No less fascinating is the breakdown of who was primarily responsible for which sections. With Titus Andronicus, where Shakespeare was the less established writer, Peele wrote the opening third of the play as well as a terrific scene at the beginning of Act 4. Shakespeare handled the rest. The other collaborations are Jacobean, and Shakespeare is in each case the more experienced partner. Wilkins seems to have written the first half of Pericles, Shakespeare the second half. Timon is more complicated: Shakespeare apparently wrote the opening scene and the closing act, but much of the rest is shared – with individual scenes at times divided between the two, suggesting that the collaboration with Middleton was unusually close. In Henry the Eighth, his first collaboration with Fletcher, Shakespeare again begins the play; Fletcher ends it, but as with Middleton, there’s considerable back-and-forth along the way. And in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare once again handles the opening and this time gets the last word in as well, along with most of the fifth act.
Stanley Wells, in Shakespeare and Co., has suggested that Shakespeare’s practice here may have been fairly typical, if one of the few scraps of evidence to survive – a lawsuit concerning a collaborative play from 1624, Keep the Widow Waking, jointly written by Thomas Dekker, John Webster, John Ford and William Rowley – can be taken as representative. Dekker gave evidence that he wrote eight pages of the first act, along with one speech that came much later, and it’s clear that he established the plot line for his colleagues to follow. Dekker also testified that he ‘often’ saw the play (or at least part of it) acted, suggesting some sort a professional obligation on the part of the playwright to be present on days when the play was rehearsed then performed. I suspect that in a decade’s time the account of the field as it now stands will sound sketchy and elementary. More scholars are turning their attention to these issues and more sophisticated approaches are being developed; it will take some time, but in due course Shakespeare’s editors and biographers will offer a truer portrait of this late, collaborative stage of his career.
If mainstream scholars have been uncomfortable acknowledging the degree to which attribution studies have transformed our understanding of how Shakespeare worked, one can only imagine how those who don’t believe he wrote the plays feel. To date they have been almost silent on this question. It’s not hard to see why. It’s impossible to picture any of their aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel. For Oxfordians in particular, attribution studies are a nightmare. Their strategy has long been to argue that after de Vere’s death in 1604, any unfinished works were touched up or completed by other playwrights. Orthodox Shakespeareans deride this as a ‘jumble sale’ scenario. You’d have to imagine something along the lines of Middleton, Wilkins and Fletcher coming upon Oxford’s estate sale in 1604, finding these unfinished plays for the having and each making a grab for them, with the dextrous Fletcher making off with three, the others with one each.
The Oxfordian claim that lesser playwrights touched up the works attributed to Shakespeare but written by de Vere by 1604 had until now proved quite difficult to refute. But editors of the collaborative plays have recently shown that some of these late plays could not have been started by one writer and later finished by another. A representative example appears in Lois Potter’s Arden edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen, where Potter shows that Fletcher wasn’t adequately aware of what Shakespeare was up to in the previous scene. In Act 2, scene 1, Shakespeare’s has a Jailor’s Daughter describe how Palamon and Arcite ‘discourse of many things, but nothing of their own restraint and disasters’ (2.1.40–1). The friends appear on the upper stage at the end of the scene but never exit – and that’s where Shakespeare leaves them. Fletcher, independently writing the scene that immediately follows, clearly had only a rough idea of what Shakespeare was busy writing in his assigned section, and has Palamon and Arcite appear on the main stage. And when they start to speak they contradict what the Jailor’s Daughter has just told us in the scene Shakespeare wrote, for the pair act as if they are meeting for first time since the battle, with Palamon asking ‘How do you, noble cousin?’ and Arcite replying ‘How do you, sir?’ (2.2.1–2). Such discrepancies, while no doubt ironed out by the company in production, are still visible in the surviving script – and render highly improbable the argument that Fletcher is completing an old unfinished playscript that fell into his hands. Things were a lot easier in the old days for those who doubted Shakespeare’s authorship, when it was still possible to imagine the ‘real’ author having his latest play delivered surreptitiously to the stage door at the Globe.
Epilogue
‘By me William Shakespeare,’ from Shakespeare’s Will, 1616
The controversy over Shakespeare’s authorship has proven to be, in retrospect, a long footnote to the larger story of the way we read now. We’ve inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development – part of what distinguishes the ‘modern’ from the ‘early modern’ – has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It’s fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so – and I’m thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth and Coetzee, to name but a few – has been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we’re curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favourite author.
Over the past decade or so, interest in writers’ lives has only intensified. Creative-writing programmes and bestseller lists confirm how pervasive self-revelation has become in our literary culture. An author photo and few sentences of biography on the dust jacket are no longer enough; readers now turn to a writer’s home page and blog. Hardly a year goes by without a scandal in which yet another writer is vilified for peddling fiction that could never sell except in the guise of a memoir. If the life fails to correspond to the work, something is wrong, and we feel cheated when invention masquerades as hard-earned experience.
