Malone excitedly turned its pages looking for evidence that might cast light on the disputed plays that had been attributed to Shakespeare – and was delighted to see that his hunch that Oldcastle was not by Shakespeare had been right: the Dulwich papers proved that it was ‘the joint production of four other poets’ – Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, Richard Hathway and Robert Wilson. Malone was now in sole possession of evidence that could extend to Shakespeare the possibility of joint authorship. But he couldn’t bring himself to change his mind about Shakespeare’s singularity, free himself from the fantasy that the plays were easily separated mixtures, not compounded on occasion by a pair or more of talented writers working together, one of whom was Shakespeare. Malone even imagined that if a similar ‘account book of Mr Heminge shall be discovered, we shall probably find in it – “Paid to William Shakespeare for mending Titus Andronicus.”’
Even when confronted with the overwhelming evidence from Henslowe’s Diary, Malone couldn’t break the habit of seeing plays composed by one playwright, then subsequently mended or repaired by another, and so concludes: ‘To alter, new-model, and improve the unsuccessful dramas of preceding writers, was I believe, much more common in the time of Shakespeare than is generally supposed.’ It followed then, that Pericles was ‘new modelled by our poet’ rather than jointly composed. By the same logic, the Second and Third Part of Henry the Sixth are ‘new-modelled’ and ‘rewritten’ by Shakespeare. Malone hastily appended some excerpts from Henslowe’s Diary as his 1790 edition was at the press. But he had not had a chance to really digest the implications of this find for his understanding of how Shakespeare collaborated, and never seems to have done so.
I have been hard on Malone in these pages, perhaps unduly so. But I find his inability to step back and see how Henslowe’s Diary might have altered his thinking about authorship deeply frustrating. Malone was clearly committed to a vision of Shakespeare as an Enlightenment figure, always working toward improving, perfecting, the unsuccessful efforts of others – a Mozart to the Salieris of the theatrical world. But what was truly unforgivable was that Malone made sure that nobody else had a chance to read the Diary and offer an alternative account of the stage and of how Shakespeare himself might have written. He not only refused to share the Diary, he wouldn’t even return it to Dulwich. Only after his death many years later would his literary executor find these materials among his papers and return them to their rightful owner – minus a number of literary autographs, which Malone had cut out.
A great opportunity was lost. Malone should have known better about collaboration. In fact, he was actively engaged at just this time in an intense collaborative writing project, helping Boswell write and revise his Life of Johnson, busily refining the prose, altering the tone, eliminating Scotticisms and so on, going back and forth on a daily basis, in close company with his needy friend. Yet he somehow couldn’t imagine Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton working closely like this on Timon of Athens, or Shakespeare actively collaborating with Fletcher on Henry the Eighth, Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The likeliest explanation for Malone’s refusal to consider the possibility that Shakespeare worked in similar ways – through ‘joint production’ or ‘in concert’ with other writers, to use his own terms – is that such a view could not be reconciled with his conviction that Shakespeare’s works were autobiographical and that Shakespeare himself, if not divine, was at least singular, so much so that a good editor should be able to separate the dross of lesser mortals from Shakespearean gold. By the time that Henslowe’s Diary was finally viewed by others – it was eventually transcribed and published by John Payne Collier in 1845 – it was too late. By that point, the notion that Shakespeare was autobiographical, singular and divine was indelibly imprinted on readers and theatregoers. Just how hardened this view became by the mid-nineteenth century is clear when a writer like Henry Tyrrell, in The Doubtful Plays of Shakespere, can reject a collaborative ascription on the grounds that ‘It is not probable that the great Shakespeare, the acknowledged poet of the age, the friend of nobles, and the pet of princes, should have united with a dramatist of third-rate reputation.’ Joseph C. Hart, one of the earliest to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays, was similarly influenced by the evidence offered in the ‘old Diary’ (which he believed in 1848 to have been ‘discovered but a few years ago’). Based on his reading of the Diary, Hart concluded that some of the plays attributed to Shakespeare must have been collaborative – but that Shakespeare could therefore have had no hand in them. The critical tradition that extends from Malone through Tyrrell and Hart persists to this day, and the conviction that Shakespeare was a solitary writer whose life can therefore be found in his works cannot comfortably accommodate the overwhelming evidence of co-authorship.
