Contested Will (36 page)

Where his name does appear on the title pages of these early editions, it was variously spelled ‘Shakspere', ‘Shake-speare' and ‘Shakespeare'. There's no pattern. Spelling simply wasn't uniform at the time. Shakespeare himself didn't even spell his own name the same way. On his will alone (which bears his signature on each page) he spelled it ‘Shakspere' on the first two pages and ‘Shakspeare' on the last one. As Marlovians and Oxfordians well know, the names of their candidates were also spelled variously at the time. Alan Nelson has pointed out that Oxford spelled a word like ‘halfpenny' eleven different ways, but this doesn't suggest that de Vere was barely literate, any more than claims about Shakespeare's spelling habits should. The author's name on the first quarto of
Hamlet
is spelled ‘William Shake-speare'; the second quarto, published a year later, reads ‘William Shakespeare'. Others heard and spelled his name differently, including whoever
recorded the Revels Account for performances at Whitehall Palace during the Christmas season of 1604. Listed there alongside the ten plays performed by the King's Men are the names of the ‘poets which made the plays': ‘Shaxberd' is written alongside
Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors
and
The Merchant of Venice
– yet another inventive spelling and at the same time powerful evidence ascribing to him the authorship of these plays.

Early editions of Shakespeare's plays contain additional clues about the identity of their author. Playing companies turned over to printers different sorts of manuscripts. Scholars have spent lifetimes poring over the resulting printed texts, reconstructing from the smallest details the lost originals – whether one play or an other was printed from ‘foul papers' (an early modern term for an author's rough draft), ‘fair copy' (an author's or more likely a scribe's neater transcription of that earlier draft) or ‘prompt copy' (either foul or fair copy that would have been marked up and used in the playhouse). Plays set from ‘foul papers' often reveal a great deal about an author's writing habits.

An Elizabethan playwright had to devote a good deal of his attention to mundane concerns: which actors in the playing company were available, how many roles had to be doubled (for there were far more roles than performers in each of his plays), and how to get them onstage and offstage, or from a balcony to the main stage, or through costume changes, on time. All this is vastly more complicated than it seems, and as someone who for much of his career acted in the plays he wrote alongside those for whom he wrote the other parts, Shakespeare had a decided advantage over freelance dramatists.

For most of his professional life, Shakespeare wrote for an unusually stable and prosperous company, named the Chamberlain's Men from their formation in 1594, and after King James came to the throne in 1603, rechristened the King's Men. Shakespeare knew that every play he wrote had to include significant roles for the half-dozen or so shareholders in the company, actors all, including himself. Other roles would go to hired men,
some of whom worked with the company for years, others sporadically. And then, of course, there were the two or three boys who played female roles, since women were not allowed to perform on the Elizabethan stage. These boys were only around until maturity, when their voices and bodies changed; so there was quite a bit of turnover, making life especially difficult for a playwright who had to depend on the capabilities of those working for the company at any given moment. You couldn't write Rosalind's part in
As You Like It
unless you had absolute confidence that the boy who spoke her seven hundred lines, a quarter of the play, could manage it. You couldn't write a part requiring the boy playing Lady Percy in
The First Part of Henry the Fourth
to sing in Welsh unless you knew that the company had a young actor who could handle a tune and was a native of Wales. Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of everyone in the company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor's talents.

There were times when Shakespeare was thinking so intently about the part he was writing for a particular actor that in jotting down the speech headings he mistakenly wrote the actor's name rather than his character's. We know this because compositors passed on some of these slips when typesetting his foul papers. Take, for example, the stage direction in the First Folio edition of that early history play,
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth
, which reads: ‘Enter Sinklo and Humfrey'. John Sinklo was a regular hired-man for whom Shakespeare wrote lots of skinny-man parts. Shakespeare would slip again and start thinking of Sinklo rather than the character he was playing in the draft that was used to produce the quarto edition of
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
, where his stage direction reads: ‘Enter Sincklo and three or four officers'. It's clear that the scene was originally written as a star turn for Sinklo, and wouldn't be half as funny or make as much sense without him, for he is brought onstage mostly to be teased about his waistline. The others take turns calling him names: ‘nuthook', ‘starved bloodhound', and, in case we miss the point, ‘thin thing'.

The author of Shakespeare's plays could not have written the great roles of Richard III, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello and Lear unless he knew how far he could stretch his leading tragedian, Richard Burbage. Writing parts for the company's star comedian was even tougher. How could anyone but a shareholder in the company know to stop writing comic parts for Will Kemp the moment he quit the company in 1599 – and start writing parts in advance of the arrival of his replacement, Robert Armin, whose comic gifts couldn't have been more different? Kemp was another one of those actors Shakespeare kept confusing with his characters – easy enough to do, since Kemp always partly played himself no matter what role Shakespeare had written for him. The 1599 quarto of
Romeo and Juliet
identifies the Nurse's comic sidekick Peter first as ‘The Clown' and then in an ensuing stage direction as ‘Will Kemp'. The same sort of slip occurs in the quarto of
Much Ado about Nothing
, where we learn that the comic roles of Dogberry and Verges had been written for Kemp and Richard Cowley.

