ROBERT B. REICH: CLINTON'S WAY WITH THE POOR HARPER'S MAGAZI E/ APRIL 1999 THE GHOST OF SHAKESPEARE Who, in Fact, Was the Bard? Harold Bloom Marjorie Garber Joseph Sobran ]onathan Bate Richard Whalen Mark Anderson 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: David 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? * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 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 England. 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 Harvard University and di- of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, and Co- rector of the Center for Literary and Cultural Patron, with Sir Derek Jacobi, of the De Vere Studies, She is the author of numerous books, in- Society of Great Britain. cluding Shakespeare's Ghost Writers and, most re- cently, Symptoms of Culture. MARK K. ANDERSON is a writer living in Northampton, Mass.·His book with the de Vere IRVIN MATUS is an independent schol~r and Bible scholar Roger Stritmatter, 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 Sterling Professor of preparation. Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. JOSEPH SOBRAN isa syndicated columnist and He is the author of more than twenty books, a contributor to several national publications. including The Western Canon 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 JONATHAN BATE 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 Titus Andronicus. 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 New Place 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 Folio 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 King Lear 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 Hamlet. 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 bailiff Warwickshire, 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 1590s, 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 Othello 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.