Speak the Speech

The fact that William Shakespeare of Stratford began as an actor seems entirely compatible with his writing when we look at his obsessive references to theatrical performance and illusion in several of his works: the As You Like It  “All the world’s a stage” speech, the Prologue’s “wooden O” invocation in Henry V, and Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.” It makes perfect sense for Shakespeare -- an actor with years of stage experience, a feeling of solidarity with other players, and a financial commitment to theater through joint stock in his own company -- to insert plays-within-plays into Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet. Yet it seems less likely that a poet like the Earl of Oxford, sequestered (per the film Anonymous) on an aristocrat’s estate far removed from the London theater world, would express himself in those terms.  A detached, reclusive writer seems unlikely to spend so much time on the Melancholy Dane’s relationship with the Players, or Hamlet’s master class in the craft of acting, but an actor-writer might -- and might get away with preaching to fellow actors. 

Even more germane to the way acting shaped Shakespeare the writer, however, is that Shakespeare’s writing, far from being constantly flowery poesy, is down-to-earth and psychologically astute. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona rips up her admirer’s letter to show she has no interest in him, then once alone, she falls to her knees and tearfully scoops up the pieces. Googoo-eyed Juliet calls Romeo back to her balcony, then forgets what she was going to say. The heartbroken Falstaff denies that King Henry V really meant to reject him, and waits vainly for a reprieve. Beatrice gets a cold on her cousin’s wedding day because subconsciously she wishes she were getting married, despite what she says about romance.

Such insights extend to deeper psychological through-lines and major characters as well. Macbeth makes a big splash as a warrior-captain and is promoted by a grateful monarch, but the moment he tastes that career success, this hitherto rule-playing and loyal subject is consumed by an insane ambition. Othello wants to trust that his beloved Desdemona is faithful, but being an exception as a general in a fundamentally racist society, he is easily tricked into suspecting that a white woman could not really love a black man; despite all his accomplishments and recognition, he can’t believe that the power structure, to which Desdemona is related, truly accepts him. Getting ready for retirement, King Lear falls for flattery and obsequiousness just when he is trying to set up his legacy, and like a narcissist who needs to hear constant compliments or he’ll get offended, he cannot see which of his children or aides are actually the loyal ones. All of these portraits are immensely gratifying for any actor to mine, and a strong argument could be made that these profoundly human roles still fascinate artists and audiences precisely because Shakespeare as an actor knew how to give other actors emotionally-sophisticated parts.

Shakespeare’s writing is even more precisely actor-oriented, however, in the rich variety of ways he uses pace and rhythm to express character and emotion. As actors who study the texts know, the speech patterns of Shakespeare’s characters can be profoundly psychologically revealing. Cleopatra misses Antony like a lovesick teenager would, asking her entourage a torrent of questions about what he might be doing at that moment. In Much Ado About Nothing, after her cousin’s wedding descends into chaos, an outraged Beatrice gets emotional around Benedick, interrupting and contradicting herself, blurting out her love for him before she realizes. When the treacherous Iago lays the seeds to taint Othello’s mind, he speaks in a simple and straight-forward way, so that he won’t appear too smart to Othello and arouse his suspicion. By contrast, when Iago speaks to the foolish Roderigo, he uses more complex language in order to impress and intimidate him into helping Iago carry out his scheme.

Students acting Shakespeare are taught to ‘scan’ the meter of the lines, because diagramming the rhythm shows what the characters feel, beat by beat. Cracking the code reveals mood, energy, intended pauses, racing thoughts, tortured logic, and so much more. If a line runs shorter than the usual iambic pentameter, that’s a clue as to the character’s thought process. If it runs longer, that’s another clue. If it begins with an “O,” extending that vowel sound can be wonderfully expressive. If the line has a lot of monosyllabic words, those can be drawn out. If one character stops half way through a line and another character comes in for the second half of the line, the second actor benefits from picking up the cue (following quickly on the heels of the previous line) because it reveals the appropriate energy and therefore the character’s emotion.  

Noticing whether characters speak in verse or prose, what makes them switch between those forms, where or whether they rhyme, and where they use alliteration, antithesis, or simile — these are all clues. Well-trained actors also pay close attention to the word on which the line ends, since they have discovered that Shakespeare has it there for a reason that is particular to that character at that moment in time. Shakespeare’s verse does not just get to the end of the line and allow the actor to take a breath; it ends the character’s thought there, or uses it as a jumping pad for an altered or more highly charged thought, or continues a complicated thought onto the next line in a new way. The end of the line is thus a clue to subtle inner changes within the character. 

