The work of Bill Rubinstein and John O’Donnell on Sir Henry Neville places them in an Australian tradition of heretical Shakespearean research that stretches back well into the nineteenth century. George Caldwell achieved a world first in Melbourne when his 1877 pamphlet on Sir Walter Raleigh proposed the famous adventurer as the surreptitious poet and playwright. In the same city the Baconian Dr William Thomson produced a series of major books about the Authorship Question. His On Renascence Drama, or History Made Visible (1880) quoted Bacon’s attitude to drama thus: ‘It is a thing indeed, if practised professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it is of excellent use: I mean stage-playing.’ Arrogant, superior, cranky, Thomson possessed a unique ability to annoy people. He died from a kick he received from a patient. Despite his personality, he attracted in his life a devoted following of Baconian professionals, all of whom were convinced that Bacon wrote publicly as a philosopher and privately as a playwright.
In Hits! Skits! and Jingles! (1899) the comic balladist William Thomas Goodge produced a humorous rebuttal of the Baconian case:
Shakespeare’s the author, I’ll vow,
And nothing my faith can be shakin’,
For it would be ridiculous, now
If we talked about ‘Lamb’s Tales of Bacon’.
The Melbourne-based spiritualist and distiller Hugh Junor Browne arrived at the same destination via a very different route. Browne’s supernatural findings appeared in 1888 as The Grand Reality, followed by the 1898 pamphlet The Baconian Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays Refuted. The latter work included the surprising revelation that Shakespeare had composed his plays while under the control of a band of poetic spirits, led by a chief called Busiris. Thus controlled, Shakespeare could not ‘blot a line’—because he lacked the skill to edit the spirits’ writing.
Using the paranormal apparatus of séances, automatic writing and intermediating ‘sensitives’, Browne conversed extensively with Shakespeare. Revelations came thick and fast. According to Browne, the Bard spent ‘his younger days on earth’
slaughtering sheep and delivering the meat to customers, and…often in those days his hand would be controlled to write all over the skin of the sheep he had just skinned, but from his not understanding, as I and others do now, about automatic writing through sensitives, he placed no value on what had thus been written, consequently, he added, many plays probably almost equal to any written through him in after years were in this way lost to the world.
This adds a grotesque new dimension to the authorship problem and the missing manuscripts. John Aubrey’s gossipy Brief Lives contains a less colourful but equally doubtful farmyard anecdote. In Aubrey’s tale, John Shakespeare was a butcher and young William followed in his father’s trade. Whenever William killed a calf, ‘he would do it in a high style, and make a speech. There was at this time another butcher’s son in this town that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural wit…but he died young’. Apart from making unprecedented findings about Shakespeare, Browne also described how Mozart wrote under the control of ‘spirit musicians’.
The tradition of Australian Shakespearean heresy continued into the twentieth century. The Bulletin magazine published heretical articles. The ‘Scope’ radio program hosted heretical debates. Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) expressed a new variety of unorthodoxy, as did Christina Montgomery’s Shakespearean Afterglow (1942), which argues that Shakespeare was a talented Latin scholar. Heretics took up Montgomery’s thesis to help prove the true author must have had more than just a provincial grammar-school education.
The number of radical and unorthodox works produced in Australia seems disproportionately high. For some reason, Australians have been more willing to entertain ideas of fake authorship, misleading title pages, unscrupulous publishers; more willing to believe ‘William Shakespeare’ might just be an ‘allonym’, a brand or a catch-all for works authored by someone else, or by multiple other someones. Melbourne and Sydney are almost as far from London and Stratford as a traveller can get without leaving planet Earth. Perhaps the extreme distance permits greater neutrality, more freedom to countenance heresy. There is probably another reason as well. When it comes to authorship mysteries, Australia has seen this kind of thing before.
