THE REST OF THE EVIDENCE FOR SHAKESPEARE
That Will Shakespeare of Stratford was the only person of the right time and place to have the same name (or nearly the same name, if you want to be ridiculous) as Will Shakespeare the actor/poet is demonstrated by direct concrete and other evidence of (1) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and places of residence with the actor/poet (London and Stratford); (2) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and an association with the river Avon with the actor/poet; (3) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and date of death with the actor/poet; (4) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and apparent level of formal learning with the actor/poet; (4) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and writing ability with the actor/poet; (5) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and acquaintances with the actor/poet; (6) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and a face with the actor/poet; (7) The Stratford man’s sharing both a name and literary ability with the actor/poet; (8) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and vocation with the actor/poet; (9) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and a social status with the actor/poet;and, most convincing of all, (10) the Stratford man’s sharing both a name and a Stratford monument with the actor/poet.
(1) places of residence
We know that the actor/poet William Shakespeare lived at least some of his life in London. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon also spent part of his life in London.
To begin with, on 17 August 1608, Shakespeare of Stratford sued John Addenbrooke in the Court of Record at Stratford. In the court documents Shakespeare is described as “generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc regis Anglie” (gentleman, recently at the court of lord James, present king of England). This indicates that the Stratford man had been living in the judicial district of London, where the poet/actor Shakespeare certainly lived.
Much weaker as evidence but still evidence the Stratford Shakespeare resided at times in London is the fact that his brother Gilbert stood in for him in 1602 in a real estate transaction in which Gilbert received a deed (which Gilbert signed) to land Will had bought from John and William Combe—which suggests Will was out of town. Similarly weak evidence is the fact that Will bought London property, the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse, in 1613.
Slightly stronger but not direct evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford lived in London are the tax records of a William Shakespeare who lived there in the early 1600s. Much stronger evidence—direct concrete evidence, in fact—that he resided at some point in London is a William Shakespeare’s recorded testimony in the Mountjoy trial of 1612 in which he stated he was of Stratford-on-Avon, and that in 1604 he was a lodger with the Mountjoy family in London (and was probably living with them a year or two earlier since he declared he’d first known Mountjoy and his son-in-law—and former apprentice—Stephen Belott around 1602).
The fact that after the death of Shakespeare of Stratford, Stratford-on-Avon smoothly and fairly rapidly became well-known as a place worth visiting for lovers of the Shakespeare’s plays and poem and has, of course, remained so to this day, is a point in favor of the supposition that the Author and the Stratford man shared that town as a hometown. So are the many anecdotes about Shakespeare the poet such as those reported by Aubrey and Rowe that place him without comment in Stratford-upon-Avon, and explicitly state that he resided in London, as well (and corroborate much else in this list)—and Thomas Fuller’s giving his birthplace as Stratford in his book, Worthies, Warwickshire (1662), for which he may have begun collecting material as early as 1643. Conclusion: the Author and the Stratford man not only shared a name but places of residence.
(2) the river Avon
Next we have the fact that both the Stratford man and the actor/poet were associated with the river Avon, which flows through the former’s hometown (and is part of that town’s name). The following excerpt from Ben Jonson’s eulogy of Shakespeare, the actor/poet in the First Folio is pertinent:
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appeare, And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames, That so did take Eliza, and our James!
Anti-Stratfordians bring up other river Avons, or point to such trivia as a house on another part of Stratford’s Avon that Oxford briefly owned and probably lived in only briefly, if at all. Regardless of that, however, it is certain (unless Jonson was lying, and there’s no evidence of that) that the Stratford man and the Author shared not only a name but a significant connection to a river named the Avon.
(3) date of death
That Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon died at the same time as William Shakespere, the poet, is indicated by a poem William Basse wrote. It was first published in 1633; but over two dozen manuscript copies of it from before that time have come down to us, and since Ben Jonson responded to it in his elegy to Shakespeare of 1623, it’s clear that it was written between 1616, the year of the Stratford Shakespeare’s death (a fact confirmed by church records), and 1623. It is called, “On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare,” and on several manuscript copies and the printed version has “he dyed in Aprill 1616” as a sub-title:
Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie A little nearer Spenser to make room For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb. To lodge all four in one bed make a shift Until Doomsday, for hardly will a fifth Betwixt this day and that by fate be slain For whom your curtains may be drawn again. If your precedency in death doth bar A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher, Under this carved marble of thine own Sleep rare tragedian Shakespeare, sleep alone, Thy unmolested peace, unshared cave, Possess as lord not tenant of thy grave, That unto us and others it may be Honor hereafter to be laid by thee.
