In order to study the Shakespeare authorship question effectively, you'll need to understand a little bit about human psychology. That's because people who get involved in looking at the authorship question, write about it, and argue about it, tend to have already formed beliefs - sometimes strong beliefs - about who wrote Shakespeare. Most people first form their beliefs by accepting what they're told by people they trust, or admire: their teachers, their lecturers, and their parents. Beliefs can change, of course, as we learn new things. But if those beliefs become strongly held and particularly if we build our identity around them, they begin to act as perception filters. Indeed, it might be useful to think of a belief as a perceptual framework, something that helps us make sense of the world around us. The problem with our perceptions being filtered through our beliefs is that it can create something called confirmation bias. We tend to interpret new information in such a way as it will confirm or strengthen our existing beliefs. We will search out information that confirms our existing beliefs. And if we are confronted with information which conflicts with a strongly held belief, we will either not register it or will find ways to discard it: by explaining it away as an error, for example. This is to avoid what is known as cognitive dissonance - the mental distress caused by being confronted by information that doesn't fit with our understanding of the world. Let me give you an example. There is an experiment by two psychologists called Bruner and Postman which was conducted in 1949. There's a link to the article in the reading for this lesson. Bruner and Postman made up some playing cards that were a little bit different to normal playing cards. Then they experimented on test subjects using short, timed exposures to see if they would notice that something was different about the cards. Can you see what's different? What are these cards? These cards are anomalous. They don't fit the expected pattern. We expect hearts to be red and spades to be black. But here we have a black four of hearts and a red six of spades. Human beings find it hard to see things that don't fit their expectations, and that's what this experiment proved. Bruner and Postman put these cards into a normal pack of playing cards. They demonstrated that people exposed to a pack of playing cards that included these anomalous cards repeatedly failed to identify any problems with the pack. Only with longer and repeated exposures did certain individuals begin to register the anomalous cards and even then, they often couldn't identify what exactly was wrong with them. Some didn't register the anomalies no matter how long or how often they were exposed to them. Others showed signs of considerable distress - signs, in fact, of cognitive dissonance. One of them exclaimed, "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like! My God!" That's the kind of reaction you can sometimes get when you confront people with evidence that Shakspere as we're calling him may not have written the works we know as Shakespeare's. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable and people will sometimes go to great lengths, conscious or unconscious, to avoid it. It is important to our general functioning in the world that we keep our perceptual frameworks fairly rigid. Thus even when the brain does identify a piece of data as anomalous, cognitive dissonance will often lead us to explain it away as an error. Anyone can suffer from confirmation bias, and that includes everyone: teachers, eminent Shakespeare scholars, even scientists. Social scientists studying scientists at work in their laboratories discovered that in over half of the scientific experiments they studied, their results were inconsistent with the scientists' predictions and that scientists were reluctant to consider that data as real. The surprising finding was usually classified as a mistake: "perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale... The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn't understand. It's as if they didn't want to believe it." Even after scientists had produced the anomaly consistently, they would often choose not to follow it up. Explaining away, dismissing, or minimizing the significance of something through explanation, is a common effect of confirmation bias. Searching for and retaining only information that supports your existing belief, is another. We will literally see what we want to see and not see what we don't want to see. This is how your beliefs filter your perceptions - because perception is a process that happens not in the eyes, but in the brain. People suffering from confirmation bias might see non-existent correlations between things. You might ask for a miracle, for example, and then see a religious image on your piece of toast. It's important to understand the difference between evidence itself and the interpretation of evidence. Why? Because confirmation bias can affect your interpretation of the evidence. Here, for example, is a line from Shakspere's will. In it, he bequeaths a bed to his wife, Anne. It is the only thing he bequeaths to his wife in the four pages of his will and what he bequeaths is the second best bed. If you look at the original document this line is a interlineation, a piece of writing squeezed between the lines. In other words, it wasn't in the original draft of the will and was added later. This is the evidence, but how should we interpret it? There are different interpretations, and if you have any ideas at all about the person whose will this is, beliefs about what kind of person they are, that can affect your interpretation. We don't know very much about Shakespeare at all. About Shakespeare the author of the works or about Shakspere the author of the will. Most people think Shakespeare and Shakspere are one and the same that the person who wrote the works wrote the will. Many perceive the person who wrote the works as a kind and wise and good person. So why would such a person bequeath the second best bed to their wife of 34 years? Here are two interpretations of the evidence. One argument is that the best bed was kept for guests and the second best bed was the marital bed making the bequest personal and meaningful. If you already think of the person who wrote the will as a kind person, this interpretation allows you to hold onto that belief. But I've seen no evidence to support the idea that Elizabethans kept their best beds for guests. Would you keep your best bed for guests? And why call it second best bed rather than the south bedroom bed? Isn't "second best" rather pointed? Another interpretation is that Shakspere had an unhappy marriage. The will shows us he left his whole estate including the best bed to his daughter Susanna. The fact that the bequest to his wife is an afterthought is suggestive. Even if he wanted to leave her nothing, he might have been legally advised to leave her something to show that he remembered her, so she could not contest the will. You can see from this simple example how the interpretation of evidence will be affected by your beliefs. If you believe the man who wrote the will wrote the works, your sense of who that person is, derived from watching or reading the plays and reading the poems, will influence your interpretation of and even your perception of the evidence. If evidence conflicts with your beliefs, you may try to push it to the back of your mind or say it doesn't matter. Remember that Stratfordians and non-Stratfordians, no matter what they are arguing, share a love of the works, and therefore of the author, even if they disagree who the author might be. I'm going to encourage you to approach this subject with a broad and where possible unemotional curiosity. Look out for signs of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance in others, but also in yourself. As much as you can, keep an open mind. If you have beliefs about Shakespeare, actively look for things that could prove you wrong. What beliefs about Shakespeare do you hold that might affect your perception of the evidence surrounding the authorship question? Write them down. And see if you can challenge them.
