Shakespeare couldn’t have written
Shakespeare’s works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly
familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and
lawyer-ways—and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely-divided star-dust that
constituted this vast wealth, how did he get
it, and where, and when? . . . [A] man can’t handle glibly and easily and
comfortably and successfully the argot of a
trade at which he has not personally served. He will make mistakes; he
will not, and cannot, get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right; and the moment
he departs, by even a shade, from a common trade-form, the reader who has served that
trade will know the writer hasn’t.
—Mark Twain[1]
[Q]uestions that were raised
by such skeptics as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Galsworthy, and Sigmund
Freud still intrigue those mavericks who are persuaded that William Shakespeare is a
pseudonym for an exceptionally well-educated person of noble birth who was close to the
English throne.
—Justice John Paul Stevens[2]
[Shakespeare] seems almost to
have thought in legal phrases—the commonest of legal expressions were ever at the end
of his pen in description or illustration.
—Lord Penzance[3]
Introduction
If the author of the plays and
poems attributed to William Shakespeare was as well versed in the law as Mark Twain
asserts, then it is *378 unlikely that he could have been the
Stratford glover’s son to whom an entire tourist industry is dedicated in his
hometown. Shakespeare’s frequent use of the law and of legal terms in his plays is
well documented. Whether his legal terms are always used correctly has
been a matter of dispute. In order to shed light on the authorship question, we must not
only examine how accurately legal terms are used
in the plays, but also how accurately and deeply legal issues are developed. It is one thing for an author
to portray a trial scene or to insert a legal phrase into a play now and then; a person
untrained in the law could easily confer with a lawyer to ensure that he is not making
mistakes about the law. But to write a play in which the entire plot is informed by
complex and subtle legal issues is another matter altogether. This requires not only the
vocabulary of a lawyer, but his way of thinking as well. The authorship controversy needs,
not only analysis of passages, but also analysis of plots. Recent research on inheritance
law in Hamlet reveals that the author of that
play had a precise and extensive knowledge of inheritance law and that this knowledge
informs many aspects of the plot and the interrelationships of characters. Whether this
revelation means that the play’s author meets the test of being able to think like a
lawyer is the subject of this Comment.
Part I of this Comment gives
an overview of the authorship controversy and demonstrates why the controversy persists.
It explains problems with the Stratford theory and summarizes the arguments for three
alternative candidates: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford.
Part II discusses
Shakespeare’s general use of the law in his works, summarizing the arguments
regarding his accuracy and analyzing the scope of his usage of legal
terms. It concludes that some of Shakespeare’s uses of legal terms and imagery could
have been written by a person without formal legal training, but that many other uses are
indicative of an author with a sophisticated legal education.
Part III explores inheritance
law issues in Hamlet and shows that the
author’s legal knowledge is deeply and subtly woven into the plot. It also shows that
the author of Hamlet was familiar with some
obscure legal texts written in the arcane language known as Law French and inscribed in a
style of handwriting that was used mainly by law clerks.
I.
