11.

The Man from Stratford

One autumn there was a curious announcement when we returned for the new school year. Mr Frank Dawson, who taught me for O-Level Latin and Greek, had changed his name by deed poll. He would now be LEMA instead of FD. Lewis Edward Mithras Alexis. In our first lesson of term, he explained the names. Lewis was the anglicized form of Ludwig, chosen because Beethoven was the greatest of all composers. Mithras because he was a believer in the Roman mystery cult of that bull-slaying god. Alexis because the greatest of ancient poets, Virgil, devoted his second Eclogue to a lovely boy of that name. I am not sure that a schoolmaster could advertise this predilection today. And what of Edward, which seemed a mundane choice in such company? It was in honour of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the ‘true’ author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

LEMA would shuffle into class wearing a long grey and not very clean raincoat. To picture his pale face and long black hair, you only have to visualize Alan Rickman as Snape in the Harry Potter films. ‘After God,’ he told us, quoting the French novelist Alexandre Dumas, ‘Shakespeare has created most.’ He had a quick wit. ‘Or, as Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn said on first leafing through the collected works, Fantastic! And it was all written with a feather!’ But the mere grammar-school boy from rural Warwickshire: how could he have known enough about courts and kings to create Hamlet and Lear, about Italy to have written The Merchant of Venice, about war to have written Henry V? Where did he get his vast vocabulary and his knowledge of the law? Aren’t the surviving documents about his life mysteriously silent about his plays?

LEMA was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He believed that Nero was a Christian emperor and that Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun, was actually Moses. But because I admired him as a teacher, I wanted to believe him. I started reading books such as Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn’s This Star of England, which argued that the lovely boy of the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (which may well have been true), offspring of an illicit union between the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth (which was news to my history teachers). Then there was Broadway press agent Calvin Hoffman’s The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare’, which proposed that Christopher Marlowe wasn’t really killed in a brawl over the bill for the booze in a house in Deptford, but that a dead sailor was substituted in his place and he was whisked away to Italy by the secret service, from where he wrote the plays and sent them back to be passed off as Shakespeare’s. All these theories did seem a lot more exciting than the idea of a middle-class grammar-school boy going to London and making some money in the nascent entertainment industry, then returning home to quiet retirement in his native town.

It is, of course, the first question I am always asked by taxi drivers when they ask me what I do. ‘Shakespeare professor, are you, guv? So tell me, did he write all those plays himself?’

The doubting began two and a half centuries after Shakespeare’s death, with an American woman called Delia Bacon. She proposed that the plays were really written by … the philosopher and lawyer Sir Francis Bacon, a proper scholar and courtier. But the unfortunate Delia couldn’t find any evidence, so she attempted to dig up Shakespeare’s grave in the hope of finding a secret message from Sir Francis. Not long after, her family reported with regret that she had been ‘removed to an excellent private asylum at Henley-in-Arden – in the forest of Arden’. Eight miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, as it happens.

Then along came an Edwardian schoolmaster with a new theory: Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the 17th Earl of Oxford. That the Earl was an enthusiastic and sometimes violent pederast is not necessarily an impediment to his candidacy. A little local difficulty comes with his death in 1604, before half the plays were written. He would also have struggled to collaborate with the actors during the long period when he was in exile abroad for having committed the unpardonable offence of breaking wind in front of Queen Elizabeth. The story is told by the biographer John Aubrey, who also happens to have had reliable information that the actor from Stratford was indeed the author of the plays attributed to him:

This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travel [for] 7 years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, ‘My Lord, I had forgot the Fart’.

The schoolmaster who pioneered the ‘Oxfordian’ theory was called J. Thomas Looney, though he liked to pronounce it ‘Loney’.

As I investigated the ‘Authorship Controversy’, I found that no shortage of candidates had been put forward at one time or another: 17th Earl of Oxford, 8th Lord Mountjoy, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, 6th Earl of Derby, 5th Earl of Rutland, 2nd Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Countess of Pembroke, Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. These names seemed to have something in common. Did it all boil down to snobbery, the conviction that such high genius could not have come from a lowly place? Americans, including Mark Twain of all people, have often taken this line, which is curious in a country where it’s supposed to be possible to go from a log cabin to the White House.

Conspiracy theorists dismiss ‘the Man from Stratford’ as an imposter. They suppose that he was an illiterate actor mouthing some nobler man’s words. It wasn’t quite clear how the actor could have learned his parts if he couldn’t read.

