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ROBERT B. REICH: CLINTON'S WAY WITH THE POOR

HARPER'S MAGAZI E/ APRIL 1999

THE OF SHAKESPEARE Who, in Fact, Was the Bard? Marjorie Garber ]onathan Bate Richard Whalen Tom Bethell Gail Kern Paster Irvin Matus Daniel Wright ------+ ------LISTENING FOR SILENCE Notes on the Aural Life By Mark Slouka THE GREEN MACHINE Is Monsanto Sowing the Seeds of Change, or Destruction? By Jennifer Kahn 04) c E Also: Lehman, Charles Baxter, and Ted Nugent '" ~ ~------+ ------309957 5 ~ F 0 L 0

THE 'GHOST OF S HA'KE SPEARE

Who, infact, seas the bard: the usual suspectfrom Stratford, orEdward devere, 17thEarl of Oxford?

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DRAMATIS PERSONAE

FOR OXFORD FOR SHAKESPEARE

TOM BETHELL is the Washington G~IL KERN PASTER is Professor of correspondent of the American Spec- English at George Washington Uni- tator and the author.of The Noblest versityand editor of The Shakespeare Triumph: Property and Prosperity Quarterly. She is the author of The Through the Ages. Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem DANIEL WRIGHT is Professor of . English at Concordia University in Portland, Oreg. He is the director of the annual MARJORIE GARBER is William R. Kenan, Jr. Edward de Vere Studies Conference, a trustee Professorof English at and di- of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, and Co- rector of the Center for Literary and Cultural Patron, with Sir , of the De Vere Studies, She is the author of numerous books, in- Society of Great Britain. cluding Shakespeare's Ghost and, most re- cently, Symptoms of Culture. MARK K. ANDERSON is a living in Northampton, Mass.·His book with the de Vere IRVIN MATUS is an independent schol~r and Bible scholar , Prospero's Bible: the author of Shakespeare, in Fact. The Secret History and Spiritual Biography of the Man who was "Shake-speare," is currently in HAROLD BLOOM is of preparation. at and Berg Professor of English at . JOSEPH SOBRAN isa syndicated columnist and He is the author of more than twenty books, a contributor to several national publications. including The and, most recent- He is the author of Alias Shakespeare. ly, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

RICHARD F. WHALEN is a writer, lecturer, and is King Alfred Professor of former president of the Shakespeare Oxford English at the University of Liverpool. He is the Society. He is the author of Shakespeare: Who author of The Genius of Shakespeare and editor of Was He! the new Arden edition of .

FOLIO 35 I. LIFE * * ** ** * ** *** ** * * *** * ** ***** * ** ** * ** *** * * ** 1. out success, speculating that he may be "dead, departed, and gone out of the said ward." One A NEVER WRITER William Wayte, evidently threatened by our Will, "craves sureties of the peace against William Shakspere," whereupon the Sheriff of By To m Bet hell Surrey was ordered to arrest him. The next year Will bought in Stratford. Toward the end of his stay in London, we know that he . ·he docu.mentary record o£.William was renting a room in Cripplegate, a meager Shakspere of Stratford consists of item that was discovered by Charles Wallace U little more than a few court in 1909 and was later hailed by biographer records, one important book, the First of S. Schoenbaum as "the Shakespearean discovery 1623, and a bust in Stratford's Holy Trinity of the century." But Wallace was "disappointed," Church. The evidence does not establish that and reasonably so, as he saw that the Crip- he was' the authoi of anything, let al~ne the plegate lodger did nothing to strengthen the erudite works of "Shakespeare." We are left in Stratford case. In fact, all research in the last 200 all honesty wondering whether he could write years has tended to reduce the older literary his own name. The great problem with the anecdotes to mythical status and to expose mod- conventional biography is that it conflates em-day readers to this stark contradiction: the what we know about the man from Stratford author of Wasa litigious businessman. (1564-1616) and the author of the works. The indications are. that Shakspere left Whether they are one and the same person is London in 1604, at the age of forty. He must the very point at issue. The have been the only great former I shall' call Shak- writer in history to "retire" spere, as his name was usu- so young and in the midst ally spelled, especially in of such triumph. He shows Stratford, and Shakespeare up almost immediately in will be reserved for the Stratford, suing a neighbor author, whoever he was. for a malt debt of 35 Thick biographies of the shillings-e-this soon after bard are written-but mostly the publication of . in the conditional. (Shake- J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, the speare would have ... must nineteenth-century schol- have could hardly have ar, admitted that this was avoided ) In them, an uneasy, composite pic- "one of the most curious documents connected ture emerges, combining the taciturn Stratford with Shakespeare's personal history known to grain-hoarder and the eloquent poet. We have no exist." At the height of his powers, we are led to letter or manuscripts in Shakspere's hand, though' suppose, England's greatest writer threw down we do have six signatures, quavering and ill-writ- his pen, perhaps in mid-play, and headed back to ten, on legal documents. (One imagines a , preferring the milieu of Stratford's helpfully at his elbow: "Keep gain', Will, now an small-claims court and its conveyance office to S. That's good .... ") In Stratford, we have records literary London. A trader like his father, he of baptism, marriage, lawsuits, death, and taxes. engaged in several more property deals. Not one gives us a reason to think that Shakspere In his win he attends to the disposition of was an author. We don't know that he went to bowls, even his own clothes, and, notoriously, school, though he may have attended Stratford his second-best bed. He makes no mention of Grammar. His daughter Judith signed her name any literary remains. At that time, half of with an X. So did Anne Hathaway, his wife. Shakespeare's plays had not been published Shakspere did go to London, and in one .anywhere. The contrast between the life'of the account he first found work minding the horses Stratford trader and the exalted verse reaches of theatergoers. Certainly he became an actor, as the level of absurdity.. did his young brother Edmund. Will joined the We must seek ~ome explanation of these Chamberlain's Men and was paid for Christmas problems beyond "genius," the Stratfordians' performances at court in 1594. The London tax one-word reply to all difficulties. Genius does collectors sought him twicein the , with- not convey knowledge. Yet the author was sure-

36 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 1999 ly one of the best-educated men in England. Ben performed at court. He leased the BlackfriarsThe- Jonson's jibe that Shakespeare had "small Latin atre. Lord Burghley complained of his "lewd and less Greek" cannot be taken at face value. friends." Oxford, we would say,was slumming. In When was published, its Italian source 1580,he had accusedthree courtiersof treason and had not been translated into English, nor had was in turn accused by one of them of "buggering the French source of Hamlet when that play first . a boy that ishis cook and many other boys."Three saw print (1603). The Latin source of Comedy of were named, including one whom Oxford had Errors was not yet translated when the play was brought back with him from Italy.It seems first performed. Love's Labour's Lost, a parody of that in court circles Oxford wasknown court manners dated by some scholars to the late as a pederast and was in disgrace on 1580s, contains allusions to the 1580 visit of that account. We read of his profli- Marguerite de Valois and Catherine de Medici gacy,his improvidence, his "decayed to the Court of Henry of Navarre at Nerac, the reputation." There are traces of ho- names of French courtiers remaining largely mosexuality in the Son- unchanged in the play. nets addressed to the In the nineteenth century, such considera- "fairyouth," and Ox- tions encouraged men of letters to believe that fordmayhave had a the real author had concealed his name. For homosexual affair many years the preferred candidate was Francis with the young Bacon, but that hypothesis was not fruitful and Earl of South- became encrusted with absurdities: ciphers, ampton, whom buried manuscripts, excavations by moonlight. he later urged By the twentieth century the authorship ques- to marry his tion had become a target of ridicule. Scholars daughter intoned, as though speaking to children: "Let's Elizabeth. 'just say Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare!" At an Venus unpropitious moment in 1920, an English and Adonis, schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney pub- Shakespeare's lished a book claiming that the real author ~as debut ("the Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. (Now first heir of my comes the Looney theory! Oh, what fun') invention"), was probably in- tended to glorify the young earl, to whom it was dedicated. If so, xford.(1550-1604) grew up as a ward "it was not enough to publish it in the household of Elizabeth's min- anonymously," Joseph Sobran Oister Lord Burghley. He married writes in Alias Shakespeare; "he Burghley's daughter; Anne, and they had three needed a blind to divert suspi- daughters. The oldest was engaged to Henry cion about his relations with the Wriothesley" the Jrd Earl of Southampton, to younger earl." In 1609, Shake- whom the long Shakespeare poems were dedi- speare's Sonnets were published cated. Two daughters were engaged and married, without the author's coopera- respectively, to the two dedicatees of the First tion, and in the same year the Folio, the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. cryptic preface to Troilus and Oxford's uncle, Henry Howard, introduced the Cressida (UA"Never Writer, to sonnet form into English; another uncle, Arthur an Ever Reader. News") hint- Golding, translated 's Metamorphoses, an ed that the manuscripts were held by important Shakespeare source. Macaulay wrote unnamed "grand possessors," no doubt Oxford's that Oxford "won for himself an honorable place son-in-law, the Earl of Montgomery, and his among the early masters of English ," and brother. These were the "incomparable pair of of all the courtier poets, Edmund Chambers wrote, brethren" of the Folio's dedication. "the most hopeful" was de Vere, but "he became mute in later life." Oxford travelecfto Italy in 1575. With stops in upreme Court Justice John Paul Paris and Strasbourg, he went to Padua, Genoa, . Stevens, an Oxfordian himself, has Venice, and Florence. Shakespeare's detailed Scommented that the advocates of knowledge of these parts has long mystified con- Oxford lack "a single, coherent theory of the ventional scholars. In his thirties, Oxford con- case." Such a theory might go like this. In writ- trolled the Earl of 's acting company and ing for publication, the public theater in partic- employed playwright .His company of ular, noblemen could not allow their names to be boy actors went on tour (to Stratford, once) and used. The Elizabethan author of The Art of English

Illustrations by Barry Blitt FGtIO 37 Poesie (probably GeorgePuttenham) knew "No- 11. blemen and Gentlemen of Her Majesty's own servants, who have written excellently well, as it THE SWEET SWAN would app~ar if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Ox- 13y Gail Kern Paster ford." Although they often wrote well, he added, they "suffered it to be published without their own names to it: as if it were a discredit for a ost Shakespeareans of my genera- gentleman to seem learned." In the book Palladis . tion have spent little time think- Tamia (1598), Francis Meres wrote that "thebest ing actively about William for comedy among us be Edward Earl of Oxford." Shakespeare'sm biography or trying to fit that life No plays with Oxford's name on them have into his works. Hypersensitive to the excesses of come down to us, but we are 'told that he was biographical critics of the past; we convince our writing them and that he withheld his name. If so, students that imagined glimpses into the interi- . why would the author go so far as to impute them or life of the poet are likely to be an exercise in to an actual person?The imputation ismade in the self-reflection. Today, preoccupation with prefatory material to the , and we should Shakespeare's life is mostly for others-those note that this is the only document that unam- for whom Shakespeare the man is the object of biguously unites Shakspere and Shakespeare. In cultlike devotion or equally cultlike denial. the Folio, refers to the author as And so although popular interest in the life of "Sweet Swan of Avon," and al- the National Poet may serve as a fir subject for ludesto "thy Stratford Moniment." There is indeed post-structuralist critique, the life itself remains a monument in the Stratford church, The refer- strongly off-limits to most scholars. The ences to "Shakespeare" in Jonson's private note- works-e-suitably renamed "the texts" or even book; the alleged allusion to him in Greene's sometimes "the scripts"--eommand the central Groatsworth of Wit, as well as the other scanty field of professional vision while responsibility references put forward by proponents of the stan- for what they contain devolves from the author dard view,do nothing to advance their case, They to his culture. can.easily be take~ as references to the pen name, For well-schooled professionals, then, the just as we usuallyrefer to and George authorship question ranks as invert- Orwell by their pseudonyms. ' ed, bardolatry for paranoids, with one object of By1623, if the foregoing is.correct, we may be false worship (Shakespeare) replaced by anoth- sure that Southampton, by then a powerful fig- er (Marlowe, Bacon, Edward de Vere). To ask ure, wanted no further reminders of his misspent· me about the authorship question, as I've youth with Oxford. Pembroke and Montgomery remarked on more than one occasion, is like must have felt the same way. All traces of asking a paleontologist to debate a creationist's .Southampton, and of Shakespeare's 'poems ei- account of the fossil record. But the authorship ther dedicated to him or associated with him, question does have the merit of returning the were removed from the Folio. For Strarfordians, scholarly mind, with sudden and surprising vio- the Folio (and everything else) istaken at face val- lence, to the real salience of biographical. inter- ue. Perhaps that is reasonable. For both sides pretation. For much worse than professional there's a.trade-otf, but Stratfordians must live-with disclaimers of interest in' Shakespeare's life is many baffling questions. Oxfordians, on the oth- the ugly social denial at the heart of the er hand, can answer these: Why wasthe author re- Oxfordian pursuit. To deny the life of William ferred to in the past tense two or three times af- Shakespeare its central accomplishment, to ter 1604?Why did he "retire" so young? Why did deny the man his standing as the necessary (if he employ a collaborator in his maturity? Why still not sufficient) cause of at least thirty-six were plays such as The London Prodigal (1605) plays, two long poems, and a substantial . and (1608) published with sequence of sonnets requires not only a massive his name on the title page-but only after 1604? conspiracy on the part of a generation of Why were the Sonnets published without his co- Elizabethan theater' professionals, courtiers, and operation in 1609? Why was he referred to 'as kings but a ferociously snobbish and ultimately "ever-living" if he were still alive?Why was there anachronistic celebration of birthright privi- no tribute in London when Shakspere died 'in lege. It is almost always the case that proposed 1616?Whydid the author say that his verse would authors of the plays are scions of famous fami- live on but that his name would be "buried," and lies, aristocrats. The anti-Stratford ian position also say,in Sonnet 76: "That every word doth al- is a summary judgment about the curse of most tell my name,/Showing their birth, and provincial origins and barbarian rusticity, one where they did proceed"? that radically underestimates the classical rigors

