"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Four: "The Truth Will Out"

In 1949, because of disputes over the editorialization of radio news broadcasters during the previous decade, the FCC established a policy called the Fairness Doctrine, which would require licensed broadcasters to devote air time to opposing views on controversial issues important to the public. While this may sound positive, it’s somewhat more complicated than it may appear at first blush. The policy was widely used in the 1960s to silence political speech, as complaints to the FCC about rural broadcasters who could not afford to provide airtime to those espousing counterpoints led in a lot of cases to a general chilling effect on free speech. But when it was repealed, the country saw a surge in biased political speech and misinformation. This was the era in which Rush Limbaugh became a sensation, mostly because the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine allowed his very one-sided program to go national. Limbaugh called any subsequent legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine “Hush Rush” bills. Today, in an age of biased and unreliable news sources pushing conspiracy theory and misinformation, there have been further efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but many protest that such a policy could result in the amplification of nonsense, with the notion that opposing views on any topic must be given equal weight. Imagine a world in which programs about the Holocaust would be forced to present the claims of denialists uncritically, when newscasters covering the election would be forced to present conspiracy theories about election fraud as if they had equal weight. The post-truth era would have reached it most terrifying conclusion. And it is certain that the Fairness Doctrine would be exploited in this way. It already was. Before its repeal, Charlton Ogburn, the man who had in the ‘60s and ‘70s tirelessly rehabilitated the Oxfordian Theory of the authorship of works attributed to Shakespeare, had tried to use it to promote his theories, appealing based on the policy for equal time in a certain National Geographic television production on Shakespeare so that he could cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship. This notion that anti-Stratfordian views deserved equal footing and consideration on par with traditional historical views about Shakespeare and his works is what lay at the root of his efforts to arrange the mock trials in both America and Britain—that the Shakespeare denialists should be taken seriously, that their views deserved a fair shake. It was thus a devastating blow when in both trials it was determined at the outset that, since anti-Stratfordians were challenging established history, the burden of proof was on them. Because of the general refusal of the scholarly community to grant his views equal weight with consensus views, Ogburn cried conspiracy and cover-up. He claimed that academia was silencing anti-Stratfordians because their theories challenged the status quo, calling it an “academic Watergate.” Again, it was all very much like the claims of Creationists, who wanted religious doctrine to be granted equal footing with scientific principles and cried suppression when they didn’t get their way. Twice in this series I have acknowledged some instances of genuine suppression by academics: when Edmund Malone did not make public a document proving that some of Shakespeare’s works may have been collaborations and when a scholar talked Putnam’s out of printing more of Delia Bacon’s theories. But a vast scholarly conspiracy these instances do not establish. After all, on Malone’s death, another scholar did publish the document, and it must be remembered that Putnam’s had published some of Delia Bacon’s work already, and no one prevented the subsequent printing of her book. The simple fact that Oxfordians managed to get a graduate program established in one school demonstrates that there is no cover up. Rather, there is only a failure on their part to convince the academic world to take their claims seriously, and that is because they reject the burden of proof. In 2007, when Brunel University started its authorship studies program, a document was drafted by Oxfordians and signed by some famous stage actors, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, called the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare.” This document, which continues to gather signatures online, focuses not on the case for Oxford, but rather on the case for Shakespeare being the Bard, shifting the burden of proof by claiming that Shakespeare’s authorship is more questionable, and declaring that “the identity of William Shakespeare should, henceforth, be regarded in academia as a legitimate issue for research and publication.” So in the spirit of fairness, we will now lay out, in the clearest of terms, the case for Shakespeare which has so convinced historians that any alternative theories must meet a high bar of evidentiary proof.

There is a reason I bring up the Fairness Doctrine, beyond its connection to Ogburn and his efforts to see Oxfordianism taken seriously. Before this series got started, I had a patron of the program express reservations about the choice of topic. Her comments raised an idea that I think is worth exploring: whether or not a claim that has been debunked again and again is worthy of bringing up and rehashing. This is something I often find myself wresting with because of the nature of my podcast. As I discussed at length in my talk at Sound Education at Harvard Divinity, audio of which you can find in the podcast feed, I don’t think critical thinkers and skeptics should shrink from addressing dubious and false claims, whether wrong or even dangerous—perhaps especially if they are dangerous. Even claims that have already been thoroughly debunked can be further debunked or can have their refutation amplified through further discussion. Most of the topics I have covered have already been thoroughly debunked over and over, like conspiracies about the Illuminati or Templars, but recoiling from covering those topics because we might find them distasteful or problematic or even embarrassing or silly gives misinformation the edge. Those who promote them certainly aren’t avoiding them; they work tirelessly creating content that amplifies misinformation and conspiracy theory. And there will always be people looking these claims up. If they find more material out there promoting whatever false claim has caught their interest, they may be more likely to fall for it. It’s a continual battle in which I feel I’m doing my part by producing content that refutes misinformation. I do, however, understand the views of some in the academic community and the news media that to give any air to misinformation is to strengthen it. I recently had a listener email me saying he was a conspiracy theorist who disagrees with everything I say but listens to the podcast to learn where his favorite conspiracy theories come from. I admit that is extremely discouraging, the idea that despite my greatest efforts, my work might actually arm a conspiracist with some information they can use to convince others. However, I reject the entire notion that if we just ignore these topics they will go away. How many times have we seen something like the Protocols of Zion forgery be debunked over and over yet continue to be touted and spread as if it never was debunked. The promoters of misinformation will likely always outnumber its opponents, so I believe it is important to continually fight it, so that falsehood doesn’t get the final word. Although there are tricky problems with policies like the Fairness Doctrine, I feel it important that there are people persistently making the effort to provide opposing views on unreliable claims. But at the same time, I don’t intend to offer equal time or present such topics as having equal weight. I have always tried to be frank about what is BS and why. And here at the end of my series on the Shakespeare authorship question, I hope to establish once and for all why Shakespeare’s authorship should not and indeed should never have been questioned. 

Charlton Ogburn, influential Oxfordian

First and foremost, we should look at some ways the anti-Stratfordian theories have never and cannot meet the burden of proof. I have endeavored to reveal this throughout the series, pointing out numerous ways their assumptions and interpretations lack merit or have been proven wrong. I am hopeful that it has become apparent that each of these theories rests on far more unproven conjectures than does the authorship of Shakespeare. In order to account for the problems that anti-Stratfordians see with his authorship, we need only reason that some documentation of his life may have been lost or that he simply happened not to leave behind certain personal papers, something that was common of many an Elizabethan. But to support any other candidate, entire vast conspiracies need be imagined. And the nature of the conspiracy, how it worked, is not only unproven but often quite vague. Was William Shakespeare simply a pseudonym adopted by the true writer, and the existence of another by that name a coincidence? Was the pseudonym adopted because of the existence of the actor? In which case, why would the actor allow it? Was some arrangement made, such that the actor by that name benefitted from the arrangement? Anti-Stratfordians all disagree on the particulars, making it nothing more than a set of competing fictions. Since the plays performed by Shakespeare’s companies, Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later the King’s Men, actually belonged to the companies, of which William Shakespeare was only a partial shareholder, early publications of the plays certainly did not enrich him, and since the collected plays were not published in the First Folio until after his death, he did not earn a penny from it. So if this imaginary arrangement did occur, it benefitted the author not at all, and benefitted Shakespeare only insofar as he acquired new plays for his company to perform and perhaps earned himself a reputation as a writer. Most of the theories have it that the true author simply didn’t want to be known as the author, because there was some stigma attached to the art, and yet many of the leading candidates were already known to have been poets and playwrights, so this motive makes no sense. And if the true author sought only to see their works performed and not be credited, it could have been arranged for the plays to be anonymous. Many were the anonymously penned plays performed in London at the time, and many were the plays published anonymously, so just the simple notion that the true author would have to or even want to have someone else’s name put on the works falls apart under closer consideration.

Let us further entertain the notion that not only was it an embarrassment for a nobleman to be involved with playwriting and, to a lesser extent, poetry, but also that there was some hidden and radical message within the works attributed to Shakespeare, which would be further reason for even a gentleman known to dabble in literature to distance himself from the work. This is the argument that some anti-Stratfordians make, such that the true author simply could not risk putting their name on it, so they wanted or needed a front man or fall guy. Even if we swallow all of this, we must consider the risks that both parties were assuming in such an arrangement. Back in 1593, one writer, Thomas Kyd, was arrested on suspicion of producing “mutinous libels,” and was ruthlessly tortured until he informed on other writers, namely Christopher Marlowe, whose suspicious stabbing occurred in the midst of the scandal. This repressive atmosphere suggests that if William Shakespeare were approached with an arrangement to put his name on potentially seditious plays, he likely would have refused, and if there were some other author wanting to hide his authorship, he wouldn’t reveal himself to the man whose name he wished to put on the works, as then his authorship would come out under torture. All of these were unnecessary risks because, again, anonymous plays were common. For some further insight, it is worthwhile to look at what actually happened when a satirical play that had not been anonymously written actually did displease the Queen and her Privy Councilors. In 1597, a play called The Isle of Dogs, in reference to a certain palace where the Queen kenneled her dogs and where the Privy Council met, seems to have satirized either the Queen herself and/or certain of her nobility and was thus declared seditious. We don’t know exactly how it satirized them today, since the play was suppressed, though there are guesses. The Isle of Dogs was a place where river sewage accumulated, so it may be that the play compared the Queen and her counselors meeting there to the excrement collecting there. Alternatively, considering the title, the Privy Council may have been satirized as dogs, the Queen’s dogs, like lapdogs. Regardless, the Council had three of the actors who performed in the play arrested, one of them being a coauthor of the play, Ben Jonson, a close associate and rival of William Shakespeare’s. With an additional standing order to apprehend everyone involved, the entire playing company that put on the play, Pembroke’s Men, had to go on the run for a while. The Isle of Dogs incident had a chilling effect on satire in the theater, such that few playwrights and few companies would risk their livelihoods by staging anything that might seem seditious. This makes it unlikely that William Shakespeare would even put his entire company at risk by staging plays that might have been subversive, let alone that he would want to put his name on such material. By this reasoning, it is entirely unlikely that any of the hidden messages later anti-Stratfordians imagine are hidden in the plays were ever actually intended by their author. If they were, they were so well hidden that censors of the time did not catch them, and neither did audiences, at which point, what would have even been the purpose?

