Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  No less groundless is the argument that Shakespeare’s vocabulary was far greater than someone with only a grammar-school education could have possessed. As David Crystal, the leading expert on Shakespeare’s language, has shown, the myth that ‘Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any English writer’ is hard to dispel. Impressive claims are often tossed about, such as that Shakespeare used as many as thirty thousand different words. It’s true if you count variants (both ‘cat’ and ‘cats’, or ‘say’ and ‘says’); otherwise, his vocabulary was about twenty thousand words. It’s a sizeable figure but not all that surprising, given the vast range of subjects treated in his plays and poems as well as how much of his work survives (the complete Works runs to just under nine hundred thousand words). Crystal also notes that ‘most of us use at least 50,000 words’ out of the roughly one million that are available in English today – and yet few of us with working vocabularies twice Shakespeare’s can boast of having written anything of the order of Romeo and Juliet.

  Ignorance of what a grammar-school education offered has also led sceptics to claim that the true author of the plays intention ally wrote over the heads of most of those who went to see them: ‘what is all that culture and erudition doing in the plays’, Diana Price wonders, if Shakespeare is merely writing ‘primarily for the general public over at the Globe?’ This isn’t snobbery so much as an impoverished sense of how much playgoers who paid to see Shakespeare’s plays – and for that matter the even more erudite ones of Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Marston and Chapman – readily understood. Ignored, too, in attacks on Shakespeare’s limited if typical formal education, is the kind of informal study of books and foreign tongues that aspiring writers, then, as now, engage in long after classroom education has come to an end. We have no idea how much of this Shakespeare undertook in the decade or more between the time he finished school and he began writing and acting professionally.

  *

  What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes him so exceptional: his imagination. As an aspiring actor, Shakespeare must have displayed a talent for imagining himself as any number of characters onstage. When he turned to writing, he demonstrated an even more powerful imaginative capacity, one that allowed him to create roles of such depth and complexity – Rosalind, Hamlet, Lear, Juliet, Timon, Brutus, Leontes and Cleopatra, along with hundreds of others, great and small – that even the least of them, four centuries later, seems fully human and distinctive. What’s especially fascinating is that he didn’t actually invent most of these characters: he found almost all of them, half-formed, not in the people he knew but in the works of other writers – including North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and Holinshed’s Chronicles, sources he turned to again and again. The stories and portraits they contained stuck in his mind, sometimes for years, until he was able to see what was needed to transform them utterly and breathe life into them.

  The argument for writing from personal experience is implicitly an argument for a kind of realism. When it served his purposes, Shakespeare wrote realistically; but when realism fell short, he never hesitated to bring divinities onstage, have a character enter invisible, make time run backwards, or bring a statue to life. If Shakespeare really had been interested in writing about what he knew first-hand, he would have done what Jonson, Dekker, Middleton and many other playwrights at the time chose to do: set his plays where he grew up, or in his adopted city, London. But he chose instead to give his imagination freer reign, locating his plots in distant lands and former times – Vienna, Verona, Venice, and ancient Britain, Athens, Troy, Tyre and Rome. In Cymbeline, he even has modern-day Italians and ancient Romans rub elbows. Even when he is closest to personal experience and sets much of As You Like It in a version of Warwickshire’s Forest of Arden, it turns out to be a magical landscape inhabited not only by shepherds and hermits but also by lions, snakes and a divinity, Hymen.

  ‘Imagination’, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, means ‘forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses’, one that ‘does not correspond to the reality of things’. In simple terms, then, imagination begins where experience – what we see, hear or feel – ends. Shakespeare may not tell us a lot about his personal life in the plays, but he often shares what he thinks about the workings of the imagination. It’s no accident that Hamlet, the character widely acknowledged as his greatest creation, argues most cogently for the power of imagination, confiding to Ophelia: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.’ Where Hamlet most resembles his creator is not in the fact that he was captured by pirates or mourned his father’s death, but in his capacity to give shape and words to often wild thoughts: as he demands of Horatio, ‘Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?’

  Helena, Lear, Antonio, Miranda, Vincentio, Gower, Malvolio and Polixenes are among the many other characters – rulers and lovers, the puritanical and the guileless, the self-deluded and the self-knowing – who reflect upon imagination in the plays. Fittingly, it’s the character most sceptical about the power of imagination, Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to whom Shakespeare assigns its most memorable definition:

  I never may believe

  These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  The lunatic, the lover and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact.

