“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.

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

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