Note that, even if we ignore its sub-title, the poem states that Shakespeare died after Francis Beaumont, whose death we know to have occurred in March 1616. So, the poem is direct evidence not only that a William Shakespeare wrote the Oeuvre, but that this William Shakespeare was the one who died between March 1616 and whenever Jonson wrote his eulogy for the First Folio, which was published in 1623—because Jonson’s poem, in part, is clearly a response to Basse’s poem. So it is stronger evidence that the Stratford man was the actor/poet than his name on the many title-pages it was on. Moreover, the Basse poem was written by someone who was alive for the last thirty or so years of Shakespeare of Stratford’s life, so not necessarily mere hearsay evidence.
Several texts in the First Folio of 1623 confirm a death date for the poet of before that date. Conclusion: the Author and the Stratford man shared not only a name but a date of death.
(4) unlearnedness
We have more than one piece of evidence indicating that the actor/poet and the Stratford man were similarly unlearned. One is a letter in verse to Ben Jonson by an “F. B.” whom most scholars take to be Francis Beaumont—because Beaumont wrote another well-known verse letter to Jonson and the verse fits him in other ways. Exactly who wrote it is immaterial, however; all that counts is that some contemporary of Jonson’s wrote Jonson about Shakespeare, the actor/poet (in 1615). F. B. seems to say that Shakespeare’s best lines are without scholarship, and indicate “how far sometimes a mortal man may go/ by the dim light of Nature.” It is quite straightforward, but—being Jacobean (and a poem)—it also has its confusing quirks, so it has been tortured out of its most obvious meaning by the anti-Stratfordians, most notably our old friend Charlton Ogburn. Here is the passage in totum:
Here I would let slip (If I had any in me) scholarship, And from all learning keep these lines as clear as Shakespeare’s best are, which our heirs shall hear Preachers apt to their auditors to show how far sometimes a mortal man may go by the dim light of Nature.
According to Ogburn, “it is not that Shakespeare shows how far a man without learning may go by the dim light of nature. Beaumont would have had no reason to insert the line (about the Preachers) if it were. He was saying that this is something posterity is going to hear from preachers . . .” Misinformed or lying preachers, that is. When Milward Martin called Ogburn’s take a strained reading unsupported by any evidence, Ogburn was so confident of the plausibility of his reading that he responded with the claim that Martin “never attempted to tell us wherein my reading of F. B. was in error and what other reading was possible.” He was right: Martin had not bothered to do that.
It cannot be said that Ogburn’s reading is in error; it is merely implausible. There is nothing in the text to indicate that F. B. was abruptly saying something snide about preachers or critics of the future. Furthermore, F.B. had just gotten through saying that Shakespeare’s best lines were free from learning; would he have then gone on immediately to say that preachers would repeat his view in the future and, in doing so, would be lying? I’m afraid that doesn’t compute at all for me.
As for a better possible reading, that’s easy for anyone taking the passage straight. F. B. says that he would like to make his own lines as free from academicism (“learning”) as the best of Shakespeare’s were. It is possible that F.B. considered all the rest of Shakespeare’s lines scholarly but the most direct interpretation would be that he thought Shakespeare quite terrific for writing great lines that were unencumbered by learning, but that he couldn’t claim that all of Shakespeare was without academic affectations (since it wasn’t), so he slipped in the modifier, “best.” He goes on to say that posterity will hear speakers who are right for the task show them what great things can be achieved by a man who is guided only by nature (which is not easy to follow, being the equivalent of a dim light).
Jonson’s famous reference to Shakespeare’s “small Latin and lesse Greek” corroborates F. B. Surely it confirms the notion that Shakespeare was no great scholar. Moreover, it is by a man with a reputation for honesty who would surely have known the Stratford man (even if he had merely been a player); hence, it would seem to be hard to pass off. The anti-Stratfordians must contest it if their side is to have any chance at all, however, so they have attacked it in various ways. The simplest, and least persuasive, has been simply to label the whole thing a lie that Jonson wrote because paid to do so. The problem with this is that there is no evidence whatever for it. Furthermore, what Jonson later in life wrote about Shakespeare in his journal tends to confirm that Jonson thought him lacking in learned virtues. Was he paid to repeat his “lies” in his personal journal more than 15 years after the First Folio was published, twenty after Shakespeare died, and over thirty after Oxford died? It doesn’t seem likely.
