Some of the most outspoken Oxfordians, or Shakespearean authorship challengers, claim that the Stratford-born thespian William Shakespeare was essentially illiterate. The lack of written documents in Shakespeare’s hand and the collection of vastly varied signatures attributed to Shakespeare fuels this view, and his alleged illiteracy is treated as an indication that he could not have penned the plays attributed to him.
Yet how on earth would middle-class Shakespeare have found work as an actor if he could not read? Perhaps an illiterate aristocrat, who would not need to depend on income from a career, could have hired a helper to read the lines over and over to help him learn his part, but to come to London as a penniless unknown, as Shakespeare did, and try to survive as a jobbing actor, when the theater companies were performing so many new plays so frequently there was barely time for rehearsal, would have required the ability to read. Moreover, as anyone who has tried to memorize Shakespearean speeches knows, it is not like memorizing modern colloquial dialogue. A line of dialogue is not a short sentence or two. This is not text you can just paraphrase or improvise.
Other Oxfordians seize on Shakespeare’s acting career as a direct part of their claim, arguing that acting as frequently as Will did would have precluded the Bard’s having the time or ability to also write 39 wordy, enduring plays. The Oxfordian feature film Anonymous makes this argument explicitly and repeatedly, presenting Will Shakespeare the performer as a crass and moronic egotist, and contrasting him with the refined and sensitive Earl of Oxford, who is shown as the real author. However, the film undermines its own argument by showing Shakespeare having plenty of free time (which he uses for debauchery) while Oxford seems constantly busy handling his estate, his nagging wife, and affairs at court. Thus even the movie about the Earl being the true prolific playwright does not show how he would have had the time.
Besides, the news that acting and playwriting do not mix might have come as a shock to Molière, who was writing, acting, and directing for his French theater company all throughout his life, less than a century after Shakespeare. The impracticability of combining the two professions would also come as a great surprise to the numerous actor-writer hybrid talents out there: the pioneering, critically-acclaimed wordsmiths Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Spalding Gray, and Wallace Shawn; actor-writer-directors Kenneth Branagh, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John Cassavetes, George Clooney, Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy, Taika Waititi, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck, Tim Robbins, Brad Bird, Christopher Guest, Woody Allen, Sarah Polley, Don McKellar, Miranda July, Lake Bell, Desiree Akhavan, Ben Stiller, Billy Bob Thornton, and Edward Burns; famous icons of early cinema Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Orson Welles, and Laurence Olivier; and writers like David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin, who both began by studying acting. It seems, therefore, that contrary to the snark against Shakespeare being an actor (especially evident in the movie Anonymous) actors can find the time and concentration to write, as have done numerous comedic talents like Seth Rogen, Tina Fey, Jennifer Saunders, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Kristen Wiig, Mike Myers, Owen Wilson, Rashida Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Albert Brooks, Rob Reiner, and a range of other thespians including Emma Thompson, Ethan Hawke, Anna Deveare Smith, Matt Damon, Mark Duplass, Tom McCarthy, Danny Strong, Regina Taylor, Brit Marling, Charlayne Woodard, Sylvester Stallone, Lauren Graham, and more. Phew! Quite a long list to just prove the point that actors can also be writers.
More importantly, having been an actor turns out to be a major asset of Shakespeare’s work. People who stage the plays marvel repeatedly over how stageable the scripts are, how attuned to the needs of production. In a tragedy with a single performer bearing the main weight of the script, like Hamlet or Macbeth, Shakespeare gives the tragedian a break, keeping him off-stage for several scenes so he can have a good rest. Great comedic roles like Falstaff coincide with the presence in the company of a superb clown, and even in the tragedies, the comedian is given the chance to strut his stuff: witness the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the Gravedigger in Hamlet, or the Porter’s monologue in Macbeth. These and other features suggest the author as a true man of the theater, no looky-loo but someone who understood its challenges and opportunities – someone who was intimately involved with it on a practical and immediate level.
