Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  His biographer, Paine, who couldn’t understand why Twain kept insisting that he knew ‘that Shakespeare didn’t write those plays’, asked how him how could be so sure. Twain replied: ‘I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned.’ Paine thought that Twain was joking and ‘asked if he had been consulting a spiritual medium’, but Twain was ‘clearly in earnest’. Paine finally learned that Twain’s confidence was based on the string cipher and Twain insisted that Booth’s book ‘was far and away beyond anything of the kind ever published; that Ignatius Donnelly and others had merely glimpsed the truth, but that … Booth, had demonstrated, beyond any doubt or question, that the Bacon signatures were there’. Paine was about to set sail for Egypt and begged for more information before his departure, but Twain refused, assuring him that the news would come by cable to his ship ‘and the world would quake with it’. Paine was so excited by this imminent revelation that, he writes, ‘I was tempted to give up my trip, to be with him at Stormfield at the time of the upheaval.’ In the end he sailed off and upon arriving in Cairo ‘looked eagerly through English newspapers, expecting any moment to come upon great head-lines; but I was always disappointed. Even on the return voyage there was no one I could find who had heard any particular Shakespeare news.’

  Twain kept writing about the authorship of the plays because he cared about something other than what he believed Booth had already proven. Left unanswered by the cipher solution were questions that bore directly on Twain’s unshakeable belief that writers could only successfully write about what they had experienced first-hand. Nowhere is this clearer than in the marginal notes he scrawled throughout the copy of Greenwood’s book that Macy had sent him. One of those annotations reveals a great deal about the prism through which Twain now saw Shakespeare: ‘Certain people persisted to the end in believing that Arthur Orton was Sir Roger Tichborne. Shakespeare is another Arthur Orton – with all the valuable evidence against him, and not a single established fact in his favor.’ Arthur Orton, known in his own day almost universally as the Claimant, is no longer a household name, though he was one of the wonders of the Victorian age. The controversy that raged over his identity goes back to 1854, when the young heir to one of the Britain’s oldest aristocratic titles, Sir Roger Charles Tichborne, disappeared, reportedly drowned at sea off the coast of South America. His body was never recovered. The story had all the trappings of Shakespearean romance: families torn asunder by tempests, long searches for lost children, and, in the end, long-desired reunion. Roger Tichborne’s mother refused to accept the news that her son had died and began making enquiries abroad about his whereabouts. In 1866 a man arrived from Australia claiming to be her long-lost son and heir. He didn’t look much like her son (he was a huge man, while her son, when she last saw him, was quite skinny, and Sir Roger’s distinctive tattoo had somehow disappeared). Nonetheless, Lady Tichborne immediately identified him as the long-lost son, as did several other family friends and servants. Relatives, keen on protecting the family title and lands, thought the ill-educated Claimant a fraud. It would take litigation to settle the matter and in 1872 the longest and most celebrated British trial for imposture began. It generated tremendous interest, cutting across class boundaries and stirring up many of the same reactions as the authorship controversy did at this time: how could a low-class, unschooled provincial possibly be mistaken for a well-travelled, worldly man, one naturally knowledgeable about the ways of the aristocracy?

  The story captivated Twain, who managed to attend the trial when visiting London and found it ‘the most intricate and fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played upon the world’s stage’. Twain kept newspaper reports on the case, for a future sketch; though he never used this material, many years later in Following the Equator he describes how he had been invited to observe the Claimant after a day at court at ‘one of his showy evenings in the sumptuous quarters provided for him from the purses of his adherents and well-wishers. He was in evening dress, and I thought him a rather fine and stately creature.’ Twain, like so many others, was taken in. The court subsequently declared that the Claimant was named Orton; he was a butcher from the Australian provinces, and an impostor. Despite this ruling, the Claimant continued to insist that he was indeed Roger Tichborne, even after his release from prison ten years later. When the impoverished Claimant died in 1898 his funeral was attended by thousands. The name placed on his coffin was ‘Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne’. For Twain, Orton’s supporters – like Shakespeare loyalists – continued to believe in their man long after the facts proved otherwise.

