Who Was Shakespeare?

It is perhaps worth mentioning that there is a long history of books purporting to establish that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays; that many of these books (like James and Rubinstein’s) get favorable press, have approving prefaces written by well-known Shakespearean actors or directors, and marshal circumstantial evidence in a seemingly compelling way; that all of these books (so far) have proven to ignore evidence that decisively contradicts their theses, and that most Shakespeare scholars regard this genre in the way most evolutionary biologists regard intelligent design.

And as with the Oxfordians, I imagine we will see a whole host of telling circumstancial evidence, none of which will really explain why a well-known actor and producer* like Billy Shakes got the credit for the plays. Neville was a participant in the Essex rebellion, but claiming authorship of The Comedy of Errors was too controversial? And the “formal education” line has been dusted off again.

The amusement value in these things really goes down when we don’t have acrostics to play with.

* Oh, excuse me. “Grain merchant”.

The scene, somewhere in London in the late 16th century

Oxford : That speech sucks, kit. Lemme work on it.

Neville : I’ve got this idea for a plot for the next one …

Marlowe : ‘This Flora new who needs no other sun’ … ‘You are my sun, light up my envious moon’ … nahhh, needs one less syllable

Neville : Thats not bad as a start though

De Vere : We need more comedy dammit. Gotta have laugh lines. Liz loves laugh lines.

Bacon : Comedy’s out. We need more tragedy.

Marlowe : Dammit, I’m out of tobacco. Anyone got a pouch ?

I wonder if future generations will argue over who wrote Spielberg’s films, and if that debate will miss the point as spectacularly as the authorship debate does.

Could you expand on this? It sounds interesting but I’m not sure quite what you mean.

Tracing back Steve’s links, I see that Prof Rubinstein harbours some familiar doubts about evolution. Given that the Prof is disposed to recycle nonsense from outside his area of expertise, one suspects his scholarly objectivity.

And before anyone gets going about bad _ad hominem_ arguments, I should note that in all of these cases there are many many things one could say on all sides of a given question, and non-experts have to defer to some extent to experts in picking out what is most salient. That means having some confidence that the person putting forward the view is acting in good faith. And I’m not particularly disposed to offer such charity to people who recycle the creationist playbook. So I now suspect there’s some fairly obvious reason why the Neville theory can’t be true, and that the authors of this book are rather declining to tell us what it might be. Given all the publicity there may well be an expert appearing in the press sooner or later to tell us what it is.

John Thomas Looney. The code grows more involved.

Professor Rubinstein has recently written three articles in History Today on subjects debated by “amateur historians” but ignored by academics, on the assassination of President Kennedy, the identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’ and the Shakespeare authorship question.

I hear suspicious things about that Rev. Dodgson, and nobody has ever been able to pin down where Thomas Pynchon was on that fateful day in 1963…

(Where’s Edmund Godfrey? I demand more crank attention to the Elizabethan period outside the Globe!)

If you trace which Shakespearean play came out in which year, the location of the plays tends to follow Neville’s movements around the country fairly well.

Yes, Neville was definitely visiting the sea coast of Bohemia in 1611.

isn’t it obvious that shakespeare’s plays were a product of an oral tradition going back generations, that who we call “shakespeare” is actually an amalgam of many folktellers who didn’t have writing…

“I see that Prof Rubinstein harbours some familiar doubts about evolution.”

The reference to the Social Affairs Unit is enough to make serious consideration of the theory unneccessary. TBH I thought the organisation was defunct, as I haven’t heard anything from the ludicrous Digby Anderson for ages.
But no, a trip to their weblog finds opining in the one area I do have some real knowledge in …”During the 1930s, the Deep South was simply awash with females strumming ebulliently on banjos and twelve string guitars, moaning the blues…” and opining ignorantly and totally inaccurately at that.

Part of the objection to William Shakespeare (WS) as the author of the plays under that name is the fact that WS was not a University graduate, yet the plays and poetry are replete with classical allusions and references, and indeed are mostly reworkings of past stories. One explanation for this is that someone with a better formal education wrote the plays (eg, Kit Marlowe). Another explanation is that WS was an autodidact and was very well read.

Indeed, a decade of his life is unaccounted for, and it is quite possible that WS did attend University classes. But not as an enrolled student, prohibited as a member of a Catholic family from attending University officially. And/or, it may be that WS spent some years as the private tutor to a rich Catholic family (perhaps in the North of England), which would also have given him time to read the classics.

Daniel, I’m fully aware of some of the peculiarities of early modern authorship, and I’m certainly willing to accept the ideas that Shakespeare stole rather quite a lot of his drama and that many of his plays were more collaborative than most people make them out to be. Indeed, given the way that seventeenth century drama worked and given the publication history of the First Folio, it seems quite possible that that’s the case. What I’m not willing to do is accept on faith that, say, Cyrus Vance wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and didn’t fess up to it because it was seen as unbecoming for a Secretary of State to write about a two-fisted archaeologist. George Lucas spends all of his time in Northern California and attested work of the Skywalkerian is really bad, whereas Vance is a globetrotter who fought in World War II. And so on. Extraordinary claims, as opposed to mere ordinary claims such as yours and Dave’s, require extraordinary evidence.

