Could the original Bard become the idol of a doomed profession?

How different things were 400 years ago. Amid all the fuss about the advent of chatbots like Bard, it's strange to be reminded of the Bard — whose works were saved for posterity by a group of friends and admirers in the form of the First Folio.

Compare the fate of some 50 works by his contemporaries which were in the possession of a passionate, but careless, collector by the name of John Warburton.

Leaving a pile of 17th century manuscripts in his kitchen, Warburton went away for a year. On his return, he found his cook, Betty Baker, had used over 50 of them as scrap paper when cooking, either for lighting fires or for lining the bottoms of pie pans.

The cruellest irony was that Warburton had not been around to enjoy a single one of her pies.

The dismissal of dramatic arts

Betty might well have had the excuse of illiteracy. The learned, on the other hand, were often snootily dismissive of the dramatic arts. In 1612, Sir Thomas Bodley – founder of Oxford University's Bodleian Library no less – warned against collecting the texts of plays, calling them worthless "baggage books".

Among the multitude of dramatists in England's Renaissance, only the posterity-conscious Ben Jonson had ever got around to publishing his complete plays before the compositors of the Folio came along.

The printing of the Folio proved a slow, complicated job, with source texts drawn from Shakespeare's own manuscripts (none of which survives), theatre prompt copies, old quarto editions and cleaned-up "fair copies" recorded by a scribe.

The team of around 10 compositors included both highly-skilled veterans and a notoriously error-prone teenage apprentice. There's always one. It was what Chris Laoutaris, author of Shakespeare's Book, has called 'a bold, gutsy and daring initiative.'

Works of sublime perfection

Despite a difficult birth, the enterprise proved incredibly successful.

In fact, it may qualify as the most successful publishing venture of all time. So unassailable have the Bard with the definite article's works become, that the best modern doubters can do is attribute them to someone else.

This actually fails to answer the real question: How could works of such sublime perfection ever have come to be? My personal theory is that he signed a pact with the devil after witnessing a production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The only flaw in this argument is that 'Hey-nonny-no' does little to prove that the devil has the best tunes.

Ditties aside, the definite article seems to have been the only one – apart, perhaps, from Kit Marlowe – to have truly mastered the genre of verse drama. The plays are a monumental achievement for that reason alone.  

My grandfather, despite being a believer, considered them equal to the King James Bible itself. Now it is a matter of public record that the latter was the work of a committee. It's even arguable that the original Bible was created in a similar way, though the committee members may never have met in real time.

But most normal committees, when they set their minds to creating things, are trying for a horse and come up with a camel.

The idea that the First Folio could have been conceived in this way appears ridiculous, but then so (to his doubters) does the idea of it being conceived by a mere actor. Betraying scant faith in the intelligence of members of his own profession, Mark Rylance has maintained that only a posh, well-travelled and courtly fellow could have managed the feat.

According to this view, the chap from Stratford was a fraudster. For reasons we may never understand, the true author of the plays kept a low profile, passing the material on to Will Shakespeare in order to preserve his anonymity.

Will, meanwhile, was no more talented a writer than his brother, Edmund, who was also playing in the London theatres. Who knows, maybe Edmund was a bigger star than his brother, but as James Joyce observed, brothers are easier to forget than umbrellas.           

Idol of a doomed profession

Far from being forgotten, it seems the original Bard is ripe for becoming the idol of his doomed profession. A mere lowly mortal from Stratford, he came to conquer London's theatres armed with quill and inkwell.

Toiling long into the night, the Bard with the definite article managed to produce plays of immense staying power.

Four hundred years on from their publication in the First Folio, they are still performed more regularly than any other playwright's. His words ring out in eerie defiance of death.

The scientists have assured us that, even given four millennia, an entire team of chimpanzee typists would struggle to replicate them.

It would take the first couple of millennia just to pose the question 'To be or not to be?' – by which time humanity would almost certainly have answered with a resounding 'not'. 

In comparison, the chatbot equivalent of the First Folio is an upstart with little to crow about. Bard's Wikipedia entry records that associate professor Ethan Mollick from the University of Pennsylvania was underwhelmed by its 'artistic ineptitude.'

So, no gold star for the most artificially intelligent pupil in the class. Even the definite article's severest critics would hesitate to call him underwhelming.

This makes the lucky survival of his plays, whose combined chimp power probably exceeds the age of the universe, seem all the more encouraging.