That Jonson wrote the eulogy in good faith but had been fooled by the plot is a second possibility—but this would rob the anti-Stratfordians of their preposterous argument that every writer in London knew who really wrote the plays and so did not comment in print on the non-writing Stratford man’s death, as they would havee to have had he been the True Author. It would also seem hard to believe, Jonson being so clever, and so in touch with both the literati and actors and other theatre people of his time. So the shrewdest anti-Stratfordians, Ogburn among them, have decided that Jonson did not lie in the eulogy, but was merely devious. When referring to “Shakespeare” in his eulogy, he was of course referring only to the man who wrote under that name, not to the bumpkin from Stratford.
Ogburn claimed that when Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, “And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek,/ From thence to honour thee, I would not seek/ For names; but call forth thund’ring AEschilus,/ Euripides, and Sophocles to us,/ Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,/ To life again, to hear they buskin tread,/ And shake a Stage,” and so on, what he meant was not “And although thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek,” but “even if” or “even supposing that” “thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek!” Proof of this for Ogburn is the word “would” instead of “will” in the phrase, “I would not seek.” If Jonson had been saying that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek, he would have gone on to say, “I will not seek.” Instead he employed the conditional mood of the verb, “shall,” which is “would.”
To support his position, Ogburn drags in C. M. Ingleby, an obscure scholar who drew attention over a hundred years ago to the fact that the “hadst” in the passage is in the subjunctive mood. Ingleby has been ignored by orthodox scholars, according to Ogburn—because, of course, they can’t refute him. He is right: they can’t. But there is no need to. If one backs up to a point in Jonson’s poem that begins four lines prior to the passage Ogburn quotes out of context, one will see the following: “For, if I thought my judgement were of years,/ I should commit thee surely with thy peers,/ And tell, how far thou didst our Lily out-shine,/ Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line./ And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,/ From thence to honor thee, I would not seek,” and so forth. The “would” is there because the subjunctive (or conditional) mood was established by the “if” of “For, if I thought.” (my italics)
As for “hadst,” according to my Oxford Unabridged, it was used in Shakespeare’s time for the second person indicative (in the past tense). Whether it might also have been used for the subjunctive case, I have not been able to determine, but don’t think it worth the time to investigate further since it is so obviously being used here for the second person indicative, as is the “didst” (certainly not in any conditional mood) in the line about Shakespeare’s out-shining Lily, Kid and Marlowe.
Now all this does not conclusively refute Ogburn: “though” could still have meant “even if.” There are a number of other arguments against this. One is that the idea that even though Shakespeare had little first-hand familiarity with the language of Rome and Greece, it would not be amiss for a poet to go to those places to find writers to compare him with is a much more natural and smooth idea than the rather awkward idea that even if Shakespeare had not been the Latin and Greek scholar he was, it would still not be amiss to compare him to Aeschylus, et al. And if Jonson, a highly competent writer, wanted to say the latter, why would he have written, “and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek” meaning “and even if thou hadst small Latin and less Greek” Jonson would still compare thim with the best of the Roman and Greek playwrights when he could have written “and though thou hadst no Latin and no Greek” to mean, “and even if thou hadst no Latin and no Greek” Jonson would still compare thim with the best of the Roman and Greek playwrights?
The second version is much more dramatic, a contrast of black and white. The first is a contrast of gray and white, like saying, “Even if you were almost a midget,” I’d still consider you a giant,” instead of “Even if you were a midget, I’d still consider you a giant.”
Conclusion, when he wrote “and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson meant what everyone who read his eulogy for over two centuries thought he meant: “even though you had small Latin and less Greek” ,Jonson would still compare him with the best of the Roman and Greek playwrights. Jonson, I suppose I should add, could not in this case have written the more dramatic “though thou hadst no Latin and no Greek” without sacrificing accuracy, Shakespeare clearly having had some Latin, and possibly a little Greek.
Aside from all that, it seems so like Jonson to sneak in a slight aspersion on a rival, that it’s hard to believe he wasn’t scoring Shakespeare for lacking a knowledge of Latin and Greek comparable to Jonson’s–while making a rhetorically deft use of contrast.
Moreover, it is not plausible that Jonson would be making the point that Shakespeare was a superior scholar, a point made by no other contemporary of Shakespeare’s; indeed, in the 1640 folio of Shakespeare’s works Leonard Digges went so far as to say of Shakespeare that “Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow/ This whole Booke, thou shalt find he did not borrow,/ One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate” in a poem that begins, “Poets are borne not made,” something with which Thomas Fuller explicitly agreed in Worthies, Warwickshire, where he said Shakespeare’s “learning was very little.” Dryden in 1668 said of him that, “those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”
To this day, in fact, almost no reputable scholar believes Shakespeare had extensive formal academic training of any kind; the consensus is that he had a fair grasp of Latin and, perhaps, a smattering of Greek, but nothing like the amount Jonson, or (probably) Oxford, had.