38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 1999 of Tudor public education and overestimates In assessing the importance of the Shake- the scope of aristocratic learning. It is perni- speares' acquisition of prominence and status in cious doctrine. ' Stratford, we would do well to remember that Shakespeare's biographers have always wres- for men in early modem England (a period com- tled with the famous gaps in the biographical prising roughly the years 1500-1700), personal record. Nothing I have to say here will make identity was construed primarily in and through those gaps disappear, though they are pre- one's place in the social order and selfconstructed dictable enough given Shakespeare's unexcep-' not from the inside out but from the outside in. tional middle-class origins and the fragility and Thatthe upwardly mobile paths of the Shake- obscurity of the public records in which his bio- speares make them look like free-wheeling mod- graphical traces have been found. We know lit- em individualists should not be misunderstood .• tle more about the lives of Shakespeare's the- In the plays, those who proclaim themselves rad- atrical peers, even those, such as 'Ben Jonson, ical individuals, self-begotten and self-made (Ia- who carefully controlled the terms of their pub- go, Edmund, Richard III) are the arch villains, lic self-presentation. We do know that the men who represent a modem and immoral sensibili- who inhabited the Elizabethan theater world ty that Shakespeare shows to be profoundly came from the middle ranks of Elizabethan life, destabilizing. Rightly to see William Shake- whether they were lucky enough, like the shoe- . speare in his social context is to render anachro- maker's son , to win a nistic any biographical understanding of him scholarship to Cambridge or to become classical grounded in narratives of autonomous self-cre- scholars on their own, as did Ben Jonson, the ation and romantic self-discovery. To put such stepson of a bricklayer. As S. Schoenbaum put narratives aside is the first step toward achiev- it in his definitive study, Shakespeare's Lives, ing an historical representation of Shake- "N 0formal life of Shakespeare laying claim to speare's life that might con- serious regard can limit itself to the facts and to ceivably match his own logical deductions from the facts alone." But self-portrait. the problem with the facts that we have, as the William's profes- editors of The Norton Shakespeare note in their sionalchoice itself prefatory account of the life, is "not that they is less than excep- are few but that they are a bit dull." . tional for several rea- Yet Shakespeare's defenders, as opposed to his biographers, have a narrower obligation to his- torical truth. All we need to prove is that such a man from Stratford could have written the plays, llre all know how much ity of puz- not that he did so. And for such a task, even the VV mytbus there is in the zles. Con- dullest biographical facts,aided by the unblinkered Shakspere .question as it ceiv'd out historical imagination, prove suggestive indeed. stands to-day.Beneath a few of the full- foundations of proved facts est heat 'and pulse of are certainly engulf'd far European feudalism-per, t is ;mportant for Shakespeare's defend- more dim and elusive ones, sonifying in' unparallel'd . of deepest importance- waysthe medieval aristocra- ers to emphasize the immense social tantalizing and half suspect- cy, its towering spirit of . distance traversed in only three gener- I ed-suggesting explanations ruthless and gigantic caste, ations of Shakespeares from Richard to John to that one dare not putin plain with its own peculiar air arid William. Arguably John played the pivotal role, statement. But coming at arrogance [no mere imita- making the great leap from his farmer father's once to the point, the tion]-only one of the utter obscurity in the Warwickshire hamlet of English historical plays are "wolfish earls" so plenteous Snitterfield to his own acquisition of a trade, to me not only the most emi- in the plays themselves, or possession of property, marriage to a well-born nent as dramatic perfor- some born descendant and woman, arid election to high civic office in mances [my maturest judg- knower,might seem to be Stratford-upon-Avon. These accomplishments, ment confirming the im- the true author of those pressions of my early years, amazing works-works in substantial but by no means unique in the that the. distinctiveness.and some respects greater than annals of early modem English social history, glory of the Poet reside not anything elsein recorded lit- made his sons eligible for grammar-school edu- in his vaunted dramas of the erature. • cation and brought the Shakespeare family to passions, but those founded the brink of gentry. status. His son William's on the contests of English -, prudent acquisition of property in Stratford and dynasties, and the French "WhatLurksBebind London, presumably so central to his motive in wars,] but form, as we get Shakspere's Historical 'Plays?" becoming an actor in the first place, would it all?the chiefin a complex- [1889] finally give the coat of arms he desired.

FOLIO 39 sons. One is the remarkably rich tradition of civic phleteer Robert Greene. Greene warns against theatricals throughout late medieval England, a this "upstart Crow, beautified with our feath- tradition that made the profession of public en- .ers, that with his tvger's heart wrapt in a play- tertainer widely available to men of Shakespeare's er's hyde, supposes he is well able to bombast class and gifts. Another is the rhetorical oppor- out a blank verse as well as the best of you: and tunities built into the Tudor grammar-school cur- ... is in his own conceit the onely Shake- riculum, which required boys in the several social scene in a countrey." The allusion is unmistak- ranks mingling there to learn Latin oratory as they ably to Shakespeare, not only as a player cos- read their Ovid and Cicero, their Virgil and. tumed in the words (the "feathers" )of writers Quintilian, To become an actor would not such as Greene but as an author presuming to have seemed to Shakespeare the first step write-"bombast out"-blank verse himself. toward becoming the National Poet, Shakespeare apparently taking offense, not even the National Playwright. Greene's friend Henry Chettle tried to make But granting in the young man from amends: "I am as sorry, as if the original fault Stratford a desire to perform and ac- had been my fault, because myself have seen cessto a traveling company ofplay- his demeanour no less civil than he excellent ers, imagining the rest is not dif- in the quality he professes." The quality being ficult. For a young man from professed was acting. the' provinces, performing Tribute paid to the plays comes in 1598 from plays held out the pragmat- Francis Meres, a minor figure on the London lit- ic attractions of the enter- erary scene fond of comparing living writers to .tainer's craft and perhaps the ancients. "The sweet, witty soul of Ovid even the allure of en- lived in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shake- trepreneurship: It could speare," writes Meres, mentioning the poems not have meant the ele- Venus and Adonis and as .vation of art. well as the Sonnets circulating privately in Shakespeare could rea- manuscript. Such evidence is sweet no less for sonably have anticipated biographers than it is for editors looking to date hiring on with an estab- the plays: "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted lished acting company the best for comedy and tragedy among the lucky eriough to receive Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the token protection of an the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; aristocratic patron. This is, for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, in fact, what happened. his Errours, his Love Labour's Lost, his Love What quickly evolved, Labour's Won, his Midsummer's Night Dream, thanks to the historical ac- and his Merchant of Venice; fot tragedy, his cident of great literary talent Richard the Seoond, Richard the Third, Hen- emerging in precisely the right ry the Fourth, , Titus Andronicus, conditions for it to flourish, was an and his ." That no one has arrangement unique in Eliza- successfully identified Love's Labour's Won does bethan theater. Shake- little to compromise the truthfulness of Meres's speare the player turned list. Nor should we accuse Meres here, as the playwright and shareholder, Oxfordians must, of special pleading on Shake- taking commissions from the speare's behalf, since Meres reserves much more company to. which he belonged notice in his Palladis Tamia for the, poet Dray- just as t~ey commissioned new plays ton and mentions many writers besides Shake- from many others. • speare, including Edward de Vere. One might. ask why Meres would do so if they were one and the same writer. he swiftness of actor Shakespeare's The testimony of Ben Jonson is more valuable ascent once in London is far more still, not only because it comes from Shakespeare's U remarkable than the historical cir- great rival and temperamental opposite but be- cumstances that brought him there during the cause-it occurs in personal notebooks not pub- late 1580s, the years when professional public lished until after Jonson's death. This is testimo- theater became established. Here the testimo- ny irrelevant to any conspiratorial intent. Jonson ny of others in and around the theater adds criticizes Shakespeare for writing with too great vivid personal detail to the documentary facility: "1remember, the players have often men- traces of the biographical record. By 1592 tioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his Shakespeare had already aroused the jealousy writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted of university-educated playwright and pam- out [a] line. My answer hath been, would he had

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 blotted a thousand." Jonson eulogizes his friend Avon. For Shakespeare, like most other play- as "indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; wrights in early modern England, immortality had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and would not have been conceivable as a function gentle expressions .... His wit was in his own either of print or of performance. Even the power; would the rule of it had been so too." The immortality imagined to be within the poet's point of citing such remarks is not that they have gift was mentioned only in sonnets never the self-evident ring of truth about Shakespeare's meant for the printed page. The recognition of habits of authorship or that they offer a reliable London's multitudes and the gratification of picture of the man. They are invaluable because playing before monarchs on command-how- they represent the common currency of everyday ever important they must have been to literary opinion, right or wrong, and can be yoked Shakespeare-would not have helped to only with violence to an absurd authorial con- secure gentleman status on the terms and in spiracy designed to protect the identity of the the place where it 'mattered most to a 'man plays' "real" author. from Stratford. For us to' comprehend the It does not dim the accomplishment of the nature of Shakespeare's professional desire as plays nor take away from our high regard for centered in the most prosaic-hence the most their author if we imagine that Shakespeare meaningful-forms of social recognition is to remained a provincial man of Stratford, true to comprehend something of the wide historical his origins, whose main purpose in undertak- gap that separates our supreme valuation of ing the business of writing plays was personal Shakespeare's plays from his own more practi- and familial advancement in Stratford-upon- cal and happy self-regard. II. MYSTERY * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *' * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1. merchant, baptized Gulielmus Shakspere, who apparently began life as a butcher's apprentice THE LIE WITH and later excelled in various business ventures but who otherwise lived a fairly nondescript life. . CIRCUMSTANCE Dr. Wilmot discovered, in short, a rather ordi- nary man who had no connection to the liter- ary.world and who, at the conclusion of a rela- By Vaniel Wright tively uneventful life, was buried without ceremony in a grave that failed even to identi- ' n the early 178,Os,the Reverend Dr. fy its occupant by name. Dr. Wilmot's findings , a friend of Dr. John- stunned him into dazed silence about the mat- I son's and the rector of a small parish ter, and he confided nothing of his discovery church near Stratford-upon-Avon in the coun- for years. He eventually confessed to a friend ty of Warwickshire, went searching for the lega- that despite his arduous labors in Warwickshire, cy of that literary prodigy, William Shake- he had unearthed nothing in his expeditions to speare-an artist whose poetry and drama were connect Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon to renowned but about whom very little was the works of the Elizabethan dramatic giant known. He searched for years in Shakespeare's whom Ben Jonson had apostrophized as the environs for information of any kind that might "Soule of the Age." illuminate this prominent man-arguably the Serious doubts about the authorship of the most celebrated resident in the history of the Shakespeare canon followed hard thereon-i- Cotswolds. For four years, Dr. Wilmot searched doubts that continue to bewilder and puzzle diligently for letters to or from the man; he readers. The past two centuries of quixotic sought records and anecdotes about his per- campaigns that so desperately have attempted sonal life in diaries and family histories; he to establish the man from Stratford as the au- combed the region for books and other arti- thor of the plays (or even to corroborate his rep- facts. To his consternation, he found absolute- utation as a writer!) are now leading many ly nothing that linked Tradition's candidate to scholars to conclude that these would-be dis- the Writing of those incomparable works that coverers of Shakespeare repeatedly fail-not had appeared in England two centuries earlier due to their lack of zeal or skill but because under the name of "William Shake-speare." they, like good Dr. Wilmot, are seeking a writer What Dr. Wilmot found, instead, was the where no writer (or, more accurately, another record of a simple, untutored wool and grain writer) exists.

FOLIO 41 Such skeptics of orthodox' claims about mutilated (as were John Stubbs, Alexander Shakespeare propose, therefore, that his po- Leighton, and William Prvnne): and some may ems and plays were not the throwaway work even have been assassinated (as was, perhaps, of an inexperienced and unpublished playwright I Christopher Marlowe). who as his first foray into poetic and dramatic Many playwrights, therefore, published composition produced the Shakespeare canon. anonymously, shielding themselves and their Instead, they argue, these works are the ma- families from persecution. In fact, as ture achievements of someone else-a worldly Princeton Professor Gerald E. Bentley attests, and urbane litterateur, a dexterous and experi- "the large majority of all English plays before enced writer endowed with broad linguistic the reign of Elizabeth are anonymous, and ability and an extraordinarily particularized even from 1558 to 1590 the authors of most knowledge of many arcane and specialized stud- plays are unknown." The unattributable ies, an erudite, well-traveled man of prior nature of these works bears directly on schol- achievement with something more than mon- ars' attempts to resolve the Shakespeare ey as a motive for his art who could not tell the authorship controversy, for the playwriting world his name. career of Shakespeare also was maintained in total secrecy. Even when the plays of Shakespeare were published, they were pub- f Oxford were this versatile and formi- lished without attribution: In fact, for seven. dable talent, why did he deny himself years after the Shakespeare plays began to be I acclaim and reputation? What possi- printed, they were published without any ble reasons could he have had to cloak himself name at all affixed to them. Not until the end in obscurity? These questions can be answered of the sixteenth century-well into the only by considering the conventions that gov- Shakespeare playwright's supposed career and erned writing and publication in Elizabethan bordering on his "retirement"-did any plays England. The invention of the printing press begin to appear in print under the riameof challenged absolutist regimes such as those of "William Shake-speare." Even then, several the Tudors. The ability to anonymously pub- of them (such as The London Prodigal and A lish pamphlets, books, plays, essays, tracts, and Yorkshire Tragedy) were clearly misidentified other texts limited the ability of authorities to by their publishers. Not even the publishers of silence individuals for disseminating allegedly his works knew who he was! seditious ideas.or unflattering satires. This rev- Moreover, if the writer behind the Shake- olutionary technology threatened to place speare pseudonym were Edwardde Vere,he would. writers beyond the effective control of the have been constrained, as the 17th Earl of Ox- state and led the English to establish civil and ford, by more than ordinary apprehensions about ecclesiastical licensing measures and censorial pubLishinghis poems and plays. Convention dis- offices to regulate and control the press with couraged many noblemen from identifying them- the goal of stifling the flow of unapproved selves with any works they composed. Some dis- ideas. Unlicensed presses were frequently dained publishing their work at all (a nobleman's . destroyed; pamphlets were seized; writers were proper weapons, and his reputation, were to be imprisoned; theaters were closed. won by swordand shield, not achieved by pen and For playwrights, the need to dissemble was es- ink). Accordingly, the works of several court pecially urgent, particularly as the public the- writers, such as Sir and the Earl of ater-already much mistrusted and often sup- Surrey,were published under their names-only af- pressed by authorities for its alleged traffic in ter they had died. If Oxford were Shakespeare, he corrupt material-was exiled in Shakespeare's would have been prompted to shield his name day to the darker districts of London (such as from discovery because court practice and prece- Southwark), where the theater's supposed vi- dent urged it. ciousness could be restricted to people who A writer for the public stage could ill afford commonly were regarded as derelicts and to be linked to the court. The plays might be scoundrels. Playwrights and their families were misinterpreted (or correctly interpreted!) as likely to be impugned by such bad association satirical commentary on the life, mores, and if they were discovered; some had reputations personages of the court, and no courtier, after to protect. Those who disdained anonymity, all, was more prominent than Oxford's own moreover, often faced frightful consequences father-in-law, the great Lord Treasurer, spy- for their daring. Many writers were hauled be- master, and chief counselor , fore the Privy Council for interrogation (as was William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to whom for his Philotas); others were Oxford was personally as well as politically imprisoned (as were George Chapman and Ben beholden (Burghley had been Oxford's Jonson for Eastward Ho); others were savagely guardian before he became his father-in-law).