  Twain, feeling as duped by Shakespeare as he had by the Claimant, was now intent on exposing the man from Stratford as the ‘Arthur Orton of literary “Claimants”’. If anyone understood what it meant to be a ‘Claimant’ it was Samuel Clemens – who enjoyed punning on the resemblance of the words. He had been writing under an assumed identity from almost the outset of his literary career, and it’s a critical commonplace that no writer has ever been more obsessed with twinning, doubling, pseudonyms, and imposture and the confusion of identity. Part Clemens, part Twain, he couldn’t help seeing others in this light as well; when he wrote a thank-you note to Helen Keller he called her ‘a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world – you and your other half together – Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole’. He was preoccupied with twins and impostors in his fiction, too, from The Prince and the Pauper and Those Extraordinary Twins to Pudd’nhead Wilson. It’s hardly surprising that a writer whose own identity was split in twain came to believe that one of the greatest of writers also wrote under an assumed identity.

  Living in a world in which imposture was more pervasive than anyone imagined motivated Twain to seek out instances of it elsewhere. So it was in 1894, his friend Henry W. Fisher reports, that Twain ‘thought he might have turned up … a bombshell’ and asked Fisher ‘to assist him in gathering evidence to prove that Queen Elizabeth was in fact a man. “Mark my word,” Twain told him, “Elizabeth was a he.”’ Fisher, who was on his way to England, dug around a bit, interviewed some people, and after a fortnight returned to Paris, where Twain was staying, to report back what he had learned. He passed along anecdotes he had heard about how Elizabeth as a girl had caught ‘malignant fever and died’, and, fearful of Henry VIII’s anger, her governess, who ‘knew that her life depended upon finding a substitute for Elizabeth’, found one in the ‘late Princess’ boy playmate’. The story was just what Twain had hoped to hear, and he assured Fisher that Elizabeth ‘was a male character all over – a thousand acts of hers prove it’. Twain found corroboration in an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which suggested that there was ‘“some physical defect” in Elizabeth’s make-up’ and that she was ‘masculine in mind and temperament’. Twain refused to believe that a woman could have the experience or character to accomplish what Elizabeth did, from enriching her kingdom to writing sophisticated letters to King Philip of Spain. ‘Wasn’t that a man’s game?’ Elizabeth’s success, which he thought well beyond the capabilities of a woman, had, for Twain, a simpler if conspiratorial explanation.

  Twain wrote a good deal more in the margins of Greenwood’s book; its argument seems to have unleashed in him a kind of running tirade about how writing works:

  Men are developed by their environment – trained by it. Consider Shakespeare’s

  Did ever a man move the world by writing solely out of what he had learned from schools & books, & leaving out what he had lived and felt?

  It is environment, & environment alone, that develops genius or strangles it

  To write with powerful effect, a [sic] must write out the life he has led – as did Bacon when he wrote Shakespeare

  Time and again Twain reaffirms the intrinsic link between powerful writing and an author’s life experience. Twain simply could not accept that a young man from the provinces, at age twenty-one, ‘without any qualifying pr
eparation in the way of training and experiences’ could bring ‘forth great tragedies like a volcano’.

  One of the oddest things about Is Shakespeare Dead? – the book Twain had been writing since the visit of Helen Keller and the Macys – is Twain’s insistence that Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays because he couldn’t have mastered the legal language that appears in the plays. Twain himself didn’t have such knowledge either, but Greenwood did, and it was the central claim of The Shakespeare Problem Restated. Twain was so taken by Greenwood’s argument that he made it his own, lifting and pasting unaltered into his book, without attribution, most of Greenwood’s chapter on Shakespeare and the law (even leaving instructions in his copy of The Shakespeare Problem Restated where to begin lifting Greenwood’s words on page 371, and where, sixteen pages later, to ‘stop’). Greenwood was furious when he learned of this and threatened legal action. Again, the ironies were great: Twain plagiarised Greenwood’s words in a work subtitled From My Autobiography in order to challenge Shakespeare’s claims to authorship, on the grounds that you had to know something about law to speak with authority about it. Yet in doing so, Twain does what Shakespeare himself had done: appropriated what others said or wrote, using their words to lend authority to his own – something that Twain had argued wasn’t possible.