One last item indicating that the poet Shakespeare’s learning was not great is the testimony of the Will Kempe character in the third of the Parnassus plays. As previously indicated, he says: “Few of the vniuersity men pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talke too much of Proserpina & Iuppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe . . .” which, of course, suggests that the stage Kempe, for one, did not consider Shakespeare learned. The conclusion is hard to escape: the actor/poet and the Stratford man shared not only a name but a (relatively low) level of formal learning.
(5) acquaintances
The hard evidence for the Stratford man’s sharing acquaintances with the actor/poet is not vast, but it exists. For one thing, there is the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse in London previously mentioned which the Stratford man bought in 1613. Acting as trustee for the buyer, “William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon” was “John Hemmyng” (also spelled “Hemming” on the same page of the deed, which nonetheless does not suggest that two men of similar names were involved). Heminges is described as a gentleman of London (which would make him pretty surely the actor even if the property’s being very near the Blackfriar’s Theatre, where both Shakespeare the actor and Heminges the actor performed, had not already done that). The property was later disposed of in the Stratford Shakespeare’s will. So it is hard evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford and Shakespeare the actor/poet shared at least one acquaintance.
That Richard Field, of Stratford, published the poet’s narrative poems, and another book containing a poem of his, is good circumstantial evidence that Field and the poet knew one another. Shakespeare (the poet) has Imogene refer to a “Richard Du Champ” in Cymbeline when asked to name her master, who is fictitious. Any name would have done, but Shakespeare seems to make a little joke on Field with the one he chose.
We have no hard evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford knew Field, but it would be strange if he had not since Field was only two or three years older than Shakespeare, was of a bookish bent (as Shakespeare, even if he’d only been an actor, would likely have been), and lived with him in a town of only 1,500 to 2,000 people. Besides that, we have a record that indicates that Shakespeare’s father appraised the inventory of the will of Richard’s father sometime around 1590.
Remember, too, that all the children of the town who went to school went to the same one, and did their lessons in the same room, regardless of their ages; and all the people of the town went to the same church, and were required by law to go to it every Sunday, though some paid fines rather than do so. It is therefore difficult to believe Richard and Will did not know each other.
Then, there is the will of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. The will records a bequest of Shakespeare’s “to my ffellowes John Hemynge Richard Burbage & Henry Cundell xxvj s viij d A peece to buy them Ringes.” Heminges, Burbage, and Condell had been fellow actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s and the King’s Men with the actor/poet, William Shakespeare. Conclusion: the actor/poet and the Stratford man shared not only a name but acquaintances.
(6) a face
Oddly enough, I may be among the first, if not the first, to point out that among the best pieces of evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was Shakespeare, the poet, are the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio, which Ben Jonson affirms is a good likeness of Shakespeare, the poet, and the bust of Shakespeare that is part of the Stratford monument to him. Discussing these in his classic study, “Shakespeare’s Portraiture,” M. H. Spielmann says, “The bust, of course, professes to show what the Poet looked like when he had put on flesh and bobbed his hair; yet in spite of the fact that adipose tissue has rounded forms and filled up hollows, broadened masses and generally increased dimensions — we recognize that the perpendicular forehead and the shape of the skull are very much the same in both; and we further observe that whereas the Droeshout Print shows us chiefly the width of the forehead across the temples, the full face of the bust gives us the shape of the head farther back, across where the ears are set on…. When all is said, the outstanding fact remains — that the forms of the skull, with its perpendicular rise of forehead, correspond with those of the Stratford effigy; and this — the formation of the skull — is the definitive test of all the portraits. The Droeshout and the sculpted effigy show the skull of the same man, who, in the engraving, is some twenty years or so younger than him of the bust” (in Spielmann et al., Studies in the First Folio, 1924: London: Oxford UP, pp. 26, 33).
So, the hard evidence of the Droeshout depiction directly provides a likeness of Shakespeare the actor/poet while the hard evidence of the monument directly provides an effectually identical likeness of Shakespeare the Stratford home-owner; ergo, the Stratford man and the actor/poet not only shared a name but a face.
I might add that the Droeshout engraving must, from almost any point of view, be an authentic portrait of the Stratford man. It would not make sense for it to be of some other known man, such as Oxford, since the whole point of the First Folio would surely have to be to make it seem that the Stratford man wrote the Oeuvre. Why say he did, and put a picture of Oxford or Marlowe in his collected works? It would also make little sense to put a picture in the First Folio that looked nothing like the Stratford man. What would be the point? And it would surely generate talk, or the conspirators would have to worry that it would. They could easily have not had any author’s picture.