A woodcut of one of the authors of The Isle of Dogs depicted in chains.

Those who argue the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes suggest there were two Shakespeares, that the Shakespeare of Stratford was not so very involved in London theatrical production, and the person writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s men was simply using a pseudonym that would cause him to be mistaken for the moneylender from Stratford. As evidence, they look at the spelling of his name on legal documents, comparing them to the name as printed on the published works. The man from Stratford appeared to spell his name with no “e” between the “k” and “s,” making it more like Shakspeare, or Shakspere, or even Shaksper! Whereas on the published works, there is the “e” separating the first half of the name from the second, and often, also, a hyphen, making it “Shake-speare.” A-ha! Evidence that they were different men, the anti-Stratfordians cry. But as was the case with many presumptions about ciphers in the plays, a little knowledge of Elizabethan printing dispels the notion. In the fonts used by compositors of the day, the long “s” or swash “s” could not be placed next to the letter “k,” so the “e” or a hyphen or both were needed to separate the letters. In fact, in one document that ascribes authorship of certain plays to Shakespeare, a record of the performances at Whitehall Palace and the “poets which made the plays,” his name is given as Shaxberd, which certainly sounds more like the spelling he used himself, on, for example, his will. Some anti-Stratfordians take this further, arguing that the variation in spelling even in documents signed with his own hand proves that William Shakespeare was illiterate. After all, he spelled his own name two different ways on his will. But this assertion too rests on ignorance, for it is well known that no clear sense of correct spelling emerged in the English language until the 18th century. Until that time, words and names were largely spelled phonetically. If anti-Stratfordians want to claim that variation in spelling his name meant Shakespeare was illiterate, then that meant other candidates, like Marlowe and Oxford, who also spelled their names different ways, must also have been illiterate.

The flip side of the argument that only someone with access to the royal court and the life of the nobility could have written so convincingly about courtiers and noblemen is the far more convincing assertion that only a member of a playing company could have written the plays for that playing company. The evidence is in the plays themselves. The person who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare had intimate knowledge of players in Lord Chamberlain’s Men and was writing plays with exactly the number of important roles for the major players in the company. Since women were forbidden from acting at the time, the author could only write substantial female roles when it was known that a boy actor capable of doing the part justice was available, and the availability of strong boy actors changed as frequently as their voices. More than that, it is apparent that Shakespeare was writing parts with specific actors in mind. It is one thing to imagine that the playwright had the tragedian actor Richard Burbage in mind when creating the characters of Lear and Hamlet, and that he crafted the recurring character of Falstaff specifically for the comedic actor William Kemp, and it is quite another to find actual documentary evidence of the fact, which we have. Although the original manuscripts are lost, some elements of them can still be discerned in early quarto publications and the First Folio, in which, on occasion, stage directions accidentally refer to characters by the actor’s name. There is even a remnant of one performance of 1 Henry IV that indicates an alternative epilogue had been written for the Whitehall Palace performance, in which the author, himself clearly a member of the company, takes the stage to address the Queen and beg forgiveness if she had not enjoyed the preceding play, reciting lines that he specifically says are “of my own making,” and saying that “I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise a better.” So it is clear that Henry the Fourth was meant to be the better play he had promised to write when next his company performed for her. What this epilogue appears to support, then, as my principal source, Contested Will by James Shapiro convincingly argues, is that the plays of Shakespeare had to have been written by a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, one who worked with them, a fellow actor, not some nobleman who had died years earlier or who did not wish to be associated with the company, or who worked with some rival company, or who lived abroad in exile. This, of course, eliminates most every other candidate—Oxford, Bacon, Derby, Marlowe—leaving only Shakespeare, who was known to be an actor and shareholder in that company.

Examples of Shakespeare’s signature, showing variation in spelling

As a further example of evidence in the works that indicates the author of the plays was working day to day among the playing company known to perform the plays attributed to Shakespeare, we can look at Shakespeare’s late style. During the last several years of Shakespeare’s life, when under King James his company took the name the King’s Men, the plays they performed adopted a different style, turning from tragedy and comedy to tragicomedy, and a denser, unrhyming style of verse. Much has been made of this evolution of his style, with some scholars claiming it shows his waning interest in making sure his work is accessible to audiences. While this may be part of the explanation, other critics have pointed out that Shakespeare was not the only playwright developing this style in those years, which suggests that it was a developing style of the period. This, then, would again disprove the authorship of Oxford, who had long been dead; Oxfordians would claim that Edward de Vere was writing in very different styles all during the same period, which is harder to believe than that Shakespeare slowly moved toward this style along with his contemporaries. And it was during this Jacobean period that the King’s Men started playing at Blackfriars. This theater was right in London and had previously been drawing large audiences who came to see children’s companies performing tragicomedies. Thus, when the King’s Men began playing there, it made sense to give their audience what they wanted, which were tragicomedies, featuring lots of dancing. It is telling that all the Shakespearian plays that appeared during this period suddenly included lots of dancing. A big part of writing plays was not only shaping the story with the number of parts matching the number of actors, such that the company had enough performers for every character that would appear on stage at any one time, and that actors playing two roles could not play two characters who interacted, but how the actors would exit and enter a scene or descend and ascend from balconies. Plays were written for theaters as much as they were for actors, and this is clearly seen in the plays written to be performed at Blackfriars. The stage was far smaller than others they played, like the outdoor Globe theater, so suddenly the far-ranging sword fights that had been a staple of Shakespeare’s plays are no longer present. With poor natural lighting, long breaks had to be written into the plays so that candles could be trimmed. And since Blackfriars audiences expected constant entertainment, this meant musicians had to be kept on hand to play through the breaks. So lo and behold, in plays from those years, there are far more mentions of musical effects, made possible by the presence of the musicians. All of these elements indicate that the writer of the plays was present, working with actors, blocking the action, orchestrating every particular. And the only candidate known to be working so closely with the playing company was the original candidate, the man who had always been credited with writing the plays, the man no one doubted had been their author for some 150 years: William Shakespeare himself.

Some anti-Stratfordians will act like there is no contemporary evidence of the existence of the actor and acting company share-holder William Shakespeare aside from the name printed on published versions of the play. In their depiction, there is just the few signatures on legal documents in Stratford and the name on the quarto and folio editions of the plays. But of course, there is far more than that. Shakespeare was mentioned by numerous contemporaries as a rising star of poetry and the theater. In 1592, a fellow writer, Robert Greene, called him an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and…is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” To interpret, Greene was suggesting Shakespeare thought he was better than every other writer, but that he borrowed heavily from them. What’s perhaps more telling, though, is that in his line about a tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, parodying a line from Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, he calls him a “player,” or actor. After his narrative poems were published in 1593 and ’94, the literati begin to refer to him by name, and he starts to even get nicknames, like “Sweet Shakspeare.” A few years later, in Francis Mere’s Palladis Tamia, in a section on English Poets, calls him “honey-tongued Shakespeare,” remarking on his excellence as both a poet and a playwright. This name seems to have stuck, as John Weever, in 1599, writing in a Shakespearian-style sonnet, refers again to “Honey-tongued Shakespeare.” In those same years, an anonymous play called Parnassus appears to show Shakespeare already being idolized to the point of deification in his own lifetime, with characters saying they “shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare,” and that they shall hang his picture up and “worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare.” Even historians recorded his accomplishments, with William Camden in 1605 listing Shakespeare as one of the “pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.” Not only was Shakespeare credited in certain publications, such as the printing of his narrative poems and early quarto versions of his plays, but even in the private libraries of gentlemen of the era, his name is handwritten in on versions of his works that had been published anonymously. It is quite apparent that the intelligentsia and literati of London knew who he was and knew what he had written. If they had been duped by a conspiracy, it was a vast conspiracy, and no one involved in it ever let the secret slip in any of their own private documents. And as we have seen over and over, vast conspiracies just aren’t believable.

A depiction of the small stage in the windowless Blackfriars Theatre.

But of course, the anti-Stratfordians only want personal anecdotes, references from those who were close with the man, especially those that can tie him directly to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the man William Shakespeare was known to have lived and died. They claim these don’t exist, but they do. I have already mentioned the anecdotes that establish the fact that the fever Shakespeare died from came on after a drinking bout with the two playwrights Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. And in fact, the clear evidence that Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson were close friends of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and that they identify this man as the great playwright of London should be the final nail in the coffin of the authorship question. Drayton too was from Warwickshire, and after Shakespeare’s death, he wrote a verse praising his friend by name as being as great “[a]s any one that trafficked with the stage.” Ben Jonson, on the other hand, left behind a more complicated remembrance of the man, as befits two men who were both friends and rivals. Jonson was known to criticize Shakespeare, to call him out when something he’d written was inaccurate or not believable. He once wrote of Shakespeare’s company that “the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech.” Besides demonstrating that Shakespeare was the writer of this company, and the actors all loved him for his writing, it also shows that Ben Jonson was perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest critic and would likely not have kept the secret that Shakespeare was not in fact a writer but was actually taking credit for the writing of someone else. This is important, because the evidence Ben Jonson provides for Shakespeare’s authorship is so irrefutable that anti-Stratfordians are forced to claim Jonson himself must be a conspirator perpetrating the fraud. In the First Folio, which collected the works of Shakespeare in print for the first time, and which included as its frontispiece a portrait printed from a brass engraving of Shakespeare, Jonson provided both an introductory poem and a memorial verse. In the first, he makes clear that the portrait captures well Shakespeare’s appearance, saying “could he but have drawn his wit / As well in brass, as he hath hit / His face; the print would then surpass / All, that was ever writ in brass.” And his memorial verse, which is called “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” he heaps extravagant praise on his friend. And in perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence to identify Shakespeare the playwright and poet with the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Jonson calls him “Sweet Swan of Avon,” comparing the performances of his plays at the riverside theater, the Globe, with the flights of these birds on the Thames, and finally to the Bard’s final “flight from hence.” It is an astonishing and touching piece of evidence proving that, after all, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and the only way for anti-Stratfordians to contend with it is to splutter that Ben Jonson too must have been in on the cover-up!