The
Authorship Controversy
When I studied Shakespeare in
college, any texts that even mentioned that there was a dispute as to the authorship of
the plays dismissed the issue as the ravings of snobs who believed that a low-born person
could not have written works of such genius. Most of the orthodox *379
Stratfordians—those who believe the man from Stratford wrote the plays—simply
refuse to confront the controversy or to consider any evidence that goes against their
theory.[4]
Louis B. Wright, former Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, is typical:
[I]t is incredible that anyone should be so naïve or ignorant as to doubt the reality of
Shakespeare as the author of the plays that bear his name. Yet so much
nonsense has been written about other “candidates” for the plays that it is well
to remind readers that no credible evidence that would stand up in a court of law has ever
been adduced to prove either that Shakespeare did not write his plays or that anyone else
wrote them. All the theories . . . are mere conjectures spun from the active imaginations
of persons who confuse hypothesis and conjecture with evidence. . . . The anti-
Shakespeareans base their arguments upon a few simple premises, all of them false. These
false premises are that Shakespeare was an unlettered yokel without any schooling, that
nothing is known about Shakespeare, and that only a noble lord or the equivalent in
background could have written the plays. The facts are that more is known about
Shakespeare than about most dramatists of his day, that he had a very good education,
acquired in the Stratford Grammar School, that the plays show no evidence of profound book
learning, and that the knowledge of kings and courts evident in the plays is no greater
than any intelligent young man could have picked up at second hand.[5]
When I read these words in my
undergraduate days, I took Wright’s certainty for truth and scoffed at any mention of
alternate theories to the authorship question. Now that I have been seduced into
considering the other theories, I see glaring errors in Wright’s statement. For
example, there is no documentation whatsoever that Shakespeare “had a very good
education, acquired in the Stratford Grammar School.”[6]
He may have had such an education, and I am much more amenable to the possibility than many Shakespeare
skeptics, but it is certainly not a fact that would stand up in a court of law.[7]
For Wright to assert this so baldly is to, in his own words, “confuse hypothesis and
conjecture with evidence.”[8]
The additional “facts” he cites, namely, that “more is known about
Shakespeare than about most dramatists of his day, . . . that the plays show no evidence
of profound book learning, and that the knowledge *380 of kings and courts evident in the plays
is no greater than any intelligent young man could have picked up at second hand,”[9]
are not facts, but matters of complex judgment on which reasonable people may disagree.
For many years, however, wary of being labeled naïve and ignorant, I overlooked the holes
in Wright’s argument.
To be sure, the smell of the
crank has sometimes befouled the Shakespeare heretic. Some absurd notions have been
propounded, such as the theory that the real author was Daniel Defoe, although he was born
in 1629, several years after most of the plays
were published.[10]
Some theorists have played endless word games trying to show that one word or another in
the plays or poems is a cryptographic clue to the author’s identity.[11]
In the 1940s, Percy Allen came to the conclusion that the plays were a collaborative
effort among Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and the Earl of Oxford.[12]
His research method would seem exemplary: he went straight to the parties involved and
interrogated them himself—by holding a séance![13]
It is easy for the orthodox Stratfordian to make the whole issue seem the province of
quacks by giving a few examples of the sillier theories on the authorship question. But
the more I have delved into the subject, the more I have come to believe that we cannot
ignore the substantial amount of circumstantial evidence that points away from Stratford.
Ad hominem attacks on Shakespeare heretics as snobs cannot conceal the tenuousness of the
link between the Stratford man and the plays. And the inanities among the heretics do not
invalidate the thoughtful insights and original research that have come from many of them.
At this stage in my study of
the authorship issue, I find that there is no conclusive evidence linking any one
candidate to the authorship of the plays, only scattered bits of concrete evidence upon
which we must make inferences about who is the most likely author. At this time, I think
the advocates for Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford,[14]
have made the most cogent case for their man, but that could change. New evidence could
point more strongly to Shakespeare or to some other candidate. But even if the anti-
Stratfordians are eventually proved wrong, their persistent questioning of the Stratford
theory will have done a great service to the causes of independent thinking and literary
truth. The Stratfordians should not be allowed to assert their theories *381
without challenge when those theories are often based on no more hard evidence than anyone
else’s.
A. The Stratfordian Presumption
Why shouldn’t we believe that the plays of
William Shakespeare were written by, well, William Shakespeare? If I buy Romeo and Juliet at a bookstore, it says “by
William Shakespeare” on the cover, doesn’t it? There is a strong presumption
that when a book is printed and sold as the work of a certain author, it is actually the
work of that author. When I buy a copy of The Old
Man and the Sea, which says on the front, “by Ernest Hemingway,” I presume
that a man named Ernest Hemingway wrote the book. This presumption serves us well most of
the time, but it has its exceptions. It will let us down in the case of pseudonyms, such
as books by “Mark Twain,” “Lewis Carroll,” or “George
Eliot.” It will also let us down in the case of a hoax, as in the 1970s Howard Hughes
“autobiography” actually written by Clifford Irving with no participation at all
by Hughes.[15]
Additionally, it tells us only part of the story when a ghostwriter is involved. Could it
be that “William Shakespeare” was a pen name, or that his apparent authorship of
the plays was an elaborate hoax, or that the plays were actually “ghosted” by
someone else?
