The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality

by John Hamer

“It is obvious at a glance that these signatures, with the exception of the last two, are not the signatures of the same man. Almost every letter in each is formed in a different way.” Shakespeare in the Public Records by Jane Cox, 1985

  So, was the greatest writer in all history so intellectually and manually challenged that he was barely able to write his own name? Another disturbing fact is that Shakespeare appeared to be almost senile by 1612. His deposition to the Bellott vs. Mountjoy court case in that year reveals that he is very confused and capable of expressing himself only in very basic and crude English. Hardly what one would expect of the great man himself.

  Another puzzling anomaly is that his death passed entirely unnoticed. There was no recognition of loss and no-one bothered to even acknowledge the fact, let alone pay any tributes to him. There was no state funeral as there had been for his peers Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and Edmund Spenser. Beaumont indeed died a few months before Shakespeare and received a fulsome national tribute whereas all Shakespeare’s departure mustered was a deafening silence. Who today other than scholars and devotees of English literature has even heard of Francis Beaumont?

  In fact his departure from this life was as mysterious as his sudden appearance upon the scene in 1593, shortly after the death of Christopher Marlowe, a fact to which we will return later. The newly-arrived poet from the backwaters of rural Warwickshire, managed to so cleverly disguise his regional background and what must have been an ear-wrenching midlands accent and dialect to the refined souls of the capital city, as to illicit no comment from his contemporaries whatsoever. But also significantly I believe, not once does his use of language in writing ever betray that homely, rural dialect he must surely have possessed, given the geography and nature of his upbringing.

  Shakespeare’s work reveals its writer as an ‘insider’, a man totally at ease with the intellectual and social elite of his day and most definitely not as a gauche countryman, which given his background and the age in which he lived, should almost certainly have been the impression he conveyed to his London contemporaries. Also, people who are highly gifted individuals, as was whoever wrote Shakespeare’s works, naturally attract attention and praise wherever they go, whereas Shakespeare most certainly did not. In fact he was all but anonymous apart from in name.

  His works demonstrate an intimate, detailed knowledge of geography, history, the classics, international politics and diplomacy, a first-hand experience of Italian ways and customs as in such works as The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet as well as an intellectual level of the highest order. However, despite this his only friends would appear to have been lowly actors and theatre people and there is no evidence whatsoever linking him to the intelligentsia of the day. Despite his gargantuan intellectual capacity, was he just simply a boring non-entity of a man?

  This strange lack of connection with the literary hierarchy of the time is compounded by the curiously reticent way in which he refers to himself throughout his sonnets. To whom were the sonnets addressed and dedicated and to what events in the life of their author do they refer? Nothing that is known of the man seems to fit the description and this compounds the issue somewhat.

  “Why did Shakespeare, apparently never averse to any transaction that would financially benefit him, defer publication of his sonnet series until many years after the Elizabethan sonneteering vogue had spent itself? So that, whereas all other sonnet sequences went into many editions, his made only one very limited edition, never to be reprinted for over thirty years? Was their publication in fact, suppressed? To date, not a single one of these questions has been satisfactorily answered, although theories abound.” A.D.Wraight, 1993

  Sonnets 71 to 76 are the ones wherein the poet’s identity is most strongly revealed. This series makes repeated references to its author’s name and more significantly, to the danger of its being revealed.

  Apart from literary references, the evidence linking the actor Shakespeare to the writer Shakespeare is also scant and it is partly for this reason that attempts have been made to assign an alternate identity to the writer from that of the actor. The three most common names in the frame are Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and Christopher Marlowe, but they all would appear at first glance to have a serious drawback and therefore strong reasons to suggest they are incorrect. Francis Bacon did not possess the literary acumen and skill that Shakespeare’s works would have demanded, the Earl of Oxford likewise would be disqualified on similar grounds and also by the fact that he died in 1604, well before the final works were known for certain to have been written. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe on the other hand would certainly have had the education, literary track record, writing skill and life experience to have written them but the problem with this assumption is that as Marlowe was murdered in 1593, this would seem to rule out that particular possibility.

  Countering the premise that the actor William Shakespeare was not the man who wrote the works attributed to that name, is almost the entire Elite literary and historical establishment whose vested interest in protecting the knowledge that has been the received wisdom for almost 400 years, is obvious. Should it ever be proven that Shakespeare was not the author of Shakespeare’s works, then the entire bedrock of academic orthodoxy would be shaken to its foundations by such a revelation and as we see in other areas of Elite orthodoxy being unwilling to yield to the truth, the entire ‘house of cards’ may well come crashing-down upon the heads of its upholders.

  As with other areas of accepted knowledge, challenges to the ‘powers that be’ are never very welcome nor treated as a basis for rational debate. In order for the incumbents to retain control, potential usurpers of the status quo must be strongly resisted at all costs by the expedients of; wholesale denial, treating them with utter contempt or ignoring them completely is the usual recourse. The simple act of questioning the authorship of ‘Shakespeare’s’ works is enough to engender extreme hostility from the establishment as with the questioning of other ‘sacred cows’ of the powers that be and this in itself speaks volumes.

