Contested Will (35 page)

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Oxfordians wondered whether a publisher would ever again accept another book on de Vere. Now that their movement had regained legitimacy, commercial presses were willing to take that chance. And for Oxfordian authors who couldn't secure a commercial publisher, self-publishing was always an option, with Oxfordian electronic newsletters in Britain and the United States setting up one-click connections to Amazon.com or their own bookshops to promote sales. Before long, there was an embarrassment of riches, and complaints in Oxfordian newsletters that so many new studies were finding their way into print that some sort of oversight process ought to be established.

Having been spurned by publishers for so long, and having been denied ready access to the young minds that Shakespeare professors indoctrinated in their classrooms, Oxfordians were well ahead of their rivals when it came to exploiting alternative ways of getting the word out. Books may offer their writers status and legitimacy, as well as a path to tenure, but the Oxfordians saw clearly enough that most people didn't have access to expensive academic monographs. By the early years of the twenty-first century, anyone interested in Shakespeare or the authorship question would probably turn first to Google or Wikipedia. And on both these Internet sites, the Oxfordians appeared more professional and impressive than their adversaries. In this new battleground for hearts and minds, academic authority no longer counted for much; the new information age was fundamentally democratic.

Nine of the top ten hits in a recent Google search for ‘Shakespeare' and ‘authorship' directed the curious to sites that called into question Shakespeare's authorship. Even the neutral-sounding
‘A Beginner's Guide to the Shakespeare Authorship Problem' steered readers through an ‘Honor Roll of Skeptics', past a history of the doubts surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare's works and through a brief section dismissing the claims of Bacon, Marlowe and Derby, before arriving at the ‘case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as “Shakespeare”'. The sole pro-Shakespeare hit is to the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Page', a nuts-and-bolts site intended to rebut the claims of sceptics. The site is formidable in terms of content but far less seductive. To any objective observer, the Oxfordians, with a more passionate investment and a more narrow set of objectives, had a clear edge when the battle over authorship was waged online.

Wikipedia was fast becoming the default resource of those in search of reliable information about the authorship controversy. Its extensive coverage of the subject put to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources, let alone reference works traditionally produced by Shakespeare scholars and accessible in public and university libraries. The Oxfordian case turned up everywhere on Wikipedia, from articles on ‘Shakespeare' and the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Controversy' to more specialised ones on ‘Edward de Vere', ‘Oxfordian theory', ‘Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays – Oxfordian', and even the ‘Prince Tudor Theory'. Marlovians, Baconians, Derbyites and a handful of other alternative candidates had brief entries devoted to their claims, though whenever these rivals were discussed together, Oxfordians were assiduous about maintaining top billing. For there is always a risk that new media will reorient attention to a rival and more attractive candidate – and indeed, the recent proliferation of sites on Christopher Marlowe, no doubt energised by interest in the government conspiracy at the heart of the case for Marlowe's faked death, may be a sign that the dominance of the Oxfordian camp may not extend much longer than the Baconian one, roughly seventy years or so. Just as the Oxfordians could attract their share of celebrities, so too could rival camps. Marlovians were pleased to announce a new recruit when film director Jim
Jarmusch told the
New York Times
that ‘I think it was Christopher Marlowe' who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Most people who turn to Wikipedia for information are content to read the articles. But accessible with just a click are roiling and often recriminatory exchanges – rife with insults, charges of sock-puppetry and occasionally sputtering rage – about contributions that were altered or deleted. The beauty of Wikipedia is that entries are compiled and revised by anyone interested in contributing. Persistence and the ability to get in the last word, rather than expertise, are rewarded. And Wikipedia ruled out of bounds potentially controversial explanations of
why
people believed what they did. Wikipedia was thus a godsend for those who were sceptical about Shakespeare's authorship, for the first time allowing them to compete on equal footing with their opponents. The forces of democracy and equality and the overturning of hierarchy, the very things that drove Looney to argue that Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays, now, ironically, had come to the rescue of the movement he had founded.

On 9 September 2007, a recently formed website – ‘The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition' – received six hundred thousand hits. That extraordinary response followed a well-orchestrated campaign that had culminated in a press release announcing that a pair of major figures of the British stage, Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, had signed a petition now circulating on the Internet, a ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the Identity of William Shakespeare'. They had done so following a performance of Rylance's play questioning Shakespeare's authorship –
I Am Shakespeare
– and had timed the announcement to coincide with the news that a graduate programme in Shakespeare authorship studies had been established at Brunel University in London.

It was a skilfully drafted document, the collaborative effort of some of the best minds committed to casting doubt on Shakespeare's authorship. Its title was inspired, combining the uplift of an historical declaration with that long-established sense of fairness that guided juries to just verdicts: ‘reasonable doubt'. A
whiff of the courtroom is apparent throughout, as ‘the
prima facie
case for Mr Shakspere' is shown to be ‘problematic' and the ‘connections between the life of the alleged author and the works' no less ‘dubious'. The testimony of a score of expert witnesses – including Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud and Justice Blackmun – is introduced into the record. And by not specifying a single candidate, it brought together under one roof proponents of all of them. The declared purpose was to get as many people as possible to sign on to the commonsensical position that ‘it is simply not credible for anyone to claim, in 2007, that there is no room for doubt about the author'.

