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William Shakespeare the playwright's monument
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Ever since I wrote
an article for the Spectator, responding to Jodi Picoult’s novel,
By Any Other Name, which suggests (somewhat surprisingly) that a woman called Emilia Lanier actually had a hand in the plays of William Shakespeare’s, I’ve found myself becoming more and more interested in the world of Shakespeare deniers. That a novelist with such a large following should fall prey to this kind of unevidenced theory is bad enough - we hardly know who Emilia Lanier was, let alone that she ever even met Shakespeare; that the London Library should host Elizabeth Winkler and Derek Jacobi, two people who believe that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, was somehow worse. (For the purposes of this article I am going to use the spelling Shakespeare, which has been ably demonstrated by
David Kathman as having been the most common spelling of the name at Will's time, and also has the benefit of being the one everyone recognises.)
One of the things that has been bothering me is: why? It seems to have become an emotional issue, unlike any other. Why do people think this way? And why is it only William Shakespeare? Why not any other poet, playwright or novelist? We have very little evidence about Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, and hardly any manuscripts that bear his name. For some people like Thomas Malory, there are a couple of potential candidates to be the writer of the
Morte Darthur: yet no sinister conspiracy is mooted. Dipping a toe into this world has led me into some quite strange places: one person announced, in a piece on
The Sceptic's website, that I couldn't possibly know as much about Shakespeare as the late Shakespeare denier Alexander Waugh (whom, incidentally, I knew and admired), since he was the son and grandson of two writers. (If we're going to play that fairly arbitrary game: Alexander Waugh studied music at university; I read Classics and English, and my family is highly literary, with writers, academics, priests and scholars going back generations: I have one of my gt-gt-gt grandfather's copies of Shakespeare, as well as my grandfather's. I also happen to have gone to Evelyn Waugh's school, Lancing, and I worked for
Literary Review, where Auberon Waugh had been editor. Enough Waugh connections for you?
The Sceptic writer, it seems, is making the same argument as Shakespeare deniers do about Shakespeare.)
Let's start with the basics. Most Shakespeare denialists begin with the premise that a glover’s son from Stratford upon Avon “couldn’t possibly” have had the education or knowledge to write such a glitteringly wonderful series of plays: it must have been an aristocrat. Never mind the snobbery involved, or the fact that large parts of his plays are not about aristocrats (Merry Wives of Windsor, anyone?) this also ignores several things. Firstly, the background of literally every single other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwright. Ben Jonson’s father was a bricklayer; John Webster’s a carriage maker; Christopher Marlowe’s a shoemaker, and so on. Playwrighting was clearly an occupation of the middle classes; Francis Beaumont and Cyril Tourneur are the only ones with much pretence to gentility by blood; John Fletcher came from a family of clerics.
Secondly, by insisting that only an aristocrat with knowledge of the court could have written Hamlet, it discounts several things: both imaginative responses, and the fact that by relying on such an argument, you're also saying that an aristocrat couldn't have written, say, the schoolmaster scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen. (This is also leaving aside the facts that Shakespeare didn't actually write very accurately about court scenes, or the fact that he did have some experience of court life, as he was a player for King James. These two facts can exist in tandem: he wasn't directly copying what he saw.) This argument links education with imagination, as if only a certain level of education would allow a writer to be inventive, and that invention would be limited to a direct copy of the experience. And yet it’s also demonstrably easy to demonstrate that Will Shakespeare, as the son of a civic worthy - as John Shakespeare was, without a shadow of doubt - would have had the same grammar school education as every other boy in the country. We know what was on the syllabus; we know what he would have read: we can match the reading to the plays; we know that Shakespeare didn't go to university, unlike Christopher Marlowe, but like John Webster.
Even if you start from Shakespeare’s plays and work back, the evidence
that he was educated is there: he had about the level of Classical
knowledge that you would expect someone to have who went to a grammar
school; but he’s not quite as self-consciously intellectual as, say, Marlowe. All it takes is reading the
plays side by side; but few in the game seem to want to do this.
