The Bourgeoisie Can Mourn the End of the Noble World

Yarvin and Gasda debate the Shakespeare authorship controversy after the LaRouche people try to take my weed

Curtis Yarvin hands his daughter the microphone as she pulls up a sonnet on her phone to read after the debate.

Matt Gasda was delighted to know that he had been “outcranked” by the LaRouche movement Hitlerites for the day, that no matter what he and Curtis Yarvin said at their debate about the true author of Shakespeare’s works, it’d still be more welcoming than the totalitarian security theater at the Schiller Institute’s conference in Midtown, “Build the New Paradigm: Defeat Green Fascism,” where a security guard gave me the full TSA pat-down and some boomer woman cultist fondled the crumbs of weed in my grinder, perplexed by the Polish coin I keep in the chamber to produce more keef, weed spilling out onto their table, “should we test this?” she asked the guard with a dead-serious mixture of horror and satisfaction before putting it away in a bag with the rest of the paraphernalia for confiscation. “You’re not doing anything to that fucking weed,” I said, grabbing the bag and leaving. It only could’ve gotten worse from there, and my idle curiosity in a few vile Twitch streamers wasn’t worth the real risk of violence from those people.

Later, people smoked inside at Beckett’s down in the West Village, the smoke wafting up to the chairs that hang among chandeliers from the loft’s ceiling like an art installation, walls full of bookshelves and prints of old paintings of various styles. On one wall a projector beamed images of William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Oxfordian Yarvin thinks that de Vere is the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare, and Stratfordian Gasda disagrees—which is as good a pretext as any for a social event to promote the Urbit-affiliated Mars Review of Books, now in its second issue. Yarvin was introduced as someone “who will be read centuries from now,” and Gasda as a playwright, author of Dimes Square, and contributor to Compact magazine. The audience is reassured that this isn’t “some Dimes Square humiliation ritual.” Yarvin doubts that the commoner Shakespeare could be as erudite as the poems (Yarvin’s more focused on the poems than the plays) bearing his name. “Suppose a corpus of witty, erudite academic novels, set in an unnamed Ivy League English department,” Yarvin writes on his blog Gray Mirror, “is published under the name of an illiterate immigrant from Ghana, who sells sunglasses on a blanket on the street in Morningside Heights.” But what Yarvin’s really interested in is the glamor of a boho scene orchestrated by a salonnière-agent of Queen Elizabeth. Yarvin doesn’t seem to take the Oxfordian thesis too seriously, with his closing arguments suggesting that Shakespeare was really de Vere’s “rent boy,” so it’s more about conjuring some Borgesian fiction like an anonymous Twitter shitposter spins meme magic out of thin air, a trollish vehicle for his ideas about elitism and aristocracy. Gasda came ready to defend the Bard’s honor—and the possibility for a bourgeois to mourn the end of the world of the nobility. He obviously won the debate, if it could be called that, if it wasn’t kayfabe. The burden of proof should be on Yarvin, since there’s enough reliable historical evidence to show that the man William Shakespeare did really exist, that he was connected to the Globe Theatre, and so on, and that none of this was controversial until the nineteenth century. Plus, the plays themselves hardly reveal some exclusive, intimate familiarity with the inner workings of the court, mentions of foreign geography are notoriously vague, there’s mangled French, blablabla… the idea that these works had to come from some aristocrat, that they’re erudite beyond comprehension, that could only come from the petit-bourgeoisie. It’s middlebrow! But obviously what’s really at stake in this whole show is some message about the power of fictions, fictions that propagate through these scenes, the leisure of these bohemians. Taking a quick scan at the contributors list of the Mars Review reads like if the table of contents for Nazi Literature in the Americas included the Urbit handles for each entry in that little biographical encyclopedia—alt-lit writers, crank podcasters, editors of reactionary online magazines, it’s tech-industry–inflected but clearly trying to be something more than that... Put this side-by-side with, say, The Drift, and it’s clear that the latter is more rigorous, more carefully edited, more professional—it’s not as full of shit—but the Mars Review is a journal of parodies, fictions for a “post-institutional” intellectual age. “Fiction has a lot of work to do these days precisely because there’s so little left to do,” begins Gasda’s article on Ottessa Moshfegh in the journal. Perhaps…