There may have been pictures of the poet Shakespeare in circulation during his lifetime, too, since one of the Parnassus plays mentions a character who keeps one under his pillow. Since this could not likely have been of anyone but the Stratford man for the reasons that the Droeshout portrait could not likely have been, it would be further evidence that the Stratford man was taken to be Shakespeare the actor/poet.
(7) literary ability
That the two Shakespeares, the Stratford man and the poet, shared literary ability is indicated by the monument put up to Shakespeare between his death and the 1623 publication of the First Folio. It shows a plumpish man in his fifties from the waist up. He is holding a pen with one hand, which rests on a cushion; his other hand rests on a piece of paper, likewise on the cushion. Gheerart Janssen, son of Gheerart Janssen the Elder, who had a stonemason’s yard in Southwark, near the Globe Theatre, was the sculptor responsible for the monument. According to Peter Levi (in The Life and Times of William Shakespeare), Janssen based it on a 1615 monument his team had done of the antiquarian, John Stowe—the posture of the two writers is similar, but while Shakespeare gazes ahead confidently, Stowe broods, like a scholar. The same team was responsible for the monument to Shakespeare’s neighbor, John Combe, which was executed a few years before Shakespeare’s death, and placed in the same church as his.
The inscription on the monument has the following:
IVDICIO PYLEUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MAERIT, OLYMPUS HABET. STAY PASSENGER WHY GOEST THOU BY SO FAST READ IF THOU CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST WITHIN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE WITH WHOME QUICK NATURE DIDE WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK YE TOMBE FAR MORE THAN COST SIETH ALL YT HE HATH WRITT LEAVES LIVING ART, BUT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.
According to the Latin lines, Shakespeare was in good judgement a Nestor (who was the ruler of Pylos), in genius—or natural gifts–a Socrates, and in art a Virgil (i.e., Publius Vergilius Maro) –and Olympus has (him). The monument also states that Shakespeare died 23 April 1616, as the church records have it for Shakespeare of Stratford, thus establishing beyond reasonable doubt whom the monument was for.
The inscription constitutes direct evidence that the Stratford Shakespeare shared not only a name but writing ability with the actor/poet because of what the Latin says, and the words about what he had “writt”—and the reference to his “witt,” which then meant intelligence more than wittiness.
That the Shakespeare of the monument is shown with a pen in his hand is further evidence that he was a writer. That the monument was put in so central a Stratford location as the town’s church where many who would have known that their friend and neighbor Will Shakespeare could not have been a writer, if he indeed had not been, and would have been expected at the very least to have put gossip into circulation about the lying monument, significantly increases the strength of the monument as evidence that Will was a writer. The inscription, that is, was a highly public document, so much more legitimate than a private document as evidence: it was out in the open, available for refutation, yet never questioned (that we know of).
Against all this the general run of anti-Stratfordians, amusingly, do not argue that the builders of the monument were liars or mistaken but that the monument was only erected to honor Shakespeare as a grain merchant (or his father as a grain merchant, according to a few of the looniest anti-Stratfordians and Brian Vickers). Only later was it changed to make it seem Shakespeare was a writer. But Leonard Digges, as I mentioned in Chapter One, stated in 1623 it was in Stratford and was to William Shakespeare the poet.
The monument was indeed touched up in the middle of the 17th-century, but the minister who oversaw the repairs claimed that it was kept as close to the original as possible—and at least one drawing prior to the repairs indicates that this is the case. (Another sketch by Dugdale, very hastily drawn, shows the cushion of the monument looking somewhat baglike, and leaves out Shakespeare’s pen; from this the anti-Stratfordians have manufactured wonderful stories about what really happened. The inscription is what counts, though, so I have ignored Dugdale’s sketch here. I will return to it later, when analyzing the cerebral dysfunctionality of anti-Stratfordians.)
The anti-Stratfordians can’t deny that the inscription was there from the beginning, because it was transcribed by antiquarian (and poet) John Weever around 1626, and copied again twelve years later by Dugdale. All they can find to say against it is that it is “ambiguous” (as if almost any poem can’t be found to be less than totally clear in spots), that it names none of his plays or poems directly ( so what?), and that Nester, Socrates and Virgil—two of them not writers and none of them playwrights—would have been poor choices to compare the Stratford man to had he been the “real” Shakespeare.(But would have made perfect sense if to an illiterate grain-merchant.)
