Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  James’s earliest exposure to the authorship controversy may date back to the 1880s, when a New York neighbour and family friend, John Watts de Peyster, published Was THE Shakespeare After All a Myth? While James visited Shakespeare’s birthplace several times, he didn’t write much about the experience, though, as we shall see, he seems to have shared his brother William’s opinion, expressed in 1902, that ‘a visit to Stratford now seems to be the strongest appeal a Baconian can make’:

  [the] absolute extermination and obliteration of every record of Shakespeare save a few sordid material details, and the general suggestion of narrowness and niggardliness with the way in which the spiritual quantity of Shakespeare has mingled into the soul of the world, was most uncanny, and I feel ready to believe in almost any mythical story of the authorship.

  The tension between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘sordid material’ elements of the Shakespeare myth was becoming intolerable.

  In June 1901, Henry James recorded in his notebook a story idea – ‘a little donnée’ – inspired by an anecdote he had heard a fortnight earlier when visiting the Trevelyans at Welcombe, near Stratford. Lady Trevelyan had told him about ‘the couple who had formerly (before the present incumbents) been for a couple of years – or a few – the people in charge of the Shakespeare house – the Birthplace’:

  They were rather strenuous and superior people from Newcastle, who had embraced the situation with joy, thinking to find it just the thing for them and full of interest, dignity, an appeal to all their culture and refinement, etc. But what happened was that at the end of 6 months they grew sick and desperate from finding it – finding their office – the sort of thing that I suppose it is: full of humbug, full of lies and superstition imposed upon them by the great body of visitors, who want the positive impressive story about every object, every feature of the house, every dubious thing – the simplified, unscrupulous, gulpable, tale. They found themselves too ‘refined,’ too critical for this – the public wouldn’t have criticism (of legend, tradition, probability, improbability) at any price – and they ended by contracting a fierce intellectual and moral disgust for the way they had to meet the public. That is all the anecdote gives – except that after a while they could stand it no longer, and threw up the position.

  James immediately saw potential in this tale of bardolatry turned sour – ‘something more, I mean, than the mere facts. I seem to see them – for there is no catastrophe in a simple resignation of the post, turned somehow, by the experience, into strange sceptics, iconoclasts, positive negationists.’ As he turned the story over in his mind he imagined the pair as they ‘are forced over to the opposite extreme and become rank enemies not only of the legend, but of the historic donnée itself’. His story, as initially conceived, was to have a ending more shocking than the ‘intellectual and moral disgust’ that led to their resignation in Lady Trevelyan’s account: ‘Say they end by denying Shakespeare – say they do it on the spot itself – one day – in the presence of a big, gaping, admiring batch. Then they must go.’

  James worked on ‘The Birthplace’ the following summer and autumn before publishing it in his 1903 short-story collection The Better Sort. Around this time he was also discussing the authorship question with at least two friends, Manton Marble and Violet Hunt. Marble was an American friend and former editor of the New York World who had settled in Brighton. James wrote from London in early December 1902, thanking Marble for forwarding a copy of a book on the authorship controversy that they had already discussed: ‘I surmise that this valuable volume is the Webb volume of which we spoke – and I feel how I drop far below the argument in merely saying that I rejoice to possess it, and to be able to read it again in the light of your eulogy; also that I heartily thank you for it.’ The ‘Webb volume’ was almost surely Judge Thomas Ebenezer Webb’s The Mystery of William Shakespeare: A Summary of Evidence, just published in England. Webb’s style and conclusions sound downright Jamesian and it’s easy to see the appeal the book held for him: ‘In spite of all that has been written, there is a vague feeling of unrest as to Shakespeare in the public mind … Whoever the great dramatist was, we can form no adequate conception of his mind.’ Webb cautiously concludes that in the absence of persuasive external evidence, the plays themselves point to Bacon rather than Shakespeare; only in his case are ‘the works as we possess them and the man as we know him in strict accord’.