Deniers
also seem unable to countenance that there was a very busy literary
world in the Elizabethan / Jacobean period: you could buy books from the
market, you could borrow them, you could lend them. We also know that Shakespeare visited Oxford, where he undoubtedly would
have encountered a stimulating intellectual environment, and might well have had access to the Bodleian. (But deniers
don't like the idea of an autodidact.) One of Shakespeare's Stratford friends was even a bookseller in London.
It’s clear from other Jacobean playwrights that they all had access
to a number of texts, some very erudite indeed - Thomas Dekker, for example, who after his
release from prison was at work on numerous plays, which required a
number of different sources. When I posited this evidence, the answer I was given by a denier was that Dekker must have been a front too. It seems that, like a packet of Pringles, once you pop, you can’t stop. The
idea that any working playwright was a front for someone else is, well, there’s
no other word for it: ridiculous.
Some say that it wasn’t done for aristocrats to put their name on
artistic work: which would have been news to Sir Philip Sidney, and also
to the Earl of Oxford himself, who was quite happily mentioned by
his contemporary Francis Meres as a good writer of comedy. This assumption is simply
that: an assumption, with no historical or documentary basis, which doesn't stand up in the slightest. And yet
this doesn’t seem to bother the deniers either.
To return to what we know of the life. John Shakespeare was heavily involved in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, as we know from records; he would have had a hand in the running of the grammar school there. In fact, once you situate Will Shakespeare within his time, it becomes almost impossible to believe that he wasn’t the poet and playwright. He had a father, mother, siblings, children: one of his grandsons was given the first name Shakespeare, as was another Hart relative; his brother, Edmund, came up to London to become a player.
If you had a famous playwright in the family, you’d probably want to name your child after him, especially if the surname was in danger of dying out, as Shakespeare had no male line descendents; if you had an older brother who’d spectacularly made it in the theatre world, you’d probably want to follow him into it. (Note that I say “probably” here, because of course I have no direct evidence for the motivations behind these events: but one of the things that Shakespeare deniers do is ignore probability based on evidence, in favour of wild surmise.) I can say this with a degree of certainty, because that is where the evidence points. Shakespeare, like anyone else, existed within a complex web of business and family relationships. If you are positing that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, then that's a whole lot of people who have to be in the know: and that's a whole lot of evidence, also, that has mysteriously vanished.
What’s also interesting is that as we discover more about authorial
co-operation in the Bankside theatres, the case for a mysterious
original hand entirely evaporates. You could - just about, if you had never read
the plays thoughtfully, or looked at the documentary evidence - believe
that one person wrote the plays in secret, and then had them delivered
over decades to a theatre where Shakespeare pretended they were his.
(Over decades? Give me a break. Once or twice would have been hard
enough to manage.) But once we understand that Shakespeare worked with
others - with the actors, for whom he wrote specific parts; with his
fellows in his playing company, with whom he made business decisions
about what plays to put on (such as King Lear, which was a
version of a previous hit, King Leir); and with other playwrights, then
it becomes much harder to believe in this hidden hand.
Shakespeare would
have been working in the same room as his collaborators: it’s difficult to
believe that the playwrights with whom he was working on a close, daily basis, were all
somehow privy to a mysterious secret that Shakespeare wasn’t who he said he
was. If he couldn't write, why was he in the theatre in the first place? What happened when they needed a piece or a scene rewritten quickly? These questions never seem to bother deniers.
These things should kill off any doubt stone dead. But somehow, they don't. The deniers bring up the “documentary gap”, whilst oblivious to the glaring documentary gap in their own theories. For this theory I blame Mark Twain, of whom I was quite fond until I realised how damaging he had been: he wondered why Shakespeare had not left any letters behind. Unfortunately, Mark Twain didn’t know anything about archives or Elizabethan history, or how documents survive through time. We hardly have any letters from any playwrights. There are "documentary gaps" for every single playwright of the period.
