alcohol-soaked weekend in New York did nothing to calm the anxiety. It was palpable among more than just the job-seekers. Tension over the future of the profession could be felt all the way to the top of the pecking order, in the person of dashing M.L.A. president, Harvard professor and well-known Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt, who in May sent "A Call to Action" to every M.L.A. member, asking them all to begin to face a growing crisis in their industry: The academic presses that publish their esoteric work are shrinking, even as the publish-or-perish system of academic evaluation and promotion continues unabated, forcing lit professors to do some painful reckoning.

'Please Don't Talk to Me'

As the lobbies of hotels like the Hilton, the Sheraton, the Parker Meridian and the Waldorf-Astoria were transformed into nerd villages, the streets of midtown were littered with women in bright prints and chunky jewelry, talking loudly about post-docs and Homi Bhabha. Clusters of young men pulled their ties tighter as they paced by the elevator banks at the Hilton, waiting for job interviews to begin, folding and unfolding portfolios they'd been rearranging for the last year.

For recent Ph.D.'s looking for positions in the fields of language and literature, the frantic surroundings of the M.L.A. convention offer the only dusty rays of hope. It's a bleak landscape for academic job-seekers in any field, but this year, a flyer in the conference press room trumpeted "the sharpest decline in Language and Literature jobs" since the 1992 recession. The total number of English-language jobs fell from last year's 983 to 792. Only half of these are tenure-track. These jobs are all that are available for the 977 people who received English doctorates in 2000-2001, not to mention the hundreds of frustrated job-seekers from previous years, on top of those with so-so jobs who are looking to trade up.

"Please don't talk to me," said a fragile-looking woman crowned in long, dark corkscrew curls who stood near the orange-lit ballroom known as the "job barn" in the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where she was about to be interviewed on Saturday afternoon-presumably by one of the lesser-endowed schools that didn't spring for a hotel suite in which to conduct their interviewing sessions. "Go upstairs and talk to the people who are already drinking it away."

Already getting soused in the Hilton lobby bar were a group of three friends who had met in the Rutgers Ph.D. program. Julian Koslow, a 35-year-old Milton scholar, had just completed a job interview for a university he wouldn't name. "That's why I'm wedged into my suit," said Mr. Koslow, who was practically gulping his beer and said that he was looking forward to "getting drunk with the hedonistic masses."

One of Mr. Koslow's companions was Ryan Walsh, who has not yet completed his dissertation on Shakespeare's history plays and will not be on the job market until next year. Mr. Walsh, in a comfy sweater, surveyed the hundreds of potential colleagues chatting each other up in the bar and lobby. He was a little slack-jawed.

"I cannot imagine having to do this," said Mr. Walsh, who said that at least the attitude of the conference was "high-tension, high-release."

Their friend Tom Harris said that he'd dropped out of the Rutgers program to become a private investigator, a job which he characterized as "involving long periods of boredom punctuated by terror." Mr. Koslow, looking calmer now that most of his beer had disappeared and his tie was looser, agreed with The Observer that this description also applied to the academy, except "there's less terror, more despair."

Across the bar, two Columbia University A.B.D.'s ("All But Dissertation"), Penny Vlagopoulos and Stefanie Sobelle, were drinking, smoking and chatting with Maurice Lee, a UCLA Ph.D. who scored his current job at the University of Missouri during M.L.A. 2000.

Ms. Sobelle and Ms. Vlagopoulos, who were there to support friends who were giving papers or interviewing, had been to several panels already and found themselves bugged by the fakeness on display at the convention. "People aren't willing to admit it when they don't know something," said Ms. Sobelle.

"You get the sense that everyone's in on some big secret that you're not a part of," said Ms. Vlagopoulos.

"Or that they're all playing a practical joke on you," added Ms. Sobelle.