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 By adopting the pseudonym William Shake- ticular, have required pseudonyms speare, Oxford would have provided himself, merely to get into print. Consider his family, and the crown with the means of MaryAnn Evans () and preventing the public from looking to the the Bronte sisters (who published court in search of the Shakespeare playwright. under the names of Currer, Ellis, and That the "secret" was something of an open Acton Bell). wrote one in certain literary circles seems confirmed anonymously (her name was attached by Oxford's receipt of more dedications by his to her work only after her death). fellow Elizabethans than any other contempo- rary contributor to the art of letters, even though he published nothing under his own name after 1576. By contrast, no one ever ded- s long as the question icated a thing to anyone named William A is of talent and mental Shake-speare. power, the world of men has authors, of not his equal to show. But Bacon, Milton, Tasso, when the question is to life, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of ut why Shake-speare? Why would and its materials, and its human fate; but that this . Edward de Vere adopt that name? auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it sig- man of men, he who gaveto There is little mystery here. Like :o nify? It is but a Twelfth the science of mind a new Martin Mar-Prelate, the well-known sobriquet night, or a Midsummer's and larger subject than had of an anti-episcopal dissident in Shakespeare's night's dream, or a Winter ever existed, and planted day, Shakespeare was a pseudonym that evening's tale: What signi- the standard of humanity addressed the chief realm of the writer's atten- fies another picture more or some furlongs forward into tion: in Mar-Prelate's case, his focal point was less? The Egyptian verdict Chaos,-that he should not the prelacy of the Anglican Church; in of the Shakspeare Societies be wise for himself,-it Shakespeare's case, it was the theater. comesto mind, that he wasa must even go into the world's history, that the best "William Shake-speare" is a name that jovial actor and manager. I poet led an obscure and. might have been adopted by almost any writer cannot marry this fact to his verse: Other admirable men profane life, using his who desired to conceal his title, office, orbap- haveled livesin some sort of genius for the public tismal name yet wished to assert his identity as keeping with their thought, amusement. • a playwright. After all, Pallas Athena, the but this man in wide con- mythological patron of the theatrical arts, wore trast. Had he been less, had - RALPH WALDO a helmet (crowned by a Sphinx) that, when its he reached only the com- EMERSON, visor was .drawn, made her invisible; in her mon measure of great .Representative Men [r8so] hand she carried a great spear. She was known to all and sundry as "the spear shaker." For a writer to be a "spear-shaker" intimated that he was an invisible writer of plays. That Oxford should have resorted to this pseudonym makes Daniel Defoe used more than twenty pseudo- eminent sense. Moreover, the merchant from nyms; Salman Rushdie probably wishes he Stratford-upon-Avon never once spelled his had used at least one. own name "Shakespeare," and the hyphenated English nobility who have employed pseudo- (broken) spelling of the poet-playwright's nyms since Elizabethan days include King name on many of the play texts may also have George Ill, who published as Ralph Robinson, been adopted to allude, with a wink and a and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who sometimes pub- nudge, to the author's person. The crest of the lished as Merlin. Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, Earl of Oxford as Viscount Bulbeck, after all, who wrote crime fiction in the 1940s, styled was that of an English lion shaking a broken himself as George Milner. Edward de Vere might lance. The allusion takes on additional signifi- have been comforted to know that the tradi- cance when we read Ben Jonson's knowing tion of adopting a disguise when venturing in- commemoration of Shakespeare in the First to publication continues even today among En- Folio: "He seems to shake a Lance/As bran- gland's peers. That the chief courtier- dish't at the eyes of Ignorance." poet-playwright of Elizabethan England, son- Writers always have taken terrible risks by in-law of the Lord Treasurer, and cousin to the writing "offensive" works. Dante was exiled Queen should have chosen the devices of from his beloved Florence; Voltaire {the pseu- anonymity and pseudonymity to assure himself' donym of Francois Marie Arouet) was impris- freedom of expression is hardly surprising. That oned in the Bastille and subsequently exiled; he-rather than an unlettered wool and grain Emile Zola was driven from following merchant from Warwickshire-should be Shake- his publication of "['accuse." Women, in par- speare is even less so.

FOLIO 43 11. of our wishful imagination. What could tum an ordinary playwright into the genius of the age? As THEY LIKE IT Nothing but love, and not even ordinary love, but love, needless to say,a la Romeo and Juliet. Hints of Shakespeare's famous bisexuality are very light- By Marjorie Garber ly traced (the-playwrights impulsive kissing of the scant-bearded "Thomas Kent" isfollowed, only a beat later, by the discoverythat "he" isa lady), and he success of a film called Shake- what is shown us is a classic Petrarchan struc- speare in Love may owe a great deal ture, the unattainable woman replaced, and dis- U to its witty script by playwright Tom placed, by an overactive pen. . Stoppard and screenwriter Marc Norman, as The logic of a fully Shakespearized world is well as to its personable stars, but not a little of already at work, else we would not find the sup- the fil~'s appeal lies in its title. Who among us posed original title, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's would not want a front-row seat or a voyeuris- Daughter, any sillier than our familiar Romeo tic peephole for the spectacle of Shakespeare and Juliet or, indeed, than the title of in love, especially if that love is seen to be the Shakespeare's principal source, Arthur Brooke's "cause" of his genius? In Stoppard's film the as- Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Romeus, piring young Will is presented as a playwright Romeus, wherefore art thou Romeus? who hasn't yet hit his stride. He lacks the right Stoppard's play does not purport to be history, muse. When the fictional de Lesseps but its particular choices are highly symptomatic. (Gwyneth Paltrow) auditions for a part in one For what we want-and what people have want- of his plays-necessarily cross-dressed, since ed over the years from Shakespeare's death to women were not permitted on the public stage the present time-is the answer to the conundrum in England-the result is Romeo and Juliet. Al- of "authorship" itself. Not just "Who wrote the though love's labor is ultimately lost-Viola du- plays?" but "How does great writing happen? tifully marries a nobleman who covets her fam- Where does it come from? And why?" In a secu- ily money, and is:shipped off to the colony of lar world, Shakespeare is our bible, a quotable Virginia-Will is left with a rejuvenated quill, and excerptable compendium of citations for themoney to buy a share in a company of actors, every purpose. "Neither a borrower nor a lender and a royal fan in the person of Queen Elizabeth. be," intone American lawmakers, reading the te- Shakespeare in Love, in fact, presents the wish- dious sententiae of , a puffed-up public ful audience with not one but two primal scenes: man, into the Congressional Record. "Who steals the scene of Will in bed with his muse, and the my purse steals trash, . ,. But he that filches from scene of his liberation from hired-player status. me my good name/Robs me of that which not en- Each in its own sphere, the one aesthetic, the riches him,! And makes me poor indeed." The other economic, seems to mark the inception of glozing words of Iago, baiting the trap for the . a singular career. Both, it 'should be made clear, gullible Othello, become disembodied "wisdom" are entirely fictional. and are quoted, without their attendant irony, No evidence connects Shakespeare with Lord not as the trickery of Iago but as the sagacity of Strange's Men, the company that played at the "Shakespeare."This is the Shakespeare of Bartlett's Rose. The correspondence of chief player Ed- Familiar Quotations, the passagescited therewith- ward Alleyn never mentions Shakespeare, nor out speech prefixes and thus contributing to the does Shakespeare appear in any cast list for "Shakespeare effect," the idea that there is Some- Strange's Men. There has been much specula- one---eall him "Shakespeare"-who knows the tion about the playwright's early career-might timeless truth of the human heart and mind. he perhaps have freelanced as a dramatist, or act- What biography could stand up to this test of ed with another company in these years?-but the greatness? . first record we possess that firmly connects Shakespeare is an effect. To go against the with an acting company effect is to set up an argument against a myth. lists him in 1595 as a leading member of the Lord In a sense, whatever the outcome of historical Chamberlain's Men (later taken under royal pa- investigations, "Shakespeare" is whoever wrote tronage as the King's Men), the company with the plays. As a result, the famous "Shakespeare which he was to be associated until he retired authorship controversy" is "overdetermined"- from the stage. In other words, the Shakespeare that is to say,'it is both the result of several dif- rescue-fantasy and the Shakespeare "star is born" ferent causes and related to a multiplicity of scenario offered by Stoppard's film answer to a underlying elements, each of which is coherent modem audience's desire to know the origin of lit- . and meaningful even though they may seem to erary culture's greatest hero, be at odds with one another. Thus, for example, As for the lovely Viola, she, too, is a figment it is contended by some anti-Strarfordians that

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 William Shakespeare was of the wrong socio- replacing a known (human) father figure with economic class to have been the author of the an unknown, greater one, in this case an aristo- plays. Since the plays exhibit such a thorough crat. There are also those who want there to be knowledge of the court, the author must have no Shakespeare, no idealized poet-father. The been an aristocrat (Oxford); since the plays dis- group-authorship theory is one response to this play such learning about the law, the author must impulse, fragmenting Shakespeare into many have been a lawyer (Bacon). On the other hand, hands and voices. there are those who are deeply convinced, fol- Territorial investments. It is striking that lowing the Miltonic and Romantic ideology of Americans have been by far the most zealous the poet "warbling his native woodnotes wild," group of combatants on both sides of the that this greatest of all playwrights must have authorship question. Turn-of-the-century critic been a child of nature, unsullied by excessive Georg Brandes, noting this trend, fulminated book-learning, unconstrained by courtly man- that had fallen into the hands ners. Both groups are left unsatisfied by an of "raw Americans and fanatical women." From account of the curriculum of the Stratford gram- John Greenleaf Whittier to Mark Twain and mar school, which suggests that Shakespeare's , American writers have professed "small Latin and less Greek" in fact involved a their doubts about the Stratford man. "Is detailed study of classical literature, mythology, Shakespeare Dead!" asked Twain in an essay rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Likewise, the that faulted Stratfordians for conjuring their information that Shakespeare's father was not man's life story out of little or no evidence. Why just a glover but also the highest elected official should the authorship controversy be an in Stratford, who presided at the Court of Record "American" preoccupation? For one thing, it and at council meetings and served the borough reverses any lingering sense of colonial inferiori- as justice of the peace, will satisfy neither those ty by rendering the true identity of Shakespeare who want the playwright to be very lowborn or an American discovery, despite the fact that he those who insist that he is a closet nobleman. may have been born an Englishman. At the same time, it speaks to Americans' fascination with and ambivalence about aristocracy, something number of investments motivate simultaneously admired and despised. Henry the controversy on both sides. Let James's story "The Birthplace," without ever iI:me quickly summarize them: using the words "Shakespeare" or "Stratford," Institutional investments. The Shakespeare superbly evokes the dilemma of the tour guide Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon; the recon- who shows visitors around "The Holy of Holies structed on the Bankside in of the Birthplace," the "Chamber of Birth," London; the Folger Shakespeare Library in where "He" (the unnamed author of the capital- Washington, D.C.; numerous "Stratfords'' from ized "Works") is said to have been born. Should Ontario to , with their annual he allow his doubts to show? "What we can say Shakespeare-festival seasons; the collected is that things have be~n said; that's all we have works of Shakespeare as merchandised by pub- to do with. 'And is this really'-when they jam lishers from Norton to Riverside to Bantam and their umbrellas into the floor-'the very spot Arden-these are institutions that depend where He was born!' 'So it has, from a long time upon the Shakespeare logo, and the man from back, been described as being.'" Ultimately the Stratford, for their existence. But Oxfordians- guide goes in the other direction, becoming a and again, before them, Baconians-have like- tourist attraction himself as he convincingly wise banded together. The Bacon Society was retells the story. The idea that "[pjractically ... founded in England in 1885, and its American there is no author" paradoxically frees him to counterpart was organized in 1922; the become one himself-and at a handsome profit. Shakespeare Authorship Society (originally the In fact, although the authorship question seems ) has been promoting to be desperate for an answer, the absence of an the claims of Oxford since 1922, and an answer is often more satisfying. "Others abide American version was started up in 1939. All our question. Thou art free," wrote Matthew' these groups have newsletters, 'Tshircs, and Arnold in his sonnet on Shakespeare. "We ask itinerant spokesmen. An Oxford descendant and ask-Thou smilest and art still,jOut-top- currently makes numerous personal appear- ping knowledge." It begins to become clear that ances on the campus lecture circuit. Shakespeare is the towering figure he is for us Psychological investments. Noting that not despite but rather because of the authorship himself became a proponent of controversy. Were he more completely known, he the Oxford candidacy, Shakespeare biographer would not be the Shakespeare we know. S. Schoenbaum suggested that Freud was moti- It is therefore far from surprising that two of vated by his own theory of the family romance, the stage roles we think that Shakespeare the