In truth, there isn't much of a "documentary gap" at all when it comes to Shakespare, and we have a lot of documents, alongside other evidence, that demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Shakespeare was exactly who everyone said he was. What we don't have is any documents that suggest a conspiracy, and I'll come to that later.
Will Shakespeare's father’s life is exceptionally well documented, and we know that dozens of players visited Stratford in Will’s childhood. We have his will, dictated on his deathbed (hence the shaky signatures, which Lena Cowen Orlin suggests were because he was writing leaning on a cushion); we have the evidence his friends and fellows in his acting company, and of people who saw the plays and talked about them. We have a document showing he was given red cloth (as a player) by King James. We have a letter to him from a relative. We have the grant of arms that he petitioned for his father. We have his monument in the Stratford church, and we have the reactions to his death from his friends and fellows (whom he left money with which to buy remembrance rings). We have much more, which I will not enumerate here, but which is all available to look at in the Folger Library.
And that’s even setting aside the evidence that stares us in the face - the fact that it’s William Shakespeare's name on the poems and the plays, and not anybody else's. There is no reason to posit that Will Shakespeare was lying, that the printers and editors were lying, or that the Stationers’ Guild were lying when they wrote down his name in their register, just as there is no reason to believe that they were lying about Webster, Dekker or Middleton.
So let's entertain the idea, for a minute, that there was in fact a conspiracy to hide the "real" identity of the works of William Shakespeare, even if we can't think of a plausible reason for this. Think of the number of people who would have to be involved in it: his family; his landlady; his colleagues; the players in the companies; his fellow playwrights; the people he knew in Stratford and London. That's just on his side.
If there had been an aristocrat involved, there would have been liveried servants passing to and fro all the time, who would have been noted. And every single one of these people would have had a very good and concrete reason for letting this apparent secret slip. Had there been a conspiracy, there would have been evidence of it, since people involved in conspiracies tended to write letters to each other (think of the letter in the Gunpowder Plot that was mercifully discovered), and such a letter would have had immense value and thus, on the balance of probability, given its apparently earth-shaking contents, would have been kept, whereas a letter from Will Shakespeare about his tithe lands would have gone the way of all other letters. Given the cutthroat relationships of the theatres with each other, it would have been golddust for a rival company to uncover that Shakespeare was a front. In other words, had there been such a conspiracy, we would have known by now. But all that happens is that more research and more scholarship links William Shakespeare, the boy born in Stratford, with the plays and poems that bear his name.
Shakespeare deniers refuse to believe entirely probable things about William Shakespeare, such as that he went to grammar school, or that he was able to conduct business transactions at the same time as writing plays; but they insist that their preferred candidates must have done impossible things in order for their theories to stand up. Perhaps the most outrageous of these is the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, before Shakespeare had written several of his final plays, including King Lear. The response to this, I was amazed to discover, is that the Earl of Oxford must have written King Lear before he died, along with all the other subsequent manuscripts, and he left it lying around to be performed after his death.
So once more: what’s more probable? That a time travelling Earl, whose letters we do have, and whose upbringing, accent, handwriting, and vocabulary range were entirely different from Shakespeare’s, wrote King Lear several years before it was put on, even despite the play’s many direct contemporary relevances to 1609? Or that Will Shakespeare, the well known playwright, actor and poet, responding to demands from the theatre and his fellows, saw a good thing in King Leir, noted the relevance of it to the recent union of Scotland and England, and added his own particular brand of tragic art to the ending?
In truth, to return to my original question: I wonder why would you take away a man’s singular and well-attested artistic and dramatic achievement, and replace it with someone else’s, on the basis of nothing more than assumptions which, when examined, fall away like thistledown?
I wish I knew the answer to that question, but I fear it will never come. In the meantime, I’m certainly going to continue to work to promote documentary evidence, historical accuracy, and rigorous scholarship in everything that has to do with the Stratford playwright, William Shakespeare.
Those wishing to discover more: read
The Private Life of William Shakespeare by Lena Cowen Orlin
Contested Will by James Shapiro