The technical nature of Shakespeare’s writing becomes ever more astonishing the more one delves into it. Though of course we cannot expect Shakespeare to have been methodically and deliberately going about his writing with a conscious effort to plant clues for the actor, there is such richness to every piece of text it shows a profound inner actor’s instinct. He even seems to have been aware, probably subconsciously, of the emotional flickers that could be mined in the split-second pause of a ‘separation’: the slight breath necessary when a word ends on one letter or sound and the next word begins with the same letter/sound. An actor cannot rush through “Say I am merry” or “’Tis Caesar that you mean” without making the words unintelligible – and if he pauses between the two similar sounds and puts an emphasis on the second word, emotional subtext (sarcasm, anger, suspicion, and so on) can be conveyed. Separations can also help with stage business. “This is thy sheath: there rust and let me die” has two separations, the ‘th’ sound and the ‘r’ sound, and this allows the actor time to, first, stab himself and second, take a pained breath in reaction.

Such sensitivity to the actor’s needs seems so absolutely informed by an insider’s knowledge of acting, it is almost incomprehensible that the authorship debate has not acknowledged this fact as the predominant one. Shakespeare wrote like an actor would write.

Finally, Shakespeare was never likely going to attain wealth just as a performer – acting was a precarious business, and besides, he was certainly not the star performer in the company, but more like a character actor. It makes sense for him to have kept writing while acting; it probably paid better. Indeed, Shakespeare had earned a pretty good fortune by the end of his life – and it was not by being a grain merchant. If, all the while that Shakespeare was raking in dough it was merely for pretending to write these sought-after plays, it is hard to believe that the supposedly rightful author would continue to pass up all that money as well as the acclaim. At the very least, one might expect the ‘real’ playwright to throw down his quill and refuse to do any more plays under that unfair arrangement.

But the Oxfordians have an even greater problem with regards to the money that Shakespeare earned: their candidate the Earl of Oxford had money troubles. Anonymous rationalizes from this fact to defend their own position: de Vere went broke, so the reason must have been because he was too busy writing the Shakespearean canon to manage his finances. But why wouldn’t he get paid for his work like Shakespeare did? And also, De Vere did put his name on numerous poems -- he was not too proud or private for that. It seems to strain credibility that when he ran into money troubles he would not also lay claim to the greatest plays in the English language if they were his and the result of many years of constant effort. These plays were widely celebrated by then, and commercial hits – it seems coming forward might have offered a solution to his financial woes.

All the World’s A Stage

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.

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.

And This Cushion My Crown

One class-based argument against Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays is sometimes presented (and, interestingly, is often from those who are not from upper-class backgrounds themselves). It offers that Shakespeare wrote like a patrician, elevating the importance of court life, and that he ignored or demeaned the proletariat. Certainly he often wrote about royal rulers, but that seems no stranger than Hollywood making movies and miniseries about legendary heroes, famous politicians, or movie stars – it sells tickets because of the name recognition and public interest in the topic. Shakespeare did write about political intrigue at court in ways that made the characters three-dimensional, but it is odd to deduce from this the necessity of first-hand observation in an actual royal court, especially since so many of the plays about royals were set in the past, when Elizabethan palace customs mattered less. It seems like what was most needed to write about the rulers and the intrigues in the halls of power would simply be historical research, imagination, and an understanding of human nature. 

Julius Caesar and Coriolanus do seem to indicate a profound distaste for ‘mob rule,’ and his history plays frequently have rebels mounting attacks on lawful rulers and causing chaos, and eventually being punished. However, this general slant hardly makes Shakespeare’s provenance from a middle class background disqualify him as a writer who might express such themes. Elizabethan England was not a democracy, and letting the people decide on a course of action would have seemed like anathema – but particularly to the theater’s underwriters, who were either royalty or nobility. In fact, universal human equality would actually have been an alien idea to everyone, no matter what their class. Their whole belief system during the Renaissance rested on an overarching concept of hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being -- with God at the top and the various races and animals arranged at specific, assigned levels on a kind of permanent staircase below.

But at the same time, it is not even universally true of his plays that rebellion was naughty: in Hamlet, though Leontes foolishly tries to overthrow Claudius, when Fortinbras marches on Elsinore at the end of the play, he is returning a troubled castle to peace and stability. Moreover, this comes after the protagonist has murdered a king -- something that in the world of this particular play comes across as a noble act. In Macbeth, the rebels are technically the good guys, recruited by the stalwart Macduff into overthrowing the bloodthirsty eponymous tyrant. When they march on the usurper on the throne (Macbeth) they do so to end his murder spree, so clearly this rebellion is positive.