The comparisons make perfect sense, though: Nestor and Socrates were then held above all others for wisdom, and Virgil was widely considered the greatest poet of all-time; it is thus odd that anyone would consider them poor choices to compare Shakespeare to. Aside from that, what Virgil-level works other than Shakespeare’s could the lines have been referring to? Conclusion: the actor/poet and the Stratford man shared not only a name but the vocation of writing.
A lesser piece of evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford was a writer is a 1607 record from the Stationers Registry that states: “26 Novembris. Nathanial Butter John Busby. Entred for their Copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Thwardens A booke called. Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Backsyde vjd.” By attaching the honorific, “Master,” to the author of Lear, the entry identified him as the Stratford man, the only Shakespeare then who was a gentleman.
George Buck, one of those who signed the entry, thus in effect testifying that Mr. Shakespeare was an author, personally knew the latter, by the way, which strengthens this piece of evidence. According to notes in Buck’s hand, he had once consulted Shakespeare about the authorship of a play called George a Greene.
Similarly, when Edmund Howes published a list of “Our moderne, and present excellent Poets” in John Stow’s Annales in 1615, he listed the poets “according to their priorities (social rank) as neere I could,” and in the middle of the thirsteen listed, number seven “M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman,” or Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford.
(8) the vocation of acting
There’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford was an actor. Such evidence, needless to say, doesn’t count nearly as much as direct contemporary evidence, but it ought to count something, so I have no qualms about bringing it up, beginning with John Aubrey’s writing in his Brief Lives (around 1680) that Shakespeare of Stratford, “being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting, came to London, I guesse about 18: and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses, and did acte exceedingly well.”
Shakespeare’s first formal biographer (1709), Nicholas Rowe reported of the Stratford man, “Tho’ I have inquir’d, I could never meet with any further account of him than that the top of his performance was the ghost in his own Hamlet.” Rowe made much use of the researches of Thomas Betterton, the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of the time, and a man with a great interest in Shakespeare the man. Much of Betterton’s information came to him through John Lowin and Joseph Taylor, two actors who had been colleagues of Shakespeare and who lived into the Restoration period. According to John Downes, a theatrical prompter at the end of the seventeenth century, these veterans (Lowin and Tayler) brought to the new generation the actual instruction they had received from the dramatist himself of the playing of the parts respectively of Henry VIII and Hamlet.
William Oldys, in his manuscript, Adversaria, now in the British Museum, reports a few further fragments of gossip, the chief of which is that Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert was discovered still living about 1660 and questioned by some actors about his brother. All they got from him was a vague recollection of his having played the part of Adam in As You Like It. But Gilbert died in 1612. Nonetheless, this and the other bits of anecdotal evidence at least confirm that people connected the Stratford man to an acting career (and playwrighting) during his lifetime and long afterward.
There is also his brother Edmund’s having been, apparently, an actor. A record of the burial 31 December 1607 of an “Edmund Shakespeare a player” is extant from St. Saviour’s Church, Southwark, 31 December 1607. A few months earlier, Edmund’s son Edward was buried at St. Giles, near the house where Shakespeare lived with the Mountjoys. His father is called “Edward Shackspeere,” but in a church register containing other errors like calling an Edmund Edward, and no other Shakespeare has been turned up as the possible father. Both father and son probably died of the plague then rampant. The amount of money spent on the seemingly unaffluent actor’s funeral, with “a forenoon knell of the great bell,” and burial inside the church (much more costly than the ringing of a lesser bell, and a grave outside the church) has led many scholars to surmise that Will Shakespeare paid for them. In any event, that William Shakespeare’s brother’s probably acted suggests that acting ran in the family, and that William was an actor, as well.
The strongest evidence that the Stratford man shared the acting vocation with the poet is the previously mentioned bequests in his will of money to buy rings to his “ffellowes John Hemynge Richard Burbage & Henry Cundell xxvj s viij d A peece to buy them Ringes.” Heminges, Burbage, and Condell had been fellow actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s Men with William Shakespeare. This, of course, makes William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon an actor. Unless the entry in the will was a forgery, as many anti-Stratfordians claim. In the PBS/ Frontline exercise in Oxfordian propaganda, Enoch Powell suggested that the entry was there because the Oxfordian hoaxsters needed something to connect “Shakspere” to First Folio editors, Heminges and Condell. With imperfectly concealed contempt for anyone who could fail to see this, Powell pointed out that the entry was interlineated, whereupon the tv camera slowly scanned it, to prove him right. For an opposing view, PBS/Frontline went to perhaps the only person involved in the controversy more imperviously block-headed than Powell, the aged historian A.L. Rowse, whose mouth-twitchingly belligerant retort to this was that Powell didn’t know what he was talking about.
