Contested Will (37 page)

It's inconceivable that any of the rival candidates for the authorship of the plays associated with the court – Francis Bacon, the Earls of Oxford, Derby and Rutland, Mary Sidney, to name but a few – could possibly have stood upon that stage at Whitehall Palace, publicly assuming the socially inferior role of player, and spoken these lines. And it is even harder, after reading these powerful and self-confident lines, to imagine the alternative, that the speaker, who claims to have written the play they just saw, was merely a mouthpiece for someone else in the room, and lying to both queen and court.

London's literary community at the turn of the seventeenth century was small and remarkably tight-knit. Authors shared publishers, patrons, and in a few instances even lodgings or writing quarters. They often worked collaboratively. Shakespeare frequently crossed paths with many of them. He co-wrote plays with several dramatists, acted in the plays of many others and would have heard still others pitch their plays to his company's sharers. Even as a lyric poet he didn't work in isolation, sharing his Sonnets, we are told, with his ‘private friends' and, along with such other ‘modern writers' as Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John
Marston, contributing poetry to a volume called
Love's Martyr
in 1601.

Then, as now, writers gossiped about each other. Fortunately, a good deal of what his fellow writers thought about Shakespeare has survived. Some wrote or spoke directly to each other about him, some chose to share their thoughts with a broader reading public and some privately jotted down their observations, never expecting them to be read by anyone else. Their comments about him stretch without interruption from his early years in the theatre to his death in 1616, and after.

The first notice of Shakespeare appears in a pamphlet, about which much remains unclear, attributed to a university-trained writer named Robert Greene. In 1592, Greene (or possibly his fellow playwright Henry Chettle, who was involved in the volume's posthumous publication) warned established dramatists that

The objection here is not so much to an actor aspiring to write plays, but to his confidence that he can do so better than they can, that he thinks himself ‘the only Shake-scene in a country'. Worse still, he does so ‘beautified with our feathers', that is, shamelessly appropriating the popular styles they had forged. A lot is packed into this attack, a good deal more than we can understand four hundred years later. But we are left with the impression of a veteran writer shrewdly taking the measure of an upstart he doesn't much like, even parodying a line from his recent
True Tragedy of
Richard Duke of York
(better known by its Folio title,
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth
), where Shakespeare, showing a fine ear for bombastic blank verse, had written, ‘O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide'.

The publication of Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
in 1593 and
Lucrece
in 1594 elicited far more flattering responses, especially
from aspiring poets. Shakespeare is also named for the first time in 1594 in the commendatory verses to
Willobie His Avisa
, which alludes to how ‘Shakespeare paints poor Lucrece['s] rape'. A year later, Cambridge scholar William Covell also praised ‘Sweet Shakspeare' for ‘his Lucrecia'. The pair of narrative poems soon won Shakespeare other admirers, none more devoted than young Richard Barnfield, whose ‘A Remembrance of Some English Poets' in 1598 provides the first extended critical appreciation of Shakespeare:

The rhymes are a bit wooden, but the message is clear: Shakespeare was a writer to be reckoned with.

Even as Barnfield was praising his lyrical gifts, Francis Meres was cementing Shakespeare's reputation as both poet and playwright in
Palladis Tamia
(1598), an invaluable account of what Shakespeare had achieved a decade into his career. Meres, just a year or so younger than Shakespeare, had earned degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford before moving to London by the mid-1590s to make a living as a writer and translator. The most exciting section of
Palladis Tamia
is his ‘Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets', in which Meres touches on eighty English writers. He is surprisingly astute about the great talent at work all around him, and his judgements have stood the test of time. No contemporary writer earned as much praise from Meres as Shakespeare.

Meres likens modern English writers to ancient Roman ones (so that, for instance, ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare'). When it came to finding a match for both Plautus and Terence, ‘the best for comedy and tragedy' among the Roman dramatists, he concludes that only Shakespeare ‘among the English is the most excellent in both
kinds for the stage' – and to underscore his point, Meres lists a dozen of Shakespeare's popular comedies and tragedies. Crushingly, for those who want to believe that the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare were one and the same writer, Meres names both and distinguishes between them, including both ‘Edward Earl of Oxford' and Shakespeare in his list of the best writers of comedy (while omitting Oxford from the list of leading tragedians). Meres also ranks Shakespeare among the best of English lyric poets as well as among those who are ‘the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love'.

Shakespeare caught the attention of both older and younger generations of writers. Around 1600, the veteran author and controversialist Gabriel Harvey wrote in his copy of Chaucer's
Works
about Shakespeare's growing popularity, as well as the split between what we might call highbrow and lowbrow responses to his works: ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
; but his
Lucrece
, and his
Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
, have it in them, to please the wiser sort.' In another private note, Harvey lists Shakespeare along with his old friend Edmund Spenser ‘and the rest of our flourishing metricians' – high praise from a university man.