  In 1994, the historian A. D. (Dolly) Wraight postulated that Christopher Marlowe did not die in 1593 as has been widely claimed, but that his so-called murder in May of that year was a ruse to enable him to escape his imminent arrest, torture and execution on the grounds of his well-known atheistic views. After 1593, Marlowe, according to Wraight’s theory, went into voluntary exile in France and Italy but continued to write his literature under the pseudonym of ‘William Shake-speare’.

  Kit Marlowe was indeed a genius and had fate not intervened in the form of his being persecuted by the fundamental Christianity that was rife throughout society at that time, it may well have been he who was regarded as ‘the Bard’ and the greatest literary icon that ever lived rather than the man who now bears those accolades. From 1587 until his alleged death in 1593 he was the author of a series of wonderful literary works to rival even the best that ‘Shakespeare’ himself could manage. There had been nothing in literature to challenge his superiority before and only Shakespeare since, has been remotely comparable to the genius that was Marlowe.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Marlowe’s biographer, Dr. John Bakeless noted without irony that Shakespeare’s work is replete with allusions to and quotations from Marlowe’s work, whilst almost entirely ignoring his other literary contemporaries. There are numerous comparisons between the two and even contemporary literary critics were often known to have confused the works of both on occasion, such was the stylistic similarity.

  “All the blank verse in Shakespeare’s early plays bears the stamp of Marlowe’s inspiration.” Sir Sidney Lee.

  “Marlowe is the greatest discoverer, the most daring pioneer in all our poetic literature. Before Marlowe there was no genuine blank verse and genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival, the way was prepared, the path made straight for Shakespeare. Compared with his contemporaries such as Greene, Peele and Lodge, Marlowe differs from such peo
ple not in degree, but in kind; not as an eagle differs from wrens and tit-mice, but as an eagle differs from frogs and tadpoles. He first and he alone, gave wings to English poetry; he first brought into its serene and radiant atmosphere the new strange element of sublimity… Among all English poets he was the first full-grown man. Only young and immature by comparison with such disciples and successors as Shakespeare and Milton; but the first-born among us of their kind.” Algernon Swinburne

  I believe that this makes clear that in Swinburne’s view that had Marlowe lived to fulfil his potential, he would have matched the achievements of Shakespeare.

  The 20th century literary critic Edward Dowden also believed that in terms of ability, Marlowe was at least Shakespeare’s equal…

  “If Marlowe had lived longer and accomplished the work that lay clearly before him, he would have stood beside Shakespeare.”

  A more than significant point also is that a number of Shakespeare’s early plays were, until recently, ‘erroneously’ attributed to Marlowe and there is an almost seamless transition from Marlowe’s final work to the first one attributed to Shakespeare. Marlowe ‘died’ on the 30th May 1593 and Shakespeare made his first documented mark on the literary world two weeks later with the publication of the poem ‘Venus and Adonis’. As the scholar Arthur Acheson, noted; “No atom of proof exists to show that previous to the publication of ‘Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare had done any serious literary work”.

  This poem, to which Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ seems to be a prequel as it refers quite explicitly back to it, was entered at the Stationer’s Register on 18th April 1593 without author. The printed version, appearing in June, contained a dedication and authorial attribution on a page that had been separately printed and interleaved with the main text as though it were an afterthought. This was most certainly not normal practice and was not the way that Shakespeare’s subsequent (second) work was produced (The Rape of Lucrece). Thus do the circumstances around Marlowe’s demise as a literary icon and Shakespeare’s rise from obscurity, dovetail extremely neatly together – overwhelming circumstantial evidence I would suggest.

  There are several ways to attempt to determine common authorship of literary works. There is the subjective method and the more objective, statistical methodology. Regarding the latter, one popular technique is to monitor the distribution curve of words and word-types so as to produce a ‘fingerprint’ for each individual writing style and thus provide a comparison with others. This method was devised by the famous, respected physicist Thomas Mendenhall at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Mendenhall was very interested in identifying the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, not for reasons of proving any particular pet theory; he merely wished to apply his methodology to an area of popular interest.

  He and his specially gathered team of researchers set about counting the more than two million words in Shakespeare’s work, plus those of his contemporaries – a monumental task in the days before information technology and the results of this project were pretty-well unambiguous. The resulting curves for Shakespeare and Bacon were entirely different as were the ones produced for Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher. However, when the curves of Marlowe and Shakespeare were compared the results were astonishing to say the least.

  “Something akin to a sensation was produced among those engaged in the work. In the characteristic curve of his plays, Marlowe agrees with Shakespeare about as well as Shakespeare agrees with himself!” Thomas Mendenhall

  In the intervening century or so since Mendenhall’s project, his methodology, if anything, has been further perfected. Louis Ule and John Baker updated Mendenhall’s work using computer technology to analyse both word-length frequency distribution and the pace of new word uptake in both Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s work. Based on analysis of every single piece of work known to have been produced by the hands of these ‘two’ authors, Ule and Baker were able to determine beyond reasonable doubt that they were statistically indistinguishable from one another.

