Scholars still can’t agree whether this was our Shakespeare and not another who sued Clayton; whether or not it was, it fitted the pattern of a tight-fisted Shylock all too well. There would be a few more dramatic discoveries made in the early twentieth century – including information about Shakespeare’s life in a Huguenot household on Silver Street in London in the early years of the seventeenth century (a story wonderfully told in Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger) – but as matters stood in the 1850s, a biography so heavily weighted to financial dealings profoundly influenced how Shakespeare’s life was imagined. Halliwell-Phillipps conceded as much in the most influential biography of the age: ‘It must be admitted that nothing whatever has yet presented itself, which discloses those finer traits of thought and action we are sure must have pervaded the author of Lear and Hamlet in his communication with the more cultivated of his contemporaries.’ In the absence of such disclosures, it was best to accept what the evidence does confirm, that Shakespeare was ‘a prudent man of the world, actively engaged in the promotion of his fortune, and intent on the foundation and preservation to his posterity of the estates he had won by his writings’.
Halliwell-Phillipps knew how hard this would be to swallow, how it would ‘tend to destroy the finely drawn appreciation of Shakespeare’s life, which owes its existence to the fiction of later days’. But he chose not to emphasise that all we could expect to find at this late date were legal records, rather than more personal ones, so that too much weight should not be placed on quite partial evidence. Unlike his fellow biographers, Halliwell-Phillipps wasn’t in the least uncomfortable with his portrayal of his subject as preoccupied with money; that was precisely how he himself experienced the world of the professional writer, and it’s telling that late in life he compiled a list of ways in which he was just like Shakespeare. Once again, biography and autobiography were not easily untangled.
Halliwell-Phillipps’s verdict was that no doubt ‘can exist in the mind of any impartial critic, that the great dramatist most carefully attended to his worldly interests; and confirmations of this opinion may be produced from numerous early sources’. Alexander Dyce put matters even more bluntly in his biography: ‘from his earliest days’ Shakespeare’s ‘grand object’ was ‘the acquisition of a fortune which was to enable him eventually to settle himself as a gentleman in Stratford’. By 1857, when Dyce wrote these words, an unbearable tension had developed between Shakespeare the poet and Shakespeare the businessman; between the London playwright and the Stratford haggler; between Shakespeare as Prospero and Shakespeare as Shylock; between the kind of man revealed in the autobiographical poems and plays, and the one revealed in tax, court and real-estate records; between a deified Shakespeare and a depressingly mundane one. Surely he was either one or the other. Less than a century had passed since Dr Johnson, who would have found the very idea of having to choose between these alternatives ludicrous, had said that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ The writing life may not have changed much, but assumptions about it certainly had.
A tipping point had been reached; it was only a matter of time before someone would come along and suggest that we were dealing not with one man, but two. An essay called ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ appeared in 1852 in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Surveying the field, its anonymous author acknowledged the obvious: ‘Is it more difficult to suppose that Shakespeare was not the author of the poetry ascribed to him, than to account for the fact that there is nothing in the recorded or traditionary life of Shakespeare which in any way connects the poet with the man?’ The biographical facts reveal only a ‘cautious calculating man careless of fame and intent only on money-making’, while the ‘unsurpassed brilliancy of the writer throws not one single spark to make noticeable the quiet uniform mediocrity of the man’. Nothing connects this Shakespeare to Hamlet ‘except the simple fact of his selling the poems and realizing the proceeds, and their being afterwards published with his name attached’. We are left, the anonymous author concludes, with equally unhappy alternatives: either Shakespeare employed a poet who wrote the plays for him, or the plays were miraculously conceived, with Shakespeare resorting to a cave to receive by ‘divine afflatus’ the sacred text.
