Contested Will (2 page)

Shakespeare scholars insist that Christopher Marlowe could
not have written plays dated as late as 1614 because he was killed in 1593, and that the Earl of Oxford couldn't have either, because he died in 1604, before
Lear, Macbeth
and eight or so other plays were written. Marlowe's defenders counter that Marlowe wasn't in fact killed; his assassination was staged and he was secretly hustled off to the Continent, where he wrote the plays now known as Shakespeare's. Oxfordians respond that despite what orthodox scholars say, nobody knows the dates of many of Shakespeare's late plays, and in any case Oxford could easily have written them before his death. Shakespeareans reply that there is not a shred of documentary evidence linking anyone else to the authorship of the plays; advocates of rival candidates respond that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence – and, moreover, many reasons to doubt Shakespeare's claim. Positions are fixed and debate has proven to be futile or self-serving. The only thing that has changed over time is how best to get one's message across. Until twenty years ago it was mainly through books and articles; since then the Web has played an increasingly crucial role. Those who would deny Shakespeare's authorship, long excluded from publishing their work in academic journals or through university presses, are now taking advantage of the level playing field provided by the Web, especially such widely consulted and democratic sites as Wikipedia.

My interest, again, is not in what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why they think it. No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world in which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story. Groups are locked in opposition, proponents gravitating to their own kind, reinforced in their beliefs by like-minded (and potentially closed-minded) communities. There are those who believe in intelligent design and those who swear by theories of evolution; there are those who believe that life begins at conception and those who don't. Then there are those whose view of the world is shaped for better or worse by conspiracy, so while most
are convinced that astronauts walked on the moon, some believe that this was staged. More disturbingly, there are those who survived the Holocaust and those who maintain it never happened. I don't believe that truth is relative or that there are always two sides to every story. At the same time, I don't want to draw a naïve comparison between the Shakespeare controversy and any of these other issues. I think it's a mistake to do so, except insofar that it too turns on underlying assumptions and notions of evidence that cannot be reconciled. Yet unlike some of these other controversies, I think it's possible to get at why people have come to believe what they believe about Shakespeare's authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book.

I should say at this point that I happen to believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, a view left unshaken by the years of study I have devoted to this subject (and toward the end of this book I'll explain in some detail why I think so). But I take very seriously the fact that some brilliant writers and thinkers who matter a great deal to me – including Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Mark Twain – have doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. Through their published and unpublished reflections on Shakespeare I've gained a much sharper sense of what is contested and ultimately at stake in the authorship debate. Their work has also helped me unravel a mystery at the heart of the controversy: why, after two centuries, did so many people start questioning whether Shakespeare wrote the plays?

There's another mystery, often and easily confused with this one, that I cannot solve, though it continues to haunt both Shakespeareans and sceptics alike: what led to the playwright's emergence (whoever one imagines he or she was) as such an extraordinary writer? As for the formative years of William Shakespeare – especially the decade or so between his marriage to Anne Hathaway in the early 1580s and his reappearance in London in the early 1590s, by now an aspiring poet and playwright – they are called the ‘Lost Years' for a reason. Was he a lawyer, a
butcher, a soldier, or teaching in a Catholic household in Lancashire during those years, as some have surmised? We simply don't know. No less inscrutable is the ‘contested will' to which the dying Shakespeare affixed his signature in 1616. The surviving three-page document makes no mention of his books or manuscripts. And, notoriously, the only thing that Shakespeare bequeathed in it to his wife Anne was a ‘second best bed'. Not only the nature of their marriage but also the kind of man Shakespeare was seems bound up in this bequest. Was he referring, perhaps, to the guest bed or alternatively to the marital bed they had shared? Was he deliberately treating his wife shabbily in the will or did he simply assume that a third of his estate – the ‘widow's dower' – was automatically her share? We don't know and probably never shall, though such unanswerable questions continue to fuel the mystery surrounding his life and work.

With these challenges in mind, this book first sets out to trace the controversy back to its origins, before considering why many formidable writers came to question Shakespeare's authorship. I quickly discovered that biographers of Freud, Twain and James weren't keen on looking too deeply into these authors' doubts about Shakespeare. As a result, I encountered something rare in Shakespeare studies: archival material that was unsifted and in some cases unknown. I've also revisited the life and works of the two most influential figures in the controversy, the allegedly ‘mad' American woman, Delia Bacon, who first made the case for Francis Bacon, and the schoolmaster J. T. Looney, the first to propose that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays. For a debate that largely turns on how one understands the relationship of Shakespeare's life and works, there has been disappointingly little attention devoted to considering how Bacon's and Looney's experiences and worldviews determined the trajectory of their theories of authorship. Scholars on both sides of the debate have overlooked a great deal by taking these two polemicists at their word.

More than any subject I've ever studied, the history of the
authorship question is rife with forgeries and deception. I now approach all claims about Shakespeare's identity with caution, taking into account when each discovery was made and how it altered previous biographical assumptions. I've also come to understand that the authorship controversy has turned on a handful of powerful ideas having little directly to do with Shakespeare but profoundly altering how his life and works would be read and interpreted. Some of these ideas came from debates about biblical texts, others from debates about classical ones. Still others had to do with emerging notions of the autobiographical self. As much as those on both sides of the controversy like to imagine themselves as independent thinkers, their views are strongly constrained by a few powerful ideas that took hold in the early nineteenth century.

