Shakespeare Authorship

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Authorship Question

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Did Shakespeare Really Write the Plays and Poems?
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This essay was updated in January 2006
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003, 2005
. .......Did William Shakespeare really write the plays and poems attributed to him? A small but vocal minority of Shakespeare readers maintains that he did not write them, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Among the leading candidates promoted as the "real Shakespeare" are the following:

.......Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a brilliant statesman, philosopher, essayist, and lord chancellor of England under James I
.......Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), a playwright of the first rank
.......Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604)
.......Sir Henry Neville (1562-1615), a British diplomat

.......There are also sundry other candidates–including William Stanley, the 6th Earl of Derby (1561-1642), and Elizabeth I, Queen of England (1533-1603)–but few scholars take seriously the claims of the supporters of Stanley and Elizabeth.
.......During the 20th Century, de Vere gained a following as the man who wrote the plays and sonnets. His supporters say he withheld his byline to keep his identity a secret, allowing Shakespeare, an actor from Stratford, to take credit. Today, de Vere's supporters regard him as the leading Shakespeare claimant. However, supporters of a new candidate in the Shakespeare sweepstakes are challenging the de Vere crowd for attention. The new man, Sir Henry Neville, was a well-traveled diplomat who supposedly possessed the erudition and sophistication to stroke out the genius of the plays and sonnets. The whole authorship question has taken on the aura of an Hercule Poirot or Charlie Chan mystery–and sometimes a Jacques Clouseau caper–in which the anti-Shakespeare researchers and dilettantes (or anti-Stratfordians, as they have come to be known) serendipitously stumble across "telltale evidence" from time to time.
.......Near the end of 2005, Neville promoters William Rubinstein and Brenda James staked a claim for their candidate in their new book, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare. Rubinstein, a professor of modern history at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, and James, a former lecturer in English at England's Portsmouth University, offer new evidence to document their claim. However, this evidence is circumstantial; nowhere in their thesis do they present irrefutable, empirical evidence. Consequently, their research appears to rise only to the level of conjecture.
.......It is all good fun–mingled here and there with a modicum of serious scholarship–but the arguments for de Vere, Neville, Bacon, and the others have been, up to now, unconvincing.
.......Supporters of de Vere, for example, contend that he refused to affix his byline to the plays and sonnets to avoid association of his family name with the sordid professions of stagecraft and writing. (In Elizabethan England, the public generally regarded playwrights and actors as reprobates and scapegraces; lords and ladies risked their reputations by hobnobbing with dramatists and deuteragonists.) However, de Vere did openly patronize an acting company, the Oxford’s men, and willingly signed his name to 23 poems. H.N. Gibson has concluded that the whole theory of a conspiracy–that a Marlowe or a de Vere had decided to hide behind the Shakespeare name–“is manifestly absurd.”

Since he [Shakespeare] was a member of the Company which produced the plays he would be a most unsuitable person to act as a “cover” for the true author. He would constantly find himself in embarrassing situations, such as being called upon to elucidate some obscure point or to rewrite part of a scene on the spot, and the recipient of other similar requests with which he would be totally unable to comply. If the “true author” had employed a cover at all, he would have selected for the purpose some minor man of letters who had no connection whatever with the practical side of the theatre–Gibson, H.N. The Shakespeare Claimants. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963 (Page 302).

.......A major problem for the de Vere supporters is that he was an arrogant, thoroughgoing egotist–a fact well established by historical accounts–hardly the kind of person who would cede credit for a monumental body of masterpieces to someone else. That he would gild bumpkin Shakespeare as the architect of Antony’s funeral oration (Friends, Romans and countrymen), Shylock’s interrogatory speech (Hath not a Jew eyes?), or Jaques’ philosophical monologue (All the world’s a stage) is to assert that pride is humble and lions are meek. Supporters of de Vere, as well as supporters of Neville and other pretenders to Shakespeare’s throne, also maintain that Shakespeare was an unschooled rustic who lacked the sophistication and depth of knowledge to produce a great body of brilliant work. After all, Shakespeare grew up in a rural area away from centers of culture and learning and never stepped foot inside a university classroom.
.......However, Shakespeare did receive an excellent education at the King's New School in Stratford, according to the best evidence available. There, the curriculum included classical history, religion, ethics, logic, rhetoric, public speaking, Roman poetry and drama, the natural sciences, and other subjects taught in Latin by well-trained teachers from Oxford University. Students also studied the New Testament of the Bible in Greek. Because of the broadness and excellence of the education at the Stratford school, its students were extremely well versed in the liberal arts, perhaps even more so than typical college graduates of today.
.......If Shakespeare was a bumpkin, he was a well educated bumpkin. It is interesting to note that Ben Jonson, another great Elizabethan playwright, was considered one of the foremost intellects and men of learning of his day even though he, too, lacked a university education.
.......It is true, of course, as the anti-Stratfordians point out, that Shakespeare was a country boy–a raw, unsophisticated provincial when he arrived in London in the 1590's. But would his rusticity have been a disadvantage? Hardly. After all, he had learned a goodly headful from the forests and farms surrounding his home, and his knowledge of hunting, hawking and the appetite of worms in rural cemeteries later served him well in his plays. More important, he had a knowledge of people in all their varieties; for Stratford in the Elizabethan Age was a market town, a crossroads of rural commerce. Among the visitors to his town were suspicion and intrigue that required his parents–both Roman Catholics in an age of Protestant crackdown on papists–to be on the watch at all times against tattletale representatives of the Crown. While they pretended to practice the queen’s religion, young William no doubt recorded their reactions on his tabula rasa, then later called them forth in plays of conspiracy and cabal, such as Richard III and Julius Caesar. In sum, people–and trees and rocks and clouds–gave Shakespeare an extraordinary education of a different kind. In this regard poet John Dryden described Shakespeare as "naturally learned":

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature: the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.–Johnson, Samuel. Quoted in Ribner, Irving. William Shakespeare: An Introduction to His Life, Times and Theatre. Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1969 (Page 200).