Here at the end of our study we should make one thing very clear. The study of Shakespeare’s plays, and who should rightly be credited as their author, is not in and of itself a ridiculous or not worthwhile scholarly pursuit. In fact, there is a long history of legitimate scholarship pertaining to Shakespeare scholarship. Determining which plays were compositions of Shakespeare’s despite having been published anonymously was long a legitimate academic undertaking, as has been searching for evidence of lost works and evidence of source plays that were rewritten as the plays we now recognize, like Love’s Labour’s Won, which appears to have been reworked as All’s Well that Ends Well. During the 18th century, several plays were attributed to him, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, Pericles, and Thomas, Lord Cromwell, all of which would later be disputed as misattributed. Because of this, furthering the parallels between devotion to Shakespeare and religion, we have come to refer to the Shakespearian canon, and everything excluded from it as apocrypha. And much great scholarship has appeared that studies Shakespeare’s collaborative writing. As mentioned in Part One, ever since the emergence of documentation that London playwrights regularly collaborated on their plays, there has emerged an entire field of study on Shakespeare’s collaborations, such that now it is widely accepted that he contributed to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Edward III, and Anthony Munday’s Sir Thomas More, that Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s revision of a work by George Peele, and that Henry the Sixth was his revision of a play by Thomas Nashe. What sets this work apart from so-called “authorship studies” is that they do not reject consensus scholarship but rather build on it, in an empirical sense. What anti-Stratfordians do is less like empirical historical study and more akin to historical negationism or denialism. If we look at scholarly definitions of denialism, we see a few criteria. It relies on fake experts, and the fact that Shakespeare authorship claims are almost universally raised by amateur researchers meets this criterion. It is selective in its use of evidence, and relies on outlier evidence, and misrepresents facts, and I think we’ve seen that throughout this series. It resorts to impossible expectations of evidence, which I think is true of anti-Stratfordians as well, as one critic in the New Yorker pointed out that they use “an interpretive framework that has an infinite capacity to explain away information.” And most importantly, denialists always fall back on unsupported claims of widespread conspiracy, and we see that here unmistakably. So let’s lose the terminology that has developed around this topic; let us not speak of Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians, of Baconians, Marlovians, and Oxfordians. Let’s call them what they are: Shakespeare denialists.

 Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Three: Oxford's Ghost

Following the initial failure of the Baconian heresy to convince the world that Francis Bacon was the author of the works of Shakespeare, other candidates began to be named as the potential true writers of the Bard’s great works. The playwright Christopher Marlowe was one. There were, of course, many reasons why it could not have been Marlowe, but for many anti-Stratfordians, who simply refused to consider the notion that Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, could possibly have written the works, Marlowe too had come from too modest a background to have written the plays. Though Marlowe had written well-regarded plays, and though he had risen from his lower class background to attend Cambridge, and though he even had connections to the royal court, which many continued to believe was a prerequisite for consideration, Marlowe’s connection was rather shady, through the world of espionage. In the minds of many, the true Bard simply must have been an aristocrat, born of high breeding, and so they looked to members of the peerage, earls who seemed to fit their pet notions of what the writer might really have been like. In the early 1900s, while the Baconians were still searching for ciphers and hidden manuscripts, a few noblemen were suggested as the real culprit. One was the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who had long been associated with the Bard because Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated to him, with the words “What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours.” This, of course, was rather common language in dedications to lords who had sponsored the works in question. Long had Southampton already been viewed as the person referred to as “Fair Youth” in the Sonnets, but to suggest that he was also the author was simply insupportable. We’d have to imagine him dedicating his own works to himself and expressing love for himself in extravagant ways. It’s rather comical, and therefore was never very convincing. Another candidate was the 2nd Earl of Essex, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth during the later years of her reign, who eventually fomented a rebellion and was executed, a full 15 years before the date on William Shakespeare’s last will and testament. With no literary work attributed to him that could be compared to the great works of Shakespeare, there was little to his candidacy beyond a passing resemblance to the portrait of Shakespeare that appeared on the First Folio edition of his works, so this theory, too, fizzled, only to survive as the watered-down theory that whoever the author was had just used Essex as the model for the portrait. The fifth Earl of Rutland drew more support as a likely candidate in 1907, as he had literary connections and as an ambassador had traveled to the places that it was imagined Shakespeare had personal knowledge of. For example, he had served as an envoy to the Danish court, which his supporters said qualified him to write Hamlet. For Rutland to have been the guy, though, he would have had to write Romeo and Juliet at only 17 years old. Rutland and the others would soon enough be eclipsed by William Stanley, the Earl of Derby, as a favorite candidate. Derby’s initials were the same as William Shakespeare’s, the dates of his life fit, bits and pieces of the plays seemed to have some similarity to events in his life and travels, and according to one report, recorded by a Jesuit spy in 1599, he spent his time “penning comedies for the common players,” and he was known to finance drama companies and even had his own. Why he would write plays exclusively for a rival company of actors could not be adequately explained, however, so the theory never reached Baconian levels of popularity, though it still lingers today. Instead, the next favorite candidate to be credited with the authorship of Shakespeare’s works would be another earl, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, even though the Oxfordian theory, as it came to be called, suffered from many of the same problems as the cases in favor of these other earls.

In the previous episode we heard about how Baconians are somewhat ashamed of the origins of their preferred authorship theory, since it was dreamed up by a woman who would eventually be institutionalized as insane. Of course, there was much more to her story, and far more contributing to her mental health decline than just her theory regarding the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, which I tried to illustrate in the episode, but it does seem to have been embarrassing enough that works have been forged to pretend the theory did not originate with her. Similarly, the origin of the Oxfordian theory could be considered something of an embarrassment as well, stumbled on as it was by a Looney. To be more precise, his name was John Thomas Looney, though he actually insisted that it was pronounced “low-ney.” I can’t help but wonder if he insisted on that because its pronunciation had led to no small amount of ridicule in his lifetime, and certainly the name has led to similar mockery by those who would heap scorn on Oxfordians. I’m guilty of it myself, just now. Though I actually know someone with the same surname who pronounces it just how it looks, but since the man insisted that it rhymes with baloney, then we’ll say it rhymes with baloney. There was more to John Thomas Looney than just a silly name. He was a schoolteacher, and he was an influential member of the English Positivist community, specifically a member of its Church of Humanity, a kind of secular religion. Positivism was a philosophical movement that is somewhat hard to characterize. It was a 19th century school of thought that valued progress, but far from progressive, in its focus on order as a means of progress, it rejected revolutionary ideas as harbingers of chaos, and thus it was inherently reactionary. This was because its founder, Auguste Comte, had grown up in the age of the French Revolution and detested the disorder and anarchy that he believed was its result. While Comte rejected the metaphysics of religion, he valued the cohesion and order that organized religion engendered, so he and his Positivists sought to use the forms of religion to promote progress and the ideas of Positivism. Thus the Church of Humanity was born, ironically following in the footsteps of French Revolutionaries who converted churches into Temples of Reason. In the Church of Humanity, great leaders and thinkers were worshipped, their busts put in places of honor like idols, and among them was always a bust of William Shakespeare. So the Bard was deified again, but John Thomas Looney, who likely would have become the leader of the Church of Humanity had it not been for a schism and leadership struggle within the movement, would eventually go on to promulgate perhaps the most successful authorship theory, Oxfordianism, in his book “Shakespeare” Identified in 1920, tearing down the idol of Shakespeare once again.

A photo of J. Thomas Looney, originator of Oxfordianism

Looney’s book begins with a careful explanation of how he came to settle on the candidate Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, taking pains to present himself as so very open-minded and unbiased, although it is clear that from the outset he believed William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the works. Like others, he asserts that the records we have of Shakespeare’s financial matters just don’t comport with the expansive mind we encounter in the works, insisting the true author could not have cared about money so much as it seems the Stratford man had. That’s right. You heard it here first. Great writers don’t care about money. And it’s not as if the realities of the world force even the most profound thinkers to devote thought to such matters. What he says led him to Oxford was that he found a poem the earl had written that happened to be in the same poetic form as Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare. The stanzas were similarly structured. That’s it. A poet would laugh at this, for not only are the same poetic forms used over and over by many poets, but even a very unique form may be thought up independently by more than one poet. The elements of poetic structure—rhyme, meter, stanza, line lengths—are not fingerprints. But instead of comparing Shakespeare’s poetry to other poetry of the day, or comparing his plays to other plays, or in general just looking further than the first character he came across, he fixated on Edward de Vere, believing that elements of his life story fit well with the man he imagined the author of Shakespearian works to have been. Oxford had been a poet and playwright, though none of his dramatic works survive for comparison to the works of Shakespeare. He was a patron of the theater, with numerous works dedicated to him. He was well-educated and well-traveled, and he had connections to Elizabeth’s court. At the time that Looney was writing, there actually wasn’t much biographical information about Edward de Vere. There was his surviving poetry, some broad strokes about his life, and the occasional offhand remark about him, like the anecdote that Oxford left on his travels out of shame after he “happened to let a fart” in the presence of the Queen, and seven years later, when he returned, Elizabeth reassured him by saying “My lord, I had forgot the fart.” This vagueness with regard to the known facts about de Vere rather helped Looney’s theory, since there was little to disprove it. But there was the troublesome fact that he had died in 1604, before several of Shakespeare’s greatest plays are believed by scholars to have been written. Looney claimed, with no evidence, that Oxford wrote under a pseudonym because writing plays was an embarrassment to a nobleman, and that he had hoarded the plays to be released and performed posthumously. It is true that writing plays was not considered a proper use of a nobleman’s time, but it’s also apparent that people knew de Vere wrote poetry and plays, so who exactly he might have been hiding it from is unclear. And it’s certainly possible for someone’s written work to be released posthumously, but that is not typical of plays, which were collaborated on with the players of each company. The simple fact that the first appearances and performances of the plays attributed to Shakespeare match up with the lifetime of the Stratford man whose name appeared on them would certainly seem to be a clearer point in favor of Shakespeare having been the author.