  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

  That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

  Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

  The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Such tricks hath strong imagination

  That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

  It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

  (5.1.2–20)

  One of the great pleasures of this speech is that Theseus is himself ‘an antique fable’. Along with lovers and lunatics, writers share a heightened capacity to imagine the ‘forms of things unknown’. But only writers can turn them ‘to shapes’ and give ‘to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’. It’s hard to imagine a better definition of the mystery of literary creation. Not long after delivering this speech, Theseus watches a play performed by Bottom and the other rude mechanicals and finds himself transformed by the experience. His reaction to their play ranks among the most wonderful speeches in Shakespeare: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.’ His captive bride-to-be Hippolyta is quick to remind him, as well as us: ‘It must be your imagination then, and not theirs’ (5.1.210–12).

  When I first explored the idea of writing this book some years ago, a friend unnerved me by asking, ‘What difference does it make who wrote the plays?’ The reflexive answer I offered in response is now much clearer to me: ‘A lot.’ It makes a difference as to how we imagine the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. It makes an even greater difference as to how we understand how much has changed from early modern to modern times. But the greatest difference of all concerns how we read the plays. We can believe that Shakespeare himself thought that poets could give to ‘airy nothing’ a ‘local habitation and a name’. Or we can conclude that this ‘airy nothing’ turns out to be a disguised something that needs to be decoded, and that Shakespeare couldn’t imagine ‘the forms of things unknown’ withou
t having experienced them first-hand. It’s a stark and consequential choice.

  Bibliographical Essay

  The literature on the Shakespeare authorship controversy is vast. A full accounting, if it were even possible, would multiply the length of this book several times over. What follows, then, is a guide limited to the specific sources I have drawn on in print, manuscript and electronic form, so that anyone interested can retrace or follow up on my research.

  For those seeking an overview of the controversy, there are a number of fine surveys, all of which I have found helpful and reliable: R. C. Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters (London, 1958); H. N. Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants (London, 1962); Warren Hope and Kim R. Holston, The Shakespeare Controversy (Jefferson, North Carolina, 1992); and John F. Michell, Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London, 1996). See, too, William Leahy, ed., Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question (London, 2010). For early bibliographies of the controversy, see W. H. Wyman, Bibliography of the Bacon–Shakespeare Controversy (Cincinnati, 1884), and Joseph S. Galland’s dissertation, Digesta Anti-Shakespeareana (Evanston, Illinois, 1949).

  Those interested in the strongest arguments in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship should consult Irvin Matus, Shakespeare, in Fact (New York, 1994) and Scott McCrea, The Case for Shakespeare (Westport, Conn., 2005). The best scholarly account remains S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1970), extensively revised in 1991. Particularly recommended, and to which I am deeply indebted, are discussions of the authorship controversy that appear in F. E. Halliday, The Cult of Shakespeare (London, 1957), Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers (New York, 1987), Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (New York, 1989), Harold Love, Attributing Authorship (Cambridge, 2002) and especially Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1997). Those seeking a point-by-point defence of Shakespeare’s authorship should consult the website of David Kathman and Terry Ross, www.shakespeareauthorship.com, as well as Alan Nelson’s: socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/authorsh.html.

  Literature in support of alternative candidates – both print and digital – dwarfs that defending Shakespeare’s claim. A few of the titles that I have found most useful are, in chronological order: George Greenwood, The Shakespeare Problem Restated (London, 1908); Gilbert Slater, Seven Shakespeares (London, 1931); Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (London, 1955); Charlton Ogburn, Jr, The Mysterious William Shakespeare (New York, 1984); Richard Whalen, Shakespeare, Who Was He? (Westport, Conn., 1994); Joseph Sobran, Alias Shakespeare (New York, 1997); Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography (Westport, Conn., 2001); Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare (New York, 2006); Mark Anderson, ‘Shakespeare’ by Another Name (New York, 2005); and Brian McClinton, The Shakespeare Conspiracies (Belfast, 2007). I’ll refer to others as occasion demands. Those in search of a full array of arguments that challenge Shakespeare’s claim and bolster those of other candidates have a host of online alternatives to choose from, the best of which include the ‘Shakespearean Authorship Trust’ (www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk); ‘Francis Bacon’s New Advancement of Learning’ (www.sirbacon.org); the ‘Shakespeare Fellowship’ (www.shakespearefellowship.org); the ‘Shakespeare Oxford Society’ (www.shakespeare-oxford.com); the ‘Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection’ (marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com); and the ‘De Vere Society’ (www.deveresociety.co.uk).

  When referring to specific facts about William Shakespeare’s life in these pages, my sources, unless otherwise specified, are E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975) and S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (London, 1981). I have also made extensive use of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography throughout. Unless I’m quoting the exact title of a book or article or need to quote the original spelling for a specific reason I have modernised spelling and punctuation. Quotations from the plays and poems are taken from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, updated 4th edn (New York, 1997).

