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Beginning about one hundred years after William Shakespeare's death in 1616, when the estimation of the critical value of his works had risen in the popular mind and the knowledge of Shakespeare's repute had begun to fade, some began to express doubts about the authorship of the peerless plays and poetry hitherto unquestionably attributed to "William Shakespeare". These doubts reached their height in the 19th Century, with the most popular alternative candidate being Sir Francis Bacon.
The belief of conventional scholarship remains that William Shakespeare, the author of the plays, is the same man as one William Shakespere recorded as living in Stratford-upon-Avon; the alternative author theories are not taken seriously. There is, however, ongoing serious academic work to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.
Shakespeare: the pros and cons
The conventional view is that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. He was a poet, a playwright, an actor, part-owner of the Globe Theatre in London and a member of the favoured acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later The King's Men). His father was illiterate.
Those who question whether William Shakespere of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of Shakespeare's plays are called anti-Stratfordians. They call those who have no such doubts Stratfordians. ("Stratfordians" view the question of authorship as settled, and generally have no need for a name for themselves.) Anti-Stratfordians discussing the authorship controversy conventionally refer to the man from Stratford as "Shaksper" and the author of the plays and poems (whoever he may be) as "Shakespeare."
Shakespeare's life
Anti-Stratfordians say that we know little of Shakespeare's life, though mainstream scholars point out that we know more about him than we do about any other literary figure of that day other than Ben Jonson. In his lifetime Shakespeare was referred to specifically by name as a well-known writer at least twenty-three times, and his name also appears on the title pages of fourteen of the fifteen works published during his lifetime. No contemporary document connecting any other person with the plays exists.
Shakespeare's education
Anti-Stratfordians believe that Shakespere was either uneducated or poorly educated. They doubt he could have produced the plays and poems that are critically acclaimed as sublime, and assert that the author of the Shakespeare canon must have been a man of better education and probably noble background, concealed behind a pseudonym in part because the writing of drama for the public stage was considered a disreputable activity for an Elizabethan gentleman.
William Shakespere of Stratford-upon-Avon is held by anti-Stratfordians to have been a bumpkin whose father was unable to write his own name. Indeed, his wife and his two daughters are also said to have been illiterate beyond signing their own names, and, they claim, the literacy of Shakespere himself is in doubt. How, they ask, could he have written the masterpieces of literature that we know as the works of Shakespeare?
The man from Stratford spelled his name in several different ways, as there was no standardized orthography at the time. (Early editions of the works of the university-educated Christopher Marlowe spell his name as Marlowe, Marlo, Marlow, Marklin, and Marley.)
Anti-Stratfordians point out that there are no records that William Shakespere of Stratford ever attended school at all, although it is assumed that he was a student in the Stratford Free School (textbooks used at the Stratford Free School are alluded to in the plays). But there are no extant records of the school from the relevant period, for Shakespeare or anyone else. No one contends he attended any university, though there is little actual information about his activities between leaving Stratford and the first reference to him in the London theatre many years later.
Shakespeare's colleague Ben Jonson stated that Shakespeare knew "small Latin, and less Greek," which by the standards of the day implies that Shakespeare the actor was likely to have studied both at least partially. This supports the argument that he did indeed attend a school at some time.
It is known that the Stratford Shakespere was a fairly rich man from information about land he owned. Anti-Stratfordians claim he amassed this wealth from his trading career. However, to be a successful trader at that time one would likely need to be able at least to read and write, though not necessarily to compose poetry and plays. There are also several signatures from this time that are almost universally accepted to be valid.
The poems
Strong arguments exist against the claim of any rival author. The opening lines of Sonnet 135 argue strongly against any alternate author, or at least any not named William:
- Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy 'Will,'
- And 'Will' to boot, and 'Will' in overplus;
- More than enough am I that vex thee still,
- To thy sweet will making addition thus.
It is also hard to understand why the poems (as opposed to the plays), if by a nobleman, would have been published under an assumed name. The writing of poetry was a skill expected of an Elizabethan courtier, and poems like The Rape of Lucrece or Venus and Adonis, long narrative works on classical subjects, were a prestigious and highly respectable form of composition, and in a completely distinct category from 'merely popular' plays. The poems' timing, having originally been published after a period when theatres had been closed by an outbreak of the plague, is also more consistent with composition by a professional writer looking for an alternate source of income than a rich dilettante coincidentally during a theatre closing.
Shakespeare's will
Some anti-Stratfordians bring up William Shakespeare's will. It is long and explicit, listing the possessions of a successful bourgeois in detail, but is remarkable for containing no mention at all of personal papers, manuscripts, or books (books were rare and expensive items at the time).
