Much has been written about Shakespeare’s so-called authorship controversy, however, celebrated Shakespearean scholars unanimously agree that Shakespeare’s works were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. This blogpost highlights some key historical records, Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ views, and the origins of this controversy in order to provide an insight to readers outside the realm of academia, who may be unfamiliar with intricate details.
Historical Records
First of all, no one
‘in Shakespeare’s lifetime or for the first two hundred years after his death
expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship’.[i]
It is very interesting that Shakespeare’s closest associates, friends, critics
and contemporaries, who knew him, who witnessed his work and who collaborated with
him, acknowledged him as the greatest playwright, either by offering their
eulogies or by vehement criticism. However, those who doubted his authorship,
two centuries later, had notoriously thin documentation to support their claims.
Their claims also disregard the validity of the immediate witnesses’ testimony.
When the motives behind such claims are examined, it becomes clear why such
claims gain popularity.
Secondly, ‘it is well
known that Queen Elizabeth was a great admirer of the immortal Shakespeare’[ii]
who wrote and performed in front of her and on her demand at times. When Earl
of Essex tried to raise a rebellion to overthrow the Queen, he paid huge amount
of money to Shakespeare’s company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to stage Richard
II to ignite Londoners’ sentiments against Elizabeth. The Queen reportedly
said to William Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’[iii]
Following Essex’s unsuccessful attempt, Shakespeare’s company was questioned by
the government agents, however, they claimed ignorance of Essex’s intentions
and maintained that they were motivated by financial gains in staging the play.
Essex was executed and ‘on the very eve of Essex’s execution, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men were back performing a play before the queen and the court at
Whitehall.’[iv]
Elizabeth, who was obsessed with state security and she spent ‘£12,000 a year—a
fabulous sum—spying on its own citizens’, could not have been ignorant of
Shakespeare’s identity as a writer and player.[v]
She would have invited someone else to perform before her if she had any doubts
about him.
Thirdly, historical
records show that in the Masters of the Revels account of 1604-5, which is the
record of the plays performed before King James I, ‘Shakespeare is named seven
times as the author of plays performed before James I’.[vi]
Moreover, according to Bryson, ‘Shakespeare’s company performed 187 times
before the King, more than all other acting troupes put together’.[vii]
King James became the patron of Shakespeare’s company, which then became The
King’s Men. These privileges could not have been showered on Shakespeare and
his company if the King believed that Shakespeare was not the author and
player.
Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
About Shakespeare
As mentioned earlier, the
most credible testimonies about Shakespeare’s authorship come from his
contemporaries. It is illogical and unscientific to reject these immediate
validations which stood their ground for more than two hundred years and accept
fraudulent William Henry Ireland and mentally unstable Delia Bacon’s claims
regarding Shakespeare’s authorship.
Ben Jonson, in his poem
To the Memory of My
Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, prefacing the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s
works exclaims: ‘He was not
of an age, but for all time!’[viii]
Jonson does not seem to entertain any doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship and
ironically, uses the word ‘Author’ as if foreseeing the controversy to come. Why
did Jonson not bestow such praise on his other friends? Why did he not say this
for Marlowe? Why only Shakespeare? Why would he say so if he knew that Shakespeare
was not a writer? An interesting fact: Jonson, a bricklayer once who never
attended a university and never completed his schooling, does not have a Jonson
authorship question, but Shakespeare does. Other prefatory poems in the same 1623
Folio also establish Shakespeare as an author and poet. Hugh Holland pays
tribute to Shakespeare by recognising him a ‘Famous…poet, master’, and Leonard
Digges testifies that he was an ‘authour’ and ‘Maister’.[ix]
Secondly, John Webster
(1578-1632), Shakespeare’s friend and contemporary and the writer of The
Duchess of Malfi, calls him the greatest playwright in the preface to The
White Devil. Most critics agree that Webster collaborated with Shakespeare.
How could Webster call him the greatest playwright if Shakespeare did not write
the plays? His testimony carries more weight than those claims which took birth
in the nineteenth century.
Thirdly, Francis Meres
(1566-1647), Shakespeare’s contemporary, in his book Palladis
Tamia Wits Treasury Being The Second Part Of Wits Common Wealth
(1598) lists more than a dozen of Shakespeare’s early plays and declares him ‘the most
excellent in both kinds [comedy and tragedy] for the stage’ while comparing him
with the Greek writers, who were widely respected as the torchbearers in the genre of play-writing.[x]
On the other hand, Robert
Greene, who was a snobbishly bitter critic of Shakespeare, indirectly declares
him the author of his works by calling him ‘Johannes Factotum [Jack of all
trades, universal genius, a Mr Do-it-all]’ and an ‘upstart crow’ in his
pamphlet Groat-worth of Wit (1592), a work that is only
known for attacking Shakespeare.[xi]
He hated Shakespeare because, in his own words, ‘Shakespeare had put the
scholar playwrights out of business’.[xii]
Although out of his professional jealousy, he criticises Shakespeare, he still recognises
that he put them out of business because of his playwriting prowess. Only a
playwright, not a merchant in wool or timber, could have put the scholarly
playwrights out of business. Greene could have said that the Bard did not write
anything at all out of his hatred, but he was jealous not a liar. These are
only a few testimonies straight from the horse’s mouth to determine
Shakespeare’s authorship.