Moneylender and Malt Dealer
The hunt for information about Shakespeare’s life didn’t end with Malone. Others soon followed up on his suggestions about where to look for fresh biographical details – so successfully, that in the decades following Malone’s death more new facts about Shakespeare’s life were discovered than ever before or since. The first were located in Stratford-upon-Avon by a local antiquarian who had time on his hands and the inexhaustible patience to pore through so many old records. R. B. Wheler was rewarded for his efforts with four significant discoveries. Two concerned complicated and profitable real-estate transactions: the unexecuted counterpart of the conveyance of the old Stratford freehold to Shakespeare by William and John Combe in 1602; and a record of Shakespeare’s purchase three years later of half a leasehold interest in a parcel of tithes in Stratford for the huge sum of £440 (what an Elizabethan schoolteacher could expect to earn in a lifetime).
Wheler also uncovered a pair of writs, documents noted earlier, that cast light on Shakespeare’s moneylending. In 1609, in pursuit of a comparatively minor debt, Shakespeare had John Addenbrooke, a Stratford neighbour, arrested after failing to repay £6 and demanded an additional twenty-six shillings in damages. Addenbrooke was released upon providing a surety. A jury was probably empanelled and a verdict was reached in Shakespeare’s favour, since, when payment was still not made, a second writ was issued by the Stratford Court of Record – this time against Addenbrooke’s surety, Thomas Horneby, a local blacksmith, who was now responsible for both debt and damages. We don’t know more than this. Why Shakespeare was so eager to prosecute neighbours over a loan is not known, but it was not the kind of story that pleased his admirers – and coupled with the belated publication of that undelivered letter discovered by Malone decades earlier, in which Richard Quiney asked Shakespeare for a £30 loan, a case was building that Shakespeare cared more about cash than art.
The pressure to find the right biographical materials – documents that reinforced rather than undermined what people wanted to believe about Shakespeare – led to new fakes and forgeries, including, in 1811, Richard Fenton’s anonymously published Tour in Quest of Genealogy in which he describes purchasing at an auction in southwest Wales some books and a manuscript that had been in the possession of ‘an eccentric and mysterious stranger’. The purchase turned out to include ‘a curious journal of Shakespeare, an account of many of his plays, and memoirs of his life by himself’. One of Shakespeare’s journal entries answered the question that had long puzzled those who wondered how a young man from rural Stratford could have mastered foreign languages and was familiar with leading Italian authors:
Having an earnest desire to lerne foraine tongues, it was mie goode happ to have in my father’s howse an Italian, one Girolamo Albergi, tho he went by the name of Francesco Manzini, a dyer of wool; but he was not what he wished to pass for; he had the breeding of a gentilman, and was a righte sounde scholar. It was he who taught me the little Italian I know, and rubbed up my Latin; we read Bandello’s Novells together, from the which I gathered some delicious flowers to stick in mie dramatick poseys.
It may have been taken as a jest by knowing readers at the time –
but excerpts were still being republished as fact as late as 1853.
It came as a considerable relief to Shakespeare’s admirers when in the 1830s the ambitious young researcher John Payne Collier began publishing pamphlets outlining a series of biographical finds, drawn especially from a new and untapped source: the papers of Sir Thomas Egerton, a well-placed Elizabethan official who had served as Solicitor General as well as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, and then as Lord High Chancellor to James I. Collier had become friends with Egerton’s descendant, Lord Francis Egerton, who then employed him to publish a catalogue of the ancestral holdings. Collier’s first pamphlet, New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835), offered twenty-one new documents related to Shakespeare’s life, nine of them from this collection.