  PROLOGUE

  Cowell’s lectures, which have never been published, are quoted from the manuscript in the Durning-Lawrence collection housed in Senate House Library, University of London, Durning-Lawrence Library, MS 294. Some Reflections on the Life of William Shakespeare. A Paper Read before the Ipswich Philosophic Society by James Corton Cowell, February 7, 1805 [And a second paper, April 1805].

  I have singled out a few of the many notable sceptics; James, Freud, Keller and Twain are discussed at length in chapters that follow. For Charlie Chaplin, see his My Auto-Biograph (New York, 1964), where he writes ‘I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude.’ Malcolm X relates in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York, 1965), that

  Another hot debate I remember I was in had to do with the identity of Shakespeare … I just got intrigued over the Shakespearean dilemma. The King James translation of the Bible is considered the greatest piece of literature in English … They say that from 1604 to 1611, King James got poets to translate, to write the Bible. Well, if Shakespeare existed, he was then the top poet around. But Shakespeare is nowhere reported connected with the Bible. If he existed, why didn’t King James use him?

  According to Orson Welles, ‘I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away’ (quoted in Kenneth Tynan, Persona Grata [London, 1953]). Sir Derek Jacobi said that he was ‘“99.9 per cent certain” the actual author of the plays and sonnets was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford’ (Evening Standard, 23 April 2009). For Elise Broach’s young adult novel, see Shakespeare’s Secret (New York, 2005).

  For the suggestion that there is a conspiracy at work in the Shakespeare industry, see, for example, Charlton Ogburn, who writes that to ‘prevent the unthinkable must be the primary concern of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’, and adds that the Trust draws on a handsome budget, and that the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon and Guggenheim foundations contribute to the orthodox Shakespeare cause as well. He also writes: ‘Of much greater importance, I feel sure, is the professional, economic, and psychological investment in Shakespeare orthodoxy by academicians on both sides of the ocean,’ and goes on to speak of the ‘diabolical elements’ in the case ‘which make it exceedingly difficult for such authorities to divest themselves of their ties to him’ (Ogburn, The Mysterious William Shakespeare).

  For the discovery of the Cowell manuscript, see Allardyce Nicoll, ‘The First Baconian’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1932. The wonderfully named William Jaggard pointed out in a letter to the TLS that Cowell placed Wilmot’s residence in ‘Barton-on-the-Heath’, which he describes visiting ‘six miles north of Stratford-on Avon’ when in fact it is ‘sixteen miles due south’ (3 March 1932). The only previous effort I know of to examine the Cowell manuscript is described in Nathan Baca’s report of Daniel Wright’s unpublished research on Cowell and his suspicion that the document may be a forgery, in Shakespeare Matters 2 (Summer 2003). For more on the Durning-Lawrence collection, see K. E. Attar, ‘Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence: A Baconian and His Books’, The Library 5 (September 2004), pp. 294–315; K. E. Attar, ‘From Private to Public: The Durning-Lawrence Library at the University of London’, in The Private Library, 5th ser., vol. 10 (Autumn 2007), pp. 137–56; and Alexander Gordon, Memoir of Lady Durning-Lawrence (Privately printed, 1930). The forger (or forgers) clearly incorporated arguments set forth in Sidney Lee, ‘A New Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Gentleman’s Magazine (October 1880). For the receipt for the Cowell manuscript, see Senate House Library, University of London, DLL/1/10, which contains a half-sheet, perhaps eight by four inches, on which is written: ‘Cowell M.S.S. £8 = 8 – 0 Lady Durning-Lawrence holds the Receipts.’ The half-sheet offers no date or any other information about where it came from, from whom it was purchased or whe
re these receipts are. There’s a hole in the top right corner suggesting that something may have been attached.

  For the earliest published claims that Shakespeare lent money or hoarded grain, see R. B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford, 1806); and vol. 1 of John Payne Collier, The Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1844). For the letter from Richard Quiney to Shakespeare, see Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford, 2008).

  For more on Serres, see Olivia Wilmot Serres, The Life of the Author of the Letters of Junius, the Rev. James Wilmot (London, 1813); her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography; Bram Stoker, Famous Imposters (London, 1910); and Mary L. Pendered and Justinian Mallett, Princess or Pretender? The Strange Story of Olivia Wilmot Serres (London, 1939).

  SHAKESPEARE

  IRELAND

  For facts about Shakespeare (and when specific documents were discovered by scholars) see Chambers, William Shakespeare, and Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life as well as his William Shakespeare: Records and Images. For an overview of early modern diaries and biographies, see William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1442 and 1942 (Berkeley, 1950), and Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930). Malone made his plea to search more widely for documents about Shakespeare in Gentleman’s Magazine 65 (1795). See too, Sir James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London, 1860).