University Wits Myth Debunked
There is another claim
made by Anti-Stratfordian school of thought that the plays could not have been
written by a countryman like Shakespeare, not educated enough to write such
glorious works. In order to write such wonderful works, as they claim, one
needs university education because his works cover a plethora of ideas, topics,
themes, that a countryman could not handle. Such a claim has no firm ground to
stand on. The Anti-Stratfordians imply that someone from the university wits, a
group of playwrights and pamphleteers who studied at Oxford and Cambridge
universities, might have written these plays. If university education was the
only criteria to be a successful writer like Shakespeare, then why were the
university wits not as successful as Shakespeare? They should have been more
popular, and their works should have been more wonderful than Shakespeare’s. Outside
the literary circle, very few people can tell the names of the so-called
university wits; almost none can tell who studied at which university without
searching it online, and what are the titles of some of their works. Marlowe
could be an exception, but Marlowe was a ‘forced’ university graduate which
will be discussed shortly. On the other hand, Shakespeare is well known not
only in literary circles but almost in every circle of life. Scholars as well
as common people can name his works, his characters and remember some of his
lines from his works.
Let us look at some of
the university wits and see what their accomplishments in the realm of
literature are, without any intention of undermining their works and writing talents.
They produced some great work, but not comparable in greatness to Shakespeare’s
work. Here the yardstick is Shakespeare’s work against which they are judged.
Robert Greene, a Cambridge graduate, is mostly known for calling Shakespeare’s
an ‘upstart crow’. The statue of his reputation stands on Shakespearean
pedestal. His prose romance Pandosto was unknown. Shakespeare reworked
it and turned it into The Winter’s Tale, thus giving it an eternal life.
A countryman turning the lost, unknown work of a university genius into a
masterpiece! Greene was right when he said that Shakespeare had put them out of
business.
Next is Marlowe who
stayed at Cambridge for some six years and at the end was refused an MA degree
because he did not attend his course. He was a British spy and spent most of
his time on espionage missions. ‘The Privy Council of England wrote (to the
university) to say that he had done Her Majesty good service and deserved to be
rewarded for his faithful dealings. So, he got his M.A.’[xiii]
In this way, he got his MA owing to the special efforts of his spy master and
homosexual-lover, Sir
Francis Walsingham. Therefore, he should not even be considered as a
university graduate if the Privy Council forced the university to confer
degrees upon him, and he, like Shakespeare, should also be vulnerable to
authorship controversy. But no one doubts that Marlowe’s works were written by
Marlowe himself. Secondly, how could he write The Jew of Malta,
Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus without having a university education
if that is the argument brought forward to dismiss Shakespeare’s authorship?
Apart from Marlowe and
Greene, other university wits, for example, Thomas Nashe (Cambridge), Thomas
Lodge and George Peele (Oxford) and Thomas Kyd, who was not university trained,
were not as successful in their literary careers as Shakespeare was. All of the
university wits died penniless. On the other hand, it is an established fact
that Shakespeare was a successful writer and entrepreneur who bought the
biggest house in Stratford owing to his enormous success. If university
education were the sole criteria, the university wits would have been more
successful and financially more stable than Shakespeare.
To put things in
perspective for a better understanding, let us look at some examples of the
most successful people in history who did not attend a university to determine
whether anyone can achieve success without a university education or not.
Starting with towering literary figures, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells and Mark
Twain are known for the excellence of their works. All of them did not have a
university education. In many countries, their works are part of the curriculum
which speaks volumes about their unparallel brilliance.
Next, if we look at world
leaders, Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the USA was born
into utter poverty, self-educated himself and then rose to the highest position
in his country and became a source of inspiration for many in the field of
politics and leadership.
In business, Richard
Branson, British business magnate, the owner of more than four hundred
companies, did not have a university education, but his business acumen made
him a successful entrepreneur. Similarly, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are
not university graduates.
If we look at the
biographies of some of the most iconic scientists who are known for their extra
ordinary works, they did not even have a science degree, yet they achieved what
no one with a university degree has yet achieved. Leonardo Da Vinci, the
creator of Mona Lisa, was a scientist, theorist, sculptor, painter and
mathematician who did not have a science degree. Similarly, Michael Faraday and
Charles Darwin did not have a science degree. Thomas Edison, best known for
inventing the light bulb and as the greatest inventor of all time, did not have
a science degree. He has 1093 patents to his name, a feat which has not yet
been yet surpassed by any one, with or without a university degree.