For a period in the 1780s, George Barrington was a principal actor in a Glasgow company. He played the male leads in Romeo and Juliet and The Beggar’s Opera—until his fellow actors discovered he’d been stealing from their wardrobe. Barrington skipped town with Miss H, the young actress who’d been Juliet to his Romeo and Polly to his Macheath. On Barrington’s arrival in London he resumed a prior career, that of theatrical pickpocket. We know this because several volumes of Barrington biography were published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He became so famous that Thomas de Quincey wrote of him in On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, likening him to Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, ‘a snapper up of unconsidered trifles’. This would not be Barrington’s only brush with Shakespearean fame.
Of all the eighteenth-century enthusiasts, the actor David Garrick was most responsible for the Incredible Growing Shakespeare. His 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee was intended as a gala event to celebrate the Bard in the town of his birth. (Baffled Stratford locals reportedly feared the event had something to do with the controversial ‘Jew Bill’.) James Boswell attended the gala, mainly to have an excuse to miss an appointment for the treatment of his venereal disease. In 1776, Garrick was still riding high when he and his inseparable Viennese wife, Eva Marie, celebrated the Queen’s birthday at the Royal Levee. Eva Marie wore artificial flowers and real diamonds. The Earl of Mexborough was wearing diamonds, too, in the insignia of his Order, until Barrington, disguised as a clergyman, robbed him of it in Garrick’s presence. Barrington later sold the loot to a Dutch fence for eight hundred pounds.
Though Barrington sometimes stole at such special events, and at celebrated places like St Paul’s Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament, London’s theatres were his main hunting ground, and Covent Garden was his favourite. An unsympathetic observer described that theatre as ‘swamped with thieves and prostitutes’. Barrington was one of the thieves, plying his trade in the foyer, the pit and the two-shilling gallery.
Garrick jointly managed another favoured Barrington haunt: the Drury Lane theatre where Vortigern had had its world premiere. Barrington was especially busy there whenever the glamorous Mrs Siddons played Lady Macbeth. In 1776 the King and Queen attended a performance at Drury Lane; at the same time, down in the pit, Barrington stole a young woman’s purse. At a Haymarket opera in 1784, Barrington picked the pocket of a baronet. A year later, Barrington was apprehended after another theft during another performance of Macbeth. Two years later he was back at Drury Lane, where, during a performance of Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Barrington robbed Alderman Paul Haviland le Mesurier in the presence of Major George Hanger, the social campaigner and lech who championed polygamy as an antidote to prostitution.
One of Barrington’s richest prizes was a Russian snuffbox decorated with miniature pictures and large gemstones. Barrington stole it outside Covent Garden Theatre, from Count Orlov, a visiting Russian nobleman. Arrested and placed before the Bow Street magistrate, Barrington claimed to be a surgeon and a native of Cork. He denied stealing the box, which was said to be worth a stunning forty thousand pounds. Acquitted of the theft, Barrington was again apprehended two years later—after a Humane Society event—with three watches hidden in his ‘well dressed’ hair.
During a career in which he committed scores of other known offences, and probably hundreds of unknown ones, he seems to have partnered up with Miss Elizabeth West, a femme fatale and Fagin-like figure in London’s underworld. She became his paramour and is said to have taught him much about picking pockets, and even more about the ‘tender civilities’ of the night. In the daylight hours she may have introduced him to high-tech tools like the whalebone drag, the ring with springs, the knife with three joints, and an ingenious variety of other keys and snags and jerks. Barrington and West’s affair came to an abrupt and tragic end after she was arrested outside the Drury Lane playhouse, having stolen a watch ‘after the Oratorio’. Locked up in the notorious Newgate prison, she caught ‘gaol fever’ and died just two weeks after the end of her three-year sentence.
Barrington’s conduct at his frequent court appearances earned him the reputation of the ‘genteelest thief’. He adopted the clothes and the demeanour of a gentleman and made extempore addresses to the court in a clear, eloquent and seemingly sincere manner. His theatrical training served him well: he cried real tears on demand, displayed all sorts of other dramatic flourishes, and conducted himself ‘with the greatest propriety’. In the newspapers, he published ardent though spurious letters in his defence, and came to be known popularly as the ‘Macaroni Pickpocket’—a reference to the flamboyantly foppish fashion adopted by the voguish young men of the day. Like the bookbinder Charles Lewis, George Barrington always dressed upward.