At long last, someone had discovered something having to do with Shakespeare’s life in London. Collier’s most exciting find was a certificate listing Shakespeare as a shareholder in Burbage’s company at the Blackfriars Theatre as early as 1589. The problem of the ‘Lost Years’ was half-solved – so much for the old canard, beloved even by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare had spent the late 1580s holding horses for gentlemen playgoers outside the theatre. Collier’s discoveries also pulled back the veil on Shakespeare’s final years in London. By then, another document revealed, Shakespeare’s stake in the Blackfriars Theatre had grown to over £1,400, a monumental sum. Another great find was a warrant from King James, dated January 1610, appointing Shakespeare and three others to train ‘a convenient number of children who shall be called the Children of her Majesties Revels’ in the art of ‘playing Tragedies, Comedies &c.’ As exciting as these documents were, they were also somewhat impersonal. The same could not be said for the letter in an elegant hand, signed H.S. – most likely the Earl of Southampton – asking that Egerton ‘be good to the poor players of the Blackfriars’, and mentioning in passing ‘two of the chief of the company’ – Burbage and Shakespeare – the latter ‘my especial friend, till of late an actor … and writer of some of our best English plays which as your Lordship knoweth were most singularly liked of Queen Elizabeth’. The letter also contains a lovely detail: Burbage is praised as ‘one who fitteth the action to the word and the word to the action most admirably’ – clearly echoing Hamlet.
Collier worked rapidly, publishing the finds as fast as they came to hand, following up his first pamphlet with New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare in 1836 and three years later with Further Particulars Regarding Shakespeare and His Works. The former contained transcriptions of an eyewitness account of contemporary performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale by the famous Elizabethan astrologer and physician Simon Forman. Collier also found a document confirming that Othello had been performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1602 (which overturned Malone’s late dating of the play), a letter by fellow poet Samuel Daniel indirectly alluding to Shakespeare, and a tax record indicating that Shakespeare resided in Southwark as late as 1609. A workhorse, Collier even found the time to publish Henslowe’s papers and Diary, discovering an allusion there to ‘Mr Shakespeare of the Globe’ that Malone had overlooked.
Collier’s many discoveries in the 1830s and 1840s provided a counterweight to a documentary base weighted too heavily toward Stratford and financial preoccupations. While Shakespeare’s personal life remained a mystery, evidence of his theatrical career, both early and late, as well as evidence of some of his more important relationships with fellow writers and actors, had been greatly enhanced. Almost overnight – and we will soon see why this proved disastrous – these findings found their way into what seemed like an endless stream of popular biographies of Shakespeare. Eager to claim credit, Collier decided to write the great Shakespeare biography of his day. In the early 1840s he offered a preview of this ‘Life’ as part of a planned new edition of Shakespeare’s works. This edition included even more recent discoveries made in the Stratford archives, including the notes of the Stratford Town Clerk, Thomas Greene, on Shakespeare’s freehold of unenclosed fields in 1614, as well as the document showing that Shakespeare’s household had hoarded malt in 1598, during a period of dearth in Warwickshire.
The 1830s and 1840s were boom years for historical and antiquarian societies committed to researching England’s past. The Hakluyt Society began disseminating English travel narratives; the Parker Society, religious texts; the Camden Society and Percy Society literary ones. In 1840, Collier, along with twenty or so others, founded a Shakespeare Society, dedicated to ‘the purpose of collecting materials, or of circulating information, by which [Shakespeare] may be thoroughly understood and fully appreciated’, drawing on materials ‘in private hands and among family papers, of the very existence of which the possessors are not at present aware’. Three of the leading members were also Collier’s rivals as biographers of Shakespeare: Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. All three knew how deeply they were indebted to Collier’s finds, especially Halliwell-Phillipps, who chose as the frontispiece for his first biography, The Life of William Shakespeare, published in 1848, a facsimile of the letter found by Collier in which ‘H.S.’ pays tribute to Shakespeare as his ‘especial friend’.