Personal rebellion and disobedience are also seen in positive lights in other plays of Shakespeare’s. Imogen and Hermia disobey their stern fathers’ matrimonial commands in Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we are on their side. Juliet does the same; the play certainly does not rebuke her willfulness, but instead, ends with the bereaved Capulets and Montagues both learning lessons about parenting. In Measure for Measure, it is the sanctimonious and regimental deputy overseeing the city with an iron fist who is the villain -- the libertines and lawbreakers are shown as very likeable, with understandable flaws. Antony and Cleopatra are the objects of gossip throughout the ancient world over their licentious affair, but at the end of the tragedy, the play sides with them, the independent-minded risk-takers, not with the upright bore Octavius who wages war against them. Moreover, the comedies Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest all devote considerable stage time to mischief and pranks perpetrated by characters who encapsulate the idea of high-spirited anarchy. 

Then we should consider Henry IV, Parts I and II. Though these plays are ostensibly about an English king, he barely appears in it. The riotous, hedonistic, unrepentant anti-hero Falstaff actually seems like the centre of both plays. Prince Hal is the character who changes most over the course of the two plays -- he is the protagonist, strictly speaking, and ultimately he has to disavow the values of the rascal knight Falstaff after his coronation. The play itself does not disavow them, however. When Hal rejects Falstaff, it is Hal who disappears from the stage; Falstaff stays on so we can feel his pain. Moreover, in Henry V, we learn that Falstaff has died of a broken heart because of Hal’s rejection; Shakespeare’s humane ethic has a lot of warmth toward Falstaff, over three plays.

The strongest argument against the theory that Shakespeare must have been a nobleman is Act 2, Scene IV in Henry IV, Part 1. This very long scene takes place at The Boar's-Head Tavern in Eastcheap and shows the deep friendship that Prince Hal and Falstaff have with each other – it also, through their constant playful banter and competition, proves how well-matched they are, though one of them will inherit the kingdom and the other is already disgraced. The teasing and back-and-forth culminates in a role-playing game in which Falstaff turns an ordinary tavern chair into a throne, a dagger into a scepter, a pillow into a crown, and himself into the king, Henry IV. 

Disrespectful? Disloyal? It certainly could have been perceived that way by the gossips and spies from the court. Falstaff apes a monarch, rather like the Lord of Misrule tradition in the Feast of Fools though Queen Elizabeth had banned such festivities. Falstaff presumes, during his play-acting, to put words in the king’s mouth – and to benefit himself. He treats the ceremonial trappings of royalty as a joke, all while playing around with a prince who is next in line for the throne. Falstaff is a commoner, and this mockery is being done in public, before a crowd of both men and women, at a disreputable, low-class tavern. Does Shakespeare show the prince being offended by it, though? No, instead Hal is tickled, and he does exactly the same thing himself – he switches roles with Falstaff and likewise dishonors the king, his own father, by mocking the monarch’s serious commands. When the king’s officers arrive and disrupt the proceedings, the harshness of their interruption is a subtle reminder of the dangers this irreverent display might actually bring in an autocratic state. Yet we are not on their side.

It seems impossible to imagine a nobleman writing this scene. Aristocrats in the Renaissance may have received better education than middle-class Englishmen, but they also were educated to think a certain way: it is much more likely that an aristocrat would have been shocked by that scene, viewed it as undignified and scandalous. That’s not all, though. The play as a whole, both parts of Henry IV in fact, place much greater value on the Eastcheap gang’s irreverent and mischievous scenes than on the formal, serious dialogues at court. The scenes which come alive and seem the most naturalistic -- the most closely observed, if anything in Shakespeare should legitimately be said to feel observed -- are not the courtly pontifications, but the scenes surrounding Falstaff and his milieu. The Oxfordians would have us believe that their Shakespeare was a nobleman who kept himself hidden away on a remote estate, writing in secret – while the actor Shakespeare frequented taverns and apparently had an active London social life. Yet the plays themselves do not sound like they were written by someone in a garret or in an approved, important, careful position at court – they sound precisely like they’re written by someone who enjoyed goofing around with other actors and hanging out at taverns. They sound as if they are written by someone who did not view the pedigreed as the only legitimate subjects of drama, but by someone who admired the full variety of human types and frailties.

 

Small Latin and Less Greek

A number of doubters argue that Shakespeare’s provenance from the backwater of Stratford could not possibly have allowed him to accrue the expertise in legal customs, the enlightenment of travel, and the observations of life at the royal court which appear in his plays – they believe that a writer would need the education and opportunity of a nobleman like the Earl of Oxford to achieve the level of detail in these areas that Shakespeare did over the course of the canon. This is one of the most bizarre aspects of authorship theory, because it rests on the assumption that somehow Shakespeare’s mind must have stayed permanently fixed at the level achieved by a middle-class grammar school education, that he could not have learned enough of substance beyond what his instructors taught him to create these plays as an adult.