Wright says, “no credible
evidence that would stand up in a court of law has ever been adduced to prove either that
Shakespeare did not write his plays or that anyone else wrote them.”[16]
Let me ask the question that Wright ignores: What credible evidence that would stand up in
a court of law has ever been adduced to prove that Shakespeare did write the plays? And let me ask an even more
basic question: To whom exactly are we referring when we say “Shakespeare”?
It is a documented fact that
on April 26, 1564, an infant named William “Shakspere” (note the spelling), the
son of John Shakspere, was christened in the town of Stratford, England.[17]
Nothing further about his *382 life is documented until, when he was
eighteen, his name appeared in a diocesan register of betrothals, showing that on November
27, 1582, “wm Shaxpere” and a woman identified as “Anna whately de Temple
grafton” were licensed to marry.[18]
The following day, the register recorded the marriage bond of “willm Shagspere”
and “Anne hathwey of Stratford.”[19]
Perhaps the clerk had confused two different families in the first record.[20]
Actual documentation about his life shows that he spent some time in London as well as in
Stratford, that he liked to sue his neighbors for small amounts of money, that he may have
done some acting and invested in a theatre company, and that he was fairly prosperous, by
Stratford standards, at the time of his death in 1616.[21]
None of the documents concerning him that were produced during his lifetime describes him
as a poet or playwright, though he is sometimes described as a “gentleman.”[22]
Note that his name is spelled several different ways in the various documents.[23]
It is possible to make too much of the spelling variations, since Elizabethan spelling standards were much looser than today’s and spelling
variations were quite acceptable; but spelling was phonetic.[24]
Only one of the thirty or so spellings of the name in Stratford documents about the
Shakspere family (the registration of his daughter Susanna’s christening) spells the
name with a long “a” in the first syllable; all the others have the short
“a.”[25]
All of the six extant copies of Shakspere’s signature spell the first syllable with a
short “a.”[26]
This indicates that the Stratford man pronounced the first syllable of his name as
“shack,” while the first syllable of the name of the author of the plays and
poems would have been pronounced “shake.”[27]
For the purposes of this Comment, I will follow the heretics’ custom and refer to
this gentleman of Stratford as “Mr. Shakspere” or “Shakspere.” I will
refer to the author of Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello, and so on, whoever he may turn out to
be, as “Shakespeare.”
In 1593, a narrative poem
entitled Venus and Adonis was published as the
work of “William Shake-Speare”[28]
(again, note the spelling). The *383 next year, another poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was published as Shake-
Speare’s.[29]
Beginning in 1598, plays began to be published under that name, though some of them had
already been performed or published anonymously.[30]
Sometimes the name was hyphenated as “Shake-Speare,” sometimes not, but usually
the letters were the same and the “a” was long. The two narrative poems were
dedicated to Henry Wriothesely, the Earl of Southampton.[31]
None of these publications, nor any contemporary reference, states
that Shakespeare is from Stratford or identifies him in any way with Mr. Shakspere.[32]
During Shakspere’s life there is a complete disjunction, except for the similarity in
names, between the Stratford man and the author of the plays.[33]
If the Stratford man was the author of the plays, why did he never, during his lifetime,
conform the spelling of his name to the spelling that was consistently being used in
association with his writings?[34]
The link was finally made in 1623, seven years after Shakspere’s death, with the
publication of the First Folio.[35]
There, thirty-six plays were collected, many of them never before published, as the works
of William Shakespeare, who, according to one of the dedicatory poems, had a monument in
Stratford.[36]
This was the first time the Stratford man was ever identified as Shakespeare.[37]
The First Folio contains a portrait of the author which seems unlikely to have been drawn
from life, as Martin Droeshout, the artist, was only fifteen when Shakspere died.[38]
Many anti-Stratfordians condemn the portrait’s cartoonish style as evidence that it
is a picture of a mythical person rather than of a real human being.[39]
I am inclined, however, to ascribe the portrait’s crudeness to the artist’s
limitations and to his lack of a live subject.