But it wasn’t long before these competitors began to question some of Collier’s discoveries. To charge someone with forgery was a sensitive business, and it wouldn’t be easy proving the case against so prominent a figure. Dyce was the first to do so in print in his Memoir of Shakespeare (1832). Knight expressed his scepticism a decade or so later in his William Shakespere: A Biography (1843). Halliwell-Phillipps chose to publish his Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House privately, in 1853. For Halliwell-Phillipps, this was an especially delicate matter, as he himself had been accused of tampering with and then reselling manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge in his younger days – and even of stealing and disfiguring one of the two extant copies of the First Quarto of Hamlet.
By now the word was out. Collier was an incredibly skilled forger. How much had he faked? Some of his finds, such as Forman’s playgoing accounts, were without question genuine. Yet Collier had handled virtually every key document in Stratford as well as London and Dulwich, indeed had got to many of them first, making it next to impossible to determine whether he had added materials to otherwise genuine documents (and, in fact, he had). Every Collier discovery had to be suspected – and scholars would spend decades going over every biographical claim he had advanced. As a rule of thumb, the claims that Collier made regarding Shakespeare of Stratford, or Shakespeare’s business transactions, were true; those having to do with Blackfriars, or Southampton, or the Globe, or in fact anything to do with Shakespeare’s creative life were fabricated, especially all that rubbish about Shakespeare’s early affiliation with Blackfriars, yet one more effort to satisfy the bottomless need to provide the evidence, now all but lost, of Shakespeare’s early years and professional associations. The rest – and there are many other finds – are genuine. Collier had discovered more documents about Shakespeare than anyone before or since; they just weren’t the ones he had hoped to find. Those, he made up.
Collier hadn’t left much to discover, and most of the remaining scraps were just what researchers least hoped to find. Joseph Hunter learned that Shakespeare defaulted in 1598 on taxes of thirteen shillings four pence, while Halliwell-Phillipps discovered that Shakespeare had taken the apothecary Philip Rogers to court in 1604 for repayment of twenty bushels of malt as well as a small sum. Apparently, Rogers, who had many mouths to feed and was often in debt, had only paid back six shillings on a bill of £2.
Much was made of Shakespeare’s dealings in malt, revealing how little Victorians understood about daily life in late sixteenth-century Warwickshire. When viewed through a nineteenth-entury lens, Shakespeare’s financial activities made him appear to be a rapacious businessman. The hoarding of malt is a particularly good example of what’s lost when actions are severed from their cultural contexts. For
in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town’s principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible. Shakespeare’s holdings were about average; a dozen men, including the local schoolmaster, had stored more. When local officials protested at restrictions made on their hoarding malt, they explained that ‘our town hath no other special trade, having thereby only time beyond man’s memory lived by exercising the same, our houses fitted to no other use, many servants among us hired only to that purpose’. Their defence was self-serving, but it was also true. In addition, it’s likely that a good many of the local records concerning Shakespeare’s business activities in Stratford were actually the affair of his wife, Anne Hathaway, who would have been responsible (though as her husband, Shakespeare would have been officially involved in cases going to court). This is not to exonerate the Shakespeares for hoarding malt while impoverished Warwickshire neighbours starved. It is to say that biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment. If Shakespeare was a ‘grain merchant’, as some now began to call him, what man or woman from the middling classes in Stratford wasn’t?
Halliwell-Phillipps, more than any of his predecessors, had a knack for finding uninspiring facts about Shakespeare’s business dealings, including an assignment of an interest in a lease of tithes from Ralph Huband to Shakespeare in 1605, records of Shakespeare’s involvement in land enclosure in Welcombe in 1614, and a pair of letters by Stratford neighbours that mentioned Shakespeare in connection with other financial dealings. Things hit rock bottom when Halliwell-Phillipps came upon yet another lawsuit, brought by a William Shakespeare in 1600 in the Court of the Queen’s Bench against John Clayton; he had lent Clayton £7 in May 1592 and now wanted his money back.
Contested Will Page 8