Contested Will (6 page)

These and other anachronisms underscore how irrevocably the nature of authorship had changed since Elizabethan times (though they have changed comparatively little since then, so that
we stand much closer to Ireland's contemporaries than they do to Shakespeare's). It wasn't just authorship that had changed, but the most basic social customs as well: one of Ireland's forgeries, a poem Shakespeare addresses to Queen Elizabeth, describes how ‘Each titled dame deserts her rolls and tea'. Only Malone seems to have been aware that tea, that quintessential English beverage, was as yet unavailable in England in Shakespeare's day.

Many at the time felt that Malone had engaged in overkill. Had his main target been William-Henry Ireland, that accusation would have been justified. Ireland was quite young, for one thing; for another, it was obvious that he wasn't profiting directly from the forgeries, and, at least at the outset, was motivated by a desperate wish to win a withholding father's approval. Malone, though, had a greater objective than attacking the Irelands, and that was putting in their place amateurs who thought they knew enough about Shakespeare to judge such matters and who on the basis of this authority had declared the forged documents to be authentic. Many chafed at this; a critic in the
St James's Chronicle
spoke for many when he derided Malone's efforts to dominate Shakespeare scholarship as an act of a ‘Dictator
perpetuo
'. But Malone had made his point: the Ireland incident had turned out to be a perfect way to distinguish those who knew enough to pass judgement about Shakespeare's authorship from those who didn't. The most enduring lesson of this episode is that some people will persist in believing what they want to believe – in this case that Shakespeare really was the author of the Ireland documents.

As far as Samuel Ireland and his closest supporters were concerned, Malone, who had for so long tried and failed to find the lost Shakespeare archive, was jealous and delusional, convinced that ‘everything that belonged to Shakespeare was his own exclusive property'. Others picked up on this point, wondering how Malone or anyone else knew precisely how Shakespeare wrote: ‘How are they to be proved not genuine? From conjecture!' From their perspective, the dispute over the authorship of these documents had to end in a standoff; each side had its own story to tell,
for ‘conjecture may be answered and contradicted by conjecture equally as fair and forcible'. Samuel Ireland questioned Malone's authority in a new book,
An Investigation of Mr Malone's Claim to the Character of Scholar, or Critic
, concluding that Malone's case ‘is by no means established by that mode of proof which he has adduced and the arguments he has used'. Did Malone have ‘in his possession any of the original manuscripts of Shakespeare, to show the specific usage of the bard?' Lacking that crucial evidence, ‘upon what ground does his inference rest?'

Others who remained convinced of the documents' authenticity rallied to the Irelands' cause. For Francis Webb, the fact that all the documents ‘reciprocally illustrate and confirm each other' surely trumped Malone's objections: ‘Shakespeare's genius, character, life, and situation, connect them all.' ‘After frequent inspection and careful perusal of these papers,' Webb concludes, ‘duly weighing their claims to my belief, founded on their own evidence, I am not only fully satisfied of their authenticity: but also … that no human wisdom, cunning, art, or deceit, if they could be united, are equal to the task of such an imposture.'

Some others hedged their bets: while willing to concede that the
Lear
and
Vortigern
manuscripts were probably forged, they maintained that the contemporary deeds and letters were genuine. The critic and scholar George Chalmers was also convinced that some of these documents could not have been faked, especially the letter from Queen Elizabeth thanking Shakespeare for his ‘pretty verses'. And there were those who still refused to accept William-Henry's confession at face value and hinted darkly at a wider collusion over the authorship of the works – conspiracy theories that implicated Samuel Ireland, Albany Wallis and even George Steevens.

The story would take another and unexpected turn. Malone prided himself on exposing those who tried to dupe the literary world.
He had even attacked the beloved ninety-one-year-old actor William Macklin for having decades earlier circulated a forged Elizabethan document. Malone felt it his duty to ridicule those so desperate for clues to Shakespeare's personality that they had allowed themselves to be seduced by Ireland's falsehoods. Yet his own desire to imagine what Shakespeare was like proved no less overwhelming. As a scholar he was adept at distinguishing archival fact from biographical fiction; but in accounting for Shakespeare's life he confused the two, and in doing so cleared the way for those following in his footsteps to do the same. While justly celebrated for having resolved one authorship controversy, Malone bears much of the blame for ushering in far more divisive ones.

This occurred not in a bold polemic like the
Inquiry
, but quietly, in his textual annotations, which first appeared in a two-volume 1780 supplement to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens's 1778 edition of
The Plays of Shakespeare
, and then again in his solo edition of Shakespeare's works in 1790. This 1790 edition broke sharply with longstanding traditions going back to the First Folio of 1623 and continuing up through the great eighteenth-century editions of Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Johnson, Capell and Steevens. Malone parted company with his predecessors in two key ways. First, he tried to present the plays chronologically rather than as Heminges and Condell had originally arranged them in 1623, by genre, with no attention to the order in which they were written, under the headings of Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Secondly, he included Shakespeare's poems alongside the plays; his edition was the first to be called
The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare
. Today these innovations seem unremarkable but at the time they were unprecedented and would have unforeseen consequences for how Shakespeare's works were read and his life and authorship imagined.

Before the plays could be arranged chronologically the order of their composition needed to be worked out. Nobody had ever done this and it's unclear when anyone first thought it worth
doing. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe wondered which was Shakespeare's first play – he couldn't even hazard a guess – but thought it a mistake to assume that Shakespeare necessarily improved over time: ‘We are not to look for his beginnings in his least perfect works.' A half-century later, Edward Capell, who was also curious about how Shakespeare had ‘commenced a writer for the stage, and in which play', took things a step further, proposing that someone ought to investigate ‘the order of the rest of them'. Capell was well aware of how daunting a task this would be, requiring comprehensive knowledge of everything from versification to the printing history of the plays and the sources that Shakespeare drew upon. While Capell himself in his
Notes and Various Readings
broke fresh ground in this field, it would be left to Malone to attempt a full account of the plays' chronology.

