Writer and historian Ivan Southall won a string of literary awards in the 1960s and 1970s, including the coveted Carnegie Medal. As an author he shunned literary fashion, writing instead from untutored inspiration and experience (or, as a Shakespeare biographer might say, from Nature). Southall built his work on an insight that is fundamental to Shakespeare, as it is to Freud, Heidegger, Dickens and every significant modern novelist: that only through human beings and human interaction does reality occur and have meaning.
In the early 2000s I assembled a large collection of Ivan Southall books, many from his own library, including first printings of his first break-through successes, the ‘Simon Black’ series of adventure stories. The initial series of ten books had titles like Simon Black in the Antarctic (1956), Simon Black in Coastal Command (1953) and Simon Black in Space (1952). Ivan had inscribed these volumes proudly to his mother, who raised him and his brother Gordon after their father died when Ivan was fourteen.
Southall’s personal copies reveal much about his methods as a writer. Like Shakespeare, he was a frequent reviser and recycler of his own work. To produce the children’s book Fly West (1974), Southall scrawled all over his copy of They Shall Not Pass Unseen (1956), making dramatising additions and clarifying excisions to almost every paragraph. He did something similar when he abridged his book about bomb-disposal officers, Softly Tread the Brave (1960), into a version for young people, Seventeen Seconds (1973). Southall helped me picture what Shakespeare’s working library might have been like: a dynamic resource of marked-up plays and manuscripts, subject to a continual process of revision and adaptation.
At Monash I would encounter other revelations about writing. In the 1950s, Australian readers had a voracious appetite for dramatic stories of crime and adventure. The stories appeared in squarish booklets, bound cheaply in thin paper but with lurid cover illustrations, usually of private dicks and discount damsels, under suggestive titles like The Roots of His Evil and Deadly Reaper. These ‘pulps’ (Allen Lane called them ‘breastsellers’) were sold at train stations, newsagents and other places where ‘low literature’ could be found. Publishers such as Horwitz and Transport Publishing Co. planned each series and engaged studios of hard-living, hard-drinking writers. The most popular pulps appeared under the names of authors such as Carter Brown, Tod Conrad, Marc Brody and K. T. McCall. Under intense pressure from publishers and editors, a typical pulp author would churn out books at the staggering rate of more than twenty a year. How did they do it?
First of all, the series names were a bit of a cheat. Different authors shared the same allonymous pen-names. ‘Carter Brown’ was mostly Alan Yates, but C. J. McKenzie and other authors also wrote under that name. ‘Larry Kent’ was mostly Des Dunn and Don Haring. ‘Marc Brody’ was mostly, but not exclusively, W. H. ‘Bill’ Williams. The second trick was to use crutches and shortcuts. The authors wrote to a formula: one slangy sidekick, one love triangle, two sex scenes, one chase, two murders. And they borrowed liberally from each other and especially from American authors of crime pulps and wild-west adventures and romantic potboilers.
In 2010, my wife, Fiona, and I found a revealing document inside a paperback we bought at auction. The book was Bill Williams’ copy of US author Brett Halliday’s Murder Is My Business (1957). Williams had scrawled notes throughout the book. On a separate manuscript he had mapped out his plan for another book that used Halliday’s slang, plot points and characterisation. The manuscript shows Williams extracting the sharpest dialogue, the most evocative jargon and the sexiest plot elements. In the University of Melbourne library there is a similar document that shows Williams pinching from John Ross Macdonald’s 1958 Experience with Evil. Williams’ fellow authors did the same, ruthlessly plagiarising, appropriating and cannibalising other works. Fiona and I sold our Williams–Halliday manuscript to the rare-books library at Monash. That was the beginning of a long collaboration in which we helped the library build a rich collection of pulps that tell an important cultural story, and reveal much about allonymous authorship and sharp publishers.
When first published, the sixpence Penguin Shakespeares sat on railway bookstalls alongside pulps by Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers and Edgar Wallace. In the Monash library the growing collection of pulps rubbed up against foundational volumes of Shakespeare heresy: Hugh Junor Browne’s The Grand Reality (1888), Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram (1888) and William Thomson’s On Renascence Drama (1880). Shakespeare’s quartos are the Elizabethan equivalent of Carter Brown and Marc Brody pulps. Early playwrights borrowed and stole from each other with the same voraciousness and ruthlessness. In Shakespeare’s library, apart from marked-up copies of earlier versions of his own plays, there would no doubt have been scrawled-on copies of Thomas Kyd’s Hamlet, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and other prior plays and novels—an evidentiary trail of Shakespeare filching plot points, vocabulary, characters, settings.
