Though not quite a curse, and though most traditionalists vehemently deny it, there is certainly a problem at the heart of Shakespeare scholarship. The case against Shakespearean authorship is nowhere near as strong as the heretics would have us believe, but the case for is also weak. The historical record is incomplete and riddled with false leads. Much of the evidence is circumstantial and inconclusive, or was written at second or third hand, long after the fact.
Fabrications (like forged papers and plays) and falsities (like mis-dated books) impair the documentary record. John Payne Collier is one of several latter-day vandals who mischievously added to and subtracted from the documentary trail. John Manningham captured the ‘William the Conqueror’ episode in his diary of 1601; Collier examined the diary in 1831, leading some scholars to treat it warily and a few to discount it altogether. But, on balance, for the time being, it is still regarded as genuine. Shakespeare’s indirect entanglement in a palace intrigue (the Essex Rebellion) is a further source of mystery and skulduggery in the documentary record. Overall, Shakespearean biography is a conundrum.
As the basis for their work, biographical and literary researchers normally rely on registers (of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms), school enrolment records, academic transcripts, ledgers, account books, diaries, letters, drafts and inscribed books of various types, including ‘presentation copies’ and ‘association copies’. (A presentation copy is a book inscribed by its author to a friend or fan. An association copy is a book demonstrably owned by someone famous. ‘Association’ here is used in the sense of ‘guilt by association’, not ‘booksellers association’.) Scribbled notes can be incredibly important. Oscar Wilde’s annotations in the margins of his books are a rich source of information, the closest he came to keeping a diary.
For historians of Shakespeare, though, such documentary pickings are slim. Aside from the poems and quarto plays published in his lifetime, few Shakespearean documents survive. Most of the seventy or so extant biographical records are arid administrative and legal papers like writs and wills. Much questionable work has been done to build around those records. Overbrimming with secondary detail, Shakespeare biographies are elaborate exercises in imagination and extrapolation. As Mark Twain remarked about the biographical Shakespeare, ‘He is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six-hundred barrels of plaster of paris.’
Multiplicity deepens the conundrum. The little information that we have looks as though it came from multiple Shakespeares living separate, parallel lives in London and Stratford. At the same time that Shakespeare was ostensibly a respectable citizen of Stratford, for example, he was charged in London with affray and disturbing the peace. At the time he was supposedly writing his most immortal and hilarious comedies, he was mourning the death, at the age of eleven, of his beloved son Hamnet. William Shakespeare purchased New Place, a grand house in Stratford, for sixty pounds or more when, in London, his theatre company was in financial distress and he was pursued for a five-shilling tax debt. The mainstream Shakespeare biographies valiantly attempt to knit together these disparate lives; to reconcile in one person and one narrative a ferret-race of incompatible facts. The results are universally unsatisfactory, and a spur to scepticism.
To distinguish between the Stratford Shakespeare and the London one, many sceptical authors name the former ‘Shakspere’ and the latter ‘Shakespeare’. The Stratford man never referred to himself as ‘Shakespeare’ (as opposed to variants like ‘Shakspere’ and ‘Shagspere’). More than once, he made a mess when writing his own name; ink blots mar several of the six surviving Shakespeare signatures. More than once, he signed in an abbreviated form.
His last will and testament is a precious document for Shakespearean biographers: three of the six signatures are there, and it is one of the most fertile records in a documentary desert. Tellingly, the will makes no reference to Shakespeare’s former profession, his literary legacy or his stakes in two famous theatres. One part of the will does, however, link him to the London theatre world, and therefore connects the London and Stratford Shakespeares. The part in question bequeaths money to Richard Burbage (the man who lost out to William the Conqueror) and two other theatre-world celebrities: Henry Condell and John Hemmings. The linking part was, however, added as an interlineation in a different hand, so the link is dubious.
In other ways, too, the will looks suspicious. The parchment, the handwriting, the contents, the annotations, the witnesses; all are causes for doubt and suggestive of conspiracy. One or more of the three Shakespearean signatures may well have been written by someone else, probably the lawyer Francis Collins. At five, the stated number of witnesses is atypically high. Most troubling of all: in the will, there is no trace of the great writer. After reading the will, Mortimer J. Adler pronounced a devastating judgement. The Stratford man’s ‘pathetic efforts to sign his name (illiterate scrawls) should forever eliminate Shakspere from further consideration in this question—he could not write’.