These examples are the
tip of an iceberg, which shout at the top of their lungs that one does not need
a university education to be successful. Shakespeare’s case against this
backdrop, seems more plausible.
The Origins of the Authorship
Controversy
Before we dig into the origins
of the Anti-Stratfordian controversy, it should be noted that propaganda and
sensationalism spread very fast, particularly if they carry lucrative financial
incentives, which makes more sense in today’s world where things go ‘viral’.
These two diseases sell like hot cakes and turn people into millionaires. The
same thing happened to the authorship controversy.
Jonathan Bate in his
book The Genius of Shakespeare (1997) writes that in 1795, Samuel
Ireland, an English Author, and his son William Henry Ireland claimed that they
had original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays with his signatures. They
published the manuscripts in a four-hundred-page book which sold five hundred copies
of that pricey book within the first forty-eight hours.[xiv]
People started flooding to their residence to view those manuscripts. Later on,
Shakespeare’s scholar Edmond Malone examined those manuscripts and declared
them all fake and a gross act of forgery. This incident changed Shakespeare
into a sellable commodity, which saw the birth of Shakespeare industry that
gave people an idea that anything controversial about Shakespeare could be
extremely beneficial. The Ireland episode fermented the germs of the birth of
the authorship controversy.
Secondly, Delia Bacon,
an American who claimed to be Sir Francis Bacon’s descendent, wrote in her book
The Philosophy
of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857) that ‘ignorant,
low-bred, vulgar country fellow, who had never inhaled in all his life one
breath of that social atmosphere that fills his plays’ could not write those
wonderful works.[xv]
She implied that the works must have been written by an aristocrat, proposing Francis
Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spencer as potential candidates. However,
she wished that it were Francis Bacon more than anyone else. Her argument rests
on the theory that the works contain stories of the lives of the upper class,
forgetting about the fact that almost every playwright in Shakespeare’s time,
whose name has not been dragged into authorship controversy, wrote about
courts, royals and the upper class. Shakespeare’s works also contain stories of
the lower class and Ms Bacon miserably failed to address how an aristocrat
could accurately depict the lower class, their lives, and their language if he did
not ever inhale one breath of that social atmosphere. Anyhow, such limbless and
truncated arguments are part and parcel of all those claims related to the authorship
controversy.
The controversy gained
further momentum when in 1853 she raised funds, thanks for her sensationalist sympathisers
in America, for a visit to England where she spent three years writing her
controversial book. In 1856, she decided to spend a night in Holy Trinity
Church with a lantern and tools, planning to dig Shakespeare’s grave in the
hope of finding some manuscripts or any other proof to confirm her theory. As
she was not feeling well, she could not materialise the idea. Stanley Wells writes
that Delia Bacon believed that she was not Delia Bacon but ‘the Holy Ghost and
surrounded by devils’, which reflects her mental instability.[xvi]
She died of insanity in an asylum in 1859. Her death gave birth to an English
Bacon Society who believed that it was Francis Bacon who wrote Shakespeare’s
works.
Conclusion
As of now, the most
influential Shakespeare scholars, for examples, Sir Stanley Wells, Sir Jonathan
Bate, Helen Hackett, Bill Bryson, James Shapiro, Emrys Jones, Lynn Enterline
and Ivor Brown strongly believe that it was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon
who wrote his works. Regarding the authorship controversy, Bate says:
The desire to kill off William
of Stratford is only a mark of the power of William of Stratford. It follows
that, paradoxical as it may seem, in order to have the genius of Shakespeare,
we also have to have the Authorship Controversy.[xvii]
[i] Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare
(London: Picador, 1997), p. 181.
[ii] Waugaman, Richard M., ‘The Psychology of Shakespearean
Biography’, Brief Chronicles: The Interdisciplinary Journal of
Authorship Studies, 1, (2009), 29-39, (p. 37).
[iii] Bate, Jonathan, Soul of the Age: The Life,
Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Viking, 2008), p. 281.
[iv] Bate, Jonathan, Soul of the Age: The Life,
Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Viking, 2008), p. 281.
[v] Bryson, Bill, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage,
(London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 90.
[vii] Bryson, Bill, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage,
(London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p. 132.
[viii] Shakespeare, William, Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the True Originall Copies
(London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), p. A4v.
[ix] Shakespeare, William, Mr. William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to the True Originall Copies
(London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), pp. A5r, A6r.
[x] Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia Wits
Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth (London, Printed
by P. Short, 1598), p. 281.
[xi] Wood, Michael, In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC, 2003), p.144; Vickers,
Brian, '"Upstart Crow?" The Myth of Shakespeare’s Plagiarism', The
Review of English Studies 68.284 (2017), 244-67 (p.249).
[xiii] Brown, Ivor, Shakespeare in His Time (London: Nelson, 1960), p. 172.
[xiv] Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of
Shakespeare (London: Picador,
1997), pp. 83-86.
[xv] Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare for All
Time (London: Macmillan, 2002), pp. 314-315.
[xvii] Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), p. 97.
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