More than four hundred years ago, William Shakespeare led an intriguing life. By all accounts he was a fun guy moving in a fun circle. One member of his London entourage, John Florio, is remembered as a consummate editor who gave the English language such indispensable phrases as ‘higgledy-piggledy’ and ‘helter-skelter’. Shakespeare himself is blamed for ‘blood-stained’, ‘eyeball’, ‘fancy free’, ‘seamy’, ‘zany’ and hundreds of other poetic and prosaic innovations.
A street-brawling, heart-breaking actor and grungy man of letters, the Shakespeare who emerges drinking and smoking from contemporary documents is a kind of punk poet, a proto-rockstar, a sixteenth-century Russell Crowe, or Russell Brand. Few documents about Shakespeare’s life have survived, but a surprisingly high proportion of them concern his racy and bawdy exploits. When, for example, he got into trouble with a brothel keeper and two young women, his fearsome conduct was documented vividly in a writ. Another notorious incident followed a performance of the play we now call Richard III. Shakespeare’s fellow actor Richard Burbage played the king and caught the attention of a beauty in the audience. The lady was so impressed by Burbage’s performance that she invited him to her home that evening—so long as he promised to remain in costume and character. Shakespeare got wind of the assignation and went first to the lady’s residence. Burbage arrived at the appointed time but Shakespeare was already inside, being ‘entertained and at his game’. When the lovers were informed that Burbage was at the door, a triumphant Shakespeare sent his colleague a mischievous reply that contained a sharp lesson in English history. ‘William the Conqueror,’ he said, ‘was before Richard the Third.’
The study of Shakespeare’s life and authorship is every bit as exciting as the man himself. As they do in a Dan Brown thriller, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons enter the picture more than once. Some of the best known episodes of Shakespearean research read like outtakes from the Nicholas Cage film National Treasure. Searching for buried plunder in the bed of the River Wye at Chepstow Castle. Breaking into the Walsingham family tomb in St Nicholas Church, Chislehurst, to find evidence of a Marlowe–Shakespeare conspiracy. Molesting a commemorative bust of the man himself, in the hope of finding hidden manuscripts. Methodologically, in Shakespeare studies, anything goes.
The American codebreaker Elizabeth Wells Gallup found secret messages that directed her to Canonbury Tower, Islington. Full of expectation, she entered the tower room and went straight to the panelled wall where a hidden door was supposed to conceal ‘rare papers’. Counting five panels along, she opened the cavity only to find it had been cleared of its contents. But, as always happens in this branch of the quest genre, there was another clue. Inscribed above the lintel was a list of monarchs that suggested—faintly, remarkably, implausibly—that Sir Francis Bacon was heir to Queen Elizabeth.
Cryptologists have gone to great lengths to discover clues about Shakespeare’s life and authorship. In late-nineteenth-century Detroit, Dr Orville Ward Owen designed a remarkable machine for the specific purpose of reading messages hidden in the plays and in works by other authors published around the same time. Now a museum piece at Montana’s Summit University, Owen’s ‘Wheel of Fortune’ is a deranged contraption of gears and rollers and other moving parts that paint a false picture of busy industry. Owen believed his task as a cryptographer was to line up ‘the connaturals, concurrences, correspondents, concatenations, collocations, analogies, similitudes, relatives, parallels, conjugates and sequences of everything relating to the combination, composition, renovation, arrangement and unity revolving in succession, part by part, throughout the whole’. No one has satisfactorily replicated his method.
Playing around with numbers is at the heart of Shakespeare studies. A whole branch of the discipline (which is not, it must be said, very disciplined) focuses on the mysterious references to ‘shake’ and ‘speare’ in the 1611 King James Bible. They are, respectively, the forty-sixth word from the beginning and the forty-sixth word from the end of Psalm 46—so long as certain words are excluded from the counting. Scholars in the same branch of Inexact Shakespearean Numerology count approximately 720 names of God and approximately 208 steps of the Great Pyramid, and detect pregnant meaning in the triangular number 153. It is both the number of Hail Marys when saying the Rosary, and the number of sonnets in Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets—provided one sonnet is left out.
