My literary-cultural crisis
I’ve mentioned before here that my wife and I have season tickets to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. I’ve also been an actor in the past, and have played several roles in Shakespeare in professional theatres.
This past year I came to a Shakespearean crisis point. Or perhaps I should say a Shake-spearean crisis point. That hyphen in Shake-speare is deliberate. I have come to believe with very strong conviction that Shake-speare was a penname, and that the actor guy from Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a word of those plays.
I’ve had serious doubts about the authorship of the plays by the Stratford guy for many years. Although Stratfordian scholars argue with amazing vehemence that William of Stratford was the author of all those plays, even they have to concede that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything more than his name in his own handwriting. I don’t think this observation is an anti-working-class judgment or snobbery or anything. There just isn’t any sample anywhere of his own writing–no notes, no letters, no diary entries, nothing. Just his signature on his will and a couple other legal documents.
Last spring I picked up a book in my local Barnes and Noble while waiting to be seated in a restaurant. It was “Shakespeare” by Another Name, written by Mark Anderson. This is a biography of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is considered by many anti-Stratfordians to be the true author of the works. In this remarkable book, Anderson shows a great number of parallels between de Vere’s life and the details of Shakespeare’s plays.
It is Anderson’s contention that these connections are so strong they cannot be ignored. He makes a very convincing case. As Orson Welles once said, “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away.” After reading Anderson’s book, I completely understand Welles’s point. The Italian cities mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are those known to have been visited by de Vere in 1575 and 1576.
I’m now in the middle of my second, deliberately more skeptical reading of “Shakespeare” by Another Name. This time I am being very careful to ignore, or at least devalue, any assertions made in the subjunctive mood. For example, in chapter 2, Anderson describes Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge University in 1564. He mentions the entertainment that might have been enjoyed by the queen:
A troupe of players from the university, however, followed the queen’s train. De Vere, who probably departed Cambridge with Elizabeth, would have watched as these presumptuous undergraduates overtook the massive convoy of horses and carts. The players begged Elizabeth to let them perform just one masque. After some pleading, she finally consented.
When Anderson uses constructions such as “de Vere…would have watched…”, it feels like pure speculation. But even skipping past all these “what if” passages, the concincidences are indeed very funny.
The debate about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare (or Shake-speare, which Anderson and other Oxfordians posit as a pseudonym for de Vere) has been going on for a couple centuries at least. I’m only just now getting into it. The thing I find most surprising is the heat and blind passion of the defenders of the Stratfordian position. Their strongest argument seems to be that William of Stratford must have written the plays because his name is on them. In other words, they don’t even admit that a publication could ever appear under a penname or the name of a frontman. (Anybody who knows about Hollywood in the 1950s knows that authors use frontmen quite often.)
The next most common critique of the Stratfordians against the Oxfordians is that they are stupid. Or at least lazy. For example, David Kathman, in a 1999 letter to Harper’s magazine, accuses Oxfordians of engagement in conspiracy theory, of pursuing pseudo-science and of observing a double standard with regard to Oxford and William Shakespeare. Sometimes, as on the Stromata blog, they seem to resort to simple name-calling. (Because Roger Strittmatter’s Ph.D. dissertation has a very long title, as dissertations usually do, Stromata calls it “ponderous.”)
What the Stratfordians are unable to convince me of, though, is that William of Stratford absolutely has to be the person who wrote the plays, and that no one else could have done it. The basic incongruence is just so strong. Where is anything else the man wrote, other than the core canon of English literature? Where are the letters? Where are the notes? What of William of Stratford’s own life is reflected in these works? Why does the First Folio seem to appear out of nowhere, with William Shakespeare’s name on it?
I think the reason this matters so much to me is that after reading Anderson’s book and other resources, and after thinking about the question for several months, I want to know that the plays and poems were written by a real human being. I want to know that they reflect the personal experience of a person with a life story. I don’t want to keep accepting that William of Stratford, human history’s epitome of accidental and natural genius, received these works from Heaven above just as the New Testament authors received the Word of God.