His trials were at least as entertaining as Covent Garden’s dramatic performances. Throughout his career, his exploits were closely followed by the Morning Post, Morning Chronicle, London Chronicle, London Magazine, Daily Universal Register, Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Public Ledger and World—and were widely reported outside London as well. He was enough of a household name to earn a mention in the comic opera Fontainebleau. His name was also linked to a political scandal. During the grubby general election of 1784, he appeared on the satirical frontispiece of a parodic work, The Oriental Chronicles of the Times, written for the Whig MP Charles James Fox, whose vigorous supporter, the Duchess of Devonshire, was accused of ‘trading sexual favours for votes’. Compounding the insult, the conservative Morning Post claimed that Barrington voted for Fox, ‘at the earnest solicitation’ of the Duchess.
Barrington’s oratorical skills won his acquittal many times, but not every time. In a seventeen-year criminal career he spent seven years in prison. Towards the end of his career, his flamboyant ruses and excuses were wearing thin. As the heat closed in, he appeared at his second-last trial under the alias ‘William Jones’. Things came to a head when Barrington was arrested after picking the pocket of Henry Hare Townsend at an Enfield race meeting. In September 1790 he was sentenced to be transported far away to the new penal colony at Port Jackson in New South Wales.
Two years after Barrington set sail, a delectable snippet reached London: the pickpocket had become a policeman. And not just any policeman, but ‘Head Constable’ at the satellite settlement of Parramatta. The notorious Barrington was, it seemed, one step away from becoming the new colony’s chief of police! The news may have been exaggerated, but Barrington’s appointment was far from impossible in a colony where former and serving convicts occupied many official positions. Whatever the truth about the anecdote, it became the catalyst for Barrington’s fame as an author. The publisher H. D. Symonds issued in 1795 a work by Barrington entitled A Voyage to New South Wales. The book was a great success. Publishers such as ‘M. Smith, Opposite Fetter-Lane, in Fleet-Street’ and ‘A. Swindells, Hanging Bridge’ also issued Barringtonian accounts.
Writing in 1930, Barrington’s biographer R. S. Lambert detailed the former pickpocket’s transformation into the chronicler of Botany Bay. Barrington, Lambert wrote, ‘had some skill in observation of detail, and some power of describing particular episodes [but] no talent for composition and arrangement as a whole’. It was up to Symonds in London to paper over the cracks; he did so, efficiently, and in the book’s preface Barrington promised a further volume, on Norfolk Island. Plentiful Barringtonian accounts of the antipodes would follow. His literary talents extended not just to books but also pithy epigrams, and an ode, of passable poetic merit, ‘to Light’, and a verse prologue, ‘Spoken by George Barrington, on Jan. 16, 1796, at the opening of the Theatre at Sydney, New South Wales’. Printed as a broadside in 1802, the prologue contains the oft-quoted lines, ‘True patriots all—for be it understood, / We left our Country for our Country’s good’.
Though uneven, Barrington’s writings are vivid and engaging. Moving deftly between different styles and genres—the life story, the travel memoir, the adventure romance, mysteries, histories—Barrington produced works that appeared under such titles as The History of New South Wales and The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of George Barrington, Now Transported to Botany Bay. Some were mere pamphlets, others expensive octavo volumes with colour plates. The books were the means by which many people in England received news of the infant settlement on the other side of the globe. Barrington helped feed the huge appetite for books about natural history and the expanses of the Empire. An important document for the birth of Sydney, Barrington’s 1802 The History of New South Wales contained the first colour illustrations of the settlement, and one of the first printed images of a kangaroo.
John Ferguson’s Bibliography of Australia informs us that Barrington’s books made it into many of the world’s great libraries. There is a copy of the 1802 The History of New South Wales in the Bodleian, and other volumes are held by the Mitchell Library, the British Library, the National Library of Australia and nearly every other significant collection of Australiana.
