Saturday was one of those rare days when I read a book in a day. It has to be a short book, compelling and have no competition from other things that need doing but it has happened before.
Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays? by William D. Rubinstein claims to be objective in considering the arguments for and against the most popular candidates in the Authorship Question but Rubinstein's previous books include
The Truth Will Out, which set out the case for one of the latest candidates, Sir Henry Neville, that he has a share in and so it might not be completely impartial.
I'm not impartial either but was swayed to some doubt when first taking up the subject of Shakespeare biography quite a few years ago now and was prepared to accept the upshot of John Michell's
Who Wrote Shakespeare? that the Stratford man was an uneasy favourite and that collaboration was an attractive answer to what has become a battlefield of sometimes quite vitriolic debate. But, without any axe to grind or point to prove, and no reason to uphold the status quo, I'm squarely back in with the Stratford man even if reviewing books on the subject here has led to even me being condemned elsewhere as an arch-Stratfordian unwilling to engage with the evidence. But, for reasons of their own, there continues to be this various group of conspiracy theorists, some more 'crackpot' (Rubinstein's word, not mine) than others, who keep the debate going. So, taking this little book as a starting point, I understand the overall position to be something like this-
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had his name on the plays and poems since they appeared in print, some during his life and some after his death. It wasn't seriously questioned whether he wrote them for two hundred years and more.
He is referred to as their author by Ben Jonson, who would have known him, in his tribute and other contemporaries, not always quite so graciously.
He was a theatre man, an actor and share-holder in theatre companies. His day to day involvement in the theatre meant that he wrote parts specifically for the actors in his company, like Richard Burbage, but, most significantly, for his comic actors and the nature of the fool/clown parts in the plays changes immediately when Will Kempe leaves- quite possibly to the relief of the rest of the company - and Robert Armin, a more melancholy fool, is brought in and thus plays Feste, Touchstone and the Fool in
Lear.
There are references to Warwickshire in the plays, specifically to Wincot in
The Merry Wives of Windsor as well as the apparent wordplay on 'hate away' (Hathaway) in
Sonnet 145, that looks like an early poem about a domestic disagreement that was resolved lovingly even if subsequent stresses in the marriage might not have been.
And there is not much to convince us of a genuine alternative candidate for the authorship in the cases made for others, which increasingly look more like exercises in ingenuity by those who see themselves as amateur sleuths indulging in a game they enjoy than literary scholarship.
The case that there was some collaboration between writers in the Shakespeare plays is not at issue. Most accept Thomas Middleton as having a hand in
Timon of Athens. The sudden change to a whole new style of theatre late in Shakespeare's career looks to me to involve John Fletcher and perhaps Francis Beaumont. Plays in those days were the property of the theatre, the writers more like jobbing professionals than the revered artists they are seen as in the C21st, and the need to adapt, edit or make good a play for a new production meant that any scriptwriter could pick up a text and doctor it to suit requirements.
The Two Noble Kinsmen is generally attributed to Shakespeare and Fletcher. And so the idea that the plays were written by a number of people is not disputed, only the extent of the involvement of others as well as Shakespeare.
But the evidence put forward in favour of the other candidates is much more tenuous than the various points made against the case for Shakespeare.
If Francis Bacon's was the first major claim to be put forward, it has receded to the status of historical curiosity by now, but is most convincingly disparaged by Rubinstein on account of his 'elephantine prose style' that stands in comparison to Shakespeare's,
as the poems of Pushkin compare to a speech by Leonid Brezhnev on tractor production in the Urals.
The Earl of Oxford died in 1604 which make the continuing support for him difficult to understand but many years ago I had a poem by Oxford in front of me on my desk at work and kept it there for months, looking at it regularly and, no, it was workmanlike, ordinary and unconvincing as a piece supposedly by the same poet that wrote the earliest sonnets, not even just 145, or the likes of
Richard III.
Marlowe died even earlier, in 1593. There was no need for him to be secretly smuggled out to Italy to write plays under a new name (and more about Italy in a bit). Shakespeare's early plays seem to take the cue from Marlowe's,
Richard II from
Edward II or
The Merchant of Venice from
The Jew Of Malta, but do it somehow better in the same way that Thomas Tallis's
Spem in Alium sounds as if he heard Striggio's 40-part motet and decided he could do better than that. Marlowe is unlikely to have written such similar plays in pairs.
And so Rubinstein's book leads us quite logically to Neville, his own previously stated preferred option. But he has no evidence that the M.P. wrote anything of a literary nature, or had any such interests, with no connection to the theatre having been found.
The latest count of alternative candidates is about 70. A list I saw counted Thomas Campion's supporters numbered as one. Which corroborates the idea that identifying any known name in Elizabethan/Jacobean England as a potential author of
Hamlet has become an ingenious game. So, before anybody else floats the idea, I wish to lay claim to the radio or television panel game,
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
But since the brief summary of positive identifications of the Stratford actor are not enough to satisfy the sceptics, it is useful to dispel some of their main objections. Not all of them are quite as damning to the acceptance of this traditional, dyed in the wool (and more about wool later), unthinking adherence to the Bard. And it is worth mentioning that I'm not one of those Bardolaters identified in Germaine Greer's book who thinks the world of the man, his works and everything about him. The writer needs to be human to write about humanity and fine writing, as I was told by a sixth form history teacher, isn't enough. Well, not unless you want to be a writer, I should have replied. And George Orwell says somewhere in his essays that writers are vain, selfish and lazy. Nobody is attributing the plays to Shakespeare because we like the bloke; we didn't know him. He would have had faults like anybody else. The writing is no better or worse whoever wrote it. It just happens to be tremendous writing and it looks as if he wrote it.