Earlier I asked what evidence
could be adduced to prove that Shakspere wrote the plays. When the authorship question was
taken up in the *384 American
Bar Association Journal in the early 1960s in a series of
articles by lawyers, William W. Clary argued that the First Folio (along with allegedly
corroborating evidence in Shakspere’s will) was documentary proof of the Stratford
man’s authorship.[40]
The First Folio is the primary evidence. If it fails, then the Stratfordians have almost
nothing left to support their claim that Shakspere was Shakespeare.
How good is this evidence?
Clary notes that Shakspere’s fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, wrote in
the dedicatory address to the First Folio that they had collected the works of their good
friend for publication.[41]
One of the links between these two actors and Shakspere is that Shakspere’s will
leaves small bequests to Heminge and Condell so that they may buy rings.[42]
Clary ignores the issue of the authenticity of the bequests in the will, which are
interlined (i.e., squeezed in between previously written lines in the document) and
apparently in another hand from that of the original writer.[43]
Clary’s argument that Heminge and Condell were not lying about the authorship of the
plays is a simple, “Why should they?”[44]
Let’s go back to the
strong presumption that when a book cover states that the book is written by a certain
author, it is written by that author. The presumption is much more reliable in
today’s publishing industry than it was in that of the Elizabethan Age. In those
days, intellectual property was not highly protected, publishers
often took liberties with an author’s work, and name-stealing and misrepresentation
were more common than they are today.[45]
In fact, between 1595 and 1608, the following plays were published under the name of
William Shakespeare: Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, The True Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The London Prodigal, The Puritan, and A Yorkshire Tragedy.[46]
But today, conservative Shakespeare scholars who support the Stratford theory of
authorship reject the idea, on external and internal grounds, that these plays were
written by the person who wrote Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth.[47]
This suggests that the name on the title page is far from conclusive in determining the
authorship of an *385 Elizabethan work.[48]
Furthermore, the prefatory
material in the First Folio contains so much internal inconsistency and disingenuousness
that it casts doubt on the integrity of the whole enterprise. In the dedication to the
Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery (I will say more about these gentlemen when we discuss
other candidates for the authorship), Heminge and Condell say, in part:
We have
but collected them [the plays], and done an office to the dead to procure his Orphans,
Guardians: without ambition either of self-profit, or fame: only to keep the memory of so
worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his Plays,
to your most noble patronage.[49]
Calvin Hoffman convincingly
demonstrates that the entire dedication, which goes on for many more lines, is a clever
paraphrase of Pliny’s Latin classic, Natural
History.[50]
He doubts that Heminge and Condell, former actors who were at that time a grocer and a
publican (tavern keeper), respectively, could have written such a learned parody as this.[51]
After completing their dedication to the two earls, Heminge and Condell address the
reader:
It had
been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to
have set forth and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise,
and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office
of their care and pain to have collected and published them; and so to have published
them, as where, before, you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies,
maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them;
even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest
absolute in their numbers as he conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature,
was a most gentle expresser of it.
*386 His mind and hand went together; and what he
thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his
papers.[52]
The two actors’ claim
that the plays are now “cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute
in their numbers as he conceived them”[53]
is wildly untrue.[54]
The First Folio contains so many patent mistakes and inconsistencies that scholars have
spent centuries cataloguing them and suggesting emendations.[55]
After Heminge and
Condell’s dedications comes a laudatory poem about Shakespeare written by Ben Jonson,
the poet and playwright, which says, in part:
To draw
no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy
Book, and Fame:
While I confess thy writings to be such,
As neither Man, nor Muse,
can praise too much . . . .
I, therefore, will begin. Soul of the Age!
