Ashley Cross

I’m amazed at the energy people put in to questioning the authorship of the plays we refer to as Shakespeare’s. Today, in an article on the front page of BBC news, a group called the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (which includes Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance) has whipped up some publicity for their concerns over whether the Stratford-born country boy Will Shakespeare could really have been responsible for the most prominent works of English literature.

Does anyone have the heart to tell them that the question of who authored the Shakespeare canon has been studied in great detail for many years? Or that, despite the healthy need for questioning everything to do with a document-deprived life story, the doubters always seem to be eccentric and willfully contrarian despite the facts and reasonable assumptions we have to hand?

It is one of the most hotly-contested arenas for the juxtaposing views of vocal firebrands and quiet scholars alike, at least since Francis Bacon (1561-1626), philosopher and viscount, was suggested as the real author in the 18th century.The 20th century came up with Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), as an alternative candidate. (Suggested, as it happens, by one J. Thomas Looney).

I admire the doubters’ passion and would never admonish those who question. But bawling out skeptical questions about the “real” Shakespeare and suggesting massive holes in our knowledge, without acknowledging that there are reasonable answers to most of their questions, is like closing your eyes and claiming the sky may not be purple.

There is a long history of questioning whether Shakespeare really could have written the works attributed to him. After all, he was lower-class, ill-educated and was, well, a country bumpkin. He could not have written 38 plays on his own. The real playwright had to be an aristocrat, with access to a library and who had learned about the world by extensive travel. An aristocrat who, because of the lowly status accorded the “profession” of playwright, had to hide behind a nom-de-plume or who had the money to hire a cover: Shakespeare may have been paid to take on the public role of an upper-class aristocratic who didn’t want to dirty his hands negotiating his way through the grubby world of theatre business.

Of course, Shakespeare was not categorically lower-class, ill-educated or a country bumpkin. There has been some biographical simplification in questioning whether Shakespeare was good enough for his job as the greatest playwright. It assumes that a boy from a modest background had no opportunities to flourish. There are counters to all the assumptions made by the doubters. The doubters claim, according to the BBC article, that his authorship can be questioned like this: 

1. His final will and testament never mentions his “books, plays or poems” 
2. The plays couldn’t have been “penned by a 16th century commoner raised in an illiterate household” 
3. His plays are mostly set in the upper classes 
4. Stratford-upon-Avon is never referred to in any of his plays 
5. “How did he become so familiar with all things Italian”? 
6. How could one man write so much? 

 In answer, briefly, to those concerns, I would counter: 

1. Why should his will mention his works? He wrote for a theatre company he co-owned who had the rights to his plays. He couldn’t have passed the rights to his plays to anyone else. The will is a very dry, standard legal document. He doesn’t mention very much at all, let alone his plays. He took no trouble to get his plays in print. They seemed only to live for him when they were acted on stage. The First Folio of his collected works wasn’t published until after his death. 
2. He wasn’t a commoner or at least not in the sense of someone trapped and down-at-heel in a single social world. His father was a major figure in Stratford life, becoming very comfortable as the mayor and a well-known public official. It is unlikely that a family with so many connections and influence, however rocky, were entirely illiterate or ignorant of the power of words. Regardless, Shakespeare likely attended the local grammar school, where he would have learned about the classics. There is little in Shakespeare that could not have been thought up by a diligent Elizabethan grammar school boy. 
3. Even his “upper class” plays feature memorable lower class characters. His (mainly lower class) audience wanted to be shown things to which they wouldn’t have had access. The argument that the real playwright had to be upper class is nonsense: the question follows “How could an upper class author know so much about working class life?” as evidenced in the plays. 
4. So what? I can barely bring myself to answer that question. To be sure, Shakespeare had an amazing knowledge of country life and his works abound in references to the workings of towns up and down England that were likely garnered from his upbringing in Stratford and surrounding countryside. 
5. Because it was the Renaissance! Italian culture was fully in vogue. Books about Italy and Italian books translated into English abounded. There is the possibility that Shakespeare travelled to Italy and a very high chance that he met and got to know Italians here in England. London was a melting pot then as it is now. Lots of trade, travel and tales. 
6. He lived until he was 52. He wrote 38 extant plays, a handful of major volumes of poetry and doubtless collaborated on at least a few other plays (possibly, many, many more. Theatre was and is collaborative). The theatre really took off during Shakespeare’s lifetime and trade was brisk. There was a real hunger for new material. New plays were put on all the time, at least once a week. There was a need to write and write quickly. It is possible to write huge amounts of quality words in one lifetime: see Proust. Indeed, Shakespeare could have written more. Some of his plays were drivel, he was patchy. But 38 great plays remain, and some of those are the very finest things ever crafted in words. 

The group have devised a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, which has been signed by academics, actors and the public to promote the idea that questioning his authorship “be regarded in academia as a legitimate issue for research and publication, and an appropriate topic for instruction and discussion in classrooms.”

It already is.