Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

Comments

  1. Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge?

    Yes.

    As for the supposed cult of the amateur, is it possible that a man who hasn’t had a job in years, lacks any academic appointment and lives with his mother is one of the best living mathematicians? Grisha Perelman makes me think the answer here also is yes.

    Proxies for expertise, like those we find lacking in both Shakespeare and Perelman, remain that: proxies. The absence of proxies never conclusively demonstrates anything. In real life, we rely on them. No need to identify the exception. As a result, intuition starts to believe that their absence demonstrates more than it should.

  2. Connecticut Mike

    Keith, how does it work out that you’ve only read three Shakespeare works? I’m a little surprised you didn’t have to read more of it in school or somewhere along the line.

  3. I only took one literature class after high school, and that was on comic novels. We read one Shakespeare play in grades 9-11; King Lear was on the AP Lit reading list but we never got to it, and that was it. I don’t like reading plays on their own, in general, so I’ve never been driven to pick any of his up. I’ll watch any good adaptation, though, since I do like his works.

  4. …or perhaps Einstein being a simple Venetian patent clerk?….or perhaps Dickens much-to-be-desired and sporadic education?

  5. Keith, you should read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Shakespeare if you’re further interested in the topic (and the man). It’s interesting that Ackroyd managed to write a 500-page biography on a man who left little to no historical footprint, but regardless, he writes very in-depth about Shakespeare and his contemporaries and puts everything about the era into context. He more or less laughs off the authorship issue, but you’ll understand why after the insane amount of details he puts into the book.

  6. Keith – is there any mention of the militant Baconians so often encountered by Thursday Next?

  7. No … but Cardenio comes up a few times, including as one of the plays on which Shakespeare worked with a partner.

  8. I find it interesting that the Shakespeare authorship question seems to appeal to US Supreme Court Justices, in particular.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB123998633934729551.html

    Between cases, members of the high court have been debating the question for decades. In a bizarre twist, outspoken Oxfordian Justice Harry Blackmun, was succeeded by Stephen Breyer, a Stratfordian.

  9. http://iwl.me/

    I discovered that site and have been messing around with it using my own writings. I wanted to know how consistent and accurate it was. So, I started putting in your pieces since I’ve been reading your stuff for a while. Your name didn’t come up in any of the five pieces, yes I know SSS, but I assume that it’s because you aren’t in the database. That being said, four of the five articles I put in spewed out H.P. Lovecraft as the author you write like. So, there you go. The other one was Cory Doctorow. I don’t have the slightest idea who that is other than that he’s a blogger thanks to Google.

  10. I’ve read in a few places that Lovecraft is the most frequent answer. I have never read any of his stuff so I have no idea if there’s any similarity, but if so it would be coincidental.

    I find it disturbing that so many of our SCOTUS justices are party to such crackpot theories.

  11. Anyone who’s read Bacon’s short story ‘New Atlantis’ should be assured that he was not Shakespeare. 😉

  12. bill bryson’s bio, “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” is a rather good read also. always like bryson’s books and this one didn’t disappoint.