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Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James ShapiroThe Sunday Times review by John Carey
James Shapiro’s prize-winning book 1599 was a work of micro-history. It showed how the plays Shakespeare wrote that year reflected current political tensions, and how, as a working dramatist, he had to cope with day-to-day pressures, from quarrels among his fellow actors to struggles with the first draft of Hamlet. This new book seems wildly different, but, like 1599, it is a search for historical causes. It tells the story of the generations of sceptics who have denied, over the years, that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. Shapiro is clear that they are wrong, but he wants to know why they started going wrong when they did.
To answer that question he identifies a historic change in the way people thought about art and literature. For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, he points out, nobody doubted that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Doubts started because a powerful new idea took hold in the early 19th century, which was that artworks are expressions of their creator’s inner self, and should be interpreted as spiritual autobiography. This change was part of the tectonic shift that we call Romanticism, and it affected Shakespeare because the few surviving documents relating to his life in Stratford did not suggest he was a spiritual sort of person at all. They showed that part of his income came from moneylending, and that he took neighbours to court when they failed to pay their debts. Could the lofty poet and the hard-nosed businessman be one and the same?
Nowadays we easily accept that possibility, because innumerable biographies of writers and artists have cured us of expecting their lives to match their ideals. But the Romantic age was less cynical. Besides, as Shapiro notes, doubts about authorship were in the air. A German scholar had put paid to the notion that a bard called Homer wrote the Homeric epics. Another German scholar had demonstrated that the biblical gospels were second-hand and anecdotal, not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life. In this atmosphere it was only a matter of time before someone suggested the man from Stratford and the playwright were different people.
An American woman, Delia Bacon, lit the fuse. Born in a frontier log cabin in 1811, she was the daughter of a visionary Congregationalist minister and became a schoolteacher and lecturer. Her studies convinced her that Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays attributed to him, since he was a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor”, whereas the plays manifested “the last refinements of the highest Parisian breeding”. Why she chose Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman and prophet of the scientific revolution, as the real author is a mystery. Nothing in his acknowledged works suggests that he could or would have written plays and poems, and Delia did not, it seems, select him because she believed he was her ancestor, as some have alleged. Her key insight was that Bacon was secretly an ardent republican who hated the despotism of Elizabeth and James I. Obviously it would have been dangerous for him to express these views openly, so instead he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, which are, properly understood, republican manifestos.
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Delia died in a lunatic asylum in 1859, two years after publishing these findings. But numerous disciples took up the Baconian cause, generating a vast agglomeration of books and articles. Francis Bacon’s known interest in ciphers encouraged research into cryptograms in the plays, and this yielded rich results. Orville Ward Owen, a Detroit doctor, built a decoding machine incorporating a 1,000ft-long canvas belt on which the pages of all Bacon’s works were pasted. When the drums of the machine revolved, they revealed that Bacon was not merely the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, and the rightful heir to the English throne. The tragedy of Hamlet expressed his annoyance at being debarred from his birthright. Owen’s machine also told him the manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays, in Bacon’s handwriting, would be found in waterproof lead containers in the river Severn.
The zeal of the American Baconians, and Owen’s unsuccessful dredging of the Severn, attracted some ridicule, and several new claimants entered the field, including Christopher Marlowe and the Earls of Rutland and Derby. Mercifully Shapiro skates over these, concentrating on the most popular alternative Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As with Bacon, there was no evidence of any kind to connect him with Shakespeare’s plays, and as he had died in 1604, before many of the plays were written, establishing his authorship presented problems. However, his proponents argued that he knew about falconry, foreign travel and other aristocratic pursuits touched on in the plays, which a Stratford yokel would have been ignorant of. He also had three daughters, like King Lear, and his wife was the same age at marriage as Juliet when she married Romeo. These proofs were first advanced by the unfortunately named JT Looney, a South Shields schoolmaster, who launched Oxford’s claim in a book published in 1920.
