Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

  One obvious objection to any Baconian theory is that Bacon had a very full life already without taking on responsibility for the Shakespearean canon as well, never mind the works of Montaigne, Spenser, and the others. There is also an inconvenient lack of connection between Bacon and any human being associated with the theater-perhaps not surprisingly, as he appears to have quite disliked the theater and attacked it as a frivolous and lightweight pastime in one of his many essays.

  Partly for this reason doubters began to look elsewhere. In 1918 a schoolmaster from Gateshead, in northeast England, with the inescapably noteworthy name of J. Thomas Looney put the finishing touches to his life’s work, a book called Shakespeare Identified, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that the actual author of Shakespeare was the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, one Edward de Vere. It took him two years to find a publisher willing to publish the book under his own name. Looney steadfastly refused to adopt a pseudonym, arguing, perhaps just a touch desperately, that his name had nothing to do with insanity and was in fact pronounced loney. (Interestingly, Looney was not alone in having a mirthful surname. As Samuel Schoenbaum once noted with clear pleasure, other prominent anti-Stratfordians of the time included Sherwood E. Silliman and George M. Battey.)

  Looney’s argument was built around the conviction that William Shakespeare lacked the worldliness and polish to write his own plays, and that they must therefore have come from someone of broader learning and greater experience: an aristocrat in all likelihood. Oxford, it may be said, had certain things in his favor as a candidate: He was clever and had some standing as a poet and playwright (though none of his plays survives, and none of his poetry indicates actual greatness-certainly not Shakespearean greatness); he was well traveled and spoke Italian, and he moved in the right circles to understand courtly matters. He was much admired by Queen Elizabeth, who, it was said, “delighteth…in his personage and his dancing and valiantness,” and one of his daughters was engaged for a time to Southampton, the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s two long poems. His connections, without question, were impeccable.

  But Oxford also had shortcomings that seem not to sit well with the compassionate, steady, calm, wise voice that speaks so reliably and seductively from Shakespeare’s plays. He was arrogant, petulant, and spoiled, irresponsible with money, sexually dissolute, widely disliked, and given to outbursts of deeply unsettling violence. At the age of seventeen, he murdered a household servant in a fury (but escaped punishment after a pliant jury was persuaded to rule that the servant had run onto his sword). Nothing in his behavior, at any point in his life, indicated the least gift for compassion, empathy, or generosity of spirit-or indeed the commitment to hard work that would have allowed him to write more than three dozen plays anonymously, in addition to the work under his own name, while remaining actively engaged at court.

  Looney never produced evidence to explain why Oxford -a man of boundless vanity-would seek to hide his identity. Why would he be happy to give the world some unremembered plays and middling poems under his own name, but then retreat into anonymity as he developed, in middle age, a fantastic genius? All Looney would say on the matter was: “That, however, is his business, not ours.” Actually, if we are to believe in Oxford, it is entirely our business. It has to be.

  The problems with Oxford don’t end quite there. There is the matter of the dedications to his two narrative poems. At the time of Venus and Adonis, Oxford was forty-four years old and a senior earl to Southampton, who was still a downy youth. The sycophantic tone of the dedication, with its apology for choosing “so strong a prop for so weak a burden” and its promise to “take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour,” is hardly the voice one would expect to find from a senior aristocrat, particularly one as proud as Oxford, to a junior one. There is also the unanswered question of why Oxford, patron of his own acting company, the Earl of Oxford’s Men, would write his best work for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a competing troupe. Then, too, there is the problem of explaining away the many textual references that point to William Shakespeare’s authorship-the pun on Anne Hathaway’s name in the sonnets, for example. Oxford was a sophisticated dissembler indeed if he embedded punning references to the wife of his front man in his work.

  But easily the most troubling weakness of the Oxford argument is that Edward de Vere incontestably died in 1604, when many of Shakespeare’s plays had not yet appeared-indeed in some cases could not have been written, as they were influenced by later events. The Tempest, notably, was inspired by an account of a shipwreck on Bermuda written by one William Strachey in 1609. Macbeth likewise was clearly cognizant of the Gunpowder Plot, an event Oxford did not live to see.