I stuck with the Oxford theory for as long as I could, even trying to convince my college tutor. By then, though, I was only doing it to be contrary. The benefit of my dalliance with heresy was that it had made me look very hard at the evidence. This proved invaluable when, many years later, I was accosted by Prince Charles during the interval of a performance of Henry V: ‘I wonder if you can help me out? We always have a family row at Christmas because my father doesn’t believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays. Can you send me a single page laying out the key facts, so that I can win the argument next time?’

This is what I told him.

In his will, Master William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon left legacies to his fellow-actors John Hemmings and Henry Condell. They in turn edited the First Folio of his collected works, referring there to his writing techniques and their close friendship with him. The First Folio also includes poems by Ben Jonson attesting to the authentic likeness of the engraving of Shakespeare on the title page, to Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and to his coming from Stratford (Sweet swan of Avon). In both his notebook and his conversations with the Scottish poet Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson spoke (sometimes critically) about Shakespeare, who acted in his plays, as a writer.

Many other contemporaries also referred to Shakespeare as a poet and playwright. They range from Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels at court, to other dramatists such as Francis Beaumont and Thomas Heywood, to Leonard Digges, a family friend of Shakespeare’s who was also a writer himself. Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church represents him as an author and refers to his literary greatness. It was seen by a visiting poet soon after his death, negating the claim of some conspiracy theorists that it was altered at a later date.

How did a man who did not go to university write such ‘learned’ plays? They are actually much less learned than the plays of his contemporaries George Chapman and Ben Jonson, neither of whom went to university. The simple fact is that the education in Latin language and literature that Shakespeare received at the Stratford grammar school meant that by the age of twelve he would have had a command of the discipline as good as that of a university Classics student today.

How did he know about courts, how see into the minds of dukes and kings? Through his reading and through witnessing the court by acting there. Payments to him for writing plays for court performance survive in the Chamber accounts of the royal household. His knowledge of Italy? Better to ask how someone who had been to Italy could write two plays set in Venice and never mention a canal. The real questions should be: how could anyone but a glover’s son have put in his plays so much accurate technical detail about leather manufacture and the process of glove-making? And how could anyone but a professional actor have filled his plays with inside information about the nitty-gritty of making theatre?

The truth of the Authorship Controversy is that it is an offshoot of the cult of Shakespeare that emerged with the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. No one had any doubts about his identity before then. But once you turn someone into a god, sects and heretics are bound to emerge.

There is a rather glorious lunacy to the whole thing. No one has exposed this better than the word-magician Vladimir Nabokov. Reading his second English-language novel, Bend Sinister, when I was at university, I warmed to his account of how anti-Stratfordianism has the same allure as men of bizarre genius, big-game hunters, chess players, prodigiously robust and versatile lovers and the radiant woman taking her necklace off after the ball. The protagonist, a philosopher called Adam Krug, and his friend Ember consider the authorship question from a strictly epistemological point of view:

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one’s awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one’s personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth. One day Ember and he had happened to discuss the possibility of their having invented in toto the works of William Shakespeare, spending millions and millions on the hoax, smothering with hush money countless publishers, librarians, the Stratford-on-Avon people, since in order to be responsible for all references to the poet during three centuries of civilization, these references had to be assumed to be spurious interpolations injected by the inventors into actual works which they had re-edited; there still was a snag here, a bothersome flaw, but perhaps it might be eliminated, too, just as a cooked chess problem can be cured by the addition of a passive pawn.

Ember then comes up with a fantastically perverse reading of Hamlet in which

The real plot of the play will be readily grasped if the following is realized: the Ghost on the battlements of Elsinore is not the ghost of King Hamlet. It is that of Fortinbras the Elder whom King Hamlet has slain. The ghost of the victim posing as the ghost of the murderer – what a wonderful bit of farseeing strategy, how deeply it excites our intense admiration!

There was nothing to stop Nabokov from inventing a character who seeks to reinvent Hamlet as a cypher in the manner of his own novels, which are full of doubles and shadows, poses and stratagems (Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty in Lolita, the Twelfth Night-like twinning of the narrator V and his biographical subject in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and many more). And since there is no way of proving definitively that what you think of as the real world is not a dream, that this morning was not your first morning, that the past is not a fiction, and that the plot of Hamlet is not a hoax, you can’t prove definitively that the identity of Shakespeare is not a hoax.