The applause! delight! the
wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise: I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid
Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument,
without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy Book doth live,
And we have wits to read,
and praise to give.[56]
Such praise, which continues
for many more lines, is surprising coming from Jonson, who was openly scornful of his
rival’s output during his life.[57]
“[T]he Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare” wrote Jonson in Timber: or,
Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matters, “that in his writing, (whatsoever he
penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a
thousand.”[58]
This and other comments made by Jonson about Shakespeare give us reason to doubt
Jonson’s sincerity.[59]
In addition, Jonson was for twenty years a frequent writer of dedications and eulogies,
for which he was well paid.[60]
Stratfordians have taken Jonson’s participation in the First Folio as evidence of its
genuineness, but Jonson was merely a mercenary *387 who would write anything for money.[61]
Besides, Jonson was a master of double entendres. When he says that neither man nor muse
can praise Shakespeare’s works “too much,” is he saying: (1)
Shakespeare’s works are so great that even the most extravagant praise is deserved;
or (2) Shakespeare’s works are so ordinary that no one can really give them much
praise? Jonson was probably well aware of the possible readings and intended them both. As
Jonson would have known if Shakespeare and Shakspere were not the same person, this may
have been his way of praising the true author while subtly lampooning the pretender.
Sobran argues that the First
Folio, particularly through the Jonson poem, attempts to create an image of Shakespeare as
a “self-made rustic.”[62]
This characterization would have been necessary to equate Shakespeare with Shakspere:
Jonson
implies that [Shakespeare] had “small Latin and less Greek,” yet
Shakespeare uses nearly four hundred classical names in his works and shows familiarity
with many Latin authors. In fact, Venus [and Adonis] and [The Rape of] Lucrece (neither of which is included or even
mentioned in the Folio) are taken directly from classical sources; neither has ever been
accused of erring in the slightest in its treatment of ancient history and myth.
Before
Jonson, Shakespeare was known as a supremely urbane
poet. Virtually every contemporary tribute praises him as “honey-tongued” or
“mellifluous.” Meres himself avers that “the Muses would speak with
Shakespeare’s fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English.” It is in the
Folio that we see a subtle attempt to wrench Shakespeare’s image, to make him not a
polished gentleman- poet but a popular actor-playwright . . . .[63]
Jonson’s tribute is
followed by three more poems—by Hugh Holland, L. Digges, and “J.M.”
(thought to be James Mabbe).[64]
The Digges poem contains the only reference to Stratford: “And Time dissolves thy
Stratford Monument,”[65]
thus making the connection between “Shakespeare” and “Shakspere”
complete. It is also around this time that a monument containing a bust, supposedly of
Shakspere, appeared in the church in Stratford.[66]
We see in the First Folio the
first attempts to identify Shakespeare as the Stratford actor and to redefine Shakespeare
as an unlearned child of nature. Wright claims, “the plays show no evidence of
profound book *388
learning.”[67]
But Shakespeare’s works show a deep knowledge of many subjects, particularly, as we
shall see, of the law. Possible reasons why someone may have wanted to perpetrate such a
hoax will appear when we examine the cases for other candidates for the authorship.
It is not merely the lack of
solidity of the First Folio as evidence, but also the inadequacy of Shakspere as the
author of the plays that makes the Stratford theory so unsatisfying to many readers. Ralph
Waldo Emerson wrote that he could not “marry” Shakspere’s life to
Shakespeare’s work.[68]
It is often the reading of the orthodox biographies of Shakspere that make one the most
skeptical—why is there nothing in them to prove that Shakspere wrote any plays?[69]
Eminent skeptics of the Stratford theory include Oliver Wendell Holmes,[70]
Henry James, Walt Whitman, John Galsworthy, Sigmund Freud, Sir John Gielgud, Orson Welles,
Mark Twain,[71]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Tennyson, and Samuel Johnson.[72]
The problem is not that we know so little about Shakspere. Wright is correct that we know
more about him than we do about many playwrights of his time.[73]
What is disturbing is that what we know gives no hint that this man was a great playwright
and poet, or even that he had any degree of wit, intelligence, or grace. All the documents
relating to his life reveal nothing but the most ordinary, humdrum human being imaginable.