  The New York Times and other newspapers picked up on the mild scandal, and Twain, who first brushed off his theft as an oversight, was forced to insert a leaf after the copyright notice that read: ‘Chapter VIII, “Shakespeare as a Lawyer,” is taken from The Shakespeare Problem Restated by George G. Greenwood.’ Despite his protests, Twain understood exactly what he was doing in folding Greenwood into his autobiography, and felt that even through Greenwood might have written it, it was still his. Writing to Macy in late February to thank him for sending along Greenwood’s book, he admitted that he had ‘stolen meat enough from it to stuff yards and yards of sausage-gut in my vast autobiography and make it look like my own’. And, he underscored, ‘really the gut is mine’.

  Is Shakespeare Dead? was published in April 1909. It was Twain’s final chance to air his views about the difference between major writers who drew on ‘experience’ and inferior ones who depended on ‘listening’. He also couldn’t resist making a case for the fame that would surely have been Shakespeare of Stratford’s had he written the plays: ‘If Shakespeare had really been celebrated, like me,’ he adds in a postscript to the book, his neighbours in ‘Stratford could have told things about him; and if my experience goes for anything, they’d have done it’.

  The book’s title was based on an old joke, one that he had told in Innocents Abroad. The question was Twain’s way of needling tour guides who had ‘exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out to us … the beauties of some bronze image’. Twain and his fellow tourists would ‘look at it stupidly and in silence’ for as long as they could ‘hold out’ before asking: ‘Is he dead?’ Actually, as Leslie Fiedler has pointed out, the title should have been Is Shakespeare Shakespeare? But the death of the author had always been a subject near and dear to Twain, and his own demise, he knew, couldn’t be far off. In that sense, the title is shadowed by another, used by one of its reviewers: ‘Is Twain Dead?’, and calls to mind as well the title of Twain’s unsuccessful play Is He Dead? (in which an artist pretends to be dead in order to ensure his posthumous success). Behind it all was an echo of Twain’s famous response to an erroneous report in 1897 in the New York Journal, that the ‘report of my death was an exaggeration’. A few months after Twain died in 1911 the executors of his estate ‘dispersed much of his private library at an urgent sale in New York City, as though intending to capitalize on what could be fleeting fame’. Twain himself had mockingly scribbled in his copy of Greenwood’s book that Shakespeare ‘Left no books – “doubtless” hadn’t any.’

  *

  Baconian reports of Shakespeare’s demise were also exaggerated – and the publication of Twain’s book coincided with the death-knell of Baconianism. After a half-century the movement had peaked and was now in decline, though Baconian diehards soldiered on (including those at Baconiana who announced in July 1911, with no irony, that they were ‘Nearing the End’). The case for Francis Bacon’s authorship of the plays continues to find new supporters to this day, though they are fewer in number, less prominent, and less vocal. Baconiana is still published and a steady trickle of books maintaining that Bacon wrote the plays continue to appear, mostly rehearsing familiar arguments.

  William Stone Booth’s book fell on deaf ears, as did his subsequent and increasingly desperate Marginal Acrostics and Other Alphabetical Devices, A Catalogue in 1920 and his Subtle Shining Secrets Writ in the Margents of Books in 1925. A year later, John Macy reported Booth’s death to a friend: ‘I fancy his ghost arguing with Shake and Bake until they both wish they were in Hell.’ Helen Keller failed to persuade a publisher to run her piece on the authorship question. Her thirty-four-page manuscript sits unpublished in the archives of the American Foundation for the Blind in New York City. She never revisited the subject.