And then there is the simple problem of distance. Shakespeare scholars such as James Shapiro and Diana Price speak of Shakespeare ‘commuting’ between London and Stratford. After 1604, he had diverse commercial interests in the metropolis, but seems to have focused on his Warwickshire investments. Before then, he supposedly maintained residences in both localities and spent much time in each of them, especially in the 1590s and early 1600s. Commuting between London and Stratford is eminently practical in 2018. The trip takes about two hours by train or car. Not so, however, in 1600. For a middle-class Elizabethan like Shakespeare, the trip would have taken three days in each direction, provided there were no delays from incumbent hazards like highwaymen, rufflers, beggars, robbers, murderers, plunderers, cutthroats, vagabonds, horse-stealers, shady innkeepers and poor roads. To make the trip in safety and comfort was expensive and difficult. Shakespeare might have done it often, but he probably didn’t. The life of Christopher Marlowe is informative here. Born in the same year as Shakespeare, and into the same provincial tradesman class, he hailed from Canterbury, a good deal closer to London. Once he became established in the capital, though, he seems seldom if ever to have made the trip back to his home town.
Much biographical scepticism has focused on the apparent clash between Shakespeare’s modest provincial origins and the refined erudition of his writing. Charlie Chaplin’s views typify one line of argument: ‘In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare.’ How, sceptics have asked, could a provincial entrepreneur become one of ‘the universal geniuses of the world’? Biographers have looked in vain for signs of childhood prodigality or any other portent of adult excellence. Once Shakespeare arrived in London, he seems rapidly to have risen to the top of the theatre world, and rapidly to have gained an audience. How did he do it? Did he in fact do it? Was such a rapid rise even possible?
Contradictions are also apparent between the meagre facts of Shakespeare’s life and the content of the works that bear his name. Like his father before him, Shakespeare lent money at interest. One of the most informative Shakespearean documents, and one with an early date, is a record of a loan of seven pounds that he advanced to John Clayton. Yet The Merchant of Venice, Coriolanus and Hamlet all condemn usurers. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are concerned in one way or another with heterosexual love. In life, too, he seems to have delighted in the pursuit of women. Yet many of his sonnets were written from an altogether different perspective. This is such a striking feature of his verse that Bill Bryson characterised Shakespeare as ‘English literary history’s sublimest gay poet’.
Reading the plays creates a picture of a man closely familiar with law, science, falconry, statecraft, classical literature, Biblical studies, jurisprudence, navigation, Freemasonry, international affairs, the royal court and the aristocracy. How, the sceptics ask, could the son of a provincial tradesman display such knowledge of these high-flying fields and their specialised vocabularies?
Biographical contradictions are not the only reason why sceptics think there is a Shakespeare problem. Elizabethan and Jacobean London was a gossipy place. Literate people pumped out letters, books, pamphlets and plays on topical subjects, including each other. If Shakespeare was an important playwright and poet, he should have been captured and roasted extensively in the documentary chatter. Such contemporary references to Shakespeare, though, are rare. When they do occur, they are invariably cryptic, seemingly hinting at something mysterious or disreputable in the background. Even more striking are the documentary silences.
A year older than Shakespeare, Michael Drayton was born in the same county of Warwickshire. As a successful poet and dramatist, he moved in the same circles as Shakespeare. The two men could easily have met when Drayton lived in London, or when he stayed with the Rainsford family at the village of Clifford Chambers, less than three miles from Stratford. Drayton knew at least one member of the extended Shakespeare family. John Hall, husband of William’s daughter Susanna, was the Rainsfords’ family doctor. According to Hall’s notebook, he treated Drayton for fever, with an ‘emetick infusion mixed with syrup of violets’, which ‘wrought very well both upwards and downwards’. When not at the doctor’s, Drayton immersed himself in English literary life. With his peers he exchanged scores of chatty and insightful letters and commendatory poems. His peers, that is, except for William Shakespeare.
John Chamberlain was another avid letter-writer who pre-dated and post-deceased Shakespeare. Full of priceless details, his letters bear upon celebrity culture and reveal a sincere interest in the theatre world. Yet there is nothing in the letters about Shakespeare. In An Account of the Life and Times of Francis Bacon (1878), James Spedding observed that Chamberlain’s letters were ‘full of news of the month, news of the Court, the city, the pulpit and the bookseller’s shop…court masques are described in minute detail, authors, actors, plot, performances, receptions and all, [yet] we look in vain for the name of Shakespeare’.
