POETICKS

AN OVERVIEW OF THE AUTHORSHIP CONTROVERSY

For the first 150 years or so following the death of William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in 1616, it seems to have been taken for granted that he was the author of the works credited to him. Certainly no record from those years has ever been found to indicate otherwise. Then, in 1769, a book by the actor David Garrick’s friend Henry Lawrence called Life and Adventures of Common Sense appeared. An allegory, this work follows an Elizabethan character named Common Sense on his travels through England with his friends Wit, Genius and Humour. Along the way they run into a country rogue who steals various magical tools from them that enable him to write a series of brilliant plays. The rogue’s name, needless to say, is Shakespeare. His victims decide to remain silent about his thefts in order not to rob his country of “its greatest ornament.”

17 years later another book appeared that was slightly relevant to the authorship question: The Story of the Learned Pig. Its not-too-trustworthy hero, the pig of its title, claimed to have had many previous lives. In one of them he did odd jobs for Shakespeare’s company such as holding horses, and writing Shakespeare’s best plays for him.

Neither of these books is a serious attack on Stratfordian beliefs. The first is merely a playful description of Shakespeare as having had common sense, wit, genius and humor. The second attempts to deflate bardolatry more than anything else—in the few of its pages that have anything to do with Shakespeare. But to those who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was responsible for The Oeuvre they indicate that even two centuries ago there was suspicion concerning its authorship.

A more plausible indicator of such suspicion was the Stratford-based research around the time of the publication of The Story of the Learned Pig said to have been carried out by James Wilmot, a friend of both Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. What he learned convinced Wilmot that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays—or so he told James Corton Cowell (according to Cowell) years later when the latter was gathering material for a talk on Shakespeare’s life he was to give to the Ipswich Philosophic Society. Wilmot never let anyone see the records of his research, and had all his papers burned upon his death. But he told Cowell that Francis Bacon was the true author of The Oeuvre. That the Stratfordian could not have written it was proven, for him, by the inability of the Stratford townsfolk Wilmot interviewed (a century-and-a-half after Shakespeare’s death) to tell him a single thing about the poet.

But I am not being fair to Wilmot. That he was unable to find any Shakespearean manuscripts in Stratford, or books from the library of Shakespeare, also contributed to his stand. And there was the problem of the knowledge revealed in the plays (regarding, for instance, the circulation of the blood), which seemed to him beyond the Stratford man’s reach. Moreover, Wilmot discovered a host of fascinating local legends and folk tales in Stratford that went back to Shakespeare’s day, like one about pancakes falling out of the sky. None of these legends and tales showed up in Shakespeare’s plays, as one might have expected (according to Wilmot). In short, Wilmot’s findings were not completely worthless, but–except for Cowell–he had no disciples, and Cowell didn’t even have one disciple, for he swore the Ipswich Philosophic Society to silence before revealing what he’d found out from Wilmot (in 1805). That silence wasn’t broken until around 1930, when the texts of the two talks Cowell gave about Wilmot’s research were discovered by a Baconian–which proved to many an anti-Stratfordian how mortally fearful our ancestors were of revealing . . . The Truth.

Or so the story goes.  Unfortunately for the anti-Stratfordians, though, later research spoiled things.   Paul Altrocchi and Daniel Wright (both Oxfordians, but scholars as well–which is possible!) found no records of an “Ipswich Philosophical Society.  They also discovered several instances of anachronistic vocabulary in the Wilmot papers to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt  that the whole affair was a hoax. 

Ergo, it was actually 51 years after The Story of Learned Pig before anyone else had anything anti-Stratfordian to say in print.  It was only someone fictitious, though, a character in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1837 novel, Venetia, who claimed that Shakespeare was just an adaptor of other men’s work: “a botcher up of old plays.” But that, of course, is not saying he wasn’t responsible for The Oeuvre, just that he wasn’t as original as he might have been—according to this one fictional character.

Eleven years later, Joseph C. Hart, New York lawyer, writer, colonel, yachtsman, speculated in a memoir that late in the seventeenth century, the author of the Shakespearean plays having been forgotten, the actor Betterton and the writer Rowe found a bunch of anonymous plays and decided to say they were by Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself, according to Hart, “grew up in ignorance and viciousness and became a common poacher. And the latter title, in literary matters, he carried to his grave.” Shakespeare was, in short, a fraud. But he did contribute to the plays—by adding the lewd bits.

Along the way, Hart quoted someone unnamed of his own era who spoke of the “singular and unaccountable mystery . . . attached to Shakespeare’s private life,” and how “almost every document concerning him has either been destroyed or still remains in obscurity.” Meanwhile, in 1852, an anonymous article appeared in an Edinburgh journal whose author was bothered, like so many others, by the wide contrast of Shakespeare’s known life with the life the creator of such exalted masterpieces must have led, and by the lack of letters and manuscripts by Shakespeare, and scarcity of references to him by contemporaries. For instance, if Southampton knew Shakespeare, why had Raleigh, Spenser and Bacon “ignored his acquaintance?” The writer suggested that Shakespeare bought plays from some starving playwright and passed them off as his own. He claimed not to think much of his hypothesis but considered it at least as valid as the idea that Shakespeare himself wrote the plays.