The fiction film Anonymous makes this issue (albeit unintentionally) all the more tangible and all the stronger a counter-argument by portraying its proffered author of Shakespeare’s plays, the Earl of Oxford a.k.a. Edward de Vere, as deeply mortified that an actor is going to be his front. It is a bit of a joke in the film, but he really does find actors vain and shallow. He is shown watching the plays from his isolated box seat, uninvolved in rehearsals and never interacting with the cast members. He just retires to his estate and churns out these brilliant plays as from a vacuum. How such an aloof figure could have understood the needs of theatrical production seems hard to fathom.
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Then there are the four romance plays which Shakespeare wrote late in his career: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. These are so different in tone, genre, and style from his previous work that they have long struck scholars as a radical change of direction for the Bard, bespeaking a psychic change as he aged and sought to retire to Stratford. Consequently, these romances make a strong argument against the top two alternative candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s works: de Vere and Christopher Marlowe. Also, it is relevant that both those men were dead at the time.
Yes, it would seem that their deaths alone should immediately remove them from the short-list, bar them from penning new plays that appeared after their demise. But those who debate Shakespeare’s authorship do not feel death should stand in the way of a pet theory. They rationalize that either Oxford or Marlowe could have written a backlog of plays in advance of their deaths, and that these were simply produced posthumously while carrying on the ruse of attributing them to Shakespeare. Alternatively, the theorists posit that either one could have faked their own deaths (this is quite a popular theory in the case of Marlowe) and simply continued to write secretly.
Let us put aside the fact that it does not quite make sense that, if the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays were forced to hide his identity to protect himself from political or social backlash, this charade should still have to continue once he was safely dead, whether really dead or even just faked dead. Also, let us not puzzle here over what exactly could possibly have been so controversial in Shakespeare’s works in the first place – plays that were frequently performed in front of England’s monarchs and with their full sanction. Let us not ponder why some people believe that the writer’s real name would need to be so permanently concealed, even after the theater companies switched around, laws changed, and Queen Elizabeth I died and was succeeded by King James. Let us ignore how incredible it seems that Marlowe, so close to literary immortality already in his lifetime, would be willing to forego credit if he was the one who wrote Shakespeare’s plays – considering how well-received they already were at the time.
We won’t dwell on those points, because the clearest and most obvious problem with both of the authorship doubters’ explanations of their candidates’ deaths lies in the four romance plays themselves. If an underground ‘Shakespeare’ figure had written this quartet along with many other plays from the canon years earlier, while still in the prime of life, while his life circumstances were still unaltered, why would the plays differ so markedly in tone and spirit from Shakespeare’s other late works? On the other hand, if the author of those romances wrote them later, after he had faked his death and was hiding his very existence, why would he experiment so noticeably in the plays, drawing attention to himself and risking the arousal of suspicion which might lead back to him?
Those romances illuminate the authorship question even more simply, though, when we consider that these plays were deliberately written for a smaller, indoor theater -- a dramatic shift for Shakespeare – according to James Shapiro in his book Contested Will. The theater used artificial lights, accommodated a much smaller audience, and encouraged new staging techniques, and Shakespeare was conscious of all that in his writing. Shakespeare knew that he could experiment and write a storm at sea, as he did in The Tempest, because of the new technology that allowed for greater scenic realism. Besides the design possibilities, and the opportunity to embrace genres and forms that interested him, there was also, once again as a practical matter, the changed needs of a smaller and more intimate venue -- an impetus to rethink the type of dialogue and plots that would play well. In summary, the new place required that the writer be actively involved with the company, that he understand the physical effects of the space itself, and that he respond to the changing stagecraft – all of which align once again with an active man of the theater like Shakespeare, who became a shareholder in the Blackfriars Theatre.
More specifically, this consideration establishes the timeline. The concordance between the late romance plays and an indoor theatre are proof that the romances were, just as historians have said, composed later in Shakespeare’s life. The way they were suited to their performance venue would have been impossible for a writer to predict years before the altered theatrical possibilities became a reality.