However, manuscripts of the plays would have, as was the ordinary practice, been owned by the theatre company of which Shakespeare was a shareholder. And books were not normally listed separately in wills at this time; despite their value, they were included among the house-contents. Known wills of other authors of the time often do not mention books either.
Cryptograms
Ignatius Donelly, a US congressman, science fiction author and Atlantis theorist, wrote The Great Cryptogram (1888), in which he found encoded messages in the plays attributing authorship to Francis Bacon — encoded messages that Donelly alone could discern, however.
With the 19th Century authorial debate, the floodgates of doubt opened, and a new fad developed: discerning authorial cryptograms in Shakespeare's works. One of the most vigorous "cryptographers" was Mrs. Ashmead Windle. Elizabeth Wells Gallup examined Bacon's "bi-lateral cipher" (in which two typefaces were used as a method of encoding) and announced that Bacon was not only the author of the Shakespearean works but also the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth, the product of a secret marriage. Again, however, only Ms. Gallup could reliably distinguish between the "two" fonts.
One of the most convincing arguments against the cryptogram theories, and particularly the Baconian theory, was published in 1957 by William F. Friedman and his wife Elizebeth. William, considered by many to be the greatest cryptologist of all time, and Elizebeth, a noted cryptologist in her own right for her US Government work on "rum runners'" ciphers, demonstrated that the encrypted messages claimed to have been included in texts from one (or both) of these authors were entirely implausible cryptographically and in some cases impossible. Using the same methods, Friedman and several others produced cryptograms showing that Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare himself and Babe Ruth wrote the plays. They then went on to use statistical methods to demonstrate just how different Shakespeare's and Bacon's styles of writing were.
A common example of a word which looks like an encrypted message of some kind is the word honorificabilitudinitatibus, used in Love's Labour's Lost. Unfortunately for those seeing more than an unusual word, it had been used (though rarely) by other writers before Shakespeare. Honorificabilitudo appears in a latin charter of 1187, and occurs as honorificabilitudinitas in 1300. Dante cites honorificabilitudinitate as a typical example of a long word in De Vulg. Eloq. II. vii. It also occurs in the Complaynt of Scotland, and in Marston's play The Dutch Courtezan (1605).
Curiously, a cryptogram is supposed to be present in Psalm 46 of the King James Bible. This is supposed by some to be cryptographic evidence that Shakespeare had a hand in writing the King James Bible. The 46th word from the beginning of the psalm is "shake"; the 47th word from the end of the psalm, counting backwards, is "spear" (though if one omits the final word of the Psalm, this is the 46th word counting backwards). In the Bishops Bible (published in 1568, when Shakespeare was four years old) '"shake" is 47 words from the beginning and "spear" 48 from the end. In the Geneva bible (1560), the numbers are 47 and 45. In Miles Coverdale's translation of the psalm, which appeared in the Book of Common Prayer of the 1540s, the numbers are 46 and 48.
Other evidence
There are no direct comments about veiled authorship in Ben Jonson's private Diaries of the time, nor in any of the known gossip reports of the time or the succeeding few decades (e.g., Aubrey's Lives or Pepys's Diary). Argument from absence is tricky and rarely compelling at best, but in this case certainly is supportive of the Stratfordian position.
The debate, such as it is, seems far from being resolved, with standard scholarship noting that the theories of ghost authorship began to develop two centuries or more after Shakespeare's death while anti-Stratfordians claim evidence of a "cover-up" during the lifetime of the author. The debate has gone on for several centuries, and, barring the sudden discovery of new evidence which disposes of the question, is unlikely to be settled in the near future.
Candidates and their champions
As early as the 18th century, unorthodox views of Shakespeare were expressed in two allegorical stories. In The Life and Adventures of Common Sense (1769) by Herbert Lawrence, Shakespeare is portrayed as a "shifty theatrical character ... and incorrigible thief" (Michell). In The Story of the Learned Pig (1786) by an anonymous author described as "an officer of the Royal Navy," Shakespeare is merely a front for the real author, a chap called "Pimping Billy."
Around this time, James Wilmot, a Warwickshire clergyman and scholar, was researching a biography on Shakespeare. He travelled extensively around Stratford, visiting the libraries of country houses within a radius of fifty miles looking for records or correspondence connected with Shakespeare or books that had been owned by him. By 1781, Wilmot had become so appalled at the lack of evidence for Shakespeare that he concluded he could not be the author of the works. Wilmot was familiar with the writings of Francis Bacon and formed the opinion that he was more likely the real author of the Shakespearean canon. He confided this to one James Cowell. Cowell disclosed it in a paper read to the Ipswich Philosophical Society in 1805 (Cowell's paper was only rediscovered in 1932).
