Shakespeare's Ear

by Tim Rayborn

  Suicides

  Cleopatra and Mark Antony (Antony and Cleopatra, act IV, scene 15, and act V, scene 2): Antony’s naval forces have lost to Caesar’s, and he blames Cleopatra’s treachery for the defeat. He threatens to kill her, so she has word sent to him that she has killed herself. Overcome with guilt, he draws his sword and falls on it, but learns before he dies that she hasn’t killed herself. The two reconcile, he dies, and she decides to take her own life by letting venomous asps bite her, thus robbing Caesar of the prize of humiliating her in Rome. When Caesar learns of their deaths, he orders that both be buried with honor.

  Ophelia (Hamlet, act IV, scene 7): Ophelia has gone insane from Hamlet’s apparent cruel behaviors and because he killed her father, Polonius. Queen Gertrude relays the information that she climbed a willow tree, the branch broke, and that she plunged to her death in the river below. She was so far gone that she did not even attempt to save herself, which makes her death a kind of suicide.

  Portia (Julius Caesar, act IV, scene 3): Portia is Brutus’s wife and when she realizes that he will not be able to defeat the forces of Antony, she kills herself by swallowing fire. Well, that’s one way to do it.

  Othello (Othello, act V, scene 2): Othello has spent much of the play being riled up by Iago, who intended to drive him mad with jealousy and rage over his wife’s supposed infidelities. When he learns that Desdemona, whom he has just murdered, is completely innocent, he stabs himself with a dagger in his chest, and so dies beside Desdemona.

  Romeo (Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 3): Everyone knows this classic case of a tragic mix-up. Romeo discovers Juliet in her tomb and thinking her to be dead, he drinks the poison he bought from an apothecary, speaking his famous last words: “Thus with a kiss I die.”

  Juliet (Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 3): Things go from bad to worse, as Juliet awakens from her deathlike slumber and sees the dead body of Romeo beside her. Her plan has failed, and she cannot bear to be without him. She kisses him and stabs herself with his dagger, dying and falling on his body.

  Deaths in battle

  Hamlet (Hamlet, act V, scene 2): Possibly the most famous of all of Shakespearian deaths, Hamlet is stabbed by Laertes’s blade, whose weapon is poisoned.

  Henry Percy, “Hotspur” (Henry IV, Part I, act V, scene 4): Prince Hal (the future Henry V) fights with and mortally wounds Hotspur. During the fight, that old chubby knight, Falstaff, wanders into the scene and cheers on Hal, because a good fight to the death needs some comic relief. Falstaff pretends to be dead after a scuffle with another knight, and Hal eulogizes him. The prince leaves, and Falstaff springs back to life, stabs the dead Hotspur, and then claims to Hal (when he reenters the scene) that Hotspur was not dead, but that he bravely finished him off. Always a con man, that Falstaff!

  Macbeth (Macbeth, act V, scene 8): Macduff fights against Macbeth, desperate to kill him and rid Scotland of his tyranny. Macbeth is confident that he will win, because the witches have prophesized that no man born of woman can kill him. But what Macbeth does not know is that Macduff was not “born,” but rather “from his mother’s womb | Untimely ripp’d” (i.e., emerged through a Caesarian or some other violent method of delivery). This unnerves Macbeth after he learns of it and, sure enough, he loses, with Macduff reentering the scene holding Macbeth’s head and taking the kingship for himself.

  Richard III (Richard III, act V, scene 5): Richard III, the notorious hunchbacked villain, meets his end at the hands of Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), who slays him during the battle of Bosworth Field. The portrayal of Richard as a hideous villain was no doubt written to please the Tudor queen, Elizabeth, since Henry VII was her grandfather.

  Mercutio (Romeo and Juliet, act III, scene 1): Mercutio is Romeo’s best friend and is neither Capulet nor Montague. When Romeo will not fight Tybalt (Juliet’s cousin), Mercutio challenges Tybalt to a duel instead, to defend his friend’s honor. Romeo tries to stop the fight, but Tybalt kills Mercutio. As he dies, Mercutio utters his famous phrase, “A plague o’ both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me.”