  Ignatius Donnelly kept writing to the very end, though failed to find a publisher for his last discovery, Ben Jonson’s Cipher. Orville Ward Owen continued digging, right up to 1920, though never found those hidden manuscripts. On his deathbed in 1924 he warned an admirer to avoid the ‘Bacon controversy’, for

  you will only reap disappointment. When I discovered the Word Cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit. I could have been the greatest surgeon there … But I thought that the world would be eager to hear what I have found. Instead, what did they give me? I have had my name dragged in the mud … lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden almost penniless invalid.

  Owen’s Cipher Wheel, recently rediscovered in a warehouse in Detroit, is now housed at Summit University, in Montana.

  Elizabeth Wells Gallup never found the hidden manuscripts either. And when her benefactor, Colonel Fabyan, had experts in typography examine her work, they found it to be fundamentally flawed: she had been working under the assumption that the compositors of all the works she had been examining alternated two distinct typefaces to create the biliteral cipher. It turned out that in the trays of Elizabethan compositors were dozens of fonts, with slight differences, mixed together. Her project was doomed from the start.

  The cipher story had one positive, if unintended, consequence. William Friedman, a talented young geneticist who was teaching part-time at Cornell University, was lured away by Colonel Fabyan to a job at his Riverbank Laboratories, where Fabyan also supported the cipher hunters. Expecting to work there on Mendelian genetics, Friedman was enlisted instead to help Mrs Gallup and was soon appointed ‘Head of Ciphers’. The cipher department at Riverbank became the primary recruiting ground for the cryptanalytic training of American officers during the First World War, and after that, for the National Security Agency. In 1921 Friedman left Riverbank to work for the government, armed with the knowledge of cryptography that during the Second World War would enable him to lead the team that cracked the seemingly unbreakable Japanese machine cipher, providing the intelligence that helped Allied forces to prevail in the Pacific, including the decisive battle at Midway. Donnelly, Owen and Mrs Gallup never achieved the fame they sought, but their work on ciphers helped win a war.

  Henry James

  Is Shakespeare Dead? won few admirers and Twain’s retainers did their best to shield him from what Lyon describes as ‘sour bitter letters … more of censure than of praise’. In surviving correspondence a defensive Twain retreated from his advocacy of Francis Bacon: ‘all I want’, he insisted, ‘is to convince some people that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Who did, is a question which does not greatly interest me.’ In this, he was moving toward the position of another major writer of the day, Henry James.

  Pinning down Henry James’s scepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t easy. Unlike Twain, James wasn’t willing to confront the issue pu
blicly or directly. We don’t know when he became interested in the subject or how much his views changed over time. His position has to be pieced together from tantalising bits of evidence: a handful of letters, a journal entry, a short story, an essay and a passing allusion in his fiction. It’s not a lot to go by, and any claims are further qualified by James’s maddeningly elliptical and evasive style. Still, there are good reasons to pursue this as far as it leads, for James is representative of what I suspect were many artists who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship but were fearful of the ridicule that might follow if they expressed their reservations publicly. He also succeeded, far better than any other writer, in finding a creative outlet for his doubts, first in a twenty-thousand-word story, ‘The Birthplace’, and then, a few years later, in a remarkable essay on The Tempest.

  James was no stranger to Shakespeare. As a child he had been given a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and even called his first story ‘A Tragedy of Errors’. James knew the plays and poems intimately, owned several editions of them, reviewed a dozen or so productions, had engaged with Shakespeare’s plays in his fiction and frequently cites them in his letters, notebooks and criticism. There were few periods in his creative life when James didn’t find himself responding in one way or another to Shakespeare or reflecting on the mystery of his genius. This was certainly the case in the early years of the twentieth century, when James was approaching sixty, at the pinnacle of his career, beginning to write both biography and autobiography, planning a trip to America where he would revisit his own birthplace, and fashioning what might be described as a modern-day equivalent to the First Folio – the landmark New York Edition of his novels and stories. Everywhere James turned, Shakespeare’s example loomed large. Two years before he died, anxious about how biographers would treat his life and work, and having already condemned to the flames manuscripts and thousands of letters, James instructed his literary executor that there ought to be a provision in his will containing ‘a curse no less explicit than Shakespeare’s own on any such as try to move my bones’.