Homer, Jesus and the Higher Criticism
Back in 1794, even as Londoners were honoring ‘Drama’s God’ at Drury Lane, a German scholar at the University of Halle was completing a book that would forever cast doubt on the authorship – even the existence – of an even greater literary divinity, Homer. The publication of Friedrich August Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795 sent shock waves through the world of classical studies and well beyond. Wolf argued that the oral composition of the Iliad and Odyssey could be traced as far back as 950 BC, well before the Greeks were acquainted with literary writing (though Wolf proved to be wrong about this detail). Close philological analysis showed that these long poems could not have been the unchanged words of an ancient bard, preserved and transmitted orally from generation to generation for four hundred years. It was no longer possible, though, to recover exactly when the Iliad and Odyssey arrived at their final form or the identity of those involved in their composition and revision. According to Wolf, if there had been a Homer, he was no more than an illiterate and ‘simple singer of heroic lays’. The conventional biography of Homer – accepted almost without question from Herodotus and Aristotle on down through the Renaissance – was suddenly and permanently over-thrown. As Emerson put it a half-century later, ‘From Wolf ’s attack upon the authenticity of the Homeric poems dates a new epoch of learning.’ Authorship would never be the same.
Admittedly, there had been rumblings about Homer going back to antiquity, when Josephus had claimed, without citing any evidence, that Homer was illiterate. More widespread scepticism began in earnest in the late seventeenth century, when the French critic François Hédelin attacked the Iliad ’s bad style, morality and inconsistencies; citing ‘ancient reports of Homer’s illiteracy’, he concluded that ‘there had never been such a person as Homer, and the Iliad and Odyssey were the patchwork creations of a later and incompetent editor’. Giambattista Vico expressed similar doubts in 1730: ‘Homer was the best poet ever, but he never existed.’ In England, Robert Wood added that ‘the Greek alphabet was a late invention’, and that Homer’s works had only reached their current form because of the ‘deliberate intervention of learned collectors, after centuries of oral transmission as separate ballads’. It was clear what conditions had made the Homeric authorship controversy possible; according to Thomas Blackwell, the Greeks had come ‘to persuade themselves that a mind so vast could not belong to a man; that so much knowledge could only flow from a heavenly source; and having once firmly settled his Apotheosis in their own minds, they wanted next that everything about him should appear supernatural and divine’.
What set Wolf ’s book apart – and made it one of the landmark works of modern scholarship – was not his conclusion, already shared by others, but the philological and historical method by means of which he explored how texts were transmitted over time, a method that would have profound implications for other fields of intellectual enquiry and other revered books and authors. Eighteenth-century readers were not quite ready to accept the conclusion, as one recent classicist has put it, that Homer was no more than ‘a discursive effect, the function of institutional apparatuses and practices that developed over time’. Yet these unnerving postmodern implications of Wolf ’s work were grasped early on by critics like Friedrich Nietzsche, who addressed the problem directly in his inaugural lecture at Basel in 1869, when he asked, regarding Homer: ‘has a person been made out of a concept’ or ‘a concept out of a person?’
Scholars were soon confronted with a troubling set of questions (which would be dusted off and asked of Shakespeare a half-century later). Why were there no surviving contemporary references to so great a poet as Homer? Was ‘Homer’ a pseudonym? Could authorship be determined by means of internal evidence and consiste
ncy (in other words, was there an identifiable style that transcended textual irregularities)? What now was the status of other poems long attributed to Homer, such as The Battle of the Frogs and Mice and The Homeric Hymns? And why were those with a professional investment in the traditional view of Homeric authorship so resistant to new ways of thinking about these issues?
Controversial theories of authorship were proposed, including one by the English novelist Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, and a trained classicist. Butler, arguably the most autobiographical writer of his day, read the Odyssey as a fundamentally autobiographical poem. The Phaeacian episode convinced him that the poem had to have been written by a young and strong-willed Sicilian woman who drew on her own experience – and he published The Authoress of the Odyssey in support of this claim. Butler also saw what the Homeric controversy meant for Shakespeare: ‘Who would have thought of attacking Shakespeare’s existence – for if Shakespeare did not write his plays he is no longer Shakespeare – unless men’s minds had been unsettled by Wolf ’s virtual denial of Homer’s?’ It was not an isolated view. One of Benjamin Disraeli’s characters in his 1837 novel Venetia had already wondered: ‘And who is Shakespeare? We know of him as much as we do of Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it.’