  The authorship controversy—did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

  Surprisingly, many don’t know much about this not-so-little controversy, but it has circulated in (or plagued) the dramatic community for well over a century. The basic premise is fairly simple: someone from a humble country background, as William Shakespeare was, could not possibly have had the education and worldliness to write the vast array of plays attributed to him, works that brought in all sorts of topics, from philosophy to history to geography to political commentary. Therefore, the plays must have been written secretly by someone else with the appropriate education and/or social status and ascribed to the actor, theater manager, and mediocre playwright named Shakespeare. But why would anyone do this? If one had written some of the greatest literature in the English language, wouldn’t that person want to proclaim it to the world and grab all of the glory?

  Well, therein lies the problem. What would motivate someone to remain anonymous and give their greatest work to an actor and hack writer who didn’t deserve such praise? Possible answers to that question raise even more questions. The usual reason given is that plays for the public were seen as being too “common,” too lowbrow for anyone of noble ranking to indulge in writing; poetry was the proper literary outlet. So perhaps the noble (or even royal) author of these works had to hide his (or her) identity to avoid public shame, and chose instead to have these masterpieces published under the name of a commoner to avoid the scandal. Further, if an author did not give his real name, he could be freer with political commentary, especially if it were critical of the government, not always an option for a courtier to do openly.

  A word of warning: if you doubt Shakespeare’s authorship, you’re probably not going to like this entry. But if you’re already furrowing your brow a little in skepticism about this secret author business, you’re not alone. This theory seems intriguing at first, but the problem is that to date, something like seventy possible alternative authors have been suggested (including Queen Elizabeth herself!), and the “evidence” offered for some of them blatantly contradicts the evidence offered up with equal sincerity for others. We’ll briefly look here at a few of the more popular choices: Sir Francis Bacon, fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, and the perpetual darling of conspiracy theorists, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

  Statesman, philosopher, and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was proposed in the mid-nineteenth century by one Delia Bacon (she hinted at being a distant relation), who became obsessed with the idea of his secret authorship and spent considerable time at places in England where he had resided, doing no actual research, but attempting to “absorb” impressions about his hand in writing the plays. Her resulting work, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, published in 1857, is nearly seven hundred pages of unreadable nonsense that doesn’t actually name Bacon as the author but instead just implies it.

  This inauspicious beginning to anti-Stratfordian studies led to some more grounded work a few decades later, when various researchers claimed to have found anagrams in the texts and in the First Folio (the first edition of Shakespeare’s plays from 1623) which, when rearranged, made simple Latin phrases stating that Bacon had written the plays. The problem is that the phrases were often clunky and forced. One writer claimed that a line from Hamlet yielded the Latin Fr. Baconi Nati, which would translate as “of the birth of Fr. Bacon,” a rather odd way of claiming authorship. The problem with looking for secret codes is that you can find almost anything you want—see the works of Nostradamus or the “Bible code.” One researcher tried applying a code method (extracting key letters at various points in the text) to the First Folio and came up with “Gertrude Stein writ this Great Work of Literature,” which would be quite an impressive feat, considering that she lived from 1874 to 1946!

  Nevertheless, the idea that Bacon was behind Shakespeare’s plays had some prominent early supporters, including
Mark Twain (who also believed that Queen Elizabeth was secretly a man) and Helen Keller, but later enthusiasts went a bit overboard and started crediting Bacon with pretty much every other work of literature from the time: the plays of Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene; Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene; the Essays of Montaigne; and even the King James Bible. You can see that it was getting rather ridiculous, considering how much Bacon wrote under his own name. When would he have had time to write all of these works secretly? Further, he disliked the theater, considering it to be frivolous, so he hardly would have devoted so much time to writing nearly forty plays in secret.