FOLIO 45 actor may have taken in his own plays-that of vexed question of the signature-could Old in and, most famous- Shakespeare write? could his parents? could his ly, the Ghost in Hamlet-are both spectral daughters?-and the paucity of handwritten evi- father-figures, who advise their "sons" and pro- dence (only six signatures of Shakespeare sur- teges, then disappear from the stage. They vive, all of them on legal documents, none of become, as I have argued in a book of that title, them affixed to the plays) seem uncannily the- Shakespeare's ghostwriters. In fact, the uncan- matized within the plays. ny appearances of in the plays, often jux- The authorship controversy, in short, is itself taposed, as in Hamlet, , Richard II, a cultural symptom. For what we desire is the , and , with answer to the genesis of "genius." But there are scenes of writing and reading, and with the those-most of them, significantly, poets and dead hand of the father, stage the authorship writers themselves-who cherish the question controversy within the plays as a textual effect. rather than the answer, who prefer not to know: The plays are full of ghostwriting: questions "Is it not strange," writes Emerson, "that the raised about who wrote a document and in what transcendent men, , Plato, Shakespeare, hand, suspicions voiced that a document may be confessedly untivalled, should have questions of a forgery or a "double" or a copy or a substitution identity and genuineness raised respecting their (think of Hamlet's "dozen or sixteen lines" writings?" Yet it is that kind of question that added to the "Mouse-trap" play, or the death certifies their transcendence. They are not mor- sentence on Rosencrantz and Guildenstem that tals but myths. "Shakespeare led a life of he forges, in his father's hand and with his Allegory; his works are the comments on it," father's seal, to replace Claudius's "commission" claimed Keats. And , a novelist for his own death), encounters with spectral often characterized by that all-purpose adjec- doubles, other selves, whether they are witches, tive of praise, "Shakespearean," remarked with gravediggers, apothecaries, or magicians. satisfaction, "The life of Shakespeare is a fine in Twelfth Night is gulled by a forged mystery and 1 tremble every day lest something letter. So is Gloucester in King Lear. Even the should tum up." III. DRAMA * * * * * ** * ** * ** * * ** * *** ** *** ** * ** * ** ** * ** ** *

other Elizabethan pseudonyms include "Cutbert 1 Curry-knave," "Simon Smell-knave," and "Adam Fouleweather (student in asse-tronorny)." * THY 'COUNTENANCE The case for Oxford's authorship hardly rests S HAKE S S PEARS on hidden clues and allusions, however. One of the most important new pieces of Oxfordian evidence centers around a 1570 English Bible, By Mark K. Anderson in. the "Geneva translation," once owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. In an eight-year study of the de Vere Bible, a University of Massachusetts doctoral ar a host of persuasive but common- student named Roger Stritmatter has found . lly disregarded reasons, the Earl of Ox- that the 430-year-old book is essentially, as he Eford has quietly become by far the puts it, "Shake-speare's Bible with the Earl of most compelling man to be found behind the Oxford's emit of arms on the cover." Stritmatter mask of "Shake-speare." As Orson Welles put it discovered that more than a quarter of the in 1954, "I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If 1,066 annotations and' marked passages in the 'you don't agree, there are some awful funny co- de Vere Bible appear in Shake-speare. The par- incidences to explain away." Some of these co- allels range from the thematic-sharing a incidences are obscure, others are hard to over- motif, idea, or trope-to the verbal-using look. A 1578 Latin encomium to Oxford, for example, contains some highly suggestive praise: * Another intriguing reference comes from the satirist "Pallas lies concealed in thy right hand," it says. Thomas Nashe, who included a dedication to a "Gentle "Thine eyes flash fire; Thy countenance shakes MesterWilliam" in his 1593 book Strange News, de- scribing him as the "most copious" poet in England. He al- spears."Elizabethans knew that PallasAthena was !udes to "the blue boar," Oxford's heraldic emblem, and known by the sobriquet "the spear-shaker." The TOasts"William" with the Latin phrase Apis lapis,which hyphen in Shake-speare's name also was a tip-off: translates as "sacred ox."

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 names, phrases, or wordings that suggest a spe- summary of the Oxfordian reading of the entire cific biblical passage. canon. If pressed, Shake-speare, like Hamlet, In his research, Stritmatter pioneered a styl- would probably deny a play's topical relevance. istic-fingerprinting technique that involves iso- But, as an ambitious courtier, he would have val- lating an author's most prominent biblical allu- ued his dramaturgical ability to comment on, sions-those that appear four or more times in lampoon, vilify, and praise people and events at the author's canon. After compiling a list of Queen Elizabeth's court. It is hard to deny that such "diagnostic verses" for the writings of Hamlet is the closest Shake- Shake-speare and three of his most celebrated speare comes to a picture literary contemporaries-, of the dramatist at work. Christopher Marlowe, and - Nowadays, assertions Stritmatter undertook a comparative study to that one can recover discern how meaningful the de Yere Bible evi- the author's perspective dence was. He found that each author's favorite from his own dramatic biblical allusions composed a unique and idio- self-portraits are often syncratic set and could thus be marshaled to dis- ridiculed as naive or tinguish one author from another. Stritmatter simplistic. Yet the con- then compared each set of "diagnostics" to the marked passages in the de Yere Bible. The results were, from any perspective but the most dogmatically orthodox, a stunning confirma- am "a sort of" haunted by only express my general tion of the Oxfordian theory. Ithe conviction that the sense by sayingthat I find it Stritmatter found that very few of the marked divine William is the biggest almost as impossible to con- verses in the de Yere Bible appeared in Spenser's, and most successful fraud ceive that Bacon wrote the Marlowe's, or Bacon's diagnostic verses. On the ever practised on a patient plays as to conceivethat the other hand, the Shake-speare canon brims with world. The more I turn him . man from Stratford,' as de Yere Bible verses. Twenty-nine of Shake- round and round the more we know the man from Stratford, did. • speare's top sixty-six biblical allusions are marked he so affects me. But that is all- I am not pretending to in the de Yere Bible. Furthermore, three of Shake- treat the question or to carry -HENRY JAMES, speare's diagnostic verses show up in Oxford's ex- it any further. It bristles letter toViolet Hunt tant letters. All in all, the correlation between with difficulties, and I can [August'2.6,190il Shake-speare's favorite biblical verses and Ed- ward de Yere's Bible is very high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020 for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon. Was "Shake-speare" the pen name for Edward de Yere, Earl of Oxford, or must we for- verse-that Shake-speare somehow evaded the mulate ever more elaborate hypotheses that pre- realities and particulars of his own life in creat- serve the old byline but ignore the appeal of com- ing his most enduring, profound, and nuanced mon sense and new evidence? characters-is absurd on its face. Of course, the infinite recesses of the imagination make an ap- pealing refuge to the savvy debater. Shake-speare ne favorite rejoinder to the Oxfor- was a creative genius (a claim no one would dare dian argument is that the author's dispute); ergo, he could and did make it all up. Oidentity doesn't really matter; only Following the same reasoning, though, Hamlet's the works do. "The play's the thing" has become . own masque holds no political purpose either. the shibboleth of indifference-claiming doubters. Rather than seeing it as a ploy to "catch the con- These four words, however, typify Shake-speare's science of the king," a strictly Stratford ian read- attitude toward the theater about as well as the ing of "The Mouse-trap" would be compelled to first six words of A Tale of Two Cities express see it as little more than a fancifulltalian fable di- Charles Dickens's opinion of the French Revo- vorced of its obvious allegory to the foul deeds lution: "It was the best of times." In both cases, committed at the court of Elsinore. The fact that, the fragment suggests an authorial perspective just like Hamlet, "The Mouse-trap" stages a king's very different from the original context. poisoning and a queen's hasty remarriage be- "The play's the thing," Hamlet says, referring comes just another "awful funny" coincidence. to his masque "The Mouse-trap," "wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hardly a pre- cis for advocating the death of the author, Ham- n the history of the Shake-speare au- let's observation -reports that drama's function thorship controversy, every claimant to comes closer to espionage than to mere enter- I the laurels has queued up offering the tainment. Hamlet's full quote is, in fact, a fair 'promise of mouth-watering connections to the

FOLIO 47 can:on. justifiably, skeptics h;ve countered that their wives by virtue of a "bed trick" (the strange if you squint your eyes hard enough, any scrap or and almost unbelievable stratagem wherein the biographical datum can be made to resemble husband thinks he is sleeping with another something from Shake-speare. With Oxford, woman but is in fact sleeping with his own wife). however, everything seems to have found its way Falstaff. The comic conscience of the Henry IV into Shake-speare. Gone are the days when plays, Falstaffcan be read as an authorial self-par- heretics would storm the ramparts whenever ody embodying two of Oxford's more notorious some thread was discovered between the char- qualities: a razor wit and a wastrel's worldview. In acter Rosencrantz and Francis Bacon's grandpa. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff also pro- Today it's more alarming when a Shake-speare vokes Master Ford'sjealousy, lampooning the au- play or poem does not overflow with Oxfordian thor's own hypocrisy in flying into a jealous rage connotations and connections. The problem for at his wife when he suspected her of infidelity. any Oxfordian is the perhaps enviable task of And the romantic subplot involving the daugh- selecting which handful of gems should be ter of the other "merry wife"-Anne Page-so brought out from the treasure chest. In what fol- specifically skewers the marriage negotiations lows, then, I will touch on five Shake-speare an between Oxford, Anne Cecil, and her onetime characters-Hamlet, Helena, Falstaff,King Lear, prospective husband, Sir Philip Sidney, that the and Prospero-and will briefly point out a few dowries and pensions mentioned in the play parallels with Oxford. match precisely those of the play's historical Hamlet. More than a mere authorial specter, counterparts. In the same play, Falstaff brags to the Prince enacts entire portions of Oxford's Master Ford that he "fear]s] not Goliath with a life story. Oxford's two military cousins, Horace weaver's beam." This odd expression is in fact and Francis Vere, appear as Hamlet's comrade- shorthand for the biblical Goliath's spear as it is at-arms and the soldier Francisco. detailed in II Samuel 21:19: "Goliath the Gittite: Oxford satirizes his guardian and father-in-law, the staffof whose spear was like a weaver's beam." the officious, bumbling royal adviser Lord Not only did Oxford mark the verse in his Bible; Burghley (nicknamed "Polus"), as the officious, he even underlined the words "weaver's beam." bumbling royal adviser Polonius. The parallels King Lear. In a play whose dramatic engine is between Burghley and Polonius are so vast and the family dynamics of two tragically flawed detailed that even the staunch Stratford ian patriarchs (Lear and the Earl of Gloucester), A. L. Rowse admitted that "there is nothing Shake-speare stages the exact familial relation- original" anymore in asserting this widely rec- ships that Oxford faced in .his twilight years. ognized connection. Furthermore, like His first marriage to Anne Cecil left him a wid- Polonius, Burghley had a daughter. At age . ower, like Lear, with three daughters, of whom twenty-one, Oxford was married to Anne the elder two were married. His second mar- Cecil, and their nuptial affairs were anything riage.produced only one son, whose patrilineal but blissful. The tragically unstable triangle of claims could conceivably be challenged by Hamlet--Polonius found its living par- Oxford's bastard son-a mirror of the gullible allel in Oxford-Anne-'Polus." In short, from Earl of Gloucester's situation. As if highlighting the profound (Oxford's mother quickly remar- one oft-he thematic underpinnings of King Lear, ried upon the untimely death of her husband) in his Bible, Oxford marked Hosea 9:7 ("The to the picayune (Oxford was abducted by prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad") , pirates on a sea voyage), Hamlet's "Mouse-trap" which Lear's daughter Goneril inverts in her captures the identity of its author. venomous remark that "Jesters do oft prove Helena. Just as details of Oxford's life story prophets." appear throughout each of the Shake-speare Prospero. 's exiled nobleman, cast- plays and poems, Anne Cecil's tragic tale is re- away hermit, and scholarly shaman provides the flected in many Shake-spearean heroines, in- author's grand farewell to a world that he recog- cluding Ophelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hero, nizes will bury his name, even when his book is Hermione, and Helena. In All's Well That Ends exalted to the ends of the earth. Oxfordians, in Well, Helena seeks out and eventually wins the general, agree with scholarly tradition that The hand of the fatherless Bertram, who is being Tempest was probably Shake-speare's final play- raised as a ward of the court-precisely the sit- and many concur with the German Stratford ian uation Oxford found himself in when Anne was critic Karl Elze that/'all external arguments and thrust upon him by his guardian and soon-to-be indications are in favor of [the play being writ- father-in-law. Like Helena, Anne was rejected ten in] the year 1604." Before he takes his final by her headstrong new husband, who fled to bow, Prospero makes one last plea to his eternal Italy rather than remain at home with her. Both audience. Drawing from a contiguous set of Ox- Oxford and Bertram refused to consummate ford's marked verses at Ecclesiasticus 28:1-5 con- their vows-and both eventually impregnated cerning the need for reciprocal mercy as the pre-