Before writing Bend Sinister, Nabokov read a classic conspiratorial treatise, Bacon is Shake-speare by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, BART., B.A., LL.B., ETC. Following in his footsteps, I ventured into Durning-Lawrence’s book:

In Camden’s ‘Remains’ of 1616 in the Chapter on Surnames, because the head ornament is printed upside down, we may be perfectly certain that we shall find some revelation concerning Bacon and Shakespeare.

Accordingly on p. 121 we find the name of a village ‘Bacon Creping.’ There never was a village called ‘Bacon Creping.’ And on page 128 we read ‘such names as Shakspeare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe.’ In referring to the great Cryptographic book, we shall realise the importance of this conjunction of names.

I love the assurance of we may be perfectly certain.

Durning-Lawrence then introduces his prize exhibit, a facsimile of the title page of the great Cryptographic book, a sixteenth-century treatise by Gustavus Selenus (a pseudonym, naturally) entitled Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae. He invites the reader to look closely at its triptych of images.

Nabokov pillages and dilates upon Durning-Lawrence’s analysis. Ember has the images on his wall, allegedly annotated in the hand of a contemporaneous scholiast:

Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail … Note also the legend: ‘Ink, a Drug.’ Somebody’s idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means ‘bacon’ in several Slavic languages.

Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman) removing from the head of the gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: ‘Ham-let, or Homelette au Lard.’

Finally, number three has a road, a traveller on foot (wearing the stolen shapska) and a road sign ‘To High Wycombe.’

Public domain image from the author’s collection

Never mind that Nabokov has divided the top-left image into two and ignored the one on the top right, while also neglecting to point to the shaking spear in the sky, facing left, in the heraldic position known as bend sinister, just like the spear on Shakespeare’s coat of arms, which was reproduced on the covers of the old Temple Edition, bound in maroon limp leather, some volumes of which Nabokov took from his father’s library when fleeing St Petersburg at the time of the October Revolution. You must be convinced by now. Why have you not seen before that Hamlet sounds like Homelette au Lard, which is French for Bacon Omelette? After his tour de force of decipherment, Durning-Lawrence could proudly proclaim:

The hour has come when it is desirable and necessary to state with the utmost distinctness that

BACON IS SHAKESPEARE.

That should have been the rousing conclusion to the book, but he couldn’t resist adding a chapter in which his theory was ‘Proved mechanically in a short chapter on the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus’. This involved converting the longest word in Shakespeare into numbers (A=1, B=2 etc.), reaching a total of 287, and since ‘Honorificabilitudinitatibus’ is the 151st word on page 136 of the First Folio and 151 + 136 = 287, this proves (‘mechanically’) that Bacon is Shakespeare. Oh yes, and that the ludicrously voluminous word conjured by the clown Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost contains an anagram of Bacon’s name (in Latin). On reading this, I could think only of Polonius:

I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,

What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?

Being the most playful of writers, Nabokov flirted with anti-Stratfordianism himself, yet in the very next paragraph of Bend Sinister he both explains why the Authorship Controversy became possible and why, word games aside, we should not have any doubt as to Shakespeare’s true identity:

His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner. His penmanship is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand. On the wet morning of November 27, 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagspere and she is a Hathway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

Plays for the Elizabethan stage were not autobiographical confessions exposing court intrigue and secret love affairs, as the Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians believe. Shakespeare did not fill his works with portraits of his acquaintances (though he occasionally made joking references to members of his own acting company and to friends such as his schoolmate Richard Field, who became the publisher of his first printed work). What we can unearth in the plays is better described as the experiential DNA of the author. This is Nabokov’s point. Shakespeare was always a countryman, as is revealed by the precision of his country language: the fact that the Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose.

Disappointing as it is to acknowledge, the mighty dramatist was provincial and middle-class, and his life was distinctly uneventful. His rival Christopher Marlowe moved in a world of espionage, thuggery, buggery and skulduggery. His collaborator George Wilkins had a second career as a brothel-keeper, with a history of beating up the girls who worked for him. As for Ben Jonson, both friend and rival, he fought in the Dutch wars, killed a fellow-actor in a street brawl and was thrown into prison for writing subversive plays.

Will Shakespeare was neither a fabulous aristocrat nor a flamboyant gay double agent. He was a grammar-school boy from an obscure town in middle England, whose main concern was to keep out of trouble and to better himself and his family. He came from a perfectly unremarkable background, which is the most remarkable thing of all.