As someone with strongish feelings on the authorship question, I just want more amusing conspiracy theories.

Even better! “simply awash”!

Dave has the point exactly right; the evidence is very weak that anyone other than Shakspear of Stratford wrote those plays, but the way the Strafordians go on about it, you would think that he sat down in a hidden cell and wrote every single word of them without talking to anyone else. The connection between Ezra Pound and the Waste Land is weaker than the simple relation “he sat down and wrote the words”, but obviously much stronger than “if Ezra Pound had never been born, the Waste Land would still have been recognisably the same”.

It strikes me as probably not a coincidence that a lot of the people who have very strong views on “The Authorship Question” have quite naive views on what “authorship” really is.

Of course, the category of “Stratfordians” includes an enormous quantity of ordinary scholars of the period. In my experience, most of them have both a strong view on “The Authorship Question” (namely: give it a fucking rest, you damn Oxfordian loons) and a fully sophisticated view on the nature of authorship/authority. In fact, the Elizabethan concept of literary authority — who “owned” a text; how writers, publishers, and readers thought about their relationship to one another and to a text; how norms from manuscript culture did and didn’t transfer in to print culture — is a major active area of research, and has been for quite some time.

That said, I think it’s entirely likely that amateur historians will run into the same kind of confusions with respect to the question of who “authored”, say, Jaws. We are all auteur theorists now.

re: 27. I don’t think Stratfordians are as innocent as all that. The most obvious answer to such questions as the classical illusions, specifics of court life, etc etc is the same explanation as to why some of the odder bits of the Waste Land are there; there’s a Pound figure who does know about these things in detail who put them there.

But in general, people who take strong pro-Shakspear views tend to respond to odd and convoluted theories about how Shakspear of Stratford “couldn’t have possibly known” about this that or the other, by coming up with their own equally convoluted theories about how he actually spent ages in university libraries without ever owning any books or some such. When the obvious answer would be “well, he wouldn’t know about that, but I would suppose that one of his mates told him, probably Marlowe or De Vere”. Stratfordian scholarship isn’t just commonsensical “oh come off it” stuff; there are a lot of people involved who really have a lot of emotional investment in proving that not one single word was even remotely attributable to anyone else.

Arguments from verbal parallels are exactly how it was discovered who wrote Primary Colors, for example.

Don Foster’s work, you mean? The same Don Foster who finally had to admit after ten years that Shakespeare did not, in fact, write an undistinguished elegy?

Neville, unlike Shakespeare, had access to a detailed story of the Bermuda shipwreck of 1609, which seems to be the base of The Tempest.

The authors are confusing The Tempest with The Perfect Storm. The play does not present a detailed account of the shipwreck.

Um, Shakespeare was an actor in and writer for The King’s Men (formerly The Lord Chamberlain’s Men) and regularly performed for James I.

Yes, but that doesn’t really imply intimate knowledge of court life and politics. But then again, neither do the plays: Shakespeare knew about as much about the inner workings of James and Elizabeth’s courts as Coppola knew about the Mafia or Marlowe knew about the career of Tamburlaine or Webster knew about Italian duchesses.

What you really need to know to write terrific drama is how to write good plays. And to know that, it helps to be involved with the theater in some way, which the historical Shakespeare was.

I have always detected a whiff of the old english class demon in the not-Bill arguments. It all seems to come down to you can’t expect us to believe that a yokel from the sticks could write so well, do you?
And as far as classical education goes, my great-grandfather, at the turn of the twentieth century, studied classics, religion, accounting, and spanish literature in a one-room schoolhouse in the Canary Islands. It was the expected curriculum.

“Neville’s ancestors, Plantagenets, are always favourably depicted in the plays.”

Well, no. The only history plays that deal with Plantagenet kings are King John and Richard II. Both are portrayed as incompetent and are ambivalent characters at best.

The remaining history plays deal with the Lancastrians, the Yorkists and the Tudors. If you wanted to stretch a point, you could say that the usurping Henry IV was a Plantagenet on his father’s side.

That doesn’t help the book’s argument, though. HENRY IV depicts its title character as a cold, paranoid man and a controlling father. Henry V is a paragon king, admittedly, but icily ambitious. Henry VI is incompetent.

The dynasty Shakespeare was most concerned to glorify was, of course, the Tudor.

“When Neville was imprisoned in the Tower for his part in Essex’s rebellion, the plays suddenly turn from being light to being sombre.”

That would be 1601, right? Well, Hamlet, certainly one of the gloomier plays, was probably performed first in 1600. Julius Caesar also likely predates the rebellion. Yes, the other great tragedies were written after, but so was Alls Well That Ends Well. So I don’t think this point really holds much water either.