It was at that juncture that Delia Bacon entered the scene (with encouragement from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson). In magazine articles of 1856 and a book the following year, she attributed Shakespeare’s plays to a committee which included Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, and was led by Francis Bacon (who was not, it ought to be stressed, a relation of hers). Her thought was pretty confused but she knew that “the illiterate man who kept the theatre” could never have written the Shakespearean plays. She was committed to a mental institution not long after her book was published.

That same year William Henry Smith’s Bacon and Shakespeare came out. He, too, was disturbed by the lack of manuscripts. He couldn’t understand how Shakespeare could have “allowed” inferior versions of his plays to have been published in his name. He argued that Shakespeare of Stratford was a “poor player” who could never have written the plays, pointing out that he never claimed the plays as his own. For him, a telling clue was that Bacon never referred to Shakespeare in print. Smith also found parallels between apothegms in Bacon’s notebooks and lines in Shakespeare’s plays. It was thus certain to him that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre.

Baconianism seems to have reached its peak in 1892 when Ignatius Donnelly discovered what he (but no sane person since) took to be ciphers in the Shakespearean plays. As decoded by Donnelly, the ciphers revealed Francis Bacon as The True Author. In a Shakespeare-versus-Bacon debate that a leading publication of the time subsequently sponsored, a jury came out 20 for Shakespeare, 2 for composite authorship, 2 for neither of the two, and 1 for Bacon.

The next man credited with The Ouevre had two things going for him: he was a proven genius as a playwright, and he had a motive for concealing his authorship that makes sense. I’m alluding, of course, to Christopher Marlowe. In 1593 he was killed in a tavern brawl, or the equivalent, according to the official documents, and at the time was possibly in mortal trouble with the authorities (as–again, possibly–a loudly out-of-the-closet anti-Christian homosexual and advocate of counterfeiting—or one thought to be). His circumstances would thus have made his pretending to be killed and then going abroad, and continuing his vocation under an assumed name, a wise course of action. He was brought into the controversy in 1895 by a San Francisco attorney, William G. Ziegler, in a book called, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. Calvin Hoffman, another American, resuscitated the theory in 1955 with The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare.

At some point or another, William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and other noblemen (and women) have been put forward as the true Shakespeare, but none of them has gotten much backing (in the English-speaking world, at any rate)—except for Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. His discoverer was an English school-teacher named John Thomas Looney who in 1920 announced his theory in a book called “Shakespeare” Identified. In the words of Charlton Ogburn, his main disciple, Looney “did what no one had done before. He approached the quest for the author systematically, and with a completely open mind.” His procedure was to study the plays and poems and make a list of the traits their author must have had (such as membership in the higher aristocracy)—none of which the Stratford man happened to have–and examine the lives of the time’s nobles to find one who did have them. Looney has since been updated and amplified by Ogburn, whose views are now dominant among the anti-Stratfordians.

Hundreds of others have written vigorously anti-Stratfordian articles and books. Ogburn, unsurprisingly, considered this to be evidence of “the extraordinary proportions of the objection to Shakespearean Orthodoxy,” but hundreds of articles and books have been written to disprove Darwin’s theory of natural selection or to prove the existence of ghosts, too, so there seems little reason to take Ogburn’s observation seriously. Ogburn was also impressed by the quality of the people on his side of the question, for they have included (so anti-Stratfordians maintain) Whittier, Whitman, Lord Palmerston, Henry James, Bismarck, Mark Twain, Galsworthy, Freud, Chaplin, and many others.

These famous people contributed no direct evidence to support their view. Nor did they offer original reasons for their candidate or against Shakespeare or ever exhibit any talent for serious historical research. They are thus irrelevant (as are the at least equally large number of big names on the Stratfordian side who contribute nothing to the debate but invective and the party line).

Unfortunately, for a long time, few knowledgeable Shakespeareans deigned to argue seriously with the opponents of Shakespeare, hiding in the premise that to argue with them was to dignify them, which they didn’t deserve. This is the way all estabniks treat the ideas of those seeking to overthrow them. It is not only a disservice to the search for truth, but futile even for status-protection in the long-term. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the inflexibility of most anti-Stratfordians, and the frivolousness of so many of their arguments make it generally unprofitable to spend much time with them. A few valiant Stratfordians have nevertheless gone to the front lines. J. M. Robertson, for example, took all the passages in Shakespeare’s plays that had to do with the law, however faintly, and compared them to similar passages in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. He concluded that the use of legal terminology and ideas was standard for Elizabethan playwrights and rejected the anti-Stratfordian notion that only a lawyer could have written the Shakespearean plays.