The problem is not, as Wright puts it, that
[m]ost
anti-Shakespeareans are naïve and betray an obvious snobbery. The author of their
favorite plays, they imply, must have had a college diploma framed and hung on his study
wall like the one in their dentist’s office, and obviously, so great a writer must
have had a title or some equally significant evidence of exalted social background. They
forget that genius has a way of cropping up in unexpected places and that none of the
great creative writers of the world got his inspiration in a college or university course.[74]
Wright could not be further
off the mark, and this statement is a prime example of the unfortunate tendency of some
Stratfordians simply to dismiss the skeptics as snobs. I do not claim that Shakespeare had
to have a college degree or a title, or that genius cannot be “low-born.” I *389
do not dispute the genius of Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler’s son.[75]
I recognize that many a nobleman was a perfect ninny who couldn’t have written a
decent poem or play to save his doublet. I simply marvel at the wide range of knowledge
apparent in the plays and wonder how Shakspere, even if he did have a basic grammar school
education, could have mastered so much. I, for one, would be profoundly relieved to
discover evidence that the Stratford upstart was the true genius. This would sit much
better with my libertarian, anti-aristocratic prejudices, with my natural tendency to root
for the underdog. But I have to admit that the evidence on behalf of Shakspere is weak,
while the body of at least circumstantial evidence on behalf of
Oxford is impressive. Until the Stratfordians come up with more compelling evidence, I
cannot endorse their candidate.
The brilliant poet John
Milton, who lived shortly after Shakespeare, was surely one of the most educated,
cultivated, and literate men of his day. Studies of his works reveal a vocabulary of over
8,000 words.[76]
But Shakespeare, supposedly the son of a Stratford glover, had a vocabulary of 15,000
words.[77]
Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays must have been widely read. But we have scant
evidence that John Shakspere’s household contained any books, which were extremely
rare in those days and most of which were expensive, and it seems likely that John
Shakspere, although he was a town official, was unable to write his own name.[78]
Stratford had no public library where William might have checked out books to satisfy his
thirst for learning.[79]
None of the documented evidence concerning Shakspere that appears during his life suggests
that he was a poet or a playwright,[80]
or even that he was particularly intelligent. Mark Twain delighted in repeating the lines
that Shakspere wrote for his own tombstone:
Good
friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.[81]
We are
asked to believe that the man who wrote these words was the same man who wrote:
To be, or
not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer *390
The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.[82]
Could the author of these
lines from Hamlet have had nothing more to say
about his own demise than the trite, primitive verse written by Mr. Shakspere? Even if the
great poet had chosen, as a last joke, to memorialize himself with doggerel, would
“Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear”[83]
have been the result? Does it have any of the fingerprints of the man who wrote, “To
be, or not to be”?[84]
For many of us, the discrepancy is too much to stomach. No wonder we long for other
Shakespeares.
Unfortunately, most
Stratfordians do not even bother to argue that Shakspere was Shakespeare; like Wright,
they simply dismiss all skeptics as being naïve and ignorant. Irvin Leigh Matus, author
of Shakespeare, In Fact,[85]
deserves credit, though, for confronting the skeptics’ arguments
and attempting to rebut them. Nevertheless, I do not find him ultimately convincing. He
scores a few points refuting Oxfordian Charlton Ogburn’s speculation that the student
lists from the Stratford grammar school of Shakspere’s day were made to disappear
because they would have revealed that Shakspere was never enrolled there.[86]
Matus’s research shows that most schools did not keep records of students’ names
until the eighteenth century.[87]
But while Matus is adept at
poking holes in a few of the flimsier anti- Stratfordian theories, he does not, to my
mind, relieve the doubts about the Stratford man, nor convincingly explain away the many
coincidences pointing toward the Earl of Oxford. His argument has problems with relevance
(in the evidentiary sense), for he often wastes his impressive research on issues that do
not advance our understanding of the authorship question in either direction. Matus spends
seven pages, for example, arguing that Oxford was no great shakes as a soldier.[88]
Yet the Oxford theory of authorship does not depend on *391
Oxford’s having been a great soldier. The plays do not suggest that they were written
by a person with the military knowledge of a Wellington, but they do suggest an author
with at least some military experience.[89]
We know that Oxford had some; we don’t know of Shakspere having had any.[90]
Matus’s ultimate argument
is a passionate plea that the plays were written to be performed, not just read, and that this argues for
their having been written by a man of the stage (namely, Shakspere).[91]
I am rather weary of this false distinction between Shakespeare the literary genius and
Shakespeare the man of the theatre. It is a cliché to say the plays were written for the
stage; of course, they were written for the
stage—they’re plays. And they play very well and have achieved great popularity.