  While Marble was clearly a committed Baconian, James himself demurred, insisting on his authority as a writer that it couldn’t have been Bacon, for the man and the works were not, as Webb might put it, in ‘strict accord’: ‘Still, all the same, take my word for it, as a dabbler in fable and fiction, that the plays and the sonnets were never written but by a Personal Poet, a Poet and Nothing Else, a Poet, who, being Nothing Else, could never be a Bacon.’ Yet James was also unwilling to concede that Shakespeare wrote the plays. The gap between the poetry and what was known about the man from Stratford was simply too great: ‘The difficulty with the divine William is that he isn’t, wasn’t the Personal Poet with the calibre and the conditions, any more than the learned, the ever so much too learned, Francis.’ James never quite explains what this calibre or these conditions might be, but promises Marble that ‘we will talk of these things again’.

  Nine months later James was still wrestling with the problem. On 11 August 1903 he wrote to his friend Violet Hunt, who had recently visited him in Rye, challenging her defence of Shakespeare. Hunt’s letter, which he describes as ‘ferocious’, doesn’t survive, so all we have to go by is James’s paraphrase of one of her elaborate metaphors:

  Your comparison of genius to the passenger on the ‘liner’ with his cabin and his ‘hold’ luggage is very brilliant and I should quite agree with you – and do. Only I make this difference. Genius gets at its own luggage, in the hold, perfectly (while common mortality is reduced to a box under the berth); but it doesn’t get at the Captain’s and the First Mate’s, in their mysterious retreats. Now William of Stratford (it seems to me) had no luggage, could have had none in any part of the ship, corresponding to much of the wardrobe sported in the plays.

  Again, it’s not easy knowing exactly what James is arguing here, though it feels like the claim that Shakespeare ‘had no luggage’ is another way of expressing what he had recently told Marble: that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the ‘calibre and the conditions’ – presumably the background, training and equipment – to have written the plays. In both letters James also seems to hint that Shakespeare’s humble origins argue against his having been equipped with the right ‘wardrobe’.

  Around the time that this exchange took place, James sent Hunt a book on the controversy, perhaps Webb’s, in an effort to put more ‘pressure’ on her defence of Shakespeare. It failed to have the desired effect, as we can tell from James’s disappointed reply of 26 August. Hunt may have recoiled from the suggestion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, but James, who admits to being haunted by the conviction that Shakespeare was a fraud, doesn’t flinch at all from this possibility:

  Also came the Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter – for which also thanks, but for which I can’t now pretend to reply. You rebound lightly, I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author – but I don’t rebound: I am ‘a sort of ’ haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me.

  Having confessed, it seems, to a bit more than he was comfortable admitting (that colloquial and bracketed ‘“sort of ” haunted’ speaks worlds), James stops himself at this point, and makes clear, in the qualified language typical of his thoughts on the subject, that this is as far as he is willing to go:

  But that is all – I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive
that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.

  Bacon was an unlikely candidate, but Shakespeare unlikelier still.

  When he published ‘The Birthplace’ in 1903, James left out the public repudiation of Shakespeare’s authorship that had been the climax of the version sketched out in his notebook. Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon, while clearly implied, are no longer named. Morris Gedge, the central figure of the story, struggles to live with the lie that he is paid to tell, day in, day out, to the endless stream of pilgrims who come to visit the birthplace of the divine poet. He shares his growing doubts with his wife, who is terrified of losing their livelihood if he begins to tell the truth. Like his creator, Morris Gedge chooses to share his misgivings privately, unburdening himself to a young and sympathetic American pair, who wonder why the tourists won’t just accept that ‘the play’s the thing’ and let ‘the author alone’. ‘“That’s just what They won’t do,”’ Gedge excitedly confesses, ‘“nor let me do. It’s all I want – to let the author alone. Practically” – he felt himself getting the last of his chance – “there is no author; that is for us to deal with.”’

