Contested Will (23 page)

James was no stranger to Shakespeare. As a child he had been given a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb's
Tales from Shakespeare
, and even called his first story ‘A Tragedy of Errors'. James knew the plays and poems intimately, owned several editions of them, reviewed a dozen or so productions, had engaged with Shakespeare's plays in his fiction and frequently cites them in his letters, notebooks and criticism. There were few periods in his creative life when James didn't find himself responding in one way or another to Shakespeare or reflecting on the mystery of his genius. This was certainly the case in the early years of the twentieth century, when James was approaching sixty, at the pinnacle of his career, beginning to write both biography and autobiography, planning a trip to America where he would revisit his own birthplace, and fashioning what might be described as a modern-day equivalent to the First Folio – the landmark New York Edition of his novels and stories. Everywhere James turned, Shakespeare's example loomed large. Two years before he died, anxious about how biographers would treat his life and work, and having already condemned to the flames manuscripts and thousands of letters, James instructed his literary executor that there ought to be a provision in his will containing ‘a curse no less explicit than Shakespeare's own on any such as try to move my bones'.

James's earliest exposure to the authorship controversy may date back to the 1880s, when a New York neighbour and family friend, John Watts de Peyster, published
Was THE Shakespeare After All a Myth?
While James visited Shakespeare's birthplace several times, he didn't write much about the experience, though, as we shall see, he seems to have shared his brother William's opinion, expressed
in 1902, that ‘a visit to Stratford now seems to be the strongest appeal a Baconian can make':

The tension between the ‘spiritual' and the ‘sordid material' elements of the Shakespeare myth was becoming intolerable.

In June 1901, Henry James recorded in his notebook a story idea – ‘a little
donnée'
– inspired by an anecdote he had heard a fortnight earlier when visiting the Trevelyans at Welcombe, near Stratford. Lady Trevelyan had told him about ‘the couple who had formerly (before the present incumbents) been for a couple of years – or a few – the people in charge of the Shakespeare house – the Birthplace':

James immediately saw potential in this tale of bardolatry turned sour – ‘something more, I mean, than the mere facts. I seem to see
them – for there is no catastrophe in a simple resignation of the post, turned somehow, by the experience, into strange sceptics, iconoclasts, positive negationists.' As he turned the story over in his mind he imagined the pair as they ‘are forced over to the opposite extreme and become rank enemies not only of the legend, but of the historic
donnée
itself'. His story, as initially conceived, was to have a ending more shocking than the ‘intellectual and moral disgust' that led to their resignation in Lady Trevelyan's account: ‘Say they end by denying Shakespeare – say they do it on the spot itself – one day – in the presence of a big, gaping, admiring batch. Then they must go.'

James worked on ‘The Birthplace' the following summer and autumn before publishing it in his 1903 short-story collection
The Better Sort
. Around this time he was also discussing the authorship question with at least two friends, Manton Marble and Violet Hunt. Marble was an American friend and former editor of the
New York World
who had settled in Brighton. James wrote from London in early December 1902, thanking Marble for forwarding a copy of a book on the authorship controversy that they had already discussed: ‘I surmise that this valuable volume is the Webb volume of which we spoke – and I feel how I drop far below the argument in merely saying that I rejoice to possess it, and to be able to read it again in the light of your eulogy; also that I heartily thank you for it.' The ‘Webb volume' was almost surely Judge Thomas Ebenezer Webb's
The Mystery of William Shakespeare: A Summary of Evidence
, just published in England. Webb's style and conclusions sound downright Jamesian and it's easy to see the appeal the book held for him: ‘In spite of all that has been written, there is a vague feeling of unrest as to Shakespeare in the public mind … Whoever the great dramatist was, we can form no adequate conception of his mind.' Webb cautiously concludes that in the absence of persuasive external evidence, the plays themselves point to Bacon rather than Shakespeare; only in his case are ‘the works as we possess them and the man as we know him in strict accord'.

While Marble was clearly a committed Baconian, James himself demurred, insisting on his authority as a writer that it couldn't have been Bacon, for the man and the works were not, as Webb might put it, in ‘strict accord': ‘Still, all the same, take my word for it, as a dabbler in fable and fiction, that the plays and the sonnets were never written but by a Personal Poet, a Poet and Nothing Else, a Poet, who, being Nothing Else, could never be a Bacon.' Yet James was also unwilling to concede that Shakespeare wrote the plays. The gap between the poetry and what was known about the man from Stratford was simply too great: ‘The difficulty with the divine William is that he isn't, wasn't the Personal Poet with the calibre and the conditions, any more than the learned, the ever so much too learned, Francis.' James never quite explains what this calibre or these conditions might be, but promises Marble that ‘we will talk of these things again'.

Nine months later James was still wrestling with the problem. On 11 August 1903 he wrote to his friend Violet Hunt, who had recently visited him in Rye, challenging her defence of Shakespeare. Hunt's letter, which he describes as ‘ferocious', doesn't survive, so all we have to go by is James's paraphrase of one of her elaborate metaphors:

Again, it's not easy knowing exactly what James is arguing here, though it feels like the claim that Shakespeare ‘had no luggage' is another way of expressing what he had recently told Marble: that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the ‘calibre and the conditions' – presumably the background, training and equipment – to have
written the plays. In both letters James also seems to hint that Shakespeare's humble origins argue against his having been equipped with the right ‘wardrobe'.

