Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  With these challenges in mind, this book first sets out to trace the controversy back to its origins, before considering why many formidable writers came to question Shakespeare’s authorship. I quickly discovered that biographers of Freud, Twain and James weren’t keen on looking too deeply into these authors’ doubts about Shakespeare. As a result, I encountered something rare in Shakespeare studies: archival material that was unsifted and in some cases unknown. I’ve also revisited the life and works of the two most influential figures in the controversy, the allegedly ‘mad’ American woman, Delia Bacon, who first made the case for Francis Bacon, and the schoolmaster J. T. Looney, the first to propose that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays. For a debate that largely turns on how one understands the relationship of Shakespeare’s life and works, there has been disappointingly little attention devoted to considering how Bacon’s and Looney’s experiences and worldviews determined the trajectory of their theories of authorship. Scholars on both sides of the debate have overlooked a great deal by taking these two polemicists at their word.

  More than any subject I’ve ever studied, the history of the authorship question is rife with forgeries and deception. I now approach all claims about Shakespeare’s identity with caution, taking into account when each discovery was made and how it altered previous biographical assumptions. I’ve also come to understand that the authorship controversy has turned on a handful of powerful ideas having little directly to do with Shakespeare but profoundly altering how his life and works would be read and interpreted. Some of these ideas came from debates about biblical texts, others from debates about classical ones. Still others had to do with emerging notions of the autobiographical self. As much as those on both sides of the controversy like to imagine themselves as independent thinkers, their views are strongly constrained by a few powerful ideas that took hold in the early nineteenth century.

  While Shakespeare was a product of an early modern world, the controversy over the authorship of his works is the creation of a modern one. As a result, there’s a danger of reading the past through contemporary eyes – from what Shakespeare’s contested will really meant to how writers back then might have drawn upon personal experiences in their works. A secondary aim of this book, then, is to show how Shakespeare is not our contemporary, nor as universal as we might wish him to be. Anachronistic thinking, especially about how we can gain access to writers’ lives through their plays and poems, turns out to be as characteristic of supporters of Shakespeare’s authorship as it is of sceptics. From this vantage, the longstanding opposition between the two camps is misleading, for they have more in common than either side is willing to concede. These shared if unspoken assumptions may in fact help explain the hostility that defines their relationship today, and I’ll suggest that there may be more useful ways of defining sides in this debate. I’ll also argue that Shakespeare scholars, from the late eighteenth century until today, bear a greater responsibility than they acknowledge for both the emergence and the perpetuation of the authorship controversy.

  *

  The evidence I continued to uncover while researching this book made it hard to imagine how anyone before the 1840s could argue that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. This working assumption couldn’t easily be reconciled with the received history of the controversy, one that, as noted earlier, goes back to James Wilmot in 1785, or at least to James Cowell in 1805. Aware of this uncomfortable fact, I held off until the very end of my research on consulting the Cowell manuscript in the Durning-Lawrence Library at Senate House Library in London. Before I called it up I knew as much as others who had read about this unpublished and rarely examined work. It was one of the jewels of a great collection of materials touching on the life and works of Francis Bacon, assembled at great expense by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, and, after his death in 1914, by his widow, Edith Jane Durning Smith, who shared his keen interest in the authorship controversy. Upon her death in 1929, the collection was bequeathed to the University of London, and by 1931 the transfer of materials was complete. A year later the leading British scholar Allardyce Nicoll announced in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement in an essay entitled ‘The First Baconian’ the discovery of Cowell’s lectures. It was Nicoll who put the pieces of the puzzle together, relying heavily on a biography written in 1813 by Wilmot’s niece, Olivia Wilmot Serres. Serres’s account, while not mentioning her uncle’s meeting with Cowell or his Shakespeare research, nonetheless confirmed that Wilmot was a serious man of letters, had lived near Stratford, was an admirer of Francis Bacon and had indeed burned his papers. Nicoll was less successful in tracing James Corton Cowell, concluding that he ‘seems to have been a Quaker’ on the grounds that ‘he was in all probability closely related to the well-known Orientalist E. B. Cowell, who was born at Ipswich in 1828’.

  Armed with this information, I turned to the lectures themselves, which made for gripping reading – how Cowell began as a confirmed Shakespearean, how his fortuitous encounter with Wilmot changed all that, how Wilmot anticipated a widely accepted reading of Love’s Labour’s Lost by a century, and perhaps most fascinating of all, how Wilmot uncovered stories of ‘odd characters living at or near Stratford on the Avon with whom Shakespeare must have been familiar’, including ‘a certain man of extreme ugliness and tallness who blackmailed the farmers under threat of bewitching their cattle’, as well as ‘a legend of showers of cakes at Shrovetide and stories of men who were rendered cripples by the falling of these cakes’. I thought it a shame that Cowell had not taken even better notes.