But as John M. Shahan, chairman of the Coalition created to disseminate the ‘Declaration', explained in the Oxfordian newsletter
Shakespeare Matters
, there were other, unspoken motives as well: ‘We can organize Declaration signing ceremonies to try to attract media attention' and ‘when we have enough signatories, especially prominent ones, we can formally challenge the orthodox to write a counter-declaration' explaining ‘why they claim there is “no room for reasonable doubt”'. By October 2007, 1,161 signatures had been gathered – admittedly a modest return, given the traffic on the site, though their ranks included another pair of leading actors, Jeremy Irons and Michael York. As much as the Declaration was a challenge to defenders of Shakespeare, it was also a test of whether the Oxfordians could translate a quarter-century of success in the mainstream media and online into a movement with broad public support. Shahan admits as much:

Twenty months later, according to the Coalition website's official tally, four hundred new signatures had been added.

William Shakespeare, by Martin Droeshout, 1623

Schoolroom, Guildhall, Stratford-upon-Avon

It's one thing to explain how claims that others wrote the plays rest on unfounded assumptions; it's another to show that Shakespeare of Stratford really did write them. When asked how I can be so confident that Shakespeare was their author, I point to several kinds of evidence. The first is what early printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him. Either of these, to my mind, suffices to confirm his authorship – and the stories they tell corroborate each other. All this is reinforced by additional evidence from the closing years of his career, when he began writing for a new kind of playhouse, in a different style, in active collaboration with other writers.

The sheer number of inexpensive quartos of Shakespeare's works that filled London's bookshops after 1594 was staggering and unprecedented. No other poet or playwright came close to seeing seventy or so editions in print – and that's counting only what was published in Shakespeare's lifetime and doesn't include
Othello
, first printed in 1622, or any of the eighteen plays first published in the First Folio a year later. Print runs were usually
restricted to fifteen hundred copies. If cautious publishers printed and sold only a thousand copies of each of these early quartos, it's likely that fifty thousand books bearing Shakespeare's name (for some were published anonymously) circulated during his lifetime – at a time when London's population was only two hundred thousand. As an actor, playwright and sharer in the most popular playing company in the land – which performed before as many as three thousand spectators at a time in the large outdoor theatres – he was also one of the most familiar faces in town and at court. If, over the course of the quarter-century in which Shakespeare was acting and writing in London, people began to suspect that the man they knew as Shakespeare was an impostor and not the actor-dramatist whose plays they witnessed and purchased, we would have heard about it.

One of those who recognised Shakespeare and knew him by name was George Buc. Buc was a government servant, historian, book collector and eventually Master of the Revels – the official to whom Shakespeare's company would submit all playscripts for approval. A familiar acquaintance of the Earl of Oxford, Buc also knew Shakespeare well enough to stop and ask him about the authorship of an old and anonymous play published in 1599,
George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield
, a copy of which he had recently obtained. He might have sought out or run into Shakespeare at the Curtain or Globe playhouses, or at a court performance, or perhaps at London's bookstalls, concentrated around St Paul's and the Royal Exchange, where Shakespeare must have been a familiar sight, browsing through titles – for he could not possibly have owned all the books that echo through his plays. Nobody could or did own that many, no bibliophile, no aristocrat, not even the Queen of England, with her sumptuous library housed at Whitehall Palace. Shakespeare did his best to help Buc, recalling that the play had been written by a minister, but at this point his memory apparently failed him. The lapse was excusable; it had been many years since
George a Greene
was first staged. But Shakespeare did volunteer an unusual bit of information: the
minister had acted in his own play, performing the part of the pinner (someone who impounds stray animals). A grateful Buc wrote down his finding on the quarto's title page, leaving space to insert the author's name later: ‘Written by . . . . . . . . . . . . a minister, who acted the pinner's part in it himself.
Teste
[that is, witnessed by] W. Shakespeare.' Buc's flesh and blood encounter with a man he knew as both actor and playwright suggests that once you begin to put Shakespeare back into his own time and place, the notion that he actively conspired to deceive everyone who knew or met him about the true authorship of the works that bore his name seems awfully far-fetched.

Those who question Shakespeare's authorship of the plays never get around to explaining how this alleged conspiracy worked. There's little agreement and even less detail about this, despite how much depends on it, so it's not easy to challenge. Some suppose that only Shakespeare and the real author were in the know. At the other extreme are those who believe that it was an open secret, so widely shared that it wasn't worth mentioning. Most doubters also brush off the overwhelming evidence offered by the title pages of these dozens of publications by claiming that ‘Shakespeare' – or as some would have it, ‘Shake-speare' – was simply the pseudonym of another writer – that hyphen a dead giveaway.