Across the Shakespeare literature as a whole, much is made of the myriad spellings of ‘Shakespeare’. There are unsurprising variants, like Shakspeare, Sheakspeare, Shakspeyre and Shackspeer. And then there are variants that require a leap of faith: Shappere, Shakespea, Shaxkespere, Saxpere, Chacsper, Shakspurre, Shagsper, Schacosper, Schaftspere, Shaxberd. Over eighty variants have been recorded, not counting the international contenders like the Old German ‘Sigispero’, the French ‘Jacques Pierre’, the Arabic ‘Sheikh Zubair’ and the Italian ‘Crollalanza’.
An everyday challenge in Elizabethan England, non-standard names are a challenge, too, for modern scholars trying to match poems and plays to people. The surname of playwright Christopher Marlowe is thought to have been spelt variously Marlo, Marloe, Marlow, Marlowe, Morley and Marley; we don’t know for sure because these spellings may have belonged to more than one person. Many authors signed their work with initials; others adopted pseudonyms, pen-names or aliases. The actor Nicholas Tooley sometimes called himself Wilkinson. The translator and dramatist John Dancer also went by Dauncy; or maybe, as some believe, he didn’t, and John Dauncy was a different person altogether.
Fans of Shakespeare’s contemporary Sir Henry Neville have all sorts of fun with his surname—spelt variously Nevil, Neuill, Neuil, Neuyll, Neuel, Neveyll—and his punning family motto: Ne Vile Velis, meaning ‘Form no vile wish or thought’. An epigram by Ben Jonson, ‘To one that desired me not to name him’, addresses both the general concept of anonymity and a specific anonymous recipient. Reading the epigram’s second line, Neville scholar John Casson seized on two unremarkable words, ‘any way’, which, when voiced with a German accent, become ‘any vay’, supposedly a play on ‘NEV’ and a sign that Henry Neville was the epigram’s anonymous addressee. References in other works to ‘envy’, and to Falstaff’s original name ‘Oldcastle’ (a pun, it is claimed, on ‘New ville’), have also been read as allusions to Neville.
In books published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, his name was sometimes hyphenated as ‘Shake-speare’. Ben Jonson’s The Poetaster (1601) seems to have ridiculed the hyphen. The character Crispinus, a ‘parcel-poet’, sometimes spelled his name, pointedly, ‘Cri-spinas’. Authors have since found all sorts of significance in Shakespeare’s hyphen. Diana Price argued the hyphen signified a pseudonym, in the vein of ‘Master Shoe-tie’ or ‘Sir Luckless Woo-all’. This is just one of the many phonological, ontological, editorial and typographical Theories of the Hyphen. Maybe the hyphen makes the name more striking, by highlighting its literal meaning—‘shaking a spear’—which has been called political—a figurative threat to authority—as well as primal, armorial and phallic. Maybe the hyphen makes the name easier to remember, or serves another practical purpose.
When ‘Shakspeare’ was printed in italic font, as it was on several early quarto editions, the front foot of the ‘k’ was in danger of interfering with the tail of the ‘s’. Interposing a little spear prevents this, as does the insertion of an ‘e’. This argument sounds convincing until we notice that the ‘e’ and the hyphen often appear together. Also, they are used even when ‘Shake-speare’ is printed in roman font, which poses no danger of foot-tail interference. According to other theories, the hyphen clarifies pronunciation of ‘Shakespeare’ by helping the ‘e’ lengthen the ‘a’, or by distinguishing ‘Shake-speare’ from, say, the mildly Francophonic ‘Shak-espeare’, or from ‘Shakes-peare’, a genuine possibility if we recall ‘Shaxpere’ was an alternative spelling of the playwright’s name. All Theories of the Hyphen are as lame as these ones, and it is best to say as little about them as possible.
When exploring his world, we must always keep in mind that Shakespeare died long before lexicographers corralled English into the predicable beast we know today. In many other ways, too, we must leave our prejudices at the door. Shakespeare preceded much that we take for granted, like tube toothpaste, inexpensive glass, piped sewerage, the Enlightenment, American independence, newspapers, professional police, inflation, universal literacy, the ‘literary life’, compulsory education, the nuclear family and the rural picturesque. He flourished before tea and coffee reached the British Isles, and long before the animal rights movement; he and his entourage seem to have relished the cruel ‘sport’ of bear baiting.