But Italy, for instance. Shakespeare almost certainly never went abroad. But how detailed did his knowledge of Italy need to be to write the plays set in Italy. I reckon I could write a story set in New York if I felt inclined to and I've never been there and am not going to go. Italy was as fashionable 400 years ago as the centre of the Renaissance as America was in the C20th and audiences were interested in the glamour they attributed to it. It is not so surprising that Shakespeare set so many plays there or that he could imagine a balcony in Verona where he might set a courtship scene. And if the author of the plays was so well travelled, why didn't he know that Bohemia didn't have a coastline, in
A Winter's Tale.
It is pointed out that there was little interest in Shakespeare biography until the C18th, as if to suggest what, exactly. There wasn't much interest in literary biography at all. There wasn't anything like the industry in it that there is now with so many Universities housing academics needing to find a subject to publish new work on to further their careers; to challenge established orthodoxies and make the lives of authors their subject rather than the work. And, by the by, Shakespeare's plays were going out of fashion before he died as a new, more cynical theatre evolved through Ben Jonson, until the theatres were eventually closed by Puritanism and Restoration theatre was an altogether different thing. And so there is every reason why Shakespeare was of increasingly less interest for a long time after 1616 and there is a parallel in music in the way that J.S. Bach, apparently less renowned than Telemann in his lifetime, needed to be rediscovered by Mendelssohn before he could occupy a similar position in music to that held by Shakespeare in literature. But, by 1759, interest in Shakespeare, presumably on account of the belief that he had written the plays and poems, was such that New Place was demolished by the Rev. Frances Gastrell, its last incumbent, because he was so irritated by tousists coming to look at his house, which had been Shakespeare's.
The regularly raised objection to the Stratford actor that he was a provincial, uneducated non-aristocrat is often dismissed as snobbery so it's very enterprising of Rubinstein to try to turn that argument the other way round. But not going to University doesn't prevent anybody talented enough from achieving success; by no means all aristocrats are intellectual giants; someone with sufficient acumen will provide for themselves in reading and finding out about those things they are interested in but by far the most depressing thing about the discounting of a so-called provincial hick is that it underestimates genius, which can occur anywhere and at anytime. It is astonishing to know people of genuine talent and outstanding intelligence, to see how quickly they learn, understand and assimilate subjects or creative ideas that stretch someone of my respectable but more limited means or prove to be completely beyond me. And I've not necessarily met a Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo or David Bowie.
That the actor, theatre share-holder and businessman, Shakespeare, would have been too busy to write two plays a year up to the seminal masterpiece,
Hamlet, and one a year afterwards is less convincing if one considers the acting career was not on the same scale as Burbage but thought to be in smaller parts and probably ended soon after or with the part of the ghost in
Hamlet, if that anecdote is to be believed but, again, such doubts are betting without giving genius its due.
That there were were no books mentioned in Shakespeare's will is also held against him as if it were proof that he couldn't have been a literary man. But it is more likely that whatever books there were would have been a part of a general dispersal of minor items not specifically left to anyone and no mention at all of books is more convincing than if the will had specificied a few religious treatises or textbooks on orchard husbandry rather than a complete set of Ovid. I have well over a thousand books in my house, maybe two thousand, I don't know, and that includes a complete set of beautifully old-fashioned, red Loeb editions of Ovid but my will will not make any mention of books.
And, finally, which is approximately sixthly in this list, why would any other author want to hide behind the name of a frontman, especially if one could have had the credit for the unparalleled body of work that has passed so thoroughly into the language. The history plays are Tudor propaganda, not dissident work likely to make their author a target for government henchmen and, as James Shapiro points out in
1606, The Year of Lear, as soon as James becomes monarch and the unity of England and Scotland is a big issue, the plays suddenly shift from an emphasis on England to Britain. It seems an elaborate disgiuse that requires much more explanation from the conspiracy theorists than has been provided so far.
But people are always going to believe what they want to believe, sometimes not only in spite of reasonable assessments of the evidence but from a contrarian attitude. Among them, quite famously, are Derek Jacobi and then Mark Rylance. It's not for me to become so partisan as to point out that Jacobi's sitcom with Ian McKellen,
Vicious, was an appalling travesty of camp that didn't even look as if they done it ironically or that Rylance's three-handed
Tempest as his farewell to The Globe simply didn't work and that staring out of windows mournfully with those eyes in
Wolf Hall doesn't make you as good an actor as Lawrence Olivier or, for that matter, the much more moving Ben Wishaw in
Richard II. Because those wouldn't be points relevant to the issue.
But what I am grateful to the Rubinstein book for is the drawing by William Dugdale, from 1653, of the Shakespeare monument up on the wall to the left of the graves of the family in Holy Trinity Church. This is not the current kitsch bust of a writer holding a quill pen, who does look like a self-satisfied pork butcher and has been previously, in places, assumed to be a likeness of the writer because his wife, Anne, must have seen it. But this is a man with his hand on a sack, perhaps of wool, with no writing implements in sight. Obviously a successful businessman, and local, you would have thought. So why have we now got an awful pastiche of a poet, one has to ask. And when did it replace this bust of someone esle.
One would like to think that the drawing is of an original monument to John Shakespeare, the father, who recent research has suggested did not suffer a downturn in his business affairs but was an early exponent of tax avoidance and made a fortune in wool that he took care to hide from the tax gatherers of the day.
It's probably that, then, and still no reason to think that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn't write the plays. Perhaps it was decided to change the monument into one of William by some local fan or entrepreneur wanting a further tourist attraction. It is to be regretted they didn't employ a better scupltor. But there's plenty of opportunity for further speculation there and everywhere.
