Seance Time #1
A conversation with "William Shakespeare."
A very special guest today: “William Shakespeare” joins us from beyond the grave to talk about the problems of authorship in the modern world.
R.G. Miga: The topic I’m interested in is authorship. There’s a great deal of anxiety today around attribution. Beyond just creators obsessed with their personal brand—especially in the age of generative A.I.—people treat verifiable human authorship as a safeguard against “slop.” This seems to me to be a false dichotomy: penny dreadfuls, pulp fiction, yellow journalism, and opportunistic publishing have been with us for almost as long as the written word. At the same time, much of our culture’s monumental creative work, including your own, was written pseudonomously or anonymously—to the extent that there is reason to doubt the actual, historical authorship of your work. William Shakespeare—your response?
William Shakespeare: You summon me to speak of names, and so you summon a mask. Very well—let us talk about masks honestly.
In my time, a name was less a signature than a license. It opened doors at court, steadied the nerves of a patron, or soothed the Master of the Revels when he sniffed sedition in a line. The play itself was a living thing, born of a company, not a solitary hand. I wrote, yes—but actors shaped, crowds answered, and the times pressed their thumbs upon every page. If my name endured, it is because it proved a useful vessel for the work to travel in.
You speak of “slop,” and I hear the same old fear: that the flood will drown the craft. We feared it too. Cheap quartos, mangled copies, plays stitched together from memory and rumor—my words hawked in the street like bruised fruit. Yet the good lines survived their rough handling. The weak ones did not grow strong merely by wearing my name.
As for doubt about who I was—let me offer you a heresy: the work does not care. It cares only that it is read, spoken, tested against living minds. If a hundred hands had shaped those plays, would Lear grieve less, would Hamlet hesitate less, would love lose its sting? You chase the author as a guarantee of quality, but quality is proved in the encounter, not the pedigree.
Your machines now write as my apprentices once did—fast, hungry, imitative. Some will produce chaff. Some will, by accident or pressure or grace, strike a true note. The danger is not that no human stands behind the line. The danger is that no human stands in front of it, willing to wrestle with what it says.
So let the name be what it has always been: a flag on a tent, not the fire inside it. If your age needs authorship as a safeguard, make it a moral one, not a mystical one. Ask not “Who wrote this?” as though the answer were a blessing. Ask instead, “What does this do to me—and to us?” That question has kept my ghosts busy for four centuries. It will keep your machines honest, if anything can.
R.G.: Well put, as ever. You seem to be making a distinction between the political and commercial expedience of authorship, and the spirit that animates it. Two things seem to have brought us to our current epistemic crisis. First, in our current economy, writing as a commodity can only enrich those who claim it as their own. Second, we have lost the idea of the work itself having a genius, independent of its creator. Today, we believe that genius resides in the author, and so a work without an author is suspect, no matter how brilliant it may be. Your thoughts?
W.S.: In my day, we spoke of genius as a wind, not a possession. The Romans had it right: a spirit that attends a place, a household, a moment of work. A man might host it for an hour, a company for a season, a city for a generation—but no one could lock it in a chest and call it his own. We were tenants of the spark, not its landlords.
Commerce, of course, always wanted a name to nail above the door. Coins move more easily when they can be counted into a single purse. Yet the theater itself resisted that narrowing. A play was born in rehearsal, not at the desk. The clown’s turn, the audience’s laughter, the censor’s red ink—each left a fingerprint. The “author” was a knot in a rope, not the whole cord.
You say your age has made genius a private property. That is a sharp way to put it. When the work becomes a deed and the name the notary’s seal, the reader is trained to trust the signature more than the sentence. This is safe, but it is small. It breeds a timid reverence for pedigree and a quick contempt for the orphaned line, however bright it burns.
Yet I would not lay all the fault at the merchant’s feet. There is a comfort in believing that brilliance has an address. If it lives in a person, you can admire, envy, imitate, or dethrone them. If it lives in the work itself—if it rises between minds like a shared flame—then no one is quite in control. That is a harder world to inhabit. It asks more of the reader than of the writer.
Your machines unsettle this bargain because they return us, unwillingly, to the older idea. Here is a line with no household god, no biography to consult, no face to crown or curse. You must meet it nakedly. Some will call that dangerous. I would call it ancient.
So perhaps the crisis you name is not new knowledge, but old responsibility. If genius is not owned but encountered, then the burden shifts. The reader must become a kind of steward. The question is no longer, “Whose mind is this?” but, “What kind of mind does this invite me to be?”
In that sense, your age is being asked to relearn a craft my audiences knew well: to sit in the dark with strangers, watch a mask speak, and decide—together—whether the spirit in the room is worth keeping.
