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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“swapping out”
Oh dear. Criticising the very things being criticised. Swapping is sufficient.
A fair point, and well spotted… and happy to be corrected… but does it really invalidate the argument as a whole?
How? In 1945 the British population voted Marxist-socialist workers control the means of production, Comrade and sold out its manufacturing base (and soul) in exchange for – bang pans – an NHS and cradle-to-grave welfare state – free stuff, everyone leeching off each other.
It’s simple. Nationalise key industries, instead of profits going to greedy capitalists, redistribution to pay for NHS, free stuff, fairness, equality – brothers.
Result: capital to fund, expand, develop, only available from the taxpayer. Not enough. Borrow and print money. Still not enough. Chronic underinvestment. The workers collective demands more and more. Industry becomes bloated, uncompetitive. That profit disappears so borrow, print money to pay the shortfall and pay the increasing cost of NHS and welfare state.
Brain drain. Underinvestment, poor pay, high taxes, drives out best and brightest – engineers, scientists, designers – abroad particularly the USA and into their aerospace industry.
British aerospace collapses, car making is a joke, strikes daily – the end of the UK as a giant of tech development and innovation.
Result: £2.8 trillion debt, 7 million on (bang pans) NHS waiting list, and in 2023 220 000 died waiting… but had they lived treatment would have “free”… yippee!, a welfare state supporting 10 million impoverished immigrants, dependence on the Chinese command economy for what we consume.
Hurrah! And… full circle. 2025 UK population votes in Marxist-Socialist Labour Party and is shocked to learn it’s Marxist-Socialist and hasn’t kept its manifesto pwomises, the wotters, how beastly.
Those old enough will remember police, fire, ambulance with dignified British bells, not those common Continental – Hee, haw, hee, haw… klaxons.
I grew up with the two-tone klaxon so that’s all that I recall (we’re all products of our era, right?). Happy to endorse the British bell being brought back to service.
The classic parable of British industry would be: In Victorian times, someone invested a lot capital in building a factory somewhere in England. This factory made him and his descendeds very wealthy/ insanely rich and was kept running with minimal investments in maintenance until about the 1970s when the Victorian machinery finally broke down and couldn’t be repaired anymore. At this point, one of two things happened:
This is a story I part invented but I think it’s an accurate picture: The empire had served its purpose after the British elite had accumulated more wealth than most people can even think of. And since it was sort-of cumbersome and expensive to maintain, it was then dismantled using more or less poor pretexts (“Winds of change” etc). What remained was a British moor who had done his job and could go now.
How this process really started: From some time in the 19th century until 1914, Britain was the world’s dominant industrial, military and financial power. Closest competitor were the aspiring German Empire. The USA was mostly a rural and very much indebted backwater. Then, the so-called first world war started which people in Germany regarded as a combined attack on them driven by a French desire for Revenge for 1871!
and an English desire to get rid of England’s most successful economic competitor.
In autumn and winter 1914, the war had frozen in place along a line of fortified trenches running from the Belgian cost just westward of Ostend southwards and then eastwards through northern France to the east of the fortress of Verdun and from there southward to the Swiss border. The next three years saw yearly repeated anglo-french attempts to break through this line of trenches with every increasing use of preparatory artillery barrages followed by infantry attacks. This needed an enormous amount of artillery shells as tenthousands to hundredthousands of shots would be fired for any individual run of artillery attacks. Most of these shells were manufactured in the USA because enough workers where available there as the country didn’t participated in the war itself until 1918 and they were paid for by the British and French state borrowing money from American banks. The final outcome was that the USA became the world’s largest creditor and the British empire one of the largest debtors.
This pattern repeated during the second world war where military hardware on the Allied side was by-and-large all produced in the USA and then lent-out on use now pay later terms to the other Allied powers.
Totally agree.
US empire indeed. Britain is just a US state in many ways. Oddly, this American-state joined the US Empire’s German project called the EU. It then disentangled itself to further submit its interests to the War-Virology-NWO-WEF-CIA regime of the US Empire.
NWO is simply US hegemony. The Uketopian war is just an expression of the US empire’s quest to destroy Russia. That is why Vlad the Invader had to get busy in 2022 when poof! the Rona magically disappeared, though morons were stabbinated long after for the fake virus. The UK has played a most useful idiot in its screaming support for the US occupation of the Ukeland, pushing us to a nuclear confrontation. Well done UK.
Rona fascism, the Climate Con, WEF – all the NWO globalist institutions are somehow linked to the US Dystopian NWO
Rule Brittania? Nah, The Fools in Britannia more like it.
