The speculations that Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we think persist, more than four centuries after his death. Musings that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone other than William Shakespeare, the London actor and “glover’s son” from the small town of Stratford, have percolated for a couple of hundred years, and have fascinated a variety of luminaries – including Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, and Freud – but in recent years the authorship debate seems to have picked up momentum. Brunel University of London offers an M.A. in Authorship Studies, and the University of London offers free courses about Shakespeare Authorship online. A few notable figures like Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and John Paul Stevens (bizarrely for figures who aren’t supposed to take stands), as well as some respected British actors of Shakespeare like Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Mark Rylance (former artistic director of the Globe Theatre), Jeremy Irons, and Michael York OBE have all signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. This petition expresses the sentiment that there is significant evidence to question the centuries-long common assumption that Shakespeare wrote the plays that every pupil studies under his name.
One of the doubters’ initial arguments is that no manuscripts of any work in the Shakespeare canon exist in his hand. This strikes numerous people as damning. However, they happily overlook the follow-up question required by logic: do manuscripts of other plays of the period exist written in the hands of their authors? The answer to that is also No, according to English Literature professor and Stratfordian (one who supports Shakespeare’s authorship) James Shapiro in his book Contested Will, a historical overview of how Shakespeare has been perceived through the centuries. Shapiro explains that the plays were considered by their authors as entirely expendable creations of the moment. So many plays were being written and performed, they were more like episodes of TV series, just without the ongoing royalties for reruns. A theater company would only pay the writer for the delivery of the play, and then it became the company’s property. There was no notion of an author having a copyright – which is one reason there were so many collaborations between writers, something again similar to TV series with multiple credited writers over a season, and with regular writing staffs in “writers’ rooms”.
Fewer people might doubt that Shakespeare was Shakespeare if they really grasped how very different things were then: none of the playwrights expected their playscripts to be published, sold, or preserved, Shapiro tells us. No-one conceived of plays being published at all until after Shakespeare’s death. The authorship doubters contrast the lack of manuscripts with the odd mundanity of the few records we do have of Shakespeare’s life, mere legal and business documents. But preserving and accounting personal transactions would have been exactly the kind of papers that would have been seen as valuable and would have been preserved by Shakespeare or his family -- that is what people did. Not for posterity, but for the short-term, in case someone got into a dispute, haggled over bills, or had to go court. No-one at the time would have thought that Shakespeare’s books, notes, or drafts would hold any interest. Certainly, in that era people did not set up museums or university archives for great cultural figures.
The very vitality and scope of Shakespeare’s works also make the authorship doubters suspicious. The plays exhibit a far-ranging imagination, while historians know that Shakespeare emanated from and later withdrew to a quiet existence in Stratford, where it doesn’t seem like he ranged very far at all. Therefore, various other personages of the time who lived much more glamorous lives sound like more appropriate candidates to have written the plays. A primary candidate, the one favored by the “Oxfordians,” is aristocrat Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. He was a poet and a patron of the arts who jousted, traveled in Continental Europe, joined military escapades, sat on trial commissions, and was welcomed at the royal court. The claim is often made that de Vere’s own life bears such notable resemblances to plots in several of Shakespeare’s plays that they must surely be clues about the writer’s identity.
However, according to Shapiro, playwrights did not write autobiographically in those days. They did not think to base their writing on their own lives the way we do now. Their subjects were places and periods far removed from their own experience. It is clear that Shakespeare became so admired after his death that the public demanded to know more about his life; they wanted to be able to understand his genius and see into his mind. This kind of curiosity did not exist in his own time, however. A writer could be private in his daily life, and it would not have occurred to him to write his commissioned plays as if they were channels for soul-baring. In fact, Shapiro would argue, when we dissect the sonnets as clues to Shakespeare’s own love life, or when we talk about Prospero’s final gesture at the end of The Tempest as an emblem of Shakespeare’s retirement, we are pursuing an inappropriate and useless track.
Another key argument by the doubters is that the only real biographical records we have to accompany such a staggering genius seem banal, and portray a rather miserly and superficial character. We do not expect someone with such fame and acclaim during his own lifetime to have lived such a prosaic personal life: retiring to the seclusion of his provincial hometown of Stratford after his prominence in the bubbling cauldron of London theater, selling grain for a profit, suing a neighbor over a debt of a mere £6, and leaving his wife his “second-best” bed. However, several of these biographical items are misunderstood, according to Shapiro.