But one can gain additional levels of understanding of them through reading, research,
reflection, and study—there are untold volumes of Shakespeare scholarship and
criticism to attest to that. Was Shakespeare a cerebral, scholarly poet who wrote for the
elite, or a popular playwright who wrote for the masses? Clearly, he was both. Besides,
there is at least as much evidence linking Oxford to theatrical activity[92]
as there is linking Shakspere, for whom the record is rather thin.[93]
Matus’s thesis, stated in
his first chapter, is instructive:
If I
cannot offer incontrovertible proof of [the Stratford man’s] authorship, the smoking
pen if you will, I did not find either that the evidence which is supposed to undermine
his authorship, any more than the evidence that alleges to show another to be the more
likely author, stands up to investigation.[94]
This statement merely means
that if one begins with the presumption that Shakspere wrote the plays, we do not have
enough evidence to disprove this theory or to prove any other. For
the reasons cited above regarding the weakness of the First Folio as proof of
Shakspere’s authorship, I cannot accept that presumption. I believe the authorship
question is still open and that much work remains to be done in this area. Recently, for
example, a ground-breaking five hundred-page doctoral dissertation by Roger A. Stritmatter
discussed Oxford’s life as reflected in the plays and analyzed parallels between the
works of Shakespeare *392 and verses Oxford marked in his copy of
the Geneva Bible.[95]
In addition, Diana
Price’s recent Shakespeare’s Unorthodox
Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem,[96]
in my view meticulously demolishes the Stratfordian presumption. Price argues persuasively
that the historical record shows Mr. Shakspere of Stratford to have been a money-lender,[97]
a play broker,[98]
a sometime actor,[99]
and a shrewd businessman who would have been quite willing to exploit the similarity
between his own name and the published pseudonym.[100]
Price points out that “[n]o one has yet found any personal records left by Shakspere
or by anybody else during his lifetime that would link him to the occupation of
writing.”[101]
Lest an opponent respond that this may be true of many other Elizabethan writers, Price
demonstrates that it is not. She documents the literary paper trails left by such
well-known Elizabethan writers as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund Spenser, as
well as by such obscurities as John Marston, Anthony Mundy, and
Thomas Lodge.[102]
Even the humblest of these left contemporary evidence of his profession as a writer.[103]
While Price concentrates on tearing the Stratfordian presumption to shreds, she does not
put forth a candidate of her own for the authorship laurel. Nevertheless, she does
hypothesize that the author of the plays was most likely a courtier.[104]
The Stratford theory, as
articulated by Matus, depends on the notion that the plays could have been written by a
person who started with a basic grammar school education, acquired some additional
knowledge through his own study, but had, as Wright puts it, “no . . . profound book
learning.”[105]
I will attempt to show that Shakespeare’s understanding of the law is so subtle and
profound that Stratfordians have a great deal of work to do in explaining how their
candidate acquired such knowledge.
B. The Case for Bacon
For many years, Sir Francis
Bacon (1561-1626) was the default *393 choice of the anti-Stratfordians as the
man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.[106]
He had all the qualifications that the Stratford man didn’t have: education, breadth
of learning, legal knowledge (he studied law at Gray’s Inn), familiarity with the
workings of the royal court, and demonstrated literary ability.[107]
Baconians point to parallels between lines in Bacon’s notebooks,
The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, and
lines in Shakespeare’s plays.[108]
For example:
All is not gold that glisters
[Promus 477]
All that glisters is not gold
[Merchant of Venice]
Mineral wits strong poisons
[Promus 81]
Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards.
[Othello]
Black will take no other hue
[Promus 174]
Coal black is better than another hue
In that it scorns to take another hue.
