Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press)

There are now 80 candidates for the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Edmund Campion has only one known advocate but he still counts. In the introduction to this collection of essays, Stanley Wells suggests that the introduction of each new candidate to the field mathematically reduces the chances of it being any of the others. It would have done if it were a lottery but since it is ultimately a matter of fact that has been brought into doubt and for some become a matter of conjecture, I’m not sure that it does. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s chances of being World Snooker Champion would not have been affected if I had competed for the title.

The book is motivated by a perceived recent upsurge in interest in the claims of the Earl of Oxford, Marlowe and 78 others, the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ issued by those who do not accept the Stratford-born actor as the proven author of the works and the film Anonymous. It hadn’t looked like that to me, though. I thought the absurdity of the evidence compiled by the supporters of other candidates meant that by now there was hardly a case to answer and so these assembled Stratfordians look to me a little bit paranoid in their keenness to defend a position that should be an easy win. However, they do it very well.

It is a well organized book in three parts. The first examines and puts away the imaginative but flawed testimony offered in favour of the major candidates, Bacon, Marlowe and Oxford. The second brings together a number of approaches in support of Shakespeare from Stratford, which is the more difficult part of the process. The third goes further by considering the motivations, the qualifications and the methods of the anti-Stratfordians, which is less necessary, of less significance and only really interesting in places.

It can be a difficult thing in which to maintain an even tone. Most readers of the book will come to it with an opinion more or less on one side of the argument rather than the other and so a scornful, droll or ridiculing attitude towards the opposing camp, while often entertaining, doesn’t present itself as impartial, forensic and objective and an argument isn’t won by stating that it is ‘clearly’ or ‘obviously’ the case when it needs to be demonstrably so. But it is a partisan issue and a gathering of several contributors and so there will be different levels of blasé confidence among them as well as possible minor contradictions in which, for example, some will deny it is possible to establish authorship of work by finding biographical correspondences in it and then, a few chapters later, suggest that the plays mention the references to place names not far from Stratford to show it must have been him. The Earl of Oxford might conceivably have been to Warwickshire, too, and been cognisant of some place names there. David Kathman usefully quotes T. S. Eliot,

‘having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience’.

But you can’t have it both ways and although the place names are nice anecdotal detail, they don’t stand up in court. Oxford’s more ticklish problem is having died in 1604, of course.

Being a collection of essays, the book necessarily repeats some crucial points that a single author would have needed to make fewer times. One of them is the accusation of snobbery against those who don’t believe in a provincial, non-University man who would have needed education and experience among the nobility to write such plays. It is hard to see how this central tenet of the opposition manifesto could have taken such a hold but it is as nothing compared to some of the presentations of Shakespeare in fictional accounts of his life described by Paul Franssen. By all means, there is no need to regard Shakespeare as a saint who visited this earth with a cool wit, calm temper and goodness abounding, his literary masterpieces to share with us. He was surely, above all, human, and that is how he knew. But there is no need to malign his character as a dullard, drunkard, and parsimonious wife-beater either. Genius can occur anywhere and at any time and is unlikely to be inculcated in one who doesn’t have it by sitting in classes. There was Classical education in Stratford Grammar School and nobody I know stopped reading books once they had left school (assuming that they read any in the first place). He had some business acumen, could very possibly have been a bi-sexual whose marriage was a loveless affair after the birth of his only daughter and he is likely to have taken a social drink but no amount of exaggeration of these shadowy biographical details can establish that he wasn’t a literary genius. University can do more harm than good to some people. As Carol Chillington Rutter quotes Ben Jonson, ‘A good Poet’s made as well as born’, but being born needs to come first.

Not every chapter contributes as much to the argument or the entertainment as the others. I wasn’t immediately inured of Kathleen E. McLuskie’s academic account of ‘conspiracy’ in Shakespeare’s life and one or two of the essays do look as if they were diverted to this volume and made to fit its purpose but I’m sure they are valid and worthy contributions to scholarship. At other times, though, the book provides many hugely enjoyable passages that go well beyond the requirements of nailing the argument.

Alan H. Nelson, a biographer of Oxford, treats us to a colourful summary of that life including the inadmissible evidence that Oxford returned from a trip to Italy with a choirboy, Orazio Coquo from Venice, with whom he ‘took up residence’ and that, in 1574,

Back in England, Oxford finally paid enough attention to Anne [Cecil, his wife] to get her pregnant.

 

That doesn’t prove he didn’t write Hamlet but MacDonald P. Jackson’s piece on stylometrics almost certainly does, and having once a few years ago had a sonnet attributed to Oxford in my eyeline at work for a long time for continued scrutiny, I find this forensic approach at least reasonable if not impressive. The person who wrote Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, not the author of Oxford’s sonnet, the authorship of which remains largely uncontested.

Stuart Hampton-Reeves’ crucial examination of the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ takes on reason with more reason, explaining that,

Few legal cases have been settled by recourse to radical existential doubt. The issue here is not whether there is any doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship, but whether there is any reasonable doubt.      

And so, the book progresses from a very fair assessment of the work of Delia Bacon, the American credited with beginning the debate in the mid-C19th, through Stanley Wells’ survey of direct references to William Shakespeare to 1642 to an analysis of Anonymous, the box office disaster, that the film perhaps doesn’t quite warrant. But the chapter on Shakespeare as collaborator by John Jowett seems to me as important as any because, in the unlikely event of any consensus being arrived at between these two (mostly) firmly entrenched points of view, it might be here. The idea that Shakespeare was the figurehead, the name, the stooge or the editor of a committee of writers that produced this body of work, in the same way that American television programmes like The Simpsons are made, is only a big stretch of generous effort from the widely accepted idea that Shakespeare collaborated with other writers on some plays. Thomas Middleton on Timon of Athens, George Wilkins, the brothel-keeper, on Pericles, and I can’t help but suspect that the shift from a downward-spiral of darker and gloomier themes through Hamlet and Lear to Timon could really have been halted and reversed to the magical reconciliation of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale without the intervention, or at least powerful influence of another writer, like John Fletcher. But this is a matter of degree and although research into such an area is still ongoing, I can’t see it becoming enough of a committee to satisfy those that have declared their doubt. It would, however, be somewhere to start in attempting a reconciliation in a debate that has surely got out of hand except that I’m not sure there is a will ( ! ) to do so and the industry would perhaps prefer to grind on forever.

The Declaration has apparently stalled with no significant upturn in signatories inspired by the film or any book published since its inception. But since it was an allegedly awful film and all those that wanted to sign it would have done so early on, it’s difficult to see how it could have been expected to become a juggernaut campaign and, even if it did, it doesn’t matter how many people doubt something, it still doesn’t make it untrue.

Paul Edmondson puts the finishing touches to the show with an account of recent developments in the debate, beginning with the proposition that,

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

and ending with a denial that there is a ‘Shakespeare establishment'.  

I don’t know how much better the job could have been done but I remain a little bit surprised that it was required given the lack of a candidate to replace the Stratford man’s name on those books of plays and poems. But, then again, it did cost me 18 pounds and so it served at least the purpose of relieving me of that. But it is not the Shakesperians who are keeping this authorship industry going, they are ‘left gasping in incredulity’ at some of it. One would like to think it was a comprehensive enough statement but one somehow doubts if it will be the last word.

Would that it were, Mr. Wells, would that it were.