But such arguments are impossible to reconcile with what we now know about how publishing worked at the time. This was not a world in which a dramatist could secretly arrange with a publisher to bring out a play under an assumed name. In fact, Shakespeare had almost no control over the publication of his plays, because – strange as it may sound today – he didn't own them. They belonged to his playing company, and once sold and entered in the Stationers' Register, ownership passed to the publisher. Modern notions of authorial copyright were a distant dream. Shakespeare certainly had a voice as shareholder, and perhaps a disproportionate one. But if the history of the publication of his plays during his lifetime is any indication, he showed little
interest in when or even whether his plays were published and even less in the quality or accuracy of their printing. If he had cared a bit more, or had more say in the matter, we'd be booking seats for performances of such lost Shakespeare plays as
Cardenio
and
Love's Labour's Won
.

Poetry was a different story. Early in his career Shakespeare showed great care in seeing into print his two great narrative poems,
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, bestsellers that went through many editions. While his name didn't appear on the title pages of these volumes, dedicatory letters addressed to the Earl of Southampton and signed ‘William Shake-speare' are included in italics in the front-matter of both. It's the first time that the notorious hyphen appeared in the printed version of his name, a telling sign, for sceptics, of pseudonymous publication. Elizabethan compositors, trying to protect valuable type from breaking, would have smiled at that explanation. They knew from experience that Shakespeare's name was a typesetter's nightmare. When setting a ‘k' followed by a long ‘s' in italic font – with the name Shakspeare, for example – the two letters could easily collide and the font might snap. The easiest solution was inserting a letter ‘e', a hyphen, or both; as we'll soon see, compositors settled on different strategies. And as the title pages of the 1608 quarto of
Lear
and the 1609
Sonnets
indicate, it's a habit that carried over when setting roman font as well.

Shakespeare had been writing plays for five or six years before one of them,
Titus Andronicus
, was finally published in 1594. Its title page advertised the names of the playing companies who had performed it, not who wrote it. This was typical. Even the most celebrated plays by the most popular Elizabethan dramatists appeared anonymously. We have no documentary evidence that Christopher Marlowe wrote
Tamburlaine
, and if not for a casual allusion by Thomas Heywood in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Kyd's name would not be linked to his masterpiece from the late 1580s,
The Spanish Tragedy
. We still don't know who wrote some of the finest plays of the period – including
Mucedorus, Arden of
Faversham
and
Edward the Third
. Still, we are lucky that they have survived at all, for only six hundred or so of the estimated three thousand plays staged between the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558 and the closing of the theatres in 1642 were ever printed. A large percentage of those that found their way into print nonetheless remained anonymous and none of these, so far as anyone knows, was published under an assumed name. It would have been pointless to do so. For a playwright anxious about being identified on the title page of a play – fearing punishment for seditious words or imagining that publishing carried a social stigma – the simplest and obvious course of action was to do nothing: allow the play, like so many others, to reach London's bookstalls without a name attached to it. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.

If an Elizabethan writer insisted on having a pseudonym appear on a title page of a published quarto, and could somehow persuade a publisher to put it there, the worst possible moment to do so was 1598. In that year the Privy Council briefly shut down the public playhouses in the wake of
The Isle of Dogs
, a scandalous play that landed both Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, who collaborated on it, in serious trouble. And if you were going to put someone else's name on a play, nothing could be more foolish than to use a real person's name, especially that of someone highly visible, such as an actor who could easily be hauled in and questioned. The memory of Thomas Kyd's brutal interrogation by the authorities five years earlier would have weighed heavily on anyone who might contemplate serving as a front for another writer. Kyd, who unluckily had shared writing quarters with Marlowe, was put on the rack and tortured, and died within a year or so, but not before telling interrogators hunting down the source of anti-alien propaganda all that they wanted to know about Marlowe and his beliefs.

Yet 1598 turned out to be the very year that two publishers independently decided that Shakespeare's popularity had reached the point where it was profitable to put his name on the title page of his plays. That year, Cuthbert Burby brought out a ‘newly corrected and augmented' edition of
Love's Labour's Lost
by ‘W.
Shakespere', while Valentine Simmes published second editions of
Richard the Third
and
Richard the Second
(both by ‘William Shake-speare'). If anyone wanted to signal through a wink and nod that a name was pseudonymous, confirmed by that hyphen, it would have helped to be consistent. Yet Burby and Simmes didn't spell Shakespeare's name the same way, and it wasn't because only one of them had been tipped off about inserting that hyphen. If there really was a conspiracy and ‘Shake-speare' a pseudonym, a score of publishers who at various times over a quarter-century owned and published Shakespeare's works, and then their various printers and compositors, and then those to whom they sold their rights, would each in turn have had to be let in on the secret – and carried it to the grave. Pseudonymous publication requires both consistency and a degree of control over the printed word; the uneven publication of Shakespeare's plays didn't allow for either. Some plays, like
Richard the Third
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, bore Shakespeare's name from the outset. Others, like
Richard the Second
, first lacked it, then added it. Still others, including
Romeo and Juliet
and
Henry the Fifth
, were never published under Shakespeare's name during his lifetime.