Looney’s reading of the plays was exactly the opposite of Bacon’s. For her they were republican, but for Looney they championed despotic feudalism, as he did himself. He made many converts, including Sigmund Freud, who, on learning that Oxford’s mother had remarried after his father’s death, confidently identified him as the author of Hamlet and a gratifyingly exact illustration of the Oedipus complex. The Shakespeare Fellowship, founded in 1922, devoted itself to promoting Oxford’s case, and its members were soon making discoveries. Oxford, they were able to announce, had written not only Shakespeare’s plays, but also the works of Marlowe, Kyd and Edmund Spenser. He had been Queen Elizabeth’s lover, and their union had produced the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Mary Sidney and Robert Cecil. Some Oxonians held that Oxford was Elizabeth’s son as well as her lover. She had given birth to him after an affair with Thomas Seymour when she was 14. In 1946, anxious to get at the truth, Percy Allen, president of the Shakespeare Fellowship, contacted a medium and was able to hold lengthy consultations with the spirits of Shakespeare, Bacon and Oxford. They confirmed everything the Oxonians believed.
Recruitment to the Oxonian cause dwindled during the 20th century, but, Shapiro reports, it has undergone a miraculous recovery in recent years. Oxonians are at large and vociferous once more. They hold international conferences, their views are published in The New York Times, and prominent figures of the British stage, including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, have signed an Oxonian declaration questioning Shakespeare’s identity. Shapiro plausibly attributes these developments to the growing attraction of conspiracy theories. The Baconian and Oxonian allegations, if true, would have entailed a huge cover-up, and modern willingness to believe that it really happened is cognate with the belief that Princess Di was murdered or that the moon landings were fake. They all stem from the conviction that governments are corrupt and secretive and that we are kept from the truth. Conspiracy theorists are prone to resist rational argument, regarding it as a tool of the authority that they distrust. So Shapiro’s book is unlikely to cut much ice with Oxonians. All the same, it deserves to. It is authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespeare is masterly.
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Faber £20 pp360
James Shapiro’s prize-winning book 1599 was a work of micro-history. It showed how the plays Shakespeare wrote that year reflected current political tensions, and how, as a working dramatist, he had to cope with day-to-day pressures, from quarrels among his fellow actors to struggles with the first draft of Hamlet. This new book seems wildly different, but, like 1599, it is a search for historical causes. It tells the story of the generations of sceptics who have denied, over the years, that Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name. Shapiro is clear that they are wrong, but he wants to know why they started going wrong when they did.
To answer that question he identifies a historic change in the way people thought about art and literature. For two centuries after Shakespeare’s death, he points out, nobody doubted that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Doubts started because a powerful new idea took hold in the early 19th century, which was that artworks are expressions of their creator’s inner self, and should be interpreted as spiritual autobiography. This change was part of the tectonic shift that we call Romanticism, and it affected Shakespeare because the few surviving documents relating to his life in Stratford did not suggest he was a spiritual sort of person at all. They showed that part of his income came from moneylending, and that he took neighbours to court when they failed to pay their debts. Could the lofty poet and the hard-nosed businessman be one and the same?
Nowadays we easily accept that possibility, because innumerable biographies of writers and artists have cured us of expecting their lives to match their ideals. But the Romantic age was less cynical. Besides, as Shapiro notes, doubts about authorship were in the air. A German scholar had put paid to the notion that a bard called Homer wrote the Homeric epics. Another German scholar had demonstrated that the biblical gospels were second-hand and anecdotal, not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life. In this atmosphere it was only a matter of time before someone suggested the man from Stratford and the playwright were different people.
An American woman, Delia Bacon, lit the fuse. Born in a frontier log cabin in 1811, she was the daughter of a visionary Congregationalist minister and became a schoolteacher and lecturer. Her studies convinced her that Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays attributed to him, since he was a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor”, whereas the plays manifested “the last refinements of the highest Parisian breeding”. Why she chose Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman and prophet of the scientific revolution, as the real author is a mystery. Nothing in his acknowledged works suggests that he could or would have written plays and poems, and Delia did not, it seems, select him because she believed he was her ancestor, as some have alleged. Her key insight was that Bacon was secretly an ardent republican who hated the despotism of Elizabeth and James I. Obviously it would have been dangerous for him to express these views openly, so instead he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, which are, properly understood, republican manifestos.
