Shortly after the death in 1942 of the great chess player Jose Raúl Capablanca, who had been world champion from 1921 to 1927, a reporter visited his widow at her New York apartment.  He wanted to see the great man’s chess set.  Mrs. Capablanca told the reporter that her husband had not owned one.

In the 1780s a man named James Wilmot, a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, a Doctor of Divinity and a rector of his church, a man of impeccable character and credentials, started scouring private libraries and collections in Warwickshire, where he had retired.  He was searching for books and papers that had belonged to William Shakespeare, who died in Stratford in 1616.  Imagine the insights scholars might glean from an early draft of a play or poem or even a marginal note left by Shakespeare in a book that had once sat on a shelf in his study or bedroom!

The good reverend found nothing.  He arranged for his notes to be burned shortly before his death.  He had developed the revolutionary theory that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare.  Better to destroy the evidence than to shake English literature to its foundation.

Wilmot was the first skeptic.  We have to guess at his reasoning – he burned his notes, after all – but it figures to be along these lines:  The man who wrote these plays and poems was possessed of such a lively mind that he would have had books at hand as he sounded the philosophical and poetic depths.  Time will turn every book to dust, but it needs more than the one hundred seventy years that had passed after Shakespeare’s death for that inexorable process to reach completion.  The traces left by a library assembled around 1600 would have survived to the 1780s.  Yet, not a hint of a book owned or possessed by the man Shakespeare could be found within fifty miles of his home.  Therefore, he did not possess the books.  Therefore, he did not have the kind of mind that could have written the plays.

There isn’t really any mystery here.  Capablanca and Shakespeare had something in common.  They didn’t bring their work home with them.  Shakespeare did his writing in London.  When he was in Stratford, he enjoyed his family and handled domestic business – property transactions, loans, lawsuits – that had filled his in-tray while he was away.

Even so, skeptics continue to claim that the man from Stratford did not write, could not have written the plays and poems attributed to him.  Such skepticism is born of snobbery.  His background is thought to have been too humble to have produced the man who wrote the plays, his commercial interests are said to be too banal to have been resident in the same brain that bodied forth the forms of things unknown.  The true author – as imagined by the skeptics – had to have been a person of refinement, university-educated, a member of the nobility (Earl of Oxford, perhaps) or the intellectual aristocracy (Francis Bacon, if you prefer).  On this view, the man from Stratford is an impostor.

William Shakespeare and Donald Trump don’t have much in common.  (Remember where you heard that.)  But they both have attracted their share of unbelievers.  Just as William Shakespeare’s authorship is held by skeptics to be an illusion, so is the election of Donald Trump held to be the result of collusion.  Similar reasoning is at work in both cases.

Think about the strikes against Mr. Trump, any of which ought to have been enough to sink him.  Democrats unite around a candidate, even a flawed one like Hilary Clinton, far more effectively than do Republicans.  In 2016, there was a substantial band of “Never Trumpers” in the Republican ranks.  The conservative establishment – National Review, Weekly Standard (RIP), George Will – was unalterably opposed.  The Bush wing of the Republican party was appalled.  The McCain wing was infuriated.  Mitt Romney went out of his way – no one asked his opinion – to make a speech detailing the disabling flaws presented by candidate Trump.  Meanwhile, the Democratic machine, including nearly all the news media, propped up Mrs. Clinton.  Literally, on some days.  So, Mr. Trump lacked a united party while his opponent had reliable support from hers.  (Remember Bernie Sanders saying “I don’t care about your emails, Hillary!”)

Mrs. Clinton outspent Mr. Trump two to one.  You can’t win an election for sewer inspector if your opponent has twice as much cash as you do.

Mr. Trump was prone to making outlandish statements, often because he had spent no time studying issues of public importance.  He altered his opinions on the fly.  (That came out wrong.)  He was opposed to policies that had been common ground for the American establishment since the second world war.  The US has promoted free trade; Mr. Trump is a protectionist.  The US has anchored its foreign policy to NATO; he wanted to withdraw.  The US establishment wanted to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mr. Trump rejected it because he didn’t trust China – but China was intentionally excluded from TPP.  He wanted criminal charges against women who had abortions, a position that it was obvious that he adopted on the spot in response to a question he had not anticipated.  And so on.