[Titus Andronicus]
[L]ove must creep where it cannot go.
[letter from Bacon to King James]
[L]ove/ Will creep in service where it cannot go. [Two Gentlemen of Verona][109]
The comparisons go far beyond these few examples, but they show a similarity of thought
and expression.[110]
Either they are the work of one man, or one man was copying the other.[111]
Bacon’s notebook is dated 1594.[112]
Ben Jonson, the perpetrator of
the hoax known as the First Folio, was closely associated with Bacon at the time the First
Folio was published in 1623.[113]
In addition, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, the dedicatees of the First Folio, were
colleagues of Bacon’s on the Council of the Virginia Company.[114]
Did Bacon fear that he would be in trouble if he were named as the author of the plays?
Some of the plays, notably Richard II, seemed to
countenance overthrow of a monarch.[115]
Besides, in that era it was considered beneath a nobleman to be an author of plays.[116]
For these reasons, Bacon, who was still alive in *394 1623, might have wanted to ensure that
someone other than himself was given credit (or blame) for the plays. Could Jonson,
Pembroke, and Montgomery have conspired with him to pass the works off as someone
else’s? But it seems odd to me that the meticulous Bacon would not have taken more
care to see that the plays in the First Folio were properly edited.
Baconian theory has gotten a
bad name over the years because of the propensity of some Baconians to dwell on
cryptograms.[117]
Words and phrases in the plays of Shakespeare, they say, can be unscrambled to reveal that
Bacon is the author.[118]
Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, for example, argues that the monstrously long word,
“honorificabilitudinitatibus”[119]
from Love’s Labor’s Lost, can be
rearranged to spell, “hi ludi f. baconis nati tuiti orbi,” which is Latin for
“These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.”[120]
Many students of the authorship question have, for some reason, failed to find this
revelation dispositive.
Perhaps
more daunting to the Baconian theory is the difficulty many readers have in reconciling
Bacon’s style with Shakespeare’s. James M. Beck, once Solicitor General of the
United States, illustrates the contrast between the two men by citing their writings on
the subject of theatre.[121]
Bacon writes, in Masques and Triumphs:
Let the scenes abound with light, specially coloured and varied; and let the masquers, or
any other, that are to come down from the scene, have some motions upon the scene itself
before their coming down; for it draws the eye strangely, and makes it with great pleasure
to desire to see that it cannot perfectly discern. Let the songs be loud and cheerful, and
not chirpings or pulings. Let the music likewise be sharp and loud and well placed.[122]
Compare this to Hamlet’s
advice to the actors:
Speak the
speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue, but if you
mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as live the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do
not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently, for in the very
torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire *395 and
beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.[123]
Granted, Beck is comparing
an essay to a play, yet it is still difficult to conceive that the same man wrote both
passages. As Sobran says: “Nothing about the somber and inflexible Bacon suggests the
Shakespearean capacity for a wide variety of moods, let alone the
creation of a great diversity of characters; what Bacon has in gravity he lacks in
quicksilver.”[124]
Furthermore, word analyses, as opposed to cryptograms, show, for what they are worth, that
a great many words used by Bacon are not used by Shakespeare, and vice versa.[125]
Thus, it is difficult to find a common style between the two men.
C. The Case for Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
(1564-1593) is surely a more appealing candidate than Bacon for the role of Shakespeare.
As the author of such plays as Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and The Tragedy of Dido, Marlowe was an acknowledged
great playwright before his untimely death at the age of twenty-nine.[126]
As the author of the line “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand
ships?”[127]
(Dr. Faustus), he had the poetic gifts that we
look for in our Shakespeare. Many lines in Marlowe’s works bear a great similarity to
lines in Shakespeare’s. For example:
These arms of mine shall be
thy Sepulchure.[128]
[Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta]
These arms of mine shall be
thy winding sheet;
My heart, sweet boy, shall be thy sepulchure.[129]
[Shakespeare’s
Henry VI, Part II]
By shallow rivers, to whose
falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies.[130]
&