It assumes that, though his schoolteachers obviously taught him reading, history, rhetoric, and the rudiments of classical languages, he could not possibly have used these skills for his own independent research later. This conclusion seems particularly obtuse, since scholars have long been able to identify the exact sources Shakespeare did use for his plays; he took his plots from Greek and Roman texts, other plays, history chronicles, and  so forth, thus it is quite well-established that whoever the person who wrote as William Shakespeare was, that person was doing a lot of reading. Why that person could not be a glover’s son just as well as a nobleman is the sticking point.

The detractors against Shakespeare’s authorship seem to have a categorical prejudice against the possibility of anyone with ordinary parentage or a mediocre education ever developing genius. However, a number of figures including Mozart, William Blake, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, and modern figures like Martin Scorsese all blossomed into phenomenal talents and geniuses despite lowly upbringings or informal educations. Helen Keller even did it without the benefit of sight, hearing, or speech – and outside of the established schools for the blind. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, public speaker Sojourner Truth, and political leader Frederick Douglass began their lives as slaves, but rose to prominence thanks to their inner gifts. Moreover, another famous figure who disproves the class-bound argument for the presence of genius is Leonardo da Vinci. To say that he taught himself Latin, math, anatomy, aerodynamics, and a host of other sciences is obviously an understatement. (It was really only art in which he had a mentor -- one he outgrew.) At the time, the printing press was a brand new invention, yet da Vinci somehow acquired this treasure trove of knowledge on his own. By Shakespeare’s epoch, the printing press had been around for over a century; why could he not have benefited from its invention, and of the presence of book-sellers in London?

The authorship questioners also consider the lack of any documentation that the real Shakespeare ever went to Italy as a serious blot on his credibility, since so many of his plays are set there. They point out that aristocratic young men traveled to Italy in those days as a common facet of their education and coming-of-age. They therefore view specific nobles who were known to have visited Italy, especially the Earl of Oxford, as much more likely candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays than the man from Stratford could be.

Yet they stumble over several critical thinking glitches with this line of reasoning. First of all, the lack of documentation that Shakespeare of Stratford ever went to Italy is hardly conclusive. What would they be looking for? A ticket stub to prove he booked passage on a ship? A ship’s register from over four centuries ago with his name on it? It is ridiculous to expect such things to have been preserved, and there would be no reason for such a trip to be notated in a formal document preserved by civil servants in the town -- which is just about the only solid paper trail actually left by Shakespeare.

Secondly, it is unclear why Shakespeare would have felt he had to travel to Italy in order to write about it. He was not trying to document current life there, or even to be historically accurate, but was in a way always writing fantasies, whether in comedic or tragic form. It would have been very strange to either him or his contemporary playwrights to think of making a real life study of a place when it was fine to merely make it all up -- just as much as when writing about fairies in a forest, or a magician on a deserted island. Besides that, Shakespeare was perfectly content to color all of the exotic locales he wrote about with the same lens: the perspective of Elizabethan England. 

Theatre practice in his time did not even strive for historically or ethnically accurate costumes; the actors wore their own Elizabethan clothes when they played ancient Romans, for instance, merely adding a cape or a breastplate. The English were very insular and chauvinistic during Elizabeth’s reign, despite the influence of trade on their culture, and the theatre-going public generally would have seen foreigners as suspect, or as laughable ethnic stereotypes (as they often can be in Shakespeare’s plays – the Welsh and the Irish even being among those they considered foreigners). Finally, most of Shakespeare’s audience would not have gone to Italy themselves, so inaccuracy would not have been a concern.

However, there is also reasoning the Oxfordians use which proceeds in the other direction: starting from the fact that Shakespeare’s plays do frequently have Italian settings, the deduction goes that therefore the person who was Shakespeare must have gone to Italy, and been influenced to set plays there because of his experience with it. Yet this assumption seems to forget that the Renaissance fascination with antiquity would naturally bleed over into a romantic attraction to contemporary Italy, and moreover, that Shakespeare was using the Italianate comedies and the Italian commedia dell’ arte theater troupes as models. The theory also overlooks how popular Italy was in the Renaissance imagination generally – and perhaps even overlooks the fact that Italy is where the Renaissance started. In retrospect, it actually seems as logical for Shakespeare to use Italian settings as it does nowadays for Hollywood to set so many of its disaster or superhero movies in New York City. It is traditional and part of the cultural zeitgeist – not a personal reflection of the artists’ own experiences.

 

Shakespeare By Any Other Name

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.