  Nevertheless, Bacon’s advocates, who saw him as a champion of early republicanism against the tyranny of the monarchs, Elizabeth I and James I, interpreted the plays to find evidence of his authorship and political sentiments. According to one fringe theory, Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s secret son, but before she could name him as heir to the throne, her secretary of state, Robert Cecil, had her strangled.

  So, if not Bacon, what about Marlowe? He was nearly the same age as Shakespeare, had a Cambridge education, was an excellent playwright, an undoubted genius, and in acting as a spy, he was certainly worldly and well-traveled. Yes indeed, he might be the perfect candidate! There is one little problem, however, as you may recall. From May 30, 1593, onward, Marlowe spent all of his time being dead. Ah, say the conspiracy theorists, but he wasn’t really dead at all! They propose two possible theories for how Marlowe could have written the plays: the first is that he was needed as a spy on the continent, and so his death was faked to whisk him away to new adventures, but because he didn’t want to forsake writing, he arranged with Shakespeare to send him new plays that Will could publish under his own name. Will would make money from them and gain fame, while Marlowe could continue to do what he loved while still serving queen and country in secret.

  The second theory is that Marlowe’s death was faked because he needed to hide his homosexual affair with Thomas Walsingham, who, like his relative Francis Walsingham, was involved in the queen’s espionage. In this version, Walsingham arranged for Marlowe to fake his death and then hid him away in southern England, where the two continued their love affair and Marlowe cranked out his plays and let Shakespeare take the credit. One proponent of this fake-death theory actually obtained permission to open Walsingham’s grave in 1956; he was absolutely sure the tomb would include letters and maybe even manuscripts of lost plays that would prove his theory. But he found nothing. In fact, the grave did not even contain Walsingham’s body, which probably only led to more speculation.

  And then there is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. He has become the favorite alternate author, with a group of “Oxfordians” giving him their wholehearted support. They believe that he had the necessary education, literary gifts, and travel experience to make him the perfect hidden author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. He had a decent enough reputation as a poet in his own time, and was a patron to other poets and playwrights. Oxfordians have been very successful over the past few decades in getting their candidate to the front of the line, such that they have managed to sideline most other contenders. So what’s the deal with Eddie? Could he be our candidate at last? Well, it’s not looking all that good.

  De Vere may be all the rage now, but no one had ever considered him a possible “man behind the man” until the early twentieth century. In 1918, a schoolmaster with the splendid name of J. Thomas Looney (which he insisted was pronounced “loney”) published a book titled Shakespeare Identified. Looney asserted that the Earl of Oxford had the education, had traveled, knew foreign languages, and was immersed in courtly life—in other words, he had the requisite cultural background. He had written poetry and allegedly plays (though these have not survived). But he was also arrogant, irresponsible, greedy, and given to anger and violence—he once murdered a servant and was let off when the jury determined that said servant must have impaled himself on the sword. He frequently quarreled with fellow courtiers, and never failed to remind others of his high status.

  Looney, like the Oxfordians that came after him, was convinced that the plays were autobiographical, and that there were enough correspondences between Oxford’s life and plots in the plays to prove that he was the true author—Oxford’s father died young, for example, like Hamlet’s, and he had three children, like King Lear. The problem with this theory was that autobiographical writing was rare at the time, while it was all the rage during Looney’s. It is quite likely, therefore, that Looney was projecting the contemporary conventions onto the playwright. His interpretations, incidentally, alleged that the plays’ author was entirely pro-monarchist and anti-democratic—the polar opposite of Bacon’s more modernist views and a useful illustration of how one’s reading of the works might vary based on the authorship theory the reader is trying to defend.

  The theory of autobiographical plays brings up other problems—how much correspondence should there be between the author’s life and the details of the plays? For example, one of Oxford’s interests was tin mining, a venture that he was sure would make him richer. And yet, no mention of it occurs in the plays. By contrast, at various times these works contain references to leather, tanning, and uses for animal hides; since Shakespeare was the son of a glover, these references seem logical enough. Would the Earl of Oxford have even cared where his super-soft gloves came from? So the autobiographical approach is tricky in support of either argument. In the end, casual references to leather don’t prove that a glover’s son wrote the plays any more than having three children proves that Oxford wrote King Lear.