48 HARPER'S MAGAZlt\E i APRIL 1999 condition of human freedom, Prosperodelivers his number of postings by far are from students farewell speech with the hopes that someone will seeking help with an assignment. One such plea take him at his word: was for information "on what awards Shake- speare won-either during his life or after his [R]eleaseme from my bands death." From "Harry" came the succinct, defin- With the help of yourgood hands! Gentle breath ofyoursmy sails itive answer: "You need a new project." Go Must fillor elsemy'project fails, ahead and laugh, but you, dear reader, may have Which wasto please.Now I want a similar question you were afraid to ask. How Spiritsto enforce,an to enchant, many times has an educated, thoughtful person And myending isdespair, prefaced a query to me with, "This may be a silly Unless I be reliev'd byprayer, question ... " And how many times has that Which piercesso that it assaults question sent me to the books to discover a Mercyitselfand freesall faults. fresh topic of fascinating and fruitful research. As youfromcrimeswouldpardon'd be, In a way, no question about Shakespearel is Let your indulgenceset me free. silly. It may reflect a general lack of knowledge' Like Hamlet, The Tempest's aristocrat cum about how these miraculous creations came in- magus begs those around him to hear his story . to being, but it will almost certainly reveal a and, in so doing, to free him from his temporary problem that has been present in the study of chains. The rest, as the academic ghost-chase both the man and his works for more than 300 for the cipher from Stratford has ably demon- years: the common tendency to view the people strated, is silence. and products of another age through the glass of one's own. In the case of Shakespeare and the theater of his time, this is particularly pro- t the end of The Tempest, Prospero nounced, for in the years between the outlawing uses the metaphors of shipwrecks of the theater by the Roundheads in 1642 and the i[. and stormy weather to deliver his restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the-records closing salvo against the desolate island he of most of the theater companies disappeared. called home. During the final year of his life, Nearly all that survive are records of perfor- the Earl of Oxford clearly had such imagery on mances and the business of the theater. This was his mind, as can be seen in his eloquent April all for the best when the apotheosis of the Sweet 1603 letter to his former brother-in-law, Robert Swan of Avon took wing in the last third of the Cecil, on the death of Queen Elizabeth: "In this eighteenth century, There wasnothing to impede common shipwreck, mine is above all the rest, his scholars from indulging in their flights of who least regarded, though often comforted, of fancy-not until came along in all her followers, she hath left to try my fortune 1857, that is.The playhouse Shakespeare, she de- among the alterations of time and chance, clared, was but "a stupid, ignorant, third-rate either without sail whereby to take the advan- player" in a "dirty, doggish group of players," tage of any prosperous. gale, or with anchor to with nothing in his background that qualified ride till the storm be overpast." The alterations him to be the author of works whose depth and of time and chance have been cruel to Edward breadth of knowledge had been discerned by his de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. But the last five scholars over the preceding ninety years. years of discoveries and developments have Drawn from the ranks of the literary world, made two things increasingly clear: the tempest these scholars ripened the early-eighteenth-cen- has broken, and Prospero's indulgence is finally tury notion that the plays were only incidental- upon us. ly works for the stage; first and foremost they were works of literature to be read and studied. It is "an indisputable certainty," declared Algernon 11. Swinburne, "that Shakespeare never wrote mere- THE REPROOF ly for the stage, but alwayswith an eye on the fu- ture and studious reader,who would be competent VALIANT and careful to appreciate what his audience and his fellow actors could not." This may be recog- nized as a recipe for Shakespeare studies, and, By I r 'V i n M at u s indeed, ever since his plays were admitted to academia they. have been increasingly over- whelmed by footnotes, critical studies, and, nowa- he "Shakespeare Discussion Area" days, an array of fashionable methodologies. is a Web page where visitors may This primacy of the page over the stage is U exchange comments and opinions .agreeable to the Oxfordians. In the words of the on the dramatist and his works, but the greatest late , the Earl of Oxford's force-

FOLIO 49 However, it is "conjec- mulated his law-treasures in whatever length of time a sur- tured" that he accomplished the first years ofhis sojourn in miser needs in his .busi- all this and more, much London, through "amusing ness-and thus became fa- more: learned law and its in- himself"by learning book-law miliar with soldiership and tricacies; and the complex in his garret and bypicking up soldier-ways and soldier-talk procedure of the law-courts; lawyer-talk and the rest of it and generalship and general- and all about soldiering, and through loitering about the waysand general-talk, and sea- sailoring, and the manners law-courts and listening. But manship and sailor-ways and and customs and waysof roy- it is only surmise; there is no sailor-talk. al courts and aristocratic so- evidence that he ever did ei- Maybe he did all these ciety; and likewise accumu- ther ofthose things. They are things, but I would like to lated in his one head every merely a couple of chunks of know who held the horses in kind of knowledge the learned plaster of Paris. l the mean time; and who stud- ' , "h,akespeare pro- then possessed, and every There is a legend that he ied the books in the garret; and , nounced "Venus kind of humble knowledge got his bread and bUtt,er by who frollicke~in th~la;v- ., :and Adonis" "the possessed by the lowly and . holdinghorses i~ fr~~t of the courts for recreatior:Also, first heir ofhis in- the' ignorant; and added London theaters~ mornings who did the call-boying and , vention," appar- thereto a wider and more in- and afternoons, Maybe he the play-acting. . ,ently implying timate knowledge' of the did. If he did; it seriously For he became a call-boy; S'" that it was his first effort at world's great literatures, an- shortened his law-studyhours and as early as '93he became a literary composition. He cient and modern, than was and his recreation-time in the "vagab6nd"-the law's un- should not have said it. It has possessed by any other man courts. In those very days he gentle term for an unlisted ac- been an embarrassment to his of his time-for he was go- was writing great plays, and tor; and in '94-a "regular" and- historians these many, many ing to make brilliant and easy needed all the time he could properly and officially listed years. They have to make him and admiration-compelling get. The horse-holding leg- member of that tin those days] write that graceful and pol- use of these splendid trea- end ought to be strangled; it lightly valued and not much ished and flawless and beauti- sures the moment he got to too formidably increases the respected profession. ful poem before he escaped London. And according to historian's difficulty in ac- Right soon thereafter he from Stratford and his farni- the surmisers, that is what he counting for the young became a stockholder in-two ly-I5"86 or '87- age,twenty- did. Yes, although there was Shakespeare's erudition-an theaters, and manager of two, or along there; because no one in Stratford able to erudition which he was ac- them. Thenceforward he was within the next five years he teach him these things, and quiring, hunk by hunk and a busy and flourishing busi- wrote five great plays, and no library in the little-village chunk by chunk, every day in ness man, and was raking in could not have found time to to dig them out of His father those strenuous times, and money with both hands for write another line. could not read, and even the emptying each day's catch in- twenty years. Then in a noble It is sorely embarrassing. surmisers surmise that he did to next day's imperishable frenzy of poetic inspiration If he began to slaughter not keep a library. drama. ' he wrote his one poem-his calves, and poach deer, and It is surmised by the biog- He had to acquire a knowl- only poem, his darling'-and rollick around, and learn raphers that the young Shake- edge of war at the same time; laid him down and died: English, at the earliest likely speare got his yast knowledge and a knowledgeof soldier- "Good friend for Iesussake moment-say at thirteen, of the lawand his familiar and people, and sailor:peopl~fnd: forbeare /To'diggthe dust en- when he was supposedly accurate acquaintance with the their waysandtalk; also a cloased hearer/Blest.be ye wrenched from that school manners and customs and knowledge of some foreign man yt spares thes stones / where he was supposedly stor- shop-talk oflawyers through lands and their languages: for And curst be he yt moves my ing up Latin for future liter- being for a time the clerk of a he was daily emptying fluent bones." He wasprobably dead ary use-he had his youthful Straifordcourt,just as abright streams of these various when he wrote it. Still, this is hands full, and much more lad like me, reared in a village knowledges, too, into his dra- only conjecture. We have on- than full. He must have had on the banks of the Mississip- mas. How did he acquire these lycircumstantial evidence. In- to put aside his Warwickshire pi, might become perfect in rich assets? ternal evidence. dialect, which wouldn't be un- knowledgeof the BeringStrait In the usual way: by sur- Shall I set down the rest of derstood in London, and whale-fishery and the ;hop- mise. It is surmised that he the Conjectures which .con- study English very hard. Very talk of the veteran exercises of traveled in Italy and Germany stitute the giant Biography of hard indeed; incredibly hard, that adventure-bristling trade and around, 'and qualifiedhim- William Shakespeare?It would. almost; if the result of that through catching catfish with self to put their scenic and so- strain the Unabridged Dictio- labor was to be the smooth a "trot-line" Sundays. But the cial aspects upon paper; that nary to hold them. He is a and rounded and flexible and , -surmise is damaged bythe fact he perfected himself in brontosaur: nine bones and six letter-perfect English of the that there is no evidence- French, Italian, and Spanish hundred barrels of plaster of "Venus and Adonis" in the and not even tradition-that on the road; that he went in Paris. -. space often years; and at the the young Shakespeare was Leicester's expedition to the same time learn great and ever clerk of a law-court. Low Countries, as soldier or -MARK TW:AIN, fine and unsurpassable liter- It is further surmised that sutler or something, for 'sev- "IsShakespeare ']Jead?" aryfonn. the young Shakespeare accu- eral months Of years-or [1909]

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 ful champion, "Though he gave us marvelous sian that authors may have found "it was better theater, I think we must recognize that he was to 'take it lying down'" than to try and obtain jus- above all a novelist, and a novelist above all oth- tice against a publisher protected by the "power- er novelists." Shakespeareans and Oxfordians ful Stationers' Company." converge as well in the assumption that the au- What makes the attempts to deny these facts thor's age held him in no less estimation than remarkable is that Oxfordians are aware that does our own, and this agreement is the well- Shakespeare's acting company-the Lord Cham- spring of the authorship debate; for if Shake- berlain's Men, later the King's Men-tried at speare was, in the words of Ben Jonson, "not of various times between 1598 and 1640 to block the an age, but for all time," surely his contempo- unauthorized publication of their plays,only to be raries broadcast his greatness as we do. But they flouted on each occasion by members of the Sta- didn't. Why not? This is the "mystery" at the tioners' Company. In initiating these effortsto pre- heart of the mysteries the Oxfordians discern in vent the publication of plays, the Chamber- the record of Shakespeare. lain's/King's Men were not acting on behalf of Shakespeare or any of the dramatists who wrote for them. Rather, as the plays were the property here was indeed a time when of the company and its shareholders, the company Shakespeare's position in the the- was seeking to protect its own interests. This was . ater was unrivaled-because he true of every syndicate or acting company of the wasnquite literally without a rivaL In Francis day, and the evidence to this effect, in contracts Meres's Palladis Tamia, we find the names of and in the words of playwrights themselves, is many playwrights, but Meres places Shake- overwhelming. speare far above all others. Meres names twelve The Oxfordians are unsatisfied nevertheless plays as examples of Shakespeare's excellence in and point to Ben Jonson's control over his plays. both comedy and. tragedy, five of which had How he pulled this off is not known, but the already been published in individual edi- probable explanation is that he was a dramatist tions. Therein lurks another Oxfordian mystery, in great demand, and acting companies there- which is that the author's name was not in the fore were willing to surrender to Jonson the rights first editions of any of these, nor of two other to his plays. Unlike Jonson, who freelanced his early' plays not noted by Meres. plays, Shakespeare was attached to a single act- The Oxfordians have a solution: the author's ing company in which he was a shareholder, and noble name could not be affixed to lowly drama, the Chamberlain's/King's Men were unrivaled and so the decision wasmade to use a pseudonym, in the protection of their plays.In the forty-eight- supposedly coined years earlier: "William Shake- year history of the company, only three plays by speare." That it was similar to the name of an ig- one of its resident dramatists were published with norant player,William "Shakspere," perhaps made the participation of their 'author and with the the choice more amusing to the knowing. But if evident permission of the company. the need to hide the identity of a noble author of this disdained literature is indeed the reason why these works were published without attribution, he most difficult problem for playwriting must have been quite the fashion Oxfordians is the dating of the amongaristocrats, for in only seven of the forty- . plays, fully one third of which are two popular playsprinted between 1590 and 1597 ngiven as 1605 or later in the Shakespearean was the author identified. chronology, whereas the Earl of Oxford died in Nor were any of Shakespeare's plays brought to June 1604. The Oxfordian response is the asser- presswith evident approval from their creator, and tion that the scholars have fashioned their the texts of some truly earned their description in chronology to suit the lifetime of the man they the First Folio as "maimed and deformed." This assume to be the author and that there is no the Oxfordians regard as further proof that the au- documentary evidence that proves any were thor wasa nobleman; a common man, they argue, written after 1604. But, of course, it is necessary certainly would have, and could have, com- for the Oxfordians to fashion their chronology plained. The generic anti-Stratford ian Sir George to suit the lifetime of the man they would make Greenwood acknowledged that although there the author, and there is no evidence whatsoev- was no copyright law at the time, authors had re- er that any of the thirteen plays in question course to English common tawas "a remedy for were written before 1605. the violation of so elementary a right." This is as Of the twenty-six plays dated 1604 or earlier, far as the Oxfordian argument usually gets, and fifteen were published and two more were en- so Greenwood's conclusion that there is no record tered for publication with the Stationers' Com- of this common-law right being successfully ap- pany; eight more are mentioned in print or in doc- pealed is not heard, anymore than is his conces- uments, leaving only The Taming of the