Maybe it was because Shakespeare was a nobody that he could become everybody. He speaks to every nation in every age because he understood what it is to be human. He didn’t lead the life of the pampered aristocracy. He was a working craftsman who had to make his daily living and face the problems that we all face every day. His life was ordinary; it was his mind that was extraordinary. His imagination leaped to distant lands and ages past, through fantasy and dream, yet it was always rooted in the real.

He shows us what it is to be human. But what was it like being Shakespeare?

Spring 2009. The message – fountain pen, black ink, flamboyant hand – arrived out of the blue on a thick white postcard embossed with the name Simon Callow. He was familiar with my work. I might have been familiar with his one-man play The Mystery of Charles Dickens, in which he told the story of the author’s life, interweaving it with dramatized readings from the novels. He had long wanted to do something similar with Shakespeare. Might I be interested in writing the script?

We met in a little private members’ club tucked into a Dickensian alleyway near Charing Cross station. He explained how, as a drama student in Belfast, he had become dresser to Micheál Mac Liammóir. Born Alfred Willmore in London, Liammóir had reinvented himself as an Irishman and, together with his partner Hilton Edwards, founded the famous Gate Theatre in Dublin, where Orson Welles made his stage debut. Liammóir played Iago in Welles’s film of Othello and Poor Tom in the extraordinary 1953 live telecast of a stripped-down King Lear, directed by the young Peter Brook, with Welles as Lear (not yet forty years old, but with Citizen Kane behind him, he was guarded throughout by the Inland Revenue Service, who took his wage as a contribution to his mountain of unpaid tax). In this version, Edmund and Edgar were omitted and Tom was a real madman, a role which Liammóir executed with panache. Then for the last twenty years of his life he toured his pioneering one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar, which dresser Callow, with some temerity but ultimately huge satisfaction, revived in London twenty years after the actor’s death. It was, Simon explained, a kind of living biography. The actor does not pretend to be Wilde; rather, he evokes him through anecdotes from his life, revelations of his character and his creative language. The aim was to move seamlessly between narrative and quotation in a way that finally began to bring the subject into the room.

‘That’s all very well for Wilde and Dickens,’ I said, ‘where we have wonderful stories about their lives, but the surviving documents that give us Shakespeare’s biography aren’t exactly dramatic, are they? All those petty legal disputes and property deals in Stratford, the odd payment for performance at court. How are we going to make theatre out of that? Shakespeare didn’t write about his own childhood in the way that Dickens did in Copperfield.’

‘We’re going to mine the plays for little details that reveal his inner life. Childhood – where are the child characters in Shakespeare?’

‘I get it,’ I replied. ‘Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, that lovely scene with Hermione and her ladies.’

‘I’d love to play Mamillius,’ boomed Simon, banging on the lunch table.

I warmed to the idea: ‘And we could link the death of Mamillius, Leontes’ only son, to that of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son. Then maybe bring in Queen Constance, grieving over the loss of her child in King John.’

‘I don’t know that one,’ said Simon, ‘but I certainly want to play some female parts. What I need you to do is find me a structure.’

Simon playing many parts. It came to me. Shakespeare’s own structure for a life. ‘One man in his time plays many parts.’

‘The Seven Ages?’ Simon looked doubtful. ‘Isn’t that a bit obvious? Gielgud did it. The Ages of Man, based on that anthology by Dadie Rylands.’

‘Obvious, but effective. Wouldn’t you like to outdo Gielgud? He just used Jaques’s speech as a peg on which to hang his beautifully spoken monologues. We use it to tell a story. Map it on to Shakespeare’s life. The schoolboy: his grammar-school education, that scene with the Latin lesson and the Welsh schoolmaster in Merry Wives of Windsor. The lover: the sonnets. The soldier: the history plays. Second childhood: Justice Shallow, Lear.’

‘Definitely Lear. You have it, my boy.’ Then he turned his head, winked, and directed my gaze across the room to a table where fellow-actor Sir Derek Jacobi was holding forth. ‘You see, what I want to do is show those who have gone over to the dark side, like my good friend, that the plays could only have been written by the Man from Stratford.’

‘The Man from Stratford?’ I said: ‘Good title.’ It pained me that Jacobi – the most glorious Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing – had become an Oxfordian. And that Bacon was the favoured candidate of Mark Rylance, whose pyjama-clad Hamlet with a very antic disposition had finally reconciled me to the play. (When the production was taken to the Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, an inmate said to him afterwards, ‘You were really mad – take it from me, I should know, I’m a loony.’) How could such consummate Shakespearean actors not see that only an actor could have written the plays? I liked the idea of a secret mission to blow the anti-Stratfordians out of the water.

