The Spectator has decided to offer a double-barrelled rebuke to and rebuttal of those who have the temerity to wonder about who Shakespeare was. Another frivolous book has been published, admittedly, but it does not serve the cause of Shakespeare to have a frivolous book reviewed in a frivolous way – twice. The frivolous book is By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult, and I shall say nothing about it. The frivolous reviews are by Gareth Roberts and Philip Womack, Shakespeare scholars – not.
We are asked, with a sigh, why there continue to be conspiracy theories about Shakespeare? Why does anyone think he might have been Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, or Edward, Earl of Oxford, or someone else, perhaps a woman? Ah, it must be snobbery or silliness. Why can’t we accept that Shakespeare was a lad from a market town who went to a grammar school, came to London, acted a bit, invested in property, signed his name a few times, had a daughter who could not write, and, cough, wrote Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet? Ach, in disputing this we must be conspiracy theorists, suffering from twisted minds, wanting to intersectionalise everything. Well, no, not at all.
Let me put it this way. Would one rather stand with Alexander Waugh, the third in the line of great Waughs, or with a myriad of Professors who refuse to think? I, for one, stand with Alexander Waugh: and, if one asks why, the answer is that he thinks. In fact, he studies: he engages in scholarship. And it is this that is the basis of a defence of Shakespeare conspiracies. On one side, some of us are sceptical: we think. On the other side, there are those who are dogmatic and dismissive: refuse to think.
There are several things we have to bear in mind if we are to be properly sceptical about Shakespeare. One is that he did not live in the 19th century: the era of rail, newspapers and photography, when we knew what was what and who was who. The Elizabethan age was an age of conspiracies, also the Jacobean age. Almost no one could speak their mind without risking imprisonment or execution. Almost everything written in Shakespeare’s time was highly allusive, indeed, obscure, arcane, recondite. This has to be seen clearly. John Dee was the greatest man of the age: and he was an occultist. Everyone was a spy. Every painting was laden with multiple meanings. Consider any painting of Queen Elizabeth. Every poem was allusive to a fault. Nothing was what it seemed.
Yawn, say the dogmatists. Why is there a question about Shakespeare? Well, how about this. We know less about him than almost anyone else of his time. There is simply no paper trail. We have manuscripts by Ben Johnson, and letters – and the same for all the other, even minor, poets and playwrights. We have nothing for Shakespeare. Here was a poet, apparently acknowledged to be the greatest poet of the age, and there is simply nothing. Not even a convincing engraving. On the other hand, in what bits and bobs survive from the archive of William of Stratford there is no reference to anything resembling literature. Here was a man who made a fuss about the repayment of small loans, but made no provision in his will for his literary estate, and cared not at all about the fact that his writings were pirated, or that his name had been used on the title page of works which were clearly not his.
The standard story fuses two separate strands.
The first strand concerns our Stratford man. He was baptised in 1564, as Gulielmus Shakspere, was affianced to two different Annes, married one, and had three children. (I shall call him Shaxper from now on so your eye is not confused.) He was named in legal actions in the 1580s and 1590s. He was a moneylender. He was mocked as “Shake-scene” and called an “upstart” actor in 1592. He was paid for performances at court in the 1590s. He bought a house in Stratford in 1597. He owed taxes; he hoarded grain; he was a shareholder in the Globe Theatre; he was mocked in a Cambridge play in 1601; he sued someone for two shillings in 1604 (though he never sued anyone for breach of copyright); he became a shareholder of the Blackfriar’s Theatre; his will mentioned shares and tithes, but no books; at his death in 1616 there was not a single elegy. No one ever mentioned that he was a poet. Contrast Ben Jonson, about whom there were so many elegies they were published as a book. Unlike Drayton, Beaumont, Jonson, Camden, Spelman and other famous men, William Shaxper of Stratford was not buried in Westminster Abbey.
Ah, but there was a monument in a church in Stratford. Yes, but his gravestone was unmarked, had doggerel written on it, not poetry, and the monument, built later, was – the evidence shows – tampered with, so that a bag of grain was resculpted to become a piece of paper, and a quill was put in the local man’s podgy hand. There is a highly ambiguous poem on the monument, but even this may be read to suggest that not everything is at it seems.
Ah, but there is a monument in Westminster Abbey. Yes, but it was erected in 1740 by Lord Burlington and other cabalists who added a highly allusive poem to it: also possibly suggesting that not everything is as it seems.