Though it is almost blasphemy to say so, Shakespeare and his editors also relied on another pulp crutch: writing to a formula. Shakespeare’s plays were built blockwise from standard characters and plot points. Young marriageable women and their dowries; adulterous monarchs; randy foreigners; unhappy bastards; madness; inheritance; betrayal; plays within plays; disguises and false identities. They were formulaic, too, in their structure, and in their blending of high and low humour, and tragic and comedic elements. Blockwise production made preparing and revising the plays easier. Among his peers, Shakespeare may have been the master of formulaic writing; this would help further explain why his peers showed such little respect for him and his work, and were so ready to call out his lack of ‘art’. Perversely, though, the formula underpinned much of Shakespeare’s appeal. Blending high thought and low melodrama, the formula had something for everyone—ideal for diverse Elizabethan audiences, and diverse modern ones.
Supposedly a Templar and the author of Rosicrucian manifestoes, Sir Francis Bacon spurred the hunt for anagrams, cryptograms, isopsephs and ciphers with his book De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). After studying Bacon’s writings, Umberto Eco wrote Foucault’s Pendulum—a fictional attempt to link all the richness of the Baconian Shakespeare heresy to an epic conspiracy embracing the deepest mysteries from history: Gnostics, Psychics and Pneumatics. The Holy Grail, the Hollow Earth, the Freemasons. For Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum was part of a lifelong exploration of textual, cartographical and bibliographical mysteries.
Some time between 1603 and 1611, John Donne produced The Courtier’s Library of Rare Books Not for Sale. It lists thirty-four imaginary books—such as Edward Hoby’s Afternoon Belchings, and Luther’s On Shortening the Lord’s Prayer—that would impart pseudo-wisdom on an aspiring courtier. Also in this tradition of imaginary booklists is François Rabelais’ catalogue, in Pantagruel, that includes The Codpiece of the Law, The Testes of Theology and Martingale Breeches with Back-flaps for Turd-droppers.
The items from these lists are ‘non-books’ or ‘promises of books’. Such volumes have a logical extension: the ‘Library of the Mind’. After ‘dreaming of the books which the famous have marked and annotated, and of being able to summon them from the ghostly shelves for his delight and reverent handling’, the bibliophile F. W. Macdonald wrote of ‘A Library that Never Was or Will Be’. Umberto Eco articulated this concept as the ‘anti-library’, made up of non-existent, unread and unending books. Given the history of the search for Shakespeare’s library, and its meagre results, there is a strong temptation to see Shakespeare’s library as a phantom; to group it among the imaginary libraries and anti-libraries.
George Barrington and James Wilmot supplied daunting images of empty Shakespearean libraries. Others, like Ireland, Collier, Owen, Browne and Gallup, railed against the documentary gaps, then resorted to all manner of fraud to fill them. Uncertainty permeates Shakespeare’s writings and the search for his library. Though this uncertainty is a problem for most scholars, Eco elevated it to a central concept. His images of postmodern texts and postmodern libraries are useful counterpoints to Shakespeare’s early modern ones. In a very real way, Shakespeare’s texts are open; his plays are dynamic not static, flows not stocks. In Shakespeare’s lifetime they existed in multiple versions, a living apparatus of the stage. There is no straightforwardly authoritative edition of any of his plays. In editing as in performance, the plays continue to be re-cast and re-imagined. Shakespeare’s library, too, is dynamic. Hotly contested, it is subject to continual reinvention. Four hundred years of searching produced a rich portfolio of conceptions of the library, and commensurately of Shakespeare himself.
But Shakespeare certainly did have books, and he certainly read them. Why, then, have we found none of his manuscripts, and why are there no books with an authentic Shakespeare signature, bookplate, book label or inscription? Gaps such as these are what led many people to doubt his authorship. The gaps, though, are explicable in light of today’s clearer picture of Shakespeare. Worldly, workmanlike, unsentimental. Pilloried and spurned. Occasionally dangerous. Accidentally talented. These attributes help explain why he was not an avid inscriber of books, nor much of a letter-writer. Practically minded and commercial, he does not seem to have been driven by abstract ideas of fame and posterity. Let us stop there. The further we take such talk, the further we stray into speculation, anachronism and the biographical fallacy in yet another guise. The nub is this: Shakespeare was not what we think of today as a ‘literary’ man. The value-laden distinctions we make between Shakespeare’s literary and non-literary work are modern ones. So, too, are our expectations of what ‘an author like Shakespeare’ would leave behind.
In Elizabethan times, Shakespeare was not a celebrity. When John Manningham recorded the ‘William the Conqueror’ episode in 1602, he had to explain the punchline—otherwise it would not be clear that Shakespeare’s first name was William. Nor, it seems, was Shakespeare a Jacobean household name. Through its scale and presentation, the First Folio created the retrospective impression of Shakespearean fame. It also brought a new polish and a new coherence to an œuvre that may in fact have been somewhat smaller and scrappier in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Apart from the job done by the First Folio, the modern fame of ‘literary Shakespeare’ is indebted most of all to the eighteenth-century enthusiasm that had its richest manifestation in Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee.