I was living near Stratford-upon-Avon at the time, so had local atmosphere ready to hand. I began my draft on the train home to Warwickshire. I finished it in three weeks and sent it to Simon. He telephoned. ‘I’m in a hotel room in Istanbul, writing about Orson. I’ve devoured your script. It’s gorgeous. I could do it tomorrow. I wouldn’t want to change a single word.’ Eighteen comprehensive rewrites later, we finally reached the stage, touring England and playing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Working on the play in the rehearsal room was my best Shakespearean education since school. I saw things I had not fully seen before. How every line of Henry V’s exhortation to his men uses the actor’s body as much as his words:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage,

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect:

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon, let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

To his full height.

How the plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream most exquisitely, were grounded in Warwickshire fields and steeped in the magic of country lore, showing that Shakespeare truly was the Man from Stratford. What would an aristocrat have known of the nine-men’s morris filled up with mud or elves that Creep into acorn cups and hide them there or the brownie that performs household chores at night?

Now it is the time of night

That the graves all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite,

In the church-way paths to glide.

And we fairies that do run

By the triple Hecate’s team,

From the presence of the sun,

Following darkness like a dream,

Now are frolic; not a mouse

Shall disturb this hallowed house.

I am sent with broom before,

To sweep the dust behind the door.

And yes, how, for all his vaunted impersonality, it was possible to track the journey of his life and the growth of his mind through his plays. The split between family in the country and work in the city, between Stratford and London. A grammar-school education – Simon brought the house down every night when he played the exchange between cheeky schoolboy William and the Welsh schoolmaster, with his focative case and horum, harum, horum. A precocious and varied love life. The direct experience of witnessing recruiting officers mustering for the militia in rural Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. Some basic legal language learned from a life of litigation. Above all, a constant awareness that all the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players. Jaques’s seven ages of man in As You Like It are at one and the same time the seven ages of Everyman and of that unique genius named William Shakespeare.

I also learned, as Shakespeare himself may have done, that not every idea poured out on paper will work in the theatre. My drafts included several comic set pieces – Malvolio’s letter scene, Lance and his remote-controlled, battery-operated dog Crab – which either disappeared in the rehearsal room or fell away as the play metamorphosed through its five years of performance on dozens of stages, from a world premiere in Plymouth by the clifftop where Sir Francis Drake (allegedly) played bowls as he waited for the Spanish Armada, via regional theatres large and small, on to a sell-out in the cavernous Assembly Rooms during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and away to distant outposts in Chicago and Trieste. But I trusted Simon and his director, Tom Cairns, on this: they were the ones who would win the plaudits or take the flak.

Only once did we have ‘artistic differences’. Late in the rehearsal process, I discovered that the scene in which the rude mechanicals rehearse their play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been removed. Bottom wants to play all the parts: let me play Thisbe too … Let me play the lion too. Plays within plays and images of life as a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage – academics call it ‘metatheatre’, theatre about theatre – why, this was the very heart of Shakespeare, so at the heart of our play the audience should see the correspondence. Like Bottom, Simon was playing all the parts, from Juliet to Falstaff to Macbeth to Lear to Prospero.

For the first and only time in my life, I threw a hissy fit.

‘If Bottom goes, I go.’

Bottom was duly restored, in a bravura sequence in which Simon played him simultaneously with Peter Quince, Francis Flute and the rest of the company. The show was ready to go on the road.

It began with Simon as Prospero storming on to the stage in the midst of a high-tech hurricane. As it evolved, we simplified both the staging and the delivery. For its three West End runs and an excursion to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, the polemical title The Man from Stratford was replaced with the more inward Being Shakespeare. Now Simon just wandered on and started to tell the story, quietly, conversationally: Just before he embarked on Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote his great romantic comedy As You Like It, in which the melancholy Jaques says, ‘All the world’s a stage …’.

We never wavered from our conviction that there are moments in the plays that go to the very heart of the Man from Stratford. Of the many reviews, the most gratifying was the one which said conspiracy theorists look away. Another suggested that the show might seal the pro-Shakespeare anti-Edward-de-Vere-and-others debate. It didn’t. As Nabokov knew, no one ever will. But of the privilege of learning from such an energetic performer as Simon Callow during the seven-year life of the play, I could say with Bottom, I have had a most rare vision.

Simon Callow being Shakespeare, the Man from Stratford

Public domain image from the author’s collection