FOLIO 51 without certain contemporary mention before that the Globe playhouse burned to the ground, 1605. Which leaves us to wonder why, if the which is attested to by two letters written with- playsascribed to years after 1604 had indeed been in days of the event that describe Henry VIIl as . written before then, a stationer would print Titus a "new play," one of which states that it "had Andronicus but not , why Meres would been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before." mention Romeo and] uliet and The Two Gentlemen What is more, this play is the second of three that of Verona but not KingLear or The Tempest. Shakespeare wrote in collaboration with John This last play is one of several for which there Fletcher; whose career as a dramatist began two is solid evidence of late composition, to which years after Oxford's death. The Oxfordians also some current Oxfordians give tacit assent. The ignore the fact that the Shakespearean chronol- tempest that gave its name to the play has def- ogy is based not only on the dates of publication inite parallels to two tracts and a letter, all three or on mention of plays in books or documents but written in 1610, that contain accounts of a ship- on Shakespeare's development as an artist. Where wreck near of the Virginia Company among the pre-1605 plays the Oxfordians would flagship Sea-Venture. There are many such ref- put these later plays, in which are found the erences, and they are so scattered throughout the highest achievement of the playwright's art, is a play that the Oxfordian suggestion that they problem they have yet to approach. Put plainly, were later additions made by another is im- they have no chronology. plausible. Nor can there be any doubt that Hen- Another issue in which Oxford's premature ry VIIl was composed well death plays a part is the playwright's sources. after 1604. Itwas All of the' primary ones for the later plays, they during a perfor- note, were in print before 1605; "Did he stop ~ mance of this play reading?" they ask. This is an interesting ques- • . on June 29, 1613, tion, but it is the wrong one. A better question is, "What precisely did he read?" And what we find is North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and Holinshed's Chronicles accounting for five of the plays, an old play first published in 1605 as the source for King Lear, and popular works for the rest. In other words, very much the same sources, exactly or of a kind, that he used for the. plays written before 1605, which raises a ques- tion about the Oxfordians' Shakespeare. Where- nthe morning had an as he is proclaimed to be a person of great eru- ISir Archibald aristocratic atti- dition; well-schooled and fluent in the ancient Flowe~ the may- tude. His utter dis- tongues, which the Earl of Oxford was indeed, or of Stratford, regard for gram- apart from classical authors common to the called at the ho- mar could only grammar-school curriculum of the day, or deci- tel and conduct- have been the atti- pherable to someone with even "small Latin ed me over to Shakespeare's tude of a princely, gifted and lessGreek" (as Jonson defined Shakespeare's mind. After seeing the cot- cottage, I can by no means as- ability in these languages), there are relatively sociate the Bard with it; that tage and hearing the scant few allusions that suggest the author of the plays· such a mind ever dwelt or had bits oflocal information its beginnings there seems in- . concerning his desultory boy- was particularly well-read in the ancients. There credible. It is easy to imagine hood, his indifferent school is nothing of Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Dio Cas- a farmer's boy emigrating to record, his poaching and his sius, or Velleius Paterculus, among others found London and becomingasuc- country-bumpkin point of abundantly in Jonson's Sejanus, the 1605 edition cessful actor and theatre own' view, I cannot believe he went of which has the author's own citations cram- er; but for him to have be- through such a mental meta- ming the margins. come ..the great poet .and morphosis as to become the Margin notes of a different kind are of great d~a'mafist, and to have.had greatest of all poets. In the interest to Oxfordians nowadays, These are in work of the greatest of ge- such knowledge of foreign a copy of the 1568-1570 Geneva Bible bound courts, cardinals and kings, is niuses humble beginnings especially for the Earl of Oxford, in which there inconceivable to me. I am not will reveal themselves some- concerned with who wrote the where-but one cannot see are annotations and underlinings that have led works of Shakespeare, the slightest sign of them in his adherents to anoint it "Shakespeare's Bible." whether Bacon, Southamp- Shakespeare. • One example of its supposed parallel to the ton, or Richmond, but I can plays is Hamlet's declaration that Claudius "took hardly think it was the Strat- -CHARLES CHAPLIN my father grossly, full of bread," the last phrase ford boy.Whoever wrote them My.Autobiography [1964-] of which is an allusion to Ezekiel, chapter 16, verse 49. We are told-in an article by Mark Anderson in the Hartford Advocate about a

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / APRIL 1999 study of Oxford's Bible by Roger Stritmatter- ruption but of drama to expose the corruption that "over a span of more than 300 verses in the in the human soul. And this is, as the scholar book of Ezekiel, Edward de Vere marks only Henri Fluchere put it, "the domain of art, not one: Ezekiel 16:49." This is indeed remarkable, the poet's life." because there are as many as fifteen other allu- sions to Ezekiel in Shakespeare's plays. What happened to them? elf-promoting though he may have This selectivity is made apparent in a further been, Ben Jonson has been proved study of Oxford's Bible, by Dave Kathman, on the f3.. right in eulogizing Shakespeare as "Shakespeare Authorship" Web site. Kathman "not of an age, but for all time." Later ages have found that of the more than 200 parallel verses admitted him into their cultures as a contem- identified by Stritmatter, only about 80 are rec- porary, sought images of the human experience ognized by scholars of Shakespeare's biblical use. in his words when their own failed, and pro- Granting Stritmatter the other 120-plus (as well claimed his genius to a degree that Jonson could as the benefit of the doubt that all the markings never have dreamed of. The unvarnished life of were made by Oxford), Kathman notes that there the singularly self-obsessed Oxford offers no ex- are roughly 1,000 verses marked in the Oxford planation for the scope of humanity found in Bible, whereas there are at least 2,000 biblical ref- the plays, and it is this that must be explained. erences in Shakespeare's works. Therefore, "on- For the unique achievement of the author is lyabout 10 percent of Shakespeare's biblical al- that, in the words of , "[elach of lusions are marked in the Bible, and only about his characters is as much itself, and as absolute- 20 percent of the verses marked in the Bible are ly independent of the author, as if they were liv- alluded to in Shakespeare." ing persons, not fictions of the mind." And these are qualities that are the special province of the theater and the actor. Shakespeare was a char- he Oxfordian justification for this acter actor relegated to playing two or three roles passionate battl~ over the identity in a play, as was the custom of the time, and the -aof the author IS that our under- actor bears a likeness to the dramatist, who, as standing and appreciation of the plays will be Gary Taylor defined him, "had to perform all the enhanced if they may be viewed in the light of parts in his head, momentarily recreating him- the author's life. Let's see what. happens to selfin the image of each." In this Shakespeare has Hamlet, in which they discern a "master had no equal. metaphor," the purported "projection" of de The human qualities of Shakespeare's char- Vere's pseudonymous intent: to use his knowl- acters have proven common to people of every edge of court life to expose its inner corruption. age and society. Thus could Akira Kurosawa But precisely what is the manifestation of the unite the pre-Christian world of King Lear with corruption in the court of Denmark? To all the medieval Japan of warlords in Ran, and thus appearances, Claudius is an able ruler, sure in could South African playwright Welcome Mso- statecraft, and respected in his own court as mi create Umabatha: A Zulu Macbeth, ac- well as in the courts of other nations. The cor- knowledging surprise at how readily Shake- ruption in Denmark's court is hidden in the speare's play lent itself to Zulu oral tradition. soul of Claudius, and drama is its purge, in the And, most tellingly of all, , who mortal world of Shakespeare's time as it was in made his reputation directing Shakespeare, said his play. In 1612, Shakespeare's colleague that in the modern theater "we are faced with wrote a defense of the stage the infuriating fact that Shakespeare is still our in which he told of performances that "have model." The Oxfordians ask us instead to cast been the discoverers of many notorious mur- the stage aside as incidental to these creations, ders, being concealed from the eyes of the a disposable framework for the overarching ge- world," two examples of which Heywood states nius of their noble creator. occurred twelve years earlier, which would be To those who find that the stage is the only about the time that Hamlet was written. And in place where the plays truly live, it is a sort of po- the play we hear Hamlet say: etic justice that the man who found so many lives within himself has come down to us seem- I have heard ingly without a life of his own. But his mastery That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene of drama and his unique ability to create "an Been struck so to the soul that presently improvisation of life" upon the stage confirms They have proclaimed their malefactions. what the documentary records of Shakespeare and his time tell us: that the domain of the po- It would appear that the author of Hamlet used et's life, no less than the domain of his art, is the his knowledge not of court life to expose its cor- theater.

FOLIO 53 IV. LOVE ***** ****** ** * ** *** ** *** *** ***** *** ** * ** ** 1 he first 126 Sonnets lovingly address a handsome young man. They be- EVERY WORn DOTH -a gin by unsuccessfully urging him to marry and beget a son; then the poet woos the ALMOST TELL My NAME "lovely boy" for himself, promising to give him "immortal life" in verse. Along with praise of the . youth's beauty, the Sonnets record estrangements By Joseph Sobran between him and the poet, charges of infidelity, a rival poet, a separation, reconciliation, and hints of the poet's own infidelity. The remaining hakespeare'sSonnets have long baf- Sonnets, wavering between love and insult, con- fled the academic Shakespeare schol- cern the poet's dark, sluttish mistress. Ejars, and with good reason. Published In the course of the poems, "Shakespeare" under mysterious circumstances in 1609, these- drops many clues about himself. He's "old," "poor," 154 intimate love poems clearly refer to real "lame," "despised," and "in disgrace." His face is people and situations in the poet's life. They "beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity," bear- ought to be a gold mine for Shakespeare's biog- ing "lines and wrinkles." He alludes to his "high raphers, who are otherwise forced to work from birth." He seems to be a public figure, a target of monotonously opaque baptismal registers and "vulgar scandal." He never says what the source real estate titles that give no hint of the turbu- of the "scandal" is, but he implies that it is sex- lent inner life the Sonnets disclose. But the Son- ual, and he seems to have lovers of both sexes. He nets don't fit what we know of William of Strat- uses two hundred legal terms, showing wide ford, their supposed author. Consequently, knowledge of the law. He proudly expects his frustrated scholars, giving up the attempt to con- "powerful rhyme" to outlive marble and the gild- nect them to William, file them under the head- ed monument of princes, yet somehow hopes ings of "poetic fictions" and "literary exercises." that his own.name win be "buried" and "forgot- They try; in effect, to declare the Sonnets inad- ten" after his death, which he feels approaching. missible evidence, like lawyers who sense that a At the time the Sonnets were written, proba- crucial document may be fatalto their client's bly the early 1'590s, William was under thirty case. This won't do. The Sonnets are too odd and and just beginning to prosper, with a long life earthy, too guarded and allusive, too personal ahead of him. There is no indication that he was and idiosyncratic, too full ofloose ends, to have lame. He had no legal training and caused no been fictional. The author of the Shakespeare public scandal; we have no reason to think he was plays knew how to tell a story, but these poems bisexual. He was rising in the world, not falling. respond haphazardly to events and problems as Ifhe wrote the works bearing his name, he would they arise, unforeseen. have expected immortal fame, not obscurity. Who are the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady,the Ri- But the poet's self-description matches Oxford val Poet? These old questions have proved unan- perfectly.Born in 1550, he hailed from the old no- swerable, because the scholars neglect to ask the bility. He received the finest education, including prior question: Who was the poet himself? They legal studies at the Inns of Court. (His surviving assume they already know the answer, so for them letters use more than 50 of the 200 legal terms in the Sonnets become a conundrum. The "riddle of the Sonnets.) By the 1590s Oxford was in his for- Shakespeare's Sonnets," as Princeton's Edward ties, over the hill and ailing. In three separate Hubler called it, is really a facet of the riddle of letters, written years apart, he describes himself as Shakespeare's authorship. Once we recognize the "lame" and "a lame man." He had wasted a huge author of the Sonnets as Edward de Vere, Earl of patrimony and was forced to scrounge for money. Oxford, the chief difficulties take care of them- His life had been marked by scandals; he had selves, and there isno need to resort to calling the been accused of "buggering boys" and taunted poems fictions. about his "decayed reputation." He had made en- Of course the scholars won't hear of this: they emies,fallen from favor at court, served time in the prefer the legend of Stratford Will, self-made Tower of London (at the Queen's command), middle-class man, and their response to any nearly wrecked his marriage, and suffered grave doubt of his authorship is merely to jeer at it. But wounds in a sword fight. Oxford also had a very the evidence for Oxford is easier to mock than high reputation as a poet and a playwright, though . ~ to refute. only a few short poems have been ascribed to

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 him. In .1589 it was reported that he had declined receives a brand." At a time when "Shakespeare" to publish his works under his own name. If he wasbeing universally praised, the poet who wrote were writing poems under an alias, he might well under that name was speaking strangely about hope both that his works would survive him and his name. "Every word [of my poetry] doth al- that his real name would be forgotten-which is most tell my name," he says, as if his name is be- exactly ~vhathappened. ing concealed. And so it was. This is an obsessive And the youth? Stratfordian scholars now ad- theme of the Sonnets, yet mainstream scholars mit that his description matches Henry Wrio- not only have failed to explain it but have hard- thesley, third Earl of Southampton (to whom Lynoticed it. Shakespeare dedicated VenUsand Adonis and The Rape ofLucrece). Oxford had reason to urgehim to marry and procreate; his powerful father-in-law, nly one detail in the Sonnets sup- Lord Burghley, had been pushing Southampton ports the traditional identification of to marry his granddaughter and Oxford's daughter, Othe poet as William. In the bawdy Elizabeth Vere, which explains why and sometimes bitter later Sonnets to the Dark pleads with the youth to beget "another self'-a Lady, the poet puns on the name "Will" ("And son-"for love ofme." Oxford isaskingfor a grand- then thou Iovest me, for my name is Will"). But son. Coming from William ofStratford,such an ap- the context doesn't tell us whether this is his peal to Southampton would be bizarre, if not in- real name, a pen name, a nickname, an inside sane. And even if William wrote the Sonnets as joke, or an alias his mistress knew him by. Oth- fictions, is it credible that he would have created erwise,the Sonnets offer no help to those who in- a narrator who closely resembles Oxford, address- sist that William wrote them. Perhaps the most ing a "lovely boy" who so resemblesSouthampton, telling fact of the authorship controversy is that at a time when Southampton wasbeing pressured William's partisans steer away from the very po- to marry Oxford's daughter? We should also re- ems that tell us most about the poet. They don't call that the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare's playswas reallyargue that William did write the Sonnets but dedicated to two more earls, Pembroke and Mont- that he could have-if they are fictional. gomery, who had also been candidates for mar- The Sonnets were published in 1609, fiveyears riage to Oxford's other two daughters, Bridget and after Oxford's death. The cryptic dedication was Susan Vere. Furthermore, Oxford's uncle the Earl supplied by the publisher, not by the author, who ofSurreywasa pioneer of the "Shakespearean"son- is praised as "our ever-living poet." All we are net form. And his uncle and mentor Arthur Gold- told of the dedicatee is that he is "the only beget- ing translated "Shakespeare's"favoritebook, Ovid's ter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W.H."- Metamorphoses: Clearly, the standard view forces Southampton's initials, but reversed. By praising us to accept too many coincidences. the poet in such terms while presuming to dedi- As 'many scholars now acknowledge, the Son- cate his poems for him, the publisher invites the nets to the youth are homosexual. No common inference that the real author was no longer able poet wouLdhave dared make amorous advances to speakfor himself:he wasalreadydead. (William to an earl, but another earl might. Read rightly, of Stratford still had seven years to live.) The .the Sonnets tell us that Oxford fell deeply in poet's self-revelations match Oxford and nobody love with Southampton, a fact that gives a prac- else in Elizabethan England. If the Sonnets and tical edge to the poet's warnings to the youth to the other works of Shakespeare had been ascribed keep a discreet distance from him, as in the famous to Oxford from the starr, it's hard to imagine that lines of : "No longer mourn for me anyone would doubt his authorship today. when I am dead/ ... Lest the wise world should Look into your moan,! And mock you with me 11. after I am gone." The "wise world" doesn't mock people for mourning their friends, though it might A SALVO FOR mock them for a scandalous affection, as homo- sexuality would certainly have appeared to the LUCY N'EGRO ELizabethans.In this view it seems clear that Ox- ford was afraid that his own soiled reputation would rub off on Southampton, which is why he By Harold Bloom hoped that his real name would be "buried where my body is ... And live no more to shame nor me I nor you." Again and again the poet complains of his s my correspondence shows me, "disgrace," "bewailed guilt," "shames," "blots," since the October 1998 publica- "vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow." He'is if tion of my Shakespeare: The "despised,""attainted," "vile esteemed": his "name Invention of the Human, Oxfordians are the