Malone made a fair number of mistakes in his
Attempt to
Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written
in 1778, dating several plays far too early (his claim that
The Winter's Tale
was written in 1594 was off by nearly twenty years) while placing others too late. But after a decade of additional research he was able to fix some of his more glaring errors, and his efforts spurred others to improve upon his chronology. It's next to impossible to arrange plays in their order of composition without seeing a pattern, and the one that Malone believed in superseded the open-minded one offered by Rowe. Citing the authority of Pope and Johnson, Malone offered his readers a more comforting Enlightenment portrait, one in which an industrious Shakespeare steadily ‘rose from mediocrity to the summit of excellence; from artless and sometimes uninteresting dialogues, to those unparalleled compositions, which have rendered him the delight and wonder of successive ages'. Malone hastened to add that he wasn't really arguing for ‘a regular scale of gradual improvement', only that Shakespeare's ‘knowledge increased as he became more conversant with the stage and with life, his performances
in general
were written more happily and with greater art'.

A few – surprisingly few – lines in Shakespeare's plays refer
explicitly to contemporary events, such as the allusion in
Henry the Fifth
to the Earl of Essex's Irish campaign in the spring and summer of 1599, which allowed Malone to date that play with considerable precision. They were so few in number that their absence seems to have been a deliberate choice on Shakespeare's part. But once Malone began sifting the plays for allusions to contemporary events and court intrigue, he found many more of them, or thought he did, reinforcing in a circular fashion his account of the plays' chronology. While his primary aim was a working chronology, his sense of what counted as topical allusions, as well as his interpretation of them, led readers to believe that specific political messages were encoded in the plays.

So, for example, when Malone came upon the comic scene in
Antony and Cleopatra
where the Egyptian queen strikes a servant who brings her news of Antony's remarriage, he recalled reading in Elizabethan chronicles that Queen Elizabeth had once boxed the Earl of Essex on the ear for turning his back on her. Malone decided that Shakespeare may have been attempting in this scene to ‘censure' Elizabeth – who at this point had been dead for three or four years – ‘for her unprincely and unfeminine treatment of the amiable Earl of Essex'. Why stop there? A few scenes later, when the same servant describes to Cleopatra her rival's features, Malone interprets it as ‘an evident allusion to Elizabeth's inquiries concerning the person of her rival, Mary Queen of Scots'. There's so much wrong about this it's hard to know where to begin. For one thing, it implies that conversations onstage shouldn't be taken at face value; they are really about something else, if only we could connect the dots and identify that something. For another, why Shakespeare, a member of the King's Men, would want to alienate his monarch by introducing into this scene a discussion of how unattractive James's dead mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been is unfathomable, though it didn't give Malone pause.

Reductively identifying topical moments as Malone had, a by-product of trying to line up the life, works and times, became an easy and tempting game. Malone's obsession with the Earl of
Essex carried over into his interpretation of
Hamlet
. He had read the penitent earl's last words from the scaffold, before Essex was beheaded in 1601 for treason: ‘send thy blessed angels, which may receive my soul, and convey it to the joys of heaven'. The dying man's conventional prayer sounded to Malone sufficiently like Horatio's words spoken over the dying Hamlet: ‘flights of angels sing thee to thy rest'. Malone suspected that
Hamlet
had been staged before Essex was executed, but even that didn't stop him. So eager was he to suggest that ‘Lord Essex's last words were in our author's thoughts' that Malone supposes that the ‘the words here given to Horatio may have been one of the many additions to the play'. Are we then to conclude that
Hamlet
is Shakespeare's secret lament for the defeated earl, who, like his play's protagonist, would be king? This is shoddy criticism and bad editing. Moreover, the history that Malone draws upon in making these topical correspondences was limited to chronicles, centred on the court, mostly from the reign of Elizabeth. That's understandable enough: he didn't have access to the kind of gritty social history that's now a bedrock on which our understanding of Shakespeare's drama and culture rests. But it badly skews the plays, turning them into court allegories, in which a Jacobean Shakespeare seems stuck in an Elizabethan past, unable to get out of his mind a slap administered by his queen, in a very different context, many years earlier.

I dwell on this at such length because Malone helped institutionalise a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare's authorship of the plays (after all, the argument runs, how would anybody but a court insider know enough to encode all this?). First, however, this approach would influence traditional accounts of the plays, such as George Russell French's
Shakespeareana Genealogica
(1869), which assures us that ‘nearly all Shakespeare's
dramatis personae
are intended to have some resemblance to characters in his own day'. Such readings turned the plays into something other than comedies, histories and tragedies: they were now coded works, full of in-jokes and veiled political intrigue for those in the know. And
given the great number of characters in Shakespeare's plays and the many things that they say and do, the range of topical and biographical applications was nearly limitless. I don't think that Malone really thought this through – he was just trying to bolster a shaky chronology and show off his knowledge of Elizabethan culture. But in doing so he carelessly left open a fire door.

The problems with Malone's topical assumptions pale in comparison with those precipitated by his biographical ones. Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare's plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare's works through events in his life. About the closest anyone had come to reading the plays biographically was suggesting that Shakespeare had modelled comic characters such as Falstaff and Dogberry on local folk he had known. But such claims were never meant to reveal anything about Shakespeare's character, other than perhaps suggesting that he had a bit of a vindictive streak.