MYTH - SHAKESPEARE DIDN'T WRITE SHAKESPEARE

If you already think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, then you will be bracing yourself for yet another establishment cover-up; if you already think Shakespeare did write Shakespeare, then this myth will be one you do not bother to read. Of all our myths, this is the most intractable because it is the one where positions are most entrenched. Put crudely, the academic establishment maintains that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did write the plays attributed to him in the First Folio in 1623 (and perhaps some others too, although the consensus breaks up a bit there). And a coalition of interested parties who are not professional Shakespeareans, including a good showing from the legal and theatrical professions and some notables including Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, and Henry James, believe he did not, either because they believe that someone else wrote them, or because they believe there is, in the words of one online petition, “reasonable doubt” about the attribution.1 Outbreaks of hostilities, when a newspaper reports the controversy, a new book proposes a new candidate, or something like Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous (2011; tagline: “Was Shakespeare a Fraud?”) enters the debate, pit implacable and sometimes complacent scholars who merely discount, rather than disprove, the apparently detailed knowledge and interrogation of their amateur opponents. Sometimes this is extremely heated: writing to the New York Times in 2005, Harvard Shakespeare professor Stephen Greenblatt suggested that “the demand [for discussion about Shakespeare's authorship] seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?” If the rhetoric of the argument can equate the fact of Shakespeare's authorship of his plays with the fact of the Holocaust, it's clearly going to be difficult to have a balanced discussion.

In this short account we can't work through all the arguments and all the candidates, but we can try to set out why and how this controversy has arisen, and some of the issues about the evidence on both sides. First, although Shakespeare's name does not always appear on the title pages of his plays published during his lifetime (see Myth 4), his fellow King's Men actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, who put together the posthumous collected edition, were in no doubt about who wrote the plays. The title page of the First Folio (1623) boasts “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies,” and the iconic engraving of a balding Shakespeare, head awkwardly atop a starched ruff, emphasizes the man behind the works (unlike, say, the collection of Ben Jonson's Works in 1616, which is illustrated with an allegorical, architectural frontispiece suggesting the book's classical antecedents). Heminge and Condell knew Shakespeare over decades—in his will he left them money for mourning rings—so unless they were part of a conspiracy, there seems little doubt about their testimony.

In fact, this notion of conspiracy is key to the authorship question. No one expressed any doubt or suspicion about the authorship of the plays in the early modern period, nor until the nineteenth century. According to the frantic logic of conspiracists, the wealth of contemporary evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford did indeed write the plays we attribute to him must be discounted as planted (“that's what they want you to believe”), and, perversely, it is the absence of evidence that really counts. Or, to put that another way, in order to question that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, we need to discount a large amount of evidence that he did, and search out the possibility that someone else did. So, that Shakespeare is listed as an actor and as a playwright in numerous contemporary sources, and that there is ample evidence to link this man with the man born, married, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon is of no more relevance than the fact that potential alternative authors Christopher Marlowe died in 1593 and the Earl of Oxford in 1604, long before many of the plays were written: these historical facts are simply ignored, or, rather, reconstructed as contingent parts of a conspiracy. The Marlowe Society even succeeded in having a question mark after Marlowe's death date in the memorial window placed in Westminster Abbey in 2002, to leave open the possibility that Marlowe wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, and the society administers a large prize for the scholar who “furnishe[s] irrefutable and incontrovertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scholarship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe.”2 The prize is unclaimed.

The authorship question is a curious ideological mismatch. On the one hand, it had its roots in a fundamental re-examination of the philosophical tenor of Shakespeare's plays. In part it was their newly perceived political radicalism that made it conceivable that their author might wish to hide his identity. The American writer and scholar Delia Bacon established this interpretative tradition in her opaque book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857), a book that drew Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson to her cause. Bacon, and her successors in this vein, argued for the plays' relation to contemporary politics in ways which have anticipated much later scholarship concerned with the place of the stage in early modern England as socially transgressive and politically provocative (James Shapiro, in an extensive recent study of the authorship question from a critical and sociological viewpoint, remarks that were these ideas not linked to the question of authorship, Bacon “would be hailed today as the precursor of the New Historicists, and the first to argue that the plays anticipated the political upheavals England experienced in the mid-seventeenth century”3).

Against this radical and politicized reading of the plays, however, the authorship question has a strongly socially conservative cast: its adherents cannot believe that the son of a glover from a provincial market town and without a university education could possibly have written the works attributed to him. It is no accident that the alternative candidates for their authorship are all noblemen: Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Neville, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, even Queen Elizabeth, supported by ingenious computer-generated graphical disintegration to reveal an image of the Virgin Queen disguised as Shakespeare on the front of the First Folio. The only other “commoner” in the list is the Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe. But there's no reason, other than social snobbery, to associate literary ability with rank or birth, particularly in the world of the theater where a playwright was an artisan, a new word for a new occupation (see Myth 21) imagined by analogy with skilled craftsmen such as wheelwrights or shipwrights. The claims either that the writer of the plays must have been a courtier or that their aristocratic author could not have sullied himself to enter the common marketplace of print are assertions rather than evidence. Elsewhere in this book we have shown that Shakespeare's education was extensive (Myth 2) and that he did not need to have traveled abroad to write his plays (Myth 5). What we do know about Shakespeare—and what is amply attested by his contemporaries—is that he could write imaginative and compelling drama, which involved inhabiting the world view and linguistic competence of different speakers from different social classes.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the preferred candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was Francis Bacon, and the preferred method for asserting this “truth” was cryptography. Bacon was believed to have placed ciphers in the plays that could be cracked to reveal his own signature. A rash of titles promised explication. Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) applied a number of code-breaking stratagems to produce a secret message announcing “Shak'st spur never writ a word of them,” but his methods were lampooned by unconvinced humorists and Stratfordians in parodic applications of his method to his own work, and to other pages of Shakespeare, “revealing,” for example, that “Master WillI a Jack Spur writ this play”;4 undeterred, Elizabeth Gallup published her The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works (1899); some judicious alterations of the nonce-word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” from Love's Labour's Lost (5.1.40) led Sir Edwin Dunning-Lawrence to a Latin sentence announcing “These plays F. Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world” in his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910); by overlaying a cosmographical diagram on the Epilogue to The Tempest in her Bacon's Dial in Shakespeare (1922), Natalie Rice Clark uncovered the helpfully explicit declaration “I, W.S. Am F. Bacon.”