Despite these holdings, and Lambert’s biography, Ferguson had his doubts. His Bibliography labelled nine Barrington titles ‘pseud.’, indicating that he thought the author’s name was most likely pseudonymous. Ferguson also expressed suspicions about Barrington’s authorship of the ‘True Patriots All’ prologue. (These were shared by Lambert, who concluded that the lines were actually written by Henry Carter.) Finally, in a separate note headed ‘GEORGE BARRINGTON’, Ferguson brought his findings together:
There is little doubt that Barrington had no connexion whatever with the many publications listed, except, possibly, to a slight extent, with A Voyage to New South Wales, published in London in 1795, with a dedication written (allegedly) at Parramatta in 1793. His name was used by literary hacks to help sell their chap-books, and Barrington is said to have expressed indignation at the liberties taken with his name.
In Australian Rare Books, Jonathan Wantrup cast an even more sceptical eye, and reached a conclusion that went further than Ferguson’s. ‘There is no question,’ Wantrup wrote, ‘that all the books ascribed to Barrington are completely fraudulent and that he had no share in them.’
Thanks to the work of Ferguson, Wantrup and a young scholar named Nathan Garvey, we now know what was going on with the Barrington books. Close textual analysis shows that the books stole flagrantly from the ‘foundation volumes’ of Australian history—such as David Collins’ An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales and John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of the Transactions of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island—but also from descriptions of China, Africa and the South Pacific. To produce the Barrington books, piratical publishers adopted a crude method. Slabs of text lifted from these genuine sources were knitted together with fanciful episodes—a boy lost in the bush; a man sleeping on an ant hill; Barrington’s amours with his new Juliet, a sexually curious Eora woman named Yeariana. In his Ireland Inquiry, Edmond Malone decried this ‘modern mode of making books’ in which earlier sources are ‘properly sliced and hashed and stewed’ before being ‘served up in a late work, without any acknowledgment where the ingredients of the literary mess were found’.
Over time, the Barrington piracies became more elaborate and grandiose in their marketing and presentation. The Barrington legend grew in proportion. Nourished by injections of more and more colourful narrative twists, Barringtoniana continued to appear for another forty years. Publishers in Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Moscow, Dublin and Cork issued editions of the Voyage and its sequel. The Russian edition, entitled Puteschestivie w Botani-Bai, bore the august imprint of the Moscow University Printer. Barrington the author had become world famous.
We know a lot, too, about the men behind the Barrington books. Dwelling on either side of the law, they dabbled not just in picturesque piracies but also in fantastical books on conjuring and the occult, practical books on farming and economics, and risky political volumes. The publisher-bookseller Henry Delahay Symonds—who produced the first edition of Barrington’s A Voyage to New South Wales—was in prison when it came out. He’d been locked up for publishing radical and anti-aristocratic works. For pirates like Symonds, incarceration was no great setback. Inside Newgate they remained ‘very busily employed… in the sale of books’, even trumpeting their imprisonment in the advertisements for their wares.
The names ‘Smith’ and ‘Swindells’ may have hinted at specious publication, but Barrington’s publishers used all the tricks in the book to make their volumes appear legitimate. One trick was to augment the texts with frontmatter and endmatter such as dedications, prologues, prefaces, appendices and indices, all of which helped create the impression of authority and authorisation. The 1802 Barrington book, The History of New South Wales, was the first such volume to be issued in parts; it was dedicated—speculatively, deceptively—to His Majesty, King George III, and it bore—shamelessly—the royal crest.
Relationships among publisher-booksellers, and between them and the state, were complex. Some booksellers entered joint ventures, or acted as retailers or wholesalers or fronts for others. To obtain literary properties, the booksellers and publishers shared with and stole from each other. Some partly clandestine publishers served useful political purposes by issuing polemics and importing and republishing foreign works that expressed convenient sentiments. Many publishers and booksellers engaged writers and editors who did the legwork of piracy. Part-time or full-time, settled or itinerant, criminal or just unscrupulous, all of them had a talent for fabricated narrative and literary fraud, and all belonged to a para-profession that had already enjoyed an extended history in England.