After the book’s appearance, Oxford very quickly surpassed Bacon as the favorite of anti-Stratfordians. Likely this had a lot to do with how bonkers Baconians had become with their secret codes and conspiracies. The Oxfordians at least had a veneer of scholarly respectability. While Baconians had quite a few very famous converts, Oxfordians too had some big names, the most famous being Sigmund Freud, who came to believe that the plays of Shakespeare simply had to be autobiographical, and that Hamlet was as important an example of his Oedipal complex as had been the tragedy Oedipus Rex. When Shakespeare scholarship revealed that Shakespeare’s father had not necessarily died before Hamlet, in which the character is struggling to come to terms with his feelings about his father’s death, Freud came to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship rather than his interpretation of the play as autobiographical. And when it turned out that Edward de Vere’s father had died when he was young, it cemented for Freud that Looney must be right, for it meant that Freud himself had been right. As Oxford became the subject of ever more research, more facts about his life came to be known, and those who wanted to believe he was the Bard would find no end to the details they could suggest corresponded to elements of Shakespearian works. Characters in the plays became thinly vailed caricatures of his friends and lovers. His wife Anne Cecil was transformed into the inspiration for Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia. The one time he purposely stabbed a cook in the leg was portrayed as the basis for Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius. But more historical and biographical knowledge on the man, as well as on Shakespeare himself, cuts both ways. It was discovered that Oxford had his own company of actors, “the Earl of Oxford’s Men,” so just like the Earl of Derby, it’s quite unclear why he would write plays for some other company of actors to perform. It was learned that Oxford’s marriage to Anne Cecil was disastrous, that he was routinely unfaithful, that he was something of a cad, and that in his final years he devoted himself only to increasing his income. Those who thought him a more fitting personality than the man from Stratford had a rude awakening. And as more was learned about William Shakespeare, more was learned about his sources, such that we know where he took the inspiration for Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius, from Histoire Traguiques, by François de Belleforest. And we further know that, if proximity to the court of Queen Elizabeth was a prerequisite for authorship, William Shakespeare was actually in the Queen’s presence, performing at Whitehall, more than Oxford was during the 1590s and the early 1600s. Examining the Oxfordian case, it becomes exceedingly clear that all alternative authorship claims are totally subjective, and whatever does not fit one’s favored narrative can be discarded. For example, anti-Stratfordians had long suggested by their biographical reading of the work, that the many sibling rivalries in the plays meant the true author must have had brothers. Well, Edward de Vere did not, and in fact, William Shakespeare had two, one of whom had become a fellow actor in London. Though a clear point in Shakespeare’s favor even by their own reckoning, Oxfordians simply removed that criterion from their litmus so that their pet candidate fit better.

Portrait of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

As Oxfordian literature expanded, the researchers following in Looney’s footsteps began to stretch the limits of credulity in their search for elusive proof, in the process developing wilder and weirder claims and becoming more and more like the Baconian heretics they detested. It started simple enough, in 1923, with one H. H. Holland reading between the lines of plays to suggest they contained allusions to events of the 1570s and 1580s, when Oxfordians held that all the plays must have been written because of Oxford’s pesky death date. In 1931, two separate writers, Montagu Douglas and Gilbert Slater, claimed much as Delia Bacon had before them that Oxford was actually part of a conspiracy, the leader of a group that was responsible for authoring the plays and for orchestrating the imposture of their attribution to Shakespeare. The same year, Oxfordians began to partake in the very technique they had so roundly rejected in Baconian work: cipher seeking. Writers like George Frisbee started to see Oxford’s signature hidden throughout the works of Shakespeare, not exactly in acrostics, but rather in the very common words “ever,” “every,” and “never,” which he claimed, with their combinations of “e” and “ver” were actually the hidden name of Edward de Vere. Unsurprisingly, since just about every piece of English writing has these words, Frisbee eventually started claiming that the works of Chistopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and King James must also have been written by the Earl of Oxford, since those words were in them. In 1937, a Scientific American article made the astonishing conspiracist claim that the Ashbourne portrait, a painting thought to be a portrait of William Shakespeare, had been altered and painted over, a literal coverup to hide Oxford’s identity as the true author of the plays. In fact, the portrait had been tampered with, before it had ever appeared on the art scene in 1847 with claims that it was a portrait of Shakespeare. As later analysis would show, though, it wasn’t a portrait of Edward de Vere. Rather, it had formerly been a portrait of Hugh Hamersley, merchant and mayor of London, as the coat of arms that had been painted over proved. It is believed that the painter who first came forward with the portrait in 1847, Clement Kingston, had altered it, changing the date painted on it, erasing the coat of arms, and scraping off the subject’s hair to make him appear more like other portraits of Shakespeare. Rather than a vast conspiracy to cover-up a historical secret, it was just a forgery, which earned the painter a fair profit. Nevertheless, some Oxfordians continue to claim, without evidence, that the portrait depicts de Vere.

The most absolutely bonkers claim ever made by Oxfordians, one that even embarrassed Looney, was actually advanced a few years before the claims about the Ashbourne portrait. It was first made by Percy Allen, a theater critic and one of the more prolific writers promoting Oxfordian claims in the 1930s. Allen argued that the Earl of Oxford had actually been Queen Elizabeth’s secret lover, and that the queen famous for having been a virgin had actually borne his son, William, who became an actor and used the stage name Shakespeare, a name his father was then using as a pen name. By Allen’s reckoning, this was the hidden meaning behind the Dark Lady and Fair Youth sonnets. Of course, with its echoes of the Baconian folly, in which cipher seekers swore that they had decoded secret messages revealing that Francis Bacon was Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son, the Prince Tudor theory, as it came to be known, was entirely embarrassing to Oxfordians who wanted to be taken seriously as Shakespeare scholars. And it only got worse as the theory evolved, with later writers adding that actually, Queen Elizabeth had borne an illegitimate son before, that her own father had raped her, and that the issue of that assault was actually Oxford himself, so when Oxford then became her lover, it was incest upon incest, with Oxford both Elizabeth’s brother and son, and their child in turn both her son and her nephew. It’s confusing and, frankly, gross, and I think it says a whole lot more about the people who came up with it than it does about the works of Shakespeare. But Percy Allen wasn’t done. Next he turned to a medium, determined that, if he couldn’t find hard evidence in the real world of Oxford being the author, he would seek it from the man’s ghost. Spiritualism, of course, had been a massively influential movement, with many reputable believers, but it should be noted that by the 1940s, when Percy Allen sought to communicate with the spirit world to find evidence of his claims, it was very much in decline. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the medium that he met with, Hester Dowdon, was able to channel not just Oxford, but Bacon and Shakespeare as well, and in their voices told Percy Allen just what he was hoping to hear, that Oxford had written the poems and plays attributed to Shakespeare, and that his works did tell the secret story of his and Queen Elizabeth’s bastard son. Perhaps he would have taken her performance with a healthier grain of salt had he known that that a few years earlier, this same medium had pretended to channel the same spirits to tell a Baconian that Bacon had been the true author. And perhaps all of these anti-Stratfordians would have considered the spiritualist method suspect had they realized that decades earlier another writer had claimed through séance to have proven that Shakespeare was indeed the author of the works attributed to him.

The Ashbourne Portrait, a forged portrait of Shakespeare

With the wilder theories of Percy Allen and others, the Oxfordian movement too went into decline and would not see a resurgence until after World War II. In 1949, the publication of a new edition of Looney’s book in America saw a brief renewal in interest, but it wouldn’t last. Indeed there was more interest in Marlowe during these years than in Oxford. This would change with the entrance onto the scene of a new Oxfordian writer, Charles Ogburn. His first book on the topic was published in the 1960s, and he oversaw a rebirth of interest in the Oxfordian theory during the 1970s and especially the 1980s. Recoiling once again from the outlandish claims and retreating into more scholarly-seeming arguments, he pushed very hard for Oxfordian theories to be acknowledged in academia and for authorship studies to be taken seriously as a legitimate academic undertaking. His arguments echoed the Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents of the same era, arguing that Oxfordian theories were a valid alternative to the traditional consensus view of William Shakespeare having been the Bard, and that schools should “teach the controversy.” In fact, thanks in no small part to Ogburn’s effort, his cause even got their own equivalent of the Scopes Monkey Trial when he orchestrated a mock trial, to be judged by three Supreme Court Justices, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and William Brennan. The result of this well-publicized event was not in their favor. They found that anti-Stratfordian arguments did not meet their burden of proof. However, the justices clearly favored the Oxfordian theory over other anti-Stratfordian theories, which was itself a victory, and the trial had the unexpected result of actually boosting the popularity of the notion. Though a second mock trial was held in London and went even more poorly for Oxfordians, back in America, mass media had taken an interest.