A Call to Action

In person, M.L.A. capo di tutti capi Stephen Greenblatt hardly seems well-cast in the part of the bringer of bad news. A solidly built man approaching 60, with salt-and-pepper hair, he still oozes the engaged, articulate charm that helped make him a Wunderkind scholar at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980's. In 1997, Mr. Greenblatt moved east with his second wife, Ramie Targoff, whom imaginative gossips claim is an heiress and a former Chanel model. Ms. Targoff teaches in the English department at Brandeis University and gave a paper called "Resurrecting Donne" at an M.L.A. session that she led, called "Remaking the Metaphysicals."

"My emphasis this year [as M.L.A. president] has been about M.L.A. and the larger world," said Mr. Greenblatt, his warm, crinkly eyes looking like they belong to a man who knows how to appreciate life's aesthetic pleasures. Sitting back in a chair in a conference room on Saturday morning at the Hilton, Mr. Greenblatt explained his position on the crisis in the field. "We should not be thinking about looking inward but about the ways that literature and the teaching of language are intellectually and culturally and socially part of the larger world."

To that end, he hosted a series of panels that featured some of his close friends and colleagues from other disciplines. One included historian Natalie Zemon Davis, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, anthropologist Clifford Geertz and philosopher Bernard Williams-not one of them a member of an English department.

"We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club," said Mr. Greenblatt. "It's as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories."

But as Mr. Greenblatt tried to demonstrate the warm fuzzy openness of a field long written off for its remote, abstract self-absorption, fear still rumbled under the surface of the convention. Much of it stemmed from the fact that academic presses, the profession's organ for self-expression-and for anointing the next generation-are in serious danger. Funding cutbacks have taken their predictable toll. Inter-library loan systems now mean that libraries buy single copies of academic books, while professors routinely Xerox course pack materials rather than asking their students to buy expensive volumes. And after decades of steadily increasing expectations about scholarly productivity, there's a glut of books about the narrowest and most specialized of subjects-books that might professionally appeal to only a small handful of an author's colleagues. Some presses are cutting their humanities lines, leaving fewer and fewer spots for which prospective scholars must compete.

"The day may have passed when a scholar can just sit down and say, 'I think I'd like to write about this ," said one senior professor with a number of books under her belt. "It used to be that if the work was good, you could just assume that it would get published."

Mr. Greenblatt, who served as a consultant for the movie Shakespeare in Love and who is considered the founder of the lit-crit school of thought known as New Historicism, is himself at the head of his generation's class when it comes to publishing:

He's the author of eight books, including Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Learning to Curse . Mr. Greenblatt has also co-edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare .

The fact that the academic presses have been so good to Mr. Greenblatt made his May 28 call to arms even more bracing. The letter, which suggested a rethinking of the system by which departments evaluate young scholars for tenure and promotion based on how many books they have published, elicited hundreds of e-mail replies.

"The response was remarkable," said Mr. Greenblatt on Saturday morning, as he delicately began to explain what was wrong with the system of academic rewards that had catapulted him to celebrity status. "Universities have had the perfectly reasonable expectation that to get tenure-which is after all a very big commitment and not to be taken lightly-they want to see evidence of scholarly creativity and promise. An official way of showing that is to publish a scholarly book-or two or three or 12."

Indeed, benchmarks for young scholars to publish in order to get tenure have increased over the years. "It used to be that you had to have one book," said Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist and friend of Mr. Greenblatt who was part of one of his panels. "Now the expectation is for two or three."

"The question is," said Mr. Greenblatt, "What happens if there's a skrinking of the possibility of doing this? What happens to a person who has a Ph.D. who is five or six years into an assistant professorship and wishes to publish something and the press that would ordinarily publish something like this says 'I'm sorry we're not doing that anymore'-what is that person supposed to do?"

Gods and Monsters

There was no doubt at the conference that Mr. Greenblatt is onto an important question. It's just that no one can agree how things can possibly get better. One tenured associate professor at a major university explained that the dearth of publishing options is a problem even after someone gets tenure. In order to get a raise, promotion or a job at another institution, a scholar in the middle of his or her career has to publish a second or a third book. And, she said, with the rumors flying around the conference about presses closing their humanities divisions, or cutting down their lit-crit lists, the panic was high.

The result, she said, was a new power structure.