Ah, but there are the attestations to the Stratford man in the First Folio. Yes, but the First Folio was published in 1623, and the attestations are not only obscure but found in poems which also suggest that not everything is as it seems. Ben Jonson, writing of the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, says: “looke/Not on his Picture, but his Booke”, suggesting that the portrait should be ignored. Then Jonson’s eulogy to Shakespeare has a false start of 17 lines, before declaring “Thou art a moniment without a tomb”, as if he is saying this is a work without an author, certainly not an author who has a tomb. The only suggestion that this is the man from Stratford-upon-Avon comes from combining two bits of information. Ben Jonson in his poem refers to the “Swan of Avon” while Leonard Digges in another poem refers to “thy Stratford monument”. That is something, but it is not everything.
If the first strand is made of twine, the other strand is made of silk. This is where we find the works: Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, but neither mentioning patronage. Various works in the 1590s by others hint that the author of these poems is a university writer and has “purple robes”, while in 1598 he is compared to Ovid and commended for his “sugared” sonnets. Whoever this man is, he is only known as a poet. It is only in 1598 that a play is published under his name, this being Love’s Labours Lost. In 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets are published. In the dedication of the sonnets, he is called “Ovr.Ever.Living.Poet” which should mean that he was dead by that time. No monument is erected in Westminster Abbey until 1740. There is no chronology of his works until Edmond Malone – friend of Boswell, Johnson and Burke – writes one in 1778. Malone’s chronology is still the basis of all modern academic Shakespeare speculation. Stratford tourism begins afterwards, and by now is too lucrative to be tampered with.
There is other evidence that Shakespeare might have been of high rather than low birth. I do not mention the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are formidably impressive on high politics. Rather, we can point out that, like Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare never wrote a commendatory verse – though every other poet of the time did. Every other poet had a finished signature: Shaxper of Stratford only had a scrawl. No signature survives by the poet of the sonnets. For centuries, students of the plays have remarked on Shakespeare’s remarkable knowledge of Italy, of medicine, of hunting and of law. Hamlet is strewn with legal language, as if it flowed out of him without thought. There is a strange silence among his contemporaries where one would expect some mention of him. Sir Fulke Greville was related to the Ardens, and was an important man in Stratford: he was a friend of other poets like Dyer and Sidney, and a patron of Samuel Daniel: but he never mentions Shakespeare. Dr John Hall, the husband of Shakespeare’s daughter, doesn’t mention his famous father-in-law. William Camden does not mention Shakespeare in his list of worthies of Stratford in 1607.
It is almost as if there was a conspiracy.
Don’t take my word for it. I am an amateur. Instead, read the formidable book by Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem, which was published in 2001, and is probably the single book everyone should read on the subject. Or read John M. Shahan and Alexander Waugh, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Exposing an Industry in Denial, published in 2013, which puts the case against the standard story. Or, even more delightful, watch some of the ‘presentations’ on YouTube by Alexander Waugh or David Shakespeare (no relation), where poems and paintings are analysed with rare precision and suggestiveness.
The great Cambridge historian, Quentin Skinner, wrote a book entitled Forensic Shakespeare in 2014. Skinner has always emphasised the importance of context, and of knowing what an author intended in writing a work: all of which means one has to know who the author is. Well, if the author was not the man of Stratford, then intention and context are completely altered. But Skinner, in his book, simply cites the ‘Stratfordian’ literature, seems to think it normal that a grammar school boy would be full of Quintilian and Cicero, and does not even begin to mention the possibility that all is not what it seems.
The reviewers of the frivolous Jodi Picoult book are dismissive of Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, who are the known faces of Shakespeare scepticism. But it is a graver business to dismiss Mark Twain, who was splendidly scathing about the standard Shakespeare story over a 100 years ago, or Henry James or Sigmund Freud – they all thought that it was unlikely that William Shaxper of Stratford was William Shake-speare, the obscure and reticent but masterful ‘Adon’ who wrote deathless poems and plays.
“There is a ton of documentary evidence that William Shakespeare [sic] wrote the works of William Shakespeare.” Oh, is there, Gareth Roberts? Check again. You mean two lines from two poems affixed to the First Folio?
“I wonder whether all this is a symptom of cultural malaise, linked to modernism and the need to question everything.” Yes, Philip Womack, it is. And it is a good thing that it is.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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