First came a piece on Frontline, the PBS documentary series, which made a play for ratings and viewers by asking just the sorts of questions Oxfordians wanted them to ask. Next, favorable pieces began to appear in the Atlantic, Harper’s, and even the New York Times. It was simply too juicy a claim for the media to ignore, which meant Hollywood wasn’t far behind. In 2011, the film Anonymous was released, with Rhys Ifans as Oxford and Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, and directed by Roland Emmerich, of Independence Day fame. Unsurprisingly, the film is far from historically accurate, but then again, maybe we shouldn’t expect accuracy from the filmmaker who brought us Stargate, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, and recent stinker Moonfall. Along with the boosts provided by mass media and Hollywood, the Internet of course helped to spread the Oxfordian thesis, as it has with so many dubious claims. And in the end, Charles Ogburn and later Oxfordians succeeded where Creationists had failed! In 2001, a University of Amherst Ph.D. candidate received his degree based on an Oxfordian dissertation, arguing that annotations in Edward de Vere’s Bible proved he was the author of Shakespeare—though since that time, further study has shown that the passages of the Bible that Shakespeare seemed most interested in were not even annotated in the Bible, and that the handwriting suggests the Bible was not even annotated by de Vere. Nevertheless, the ironbound doors of academia had been cracked, and in 2007, it finally happened: Brunel University London announced that it would offer the first master’s degree in Shakespeare authorship studies. It is telling, though, that only one other institution of higher learning has created another such program, Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, which was shuttered shortly thereafter when its principal bankrollers, the Lutheran Church, pulled its funding. Next time, in the conclusion to our series on the Shakespeare authorship question, we will finally discuss why the claims of anti-Stratfordians are rejected by academia and are not seen as worthy of their own programs of study.

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Until next time, remember, when you find out that proponents of a claim had to rely on a séance to gin up support, you can safely dismiss it as false. Seeing as how this was a pretty telltale revelation when it came to the work of Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny, maybe we can call this the “Ravenscroft Rule.”

 Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Two: The Baconian Heresy

In 1932, The Times Literary Supplement published evidence that questions about Shakespeare’s authorship had arisen decades earlier than the mid-19th century, when they had previously been thought to have appeared. The paper published was from a small 1805 meeting of the Ipswich Philosophical Society, at which one James Corton Cowell presented the 18th-century findings of a clergyman named James Wilmot, who lived near Stratford-upon-Avon and had conducted some research into Shakespeare. According to this document, the Reverend Wilmot around 1795 had gone in search of books that belonged to Shakespeare and had been surprised to not find any in the private libraries of the area. He had been further unsettled not to find anyone able to offer any clear anecdotes about the playwright. Perhaps this Wilmot should not have thought it so odd, since he was asking for anecdotes nearly 180 years after the man’s death, and more than 130 years after the last of his surviving family had passed away, but regardless, the reverend apparently found this suspicious enough that he decided the Shakespeare of Stratford must not have really been the author of the works attributed to him, and instead, he leapt to the conclusion that it must instead of have been Sir Francis Bacon, who was a true genius and luminary of the same years, and who would certainly have had the knowledge of Court life that it seemed Shakespeare must have had. But Reverend Wilmot was disturbed by his theory, and he burned all of his research, or at least, that is the story that Cowell tells in his paper to the Ipswich Society, claiming that he only knew about Wilmot’s conclusions because the reverend had confided in him. At the time that this document appeared, in the 1930s, this was no revolutionary idea, having been popularized in the middle of the previous century. It certainly was curious, though, that this document came from the collection of a devout Baconian, someone thoroughly convinced that Bacon was the real Shakespeare. Naturally, considering the long history of forgeries related to Shakespeare, this too would need to be authenticated. A biography of Wilmot seemed to confirm that he was who the document said he was, that he did admire Bacon and that he had actually consigned his papers to be burned. However, this biography was written by, it turns out, a forger who would later make false claims of having been born into royalty. Her claims about his burning his papers don’t appear to have been true, and moreover, there was no indication even in this unreliable source that Wilmot had ever conducted research into Shakespeare, nor that he had ever had a meeting with James Cowell. Indeed, no strong evidence for the existence of this James Cowell had even turned up. Curious, the author of my principal source, Contested Will, scholar James Shapiro, examined the document printed in 1932 in The Times Literary Supplement, and based on its use of anachronistic language, its knowledge of details that had not been discovered at the time, and other errors, determined that it was likely a hoax. Indeed, there is a long history to the claims that Sir Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s works, but not so long a history as this forgery would claim. Just as those who were desperate for some historical evidence to corroborate their conceptions of Shakespeare had resorted to many a forgery over the years, so too have those who are desperate to lend credibility to claims that Bacon authored Shakespeare, because without some earlier proponent of the theory, it is often pointed out that the first person to come up with it had been a mad spinster, also named Bacon.

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When we hear the term Renaissance, which is a French word simply meaning “rebirth,” we of course think of a time of new ideas in philosophy and new achievements in art, and we typically think of Italy. Indeed, it is often argued that the Renaissance began in Florence, with the writings of Dante and Petrarch and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael—all the ninja turtles. But of course, the Renaissance was not a strictly Italian rebirth of culture, and elsewhere these developments were seen as well. In England, William Shakespeare is of course counted among the luminaries of Renaissance artistry, as are some of his fellow dramatists, like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and other major English poets, like John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and John Donne. On the list the philosophers who contributed to this rebirth in thought in England, you may see many recognizable names, like William Tyndale and Thomas More, but always atop this list you’ll find Sir Francis Bacon. A true polymath, Bacon was a prolific writer on many subjects, from legal treatises, to politics, to history, to the philosophy of education and knowledge, and to natural philosophy or science, in which field he is credited as a forefather of the scientific method. He wrote every kind of thing, from tracts and pamphlets to political reports and parliamentary speeches…everything but poems and plays, funny enough. He served as a counselor to Queen Elizabeth, and later in legal positions under King James, proved himself a formidable statesman as Lord High Chancellor of England. With some questionable charges of corruption in 1621, he lost his positions and was even confined for a time in the Tower of London, after which he retired and passed away a few years afterward. But just as Shakespeare’s star would brighten years after his death, so too would Bacon’s. During the Enlightenment, the French philosophes esteemed him as a social reformer and opponent of dogmatism, and in the 19th century, he continued to be admired. Ralph Waldo Emerson heaped praise on him in much the same way he did Shakespeare, calling him “an Archangel to whom the high office was committed of opening the doors and palaces of knowledge to many generations.” And two mysterious undertakings in Bacon’s career would end up, during Emerson’s time, encouraging his identification with the works of Shakespeare: the first being that he had never finished his work, Instauratio Magna, the “great restoration,” the final, lost part of which promised to be his “New Philosophy,” and the second being that he had once developed a cipher, acting as both a substitution and a concealment code, that allowed messages to be hidden within texts. As you might already imagine, this would lead to claims that his lost philosophy was hidden within Shakespeare’s works.

A portrait of Sir Francis Bacon at the height of his career.

With the claims about Reverend Wilmot proving doubtful, it appears that the first person to not only claim Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him but also to actually name Francis Bacon as their true author was Delia Salter Bacon, a remarkable Puritan woman—with no relation to Francis Bacon—who had been born in a rustic log cabin in Ohio. After their Puritan community failed and her father, who had organized it, passed away, her brother was sent off to Yale, but she, who was far more intellectually gifted and eloquent than he, had to remain in their Connecticut home and support the family as a schoolteacher. Yet she would not be held back. She began to win short story writing contests, even beating out Edgar Allan Poe for one prize, and soon she was a popular lecturer on history in New Haven. She moved to New York City in 1836 and began to acquaint herself with the intelligentsia there, such as Samuel Morse, who was then engaged in developing Morse code and, as Sir Francis Bacon was a figure of interest to her, spoke with her about Sir Francis Bacon’s cipher. She became involved with the New York theater scene, befriending a famous Shakespearian actress, for whom she wrote a play with decidedly Shakespearian themes. After the failure of this play, she withdrew from society, beginning to develop a theory about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays that would preoccupy her for the rest of her life. During the years that she was developing this theory, she also became involved with a man, whom she seemed to believe had intentions of marrying her, but when her family confronted him about his intentions, he claimed he had none and began reading their love letters to people he knew, mocking her for her unrequited expressions of affection. Since the man was a theology student intending to become a clergyman, Delia Bacon’s brother actually took him to ecclesiastical court over it, claiming “calumny” and “disgraceful conduct.” The result was that Delia had to testify, their love letters were made public, and the rumormongering became far worse than it ever might have otherwise been. Delia began to lose her faith over the whole affair, and she would never again be connected romantically to another man.

So Delia Bacon withdrew into her studies, becoming more and more convinced of her discovery that Sir Francis Bacon had been behind the works of Shakespeare. She took the famous writer Nathaniel Hawthorne into her confidence, since he too had a family background in Puritanism, and Hawthorne thought her theory had such merit that he introduced her to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The great essayist Emerson too was quite impressed with Delia’s writings, though he expressed his doubts about her theory quite eloquently: “you will have need of enchanted instruments, nay alchemy itself, to melt into one identity these two reputations.” Nevertheless, she was convincing, for she insisted that she had found secret evidence in Shakespeare’s very works, hidden by the Baconian cipher. So convincing was she that Emerson introduced her to Thomas Carlyle, the famed historian and essayist from Scotland, and arranged for Delia to visit England to further research her theory. Of course, fleeing to England to escape the humiliation of her recent scandal greatly appealed to Delia, so she went overseas, where Carlyle actually laughed in her face about her theory, encouraging her to make use of the British Library, where the extensive materials in their collection should disabuse her of her misguided notions. But Delia Bacon was confident that there was nothing in the library to help her. Instead, she spent her time in St. Albans and Stratford, not completing archival research but rather lurking around the tombs of Sir Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare, asking about having their crypts opened because she suspected that some secret proofs of her theory, such as the lost manuscripts, had been buried with them. According to her theory, Sir Francis Bacon, along with a coterie of co-conspirators, had chafed under royal authority, and believing that his New Philosophy, which was essentially a call to throw off the yoke of monarchy for freedom and knowledge, must be directed to the people, he conspired with these others to circumvent censors and embed this philosophy within a series of plays to be put on for the public. The plays themselves proved it, she claimed. Their message about the evils of kings was Bacon’s. Her evidence was much what we have heard already, that there is no record indicating the Stratford man capable of composing the works. She relied on invective, calling Shakespeare a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play-actor,” while Bacon was exactly the sort of person one would expect to have written them—both completely unsupported claims since there is no evidence of Shakespeare’s illiteracy and in fact ample evidence that he was quite literate, and likewise no evidence that Sir Francis Bacon was capable of composing the sorts of poetry and plays she was attributing to him.