Some of the documentary silences that led to Shakespeare Authorship scepticism are not so silent after all. Though Edward Alleyn left Shakespeare out of his diary, he did acknowledge the Bard’s existence by buying a copy of the 1609 Sonnets, in the year of their publication, and by making a note of the purchase. As we have seen, there are dozens of other contemporary references to Shakespeare. To the extent that documentary silences remain, some are not surprising. There is no evidence of Shakespeare attending Stratford Grammar School, for example, but there is little evidence about other students either, as the school’s records for that period were destroyed. The school records of Robert Greene were lost, too, as were many other early documents. Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not value historical records as we do today. Nor, often, did people have the resources with which to protect them.
Shakespeare’s will famously makes no mention of books. (It does contain the notorious bequest, to Anne Shakespeare, of her husband’s ‘second best bed’.) The wills of many of his contemporaries, though, are similarly silent. Thomas Russell’s, for example, does not mention books. Examination of a range of Stratford wills from Shakespeare’s period shows very few bequests of books. Even some aristocratic bibliophiles did not mention books in their wills. There seem to be several reasons for this. First, books and other papers may have been regarded as ephemeral, or as miscellaneous chattels undeserving of a specific mention. Secondly, the market for books was highly liquid. There were many channels through which a dying bookman or his estate could convert books into cash. Thirdly, in Shakespeare’s case, possessions such as books may have been listed in a separate codicil, initially appended to the will but now lost. These reasons should be enough to stop us worrying about the ‘gaps’ in Shakespeare’s will.
Richard Field was born in the same town as Shakespeare and at around the same time. Like John Shakespeare, Richard’s father Henry was in the leather trade (he was a tanner). In 1579, just before his eighteenth birthday, Field was apprenticed to George Bishop, a prominent London stationer. By agreement with Bishop, Field spent the first six years of his apprenticeship working under the printer-publisher Thomas Vautrollier. In 1587, Field ‘was made free of the Stationers Company’. Five months later, Vautrollier died. The following year, at the age of twenty-seven, Field hit the jackpot. He took over his former master’s business, and married his former master’s widow, Jacqueline. With this head start, Field became one of London’s leading printer-publishers. From his Blackfriars printery he issued Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and hundreds of other titles, including dozens of major and minor Shakespeare sources.
Shakespeare’s ‘genius’ was in appropriation, revision and synthesis. The search for his library has elucidated his extensive use of sources—and has helped preserve his reputation by showing the ‘secret author’ theories to be ill-founded. There are many theories, too, of how Shakespeare accessed his sources: reading at bookstalls in St Paul’s Churchyard; borrowing volumes from wealthy booklovers; picking up content indirectly from source texts; and reading books in Richard Field’s printery. Shakespeare may have visited Field’s workshop and working library; he may have read sources there; and he may even have resided with Field to complete specific works, just as other bookmen did with other printer-publishers. Apart from all these reading pathways, though, Shakespeare also had a library.
Shakespeare’s library. The biggest enigma in literature; the book-world equivalent of the Templar Treasure; less well preserved than the Dead Sea Scrolls; less well documented than the Great Library of Alexandria; more sought-after than any other bookish prize. In the course of our search we have glimpsed amazing but elusive riches. Playscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. Volumes decorated with Shakespeare’s crest, or bound in fabric from his costumes. The Sonnets manuscript that circulated among his ‘private friends’. Lost printed editions of Othello and Love’s Labour’s Won. Manuscripts of the missing play Cardenio, containing Shakespeare’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The ancestor-text of Hamlet, known as ‘Ur-Hamlet’. Shakespeare’s own copies of Ovid, Plutarch, Chaucer and Spenser. His books from the dawn of English printing, from the workshops of William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde. Association copies, such as gifts to Shakespeare from Marlowe and Jonson. (Despite Shakespeare’s many arguments with Jonson, the register of the Bard’s death is satisfyingly unambiguous about his social status: ‘Will. Shakspere gent’.)
At the turn of the millennium, the search for Shakespeare’s library took a decidedly strange turn. Authors such as Brenda James, Diana Price, Bill Rubinstein, Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman brought the study of Shakespeare’s life and works firmly into the realm of conspiracy theories. The ‘anti-Stratfordians’ have more than a superficial furtiveness in common with ufologists, crop circlers and great pyramid secretists. In their beliefs and writings about Shakespeare they are mostly wrong. Many errors, though, have also been made among the orthodox. Ultimately, the heretics serve a useful purpose by keeping the mainstream honest. I’m glad to say the Monash Nevillians and I have remained friends.
The quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death coincided with a golden age of print scholarship. New insights are regularly appearing; historical frauds and missteps can be seen more clearly; there are new lenses through which to view Shakespeare authorship, editorship and ownership. Despite all the Strat-Anti-Strat bile, the combatants’ online conversation is vibrant and productive. They may even be inching towards consensus. For Shakespeare studies, ours is the best of times and the worst of times; an inflection point by any other name.