  Gedge masks his disenchantment and turns his performance into an art. His reputation soars and visitors flock to hear him. His wife is still panicked though, worried now that he has gone ‘too far’ in his enthusiastic, if ironic, embrace of the myth. His confidants, the young American couple, return a year later, partly to see if what they have heard of Gedge’s performance, given his doubts, could possibly be true. They conclude that his sardonic bardolatry is a thing of ‘genius’, though they worry that he is in danger of being exposed and losing his job. Their concerns are misplaced: Gedge’s act is so successful that receipts soar and his salary is doubled. He has managed to turn his radical doubts about the Bard into art – and is rewarded for it. And he can count on those with whom he has shared his scepticism to keep his secret safe.

  James can hardly be blamed for subsuming his own beliefs to the higher interest of creating powerful fiction, which is why many more people now read ‘The Birthplace’ than Twain’s Is Shakespeare Dead? His story, as originally conceived, would have been more revealing biographically, but a less compelling work of fiction. The closest James comes to acknowledging an affinity with Gedge is in the prefatory remarks to the story that he supplied for the 1909 New York Edition, where James admits that the appeal of the story was ‘the more direct, I may add, by reason, as happened, of an acquaintance, lately much confirmed, on my own part, with the particular temple of our poor gentleman’s priesthood’ – implying that his own recent and disenchanting experience of visiting the divine Shakespeare’s birthplace confirmed Gedge’s. Again, this is as directly as James is willing to express himself, for posterity, on the subject. When James travelled to New York to visit his own birthplace near Washington Square in the spring of 1905, he discovered that the house in which he had been born six decades earlier had been ‘ruthlessly suppressed’ and demolished – no trace left on which to affix even ‘a commemorative mural tablet’. It left James with the sensation he later describes in The American Scene of having been ‘amputated of half my history’.

  James had another opportunity to address the Shakespeare mystery when he was invited by William Dana Orcutt to write an introduction to The Tempest. It was ‘the only one of Shakespeare’s plays’, Orcutt told him, ‘in which we directly touch Shakespeare the man, and I believe that your analysis of him would be a contribution to Shakespeariana’. Though buried in his work on the New York Edition, James agreed to do it: ‘I accept the commission with great anticipation,’ he told Orcutt, before adding with uncharacteristic boldness, ‘I will challenge this artist – the monster and magician of a thousand masks, and make him drop them, if only for an interval.’

  The essay captures a decisive moment in the history of the authorship debate, a moment when a set of shaky biographical (and autobiographical) assumptions had hardened into fact and collided with equally entrenched nineteenth-century beliefs about artistic genius. James took as a given a set of beliefs that had not existed a century earlier though by the late nineteenth century were almost universally shared: that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play, most likely written specifically for a courtly occasion; that Prospero’s renunciation of his art was a veiled allusion to Shakespeare’s own; that the biographical facts confirmed that Shakespeare of Stratford was a man obsessed with money; and that the play was a work of genius by an author at the height of his powers. James was also writing in the autumnal moment of the Baconian movement, when enough was now known about Francis Bacon’s life, work and sensibility to fatally weaken his case, yet at a time when a convincing alternative for the authorship of the plays had yet to be advanced. It is no coincidence that his essay also marks the high-water mark in reading The Tempest as Shakespeare’s most autobiographical play.

  James would have understood why Delia Bacon invoked Prospero and The Tempest in her own farewell essay, for, like her and many others, he read the play as Shakespeare’s great leave-taking. But this, for James, was the most troubling thing about The Tempest: how could the genius who wrote it renounce his art at the age of forty-eight and retire to rural Stratford to ‘spend what remained to him of life in walking about a small, squalid country-town with his hand in his pockets and ear for no music but the chink of the coin they might turn over there’? He poses this central question in an unusually tortured way: ‘By what inscrutable process was the extinguisher applied and, when once applied, kept in its place to the end? What became of the checked torrent, as a latent, bewildering presence and energy, in the life across which the dam was constructed?’

