Cork Milner's site on the authorship controversy gives us this:
The most bizarre of all the pretenders is Muammar al-Qaddafi's choice, Sheik Zubayr bin William. Quaddafi came up with his champion in 1989 when Radio Tehran announced that Libya's “Great One” had declared that an Arab sheik named Zubayr bin William, who had been born in the sixteenth century, was Shakespeare.
I should point out that Qadhafi did not originate the bizarre claim that Shakespeare was a crypto-Arab. Usually cited in jest, the Shaykh Zubayr “theory” holds that Shakespeare was actually an Arab Muslim living in Britain. Various authors cite “evidence” including Shakespeare’s full lips and “Islamic” beard in the supposedly "un-English" Chandos portrait(above); his many treatments of mistaken or doubtful identity; and his allegedly unflattering views of Jews, Turks, and the British (supposedly clear in The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and the history plays). Who but an Arab could harbor unfavorable views of precisely these three groups?
But the conceit of an Arab Shakespeare has also appealed to all kinds of intercultural writers addressing Western readers. My favorite is Wole Soyinka in his essay "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" (replublished in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage). In a similar vein, Jordanian-Irish-American novelist Diana Abu Jaber in her novel Crescent has an Iraqi-American character invoke the theory, tongue-in-cheek, speaking to an American graduate student: “Did you know that Shakespeare’s favorite food was stuffed eggplant? And there’s some who say that Shakespeare’s name was actually Sheikh Zubayr . . . There’s a nice thesis for you.’” (132). Sulayman al-Bassam resorts to a similar opening gambit in a 2005 Guardian column. So the authorship theory can be a playful bid for intercultural understanding, not only (as with Qadhafi) an insane claim of Arab cultural priority.
By the way, the would-be Arabic name preserves the phallic imagery of spear-shaking. Zubr = penis. So the diminutive zubayr, on one reading, is "little penis." Shake it, Will, habibi!
By the way, the would-be Arabic name preserves the phallic imagery of spear-shaking. Zubr = penis. So the diminutive zubayr, on one reading, is "little penis." Shake it, Will, habibi!