Shakespeare lived at a time when witchcraft was taken seriously, and witchfulness was seen as valid grounds for setting a person on fire. ‘Ringleader to all naughtiness’, Satan was thought to walk the earth at the head of an army consisting of witches, possessed bodies and at least six divisions of secondary devils. Ben Jonson wrote numerous plays with occult themes, including The Devil Is an Ass (1616), a play partly set in Hell and in which Satan appears along with an inferior devil called Pug Deville (a name, incidentally, not claimed by the Nevillians as an allusion to Henry Neville). King James I wrote a treatise on the subject—Daemonologie (1597)—which denounces witches as devilish slaves. For ordinary people as well as the monarch, the boundary between science and magic was flimsy and unclear. People condemned evil witches while at the same time consulting ‘good’ or ‘white’ witches for medical advice.
In Elizabethan times, ‘amateur’ was not a word in English; nor was there a concept in the theatre of a ‘director’. Shakespeare pre-dated modern ideas of literature, plagiarism and copyright. Different conceptions of authorial rights were symptomatic of different conceptions of authorship, ownership, piracy, forgery, truth and proof.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare scholarship flourished and interest in his work was intense. Editors and critics assembled a vivid and compelling portrait of the poet from Stratford-upon-Avon. He was gentle, mellifluous Shakespeare, a natural genius, the transcendent epitome of a literary man. This Shakespeare—whom author Henry Tyrrell called ‘the acknowledged poet of the age, the friend of nobles and the pet of princes’—was often at the royal court, where he rubbed shoulders with Queen Elizabeth herself. One eighteenth-century image of Shakespeare has him on such intimate terms with the Virgin Queen, as her ‘friend and admirer’, that she gifted him ‘a gold tissue toilet or table cover’. According to this image, Shakespeare was famous in his lifetime, feted by audiences and readers, venerated by his peers. This picture was so influential that, even today, we can’t think of Shakespeare without it infiltrating our thoughts.
Just as the idealised image was taking root, however, scepticism was growing. As early as the sixteenth century, there were uncomfortable remarks about Shakespearean authorship and the extent to which he used the writings of others. In subsequent centuries those comments became a clamour; a colossal enterprise of scepticism emerged. The register of authors, thinkers, performers and dramatists who doubted Shakespeare’s authorship includes Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Disraeli, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, William James, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Orson Welles and Walt Whitman. Henry James wrote that he was ‘haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world’.
The scepticism has perhaps had the greatest influence on the Indiana Jones school of Shakespeare studies, whose adherents continue in their efforts to dig up clues, unravel ciphers and commune with the dead. These and more conventional researchers have a splendid goal: to prove William Shakespeare of Stratford—landlord, businessman, occasional moneylender—was or was not William Shakespeare of London—wild actor, serial miscreant and co-owner of theatres; and that one or both of these Shakespeares did or did not write the plays and poems many people regard as the highest achievement of English literature.
These primary controversies come in a multitude of variations, and branch into hundreds of secondary debates. Where did Shakespeare go to school? Was he educated at all? Did he poach deer? Was he a toper? Was he a Roman Catholic? Had he a Jewish girlfriend, the mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets? Who were W. H., T. T. and I. M.? And which real people were the targets of jests and jibes about Malvolio, Melicert, Phaeton, Aetion, Sogliardo and the Poet-Ape? The stakes are high: not just for English literature, but, if the Baconian heretics are to be believed, for the legitimacy of the British throne.
Who could resist the attractions of such a quest? And therein lies a problem. The price of admission into Shakespeare studies is trivially low: most of the documentary evidence and all the plays and poems are widely known and freely available in the public domain. Once inside the field, it is easy to become obsessed. Shakespeare scholars speak ruefully of addiction (another word coined by Shakespeare) and wasted years. Waylaid by the Shakespeare Siren, they dare not go forward but cannot go back. The field is full of men and women with damaged reputations and impaired sanity. Many a leader in the field has met with a bad end. Among Shakespearean researchers (very, very broadly defined), more than one died from arsenic poisoning or narcotics; more than one perished in prison. There are serious whispers of a Shakespeare Curse.