Moderate swing voters, those deciders of elections, ought to have fled from the scary Mr. Trump to the familiar Mrs. Clinton, who had been part of our lives for a quarter century, going back to the early 1990s.

So how did this gaffe-prone, ill-prepared candidate with a divided party, facing hostile media find a way to win against an experienced candidate, widely admired by opinion leaders, who had two dollars to spend for every one he could come up with?

Mr. Shakespeare’s authorship and Mr. Trump’s election each had to have been the product of conspiracy.  The problem with most conspiracy theories – not all – is the evidence.  Too often, it has to be imagined.  For the two gentlemen under consideration, their critics have drawn a conclusion and then cut the evidence to fit.

Consider the Stratford man first.  In 1623, nine years after his death, Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues John Heminge and Henrie Condell published a book now known as the First Folio.  Their title:

William SHAKESPEARES Comedies, Histories & Tragedies,
Published according to the True Original Copies

The book contained 35 plays.  Heminge and Condell presented them as having been written by Shakespeare.  Incidentally, eighteen plays had not been published previously.  We owe these two gentlemen an enormous debt.

They placed his portrait at the start of the book.  They arranged for Ben Jonson to write two poems to appear in the Folio – a short one about the portrait and a long one about the man and his works.  Jonson and Shakespeare were colleagues and rivals, possibly friends.  It’s impossible to read the two poems (google: first folio Jonson) without concluding that Ben Jonson thought that Shakespeare wrote the plays included in the First Folio.

For example, Jonson gives us these lines:

My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome :
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

When Delia Bacon explained her views on the Shakespeare authorship to Ralph Waldo Emerson – she believed that her namesake Francis Bacon was the leader of a team of profound “wits” who had written the plays using “Will the Jester” as their front man – Emerson is said to have replied “Ben Jonson must be answered.”

Perhaps Jonson was in on the secret?  If so, he wrote the two poems seven years after Shakespeare’s death to help cement in place for all time the illusion that the man from Stratford had written these plays.  The First Folio poetry would be part of the conspiracy.  Indeed, if Shakespeare did not write the plays, he could hardly have kept the secret from Jonson, so Jonson’s knowing participation in the conspiracy would be the only explanation for his First Folio poems.

There is no evidence that there was a conspiracy of this kind, much less that Jonson was part of it.  It’s only when you start with the assumption that the man from Stratford didn’t write the plays that you are forced to invent the rest.  Evidence to the contrary has to be discredited, not because it lacks weight but because it leads to a conclusion that the skeptic has discredited from the start.

Apply the same reasoning to Donald Trump.  Given his political disabilities, he couldn’t have won the 2016 presidential election.  That’s the skeptic’s starting point.  All we need now is evidence to fit.  And where is that evidence?

I have written before that if Russia interfered in the 2016 election in any meaningful way (something that I personally doubt, but that’s not the point) it was by publishing stolen emails from Democratic party and Clinton campaign officials[i].  Mrs. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of reduced participation by African American voters and a swing to the Republican ticket by blue collar workers.  It is doubtful that either group was influenced by the revelations that came from the stolen emails.

Robert Mueller and his team did not find the evidence that would have shown participation by the Trump campaign in whatever dirty tricks the Russian government pulled.  Whatever conspiracy took place, members of the Trump campaign weren’t part of it.  We are left with the conclusion that the most unconventional major party presidential candidate in American history won the 2016 election fair and square even after being outspent two to one and without the support of significant constituencies within the political party he had adopted.

Which is more surprising, harder to believe – that a small-town man from the county shires of England with a grammar school education wrote the most profound, the wittiest, and the most entertaining works ever penned in the English language, or that a big-city real estate developer with no political experience and a marked reluctance to finish a sentence after he has begun to speak it would be elected President of the United States?

[i] Interested readers are referred to “The Latest Mueller Indictments” posted July 15, 2017 (https://the-passing-scene.com/2018/07/15/the-latest-mueller-indictments/) and “Thoughts on the Opposition to Donald Trump” posted March 26, 2017 (https://the-passing-scene.com/2017/03/26/thoughts-on-the-opposition-to-donald-trump/)