That, of course, was true, but a more persuasive response would have been that: (a) there is no hard evidence whatever to support Powell’s allegation the the interlineation was a forgery; (b) interlineations were common in the wills of the period; (c) it would have been rather difficult for any hoaxsters to get at the will to make such an addition; (d) there are many interlineations in Shakespeare’s will that have no bearing on the authorship controversy, including ring-money bequests to two of Shakespeare’s neighbors as well as the famous bequest of his “second-best bed” to his wife, which suggest that they were mere additions, innocently made to take care of matters inadvertantly overlooked in the previous draft of the will; (e) there is much other documentary evidence connecting Heminges, Condell and Burbage to Shakespeare, so no spurious interlineation would have been necessary; and (f) it would have been idiotic for someone just wanting to provide a link between Shakespeare and three actors to have risked serious trouble with the authorities by illegally tampering with a document he had no reason to believe anyone later would ever bother to look at (since the document would be put away somewhere in the Stratford courthouse with the town’s other legal records). If the object was falsely to make the Stratford man seem Shakespeare the poet, why not instead add something like “to my ffellows Henrie Condell I leave ye luckie penne I usd to compose the plai concernyng ye Moor,” to really pin it down?
Or, for that matter, why would they have bothered with Shakespeare’s will at all (except perhaps to dispose of it the way, according to most anti-Stratfordians, they got rid of so much of the other evidence of Shakespeare’s having been an ordinary fellow) when they need only have paid Jonson or some other writer to claim in print to have observed Will Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in the actual act of writing Hamlet? There is thus no reason for any mentally-healthy person to doubt the validity of Shakespeare of Stratford’s will in establishing him as an actor.
The final piece of evidence I have that the Stratford man was an actor is the record previously mentioned from the Heralds’ College, which shows that someone named Shakespeare was an actor. But it also shows that this Shakespeare was of Stratford-upon-Avon. That’s because the coat of arms shown is known to be Shakespeare of Stratford’s (and is depicted on his monument). What happened was that Peter Brooke, the York Herald, officially complained in 1602 that Sir William Dethick, the Garter King-of-Arms, had awarded arms to undeserving low-lifes. Shakespeare was fourth on the list that Brooke made up of such low-lifes, with a sketch of each one’s coat of arms, including Shakespeare’s, and the note about Shakespeare “ye player” on it.
Needless to say, the anti-Stratfordians can’t let this go by without a fight. One of them surprised me some years ago when I was just beginning to consider the authorship question in depth by claiming that the Shakespeare referred to was Will’s brother Edmund. This is hard to credit considering Edmund was only around 20 at the time, and apparently quite obscure at his death five years later. And why would the herald describe Edmund Shakespeare without a first name as the player, as though no other acting Shakespeare existed—as much evidence makes near-certain was not the case? The position of the anti-Stratfordians here would (I guess) be that Edmund was an actor, William of some other Shakespeare family another actor, and William Shakespeare the writer a third person—or acting under his pen-name. The result, either way, would be two actors named Shakespeare, which means the herald should have written, “Shakespear a Player.”
Another anti-Stratfordian argument almost too dense to consider is that Brooke looked at the coats of arms for the Shakespeares, remembered that there was some actor named Shakespeare, figured he was the head of the Shakespeare family, and scribbled “Shakespear ye actor” under his sketch of the coat of arms, never looking into it further. But Brooke would not very likely have challenged the validity of the grant of a coat of arms without having done a little more than that. Moreover, had he heard enough about Shakespeare the actor to know he was the actor rather than just an actor, it’s hard to believe he would not have heard enough about him to know his name was not John but William. He would have had to have known something about John, too.
It should surprise no one that, in view of the weakness of the preceding arguments against the York document’s making Shakespeare of Stratford an actor, the craftiest of the anti-Stratfordians have suggested that the copy of this document, which is all we have, does not exactly reproduce the original. Diana Price (author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography), in her caption for a reproduction of the document, says part of the copy “may be an eighteenth-century fabrication.” She asks us to “(n)otice that the handwriting under the Shakspere (sic) arms (which says, ‘Shakespear ye Player/ by Garter’) differs from that on the rest of the page.” It is true that at first glance it does—though it is odd, if it was added after the accurate copy was made, that there was room enough between the arms and the three or four comments below it to fit the extra comment in. At second glance, Price’s innuendo becomes revealed for what it is, for one realizes that “Shakespear ye Player/ by Garter” was printed; all else was in cursive. The individual letters of the printed part and of the cursive all match quite nicely except for the additions to the letters of the cursive that allow them to connect with other letters.