  And then my heart skipped when I came upon the following words: ‘It is strange that Shakespeare whose best years had been spent in a profitable and literary vocation should return to an obscure village offering no intellectual allurement and take up the very unromantic business of a money lender and dealer in malt.’ The sentence seemed innocuous enough; scholars and sceptics alike have often drawn attention to these well-known facts about Shakespeare’s business dealings. But having long focused more on when than on what people thought what they did about Shakespeare, I remembered that these details were unknown in 1785, or even in 1805. Records showing that Shakespeare’s household stockpiled grain in order to produce malt were not discovered until the early 1840s (and first published in 1844 by John Payne Collier). And it wasn’t until 1806 that the Stratford antiquarian R. B. Wheler made public the first of what would turn out to be several documents indicating that Shakespeare had engaged in moneylending (in this case, how in 1609 Shakespeare had a Stratford neighbour named John Addenbrooke arrested for failing to repay a small sum). While an undelivered letter in which another neighbour asks Shakespeare for a loan had been discovered in the late eighteenth century, the scholar who found it chose not to announce or share his discovery; it remained otherwise unknown until 1821. So Shakespeare’s grain-hoarding and moneylending didn’t become biographical commonplaces until the Victorian era.

  The word ‘unromantic’ in the same sentence should have tipped me off; though there was a recorded instance of its use before 1800, it wasn’t yet in currency at the time Cowell was supposedly writing. Whoever wrote these lectures purporting to be from 1805 had slipped up. I was looking at a forgery, and an unusually clever one at that, which on further examination almost surely dated from the early decades of the twentieth century. That meant the forger was probably still alive – and enjoying a satisfied laugh at the expense of the gulled professor – when Allardyce Nicoll had announced this discovery in the pages of the TLS. The forger had brazenly left other hints, not least of all the wish attributed to Cowell that ‘my material may be used by others regardless whence it came for it matters little who made the axe so that it cut’. And there were a few other false notes, including one pointed out by a letter-writer responding to Nicoll’s article, that Cowell had got his Warwickshire geography wrong. It also turns out that Serres, the author of Nicoll’s main corroborative source (the biography of Wilmot) wa
s a forger and fantasist. Much of her biographical account (including the burning of Wilmot’s papers) was invented and she later changed her story, asserting she was actually Wilmot’s granddaughter and the illegitimate daughter of King George III. Her case was even discussed in parliament and it took a trial to expose her fraudulent claim to be of royal descent. So Olivia Serres, at the source of the Cowell forgery, would also prove to be the pattern of a Shakespeare claimant: a writer of high lineage mistaken for someone of humbler origins, whose true identity deserved to be acknowledged.

  I’ve not been able to discover who forged the Cowell manuscript; that mystery will have to be solved by others. His or her motives (or perhaps their) cannot fully be known, though it’s worth hazarding a guess or two. Greed perhaps figured, for there is a record of payment for the manuscript of the not inconsiderable sum of £8 8s – though this document may have been planted and we simply don’t as yet know when or how the Cowell manuscript became part of the Durning-Lawrence collection. But, given how much time and care went into the forgery, a far likelier motive was the desire on the part of a Baconian to stave off the challenge posed by supporters of the Earl of Oxford, who by the 1920s threatened to surpass Bacon as the more likely author of Shakespeare’s works, if in fact he had not done so already. A final motive was that it reassigned the discovery of Francis Bacon’s authorship from a ‘mad’ American woman to a true-born Englishman, a quiet retiring man of letters, an Oxford-educated rector from the heart of England. Wilmot also stood as a surrogate for the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays: a well-educated man believed to have written pseudonymously who refused to claim credit for what he wrote and nearly denied posterity knowledge of the truth.

  All of the major elements of the authorship controversy come together in the tangled story of Wilmot, Cowell, Serres and the nameless forger – which serves as both a prologue and a warning. The following pages retrace a path strewn with a great deal more of the same: fabricated documents, embellished lives, concealed identity, calls for trial, pseudonymous authorship, contested evidence, bald-faced deception, and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.

  ONE

  SHAKESPEARE

  George Romney, ‘The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions’, engraved by Benjamin Smith, 1799

  Portrait, from Samuel Ireland, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Head and Seal of William Shakspeare (London, 1796)

  Ireland

  For a long time after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, anyone curious about his life had to depend on unreliable and often contradictory anecdotes, most of them supplied by people who had never met him. No one thought to interview his family, friends or fellow actors until it was too late to do so, and it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that biographers began combing through documents preserved in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. All this time interest in Shakespeare never abated; it was centred, however, on his plays rather than his personality. Curiosity about his art was, and still is, easily satisfied: from the closing years of the sixteenth century to this day, his plays could be purchased or seen onstage more readily than those of any other dramatist.

  Shakespeare did not live, as we do, in an age of memoir. Few at the time kept diaries or wrote personal essays (only thirty or so English diaries survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime and only a handful are in any sense personal; and despite the circulation and then translation of Montaigne’s Essays in England, the genre attracted few followers and fizzled out by the early seventeenth century, not to be revived in any serious way for another hundred years). Literary biography was still in its infancy; even the word ‘biography’ hadn’t yet entered the language and wouldn’t until the 1660s. By the time that popular interest began to shift from the works themselves to the life of the author, it was difficult to learn much about what Shakespeare was like. Now that those who knew him were no longer alive, the only credible sources of information were letters, literary manuscripts or official documents, and these were either lost or remained undiscovered.