"The academic-press editors are gods," she said. "Everyone lines up to talk to them, to pitch them. You've got two minutes to pitch your book. And if they snub you, it's debilitating. [University of Chicago Press'] Alan Thomas, [Harvard University Press'] Lindsay Waters. These are the celebrities."

The modest, white-bearded Mr. Thomas was having none of that. "That's ridiculous," he said, when The Observer asked him about his "god-like" status. "What we do is serve the people who really matter, the scholars. And basically I think that we feel that we are all in this together."

William Germano, vice president and publishing director of Routledge Press, acknowledged the trouble in publishing but placed some of the blame for the current situation back on the academy. He said that academics had to stop writing books the way they wrote their dissertations-and that maybe the dissertations themselves are not just too "specialized" for a wide audience, but just plain bad.

"Most dissertations are badly written," he said. "They could be written much better, they could be written with a clearer eye. They're based on proving that one has done homework rather than creating something that can be read."

Mr. Germano, who has just finished work on Marjorie Garber's latest and is currently editing books by Judith Butler and bell hooks, said that he "wanted the pleasure to come back."

"I think there is pleasure in reading intellectual stuff, but the page has to be on the side of the reader," Mr. Germano added.

A few booths down, a marketing associate at another press rolled her eyes. "Do you know how many people have left their dissertations here for someone to look at?" she said.

Over at the Stanford University Press table a few paces down, publishing director Alan Harvey was combating rumors that the press was eliminating its humanities lists. He said that they were only cutting back by about two books a year, and that they had fired two editors and let two editors leave without replacing them. The last thing to go, he said, would be the publishing program itself.

"There is an overall crisis in academic publishing and it's going to be nasty and hard to break," he said.

Mr. Thomas had just spent hours talking to writers in the massive exhibition hall where hundreds of academic publishers shilled their brew of lit-crit and cultural criticism to a voracious crowd. Standing before a book by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chicago's Mr. Thomas admitted that "editorially, the conference has gone well."

Mr. Thomas was more than eager to address the problems plaguing his business, and he admitted that the competition he once faced to sign celebrity academics has now been reversed-the competition is actually to sign with him.

On Friday night, Mr. Thomas read a paper which, he said, had raised some eyebrows: He recommended changes in teaching habits-like cutting back on course packs, and asking professors to convey to their students the importance of buying books for their personal libraries-that would help.

"Academic publishing is the backbone of independent publishing," he said, his voice conveying an earnest concern.

The Fat Cats Weigh In

For every one of Mr. Thomas' ideas about personal libraries and course packs, there were 10 other propositions circulating at the convention about how to get out of the publishing crisis.

On Saturday night, Mr. Greenblatt hosted a 10:30 reception in the penthouse suite of the Hilton. It was a tweedy-swank affair, with a lot of name-tag-staring and furtive over-the-shoulder glances to see who else was in the room. Partygoers angled to get near Mr. Greenblatt, as his wife glided around the room in a fuzzy, off-the-shoulder, skin-tight lavender sheath dress with matching fingerless gloves. ("Literary theorists are often the snappiest dressers," as Ms. Holdstein commented the next night.)

Retired Princeton historian and famous leftie Natalie Zemon Davis, whom one conventioneer called "the haute couture Communist," was schmoozing in an adjoining room with Clifford Geertz. This was not her first M.L.A., she said, adding that she was mostly there because of her close personal and professional connections with Mr. Greenblatt.

She said that despite having labored in a different discipline, she was well aware of the challenges facing the M.L.A. "It's also been talked about in history. The problem, in all fields, is whether departments will take it seriously," Ms. Davis said, echoing the common fear amongst academics that it will take ages before a generation of scholars hazed by rigorous publishing demands will begin to shift its standards to ease the way for their younger colleagues.

When she was the president of the American Historical Association, Ms. Davis said, she advocated some radical ideas about other ways to produce a body of scholarly work.

"I think that for historians at least, making films-and not just documentaries, but historical fiction-could be a wonderfully creative way of thinking about history," said Ms. Davis, who herself co-wrote the screenplay for the 1983 French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre based on her book about 16th-century rural France."