  Oxfordians, of whom there remain many, argue that de Vere either must have left a stack of manuscripts, which were released at measured intervals under William Shakespeare’s name, or that the plays have been misdated and actually appeared before Oxford sputtered his last. As for any references within the plays that unquestionably postdate Oxford ’s demise, those were doubtless added later by other hands. They must have been, or else we would have to conclude that Oxford didn’t write the plays.

  Despite the manifest shortcomings of Looney’s book, in both argument and scholarship, it found a curious measure of support. The British Nobel laureate John Galsworthy praised it, as did Sigmund Freud (though Freud later came to have a private theory that Shakespeare was of French stock and was really named Jacques Pierre-an interesting but ultimately solitary delusion). In America a Professor L. P. Bénézet of Dartmouth College became a leading Oxfordian. He it was who propounded the theory that Shakespeare the actor was de Vere’s illegitimate son. Orson Welles became a fan of the notion, and later supporters include the actor Derek Jacobi.

  A third-and for a brief time comparatively popular-candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work. The idea is that Marlowe’s death was faked, and that he spent the next twenty years hidden away either in Kent or Italy, depending on which version you follow, but in either case under the protection of his patron and possible lover Thomas Walsingham, during which time he cranked out most of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

  The champion of this argument was a New York press agent named Calvin Hoffman, who in 1956 secured permission to open Walsingham’s tomb, hoping to find manuscripts and letters that would prove his case. In fact, he found nothing at all-not even Walsingham, who, it turns out, was buried elsewhere. Still, he got a best-selling book out of it, The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare,” which the Times Literary Supplement memorably dismissed as “a tissue of twaddle.” Much of Hoffman’s case had, it must be said, a kind of loopy charm. Among quite a lot else, he claimed that the “Mr W.H.” noted on the title page of the sonnets was “Mr Walsing-Ham.” Despite the manifest feebleness of Hoffman’s case, and the fact that its support has withered to almost nothing, in 2002 the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey took the extraordinary step of placing a question mark behind the year of Marlowe’s death on a new monument to him in Poets’ Corner.

  And still the list of alternative Shakespeares rolls on. Yet another candidate was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The proponents of this view-a small group, it must be said-maintain that this explains why the First Folio was dedicated to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery: They were her sons. The countess, it is also noted, had estates on the Avon and her private crest bore a swan-hence Ben Jonson’s reference to “sweet swan of Avon.” Mary Sidney certainly makes an appealing candidate. She was beautiful as well as learned and well connected: Her uncle was Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and her brother the poet and patron of poets Sir Philip Sidney. She spent much of her life around people of a literary bent, most notably Edmund Spenser, who dedicated one of his poems to her. All that is missing to connect her with Shakes
peare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

  Yet another theory holds that Shakespeare was too brilliant to be a single person, but was actually a syndicate of stellar talents, including nearly all of those mentioned already-Bacon, the Countess of Pembroke, and Sir Philip Sidney, plus Sir Walter Raleigh and some others. Unfortunately the theory not only lacks evidence but would involve a conspiracy of silence of improbable proportions.

  Finally, a word should be said for Dr. Arthur Titherley, a dean of science at the University of Liverpool, who devoted thirty years of spare-time research to determining (to virtually no one’s satisfaction but his own) that Shakespeare was William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby. All together, more than fifty candidates have been suggested as possible alternative Shakespeares.

  The one thing all the competing theories have in common is the conviction that William Shakespeare was in some way unsatisfactory as an author of brilliant plays. This is really quite odd. Shakespeare’s upbringing, as I hope this book has shown, was not backward or in any way conspicuously deprived. His father was the mayor of a consequential town. In any case, it would hardly be a unique achievement for someone brought up modestly to excel later in life. Shakespeare lacked a university education, to be sure, but then so did Ben Jonson-a far more intellectual playwright-and no one ever suggests that Jonson was a fraud.

  It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust,” which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper. Who was more likely to employ such terms-a courtier of privileged upbringing or someone who had grown up in the country? Similarly, when Falstaff notes that as a boy he was small enough to creep “into any alderman’s thumb-ring” we might reasonably wonder whether such a singular image was more likely to occur to an aristocrat or someone whose father actually was an alderman.