Around the time that this exchange took place, James sent Hunt a book on the controversy, perhaps Webb's, in an effort to put more ‘pressure' on her defence of Shakespeare. It failed to have the desired effect, as we can tell from James's disappointed reply of 26 August. Hunt may have recoiled from the suggestion that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, but James, who admits to being haunted by the conviction that Shakespeare was a fraud, doesn't flinch at all from this possibility:

Having confessed, it seems, to a bit more than he was comfortable admitting (that colloquial and bracketed ‘“sort of ” haunted' speaks worlds), James stops himself at this point, and makes clear, in the qualified language typical of his thoughts on the subject, that this is as far as he is willing to go:

Bacon was an unlikely candidate, but Shakespeare unlikelier still.

When he published ‘The Birthplace' in 1903, James left out the public repudiation of Shakespeare's authorship that had been the climax of the version sketched out in his notebook. Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon, while clearly implied, are no longer
named. Morris Gedge, the central figure of the story, struggles to live with the lie that he is paid to tell, day in, day out, to the endless stream of pilgrims who come to visit the birthplace of the divine poet. He shares his growing doubts with his wife, who is terrified of losing their livelihood if he begins to tell the truth. Like his creator, Morris Gedge chooses to share his misgivings privately, unburdening himself to a young and sympathetic American pair, who wonder why the tourists won't just accept that ‘the play's the thing' and let ‘the author alone'. ‘“That's just what They won't do,”' Gedge excitedly confesses, ‘“nor let me do. It's all I want – to let the author alone. Practically” – he felt himself getting the last of his chance – “there is no author; that is for us to deal with.”'

Gedge masks his disenchantment and turns his performance into an art. His reputation soars and visitors flock to hear him. His wife is still panicked though, worried now that he has gone ‘too far' in his enthusiastic, if ironic, embrace of the myth. His confidants, the young American couple, return a year later, partly to see if what they have heard of Gedge's performance, given his doubts, could possibly be true. They conclude that his sardonic bardolatry is a thing of ‘genius', though they worry that he is in danger of being exposed and losing his job. Their concerns are misplaced: Gedge's act is so successful that receipts soar and his salary is doubled. He has managed to turn his radical doubts about the Bard into art – and is rewarded for it. And he can count on those with whom he has shared his scepticism to keep his secret safe.

James can hardly be blamed for subsuming his own beliefs to the higher interest of creating powerful fiction, which is why many more people now read ‘The Birthplace' than Twain's
Is Shakespeare Dead?
His story, as originally conceived, would have been more revealing biographically, but a less compelling work of fiction. The closest James comes to acknowledging an affinity with Gedge is in the prefatory remarks to the story that he supplied for the 1909 New York Edition, where James admits that the appeal of the
story was ‘the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the particular temple of our poor gentleman's priesthood' – implying that his own recent and disenchanting experience of visiting the divine Shakespeare's birthplace confirmed Gedge's. Again, this is as directly as James is willing to express himself, for posterity, on the subject. When James travelled to New York to visit his own birthplace near Washington Square in the spring of 1905, he discovered that the house in which he had been born six decades earlier had been ‘ruthlessly suppressed' and demolished – no trace left on which to affix even ‘a commemorative mural tablet'. It left James with the sensation he later describes in
The American Scene
of having been ‘amputated of half my history'.

James had another opportunity to address the Shakespeare mystery when he was invited by William Dana Orcutt to write an introduction to
The Tempest
. It was ‘the only one of Shakespeare's plays', Orcutt told him, ‘in which we directly touch Shakespeare the man, and I believe that your analysis of him would be a contribution to Shakespeariana'. Though buried in his work on the New York Edition, James agreed to do it: ‘I accept the commission with great anticipation,' he told Orcutt, before adding with uncharacteristic boldness, ‘I will challenge this artist – the monster and magician of a thousand masks, and make him drop them, if only for an interval.'

The essay captures a decisive moment in the history of the authorship debate, a moment when a set of shaky biographical (and autobiographical) assumptions had hardened into fact and collided with equally entrenched nineteenth-century beliefs about artistic genius. James took as a given a set of beliefs that had not existed a century earlier though by the late nineteenth century were almost universally shared: that
The Tempest
was Shakespeare's last play, most likely written specifically for a courtly occasion; that Prospero's renunciation of his art was a veiled allusion to Shakespeare's own; that the biographical facts confirmed that Shakespeare of Stratford was a man obsessed with
money; and that the play was a work of genius by an author at the height of his powers. James was also writing in the autumnal moment of the Baconian movement, when enough was now known about Francis Bacon's life, work and sensibility to fatally weaken his case, yet at a time when a convincing alternative for the authorship of the plays had yet to be advanced. It is no coincidence that his essay also marks the high-water mark in reading
The Tempest
as Shakespeare's most autobiographical play.