Milward Martin attacked the over-all anti-Stratfordian point-of-view with dispatch in his not-yet-answered Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? (to which Ogburn referred but once in his major, very thick pro-Oxford tome—to dispute one trivial point of Martin’s about the meaning of something Francis Beaumont wrote to Jonson about Shakespeare). Since then—due probably to Ogburn’s book, a PBS Frontline “documentary” propagandizing for Oxford, and scattered superficial discussions of the question in mainstream magazines like The Smithsonian and The New Yorker (some years prior to the outburst of the even more superficial, and less responsible articles mentioned in the Preface)—several other Shakespeare-Affirmers have joined Martin against the heretics. Chief among them have been Irvin Matus, who tackled Oxfordianism in his book, Shakespeare, In Fact, the team of Terry Ross and David Kathman, who for many years beginning on 23 April 1996 combatted a wide variety of anti-Stratfordian notions at their Website at http:\www. shakespeareauthorship.com, and Alan Nelson, at his Website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson. As for me, I’ve been arguing in letters with isolated anti-Stratfordians since the middle eighties, even managing to get two letters into their publications. Of late, I’ve been active at an Internet newsgroup called humanities.lit. authors.shakespeare, site of a free-for-all between my side and anti-Stratfordians of various stripes, several of whom I’ll be introducing you to in this book.

So far as I know, no established Shakespearean scholar has ever agreed with the heretics’ position. It would be hard for one to do so, for the hard evidence is about as conclusive as historic evidence can be that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It begins with the monument put up to him in Stratford’s main church between his death and 1623, when it was referred to in the First Folio, the famous first collection of his plays. The monument’s inscription clearly states that he was a writer, referring to “all that he hath writt.” It also compares him to Virgil for art, and places him on Mount Olympus. No other person of the time who used the name “Shakespeare” is known to have been a writer. It therefore follows that he is by far the most likely person such contemporaries of his as Francis Meres, John Webster and Richard Barnfield meant when they spoke of the poet “Shakespeare,” and that the name, “Shakespeare,” on various published plays was almost certainly his—unless the inscription was fraudulent, for which there is no evidence, or mistaken, which seems absurd considering that the inscription was in the most public (and revered) place in the poet’s hometown where all his friends, relatives and acquaintances could see it.

We also have documentary evidence that makes Shakespeare of Stratford Shakespeare the actor. Two records are central. One is the Stratford man’s will, in which he bequeathed money for memorial rings to three actors, referring to them as his “fellowes.” The other is a document from the Herald’s Office from about 1600 depicting the Stratford Shakespeare family’s coat of arms, and labeled, “Shakespear, ye player.” Another clump of documentary evidence makes Shakespeare the actor Shakespeare the poet. Among the records confirming this are the First Folio, which lists Shakespeare as the leading player in his own works, and two poems by John Davies that indicate the poet acted. Hence, the two clumps together firmly establish the Stratford man as the poet (Stratford Shakespeare = Actor Shakespeare; Actor Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare; ergo, Stratford Shakespeare = Poet Shakespeare).

There is much other evidence that corroborates this. It includes the testimony of Ben Jonson in the First Folio, in recorded conversations with William Drummond, and in Jonson’s journal, Timber. Even more telling, though often overlooked, is the engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio, which resembles the bust of Shakespeare that is part of his Stratford monument—and is definitely not a likeness of any other known writer of the time. On par with that is a poem to Shakespeare by William Basse, circulating in manuscript before 1623, which had a note attached to it when published in 1633 stating that Shakespeare had died in April of 1616, as the Stratford man was known to have.

All the surviving anecdotal evidence assumes William Shakespeare was a poet/playwright, and one would expect so uncensored a source to at least hint of a great hoax, had there been one. Not only that, but all the other authorship candidates with any kind of backing either died before the dates of records showing Shakespeare still living, or were alive after the dates of records showing Shakespeare no longer living.

Against this, the doubters have only four weapons:

(1) their suspicions of fraud, such as their claim that the monument was actually put up for Shakespeare’s father and decades later changed when Stratford started trying to lure literary tourists to their town, even though Leonard Digges mentions Shakespeare’s “Stratford monument” in his poem for the First Folio;

(2) their ability to find fault with any bit of evidence, such as the comparison of Shakespeare to Virgil, a poet, on his monument (according to them, it ought to have been to Sophocles or some other ancient playwright, not to Virgil, who wrote no plays);

(3) their invulnerable conviction that the commoner from Stratford lacked the education and background to have written the (incredibly erudite) plays he was said to have; and

(4) their certainty that there are authorship-confirming parallels between the events Shakespeare described in his writings and various events in the life of whatever man they’re backing—but not in Shakespeare’s. (That one anti-Stratfordian can find as many such parallels in Lord X’s life as another finds in Lord Y’s life doesn’t seem to faze them.)

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve just said should be enough to convince any rational person that Shakespeare was the poet/playwright he has always been said to have been. Partly because the anti-Stratfordians will complain that I’ve left out their best arguments, but more to show in greater detail their manner of (dysfunctional) reasoning, I will now re-argue my position for the next ten (!) chapters. Even then, I will probably miss many of the other side’s arguments. I do hope to cover all their even slightly sane ones, however.

My extended argument begins with Shakespeare’s name.

Next Chapter here.
.