All Their Jests, Forays and Unenlightened Fools

On this auspicious date, I am pleased to be able to make one of the great revelations of this Shakespeare anniversary year. Hold on to your hats, this changes Shakespeare Studies once and for all.

To be, or not to be, the author

Earlier this week, Radio 4 had an item summarizing some of the famous April Fool hoaxes in the media from the spaghetti trees to the announcement of the decimal 10 hour day. One of them was a 2010 report on the Today programme about the discovery of a locket belonging to Shakespeare's mother, inscribed in French, where she was called Mary Ardennes. This was taken as evidence that she was French and, thus, so probably was Shakespeare.
I thought, That's Daft, but it's no dafter than some of the theories put about with regard to the man, the plays and the Authorship Question. On a scale of 1 to 10 of daftness, it's only about a 6 compared to some of the theories seriously put forward and so it hardly consitutes an April Fool. And then the penny dropped. Oh, I see.

The whole Shakespeare authorship debate has been one big April Fool and we all fell for it. Many years ago I wondered about it before becoming staunchly pro-Stratfordian and defending the traditional attribution against allcomers. It has exercised the minds of the top Shakespeare scholars in books, societies, conferences, websites and open feuding. The big hoax developed from obscure beginnings but gathered momentum as it went along and various luminaries either did, or didn't, realize what was going on.
Of course, by now, nobody seriously believes that the plays and poems were not mainly written by the man from Stratford. As Bill Bryson puts it,
The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.
The earliest extant expression of doubt is from an C18th clergyman whose idea was unlikely to be known to Delia Bacon, the American obsessive who really began the debate about 175 years ago. From then on, many have joined the bandwagon but only the most gullible believed it. The likes of Mark Twain, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance saw the joke and how brilliantly it could be made to work and went along with it to mock the dogged bard worshippers who were so infatuated with their Shakespeare that they couldn't see the mischief being made.
It's not as if the hoaxers didn't leave enough clues. Early perpetrators called themselves Looney, Silliman and Battey but the zeal of the Stratford supporters made them blind to the barely disguised taunts. The more outrageous the claims made by the conspiracy theorists became, finding hidden codes in the plays and putting forward less and less likely candidates as the True Author Revealed, the more frantic, affronted and indignant did Shakespeare's defenders become. It was a brilliantly contrived hoax and it got us 'at it' for a century and a half, spilt gallons of ink and caused more heartache than can adequately be expressed in a soliloquy. Only now can we see what fun they had at our expense.
The most remarkable contribution to the prank (when, really, they went too far but by then must have thought they could get away with anything, and did) came from Muammar Qadhafi, whose proposition that Shakespeare was actually Sheikh Zubayr was broadcast on Radio Tehran in 1989.
It has been a wonderful literary circus to put not alongside but far above that of Chatterton, or the musical equivalent in which Fritz Kreisler passed off some pieces as those of a newly discovered baroque master. Nobody noticed. Not until, luckily, I was tuned into to Radio 4 for a change and it dawned on me. It is remarkable how many such discoveries are made in such Eureka moments rather than by years of hard research. But hats off to all those apologists for the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Marlowe's faked murder and his being secreted off to Italy to write plays. I am ashamed to have ever defended the case for Shakespeare against such ludicrous claims but at least I'm big enough to give credit where it is due, which is much easier for me to do than the rest of his defenders because it's me that's uncovered all their jests, forays and what unenlightened fools we all were to ever give them the time of day.

So, I told you it would be any good. The whole issue can now be put to bed, Mark Rylance and his jolly band of tricksters can be congratulated for keeping it going for so long. But 'so long' to the Authorship question, they've been found out. All the points have been made and they are very tired now. That is an end of it and from now on we can concentrate on proper biographical questions (which will be resumed here soon) and perhaps even read and attend the plays should we wish to.

It was incorrigible... incomprehensible... indefatiguable... but now I'd like to invite Delia Bacon, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Mr. Charlie Chaplin, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and the assembled company of the Anti-Stratfordians to join us in one last chorus of Now We All Know It's All Tosh.

But, Chiefly, Yourselves.