A photograph of Delia Bacon.

Indeed, there are many other problems with the Baconian heresy, as it came to be called, other than these obvious ones. First, Delia Bacon’s entire argument rested on the content of Shakespeare’s plays being secretly subversive political narratives, and as examples she interpreted Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Coriolanus in such a way as to support this view. It is a remarkable work of what would later be called New Historicist literary criticism, but it is too flimsy to support the conspiracy theory she imagines. She ignores dozens of other plays and all of Shakespeare’s poetry, presumably because it would be a Herculean task to try to interpret all of the works according to this perspective. Moreover, even if her close readings of these plays are accurate, that the politically subversive subtext was intended by their author, that does not prove that Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon himself, could not have intended it. Any philosophical notions about freedom or equality or the tyranny of monarchs that Delia imagines must have come from Sir Francis Bacon were also ideas with which the playwright Shakespeare himself could have wrestled. Her presumption that a “play-actor” from a modest background would not be capable of profound thought and could not possibly comprehend royal court life betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of not just Elizabethan culture but also of human nature in her assumption that only people of high breeding could accomplish anything great, a notion that even her own career disproved. Disappointingly, though, the linchpin of her theory, the smoking gun that she always promised her patrons would clinch the argument, that somehow hidden evidence of the conspiracy could be uncovered using Bacon’s cipher as the key, did not appear in her writings when she published. But to be fair, some of her work was lost. She had the first of four essays published in Putnam’s Magazine, but after a Shakespeare scholar called on by the magazine to introduce the essays refused and suggested they not publish any further works of Delia’s—another genuine example of scholars actually working to silence the authorship controversy, which would only fuel the fires of controversy in the future—Putnam’s did back out of their deal, and when they sent the unpublished essays back to her, they were lost. Having no other copies, Delia Bacon was devastated, but she went to work on writing a full-length book on the topic, writing in poverty and anxious to the point of mental disturbance that someone would steal her theory. Indeed, after her initial essay appeared, a man in England printed a pamphlet making essentially the same claim, minus the co-conspirators, and the same year that Delia finally came out with her book, a long and maundering manifesto that again produced no smoking-gun cipher as evidence, this same Englishman came out with his own book. In the end, Delia Bacon’s work was a flop, as she’d feared. She was thereafter institutionalized, having been driven insane by the entire ordeal, and this, in the end, would so invalidate her theory, since it had been dreamed up by a mad woman, that future Baconians have been willing to forge precursor texts just, it seems, to dissociate the theory from its origin.

Despite the initial failure of Delia Bacon’s work, it proved to be something of a cult favorite, surviving not only in her own work but in the references of others, and among the converts to this Baconian cult were, surprisingly, some astonishing luminaries of American letters who would try to validate the Baconian heresy as a legitimate historical view. Already Delia Bacon had major literary figures like Hawthorne and Emerson writing about her in glowing terms, admiring her intellect and insight. After her passing, Hawthorne portrayed her as a tragic figure in “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” and Emerson called her “America's greatest literary producer of the past ten years.” Even if they did not subscribe to her theory, they certainly were not dismissive of her accomplishments. Soon, though, another major figure in American literature would become impressed by her, and this masterful writer, Mark Twain, would not only subscribe to her theory but also help to promulgate it. Twain had read Delia Bacon’s work, and throughout his career, he found himself drawn to it. Over the course of his own development as an author, he came to believe that all great fiction was by necessity autobiographical, as was his own—Tom Sawyer, for example, drawn from his own childhood experiences in Mississippi. Therefore he was amenable to the notion that Shakespeare must have written his plays from personal experience, and that, since he had no personal experience of court life, the man from Stratford could not have written them. Twain also knew a thing or two about writing personas, as the riverboat pilot Samuel Clemens had not only written under a pseudonym but also cultivated a character to go with the name. So he imagined that he knew something of what Francis Bacon had done in creating the playwright persona of Shakespeare. And there was no shortage of works to encourage Twain in his thinking during these years, as countless anonymous pamphlets and articles in major magazines appeared during the decades after Delia Bacon’s work, picking up where she had left off, crafting clever arguments in an effort to prove her thesis, or some version of it, as well as to challenge it. In 1886, The Francis Bacon Society began to publish their journal, Baconiana, in whose pages the Baconian heresy would be heartily endorsed and fleshed out. Then in 1888, Twain himself published the first major book-length work on the topic since those of Delia Bacon and her plagiarist. This work, The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays, was written by Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota Congressman who had found fame writing about Atlantis and ancient catastrophes. Today Donnelly is known as a major figure in the history of pseudohistory and pseudoscience. I mentioned him as a precursor to Immanuel Velikovsky in my series on chronological revisionists because of his fringe catastrophist views of ancient history, and certainly I will be discussing him again whenever I get around to tackling the massive myth of Atlantis. It is unsurprising, since Donnelly was obsessed with the idea of hidden truths and historical cover-ups, that he would be drawn to this topic and predictable that he would focus almost entirely on the idea of the works of Shakespeare being secretly encoded. His work would go on to inspire a generation of Baconian cipher seekers who believed they could decrypt secret messages in Shakespeare.

A photograph of Ignatius Donnelly.

Donnelly was no cryptologist, and he went about his work rather backward, imagining what Bacon’s secret message might be and then searching for it in acrostics. The notion that a work might be misattributed and that the true author’s signature might be discerned in an acrostic, taking the first letters of certain words, was not actually a fringe idea. Indeed, within a decade of the appearance of Donnelly’s book, a work long attributed to Chaucer would be discovered to have been authored by one Thomas Usk because of just such an acrostic signature hidden within it. But Donnelly was forced to choose rather arbitrary key words, separated each time by a rather arbitrary number of characters, for his acrostics to work, and he often miscounted purposely in order to make the text fit his preconceived secret message. Donnelly also imagined how Bacon would have had to lay out his pages in such a fashion as to make sure that each keyword was in the right position, but in doing so he betrayed a clear ignorance of how Elizabethan printing worked. These problems would continue to plague all the theories of later cipher seekers, as would Donnelly’s eventual obsession with finding the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s works. Authorship theorists regularly point to the absence of manuscripts as some indication that the man from Stratford had not written the works attributed to him, despite the fact that manuscripts of plays written for the stage were often not preserved, since plays could be viewed as a performance art rather than a literary art. Remember that Shakespeare’s collected plays would not be published in the First Folio until years after his death. But to cipher seekers, the absence of manuscripts was somehow proof that they contained evidence of the code written into them, and they imagined that Sir Francis Bacon had hidden them away like buried treasure. This is the origin of the absurd notion that Shakespearian manuscripts are buried on Oak Island. Donnelly believed the manuscripts to be buried on Bacon’s estate but could never convince Bacon’s descendants to let him dig up the grounds.

A photograph of Orville Owen.

After Donnelly came Orville Owen, a Detroit doctor, who claimed that he had found some sort of encrypted manual for decoding Bacon’s code, which he had decoded. So he decoded the key to the code he needed to decode, which, as one skeptic pointed out, seemed “like picking the lock of a safe, only to find inside the key to the lock you have already picked.” Owen claimed that the decoded message instructed him to build a device with wheels on which he would lay out Shakespeare’s plays and spin the text past his eyes in such a way that keywords would jump out. As with Donnelly’s arbitrary selection of keywords, though, Owen baked into his conception of the code much laxity, in that when he found a keyword, it would be possible to find the actual encoded terms or phrases several lines away, giving him great swathes of text in which to find whatever he wanted to find. His assistant in this work, Elizabeth Gallup, would eventually become a rival, believing that Bacon had also woven in a biliteral code through his use of two distinct fonts. Owen’s and especially Gallup’s theories both suffered from the same problem as Donnelly’s in that they depended on the notion that the plays’ author had been closely involved with the actual printing work performed by compositors, but Gallup’s theory specifically would later be entirely disproven when it was pointed out that Elizabethan compositors typically worked with trays full of lots of different typefaces, explaining the variation in font that she suspected was a code. The codes that Owen and Gallup believed they were uncovering led them to pretty outrageous conclusions; according to them, the plays’ cipher revealed that Sir Francis Bacon was really Queen Elizabeth’s son and thus heir to the throne! And Gallup’s nonexistent biliteral code took it a step further, revealing that within the plays were encoded other lost plays of Shakespeare that told the history of Elizabethan England, including tragedies about Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Boleyn, both of which I’d have loved to read. Unfortunately, Gallup only provided summaries of these plays she had supposedly found buried within other plays—taking the idea of a play within a play to absurd heights. Eventually, their decipherment led both Owen and Gallup to the location of the hidden Shakespeare manuscripts: Gallup’s code sent her to North London and Canonbury Tower, while Owen’s took him to the bottom of the Severn River. Unsurprisingly, neither of them found a single page.