There is a completely different take to the last 70 years, and that is that old Europe has been dominating the US in the manner of a dominating wife in a traditional wife role who basically has her husband do all her bidding. (Not a statement about men and women, just an example of one particular archetype.)
The US protects Europe. And if Trump’s narrative is to be believed, Europe fleeces the US economically.
The telltale is the reaction to the US wanting to change the relationship. The old European powers are up in arms and in disarray over the prospect that things aren’t going to carry on as they were.
That is certainly not the reaction you’d expect from the subservient, badly treated side.
‘The US’ shares access to some of its military infrastructure, especially in the area of satellite reconnaissance, with its NATO partners, and the NATO is procedurally geared towards being led by American officers. As always, the American armament industry also plays a prominent role here but in form of providing products in exchange for money. Lastly, the USA still has quite a lot of nukes and thus, maintain the nuclear balance of power, of however questionable usefulness this might be. Both Great Britain and France have their own nuclear deterrent and France isn’t even part of the military structures of the NATO since de Gaulle withdrew from them. Germany, as usual, is prohibited from owning or controlling any nukes. Great reason for Trump to whine about it not having any.
The USA has a standing army of less than 500,000 soldiers and the combined forces of the European NATO states easily outnumber that. Further, Germany, traditionally one of the larger military powers in Europe, is prohibited from maintaining more than a pretty tokenistic military force by the so-called “2 + 4 treaty” where the USA was a part of the 4 (the two were the FRG and the GDR). There’s no “US protection” in this area. A nice example of this would be the Enhanced Forward Presence of the NATO in Eastern Middle Europe: This is exclusively European in all areas where even a remote danger exists while pretty nominal US troops are only in safe positions in in eastern Poland.
Well, you better get in touch with all the European leaders to let them know because they all seem in a panic about the poential withdrawal of US military protection.
You’d better come up with some kind of counter-argument in case you want to prove my statement wrong instead of jumping to making untrue statements about a different topic.
You also still haven’t answered the question what kind protection the UK derives from serving as sort-of an US aircraft carrier for offensive military operations elsewhere.
Innocent ascriber inclined to Micawberomics here. Article and preceding comments amount to – Follow the money, the militarism and the myths?
Sirens? Pah! Ambulances should have bells.
They had the Green Goddesses on a brief return during the Fire strike back in 2002.
Britain’s economic and military decline is the product of an education system biased towards the Arts rather than science, and towards pure science rather than technology and engineering. The madness of Net Zero could only happen in a country run by people who are completely clueless about engineering and technology.
Britain’s participation in the “war on terror” (and the disastrous failure of that war) stems from a common failure to understand islam on the part of both Britain and Americans.
As Julian Assange puts it, the Afghan War was a long protracted money laundering operation by design.
‘Twas ever thus. Back in the 1960s, my father (an engineering lecturer at a Technical College, that later morphed into a Poly offering Business Studies, and is now a University offering a degree course in Comedy Studies) lamented the arts and humanities graduates running the country.
I’d extend “technology and engineering” to encompass trades like electrician and plumber that require technical knowledge and practical skill. Usually well-grounded and in demand, in my experience.
Presumably the book doesn’t deal with the way membership of the EU meanwhile chewed at Britain’s administrative legs making it insecure in standing on its own after Brexit.
Presumably, when Starmer says record investment is coming in to the UK he means more of our home-grown enterprise is being bought by foreigners.
Dear oh dear that ‘special relationship’ notion again. Old Mother Britain (or should it be England?) still thinking of the USA as her little baby, failing to notice the larger number of German and other European populations among its 19 C settlers, and of course numerous other nationalities whose influence on US character and interests is more important.
Like it or not societies need leaders because the majority of any population want no more than secure sources of food, warmth and shelter without having to fight for them. Our British leading class blundered into the 1914 war, destroyed itself and has been replaced by others pursuing personal gain in much larger markets for money, goods and ideas.
If you are running a humongous trade deficit, which we are and have been for decades, you have to export something to pay for those imports. And we have been exporting our industries themselves. We have been selling our country for trinkets.
The alternative is to have a huge devaluation in your currency. Personally I would prefer that. (Sterling does seem to be significantly overvalued, with computer equipment that costs £1,000 in the UK for example, costing $1,000 in the USA.) But people don’t like that. The trinkets get expensive.
There is one other alternative of course. Reciprocal tariffs to keep out artificially cheap imports. But the great and good tell us that could never work so obviously it’s a non-starter.