30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (35 page)

Against this radical and politicized reading of the plays, however, the authorship question has a strongly socially conservative cast: its adherents cannot believe that the son of a glover from a provincial market town and without a university education could possibly have written the works attributed to him. It is no accident that the alternative candidates for their authorship are all noblemen: Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Neville, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby, even Queen Elizabeth, supported by ingenious computer-generated graphical disintegration to reveal an image of the Virgin Queen disguised as Shakespeare on the front of the First Folio. The only other “commoner” in the list is the Cambridge-educated Christopher Marlowe. But there's no reason, other than social snobbery, to associate literary ability with rank or birth, particularly in the world of the theater where a playwright was an artisan, a new word for a new occupation (see Myth 21) imagined by analogy with skilled craftsmen such as wheelwrights or shipwrights. The claims either that the writer of the plays must have been a courtier or that their aristocratic author could not have sullied himself to enter the common marketplace of print are assertions rather than evidence. Elsewhere in this book we have shown that Shakespeare's education was extensive (Myth 2) and that he did not need to have traveled abroad to write his plays (Myth 5). What we do know about Shakespeare—and what is amply attested by his contemporaries—is that he could write imaginative and compelling drama, which involved inhabiting the world view and linguistic competence of different speakers from different social classes.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the preferred candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was Francis Bacon, and the preferred method for asserting this “truth” was cryptography. Bacon was believed to have placed ciphers in the plays that could be cracked to reveal his own signature. A rash of titles promised explication. Ignatius Donnelly's
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays
(1888) applied a number of code-breaking stratagems to produce a secret message announcing “Shak'st spur never writ a word of them,” but his methods were lampooned by unconvinced humorists and Stratfordians in parodic applications of his method to his own work, and to other pages of Shakespeare, “revealing,” for example, that “Master WillI a Jack Spur writ this play”;
⁴
undeterred, Elizabeth Gallup published her
The Bi-Literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon Discovered in his Works
(1899); some judicious alterations of the nonce-word “
honorificabilitudinitatibus
” from
Love's Labour's Lost
(5.1.40) led Sir Edwin Dunning-Lawrence to a Latin sentence announcing “These plays F. Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world” in his
Bacon is Shakespeare
(1910); by overlaying a cosmographical diagram on the Epilogue to
The Tempest
in her
Bacon's Dial in Shakespeare
(1922), Natalie Rice Clark uncovered the helpfully explicit declaration “I, W.S. Am F. Bacon.”

But Bacon's star has waned, and the most active contender for the authorship of Shakespeare's works is now Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Oxford's claims are largely biographical: the argument is that his life fits more closely the life perceived to be expressed through the plays than does the biography of Shakespeare. There is no external evidence to link Oxford with the works of Shakespeare. Samuel Schoenbaum, still Shakespeare's best and most cautious biographer, describes the problem of writing Shakespeare's life as that of bridging “the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record”;
⁵
for Oxfordians, Shakespeare's documented life is not only mundane but wretched, devoid of the social advantages necessary to write the plays and marked instead by suspicions of parsimony, social climbing, profiteering, and the abandonment of his wife and children. By contrast, Oxford's life could have furnished the details for
Hamlet
(although not the ending): he had traveled in Europe, he was well connected at Elizabeth's court, his own father-in-law Lord Burghley was supposed to be the model for Polonius, and he knew Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
(used in
Venus and Adonis
,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, and
Titus Andronicus
among others).

These parallels may or may not be substantive, but in any case the argument rests on an erroneous assumption that Shakespeare's works are biographical. The same is true of the case for other candidates: Sir Henry Neville is proposed because his imprisonment after the Essex rebellion in 1601 explains the move towards darker comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare's writing around that date (this shift is something of an exaggeration and, in any case, more likely to be connected to audience tastes than to authorial mood); the Earl of Rutland is proposed because he visited Denmark just before the publication of
Hamlet
(in fact the prompt for the play may be nearer home: the written sources for the play also set the story in Denmark). If we believed the plays were autobiographical, we might as well be looking for a soldier (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus, and Othello are all soldiers), a female transvestite (women dress as men in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
As You Like It
,
Twelfth Night
, and
Cymbeline
) or a father of adult daughters (see
Titus Andronicus
,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
Much Ado About Nothing
,
The Merchant of Venice
,
As You Like It
,
King Lear
,
Pericles
,
The Winter's Tale
,
The Tempest
,
Cymbeline
) (just a minute: Shakespeare
was
the father of adult daughters …). To be serious, though, the idea that literary texts, particularly early modern plays, encode biographical data is as far from an understanding of them as literature as the Baconian idea that they are codes to be broken.

Literary theorists have been proclaiming the “death of the author” since the 1960s (the phrase is Roland Barthes'), and the bankruptcy of biographical readings long before that. It oughtn't, therefore, to matter whether Shakespeare or someone else (of the same name, as Mark Twain mischievously put it) wrote the plays attributed to him. But of course it does matter. We have seen in recent years that when a play
is
newly attributed to Shakespeare—as for example
Edward III
—this results in new editions, new performances, and new scholarship, forms of attention that invent, or at least reinforce, the literary quality they purport to describe.
Edward III
was not previously an unknown play but it was in the critical graveyard marked “Anon.” Jonathan Bate has admitted that, when editing
Titus Andronicus
, a play previously considered aesthetically defective, “I so wanted to praise the play, instead of burying it as the Arden editor of the previous generation had done, that I uncritically accepted the arguments for solo authorship”: here again authorship and literary value are connected (see Myth 17).
⁶

To be sure, there is a mystery about Shakespeare's authorship. How did he write it all? How is it that his works have been so endlessly adaptable, so susceptible to readings and sensibilities and ways of thinking very different from the culture out of which they were written? It's a mystery that is only deferred, not solved, by attaching a different name to the works, since the problem is not “How did he write it since he never went to university?” but the more fundamental “How did he write it?” Jonathan Bate argues that “‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”
⁷
No wonder that Superman (in a DC comic of 1947) and Doctor Who (in an episode aired in 2007) have been imagined as Shakespeare's time-traveling collaborators: if Shakespeare didn't write the works, perhaps only a super-hero could have.