Come to think of it, the standard Stratfordian point of view does seem somewhat like a religion. Perhaps in this day and age when even religious Christians can begin to think about the real life of Jesus of Nazareth, students of English literature can start to think about the real life of the author of the Shake-speare plays.
Last week, when I attended The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre, I found myself squirming in my seat, feeling like a heretic or a traitor for even entertaining these Oxfordian thoughts. Weird.
November 7th, 2007 at 11:57 am
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November 11th, 2007 at 9:07 am
I think it is interesting that Edward de Vere’s portrait (full length) hangs in the boardroom of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. (A fact that did not make our recent podcast on the place only because of an omission during the taping of the segment. It seems a strange thing.
November 11th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Indeed, one of the strongest pieces of evidence for de Vere as the author of the Shakespearean works is his Bible, with marginal notes in his hand, which is held by the Folger Library. Roger Strittmatter has shown remarkable correlations between the verses annotated and the verses cited in the Shakespeare plays.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
“Where is anything else the man wrote, other than the core canon of English literature? Where are the letters? Where are the notes? What of William of Stratford’s own life is reflected in these works? Why does the First Folio seem to appear out of nowhere, with William Shakespeare’s name on it?”
Presumably one could ask the same questions about de Vere. Where are his letters and notes about the plays, his early drafts, his final manuscripts, and so forth. Ditto the question about the First Folio, with regard to De Vere (especially so many years after his death). Of course, the explanation given the friends of the actor/dramatist known as William Shakespeare seems perfectly rational.
November 13th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Prof. Wearing, thank you very much for your comment.
I will certainly grant your first assertion. Where, indeed, are de Vere’s drafts of the “Shake-speare” plays, his manuscripts, etc., etc.? But one can’t ask the same question about de Vere’s letters or other writings. De Vere was recognized as a writer. There is plenty of evidence (other than the Shakespeare plays and poems) that he did actually write.
But with the actor William Shakespeare (whose name I will spell in the traditional way, since I recognize that spelling it “Shakspere” is fraught with implications), there just isn’t any other actual evidence that he wrote.
I am very curious about your book, “The Shakespeare Diaries.” I want to take a look at it as soon as I can. It looks fascinating.
But I note from its subtitle that it is a “fictional autobiography.” This brings me back to my original, basic discomfort: why must we rely completely on fiction and “what-ifs” to talk about William of Stratford’s life?
I do not consider myself a full-blooded Oxfordian by any means. But I do consider myself a skeptic with respect to the orthodox view. I would love for somebody to find even the tiniest documentation about what Shakespeare of Stratford wrote, thought, felt, whether he was a generous man, a miser, a Protestant, a Catholic, a party animal or a Puritan.
But so far, after several centuries, nobody has found anything that he wrote in his own hand, other than his signature.
November 13th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
True, there is evidence that de Vere did write, but what direct evidence is there that he wrote the plays ascribed to Shakespeare (beyond mere conjecture)?
There is some evidence of Shakespeare writing a play if you accept the evidence of Hand D in the fragmentary play “Sir Thomas More” (of course, you have to accept also the verdicts of handwriting experts who have compared that manuscript with known Shakespeare autographs). There is also much evidence connecting a person called William Shakespeare with the theatre, particularly acting and acting companies, but not exclusively. His theatrical associates also ascribed the plays to him, even after his (and de Vere’s death). The Oxfordian authorship theory requires an enormous and fairly complex conspiracy sustained over a considerable period. I suppose it might be extremely vaguely possible, but when faced with a far more logical alternative, Shakespeare seems more than the likely candidate.
I would add that we shouldn’t really expect to have the sort of conclusive evidence we might like. There is the passage-of-time factor, not to mention that similar evidence for many other writers/dramatists of period also does not exist (though no one seems to want to posit alternate authors for them–why weren’t they also fronts for de Vere, or whoever?). One small point to sort of substantiate the above–we don’t even know when exactly Sir Walter Ralegh (or Raleigh) was born, which is rather amazing when you think of the man.