  James had dutifully read the Shakespeare biographies of Georg Brandes and Halliwell-Phillipps yet refused to accept their popular if ‘arbitrary’ distinction between the author’s ‘genius’ and ‘the rest of his identity’, which they reduce to a ‘a man of exemplary business-method’. Shakespeare’s biographers have perversely maintained, as James puts it, that ‘The Poet is there, and the Man is outside.’ It’s an ‘admirable’ view, he trenchantly concludes, ‘if you can get your mind to consent to it’. James could not. He found the recorded facts of Shakespeare of Stratford’s life ‘supremely vulgar’ and ill-suited to the artist who wrote The Tempest. While he would not go as far as Twain’s reductive views about the necessarily autobiographical nature of great writing, James nonetheless dismisses the possibility that a split between man and poet was possible: the two parts of the artist were necessarily ‘one’, for the ‘genius is a part of the mind, and the mind a part of the behaviour’.

  This rift between the received biography and the poetic genius James had encountered over the course of a lifetime of reading the works attributed to Shakespeare was clearly unbridgeable, the most ‘insoluble’ mystery ‘that ever was’. Either something was terribly wrong about the biography of the author of The Tempest or James misunderstood something fundamental about literary genius. The stakes here couldn’t be higher, for as many distinguished Henry James scholars have shown, the essay is as much about James’s own genius and legacy as about Shakespeare’s, and in that sense can usefully be read alongside the prefaces to the New York Edition he was writing at the time about how he himself should be read and valued by posterity.

  It’s a subtle essay by a critic at the height of his analytic and rhetorical powers. One of the most fascinating things about it is watching Shakespeare slowly recede from view. He is named only a half-dozen times or so in the twenty-three-page essay – no mean feat, since the essay concerns the authorship of his play. By the closing pages Shakespeare’s name has disappeared completely, replaced by the deliberately ambiguous ‘he’, ‘our hero’ and ‘the author of Hamlet and The Tempest’. The sordid biographical facts of Shakespeare’s life that have no observable bearing on the works are jettisoned as well.

  The essay’s closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful
wish that this mystery will one day be resolved by ‘the criticism of the future’: ‘The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there … May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?’ Is James hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are ‘one’? If so, his choice of metaphor – recalling Hamlet’s lunge at the arras in the closet scene – is unfortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet’s weapon finds the wrong man?

  *

  In the end, any post-mortem of the Baconian movement must acknowledge that the failure to find a cipher and the subsequent ridicule directed at the decoders and gravediggers hastened its demise. So too, did the failure, despite strenuous efforts, to show that Bacon’s style resembled Shakespeare’s. But given the erosion of Francis Bacon’s cultural significance, the demise of the movement was probably inevitable.

  In retrospect, the Baconians also lost support because they had erred in identifying their hero with the wrong authorial self-portrait, though, again, it was one that they had borrowed from mainstream scholars. That great image of authority, Prospero as Shakespeare – or as they saw it, Prospero as Bacon – had outlived its moment. Too aloof, bookish and a bit cold, he was hardly a Shakespeare for the twentieth century. A new biographical stand-in was needed, and Hamlet was waiting in the wings – for those who believed that Shakespeare wrote the plays as well as for those who didn’t. Philosophy and politics were out, Oedipal desires and mourning for dead fathers in. It would still be a story of failure; but rather than Delia Bacon’s account of how the plays emerged in response to political isolation and blunted republican dreams, the failure would now be more personal, and the plays an outlet for the anguish of being undervalued and overlooked. A new search was on, one that depended more than ever on finding the life in the work. It was just a different life. Whoever wrote the plays had to be someone less forbidding than a Prospero or a Bacon, someone more suited to the times: introspective, nostalgic for a lost past, psychologically complex, misunderstood, someone, like Hamlet, with ‘a wounded name’.