But Bacon's star has waned, and the most active contender for the authorship of Shakespeare's works is now Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Oxford's claims are largely biographical: the argument is that his life fits more closely the life perceived to be expressed through the plays than does the biography of Shakespeare. There is no external evidence to link Oxford with the works of Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum, still Shakespeare's best and most cautious biographer, describes the problem of writing Shakespeare's life as that of bridging “the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record”;5 for Oxfordians, Shakespeare's documented life is not only mundane but wretched, devoid of the social advantages necessary to write the plays and marked instead by suspicions of parsimony, social climbing, profiteering, and the abandonment of his wife and children. By contrast, Oxford's life could have furnished the details for Hamlet (although not the ending): he had traveled in Europe, he was well connected at Elizabeth's court, his own father-in-law Lord Burghley was supposed to be the model for Polonius, and he knew Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses (used in Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Titus Andronicus among others).

These parallels may or may not be substantive, but in any case the argument rests on an erroneous assumption that Shakespeare's works are biographical. The same is true of the case for other candidates: Sir Henry Neville is proposed because his imprisonment after the Essex rebellion in 1601 explains the move towards darker comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare's writing around that date (this shift is something of an exaggeration and, in any case, more likely to be connected to audience tastes than to authorial mood); the Earl of Rutland is proposed because he visited Denmark just before the publication of Hamlet (in fact the prompt for the play may be nearer home: the written sources for the play also set the story in Denmark). If we believed the plays were autobiographical, we might as well be looking for a soldier (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus, and Othello are all soldiers), a female transvestite (women dress as men in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline) or a father of adult daughters (see Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline) (just a minute: Shakespeare was the father of adult daughters …). To be serious, though, the idea that literary texts, particularly early modern plays, encode biographical data is as far from an understanding of them as literature as the Baconian idea that they are codes to be broken.

Literary theorists have been proclaiming the “death of the author” since the 1960s (the phrase is Roland Barthes'), and the bankruptcy of biographical readings long before that. It oughtn't, therefore, to matter whether Shakespeare or someone else (of the same name, as Mark Twain mischievously put it) wrote the plays attributed to him. But of course it does matter. We have seen in recent years that when a play is newly attributed to Shakespeare—as for example Edward III—this results in new editions, new performances, and new scholarship, forms of attention that invent, or at least reinforce, the literary quality they purport to describe. Edward III was not previously an unknown play but it was in the critical graveyard marked “Anon.” Jonathan Bate has admitted that, when editing Titus Andronicus, a play previously considered aesthetically defective, “I so wanted to praise the play, instead of burying it as the Arden editor of the previous generation had done, that I uncritically accepted the arguments for solo authorship”: here again authorship and literary value are connected (see Myth 17).6

To be sure, there is a mystery about Shakespeare's authorship. How did he write it all? How is it that his works have been so endlessly adaptable, so susceptible to readings and sensibilities and ways of thinking very different from the culture out of which they were written? It's a mystery that is only deferred, not solved, by attaching a different name to the works, since the problem is not “How did he write it since he never went to university?” but the more fundamental “How did he write it?” Jonathan Bate argues that “‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”7 No wonder that Superman (in a DC comic of 1947) and Doctor Who (in an episode aired in 2007) have been imagined as Shakespeare's time-traveling collaborators: if Shakespeare didn't write the works, perhaps only a super-hero could have.

If you look up some of the books and websites cited for this myth, you will see that one of the main argumentative tools of the anti-Stratfordians is detail: “Polonius in Hamlet refers to ‘young men falling out at tennis,’ which most likely refers to the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel”; instances of “every” and “ever” are coded references to De Vere (the Earl of Oxford); Francis Bacon's commonplace book contains phrases also found in Shakespeare's plays.8 It is hard not to see this barrage of detail and the partisanship of the debate as an unconscious smokescreen, a diversionary tactic, to avoid thinking about the bigger questions this myth throws up: questions of genius, canon, class, literary value—and of who owns “Shakespeare”: the academics or the enthusiasts?

Notes

1 http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration
2 http://www.marlowe-society.org/reading/info/hoffmanprize.html
3 James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 109.
4 Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 406–7.
5 Ibid., p. 568.
6 Jonathan Bate, “In the Script Factory,” review of Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 2003.
7 Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 163.
8 http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/

Written by Laurie Maguire & Emma Smith in "30 Great Myths About Shakespeare", Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, UK. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.