  The first document with Shakespeare’s handwriting or signature on it – his will – wasn’t recovered until over a century after his death, in 1737. Sixteen years later a young lawyer named Albany Wallis, rummaging through the title deeds of the Fetherstonhaugh family in Surrey, stumbled upon a second document signed by Shakespeare, a mortgage deed for a London property in Blackfriars that the playwright had purchased in 1613. The rare find was given as a gift to David Garrick – star of the eighteenth-century stage and organiser of the first Shakespeare festival – and was subsequently published by the leading Shakespeare scholar and biographer of the day, Edmond Malone. Malone’s own efforts to locate Shakespeare’s papers were tireless – and disappointing. His greatest find, made in 1793 (though it remained unpublished until 1821), was the undelivered letter mentioned earlier, addressed to Shakespeare by his Stratford neighbour Richard Quiney.

  A neighbour’s request for a substantial loan, a shrewd real-estate investment and a will in which Shakespeare left his wife a ‘second best bed’ were not what admirers in search of clues that explained Shakespeare’s genius had hoped to find. What little else turned up didn’t help much either, suggesting that the Shakespeares secretly clung to a suspect faith and were, moreover, social climbers. Shakespeare’s father’s perhaps spurious Catholic ‘Testament of Faith’ was found hidden in the rafters of the family home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1757, though mysteriously lost soon after a transcript was made. And the Shakespeares’ request in 1596 for a grant of a coat of arms – bestowing on the Stratford glover and his actor son the status of gentlemen – surfaced in 1778, and was published that year by George Steevens in his edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Contemporaries still had high hopes that ‘a rich assemblage of Shakespeare papers would start forth from some ancient repository, to solve all our doubts’. For his part, a frustrated Edmond Malone blamed gentry too lazy to examine their family papers: ‘Much information might be procured illustrative of the history of this extraordinary man, if persons possessed of ancient papers would take the trouble to examine them, or permit others to peruse them.’

  Some feared that Shakespeare’s papers had been, or might yet be, carelessly destroyed. The collector and engraver Samuel Ireland, touring through Stratford-upon-Avon in 1794 while at work on his Picturesque Views on the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon, was urged by a Stratford local to search Clopton House, a mile from town, where the Shakespeare family papers might have been moved. Ireland and his teenage son, William-Henry, who had accompanied him, made their way to Clopton House, and in response to their queries were told by the farmer who lived there, a man named Williams,

  By God I wish you had arrived a little sooner. Why it isn’t a fortnight since I destroyed several baskets-full of letters and papers; … as to Shakespeare, why there were many bundles with his name wrote upon them. Why it was in this very fireplace I made a roaring bonfire of them.

  Mrs Williams was called in and confirmed the report, admonishing her husband: ‘I told you not to burn the papers, as they might be of consequence.’ All that Edmond Malone could do when he heard this dispiriting news was complain to the couple’s landlord. The unlucky Samuel and William-Henry Ireland went back to London.

  They didn’t return empty-handed, having purchased an oak chair at Anne Hathaway’s cottage. It was said to be the very chair in which Shakespeare had wooed Anne, and it’s now in the possession of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Samuel Ireland added it to his growing collection of English heirlooms that included the cloak of the fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif, a jacket owned by Oliver Cromwell and the garter that King James II wore at his coronation. But the great prize of Shakespeare’s signature continued to elude him. It probably didn’t help Ireland’s mood that his lawyer and rival collector Albany Wallis, who thirty years earlier had discovered Shakespeare’s signature on the Blackfriars mortgage deed, had recently regained access to the Fetherstonhaugh papers
and located a third document signed by Shakespeare, the conveyance to that Blackfriars transaction.

  As the eighteenth century came to a close, the long-lost cache of Shakespeare’s papers – and not just legal transactions, but more revelatory correspondence, literary manuscripts and perhaps even commonplace books (in which Elizabethan writers recorded what they saw, heard and read) – still awaited discovery. And crucial information about the Elizabethan theatrical world, which might have illuminated Shakespeare’s professional life, was only fitfully coming to light. A major find in 1766 – a copy of Palladis Tamia, Francis Meres’s published account of the Elizabethan literary world in 1598 – confirmed that by then a ‘honey-tongued Shakespeare’ was already prized as the leading English writer of both comedies and tragedies. While the contours of Shakespeare’s professional world were slowly becoming visible, his personal life remained obscure. Though unsuccessful in his search for Shakespeare’s notebooks, a dogged Edmond Malone did find the record-book of one of the Jacobean Masters of the Revels in a trunk that hadn’t been opened for over a century. It was a discovery, Malone wrote, ‘so much beyond all calculation or expectation, that, I will not despair of finding Shakespeare’s pocket-book some time or other’.