Related Internet Links
Buy the book here
Delia died in a lunatic asylum in 1859, two years after publishing these findings. But numerous disciples took up the Baconian cause, generating a vast agglomeration of books and articles. Francis Bacon’s known interest in ciphers encouraged research into cryptograms in the plays, and this yielded rich results. Orville Ward Owen, a Detroit doctor, built a decoding machine incorporating a 1,000ft-long canvas belt on which the pages of all Bacon’s works were pasted. When the drums of the machine revolved, they revealed that Bacon was not merely the author of Shakespeare’s plays, but the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, and the rightful heir to the English throne. The tragedy of Hamlet expressed his annoyance at being debarred from his birthright. Owen’s machine also told him the manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays, in Bacon’s handwriting, would be found in waterproof lead containers in the river Severn.
The zeal of the American Baconians, and Owen’s unsuccessful dredging of the Severn, attracted some ridicule, and several new claimants entered the field, including Christopher Marlowe and the Earls of Rutland and Derby. Mercifully Shapiro skates over these, concentrating on the most popular alternative Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As with Bacon, there was no evidence of any kind to connect him with Shakespeare’s plays, and as he had died in 1604, before many of the plays were written, establishing his authorship presented problems. However, his proponents argued that he knew about falconry, foreign travel and other aristocratic pursuits touched on in the plays, which a Stratford yokel would have been ignorant of. He also had three daughters, like King Lear, and his wife was the same age at marriage as Juliet when she married Romeo. These proofs were first advanced by the unfortunately named JT Looney, a South Shields schoolmaster, who launched Oxford’s claim in a book published in 1920.
Looney’s reading of the plays was exactly the opposite of Bacon’s. For her they were republican, but for Looney they championed despotic feudalism, as he did himself. He made many converts, including Sigmund Freud, who, on learning that Oxford’s mother had remarried after his father’s death, confidently identified him as the author of Hamlet and a gratifyingly exact illustration of the Oedipus complex. The Shakespeare Fellowship, founded in 1922, devoted itself to promoting Oxford’s case, and its members were soon making discoveries. Oxford, they were able to announce, had written not only Shakespeare’s plays, but also the works of Marlowe, Kyd and Edmund Spenser. He had been Queen Elizabeth’s lover, and their union had produced the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Mary Sidney and Robert Cecil. Some Oxonians held that Oxford was Elizabeth’s son as well as her lover. She had given birth to him after an affair with Thomas Seymour when she was 14. In 1946, anxious to get at the truth, Percy Allen, president of the Shakespeare Fellowship, contacted a medium and was able to hold lengthy consultations with the spirits of Shakespeare, Bacon and Oxford. They confirmed everything the Oxonians believed.
Recruitment to the Oxonian cause dwindled during the 20th century, but, Shapiro reports, it has undergone a miraculous recovery in recent years. Oxonians are at large and vociferous once more. They hold international conferences, their views are published in The New York Times, and prominent figures of the British stage, including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, have signed an Oxonian declaration questioning Shakespeare’s identity. Shapiro plausibly attributes these developments to the growing attraction of conspiracy theories. The Baconian and Oxonian allegations, if true, would have entailed a huge cover-up, and modern willingness to believe that it really happened is cognate with the belief that Princess Di was murdered or that the moon landings were fake. They all stem from the conviction that governments are corrupt and secretive and that we are kept from the truth. Conspiracy theorists are prone to resist rational argument, regarding it as a tool of the authority that they distrust. So Shapiro’s book is unlikely to cut much ice with Oxonians. All the same, it deserves to. It is authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespeare is masterly.
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Faber £20 pp360