If you look up some of the books and websites cited for this myth, you will see that one of the main argumentative tools of the anti-Stratfordians is detail: “Polonius in
Hamlet
refers to ‘young men falling out at tennis,’ which most likely refers to the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel”; instances of “every” and “ever” are coded references to De Vere (the Earl of Oxford); Francis Bacon's commonplace book contains phrases also found in Shakespeare's plays.
⁸
It is hard not to see this barrage of detail and the partisanship of the debate as an unconscious smokescreen, a diversionary tactic, to avoid thinking about the bigger questions this myth throws up: questions of genius, canon, class, literary value—and of who owns “Shakespeare”: the academics or the enthusiasts?

Notes

¹
 
http://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration

²
 
http://www.marlowe-society.org/reading/info/hoffmanprize.html

³
 James Shapiro,
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
(London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p. 109.

⁴
 Samuel Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 406–7.

⁵
 Ibid., p. 568.

⁶
 Jonathan Bate, “In the Script Factory,” review of Brian Vickers,
Shakespeare, Co-Author
,
Times Literary Supplement
, 18 April 2003.

⁷
 Jonathan Bate,
The Genius of Shakespeare
(London: Picador, 1997), p. 163.

⁸
 
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/

One of the questions we are most often asked as Shakespeare researchers and teachers is: surely there is nothing new to be said about Shakespeare? Given that Shakespeare is the most researched author in the world, with thousands of publications about him each year, this is an entirely reasonable question. In fact, there is a great deal more to be learned and said about Shakespeare.

In 1823 the first quarto of
Hamlet
(published in 1603) was discovered. (To this day, only two copies of this quarto have been found.) This short text, with variant action and language, changed what we knew and thought we knew about how
Hamlet
was first staged, about how texts are transmitted, and about what Shakespeare or his company may or may not have altered in the play. Answers to the questions raised by the existence of Q1
Hamlet
are still disputed—but no one disputes that Q1
Hamlet
is an important piece of evidence in the ongoing search for an answer.

New discoveries like this don't come along every day. But small incremental steps are just as important as paradigm shifts. Many of these steps are taken by studying Shakespeare's contemporaries and Shakespeare's contexts.

Ten years ago MacDonald Jackson pointed out
All's Well
's unusual identification of a character in the Spinii Italian regiment as “one Spurio.” He is named twice (2.1.41, 4.3.166) although he does not appear in the play. The name is unusual and occurs only once elsewhere in Renaissance drama—in Middleton's
The Revenger's Tragedy
(1607), where it makes symbolically appropriate sense as the name of the Duke's bastard (spurious) son. This led Jackson to conclude that the name originated with Middleton and was subsequently picked up by Shakespeare. This gives us a date of post-1606 for
All's Well
rather than the usual 1602. There may even be an in-joke in Shakespeare's use of the name. Although Spurio is the name of the Duke's bastard son in Middleton, he is never named in the dialogue of
The Revenger's Tragedy
(his name occurs only in stage directions); Shakespeare's Spurio, on the other hand, is named in the dialogue but does not feature in the play's action. This indicates Shakespeare's familiarity with a written text of
The Revenger's Tragedy
, either in manuscript form (Gary Taylor has suggested Shakespeare may have acted in the Middleton tragedy
¹
) or in its first printed edition of 1607/8. Redating
All's Well
by five years removes it from the group of three “problem plays” in 1601–4 in which it never properly fitted (the other two are
Troilus and Cressida
[1602] and
Measure for Measure
[1604]) and makes it one of the first of the last plays (a category also under interrogation: see Myth 20). The important point here is: reading a Middleton play changes our understanding of Shakespeare's career.

Digital projects are also changing our landscape in leaps and bounds: statistics about Shakespeare's vocabulary and that of his contemporaries are no longer dependent on the Shakespeare-centric first edition of the
OED
(see Myth 21). Private letters have now been digitalized; so too has women's manuscript writing. Our contexts for Shakespeare are consequently hugely expanded.

We are confident that much new factual information remains to be uncovered about the Elizabethans we love to study. The United Kingdom is full of untapped archives waiting for patient researchers and digitalization: the London livery companies for instance. Although Shakespeare was not a member of a livery company, many of his contemporaries were; each livery company has extensive records, most of them unpublished or only published selectively. David Kathman has uncovered actors' names in livery records, adding to our knowledge of their biographies and activities. The same promise is held by funeral rolls. Held in the College of Heralds, these are extensive lists and diagrams of who marched in an important person's funeral: they thus enable us to see networks of who knew whom.

Outside London, the teams of scholars from the REED project in Toronto (Records of Early English Drama) have been working their way through county records, transcribing documents (payments to players, names of visiting theater companies), giving us a rich picture of the interaction between London drama and the provinces. The award-winning book
The Queen's Men
, by Sally-Beth Maclean and Scott McMillin, for instance, was enabled by REED's research; in their book the authors analyze the regular touring routes of the Queen's Men and argue that touring was a prestigious activity and not, as previously thought, something players only fell back on when the plague prevented them from performing in London. (Denigrating the provinces is a nineteenth-century attitude, the product of the long-run system which made London the capital of British theatrical culture.)