Predictably, Romantic writers drawn to Shakespeare’s story were also captivated by Wolf ’s new theory about Homer. But they had to overlook its focus on collaborative authorship, which undermined their conception of artistic creation as the product of solitary and autonomous genius. Coleridge carefully marked up his copy of Wolf, while ‘Friedrich Schlegel took it as the model for his own studies in Greek poetry, and his brother August Wilhelm popularised it in his lectures.’ Thomas de Quincey wrote three essays on the Homeric question for Blackwood’s in 1841, not long after he wrestled with the problem of Shakespeare’s biography, wondering how ‘such a man’s history’ could have ‘so soon and so utterly have been obliterated’. It’s difficult today to register how deeply Wolf ’s arguments unsettled nineteenth-century readers. One last example must suffice: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), where Aurora denounces the work of that ‘kissing Judas, Wolf’. For Aurora,
Wolf ’s an atheist;
And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,
By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,
Conclude as much too for the universe.
When poets hurl around accusations of ‘atheist’ and ‘kissing Judas’, it’s clear that far more is threatened by Wolf ’s method than the authorship of a pair of ancient Greek poems.
The battle over Homer’s identity, though no longer the struggle it once was, continues to this day. Classicists now have a better understanding of how oral poetry was transmitted; almost all accept that there was no Homer in the traditional sense which readers for over two thousand years had imagined. Happily, since nobody was advancing alternative candidates from ancient Greece – what contemporary rival, after all, could even be named? – there wasn’t anything to fuel an authorship controversy, and the problem was more or less ignored; the less said, the better. Still, there are those who refuse to give up on the traditional story, including E. V. Rieu, who translated the Penguin paperback that introduces so many readers to the Iliad. Rieu warns there that ‘It will astonish people who know nothing of the “Homeric question” to learn that these splendidly constructed poems, and especially the Iliad, have in the past been picked to pieces’ by scholars who argue that ‘the Iliad is the composite product of a number of poets of varying merit’. Rieu will have none of it, reassuring readers that poems with such ‘consistency in character-drawing’ could only have been written by one man.
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As groundbreaking as Wolf ’s book proved to be, his method wasn’t original. It derived, most immediately, not from work done by other classicists, but from the latest in Biblical scholarship, which had been an especially rich field of intellectual enquiry since the Reformation. Post-Reformation theologians skilled in Semitic languages, familiar with a long tradition of Jewish textual scholarship and attuned to historical changes, recognised that the Old Testament was a very complicated text. Over a century or so, close textual analysis, as well as a richer understanding of the transmission of Scripture, called into question the idea that the words derived in unadulterated form from Moses himself. Some of the finest minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had addressed the historical problems posed by Biblical texts and laid the foundations for the radical scholarship that followed. Over time, an ever-widening gap opened up between the received understanding of the Bible – especially the books of the Old Testament – and the way that Holy Writ was received by the faithful. Wolf had studied under leading Biblical scholars at the University of Göttingen and was familiar with the path-breaking and controversial work of German Biblical criticism, especially Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s Einleitung ins Alte Testament, which had begun to appear in 1780. Eichhorn showed how to reconstruct the history of a text when the original had undergone significant changes over time. The implications for the study of Homer were obvious. As Anthony Grafton has shown, Wolf in essence ‘annexed for classical studies the most sophisticated methods of contemporary Biblical scholarship’.
Eichhorn is best remembered today for having coined the term the ‘Higher Criticism’, a phrase that describes how he and others employed historical methods to study the origins, date, composition and transmission of the books of the Bible, especially the Old Testament (Lower Criticism was devoted to textual minutiae). Over time, the Higher Critics showed that Biblical works were rarely solo-authored. Collaboration of various sorts was the norm: while some books of the Bible have come down to us as composite works (with one author’s ideas or writings collected in a single volume), others were more deeply collaborative, combining the words of a number of authors in a single Scriptural text – including the Five Books of Moses.