FOLIO 55 sub-literary equivalent of the Since I long ago joined Samuel Butler, who sub-religious Scientologists. had proclaimed that the Odyssey was written by You don't want to argue a woman, when I suggested in The Book of] that with them, as they are dog- the Yahwist was a human female, I felt it would matic and abusive. I there- have been redundant had I introduced Lucy Ne- fore will let the Earl of gro into my Shakespeare book as the creator of Sob ran be and confine Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Cleopatra, and myself to the poetic the other glories of our language. And I propose power of Shakespeare's to say no more about Lucy Negro here, except Sonnets, and the relation that she far outshines Oxford as a rival claimant, of that power to the now since she at least slept with Shakespeare! In- stead I will devote the remainder of this brief meditation to a surmise as to why the Oxfor- dians, Marlovians, and Baconians cannot cease lIre willhave a lot to dis- hand-Hamlet's neurosis, to try to badger the rest of us. ~YVcuss abp~t. Shake" Lear's madness, Macbeth's The sorrows of the poet of the Sonnets are speare. I do not 'know what . defianceand the character of very complex, worthy of the best shorter po- still attracts yOIJ to the man Lady Macbeth, Othello's ems in the language. In fact, we don't know for of Stratford. He seems to jealousy, etc. It almost irri- sure who this narcissistic young nobleman was, have nothing at all to justify tates me that yo~should sup- his claim, whereas Oxford . port the notion. • though Southampton will do, and there are has almost everything. It is many candidates for the Dark Lady, though quite inconceivable to me --SIGMUND FREUD, none so exuberant as Lucy Negro. All we actu- th~:.

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999 , Hamlet and many more of Shakespeare's protag- of the major dramas are subdued in all but a few onists, and yet the affinities remain enigmatic. of the sequences. Unless you are a formalist or an historicist. Fal- From at least Measure for Measure through staff and Hamlet will compel you to see them as. Othello, and on through , larger even than their plays, and as more "real" sexuality is represented primarily as a torment- than actual personages, alive or dead. But the sometimes comic, more often not. As an archa- speaker of the Sonnets presents himself as a be- ic Bardolator, I am not inclined to separate this wildering series of ambiguities. He is not and yet dramatic version of human reality from the play- he is William Shakespeare the playmaker, and wright himself. Formalist and historicist critics fre- his two loves of comfort and despair, a young no- quently give me the impression that they might bleman and a dark woman, never have the sub- . be more at home with Flaubert than with Shake- stance or the persuasive force of Anthony and speare. The high erotic rancidity of Troilus and Cleopatra, and of their peers in the greater plays. Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Timon of Shakespearean characters are adventures in con- Athens is too consistently ferocious to be dra- sciousness;even the speaker of the Sonnets evades matic artifice alone, at least in my experience as that immensity. Of the inwardness of the fair a critical reader. The bed trick, harlotry, and young man and of the dark lady. we are given venereal infection move very near the center of only intimations. Shakespeare's vision of sexuality, We cannot recover either the circumstances of the personal motives (if any) of the Sonnets. 3 Love's Labour's Lost, uniquely among the plays, shares the language of the Sonnets. Shakespeare's osewho devote themselves to the apparent dilemma in the Sonnets, rejection by hapless suggestion that Shakespeare beloved social superior, seems analogous to Fal- did not write Shakespeare are staff's predicament in the Henry IV plays, but .nsecret, perhaps unknowing resenters of his cog- the speaker of the Sonnets has little of Sir John nitive and imaginative power, The greatest of Falstaff's vitality, wiliness, and aplomb. Some of all converts to the Oxford lunacy was Dr. the Sonnets tum violently aside from life's lusts Sigmund Freud, who could not acknowledge and ambitions, but these revulsions are rendered that his masterly forerunner had been a rather only rarely in Hamlet's idiom. It is dangerous to ordinary young man out of Stratford-upon- seek illuminations for the plays in the Sonnets, Avon. The Earl of Oxford, .dead before though sometimes you can work back from the Shakespeare's. last twelve dramas had even dramatic to the lyric Shakespeare. The poetic been composed, left behind some common- achievement of the Sonnets has just enough of the . place lyrics, not worthy of rereading. Those playwright's uncanny power to show that we con- who resent Shakespeare always will be with us; front the same writer. but the awesome cogni- our only response should be to return to the. tive originality and psychological persuasiveness plays and the Sonnets. v. DEATH * * * * * * *.* * * * * * *'.* * • * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1. contemporary letrers or other writings noted his death; no one seems to have thought him CURST BE HE YT anyone of importance. MOVES My BONES No gravestone with his name marked his burial place. A grave in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford is identified as his because his wife By Richard F. Whalen and a daughter-with names on their stones->- were later buried on each side of an unnamed stone. The stone carries only four lines of dog- deafening silence marked the gerel cursing anyone who digs up the grave. . death of Will Shakspere, allegedly, Why his family and friends would bury a promi- if. the famous playwright, on April nent citizen in such obscurity is not known, 23, 1616, in Stratford-upon-Avon. No eulogies especially if he were also the popular poet and have been found, though poets often wrote playwright. He did get a monument later, but eulogies for the deceased. His son-in-law, an it, too, argues against him being the author. educated doctor who left a diary, makes no The monument on the wall of the church was mention of him at all, not even his passing. No sketched eighteen years after his death by

FOLIO 57 William Dugdale, a prolific, well-regarded will and testament, a detailed, three-page doc- author of illustrated histories. His rough sketch, ument that is totally devoid of anything literary, the first eyewitness record of the monument, it is the will of a businessman. In this utterly shows a half-length bust of a man with a down- pedestrian document, Will disposes of a silver turned, mustache, arms akimbo, and grasping a bowl, a silver plate, his sword, his clothes, and sack of grain or wool; there is no sign of pen, his second-best bed. There is no mention of any paper, or writing surface. Will Shakspere was a books, a surprising omission if he was the learned grain dealer. poet, or any manuscripts. The three signatures A century later the monument was refur- on the will's pages are in a crabbed handwriting bished, and today the bust depicts a man with that is probably not his, according to the will's an upturned mustache, goatee, and, befitting a custodian in London. Nothing in the will con- writer, pen and paper. The sack has become a nects Will Shakspere to the theater except an in- pillow, which oddly enough serves as a writing terlineation, a late addition in another hand surface. ' that leaves small sums for commemorative rings Dugdale's sketch, was preliminary to an to three men, his "fellows" in their acting com- engraving for his book, Antiquities of War- , pany. Seven years later two of them signed the wickshire (1656). His engraver followed it quite' dedication and a promotional letter to readers faithfully, depicting the same man grasping a in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, sack. Dugdale accepted the engraving as an yet it is almost certain that they did not write accurate depiction of the monument he saw and these document~. Stratfordian scholars see the sketched. The engraving remained unchanged hand of Ben Jonson in the texts. even into a second, revised and corrected edi- -The proponents of the traditional view tion of Dugdale's book. attempt to use the prefaces of the First Folio to Unsurprisingly, conventional biographies of connect the Stratford man to the works of Shakespeare almost nev~r show or discuss the Shakespeare-and this is, in fact, their only early engraving of the monument. The late plausible evidence~but the links are ambigu- Professor S. Schoenbaum, the dean of ous, almost coy. Avon comes first. Ben Jonson Shakespeare biographers, did recognize the alludes to Shakespeare as the "Sweet S~an of problem, and he fretted that the engraving is Avon" in his p~em extolling him as "the Soule "perplexing rather than helpful, for we recon- of the Age ... the wonder of our stage.'; Three cile it with difficulty" with today's monument. pages later Leonard Digges refers to "thy He concluded, incredibly, that either Dugdale Stratford Monirnent.?" Only if the separate or the engraver got it wrong. allusions are joined does Stratford-upon-Avon The monument's inscription is also a prob- emerge. That's the closest the First Folio comes , lem for Stratfordians because it fails to identi- to biography. It provides no birth or death f", him as the great poet and dramatist of dates, nor anything about the author's life, 'London. Two lines of Latin mention Nestor except to recognize him as a member of an act- , and Socrates, neither of whom were writers, ing company. and Virgil, when Ovid-whom everyone Oxfordians suggest an explanation for the two agrees had the greatest influence on allusions. If the 17th Earl of Oxford was the Shakespeare-would have been more appro- author, Jonson could have been alluding to the priate. Six lines in English ask the passerby to estate Oxford once owned on the Avon River, read "if thou canst"-an almost insulting not far from Stratford. Digges might have been reproach-s-whom death had placed within the alluding to the Stratford suburb of London, monument. But the body is not within the which would have been mote familiar to monument. The deceased is named simply Londoners than a small town on the Avon a "Shakspeare," and no first name is given to dis- four-day journey away. 'As it happens, Oxford tinguish him from all the other Shaksperes (in lived his final years on a country estate just out- whatever spelling) in Warwickshire. The epi- side the London suburb, and Digges's "moni- taph concludes, "Since all that he hath writ leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit." This obscure line in a most enigmatic epitaph * Strat/ardians point out that Digges'sstepfather was prob- is the only mention of writing, and nowhere is ably Thomas Russell, the overseer of Shakspere's will. In The GeniusofShakespeare,JonathanBate makes much the deceased described as a popular poet, play- ,of a note Digges inscribed in a 1613 edition of Lope de Ve- wright, or theater personage. Whoever com- ga'spoems comparing the Spanish poet to "our Will Shake- missioned the bust and whoever wrote the epi- speare," but this reference adds nothing to the debate. In taph pointedly avoided identifying Will fact, Digges, who was barn in London and educated at Ox- fard, seems closer to Oxfard's circle. In 1622, when the Shakspere of Stratford as the author of First Folio was being prepared, he dedicated a book to Shakespeare's works. Oxfard's son-in-law, the Earl of Montgomery, and the Yet another problem is Will Shakspere's last Earl's brother. '

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ APRIL 1999 ment," a word that meant a narration as well as lar years and admits fitting the plays "into the a memorial, could denote Oxford's writings time allowed by the span of Shakespeare's dra- there. These readings may seem bizarre, but matic career." writers at that time were notorious for ambigui- Stratfordians most often cite The Tempest'as ty and indirection. Jonson and Digges could evidence against Oxford's authorship. The defend either reading of "Avon" and "Stratford." play opens with a ship being battered by a There is no ambiguity, however, in the telling storm near an island, a detail, it is argued, that' fact that the Folio was dedicated to the earls of depends on descriptions of a shipwreck near Pembroke and Montgomery, who undoubtedly the island of Bermuda in 1609 written by financed and. engineered its publication. Sylvester Jourdain, who published a pamphlet Montgomery was married to. Susan Vere, in 1610, and , who dated. a Oxford's daughter, and his brother, Pembroke, letter concerning the event to an unnamed was lord chamberlain, the court official who lady the same year. Composition of The controlled the performance and publication of Tempest is thus dated 1611. It's ~ neat plays.Pembroke was also apatron of Jonson's, sequence of years. But even if Shakespeare and he arranged 'for an increase in Jonson's pen- needed to read descriptions of a storm at sea, sion just as the printers were beginning work on he need not have waited until 1610 for the Folio. . Jourdain and Strachey to provide them. There The evidence piles up, any single piece of were many such descriptions before Oxford which might be dismissed as a.coincidence, and died, among them accounts of a shipwreck at the cumulative effect argues powerfully that the Bermuda by Sir in 1591, a man from Stratford was not the author. storm at the start of Virgil's Aeneid, St. Paul's Everything points to Oxford. wreck at Malta, and even one in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. All provided storm details very similar to those in The Tempest; all were' hen Oxford died.in 1604 there in print long before O'xford died. As is always was an abrupt interruption in the case with Stratfordian attempts to prove (W:. . "first' editions" of Shakespeare's that the plays contain references to post-1604 plays. During the seven years before his death, events, this piece of chronological evidence publishers had issued twelve new plays, eight of collapses under scrutiny. which were the first to carry Shakespeare's by- line; five were issued in 1600 alone. This out- pouring of new plays stopped when Oxford died, erhaps the simplest and most and only four new plays appeared over the next appealing Stratfordian argument i~ twenty years. Finally, eighteen new plays, half :nthat a vast, implausible conspiracy the dramatic canon, appeared in the Folio in would have been required to hide Oxford's 1623. Stratfordians have no explanation for authorship. But there is no need to postulate this abrupt halt in publication, which makes such a conspiracy. Shakespeare's true identity perfect sense if Oxford was the author. The was probably an open secret; there would have Stratford man, by the way, was active in his been little reason to "reveal" Oxford as the various businesses until 1616. author after his death. To be 'sure, many ques- Oxford's death in 1604 has also been used tions remain to be answered, though far fewer against him. Stratford ian scholars argue that than plague the traditional view. Archives he died too soon, claiming that a dozen plays undoubtedly hold more information about were written after 1604, some in collaboration Oxford, but it is unlikely that much more will with John Fletcher. Dead men, they intone dra- be found about the Stratford man. For centuries matically, don't write plays. Yet there is no his- scholars have searched in vain for evidence that torical evidence to support the Stratfordia'n would prove his authorship; research on Oxford chronology: no diaries, no manuscripts, no let- has really only just begun. ' . ters. Fletcher could have "collaborated" by com- Today we are left with a choice. Which man pleting' a play left incomplete at the author's is the more likely author? The Stratford mer- death. There is no evidence that he and Shake- chant and theater investor, a simple man of speare worked together. Most responsible schol- mundane inconsequence? Or the recognized ars admit deep uncertainty about the dates of poet, patron of acting companies, and play- composition, and Professor Sylvan Barnet, ed- wright, known at the time to be writing under a itor of the Signet edition of the plays, says that pseudonym; 'a complex, mercurial nobleman in the exact dates of most of the works are "high- Queen Elizabeth's court whose life is mirrored ly uncertain." E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare in Shakespeare's works; a man with direct per- scholar and play chronologer, gaysthat there is sonallinks to the publishers of the First Folio? "much conjecture" dating the plays to particu- The choice seems obvious.