Throughout the twilight of Twain’s career and lifetime, a number of other books were released on the topic—Francis Bacon Our Shake-speare by Edwin Reed in 1902, The Shakespeare Problem Restated by George Greenwood in 1908, and in 1909, the year before Twain’s passing, he had the opportunity to read the prepublication galleys of a new book making further claims about Baconian codes in Shakespeare, called Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon, by William Stone Booth. By the end of his life, Twain had become thoroughly convinced that Shakespeare could not have written the works attributed to him, his conclusions leaning heavily on the fact of the sparse biographical records of the man, saying, “He is a Brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.” Nor was Twain alone among his literary contemporaries in succumbing to the Baconian authorship theory. Walt Whitman, who loved the idea of the mundane world being infused with some mystical secret, wrote the poem “Shakespear Bacon’s Cipher,” which begins with the words “I doubt it not.” And Twain’s close friend, Helen Keller, who had once written “my Shakespeare was so strongly entrenched against Baconian arguments that he could never be dislodged,” would eventually propose to write a book of her own in support of those same Baconian arguments—something she thankfully never did. As for Twain, so preoccupied was he with conspiracy claims about Shakespeare that he tried to come up with a few similar such theories himself, arguing at one point that The Pilgrim’s Progress could not have been written by the preacher John Bunyan and must instead have been authored by John Milton. At one point he even tried to argue that Queen Elizabeth was really a man, because no woman could have accomplished what she did. At the end, the Shakespeare authorship question had become such an obsession that he made it the subject of his final work, which he called Is Shakespeare Dead? In it, he plagiarized an entire chapter from another writer, lifting a whole section about Shakespeare’s apparent knowledge of the law from another book that he failed to credit. So at the end of his illustrious career, the Shakespeare authorship controversy led him to folly and scandal. As James Shapiro points out in my principal source, Contested Will, Twain seems to have plagiarized that section because it makes a convincing case that Shakespeare could not have had the legal knowledge that the author of the plays displays. As Shapiro puts it, Twain borrowed the material “to challenge Shakespeare’s claims to authorship, on the grounds that you had to know something about law to speak with authority about it. Yet in doing so, Twain does what Shakespear himself had done: appropriate what others said or wrote, using their words to lend authority to his own—something that Twain had argued wasn’t possible.” Shapiro goes on to note the further irony that Twain believed Shakespeare to be illiterate because he left no books behind, yet after his own death, Twain’s own book collection was immediately sold off by executors looking to make a quick profit, much as might have been the case with Shakespeare’s library. In the end, with no convincing evidence of a cipher, no lost manuscripts, nor any compelling evidence to show that Bacon wrote any plays, let alone that the language of Shakespeare’s plays could be likened to his known work, the Baconian heresy faded, only to reappear far later with the advent of History Channel nonsense that the conspiracy-addled Internet. But the authorship controversy would not fade. It merely needed a new candidate, and it turned out there was no shortage of them.

 Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part One: Drama's God.

“Doth anyone here know me?” These are the words of William Shakespeare’s doomed King Lear, whose kingdom is divided, and who, in the end, loses himself to madness and despair. Since the illustrious career of the bard, the greatest of English playwrights and poets, and perhaps even the greatest in the world, there have been scholars of Shakespeare who, lacking much contemporary documentation of the man’s life, turned to his works for indications of who he was, imagining all his works autobiographical, and thus interpreting his characters as versions of himself. According to this view, then, we might imagine the words of King Lear, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” in the mouth of William Shakespeare himself, especially because his very identity would eventually come to be doubted. How could this be? In part it is because of a dearth of primary source records about his personal life. We do know that a man named William Shakespeare was born into a farming family in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, his father a glovemaker and city alderman. At 18 years old, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman 8 years his senior who was already pregnant with their first child, a daughter. Their firstborn would be followed by twins, one of whom, his only son, would eventually die at only 11 years old. But what Shakespeare is remembered for, of course, is his theatrical career, which commenced in London at some uncertain point. During a period called his “Lost Years,” between the baptism of his twins in 1585 and the known establishment of his reputation as a playwright at least by 1592, he either burst onto the theatrical scene or worked his way up, slowly but surely, to become a renowned dramatist whose plays were published. By 1597, he had accumulated enough wealth to buy the largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, which was called New Place, and spent his years traveling back and forth, dividing his time between family and the London theater scene, where for about 20 years with the same company, he produced some 38 plays that are today celebrated, along with his poetry, as the pinnacle of English language literary artistry. He passed away at 52 years old in 1616, and it is a testament to the enduring legacy and genius of his work that within 200 years, Shakespeare had become like a god to many. With the 1623 publication of the First Folio, the first collection of his great plays, his legend grew, not only among theatergoers but among the literati, and it was commented regularly that he had survived death, that he had defeated death in some Christlike fashion because he lived on in his work. In the next century, Voltaire would remark that the English customarily refer to Shakespeare as “divine,” and in 1769, this deification became nearly literal when the first Shakespeare festival was organized, and a temple was built in Hampton to honor him, complete with a few personal items displayed like relics: a glove, a ring, a dagger, and a chalice like the very Holy Grail. The person who staged the festival and built the temple, David Garrick, an actor who owed his fame to certain Shakespearian roles, was explicit in his worship of the playwright, calling him, “The god of our idolatry” and earning the title of “Shakespeare’s priest” from his contemporaries. Within a quarter of a century, Garrick’s godmaking bore fruit when the Drury Lane theater in Covent Garden unveiled a statue of Shakespeare, dedicated with a verse: “And now the image of our Shakespeare view / And give the Drama’s God the honour due.” So a man was transformed into a deity, but already there were those who would come to declare that this god was dead, or perhaps that he had never been.

When this podcast and blog first started, I imagined that one theme of the project, when I covered historical mysteries, would have to do with the unreliability of the historical record, and the parts of history that we simply cannot know about for certain. That has definitely been an aspect of certain topics, from time to time, but I have been surprised by how much academic historians are able to determine even without a strong contemporary historical records, and how lacunae, or gaps in the record like these, can fuel historical misinformation, like, for example, the claims of Christ mythicists. It is a gap like this, and the poor reliability of sources that have appeared, that led in the first place to theories that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, or rather that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon was not the true author of the works attributed to him. While the works of Shakespeare were thankfully preserved when they were collected by his theater company and published in folio edition, no actual manuscript, that is, handwritten original document, has survived. More than this, absolutely no personal papers of his, which might help to resolve the authorship controversy once and for all, have ever been discovered. We have no personal correspondence, no diary, no commonplace papers of any sort. Indeed, the only handwriting samples that exist of this, the most famous of writers, are six signatures applied to a variety of mundane documents, a deposition, a deed, a mortgage, and his Last Will and Testament, in which he famously left his wife only his “second best bed.” Beyond these records, and some others that are contested, there are only anecdotal mentions of the Stratford man’s life, of the growing reputation of someone going by the same name in late 16th century London theater, and of this playwright’s association with other dramatists and actors. Strangely, no surviving anecdotes or documents concerning the man from Stratford seem to corroborate that he was one and the same as the London dramatist, and considering nothing written in his hand survived beyond a few signatures on legal documents, and no papers or books were mentioned in his will, it would eventually be argued that there was little evidence the Shakespeare from Stratford was even literate. The fact is, however, that no one bothered to talk to Shakespeare’s colleagues in the theater about him, or even to interview his surviving family members, until it was far too late to do so. In the first several decades after his death, there was only interest in his writings, not his person. As for the lack of papers and books in his will, such items went unmentioned in wills of many of his Elizabethan contemporaries, listed instead on inventories of household effects, a document less likely to be preserved and thus often lost, as was the case with Shakespeare’s. So, among the growing idolaters who came to worship “Drama’s God,” searching for his personal effects became a sacred undertaking, like seeking pieces of the True Cross. Indeed, it seems many a pilgrim came to New Place seeking a piece of  the mulberry tree Shakespeare was said to have planted himself, and in 1756, annoyed at the souvenir hunters, the new owner cut the tree down. Afterward, carvings began to appear, like the chalice that would later be displayed at Garrick’s temple to Shakespeare, said to have been cut from the wood of Shakespeare’s mulberry. However, much like the True Cross, far more carvings would circulate than could ever have been cut from one mulberry tree, making many of them certainly frauds. And this would not be the only example of such fakes relating to Shakespeare.

A depiction of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee.

By the end of the 18th century, many a Shakespeare scholar busied himself in the hunt for Shakespeare’s papers. His will had turned up in 1737, the mortgage in 1753, and a letter from a neighbor to Shakespeare had been found in 1793, so it was known that important documents were still out there to be found, and it was hoped that someone might chance upon the real trove: Shakespeare’s letters and papers. In 1794, collector Samuel Ireland toured Stratford with his son, William-Henry, then a teenager, and they were told by a farmer that only a couple weeks earlier he had burned baskets full of Shakespeare’s papers. Ireland was devastated, though in all likelihood this farmer was having a bit of fun at the collector’s expense. Later that same year, though, Ireland’s teenage son became acquainted with a wealthy gentleman named “Mr. H,” who possessed a great many old deeds and let the boy look through them. Astoundingly, William-Henry Ireland claimed to have found yet another legal document with Shakespeare’s signature, which he gifted to his father for Christmas. Urged on by his father, William-Henry returned to Mr. H’s country manor to more thoroughly search his collection of papers, and lo and behold, he came back with exactly what everyone was hoping one day to find. He came back with numerous legal documents and receipts in Shakespeare’s name, a profession of Protestant faith, several books with what appeared to be Shakespeare’s own annotations in the margins, letters to his wife and others, and even a letter of thanks from Queen Elizabeth to Shakespeare! The literary world was in shock! Biographies were immediately emended. But William-Henry had not exhausted the astonishing finds among Mr. H’s collection, for early the next year, he came up with an actual manuscript of King Lear, which revealed the true first draft of the play before censors and actors had altered it. This was followed by more manuscripts and even by previously unknown plays Henry the Second and Vortigern. What a time to be alive, if you were a Shakespeare scholar! And alternatively, what an unfortunate time for any hoaxer to attempt to fake any such findings, for it was the dawning of an age in which Shakespeare studies was becoming a scholarly discipline, and thus there were experts out there who had devoted their lives to studying Shakespeare and could see right through any such impostures. The finds of young William-Henry Ireland were almost universally authenticated, though, and he was the toast of London literati because of it. That is, until one Edmond Malone got hold of the papers that William-Henry had found and that his father had published. Malone published a devastating critique of the Irelands’ claims, demonstrating that words supposedly used by Shakespeare in the papers weren’t in use at the time, and that the dates on documents did not accord, and that the signatures appended did not match. Malone came with receipts, if you will, making a nearly undeniable allegation of forgery. Though Samuel Ireland did deny, questioning Malone’s authority to judge the papers, the matter was settled when young William-Henry confessed that all his finds were forged. There was no “Mr. H,” and it was frankly embarrassing that no one had even attempted to ascertain who the source of all the documents actually was. William-Henry, who at only 19 years old had successfully fooled the world with fake Shakespeare plays of his own composition, finally admitted that he’d only done it all to please his father, who was obsessed with Shakespeare.