  In fact a Stratford boyhood lurks in all the texts. For a start Shakespeare knew animal hides and their uses inside and out. His work contains frequent knowing references to arcana of the tanning trade: skin bowgets, greasy fells, neat’s oil, and the like-matters of everyday conversation to leather workers, but hardly common currency among the well-to-do. He knew that lute strings were made of cowgut and bowstrings of horsehair. Would Oxford or any other candidate have been able, or likely, to turn such distinctions into poetry?

  Shakespeare was, it would seem, unashamedly a country boy, and nothing in his work suggests any desire, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, to “repudiate it or pass himself off as something other than he was.” Part of the reason Shakespeare was mocked by the likes of Robert Greene was that he never stopped using these provincialisms. They made him mirthful in their eyes.

  A curious quirk of Shakespeare’s is that he very seldom used the word also. It appears just thirty-six times in all his plays, nearly always in the mouths of comical characters whose pretentious utterings are designed to amuse. It was an odd prejudice and one not shared by any other writer of his age. Bacon sometimes used also as many times on a single page as Shakespeare did in the whole of his career. Just once in all his plays did Shakespeare use mought as an alternative to might. Others used it routinely. Generally he used hath, but about 20 percent of the time he used has. On the whole he wrote doth, but about one time in four he wrote dost and more rarely he favored the racily modern does. Overwhelmingly he used brethren, but just occasionally (about one time in eight) he used brothers.

  Such distinguishing habits constitute what is known as a person’s idiolect, and Shakespeare’s, as one would expect, is unlike any other person’s. It is not impossible that Oxford or Bacon might have employed such particular distinctions when writing under an assumed identity, but it is reasonable to wonder whether either would have felt such fastidious camouflage necessary.

  In short it is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so. These people must have been incredibly gifted-to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward. The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that is genius!

  If it was a conspiracy, it was a truly extraordinary one. It would have required the cooperation of Jonson, Heminges, and Condell and most or all of the other members of Shakespeare’s company, as well as an unknowable number of friends and family members. Ben Jonson kept the secret even in his private notebooks. “I remember,” he wrote there, “the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.” Rather a strange thing to say in a reminiscence written more than a dozen years after the subject’s death if he knew that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. It was in the same passage that he wrote, “For I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any.”

  And that’s just on Shakespeare’s side of the deception. No acquaintance of Oxford ’s or Marlowe’s or Bacon’s let slip either, as far as history can tell. One really must salute the ingenuity of the anti-Stratfordian enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history, without the benefit of anything that could reasonably be called evidence, four hundred years after it was perpetrated.

  When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man-whoever he was.

  Selected Bibliography

  THE FOLLOWING ARE THE principal books referred to in the text.

  Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek (two volumes). Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

  Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador, 1997.

  Bate, Jonathan and Jackson Russell (eds.). Shakespeare: An Illustrated, Stage History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language, (fifth edition). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

  Blayney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, D.C.: Folger Library Publications, 1991.

  Chute, Marchette. Shakespeare of London. New York: E. P. Dutton and, Company, 1949.

  Cook, Judith. Shakespeare’s Players. London: Harrap, 1983.

  Crystal, David. The Stories of English. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2004.

  Durning-Lawrence, Sir Edwin. Bacon Is Shakespeare. London: Gay & Hancock, 1910.

  Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became, Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004.

  Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1987.

  Habicht, Werner, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle. Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare, Association. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1986.

  Hanson, Neil. The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the, Spanish Armada. London: Doubleday, 2003.

  Inwood, Stephen. A History of
London. London: Macmillan, 1998.

  Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language (ninth edition). Garden City, N.Y.: 1956.

  Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. London: Penguin, 2000.

  – -. The Age of Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

  Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953.

  Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies. London: Methuen and Co., 1957.

  Mulryne, J. R., and Margaret Shewring (eds.). Shakepeare’s Globe Rebuilt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  Picard, Liza. Shakespeare’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. London: Orion Books, 2003.

  Piper, David. O Sweet Mr. Shakespeare I’ll Have His Picture: The Changing, Image of Shakespeare’s Person, 1600-1800. London: National Portrait, Gallery, 1964.

  Rosenbaum, Ron. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups. New York: Random House, 2006.

  Rowse, A. L. Shakespeare’s Southampton: Patron of Virginia. London: Macmillan, 1965.

  Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  – -. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

  Spevack, Marvin. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1973.

  Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.

  Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Thomas, David. Shakespeare in the Public Records. London: HMSO, 1985.