  So it is apparent that Marlowe was more than capable of producing Shakespeare’s works, but perhaps a more apposite question may be, who else besides Marlowe would have had the ability and the wherewithal to do so? No-one else would seem to ‘fit the bill’ at all – if the reader will pardon the unintentional pun.

  But perhaps a more important issue to address at this point would be the fact that Marlowe was murdered in 1593, was he not and so how could he possibly have written the works attributed to the Bard of Stratford? This is where the plot seriously thickens.

  Ten days prior to Marlowe’s death on the 30th May 1593, he had been arrested on a warrant from the Star Chamber on a charge of ‘atheism’. This pseudo ‘court’ was established to ensure enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes. Court sessions were held in camera, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no jury of peers and no witnesses. Over the years it evolved into a political weapon, a symbol of the misuse and abuse of power by the English establishment and judiciary. Indeed ‘Star Chamber’ has become a byword today for a corrupted court.

  From the first day, Marlowe had in effect been out ‘on bail’ and had to appear before the court on a daily basis whilst in the meantime, evidence against him was being collated by his informers. He had been under suspicion of atheism for some time prior to his arrest, being a known member of the ‘School of Night’ who openly discussed taboo issues of the day such as the accuracy of the bible etc. In those days, if something was stated in the bible, such as for example, Methuselah living to the age of 963, then that is exactly what happened – it was not up for question or debate. Anyone espousing a contradictory opinion was an atheist, pure and simple and the penalty for atheism was torture and death, no exceptions.

  Marlowe’s play, Tamburlaine had long been held to exhibit atheistic tendencies and was it not the author who was totally responsible for the contents of any work of literature, no matter how brilliant that work may be? His contemporary Robert Greene actually wrote a scathing accusation of atheism directed at Marlowe from his deathbed and this almost certainly contributed to the severe difficulties in which Marlowe found himself.

  Then in early 1593, an author and erstwhile friend of Marlowe by the name of Thomas Kyd was found to be in possession of a copy of a ‘heretical’ piece which earned him an acquaintanceship with the rack and all the agony associated with that sorry experience. Under this horrific torture he implicated Marlowe in the writing of the said piece and explained that it must have somehow become mixed-up with his own papers in some way. This statement was enough to precipitate the arrest of Marlowe and his previously far-from-perfect past meant that he would potentially be in far greater danger (indeed probably mortal danger), than was the relative ‘small-fry’, Thomas Kyd.

  Thus was engendered a situation whereby Marlowe’s friends decided to act in concert to save him from his almost certain fate at the hands of the torturers and this would entail his complete disappearance in one form or another. Fortunately, Marlowe counted amongst his friends, two very influential Elizabethan gentlemen, Lord Burghley and Sir Thomas Walsingham. Walsingham was Marlowe’s patron and it was at Walsingham’s house in Kent where Marlowe was staying upon the event of his arrest. They were both employed as government intelligence agents in what was in effect a forerunner of today’s MI5 and MI6 and as such were well acquainted with the methodology of executing covert operations – a fact which would become extremely important, especially to Marlowe.

  The ‘murder’ itself was very strange, to which anyone who has investigated the facts will bear witness. It involved three men, all known to Marlowe, all of whom had worked under Walsingham and all of whom were well versed in espionage tactics. In fact if one was to hand-pick a team with which to pull-off the alleged plot, then these would certainly have been extremely strong candidates for inclusion in it. Their names were Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres and thirdly
Walsingham’s private secretary, Ingram Frizer. They were all loyal to Walsingham and highly skilled in the art of deception.

  Even the location of the ‘murder’ seems to have been carefully chosen also. It was in Deptford, Kent in the house and grounds of Dame Eleanor Bull who was a well-respected lady, a widow and the cousin of the queen’s nanny, Blanche Parry. These very secluded grounds with no unwanted onlookers and just three plotters plus Marlowe, created a perfect environment for a ‘set-up’ of this kind. The only witnesses being the aforementioned threesome and these were almost certainly acting under the orders of Walsingham himself.

  Deptford was also seemingly a well-chosen venue for the deception. Firstly it was a port with regular sailings to the European mainland which would have been perfect to facilitate Marlowe’s swift getaway. Secondly, Marlowe was unknown there and so any inquest jury would not have been easily able to identify the corpse in those pre-photographic days and thirdly the most well-known and prominent inhabitant of the town was the Lord Admiral, who was the patron of Marlowe’s own theatre company.

  A.D. Wraight herself postulates that there may have been strong reasons for believing that the Queen herself may have been complicit in the plot. Walsingham was well known to her and importantly, highly regarded and trusted implicitly as a loyal subject to her. He also knew that her pet hate was being deceived and he may well have felt uneasy had he not confided in her. He also knew that she enjoyed a little subterfuge and intrigue herself. Indeed would the Queen have been happy to see England’s foremost literary figure, tortured and executed, given her well-known love of literature and the theatre and the fact that she most certainly had no time for religious fanaticism in any form?