A TRUE AND AUTHENTIC ACCOUNT OF A TWENTY YEAR SKIRMISH WITH VARIOUS SAD ACADEMICS WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP POST-MODERN ZOMBIES INSTEAD! Stewart Home interviewed by Michel Comte ofTNT I met Stewart Home in cyber-space, the journey was fraught with difficulties, I had to hijack a computer before I could get on-line. The notorious egg bagel eater's answers to my questions were often obtuse and since we were both disembodied, I was unable to placate him with his favourite food. Given these obstacles to effective communication, it is with great pride that I offer here a true and authentic record of our exchange. TNT: What makes the destruction ofWilliam Shakespeare's work a matter of pressing importance? SH: "Shakespeare's" work is problematic, but it isn't so much the work as the aura around it that I wish to destroy. "Shakespeare" was engaged in giving shape to the bourgeois subject, he wasn't the first writer to conjure up this subject but in plays such as Hamlethe gives it a very full delineation. While I feel ambivalent about Christopher Marlowe - an "Elizabethan" playwright whose work set the stage, so to speak, for "Shakespeare" - the low scenes in his work that are so detested by the more conservative elements of literary opinion, make Marlowe considerably more palatable to me than "Shakespeare". Of course, given "Shakespeare's" influence on Anglo-American culture and to greater and lesser extents other cultures, it is not possible to simply ignore him. I recently produced a radio play entitled Divvyas part of the Tork Radio internet project. I began work on this play by doing a William Burroughs-style cut up on the first act ofHamlet, which I then reworked, reducing the number of characters to four, to whom I then assigned different computer generated voices. In terms of logic, large parts of the play produced by this cut up technique were simply meaningless, although on the level of rhetoric I think the piece is quite easy to comprehend. This treatment ofHamletreflects my indifference to the original source material. I wasn't interested in attacking Hamleton the level of the bourgeois subject, that would have been more banal than the banalities I produced. It was much more a question of a derangement ofmeaning, a loss of meaning, simply reversing meaning would be playing into the hands of the very things I wish to attack. TNT: Is Stewart Home a multiple name and if so who are you after the interview? SH: Actually, I think that rather than addressing this question to "me", it might be better directed "against" Shakespeare. I have long been amused by the long list of"individuals" put forward as the "true" authors of "Shakespeare". These include Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Stirling, the Earl of Rutland, Sir Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe, the Archbishop of York, the Earl of Essex, the Earl ofSouthampton, Cardinal Wolsey, the Earl of Salisbury and the Earl ofDevon. Of course, in insisting that the actor William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to "William Shakespeare" so called orthodox opinion is considerably more "palatable" than the views of most "heretics". While an aristocrat might wish to constitute themselves as a bourgeois subject, coming from the upper echelons of "Elizabethan" society was not a prerequisite for success in this operation. Many ofthose arguing against "orthodox" opinion in the debates over the authorship of the "Shakespeare" plays resort to snobbish arguments which assume that only someone born into the upper classes had the intellectual capacity to produce these works.