Rehearsing with a small group of fellow actors every morning, performing that same play with them that afternoon, and meeting regularly after that with shareholders for business decisions and to hear and purchase new plays could not have been stress-free. There are even recorded instances in which Elizabethan actors and playwrights came to blows – but not, so far as we know, members of Shakespeare's company. One reason, perhaps, is that the sharers were all enriched by their enterprise. It wasn't just Shakespeare who became successful enough to seek the status of gentleman, or invested in real estate. By focusing unforgivingly and relentlessly on Shakespeare's accumulation of wealth, Victorian biographers overlooked the extent to which his interest in financial matters was typical of his fellow sharers. And the successful sharers of the Chamberlain's Men, in turn, could only look on in envy at the far vaster fortune accumulated by their rival from the Admiral's Men, Edward Alleyn.

The evidence is of a piece: the surviving texts confirm that whoever wrote the plays had to have been a long-term partner in
an all-absorbing theatrical venture. The plays could not have been written by a Christopher Marlowe squirrelled away to the Continent or an aristocrat who secretly delivered the plays to the actors. And they certainly could not have been written by somebody who, like Edward de Vere, was not alive in March 1613, when, a month or two after the Globe Theatre caught fire during a performance of a ‘new' play,
Henry the Eighth
, ‘Mr Shakespeare' and ‘Richard Burbage' were each paid forty-four shillings by Thomas Screvin, steward to Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland (the younger brother of the fifth Earl of Rutland, the one believed by some to have written the plays of Shakespeare), for collaborating on an
impresa
for the earl to use at the court celebrations honouring King James's Accession Day on 24 March. An
impresa
was a painted and ceremonial pasteboard shield on which an enigmatic saying, usually in Latin, was written. There was considerable pressure on courtiers to come up with something unusually witty, since gossip about one's
impresa
was sure to follow. Who better than Shakespeare to come up with something imaginative and apt – and the several examples of this courtly art form in
Pericles
were good advertising, confirming that he had a talent for this sort of thing, and that his Latin was strong enough. Burbage, a talented artist, was paid for ‘painting and making it'.
Imprese
were ephemeral, so we don't know what Shakespeare wrote for Rutland. But Rutland was sufficiently pleased by their work to rehire Burbage three years later, when he was paid
£
4 18s on 25 March 1616 ‘for my lord's shield and for the emblance'. This time, Shakespeare wasn't available; he lay dying in Stratford, that very day affixing his signature to the successive pages of his will.

Even if we lacked all other textual evidence of Shakespeare's authorship, there is one incident that ought to persuade even the most hardened sceptic: the special epilogue written for a court performance of
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
, where Shakespeare speaks for himself as the author of the play. Before it was performed at court,
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
had been staged for popular audiences at the Curtain Theatre in
Shoreditch. There, the play had ended with an epilogue spoken by Will Kemp. Moments before that Falstaff, played by Kemp, is hauled off to the Fleet prison and it looks for once like Falstaff, that great escape artist, will not be able to wriggle out of trouble. But Kemp suddenly dashes back onstage and a few moments pass before playgoers realise that the play really is over and that Kemp is delivering an epilogue not as Falstaff but more or less as himself:

Kemp's repeated mention of his legs and dancing signals that a jig – an often raunchy Elizabethan song-and-dance act that followed both comedies and tragedies – was about to commence. Kemp also announces that Shakespeare, ‘our humble author', promises to ‘continue the story', so that his admirers can rest assured they'll be seeing Kemp again soon.

But this epilogue wouldn't do at court, where plays didn't end with salacious jigs. So Shakespeare had to write an alternative one appropriate for the command performance at Whitehall Palace, where the Queen herself was in attendance. Taking centre stage himself, Shakespeare replaced Kemp and delivers his own lines (‘what I have to say is of my own making'). It's the closest we ever get in his plays to hearing Shakespeare speak for and as himself. It's a brassy and confident speech, one that may even have caught his fellow players off guard:

This time around there's no mention of what the next play will be about and no promise that Kemp will return as Falstaff. The apology for Oldcastle in
The First Part of Henry the Fourth
(if that's the ‘displeasing' if enormously popular play he never quite gets around to naming) is nicely finessed, as Shakespeare offers in compensation the Falstaff play they have just applauded as a way of making amends. Beyond this point, the epilogue's initial acceptance of social deference – all that begging and curtsying, appropriate to someone of Shakespeare's lower social station – gives way to the novel suggestion that playwright and spectators are bound in a partnership, sharers in a venture. If Shakespeare offers himself as merchant adventurer, his plays as treasure and his audience as investors, then it must needs follow that an ‘ill venture' which breaks or bankrupts him will prove as costly to his creditors. When Shakespeare describes his courtly audience as ‘gentle creditors' he means not only that they provide the credit or licence to let him write what he wants, but also that they credit or believe in him. Pursuing the implications of this metaphor, he redefines the basis of their understanding: accept his terms, then, and they'll be repaid with plays for a long time to come.

The episode is less well known than it should be, because for the past four centuries it has been effectively buried by generations of editors. In 1600 the Chamberlain's Men handed over a manuscript of
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
to Andrew Wise and William Aspley to publish. They in turn asked Valentine
Simmes to print it – and the title page of this quarto, like the entry in the Stationers' Register that assigned copyright to the publishers, confirms that the play was written ‘by William Shakespeare'. But when passing along the playscript, the company must have inadvertently handed over a copy containing both the Curtain and Whitehall epilogues. The compositor working for Simmes printed them both, one right after the other, resulting in the speaker first kneeling in prayer, then leaping up and resuming his speech. The Folio editors, trying to repair this, made a further hash of it in 1623, moving the kneeling bit to the end, which is how it has been printed ever since, running together two speeches with wildly different purposes. Untangled, they tell a very different story.