While Shakespeare was a product of an early modern world, the controversy over the authorship of his works is the creation of a modern one. As a result, there's a danger of reading the past through contemporary eyes – from what Shakespeare's contested will really meant to how writers back then might have drawn upon personal experiences in their works. A secondary aim of this book, then, is to show how Shakespeare is not our contemporary, nor as universal as we might wish him to be. Anachronistic thinking, especially about how we can gain access to writers' lives through their plays and poems, turns out to be as characteristic of supporters of Shakespeare's authorship as it is of sceptics. From this vantage, the longstanding opposition between the two camps is misleading, for they have more in common than either side is willing to concede. These shared if unspoken assumptions may in fact help explain the hostility that defines their relationship today, and I'll suggest that there may be more useful ways of defining sides in this debate. I'll also argue that Shakespeare scholars, from the late eighteenth century until today, bear a greater responsibility than they acknowledge for both the emergence and the perpetuation of the authorship controversy.

The evidence I continued to uncover while researching this book made it hard to imagine how anyone before the 1840s could argue that Shakespeare didn't write the plays. This working assumption couldn't easily be reconciled with the received history of the controversy, one that, as noted earlier, goes back to James Wilmot in 1785, or at least to James Cowell in 1805. Aware of this uncomfortable fact, I held off until the very end of my research on consulting the Cowell manuscript in the Durning-Lawrence Library at Senate House Library in London. Before I called it up I knew as much as others who had read about this unpublished and rarely examined work. It was one of the jewels of a great collection of materials touching on the life and works of Francis Bacon, assembled at great expense by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, and, after his death in 1914, by his widow, Edith Jane Durning Smith, who shared his keen interest in the authorship controversy. Upon her death in 1929, the collection was bequeathed to the University of London, and by 1931 the transfer of materials was complete. A year later the leading British scholar Allardyce Nicoll announced in the pages of the
Times Literary Supplement
in an essay entitled ‘The First Baconian' the discovery of Cowell's lectures. It was Nicoll who put the pieces of the puzzle together, relying heavily on a biography written in 1813 by Wilmot's niece, Olivia Wilmot Serres. Serres's account, while not mentioning her uncle's meeting with Cowell or his Shakespeare research, nonetheless confirmed that Wilmot was a serious man of letters, had lived near Stratford, was an admirer of Francis Bacon and had indeed burned his papers. Nicoll was less successful in tracing James Corton Cowell, concluding that he ‘seems to have been a Quaker' on the grounds that ‘he was in all probability closely related to the well-known Orientalist E. B. Cowell, who was born at Ipswich in 1828'.

Armed with this information, I turned to the lectures themselves, which made for gripping reading – how Cowell began as a confirmed Shakespearean, how his fortuitous encounter with Wilmot changed all that, how Wilmot anticipated a widely accepted reading of
Love's Labour's Lost
by a century, and perhaps
most fascinating of all, how Wilmot uncovered stories of ‘odd characters living at or near Stratford on the Avon with whom Shakespeare must have been familiar', including ‘a certain man of extreme ugliness and tallness who blackmailed the farmers under threat of bewitching their cattle', as well as ‘a legend of showers of cakes at Shrovetide and stories of men who were rendered cripples by the falling of these cakes'. I thought it a shame that Cowell had not taken even better notes.

And then my heart skipped when I came upon the following words: ‘It is strange that Shakespeare whose best years had been spent in a profitable and literary vocation should return to an obscure village offering no intellectual allurement and take up the very unromantic business of a money lender and dealer in malt.' The sentence seemed innocuous enough; scholars and sceptics alike have often drawn attention to these well-known facts about Shakespeare's business dealings. But having long focused more on
when
than on
what
people thought what they did about Shakespeare, I remembered that these details were unknown in 1785, or even in 1805. Records showing that Shakespeare's household stockpiled grain in order to produce malt were not discovered until the early 1840s (and first published in 1844 by John Payne Collier). And it wasn't until 1806 that the Stratford antiquarian R. B. Wheler made public the first of what would turn out to be several documents indicating that Shakespeare had engaged in moneylending (in this case, how in 1609 Shakespeare had a Stratford neighbour named John Addenbrooke arrested for failing to repay a small sum). While an undelivered letter in which another neighbour asks Shakespeare for a loan had been discovered in the late eighteenth century, the scholar who found it chose not to announce or share his discovery; it remained otherwise unknown until 1821. So Shakespeare's grain-hoarding and moneylending didn't become biographical commonplaces until the Victorian era.

The word ‘unromantic' in the same sentence should have tipped me off; though there was a recorded instance of its use before
1800, it wasn't yet in currency at the time Cowell was supposedly writing. Whoever wrote these lectures purporting to be from 1805 had slipped up. I was looking at a forgery, and an unusually clever one at that, which on further examination almost surely dated from the early decades of the twentieth century. That meant the forger was probably still alive – and enjoying a satisfied laugh at the expense of the gulled professor –
when
Allardyce Nicoll had announced this discovery in the pages of the
TLS
. The forger had brazenly left other hints, not least of all the wish attributed to Cowell that ‘my material may be used by others regardless whence it came for it matters little who made the axe so that it cut'. And there were a few other false notes, including one pointed out by a letter-writer responding to Nicoll's article, that Cowell had got his Warwickshire geography wrong. It also turns out that Serres, the author of Nicoll's main corroborative source (the biography of Wilmot) was a forger and fantasist. Much of her biographical account (including the burning of Wilmot's papers) was invented and she later changed her story, asserting she was actually Wilmot's granddaughter and the illegitimate daughter of King George III. Her case was even discussed in parliament and it took a trial to expose her fraudulent claim to be of royal descent. So Olivia Serres, at the source of the Cowell forgery, would also prove to be the pattern of a Shakespeare claimant: a writer of high lineage mistaken for someone of humbler origins, whose true identity deserved to be acknowledged.