So it is no surprise that, as Matus tells us but Price does not, that these texts have been identified as being in the hand of Peter Le Neve. Le Neve was the much-respected officer of the college of arms in whose library it surfaced. No second person surreptitiously added the reference to Shakespeare.
Price has one futher argument: she says that since “the grant application, the complaint, and the subsequent defense all related to John (Shakespeare)’s qualifications, not William’s,” the York Herald would more likely have written, ‘Shakespear ye glover.’ What she fails to recognize, needless to say, is that the York herald wanted to defame the Shakespeare family as much as possible, and actors were considered significantly lowlier than glovers.
In any case, Irvin Matus, in his Shakespeare-affirming book, Shakespeare in Fact, argues persuasively that Le Neve copied the record, and that “it is not credible that (he) would have wanted anything for his own collection but a faithful rendition of a document in the muniments of the College of Arms, just as it is not credible that a document from the college had been altered.” Conclusion: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon not only had a name in common with William Shakespeare the actor/poet, but a vocation.
(9) social status
In 1596 Will’s father, John Shakespeare, was granted a coat of arms. This made him and Will gentlemen, thus qualifying them to be addressed as “Mr.” The poet/actor Shakespeare then occasionally became referred to in print with the “Mr.” honorific, as he never had been before that date. Hence we find him five times referred to as “Mr. Shakspeare” (with or without the final e) in The Returne from Parnassus, Part I (1599); as “master Shakespere” in a Stationer’s Registry entry for Henry the Fourth, Part Two and Much Ado About Nothing (23 August 1600); as “Master William Shakespeare” in the Stationer’s Register entry in 1607 concerning Lear I already described; as “M. William Shak-speare” on the title page of, and again as a head title in, the first quarto of King Lear (1608); as “Mr. Will: Shake-speare” in John Davies of Hereford’s The Scourge of Folly (1610); as “M. Shake-speare” in John Webster’s “Epistle,” which appeared in his The White Devil (1612); and at least five more times before the First Folio came out in 1623 with “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies” on its title-page. Note well that after 1601, when John Shakespeare died, no one named “Shakespeare” except William was entitled to be called “Master.” Ergo, not only did Shakespeare of Stratford have a surname and status of gentleman in common with William Shakespeare the actor/poet, but it was a combination of shared items no other two people in the world at the time shared.
(10) a monument
The poem in the First Folio by Leonard Digges already mentioned is direct evidence that the Stratford man and the poet both had a monument in Stratford. Here it is in its entirety:
To the Memorie of the deceased Author Maister W. Shakespeare Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellowes giue The world thy Workes: they Workes, by which, outliue Thy tombe, thy name must: when that stone is rent, And Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment, Here we aliue shall view thee still. This Booke, When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke Fresh to all Ages: when Posteritie Shall loathe what’s new, thinke all is prodegie That is not Shake-speares: eu’ry Line, each Verse, Here shall reuive, redeeme thee from thy Herse. Nor Fire, nor cankring Age, as Naso said, Of his, thy wit-fraught Booke shall once inuade. Nor shall I e’er beleeve, or thinke thee dead (Though misst) untill our bankrupt Stage be sped (Impossible) with some new strain t’ out-do Passions of Juliet and her Romeo; Or till I heare a Scene more nobly take, Then when thy half-Sword parlying Romans spake, Till these, till any of thy Volumes rest Shall with more fire, more feeling be expresst, Be sure, our Shake-speare, thou canst neuer dye, But crown’d with Lawrell, liue eternally.
The pertinent line is the one referring directly to the poet Shakespeare’s Stratford monument. That the one monument in Stratford we’re aware of that’s to a William Shakespeare was put up in honor of the Stratford man is, as we have seen, close to proven by the latter’s death date, which is inscribed on it. Conclusion: the actor/poet and the Stratford man shared not only a name but a monument in Stratford. As I’ve mentioned previously but deem worth repeating is that this monument is in the church that just about all the townspeople of Stratford were required to attend weekly, so its inscription is far better documentary evidence than a page in a book or a letter because visible to just about everyone, so much more likely to be debunked if false than conventional documentary evidence. But no one is on record as saying it was not to the Stratford man, and some are on record as saying that it was to him. And with that, my central argument for Shakespeare as Shakespeare is done.
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Next Chapter here.