These stories were soon forgotten. However, Bacon would emerge again as a candidate in the nineteenth century when, at the height of bardolatry, the "authorship question" was popularised.
Sir Francis Bacon
In 1856, William Henry Smith put forth the claim that the author of Shakespeare's plays was Sir Francis Bacon, a major scientist, a courtier, a diplomat, an essayist, a historian and a successful politician, who served as Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613) and Lord Chancellor (1618).
Smith was supported by Delia Bacon in her book The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays (1857), in which she maintains that Shakespeare was in fact a group of writers, including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, for the purpose of inculcating a philosophic system, for which they felt that they themselves could not afford to assume the responsibility. She professed to discover this system beneath the superficial text of the plays.
Bacon was particularly favoured as a candidate by advocates of cryptogram theories. As an example, some anti-Stratfordians have suggested that honorificabilitudinitatibus (see above) is actually an anagram for the Latin phrase hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi (These plays, born of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world).
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
Main article: Oxfordian theory
The most popular latter-day candidate is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. First proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920, Oxford is today the alternative candidate the majority of anti-Stratfordians have settled upon. Advocates of Oxford are usually referred to as Oxfordians.
Oxfordians have argued that there are striking similarities between his biography and events in Shakespeare's plays, the acclaim of his contemporaries regarding his talent as a poet and a playwright, his closeness to Queen Elizabeth I and Court life, underlined passages in his Bible that correspond to quotations in Shakespeare's plays and his extensive education and intelligence.
Supporters of the standard view would dispute most if not all of these contentions. The supposed connections between Oxford's life and the plots of Shakespeare's plays is conjectural at best, for instance, and the acclaim of Oxford's contemporaries for his poetic and dramatic skill was distinctly modest. Near contemporaries, like John Dryden, indicated that Shakespeare got many details wrong in his depiction of life at court, meaning that Oxford's court connections do not support the case for his authorship very strongly. Oxford died in 1604, perhaps the most convincing argument against Oxford's authorship, as ten of Shakespeare's plays are most likely written after Oxford's death, and several specifically refer to events later than 1604 — e.g. The Tempest, which alludes to a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda.
Many of Oxford's poems were published under his own name during his lifetime, and they may be compared to the works of the Shakespearean canon.
The present Lord Oxford, Julian Asquith, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, is, amusingly, known to be a supporter of the Oxfordian theory.
Christopher Marlowe
The gifted playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe would seem perfectly qualified to write the works of Shakespeare — except that he was apparently dead.
A case for Marlowe was made as early as 1895, but the creator of the most detailed theory of Marlowe's authorship was Calvin Hoffman, an American journalist, whose book on the subject was published in 1955. According to history, Marlowe had been killed in 1593 by men who had worked for the English secret service, as Marlowe himself had.
The theory is that Marlowe's apparent 'patron' Thomas Walsingham, cousin of Francis Walsingham (who directed the spy network), had Marlowe's death faked to protect him from charges of atheism and heresy being investigated by the Privy Council. Regardless of guilt the interrogation methods used would have been severe. Marlowe was then smuggled out of the country and wrote "Shakespeare's" plays and other work. Alternatively it has been hypothesized Marlowe was murdered to keep sensitive or embarrassing information he knew from the Privy Council.
Either way Marlowe's death and the investigation that followed does indeed appear suspicious.
Shakespeare's first published work Venus and Adonis was licensed for publication on April 4, 1593 (the date at which it was issued to the public is not recorded), and Marlowe is reported to have died March 30, 1593. The first edition carried a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, signed by "William Shakespeare." The first record of Shakespeare as an actor comes from December 1594.
Stratfordians maintain Marlowe's work is stylistically and intellectually quite different from Shakespeare's. Given Marlowe's controversial style and subject matter this difference would be expected from any writer, including Marlowe, seeking to stay away from the scrutiny of authorities.
In 2001 the documentary Much Ado About Something by Michael Rubbo explored in detail the possibility of Marlowe's authorship.
Others
Other candidates proposed include William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, Sir Edward Dyer, Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland and at least fifty others, even Queen Elizabeth. The American black radical Malcolm X argued that Shakespeare was actually King James I.
Academic authorship debates
The above refers to what might be termed the "popular" authorship debate, which revolves around the idea of a single genius responsible for the Shakespearean canon. There is, however, another authorship debate among scholars in the field. This is concerned with the issues of collaboration and revision of plays and the correct attribution of works.