The author, poet and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was another serial letter-writer. He became provost of Eton in 1624. The list of recipients of his letters includes King James I and Henry, Prince of Wales, along with an alphabet of other worthies: Sir Edmund Bacon, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Barrett, Dr Hugo Blotius (librarian of the Hofbibliothek), Isaac Casaubon, Robert Cecil, John Donne, Sir Thomas Edmondes, Lord Zouche. Wotton’s Reliquiae Wottonianae (1651) captured the personalities of his literary world. Notably, he also described the fire that destroyed the Globe theatre during a 1613 performance of ‘All is True’ (Henry VIII).
King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground. [One] man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.
Again, Shakespeare is not mentioned.
Other books from the period are strangely silent about Shakespeare, as are some important contemporary diaries. Philip Henslowe owned and managed the Rose and other playhouses. Shakespeare supposedly wrote and acted for him. Henslowe’s working diary, discovered by the monumental Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone, covers the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s career (1592 to 1603). Henslowe was thorough. His inventory of costumes and props reads in part:
Green hats for Robin Hood and 1 Hobbyhorse. Trumpets and drum and treble viol. 1 rock, 1 cave and 1 Hellmouthe. 1 tomb of Guido, 1 tomb of Dido, 1 bedstead. 8 lances and a pair of stairs for Phaeton. 1 golden fleece and 1 bay tree. Tamburlaine’s bridle and wooden mattock. Mercury’s wings and dragons. Imperial crowns and ghosts crowns. Cauldron for the Jew.
The folio diary describes Henslowe’s theatrical business: takings from performances, and remittances to playwrights such as George Chapman, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Drayton, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and John Webster. (Also there are mentions of Marlowe’s plays, such as Doctor Faustus (1592), Tamburlaine the Great (1587) and The Jew of Malta (1589), but the one mention of ‘Marloe’ by name is thought to be a later forgery.) One way or another, the leading dramatists are present. Except for one. Shakespeare is never mentioned.
Shakespeare’s son-in-law—‘upwards and downwards’ Dr Hall—wrote a diary, too, but the part covering Shakespeare’s lifetime is missing. Philip Henslowe’s stepson-in-law and business partner Edward Alleyn was another diligent diarist. Apart from acting in plays (some of them Shakespearean in title and in plot) and co-owning theatres, he was also, by royal patent, Master of the Bears, Bulls and Mastiff Dogs. Like Henslowe, Alleyn recorded in a diary his transactions with notable actors and playwrights. Shakespeare’s name is conspicuously absent.
Appearing in several editions in the early decades of the seventeenth century, Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1627) lists the ‘English Poets of our owne nation’. After bowing to the especially esteemed ‘Sir Ieoffrey Chaurcer the father’, Peacham notes John Gower, John Lydgate, John Harding, John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Sternhold, Heywood, Sir Thomas More, Dr Thomas Phaer, Arthur Golding and Henry, Earl of Surrey. Elizabethan poets receive a special mention:
In the time of our late Queene Elizabeth, which was truly a golden Age (for such a world of refined wits, and excellent spirits it produced, whose like are hardly to be hoped for, in any succeeding Age) above others, who honoured Poesie with their pennes and practice…were Edward, Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere); Lord Buckhurst (Thomas Sackville); Henry Lord Paget; Sir Philip Sidney; Edward Dyer; Edmund Spencer; Samuel Daniel.
Peacham, though, left Shakespeare out.
There are other gaps, too, in the documentary record. Shakespeare’s Stratford school records are missing (we do not know for sure if he went there at all, or to any other school), as are the deeds of his Stratford properties. There is no record of his theatrical tours. No one in Stratford ever referred to him as a writer. In the ‘lost years’ between 1585 and 1592 and between 1603 and 1607 there is nary a trace of him. About Shakespeare the man, his literary contemporaries seem to have known little and to have written even less. He never wrote a word about himself, or, if he did, no such word has reached us.
After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, much of the great outpouring of grief and reflection was expressed in print. William Shakespeare, though, wrote not a single elegy or tribute or recollection. Ben Jonson was Shakespeare’s colleague and rival in the theatre world. When Jonson died in 1637, there was a great display of public lamentation, and he was interred in Westminster Abbey. Edmund Spenser, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Chapman and Drayton (Dr Hall’s violets could not save him) were all honoured in a commensurate way after their death. Shakespeare’s passing, though, was greeted in London with silence.
The biggest gap, however, and the most enduring mystery, is Shakespeare’s missing library.