Sheikhspeare

This post, authored by James Alexander, was republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

Hegel said everything important in world history happens twice. Marx added, grimly: “The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” And here is my thrupenny bit. Everything important said by anyone in world history is said twice: the first time as farcical observation, the second as academic argument.

As evidence I submit the following. A few weeks ago I took a brief look at the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a black lady. I accepted with grave pleasure the fact that Shakespeare is an anagram of A She-Speaker: but, of course I had to be caustic about the claim accompanying the staggering anagram. And against the argument that the name Shakespeare might allude to Shakti, the female power that lies underneath all existence, I solemnly ventured the observation that it might equally and oppositely – equality and opposition being essential to scepticism – allude to the Arabic word Sheikh, and the male power that lies underneath all existence.

That was the farce.

Now the academic argument.

Today I received a notification from Academia.edu telling me about a piece written by Sushil K. Jain from Canada, entitled, and hold your breath, ‘Shakespeare, the Sheikh, Who Became a Peer’, subtitled, ‘The Eastern Mind Behind the English Stage: A New Model of Shakespearian Authorship’, published 2026. There we are. First time as farce, second time as academic argument.

I have printed it out and will let you know what it says. It is 120 pages long. Actually, it is not very academic, though it has a fair number of citations and is written in a sort of AI-neutral prose style.

Right, I read it last night. The first thing I have to say is that the author nowhere says that he is guilty of a woeful pun. “The Sheikh who became a Peer”, indeed.Jain’s style – and I do not know how much any AI bot was involved in the writing of this: it is very smooth and laborious and explanatory and is very easy to skip through without missing anything – is Indian-joyful and also solemn or serious: and I think this is because Jain is beating the drum of modern globalism, cosmopolitanism, anywhereism, in such a way that his line of thought might sing in the contemporary academic world of postcolonialism and immigration studies. Let’s hear him in his own words.

Shakespeare’s plays bear the unmistakeable imprint of a Persian-educated, Indian-heritage, Arabic-speaking scholar. … [They] exhibit a depth of cultural knowledge — of Ottoman-Venetian politics, Indian Ocean trade, Persian narrative structures and Islamic intellectual traditions — that exceeds what Shakespeare could plausibly have accessed through reading alone.

Evidence? Well, it is mostly speculation according to the following grand logic:

• Hypothesis: Would have.
  
  
• Lemma: Could have.
  
  
• Corollary: Should have.
  
  
• Result: Did.

But there are allusions to Othello (of course), Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, the Indian boy (never seen) in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, as usual, the one play that is always essential in the most sober or the most drunken Shakespeare analysis, The Tempest. Oddly enough, there is nothing about the history plays. Yes, indeed, the Sheikh didn’t contribute much to Henry IV Part I, did he? But why was Shakespeare so digressive? Ah, well, in order to explain why Shakespeare abandoned Aristotle and the preservation of the unities we have to allege that he, or one of his cronies, knew Persian.

Like every sensible reader of Shakespeare, Jain notices that there is a gap between “the monumental works” and “the modest documentary trail”. That’s right: in order to make sense of Shakespeare at all, we have to ask the question: why do we know so little about the greatest writer of English?

But Jain putters out with mumblings, politically correct mumblings, about Shakespeare’s “global imagination”. Now, it is amusing to think that a scholar could have come to London from a birthplace such as “Surat, Cambay, Hormuz, Masulipatuam or the Swahili coast”, via an education in “Shiraz, Isfahan, Lahore, Bijapur, Cambay or Hormuz”, could have somehow acquired mastery of Arabic theology, Persian literature and Indian geography, could have worked for, say, the Levant Company, which was founded in 1581, and finally could have been taken up by one of the artistic households of the Earls of Leicester, Essex or Southampton.

He sells the book by saying that Oxfordians and Baconians can only explain Shakespeare by saying there was a conspiracy of silence, whereas, according to his explanation, Sheikhspeare (and Jain, sadly, never goes so far as to call him this: come on, man, assert your hypothesis more strongly!) was part of a collaborative enterprise involving “encounter and exchange”. Yes, not conspiracy theory but more proof that England has always been a nation of immigrants. Disappointingly, the only books on the authorship debate which Jain cites were written by J. Bate, J. Shapiro, S. Wells, G. Taylor and A. Nelson, who are all famous for being mightily opposed to any suggestion that Shuxpur was not the daft lad from Stratfud. Where are the researches of R. Strittmatter. N. Green, D. Price, E. Showerman, M. Anderson and A. Waugh? Nowhere. Ah, Jain has a lot of reading to do.

He dedicates his book to Irene Coslet, the author of The Real Shakespeare, which alleges the black lady hypothesis. I am astounded that Jain has devoted so many man hours to this odd little hundred-page project. So far it has 14 views: so the algorithm obviously knows quite a lot about me to know that it should send me this.

I tried to find out who Jain is on Google and came away a bit bewildered. There seem to be many Shulil K. Jains. One is an old man, who was associated with Canterbury College, University of Windsor in Canada. There was some trouble, as he was arrested and charged with embezzlement in 2024 and was reported as being part of a $850,000 lawsuit. Nothing seems to have come of it, as he is still writing in his retirement, aged over 80. I am not going to join the dots, as that is not my sort of thing: I want others to do the research, and then I’ll read it. Just as with Shakespeare.

What do I think about the hypothesis?

Well, as I argued about Shakespeare as a black woman, it is interesting to briefly contemplate such a suggestion, and read a bit of W.S. with it in mind. But this one is too much of a stretch, and, alas, it is very unlikely that a crowd of writers collaborating on plays would be willing to take advice from an austere Easterner who would drone on about Persian literary structure. “Please,” says the Sheikh, “let me put a little Indian boy in the play.” “Alright,” sighs Shakespeare, “but not onstage.” “Please,” says the Sheikh, “does Othello have to kill that Turk?” “London audiences,” replies Shakespeare, “love a bit of sanguinary stuff. Look, bestill yourself or begone: go and find a pipe and pathic or something. I need to write…” “Please, just one more thing,” says the Sheikh, “Where is The Tempest set? Is it Bermuda, Gran Canaria, or, possibly – the Swahili coast?” “Fuck off,” says Shakespeare.

The next suggestion has to be that Shakespeare was the son of an Aztec, perhaps a grandson of Montezuma, whose father was brought back to Spain in 1541 by stout Cortes: this small boy, born around 1550, then travelled through Italy, becoming a refined gentleman and literary expert, before amusing Queen Elizabeth with his typically huitzilopochtlian storytelling style, but now imposed on English and Italian subjects. Shakesalcoatl was always tempted to have Macbeth’s head thrown down from the top of a ziggurat by Malcolm. And The Tempest, of course, was set on, dear oh dear, Little Saint James.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

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