The Elizabethan theatre was nothing like the modern theatre, but rather more like the modern film business. Scripts were often written under pressure of performance, and many were the product of collaboration, with plays often being rewritten by the actors as well as other writers. Many scholars also argue that the concept of the creative integrity of a single author, as we know it, did not exist at the time, and the unscrupulous nature of the Elizabethan book printing 'trade' complicates the attribution of plays further; e.g., William Jaggard, who published the First Folio, also published The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare, which is mostly the work of other writers.
Many experts in the field who write about, and edit, Shakespeare for a popular audience are very conservative of the traditional ascriptions and insist that Shakespeare wrote most of the accepted canon, though it is universally acknowledged that Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII are collaborations; but it would be wrong to claim that their views represent a consensus. Most of these conservatives concede that even some of Shakespeare's greatest plays, like Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, are old plays that Shakespeare revised, and it is well known that Shakespeare 'borrowed' all of his plots from earlier writers. Others believe that Shakespeare's dependence on other writers may have been considerable. There is some reason to believe that Shakespeare contributed to plays other than those he is traditionally assigned.
Recent work on computer analysis of textual style (word use, word and phrase patterns) has given some reason to believe that parts of some of the early plays ascribed to Shakespeare are actually by other (unknown) writers.
Meanwhile, some scholars have used computer analysis to attempt to "unearth" previously unattributed works whose syntactical and semantic signatures they believe may be uniquely attributed to Shakespeare's pen. These investigations prove somewhat strange to many, who wonder why we should care about work whose merits alone have not, over the centuries, suggested themselves as products of Shakespeare's unique — and possibly unquantifiable — insight and skill. Others, primarily scholars, point out that even a clearly substandard work by Shakespeare is of great interest because of the insight it gives into his better efforts.
The most famous example of computerized attribution is that of scholar (and forensic linguist) Don Foster, who attributed A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter , previously ascribed only to "W.S.", to William Shakespeare, based on an analysis of its grammatical patterns and idiosyncratic word usage. A sign of the great interest taken in the authorship question even in today's era where Shakespeare's plays must compete with a vast array of other media for attention is the tremendous press attention paid to this discovery, which made the New York Times and other headlines.
Unfortunately for Foster, a later analysis by scholar Gilles Monsarrat showed Foster's attribution to be premature, and that the true author may well have been John Ford. Don Foster ceded to Monsarrat's argument in an e-mail message to the SHAKSPER e-mail list in 2002 . Since Monsarrat's analysis also relied upon linguistic analysis, rather than facts of historical record, however, it may be said that the idea of attempting to find a unique "linguistic signature" of Shakespearian authorship that is separable from a judgement of artistic merit — or even the possibility of eventual confirmation by historical record — has survived. Foster's "concession message," in referring to his experience serving as an expert witness in linguistic analysis in the American court system, provides an interesting take on this question: "My experience with the anonymous documents in criminal investigations indicates that competent and trusted people — math professors, parents, biowarfare experts — often commit acts or write texts that you wouldn't expect of them."
These analyses impact the more "popular" authorship debate, as any new evidence for works written outside of the known dates may be used to rule out alternate authors. Don Foster's work, in particular, was taken as a threat to the Oxfordians.
See also Shakespeare Apocrypha.
References
- H. N. Gibson: The Shakespeare Claimants, London 1962. (orthodox, but a good overview)
- John Michell: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Thames and Hudson, London. ISBN 0-500-28113-0 (paperback 1999) (neutral, slightly tongue-in-cheek)
- Irvin Leigh Matus: Shakspeare, in Fact, Continuum. ISBN 0826409288 (paperback 1999) (Stratfordian vs. Oxford)
External links
Orthodox
- The Shakespeare Authorship Page
- Irvin Leigh Matus (Stratfordian) Shakespeare Site
- The Case for Shakespeare in the Atlantic Monthly, 1991
Bacon
Oxford
- Shakespeare Oxford Society Home Page
- The Case for Oxford in the Atlantic Monthly, 1991
Marlowe
- Peter Farey's Marlowe page
- Frontline: Much Ado About Something
- Christopher Marlowe Books
- The Marlowe Society
Other
- The Search for Shakespeare Continues ... By Patrick Buckridge, an anti-Stratfordian academic
- Shakespeare, Man or Text? A scholarly view of Shakespeare as collaborator
- The Shakespeare Mystery An overview from PBS
- The Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference A yearly academic conference devoted to studying the authorship question