..... While Shakespeare was developing this "natural talent," he had the opportunity to observe roving actors who performed every year at a Stratford guild hall. The actors in the "play within in a play" in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark may have been based on actors who visited Stratford. Thus, Shakespeare was not so isolated after all.
.......The Norton Shakespeare offers this observation on Shakespeare’s origins and education:

The anti-Stratfordians, as those who deny Shakespeare's authorship are sometimes called, almost always propose as the real author someone who came from a higher social class and received a more prestigious education. Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Southampton, even Queen Elizabeth, have been advanced, among many others, as glamorous candidates for the role of clandestine playwright. Several famous people, including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud, have espoused these theories, though very few scholars have joined them. Since Shakespeare was quite well known in his own time as the author of the plays that bear his name, there would need to have been an extraordinary conspiracy to conceal the identity of the real master who (the theory goes) disdained to appear in the vulgarity of print or on the public stage. Like many conspiracy theories, the extreme implausibility of this one only seems to increase the fervent conviction of its advocates.–Greenblatt, Stephen, General Editor, et al. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997 (Page 46).

...... As for the de Vere supporters, they still argue that the earl wrote all of the plays (by himself or in collaboration with others) before he died in 1604 even though the consensus of Shakespeare experts–relying mainly on records of publication dates and performances–concludes that more than a dozen plays (including Macbeth, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII) were all written between 1605 and 1613. True, the plays could have been published after de Vere's death (or, in the case of Christopher Marlowe–author of Tamburlaine the Great and TheTragical History of Dr. Faustus–after he died at age 29 in a tavern brawl). But such a possibility offers no plausible evidence of why a masterpiece such as The Tempest, published in 1611, gathered dust for seven or more years before its first performance (probably at Whitehall on November 1, 1611, by the Kings Players). Nor does this possibility address the widely held view that Shakespeare used as sources for The Tempest certain works published after de Vere died, including The Wreck of the Sea Venture (1609), A Discovery of the Bermudas (1610), and A True Repertory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas (1610).
......As for Francis Bacon (1561-1626)–the great philosopher, politician, scientist, lawyer and writer in the court of Queen Elizabeth I–Bryan Magee writes the following in the Story of Philosophy (DK Publishing, 1998, Page 74):

He [Bacon] became a Member of Parliament at the age of 23, and eventually, in succession, Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (like his father), Lord Chancellor, as well as becoming a baron and a viscount. At the age of 36 he published the collection of essays that has been his most popular book ever since. But throughout his adult life he was producing writings that were to have a historic influence on the direction taken by Western science and philosophy. Given that he had a public career so overcrowded with work and achievements, to suggest that in addition to all this he also wrote Shakespeare's plays is about as probable as that George Bernard Shaw's plays were written by Einstein.

.....In the 20th Century, a book by English schoolmaster J. Thomas Looney gave new life to the cause of de Vere as the real author of Shakespeare's works. After the book was published in 1920, a whole army of Looney supporters emerged to crown de Vere as the king of playwrights. The case for de Vere continues to receive widespread attention today. One supporter of the de Vere theory is the great Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi. In an article in The Washington Times of April 25, 1997, he was quoted as saying, "I am highly suspicious of that gentleman from Stratford on Avon. I'm pretty convinced our playwright wasn't that fellow. This opinion is very unpopular with the good burghers of Stratford, I realize, but they also make their living on the legend of Shakespeare's local origins. I don't think it was him."
..... However, a large body of evidence in the form of hundreds of books and thousands of essays testifies that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and the other great works. Moreover, authors in his own time, including Ben Jonson, praised him; published volumes of his works (including the First Folio of the plays)–carry the imprint of his byline. In one of his famous sonnets, Shakespeare refers to his first name as part of an extended pun, thereby obliquely identifying himself as the author of the sonnet. Below, on the left, is the text of that poem, Sonnet 135, which Shakespeare addressed to a woman, the so-called "Dark Lady" he focuses on most of the time in Sonnets 127-154. On the right are annotations:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy 'Will,'	'Will': (1) wish, inclination, desire; (2) Shakespeare's nickname
And 'Will' to boot, and 'Will' in overplus;	'Will': passion, carnality
More than enough am I that vex thee still,	I bother you to point out that there's plenty of me to go around
To thy sweet will making addition thus.	I can fulfill your desire
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,	will: here, will can be taken as having a sexual connotation
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?	will: see note immediately above.
Shall will in others seem right gracious,	will in others: the desires of others
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea all water, yet receives rain still
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in 'Will,' add to thy 'Will'	being rich in 'Will': rich with the attention I give you
One will of mine, to make thy large 'Will' more.
......Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;	don't refuse (kill) me, for I am kind
......Think all but one, and me in that one 'Will.'.

..... Apparently, beneath Shakespeare's outward appearance of normalcy, beneath his prosaic Stratford veneer, was a once-in-a millennium mind at work, a genius with a capability far beyond the capability of all other geniuses, a man blessed by God.
..... When one sorts everything out–when one measures one scholarly account against another, when one measures one version of history against another–he or she can arrive at only one conclusion: William Shakespeare, hawker and son of a glove-maker, did everything attributed to him. By divine gift, he could take quill in hand and make magic on paper.
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