The Barrington scam, too, had a long run. Editions bearing his name and published in Boston (1832) and Lyons (1834) are, according to Garvey, ‘the last known books published under Barrington’s name’. By this point, Barrington had been dead thirty years, and ‘further publication would probably have seemed ridiculous, even by the generous standards of the “Barrington” fraud’.
Though a vast amount has been written about Barrington’s life, and though even more words have been published under his name, his true biography remains obscure. Possibly the illegitimate son of one Captain Barrington, he hailed from Cork, or Dublin, or somewhere else—perhaps Maynooth, on the edge of the picturesquely named Bog of Allen. In his youth, he may have been seduced out of an apprenticeship by a ‘libidinous’ young woman with the harmless-sounding name of Miss Ranby. Or perhaps he wasn’t. Afterwards, he was variously said to have become a surgeon, a clergyman, a gambler, a merchant, a gamekeeper and a messenger—and it seems he adopted most of these personae as covers for his actual career.
The details of Shakespeare’s early life are equally sketchy. Like Barrington’s, the date and place of Shakespeare’s birth are uncertain. Biographers of both men suffer from the problem of writing about people who lived long ago and were not aristocrats. Neither man was famous at birth, or during his childhood or youth, or in the early years of his career. (Shakespeare may not have been famous at any point in his lifetime.) Despite this challenge, though, we do know a few things about both lives. Curiously, there are many parallels between them.
Both men came from modest but aspirational backgrounds, away from the metropolis. Both families were litigious and half respectable. John Shakespeare was famously fined a shilling for making a dungheap on the road outside his home. Apart from dealing in wool and leather, and piling up dung, he was an alderman and an ale-taster.
William Shakespeare’s formal education, like Barrington’s, was minimal and truncated. Both men fell in with groups of travelling players. Both went to London seeking fame, fortune and fun. Formidable and resilient characters, in London they moved in grimy and shady circles, changing their lodgings frequently. (What are the implications of this for Shakespeare’s library? Did he send books to Stratford for safe keeping?) Both men brushed shoulders with the aristocracy, while at the same time consorting with publicans, usurers and pimps. Both established strong economic connections to the theatre. Each was accused of pretending to be a gentleman.
Barrington’s criminality is well established, but Shakespeare, too, had credentials in that sphere. An ancestor, William Saksper, was hanged in 1248 for robbery. The popular tradition of young William Shakespeare the poacher has already been mentioned. In the Elizabethan social taxonomy, travelling players were grouped in the same class as vagabonds. Shakespeare consorted with many varieties of player, and knew real vagabonds as well. He had his own minor scrapes with the law, and encountered hardened criminals through known associates such as Robert Greene and George Wilkins, a playwright and brothel-keeper notorious for acts of brutal violence towards women.
Some authors have painted a thuggish and decidedly ungentle picture of Shakespeare. If accurate, that picture would explain why Michael Drayton waited a safe eleven years after Shakespeare’s death before writing anything about him. When Drayton did write, he referred to Shakespeare’s ‘rage’. Other people, too, seem to have been genuinely worried that Shakespeare would beat them up. Though not entirely mad or bad, Shakespeare may have been dangerous to know.
Itinerant Barrington occasionally dropped off the grid: between 1773 and 1775, for example, his whereabouts are uncertain. He may have been in Dublin, operating at Rider’s Theatre; by 1775, though, he was certainly back in London. Shakespeare, too, had many lost years; virtually nothing is known about where he was and what he was doing in the decade of his twenties, for example. At other times, Shakespeare like Barrington had a knack for being in two or even three places at once.
Both men were naturally talented with words and oratory; both are the subject of early anecdotes in which they are told to stop carping on. Ben Jonson remarked that loquacious Shakespeare ‘had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped’. Both men had run-ins with unscrupulous publishers; the print culture of the late sixteenth century was even more shadowy than that of the late eighteenth. Like Barrington, Shakespeare allegedly complained about his name being applied to works he did not write. (He told Thomas Heywood, for example, that he was cross about The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), a book of mostly non-Shakespearean poems published by William Jaggard under Shakespeare’s name.)