And as for the alleged improbability of Shakespeare’s classical knowledge, it is actually entirely probable that someone of his status, at that time, would get at least a minimal grounding in the classics at school – and what’s to stop him from buying and reading books on his own account? Holinshed, Ovid (in translation) and Plutarch were not at all hard to get hold of…

I can’t think of too many working playwrights and directors who jump on the antiBillum bandwagon

Mark Rylance certainly takes the debate seriously, and he has been rumoured to put on the odd play or two.

what’s to stop him from buying and reading books on his own account?

aye, and having bought them, what’s to stop him leaving them in his will? The answer to the question in 40 is that there is a genuine puzzle as to why no manuscript copies of any of Shakespeare’s works exist. Although as I say, I think that the “Authorship Debate” is orthogonal to a much more interesting debate about authorship in general. Whatever the specific cuts and pastes £ made to the drafts of The Waste Land, there is a larger point that TS Eliot would never have written anything which remotely resembled TWL at all if he hadn’t been in the £ sphere of influence.

aye, and having bought them, what’s to stop him leaving them in his will?

Perhaps, like Thomas Campion and Francis Bacon, Shakespeare was illiterate.

The answer to the question in 40 is that there is a genuine puzzle as to why no manuscript copies of any of Shakespeare’s works exist.

(What about Hand D? Has consensus credited that to Shakespeare yet?)

Similarly, of course, I believe there is a single extant example of Christopher Marlowe’s handwriting. (I’ll happily be corrected if I’m wrong.) It’s not much of a puzzle, Daniel. Intact copies of Elizabethan theatrical manuscripts are very rare.

This really does bear a passing resemblance to the intelligent design debate; you can cherrypick evidence that sounds quite convincing if you want, but academics interested in serious scholarship — operating in their period, unlike Prof. Rubinstein — have studied and generally answered these questions. (I am not one of them, and I don’t claim to have read Honigmann and Brock’s Playhouse Wills, 1558-1642, but shakespeareauthorship.com is a useful resource for this sort of thing; 11 of the 14 playwrights, including Thomas Campion, whose wills Honigmann and Brock studied made no mention of books, which were generally lumped in with general household bequests of the period.)

As I said, I’m neither a historian nor a student of theatrical culture of the period; as an interested reader without a terrible amount of grounding in the period, I’m quite willing to accept the weak form of Daniel’s argument: the Shakespeare plays were more collaborative than simply slapping “by W.S.” on the front might indicate. (Two Noble Kinsmen and, if Hand D was Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More certainly suggest that script doctoring is not a twentieth century phenomenon, and the First Folio was printed from working copies that may well have been much revised.) But I don’t think my stance is particularly novel, either; certainly the current academic ideas about authorship (and ownership) in early modern manuscripts, if not theatrical culture, are as gloriously muddled as Daniel seems to want.

Harper’s did a big thing on the authorship of Shakespeare a few years back. On one side you had the Shakespear-ites and on the other you had the De Vere-ians. The DVs had all sorts of decent points (some reasonable, some more obviously stretches), though, of course, they couldn’t in the end prove anything.

But what struck me was the lame arguments of the Shakespear-ites. It was mostly “pshaw, aw c’mon, I mean really.” When countering the DVs claims about all the connections in the plays to De Vere’s real-life experience that S. didn’t have, well, they sounded like Creationists today. The Creationists, when confronted with anything tricky in the geologic record pull out the same explanation everytime – The Flood. There was The Flood, you see, and that would’ve done such and such… Well, when confronted with the familiarity, knowledge and experience the author of the plays “must have” had (so say the DVs), the Shakespear-ites said, “Genius.” No impressive school record – geniuses often don’t show themselves in school. Experience in court affairs – well, his Genius was such that… Knowledge of shipwrecks – Genius. Foreign language and affairs – Genius, etc, etc.

That and the elitist claim. Since then I have read more people who characterize the entire realm of Shakespeare doubters as “ELITISTS!!!” According to them Shakespear must’ve written Shakespeare because it is the anti-elitist choice, therefore, automatically right.

I don’t really care who or how the plays were written, but I have also read some much better arguments online for Shakespear writing Shakespeare and think that Harper’s definitely did a poor job of picking people to support that side of the story.

Prospect has an interesting review of a recent book on Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd (subscription only, unfortunately). It addresses this issue in passing and makes the point that Shakespeare’s plays include rural dialect and a detailed knowledge of farming, consistent with his actual background and a problem for, say, the Duke of Oxford. Of course, given that Oxford was, by hypothesis a polymathic genius, he would have had no trouble picking these things up.

There’s no doubt in my mind it was all attributable to Fred Nerk. Therefore every erudite bookshelf should carry the Complete Works of Nerk.

I wonder if future generations will argue over who wrote Spielberg’s films, ….

I always picture some future scholar declaring that the song “Yesterday” couldn’t have been written by this McCartney fellow, this 22-year-old from a backwater like Liverpool who couldn’t even read music.