Arguing that Genesis wasn’t written by Moses was one thing; saying that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could not have written eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus was far more subversive. But scholars couldn’t avert their eyes forever from the Higher Critical problems raised by the Gospels – and in 1835 David Friedrich Strauss, a young lecturer at the Protestant seminary of Tübingen, took on the New Testament much as Eichhorn had the Old Testament and Wolf had Homer. Strauss’s book was an immediate sensation, and its heretical implications ensured that Strauss would never again be employed at a German university or seminary. Copies of The Life of Jesus quickly made their way to America as well as to England, where it was translated by the young George Eliot.
Strauss focused his attack on biographical facts. He closely examined ninety evangelical stories – especially those recounting the miracles attributed to Jesus – and relentlessly exposed ‘the discrepancies, contradictions and mistakes in the Gospel narratives and made the supernatural explanations appear weak and untenable’. He further questioned the truth-value of the Gospels by pointing out that accounts of Jesus’ life weren’t written down until a generation after his death – so were based on second-hand and anecdotal testimony. After reading fifteen hundred pages of this assault, it was hard for anyone to escape the conclusion that there had been ‘no incarnation, no supernatural, divine Christ, no miracles, and no resurrection of the dead’. For Strauss, the life of Jesus was composed in much the same way that children sitting in a circle pass along and inevitably embellish a story as each one whispers it in the next one’s ear. Strauss imagined the earliest stories about Jesus ‘passing from mouth to mouth, and like a snowball growing by the involuntary addition of one exaggerating feature from this and another from that narrator’. It was all, as Strauss put it (in a term that became a byword for his approach), a ‘myth’. Jesus was a remarkable person but he was not divine. Strauss became the most notorious and vilified theologian of his day.
The shock waves of Strauss’s work soon threa
tened that lesser deity, Shakespeare, for his biography, too, rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths. One of the first to recognise the extent to which the Shakespeare authorship question was fuelled by the Higher Criticism was H. Bellyse Baildon, editor of the 1912 Arden edition of Titus Andronicus. For Baildon,
the fact seems obvious enough, that the skepticism with regard to Shakespeare’s authorship of the works at one time universally attributed to him, is part of that general skeptical movement or wave which has landed us first in the so-called ‘Higher-Criticism’ in matters of religion and finally in Agnosticism itself.
It’s surprising that nearly a century passed before scholars like Charles Laporte (in his fine 2007 essay on ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question’) paid much attention to the connection between the Life of Jesus and the life of Shakespeare. The authorship controversy’s theological roots also help explain why those debating Shakespeare’s claims slid so quickly into the language of apostasy, conversion, orthodoxy and heresy. Had the impulse to speak of Shakespeare as a literary deity been curbed or repudiated, Shakespeare might not have suffered collateral damage from a controversy that had little to do with him. J. M. Robertson had suspected as much back in 1913, noting that it ‘is very doubtful whether the Baconian theory would ever have been framed had not the idolatrous Shakespeareans set up a visionary figure of the Master. Broadly speaking, all error is consanguineous. Baconians have not invented a new way of being mistaken.’
Unfortunately, the conviction that Shakespeare was godlike had by now intensified to the point where his plays could casually be referred to as a ‘Bible of Humanity’ and a ‘Bible of Genius’, and his words juxtaposed with those of Holy Writ to underscore their scriptural force in books like J. B. Selkirk’s Bible Truths with Shakespearean Parallels (1862). Nineteenth-century writers in both England and America were even more devout in their worship of Shakespeare than their forebears had been. Thomas Carlyle, in ‘The Hero as Poet’, hailed Shakespeare as one of the ‘Saints of Poetry’, while Herman Melville wrote in The Confidence Man that ‘Shakespeare has got to be a kind of deity’. Even the unsentimental Matthew Arnold couldn’t help himself in his 1844 poem ‘Shakespeare’, where he addressed his object of adoration in lines better suited to Jesus than to an Elizabethan playwright:
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