Both men contributed, indirectly, to the burgeoning concept of authorial copyright. Both men would eventually become famous authors, in part for writing poetry. At least one of the men was famous for poetry written by someone else.
Barrington and Shakespeare were very much alive above the ears and below the waist. They chased skirt, consorted with fallen women and were occasionally triumphant in love. Shakespeare’s quasi-underworld colleague, Robert Greene, had a fully underworld mistress who rivalled Barrington’s Miss West for illicit charisma. Then there is the youngish woman whom Shakespeare wooed with a chair and a bugle-bead purse.
According to the Bishop of Worcester’s register, on 27 November 1582 William Shaxpere was granted a licence to marry Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. The following day, a marriage bond was issued to William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford. The Hathwey–Whateley difference is a puzzle. Are the two Annes the same person, the Hathwey–Whateley transformation yet another example of the Elizabethan versatility that permits Shakespeare / Shagspere / Shappere? Or were two women involved, in some sort of romantic intrigue? There is much speculation on this question—some authors have gone so far as to characterise one Anne as a nymphette and the other as a shrew—but no one knows for sure either way.
We do know that the marriage was ill-starred. Picture the match: William, aged eighteen-and-a-half; Anne, eight years older and three months pregnant. Two or three years after the wedding, Shakespeare moved to London. By all accounts he sowed his oats there to such an extent that he contracted more than one type of venereal disease, including syphilis, a frequent subject of his writings. (Jane Davenant, mistress of the Crown Tavern in Oxford, is one rumoured lover; her son William, the future poet laureate, inferred Shakespeare was his father in more than just a poetical sense.)
In the final years of both men’s lives there would be doubts about their cerebral faculties. Scholars looking at the handwriting on Shakespeare’s will noticed signs of mental, possibility syphilitic, degeneration. After Barrington’s death in 1804, a newspaper announced the sale of his estate with the heading: ‘Mr George Barrington, a Lunatic’. Death brought an end to neither man’s publishing career.
In 2018, bibliographical scholarship has reached a point of utter certainty that Barrington was never an author, never a poet. The bookish Barrington was a phantasm constructed by the literary culture of the day. And yet, despite the efforts of Ferguson and Wantrup and Garvey, there are still pockets of belief in Barringtonian authorship. Booksellers and librarians occasionally take the books at face value. Internet sites still assign ‘True Patriots All’ to Barrington.
Some of the books that appeared under Shakespeare’s name are universally regarded as ‘allonymous’; he certainly did not write them, and unscrupulous publishers are accused of exploiting his name as a brand. The saucy The Passionate Pilgrim is an example of a work that suffers in this way from ‘the Barrington Problem’. ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ is another; it was included in Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets but is thought to be by someone else (and is not a sonnet). In 1605 Nathaniel Butter published an unregistered play, The London Prodigal. Attributed to Shakespeare on the title page, the play is most likely the work of Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, George Wilkins or Thomas Middleton. In 1608 Thomas Pavier registered and published A Yorkshire Tragedy under the name ‘W. Shakspeare’, though the play is widely thought to be by Middleton.
Unorthodox scholars, though, go much further and contend that all of Shakespeare’s œuvre was allonymous; that, like Barrington, he authored none of the works; that his name was always merely a label behind which shady publishers, opportunistic compilers and secret authors lurked. Shakespearean heresy pivots on the extent to which the Barrington Problem applies to Shakespeare’s works.
Shakespeare’s library bulges and shrinks with the size of his authorial career. Barrington’s author library was empty; if the heretics are right, Shakespeare’s was empty, too. Machiavelli is mentioned three times in Shakespeare’s works: in two of the Henry VI plays and in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Forgery is mentioned in Hamlet (remember the altered letter that dooms Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) and in The Rape of Lucrece (‘To blot old books and alter their contents’). If Shakespeare was another Barrington—just an allonymous brand, just a gormless frontman—then there had to be a Machiavelli in the background—a cunning architect of an elaborate bibliographical hoax. How could such a thing be done? And what kind of person could pull it off?