The Ireland forgeries demonstrate the fact that authorship was long a question when it came to Shakespeare’s works, though not in the same way that the question is now framed. What we can take from this story is the fact that Shakespeare scholars have always been at the forefront of such controversies, sussing out truth from false claims, or as Shakespeare put it, “To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.” So Edmond Malone has long been viewed as an early champion of Shakespeare scholarship, but as my principal source for this episode, James Shapiro in his book Contested Will points out, Malone himself bears some blame for the eventual emergence of the claims that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. This is because, as his career continued, he pioneered a new kind of biographical literary criticism. In the frustrating absence of real biographical information about William Shakespeare’s life, he turned to the texts themselves, suggesting that within them could be found hints about the man’s life. It began with his efforts to place the plays into some kind of compositional order. To accomplish this, Malone scoured them for anything that might be construed as a reference to contemporaneous events, in order to guess when each play had been composed. His reading into the texts in this fashion first raised the notion that the plays were some kind of cipher, with a secret message woven into them, an idea that would eventually feature in a lot of conspiracy claims about Shakespeare. Beyond some political message, Malone would go on to popularize the idea that Shakespeare’s works were secretly autobiographical in nature. Beginning with assumptions like, if some sonnet were about feeling betrayed in love, then that meant Shakespeare must have been betrayed himself, perhaps by his wife, and evolving to claims that, if some passage or other showed a knowledge of law then that meant Shakespeare must have worked as a legal clerk. The entire approach lacked merit, since it denied that Shakespeare could have had any knowledge outside of his profession, rejected the idea that Shakespeare could write about feelings he had not himself felt, and finally disavowed the actual storytelling of his plays, such that they were no longer about his characters, but rather about himself. This kind of literary criticism, of course, continues to be practiced today, though typically having some actual, verifiable historical documentation is usually preferred, and it is typically recognized that such conjecture is not valid grounds for rewriting a literary figure’s biography, but in Malone’s case, his speculation would result in assumptions about Shakespeare’s life being recorded as if they were history. And eventually, his same techniques would be used by those who would argue that the man from Stratford simply could not have written the works attributed to him.

William-Henry Ireland, notorious forger.

This view of Shakespeare’s writing long outlived Edmond Malone, and throughout the 19th century, great writers and critics, like William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, would focus more specifically on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which came to be viewed as confessional. By many a reading, the figures that appeared in these poems—the “fair youths” and “rival poets”—were references to real people that Shakespeare must have known. Thus, for example, the Dark Lady sonnets, a series of sonnets that refer to what some believe to be the same woman, have sparked heated debate and rival theories about who the “dark lady” might have been, when in fact she may very well have been a literary construct and not a real person at all. Likewise, some theories have it that all the sonnets were written directly to Queen Elizabeth I, a notion that would be used by deniers of Shakespeare’s authorship to contend the works were written by someone within the queen’s orbit. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would extend the notion beyond the sonnets, claiming first that certain plays were entirely autobiographical, so that Prospero in The Tempest was actually meant to represent the bard himself, and then moving on to suggest that this was the case with the entire Shakespearian corpus, which could be read as an encrypted memoir of sorts. The problems with this view of Shakespeare’s works should be obvious. Not only does it make massive assumptions about authorial intention, elevating perceived subtext above the obvious stories and themes of the works, it also tends to ignore any works that don’t fit with the interpretation. So if one cannot see how some play or other fits with the biography one is inventing, it is simply omitted. Additionally, for any of this to be true, it must mean that Shakespeare was a solitary writer, working alone and pouring himself into every work, but actually, historical records that Edmond Malone himself turned up seem to indicate that Elizabethan playwrights regularly collaborated. Indeed, there is evidence that numerous works attributed to Shakespeare may have been written in collaboration with other dramatists. Henry the Fifth, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Taming of the Shrew are just a few of the plays that scholars have suspected of being written by Shakespeare collaboratively with others. Tellingly, when Edmond Malone came into possession of the diary of a certain theater owner, which proved how Elizabethan playwrights collaborated, he sat on it, never publishing it. It would not become public until after his death. Beyond the frauds and hoaxes that surround Shakespeare, which Malone himself helped to expose, Malone’s speculation about the biographical details hidden within the works of Shakespeare prefigure the later claims about Shakespearian authorship, and his refusal to acknowledge evidence that might upend his pet notions about the playwright certainly do make later claims about a scholarly coverup more credible than one might think.

It was this refusal of Shakespeare’s later idolaters to in any way bend or alter their conception of him as a divine and solitary genius that would lead to the questions of his authorship, for in Warwickshire, the region where they expected to find evidence of his singular character, they found only records of a regular man. 17th-century memories of the man in Stratford only extended to his having poached deer, and of his apprenticeship with a butcher, activities that sounded far to rustic for the man many imagined Shakespeare to have been. It was learned that he was a heavy drinker, when many imagined that only a sober mind could compose such divine works. It should have been telling, of course, that he was said to have died of a fever after a drinking binge with friends and that those friends happened to be two other well-known poets and playwrights, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. Regardless of rumors of the man’s carousal with other writers, though, the image of the man that emerged from the meager records he left behind simply did not comport with the icon they had raised up for worship. Documents that came to light revealed that he had been a money lender, and had even pursued legal actions against a neighbor over unpaid debts, and that he hoarded grain even when his neighbors went hungry. The picture emerging seemed to be of a callous and greedy businessman, not a brilliant and emotionally complex poet. The simple truth was that, while a writer, he was also a businessman concerned with preserving wealth for his family; he practiced money lending in much the same way many others did, and the practice of storing grains and dealing in them was very common in Warwickshire, such that some of his neighbors hoarded and sold far more than he. And finally, there is the sometimes overlooked fact that much of the business dealings in Stratford had been conducted by his wife, in Shakespeare’s name only. Nevertheless, it was disappointing enough that Shakespeare’s admirers in the 19th century simply began to forge the proof they lacked to uphold their image of the man. In 1811, Richard Fenton claimed to find a journal of Shakespeare’s that revealed his friendship to a young Italian lodger who tutored him in Italian and Latin: a total hoax. In the 1830s and 40s, researcher John Payne Collier began to publish numerous genuine discoveries that helped to fill in some gaps regarding Shakespeare’s career in London. He discovered more real evidence about Shakespeare’s life in Stratford-upon-Avon and about his business transactions than anyone ever had or ever would, but he also, it would eventually be discovered, mixed in numerous skilled forgeries intended to shed light on Shakespeare’s work in London theaters. Like others, Collier had just fabricated the evidence that he hadn’t managed to find in order to fill in his image of the playwright.

John Payne Collier, Shakespeare scholar and forger.

The last tool that questioners of Shakespeare’s authorship would use was then being developed by scholars of so-called “Higher Criticism,” an approach to biblical studies that emerged in German academia. Johann Eichhorn originated it with his studies of how biblical texts had changed over time, and those who followed his historical approach to bible scholarship, emphasizing the origins of texts, their transmission, and their transformation through the ages, would show that the authorship of any book of the bible, or any ancient text, really, was highly questionable. In 1795, Friedrich August Wolf would take this model and apply it to literature, specifically the works of Homer, casting serious doubt on the existence of any one poet named Homer and through philological analysis demonstrating that the works were really orally transmitted songs, not the work of some individual genius. These questions about the authorship and reliability of biblical texts and the question of whether a person really existed in antiquity would, of course, eventually be applied to the New Testament and to the person of Jesus Christ. You can revisit my recent holiday special to hear about the claims of Christ mythicists, but suffice it to say here that through a philological argument, it has been asserted that there was no Christ, and it was not long before these arguments, questions of gaps in records leading to doubts about authorship and even about a person’s existence, were applied also to Shakespeare. Ironically, though, they were first applied to Shakespeare only rhetorically, to demonstrate how ridiculous the claims were. In 1848, a Lutheran minister named Samuel Schmucker published a critique of the claims of Christ mythicists in which he showed how the very same sorts of arguments made against the existence of Christ could also be made against the existence of Shakespeare. It was meant to reveal how ludicrous the claims of Christ mythicists were, for he could not fathom that anyone in their right mind would actually doubt Shakespeare’s existence. What this Schmucker did not know, though, was that already, the very argument he used as an example of something patently absurd was being developed by another writer, this one a Puritan woman, who would popularize the notion that Shakespeare did not author the works of Shakespeare, whose work would convince many brilliant luminaries of her day, and who would in the end be driven mad by her theory.

Until next time, remember, even important and valid scholarship, like the Higher Criticism that brought with it such great strides in Bible scholarship, can be abused and used to make spurious and dubious claims as well.

Further Reading

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question. Praeger, 2005.

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.