Barnfield was not the only young poet captivated by Shakespeare's style. In 1599, John Weever paid homage to his source of inspiration in a full-length Shakespearean sonnet:

Weever praises both of Shakespeare's narrative poems as well as his plays, which he admits he doesn't know as well (‘
Romeo, Richard
; more whose names I know not'). Shakespeare attracted young admirers outside of London too, including the author or authors of the three anonymous
Parnassus
plays performed at St John's College, Cambridge between 1599 and 1601. In the second of these often slyly mocking scripts, Shakespeare is made much of. A character named Ingenioso says ‘We shall have nothing but
pure Shakespeare' – and refers to him again as ‘Sweet Mr Shakespeare!' – while another repeats that praise and adds: ‘I'll have his picture in my study at the court,' and concludes: ‘Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr Shakespeare.'

In the third and final
Parnassus
play, actors impersonating Burbage and Kemp make cameo appearances. After claiming that university-trained playwrights are second-rate, the actor playing Kemp adds: ‘Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson too.' In this up-to-date reference to the ‘Poets' War' raging at the time in the London theatres, Kemp also notes ‘that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit'. For these Cambridge undergraduates, Shakespeare was a living, breathing presence, one whose poetry they knew by heart, whose literary sparring they followed closely, and a copy of whose portrait they could imagine displaying in their rooms.

It wasn't just poets who took note. In 1605, in his
Remaines Concerning Britaine
, the leading historian of the day, William Camden, included Shakespeare among the greatest of contemporary writers: ‘what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William Shakespeare, and other most pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire'. Are we to suppose that as reputable a historian as Camden must have been in on the conspiracy as well – and willing to lie in print? Not long after, a twenty-one-year-old Scot named William Drummond arrived in London. He started reading a lot of Shakespeare that year, especially the sexy stuff:
Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost
and
Lucrece
. When in 1611 Drummond compiled a list of the books in his library, he included both
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, attributing both to ‘Schaksp.'. His copy of
Romeo and Juliet
survives and can be found
in the Edinburgh University Library; in it, Drummond supplies the author's missing name: ‘Wil. Sha.'. As Alan Nelson has shown, Drummond was not the only book-buyer at the time to identify Shakespeare by name. Their ranks include the author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, Robert Burton; the chief actor of the Admiral's Men, Edward Alleyn (who purchased a copy of the Sonnets); Richard Stonley, a Teller of the Exchequer under Queen Elizabeth; the Queen's nephew and godson, John Harrington, a major author in his own right; and Humphrey Dyson, who had extensive connections in the theatre world. If there were any place that we might hope to find these well-connected figures re-attributing Shakespeare's works to their ‘true' author it would surely be in such private documents. But each of these writers put down Shakespeare's name rather than someone else's because each one knew who Shakespeare was and didn't doubt that he had written these works.

It would be surprising if other dramatists had left no record of what they thought of Shakespeare. It is they, after all, who had worked most closely with him, seen his plays, seen him act, and taken his full measure. It wasn't until Shakespeare had nearly retired from the stage that they began to share their views, producing a nice symmetry: even as a veteran playwright like Robert Greene was responsible for Shakespeare's earliest notice, dramatists were prominent among those who would provide some of the last that he would read or hear about. John Webster, whose 1612 play
The White Devil
owes so much to Shakespeare that it often hovers between plagiarism and parody, was happy to acknowledge the debt to ‘the right happy and copious industry of Master Shake-speare, Master Dekker, and Master Heywood' and to ‘wish what I write may be read by their light'. Michael Drayton, fellow native of Warwickshire and a leading poet and dramatist, may have known Shakespeare longer than most. Born within a year of Shakespeare, Drayton didn't write about him until well after his death, when he praises him warmly:

Thomas Heywood, who had his hand in over two hundred plays over the course of a very long career, also had high praise for

The youngest rival playwright to write about Shakespeare was Francis Beaumont. An undated letter Beaumont wrote to his friend and mentor Ben Jonson, in verse – from ‘F.B.' to ‘B.J.' – survives and seems to have been written around 1608. In it, Beaumont alludes to several playwrights, including in passing their mutual rival, Shakespeare. The letter was only discovered in 1921 and is less well known than it ought to be:

Beaumont flatters both Jonson and himself by invoking Shakespeare as the great anomaly: an exemplary poet of Nature, one who exemplifies how far a writer can go, lacking sufficient learning and scholarship.

Jonson left the most personal and extensive tributes to Shakespeare. For many, his testimony alone resolves any doubts about Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. Their relationship dates at least as far back as 1598, when Jonson's breakthrough play –
Every Man in His Humour
– was purchased and staged by the Chamberlain's Men. Jonson proudly lists Shakespeare among
those who performed in it. While Shakespeare didn't act a year later in the follow-up,
Every Man out of His Humour
, he did have a role in Jonson's Roman tragedy
Sejanus
in 1603. In 1619, three years after Shakespeare's death, Jonson had occasion to speak about his old rival when visiting that other admirer of Shakespeare's work, William Drummond, in Scotland. Drummond kept extensive notes of Jonson's table-talk, including his judgement that ‘Shakespeare wanted art' and his disapproval of his rival's weak grasp of geography in
The Winter's Tale
: ‘Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwrack in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some hundred miles.'