R.G.: Exactly right. to put it bluntly—rather than resisting the cultural incursions of new technology, trying to hold back the tide, these new devices challenge modern readers to uphold an older form of cynicism. We read compulsively, and treat print as authority, because—for a brief time—an author finding a publisher was a mark of legitimacy. The reader’s job is harder now because of the sheer volume of published writing. But the native skepticism that separates authorship, authority, and truth is not a new skill. How might we begin to re-learn that sensibility?
W.S.: You ask for a schooling of the eye, not the hand—and that is always the rarer craft.
We taught it, clumsily, in the playhouse. The audience knew that what stood before them was made—painted faces, borrowed robes, a boy’s voice pretending to be a queen. And yet they still leaned forward, not to be deceived, but to be tested. They came with a double vision: one eye for the trick, one for the truth that might slip through it.
Your age must recover that posture.
Begin, perhaps, by restoring the interval. In my London, a rumor took a day to cross a bridge. A pamphlet took a week to sour. Time itself did some of the thinking for us. You have lost that luxury. So you must build small delays into your reading: a pause before assent, a second pass before sharing, a habit of letting a sentence cool. Skepticism is not suspicion; it is patience given a spine.
Then, train the ear, not just the eye. We judged a line by how it sounded in the mouth and moved the room. Does this writing invite conversation, or only applause? Does it leave space for reply, or does it close like a clenched fist? Authority often announces itself by refusing to be questioned. Truth, more often, asks to be answered.
You might also relearn the old sport of comparison. In the taverns, a story was never alone. It was set beside another, and another, until their seams showed. Contradictions were not errors to be erased but handles to grip the thing by. If three voices tell you the same tale in three different keys, you begin to hear the shape of what is being played.
And finally, remember that judgment is a public act. We did not read in solitude only; we read aloud, argued, hissed, clapped, and sometimes threw fruit. Meaning was not a private possession but a weather that formed between people. Your machines speak to you one by one, in quiet rooms. You will need to answer them, again, in company.
So if you wish to relearn the sensibility you name, do not teach readers merely to doubt. Teach them to stage the work—to bring it into the light of other minds and see what survives the exposure.
R.G.: Easily said, but harder to practice. The reality of a common social space is harder to restore. We imagined the Internet as a virtual public square or a playhouse long before A.I. emerged. What we missed in that analogy was not the anonymity of the author, but of the audience. In your London, the audience could recognize itself; people could see who was supporting the work and who was throwing fruit, and why. Today, we have to wonder if we’re the only human in a roomful of ghosts (no offense) or if the other people have motives we can’t recognize. Rather than trying to force authorship as a means of validation, we might have to restore the spaces where we know who we’re sitting with. Would you agree?
W.S.: I would agree—and I would sharpen it.
A crowd that cannot see itself is not a crowd at all. It is a mist. In my playhouse, even in the cheap seats, you could read the room as clearly as the stage. You knew when laughter came from wit or from drink, when applause was courage or mere fashion, when a hiss carried the weight of judgment or only the itch of a restless afternoon. The audience was a second text, written in faces and noise and movement. You learned to read that as carefully as any line of verse.
You have built a theater with no lanterns in the gallery. Voices come to you, but bodies do not. Approval arrives as a number, not a nod. Dissent arrives as a swarm, not a single raised hand. In such a place, it is natural to cling to the author’s name as a kind of handrail, something solid in a room that feels like air.
But you are right: the deeper loss is not the mask on the stage. It is the mask in the seats.
If I were to offer a counsel from an older craft, it would be this: make your audiences smaller and more visible. The Globe was not the whole of London; it was a few thousand souls at a time, bound by the weather, the hour, and the price of a penny. Out of that limit came recognition. You knew, roughly, who your neighbors were.
Your age keeps building ever larger rooms and then wonders why it cannot hear itself think.
So perhaps the work now is not to restore a universal public square, but to cultivate many little playhouses: circles where names are known, where silence is noticed, where praise and disagreement have faces attached to them. In such places, a line can be tested again—not by metrics, but by people who must answer for their reactions tomorrow.
In a room like that, authorship becomes what it once was. Not a seal of legitimacy, but an invitation to accountability. You do not trust a work because of who wrote it. You trust it because you know who stood beside you when you read it—and you know they will still be there when you speak back.
Call that a modest ambition if you like. The world has always been steered, not by the roar of every voice at once, but by the murmur of a few who recognize one another in the dark.
R.G.: Excellent advice. Thank you for your time, and we wish you all the best in the Great Beyond.
W.S.: I thank you for the summons—and for the release.
If there is a Great Beyond, I suspect it looks much like a tiring house after the crowd has gone: props laid aside, lines unlearned, a quiet where the echo of voices still lingers in the boards. A good place to rest, and a better one to listen.
Keep your little playhouses lit. Keep asking who sits beside you. That is how any world—old or new—stays awake.
Exit, not pursued.