First of all, Shakespeare did not give up writing when he left London. Scholars no longer view The Tempest as his final work but now believe that after the four romances, he went on to write Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and even a third, the late discovery, Cardenio. Secondly, Shapiro states that Shakespeare was probably not himself much involved as a grain merchant; his wife would probably have overseen that business as part of running the household. Thirdly, the lawsuit Shakespeare embarked on against a local tradesman was not uncommon for the time; it was how people went about collecting debts as there were no other means of enforcement. Moreover, £6 was of course worth much more at the time (it would be over $1350 today). And as for the ‘shade’ thrown by Shakespeare’s will, that is the subject of significant debate. Shapiro points out that the Bard also left the equivalent of about £350,000 to each of his daughters, and that the reason the only inheritance he mentioned for his wife was the bed is that every widow was automatically entitled to a third of her husband’s estate anyway, as well as to the continued use of their home as domicile. The reason it was noted as “the second-best bed” is that it would have been the bed they had both slept in together; the best bed was customarily placed in the guest room. Also, Shakespeare didn’t just abandon London, he still went up to the city often, collaborated on plays, and continued to hold a financial interest in the enterprise of theater.
Moreover, Shakespeare’s three last plays, those which follow The Tempest, are incredibly inconvenient to those who argue that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. All three of them happen to be collaborations with John Fletcher. Thus, realistically, Fletcher would have had to be in on the conspiracy to keep Shakespeare’s true identity a secret -- since if he worked with him, he would have easily discovered that he was a phony. Yet, if he knew that the Stratford actor Shakespeare was an impostor, he would not have wanted to waste his time working with him, because it would be like collaborating with an amateur (or perhaps even a non-writer). Besides all of that, if there was political repression and danger motivating use of the name Shakespeare as a front -- which is what seems to appeal to a lot of those who favor the idea of a cover-up -- then it could conceivably even have put Fletcher at risk to work with him. Therefore, Fletcher’s collaboration with the Bard is a logical conundrum if Shakespeare was faking being the writer of those plays.
On the topic of collaboration, however, there have also been some even more interesting suppositions in recent years. In 2016, the Oxford Press announced that they would be adding Christopher Marlowe’s name as a co-writer to Shakespeare’s three-part Henry VI history plays. These plays were at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career -- and I personally can’t remember a thing about them even though I watched all of them from the BBC-TV adaptations. Scholars have wondered about them for a long time. (No high-schoolers should start out by reading them first if they want to get a real feel of what Shakespeare could do, even if they might come at the front of a collection arranged chronologically.) Oxford Press based its decision on computer analysis of the texts and consideration by 23 academics. Furthermore, Thomas Middleton is also getting co-authorship credit on All’s Well That Ends Well. Scholars now see a possibility that 17 of Shakespeare’s plays may have writing in them from the quills of other playwrights.
Though it is entirely possible that computers can be wrong in trying to interpret words as if they were data points, I think this new direction, as unsettling as it may be, solves some of the core issues. The need to elevate William Shakespeare as a superhuman genius who must have written every single word of every one of his plays is a sort of psychic need, much like the desire to tear Shakespeare off that pedestal may be – but the insistence on one or the other extreme position may be part of the cause of the debate. Finding a middle ground where Shakespeare may have gotten some help seems like it could put to rest some of the doubts, or at least the arguments for them.
If we can look at it practically and reasonably, it makes perfect sense that Shakespeare may have collaborated with others. With the sheer volume of output all of these theaters were producing in that golden age when everyone went to the theater, it certainly does come across rather like Hollywood in the studio era, where of course writers often did collaborate, or at least work on scripts serially. This does not take away from Shakespeare of Stratford his achievements as Shakespeare the dramatist. It merely suggests that sometimes, some of these writers -- in that very small world of London theaters all clustered together -- may have intersected. Collaboration seems like a sane way to meet deadlines during such a prolific period. It also makes sense that the versions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been handed down to us could have bits and pieces from other writers. Those who ascribed Thomas Middleton to All’s Well That Ends Well detected that Shakespeare seemed to have been the first writer, and then Middleton added some contributions later, perhaps even after Will died. Again, rewrites and touch-ups are well-known in Hollywood, so this does not seem far-fetched, although the Writers’ Guild of America is probably relieved that these scripts are not among those they have to arbitrate for writing credits.
However, the explanations that Shakespeare may have helped out other writers with their work, and other writers may have contributed to his, does not sound at all dramatic, nor does it appear to have political motives. It’s hard to make a conspiracy and cover-up theory out of the rather mundane idea that during this fertile period, playwrights may have been collaborated with each other from time to time. These new title pages in the Oxford Shakespeare editions, therefore, are unlikely to put the authorship debate to bed.