  And another question: Why would Oxford want to hide his identity? Even if the writing of plays was considered beneath those of his rank, he was very vain, and if he had produced such magnificent works, he most certainly would have wanted to proclaim them to the world. It could have been to hide political opinions that were unpopular with his queen. But he could just as easily have released the plays anonymously, rather than hiding behind a figurehead, which would only increase suspicions and force William into some uncomfortable situations. If Shakespeare had no real literary talent but was only an actor pretending to be a playwright, how would he get around being asked to make up a verse or a scene on the spot, as could well have happened (it was not uncommon for corrections and additions to be made during rehearsals, for example)? Would he have stammered and deflected? How often could he have done that before the truth came out? This problem is equally true for any other candidates that some believe were “hiding” behind Shakespeare.

  Further, given that Oxford was one of the highest-ranking earls in England, he could conceivably have published his work under his own name. This brings up problems for the sonnets and the long poems (often also attributed to Oxford), which were dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton. The dedications of these works, which border on sycophancy, are hardly what one would see from a senior earl to one of lesser rank, especially in those days when precedence and knowing one’s place was of absolutely crucial importance in courtly politics. It’s very unlikely that a powerful and arrogant man like Oxford would have fawned over a youth who was new to court and several stations beneath him.

  Some Oxfordians have posited that Southampton (like Bacon) was actually Oxford’s secret son by Queen Elizabeth I, who hid herself away during her pregnancy, a conspiracy idea known as the Prince Tudor theory. Some have gone even further and suggested that Oxford was also Elizabeth’s son, who then later fathered Southampton with her; ew. You can see how silly this is getting. So perhaps these dedications and the poems themselves were the work of an affectionate father to his child. That just might make some sense, until you learn that Oxford’s daughter, Elizabeth, was engaged to Southampton at one point, which would have made her his half sister. So yeah, probably not so much, but given that he was apparently Southampton’s brother and father, I suppose anything is possible!

  Once again, the biggest stumbling block is the whole lifespan issue. From 160
4 onward, Oxford was taking a perpetual nap underground, while Shakespeare continued to write plays for many years. Not a problem, claim the Oxfordians. The earl simply had a stack of plays that were released at various intervals under Shakespeare’s name over the next decade or so. But even if we are prepared to buy into this conspiracy theory, we still have to account for the evolution of Shakespeare’s works. The later plays are more Jacobean in flavor: the language of these works reflects the changing tastes at the Stuart court (many plays became less direct and more “wordy”), and they contain references to masques (which were the rage during James’s reign) and indoor performances (the Blackfriars Theater was a popular indoor venue by 1610).

  They also clearly mention political and world events that happened after Oxford died: Macbeth drew on the conspiracy of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and James’s fascination with witches, while The Tempest was partially inspired by an eyewitness account of the sinking of the ship called the Sea Venture in 1609. Writer William Strachey was aboard the ship when it floundered and ran aground off the coast of Bermuda. The following year he wrote his recollection of the disaster, and Shakespeare subsequently wrote a similar shipwreck description in The Tempest, having clearly borrowed from Strachey’s account. In response, Looney and others have conveniently rejected The Tempest from the canon.

  So, unless de Vere was being contacted by séance (actually, more on that below), it seems unlikely that he had anything to do with Shakespeare’s later plays. Ah, counter the Oxfordians, but perhaps the plays were mostly finished, but then spiced up with additional material to make them more topical. The problem is that five of the late plays were definitely coauthored—Pericles, Timon of Athens, Henry the Eighth, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the sadly lost Cardenio—and show clear signs of equal partnership and simultaneous authorship, such as small continuity errors in sequential scenes, which would have happened when two authors wrote at the same time.