Ms. Davis acknowledged that the collaborative nature of filmmaking could make it difficult for departments to evaluate the individual intellectual contribution of any one academic but, she said that the idea was worth exploring, as was the idea of working and publishing using other multimedia tools like CD-ROM's.

"I'm retired," said Ms. Zemon Davis, whose short silver hair matched her tailored red and blue suit, "so I'm no longer on committees that make tenure decisions. But we need institutions to begin to take these chances. Maybe places like N.Y.U. or UCLA," both of which have strong film departments, "could be at the forefront of something like that."

"It's going to take a while," said Ms. Davis about ways in which departments need to change their standards. "But they'd better start thinking about it," she added forcefully. "It's like the early days of printing," she said. "There were some scribes who were interested in new printing technologies, and others, theologians, who didn't pay it any attention. That was a big mistake," she said.

Descending from the party in the elevator, the University of Texas' well-regarded Mark Twain specialist Shelley Fisher Fishkin was practically beside herself about the publishing question. "It is a crisis!," she said, widening her mascaraed eyes. "We must think about what other things besides publication can make scholarship get recognized." Ms. Fisher Fishkin said that she tells her students to make a practice of taking their work to community groups, to make it more broadly accessible, and that she now tells them to write different kinds of dissertations than she did 10 years ago, with a view to what will be marketable, accessible, practical.

Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah also spoke of the necessity of writing for more generalized audiences in his Sunday morning panel, which he shared with Homi Bhabha and Amitav Ghosh.

One group that took a break from selling books in the exhibit hall applauded when Mr. Appiah, who writes for The New York Review of Books , among other publications, implored the crowd to write for broader audiences.

"Somebody had to say it," one marketing executive from a big academic press said, satisfied.

But Mr. Greenblatt wasn't so sure about what he called the publishing industry's "predictable smart-ass response" to the problem, which was the imperative, "write for a larger audience!"

"It would be great to sell a lot of books," said Mr. Greenblatt, "but you don't say to a physicist or a chemist, 'Write for a larger audience!' Any serious profession produces specialized work that is obviously not going to sell tens of thousands or hundreds or thousands, but a very small number of copies."

Yet some of Mr. Greenblatt's own propositions seemed hardly likely to produce earthshaking results. They included Internet publication, which he acknowledged "is not the magic bullet we'd like it to be," and giving stipends to graduate students to promote their acquisition of personal libraries and boost the book business. He was on potentially more revolutionary ground when he advocated placing an increased importance on the publication of articles in journals over full-length books.

But will anyone really do it? It's a switch in priorities that would have a profound effect on individual departments, which for years have been trusting the stamp of approval of other major institutions (Harvard University Press! Routledge!) to convince them that one of their own employees was worth keeping on. Instead, those same departments would have to make tenure decisions based more seriously on their own gut instincts about a candidate's talents, work-ethic, and (let us not forget) teaching habits.

It's easy, of course, for academic fat-cats like Ms. Davis, Ms. Fisher Fishkin, or Mr. Greenblatt, all of whom have curriculum vitae as long as their arms, to chat about alternatives to publishing books.

As Clifford Geertz said at Mr. Greenblatt's party, "It's been a long time since I've been in any danger of perishing."

The Kids Stay in the Picture

Back in the Hilton Bar, Maurice Lee continued to gossip with Ms. Sobelle and Ms. Vlagopoulos. His shaved head and hip glasses stood out in the dingy hotel bar. He had his own thoughts on whether standards for getting tenure will change, at least in time to help him.

"The M.L.A. can issue statements about shrinking publishing, and encourage tenure committees to change their standards," said Mr. Lee. "But as long as you have a large number of people competing for limited spots, how much is going to change?" He smiled grimly over his drink.

And as one slightly sweaty job candidate at the other side of the bar, who did not wish to be identified, said about Mr. Greenblatt's "Call to Action," "It's not as though Harvard is going to start giving tenure to kids who have fewer than two books.