FOLIO 59 11. art" .of his writing and compares him to the greatest- poet and the greatest thinker of GOLDEN LADS AND antiquity, Virgil and Socrates. . There is no reference in Will's will to the CHIMNEy-SWEEPERS manuscripts of the plays that had made him both rich and famous. This is because he did not own them: they belonged to the King's By Jonathan Bate Men. Such had been the deal throughout his working life-a bit-part actor himself, his principal duty was to furnish his fellows with two or three new scripts each season, perhaps here are few sights more moving a comedy, a tragedy, and a history play. It was . than that of a dying man remem- left to Burbage, the company's leading player, Ubering his friends. Some time early and Heminges and Condell, its sharpest busi- in 1616, a well-to-do gentleman of Stratford- nessmen, to decide what to do with the work. upon-Avon dictated his will. It follows the Their goal was to keep as much as possible in legal formula of the time and mostly concerns manuscript as the exclusive property of the the disposition of real estate ("And all my theater company, because once a play was dis- barnes stables Orchardes gardens landes -tene- seminated in print, control of it would be lost. mentes & hereditamentes ... "). The beneficia- The demand in the literary marketplace for ries are mainly family members, but token gifts Shakespeare's writing was such that, by..one are bestowed upon other local gentlemen- means or another, about half his plays had Thomas Russel Esquire, one of the overseers of already found their way to the press, some- the will, is given five pounds, and Hamlet times in the form of 'what Heminges and Sadler, an especially long-standing friend, is Condell called "stolen and surreptitious left twenty-six shillings and eight pence for a copies." For a while, at least, it seemed best to . mourning ring. keep the written text of the other works out of . But tucked away in the middle of the will is the public domain. evidence of another life. As well as the But in 1619 a publisher named Thomas Stratford properties, there is a house in the Pavier, who had already laid his hands on a London theater district of Blackfriars. And number of the plays, appeared to be moving among those given money for memorial rings toward the production of what would advertise are "my fellows John Hemynges Richard itself as a complete Shakespeare. Burbage died Burbage & Henry Cundell." They were fel- that year, and so it was left to Heminges and lows in more than one sense: friends, but also Condell to act. They set about blocking fellow-actors and fellow-shareholders in a Pavier's plans and launching their own edition: highly successful business venture dating • It was a formidable task to gather together all back over twenty years. The business was a the texts and transform them from working theater company, established on a joint-stock theater scripts to coherently and consistently basis in 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain's Men presented printed works that would stand the and upgraded to the title of King's Men by test of time. Even once the copy was prepared, courtesy of James I on his accession to the it would still take a long time to print the English throne in 1603. The Stratford gentle- book-each individual letter of type had to be man was, 'of course, Master William set on the press by hand. Heminges and Shakespeare. Soon after dictating the will, he Condell had thirty-five plays in their posses- died and was buried in the parish church. A sion. At a late stage in the process, they made monument was erected, commemorating him room for a thirty-sixth, Troilusand Cressida. as a national writer, not a local businessman: They decided to exclude The Two Noble it shows him holding a pen,* and it is Kinsmen and Cardenio, Shakespeare's final two inscribed with a text that refers to the "living plays, written in collaboration with John Fletcher, his successor as the King's Men's in- house dramatist. Presumably they. felt that to * Anti-Stratfordians make much of an engraving of the have Included them in Shakespeare's works monwnentpublishedin 1656in The AntiquitiesofWar- wickshire.The) say that it shows Shakespeare holding a would have been a slight to Fletcher. The Two woolsack, notpenandpaper resting ona cushion. But this Noble Kinsmen was eventually included in the isa mistaken impression,deriving from the engraver's ol- collected plays of "Beaumont and Fletcher." terations to Sir William Dugdale's drawing. A recent re- The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher & examination of the original drawing reveals that Dugdale Shakespeare was later registered for publication definitely drew a tasseled cushion. Furthermore, a much more reliable early drawing of the monument,by George but is now lost. There is, however, ample evi- Venue, clearly showsthe pen andpaper. dence that it was a collaboration between the

,60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE IAPRIL 1999 two dramatists, undertaken shortly after the poems. For they knew what they were talking publication in 1612 of the English translation about. of Cervantes's . Oxfordians are strangely silent as to how Edward de Vere co- wrote a play with John Fletcher some eight ride of place in the Folio'sfront mat- years after his own death. ter is given to Ben Jonson's magnif- By 1623 the great book was finally ready. It :nicent tribute, "To the memory of my was printed' on large. paper in double- beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: columned "folio" format. A consortium of and what he hath left us." This great poem has publishers, headed by William and Isaac long been recognized as the chief stumbling block [aggard, had joined together in the publica- in the way of the Oxfordian case. William Shake- tion of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, speare of Stratford, an actor who lacked a uni- Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to versity education, and Ben Jonson of London, an the True OriginaU Copies. That latter phrase actor (and sometime bricklayer) who lacked a proclaims the accuracy of these texts, in con- university education, were intimate friends and trast to the unauthorized earlier editions of friendly rivals. They were swiftlyacknowledged as individual plays. the nation's two greatest livingdramatists.The best' The title page of-the 1623 Folio (known as response to skeptics who doubt that the Stratford the "First Folio," to distinguish it from the man could have written his playson the foun- reprints of 1632, 1663, and 1685) was adorned dation of nothing more than a grammar- with 's famous woodcut of school education ,isan invitation to ~~'I/ ' ,,' / the dramatist, his forehead domed like the read the complete plays of Ben Jon- IF "'\ ~ Globe, as if to gesture toward the name of his son'. They are vastly more acade- I.,it'· " ~ " theater and the universality of his genius. mic than Shakespeare's, yet they, -,iJ"11 \ Opposite the "cut" is a brief poem by too, were written on the foun- >"- Shakespeare's friend and fellow dramatist Ben dation of nothing more than a Jonson, attesting to the authenticity of the grammar-school education. image. Heminges and Condell contributed The thing is, Elizabethan both their address to the reader and a dedi~ato- grammar schools were very ry epistle to the Pembroke brothers, two noble good. They put our high earls who had assisted them in the blocking of schools to deep shame. the Pavier edition. Each of these documents explicitly states that WilliaJ;Tl Shakespeare, their colleague in the King's Men, was author of the plays. Special praise is given to his extra- uperb and inim- ordinary verbal facility, to what we would now Sitable as all is, it is mostly call his innate genius: "His' mind and hand an objective and phy- groups' and went together: And what he thought, he siological kind of power and the finest cultivated uttered with that easinesse, that wee have beauty the soul finds in roses and 'lilies and japonicas in plenty-and you have the scarce received from him a blot in his' papers." Shakspere-a stylesupreme- tally of Shakspere, The low The preliminary pages of the First Folio also ly grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short ofthe characters, mechanics, even include four commendatory poems. One of grandest sort, at any rate for the loyal henchmen-all in these, by a poet identified only by the initials fulfilling and satisfying mod- themselves nothing-serve "I.M.," makes the assumption-which was ern and scientific and demo- as capital foils to the aristoc- made by everyone in the period-that cratic American purposes. racy. Th~ comedies [exquisite "Master William Shake-speare?" was both an Think, not of growths as as they certainly are] bringing actor and the author of the works. Oxfordians forests primeval, or Yell~w. , in admirably portray'd com- reply that a universal assumption is not neces- stone geysers, or Colorado mon characters, have the sarily a truth. Could "I.M." and others have ravines, but of costly marble unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the diver- simply not been in the know? Could it have palaces, and palace rooms, tisement only of the elite of been that Master William was just the front and the noblest fixings and furniture, and noble owners the castle, and from its point' man, and that the plays were really written by and occupants to corre- of view. The comedies are Earl Edward? In response to such questions, spond-think of carefully altogether non-acceptable to the Stratford ian will point to the identity of built gardens from the beauti- America and Democracy. " • ' the authors of two of the other dedicatory fui but sophisticated garden- ing art at its best, with walks - Walt Whitman, * Several occurrences of the dramatist's name in the pre- and bowers and artificial ':A Thought on ShaksPere" liminary matter to the First Folio are hyphenated, but most lakes, and appropriate statue- [188 are not. The presence or absence of a hyphen is quite ar- 9J bitrary--a printer's vagary, not the momentous matter supposed by Oxfordians .

fOLIO, 61 Shakespeare acted in Jonson's plays. He was The Oxfordian account of the First Folio as godfather to one of Jonson's children. Jonson a gigantic put-up job presupposes a conspiracy described Shakespeare's writing habits in his extending not only through Heminges, private notebook- and wrote that "I loved the Condell, Jonson, and the rest of the London man, and do honour his memory (on this side theater world but also to Digges, Russell, and idolatry) as much as any. He was indeed hon- the family and friends who erected the est, and of an open, and free nature ... " In the Stratford monument. Equally conspiratorial is First Folio poem to the memory of his beloved the Oxfordian approach to the' plays them- friend, Jonson praised Shakespeare's plays to selves. Hamlet is approached via fantastically the skies' and referred to him' as the "Sweet cryptic supposed parallels between Lord Swan of Avon;" In the Through-the-Looking- Burghley and the character of Polan ius. More Glass world of the Oxfordians, this is not a ref- . obvious associations do not appeal to the erence to Stratford-upon-Avon! The support- Oxfordians' cloak-and-dagger mentality: plain ers of Edward de Vere ask us to suppose that old intuition inclines me to the view that the the whole body of preliminary matter in the dramatist who anglicized the name of the his- Folio was an elaborate hoax to cover tip the torical Prince of Denmark was a cer- true identity of the author of the plays. Setting tain Stratford gentleman who named his own aside the question of why there would be any son. after his old friend Hamlet Sadler. need for a cover-up So long after de Vere's "Hamlet'; was a distinctive Warwickshire death, why on earth would Jonson have con- name. In December 1579, a Katherine Hamlett tinued to perpetrate such a hoax in his private drowned. in the Avon at Tiddington, a village notebook? just outside Stratford. At the inquest, which Heminges and Condell are remembered was held in Stratford, there was some debate as with affection in the will of the Stratford man, to whether she had committed suicide, but it and they were editors of the First Folio. Jonson was concluded that she had died by accident knew the dramatist intimately in the context and would therefore be entitled to Christian of the London theater world but also linked burial. Sounds to me like the origin of him to the Avon. This ought to be evidence Ophelia's end. enough to lay all anti-Stratfordian claims to rest. But still another contributor to the Folio establishes an equally strong link that has, sur- ead the First Folio from cover to prisingly, been overlooked by previous contrib- cover and you will be filled with utors to the authorship debate. Opposite the wonder at the sheer range and "Catalogue of the severall' Comedies, nvariety of Shakespeare's style and vocabulary. Histories, and Tragedies contained in this The courtly language may make you think he Volume" there is a poem by Leonard Digges must have been a courtier. But then the coun- entitled "To the Memorie of the deceased try language will 'make you think he must have Authour Maister W. Shakespeare." Digges's been a countryman. In establishing the verses refer both to the stone of the author's author's identity, what you need to look for are tomb and to "thy Stratford Moniment." Digges, the quirky things. Courtly language may be then, knew that "the deceased Authour" lay learned by imitation. It is the small, seemingly beneath a stone in the aisle of Holy Trinity inconsequential details that constitute the Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, and that there unique fingerprint. The plays were written by was a monument to him and his work on the someone with an intimate knowledge of the adjacent wall. technical terminology of leather manufacture. .He knew this because he was brought up in a Sounds to me like the son of a glover, not the village just outside Stratford. His stepfather was son of a lord. In one of his loveliest songs the none other than Thomas Russell, overseer of dramatist writes, "Golden lads and girls all Shakespeare's will and legatee of his ceremonial must,/ As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." In sword. Here, then, is another decisive, hitherto Warwickshire vemacular dialect, a dandelion insufficiently recognized, link between the Strat- is a "golden lad" when in flower, a "chimney- ford man and the plays. Digges was proud of his sweeper" when ready to be blown to the wind. acquaintance with the great writer from his own This does not feel like a lord's memory. It locality. On a visit to Spain, he wrote a memo- belongs to a local country boy in a Warwick- randum to himself, noting that Lope de Vega was shire field.,And it is because of such lovely lit- admired as both a poet and a dramatist as "our tle things as this that my money and my repu- Will Shakespeare" was admired back in England tation will always be staked firmly on the for both his plays and his sonnets. As with Jon- friend of Jonson and Digges, "our Will," the son's private notebook, a personal note of this Stratford lad. There is too' little room for kind is a very special sort of evidence. doubt. lit

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I APRIL 1999