The extent to which so much that now gets written is autobiographical can easily alter the expectations we bring to all kinds of imaginative writing. We now assume that novels necessarily reveal something about a writer’s life (so that, for example, it has become a truth universally acknowledged that Elizabeth Bennet’s romantic longings in Pride and Prejudice are a barely-disguised version of Jane Austen’s). At the same time, many literary biographies are supplanting the fictional works they are meant to illuminate, to the point where Ariel and The Bell Jar struggle to find a readership that books about Sylvia Plath’s marriage and suicide now command. In such a climate, it’s hard not to assume that literary works – of the past no less than of the present – are inescapably auto biographical.
This has been a blessing for those who deny Shakespeare’s authorship, whose claims stand or fall on the core belief that literature is, and always has been, autobiographical. Consult the works of recent sceptics and you’ll learn from Diana Price that ‘creative writers cannot help but reveal themselves in their work’, and from Hank Whittemore that the works attributed to Shakespeare are ‘nonfiction dressed as fiction’. At one point or another, every writer who rejects Shakespeare’s authorship says much the same thing. As the editor of the Oxfordian newsletter Shakespeare Matters recently conceded, ‘without the evidence of the plays and poems of Shakespeare, there would be no authorship debate’, for the ‘works themselves are the primary evidence in the whole matter’. While I have focused in this book on the Baconians and Oxfordians, this holds true for the case made for every rival candidate.
For most of the twentieth century, C. J. Sisson’s withering attack in 1934 on the excesses of Victorian biographers – ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ – deterred sc
holars tempted to interpret Shakespeare’s works as overtly autobiographical. Sisson’s warnings were reinforced in the 1970s by Samuel Schoenbaum, whose William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life offered a model of literary biography that refused to stray beyond the documented facts. But this reluctance to speculate about autobiography embedded within the works failed to satisfy modern readers hungry for a different sort of life of Shakespeare, one more suited to popular notions of literary self-revelation.
The turn of the millennium witnessed a revival of claims that hadn’t appeared in mainstream studies of Shakespeare since the Victorian age. Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare, which first aired as a BBC television series in 2003, led the way, assuring us that the Sonnets were ‘mainly private records of real events and emotions, however much reshaped for publication’. Wood adds that Shakespeare’s ‘sexual jealousy has a subtext of his own physical decline and anxiety about his sexual performance’. Shakespeare’s infatuation with a young man was no less fraught; take ‘Sonnet 33’, for example: ‘a modern psychologist would certainly be interested in Shakespeare’s passionate, almost desperate love for a seventeen-year-old in the year after his son’s death. In today’s terms, it was very adaptive, a kind of transference.’ Wood admits that some of his claims are speculative. Though he concedes, for example, that ‘we have no evidence’ for what Shakespeare was thinking while at work on The Tempest, he nonetheless concludes that ‘for a writer as intelligent, and as conscious of the illusion of theatre, as he was, it is hardly possible that an autobiographical edge to the plot was not in his mind’.
A year later, Stephen Greenblatt’s bestselling Will in the World gave this approach the seal of approval of the leading American Shakespearean of the day. Greenblatt admits straight away that ‘the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul’. Rather than consider what historical developments gave rise to this conviction, he focuses instead on how firsthand experience can be retrieved from Shakespeare’s surviving works, allowing extraordinary access into the poet’s desires and anxieties. As Greenblatt sees it, Shakespeare ‘turned everything life had dealt him – painful crises of social standing, sexuality, and religion – into the uses of art … He had managed even to transform his grief and perplexity at the death of his son into an aesthetic resource.’
Shakespeare’s wooing of Anne Hathaway ‘offered a compelling dream of pleasure’ enacted in plays like Two Gentlemen of Verona and Taming of the Shrew, while the story of their subsequent, unhappy marriage is replayed in the ‘frustrated craving for intimacy’ found in so many later plays. This sour portrayal of married life – confirmed for him in how Shakespeare treated Anne Hathaway in his will – makes it difficult for Greenblatt ‘not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife’. And if ‘there is one thing that the sonnets, taken as biographical documents, strongly suggest, it is that he could not find what he craved, emotionally or sexually, within his marriage’. Two hundred years on we have come full circle, back to where Malone began.
Greenblatt is far from the only prominent academic to speculate about the life. In his 2007 biography Shakespeare Revealed (tellingly subtitled Decoding a Hidden Life by his American publishers) René Weis, a leading British scholar and editor, similarly concludes that ‘the plays and poems contain important clues’ about ‘Shakespeare’s inner life’. The Sonnets, for Weis as well, are particularly revealing. Their metaphors about ‘strength by limping sway disabled’ and being ‘made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite’, for example, suggest that Shakespeare himself may have walked with a limp, perhaps a result of a childhood illness or ‘an accident like a fall from a horse’. Again and again, for Weis, things that happened in Shakespeare’s life resurface in the plays: there ‘is every reason for Shakespeare to have modelled his younger heroines on his own daughter’; in Twelfth Night ‘Shakespeare indulges in the fantasy of resurrecting a lost male twin’; and in Othello, ‘Iago’s latent homosexuality may also connect guiltily with Shakespeare’. Like Freud, Greenblatt and many others, Weis believes that it was the death of his father that prompted Shakespeare ‘to write a play named after his dead son’ – leading him to break from scholarly consensus and conclude, improbably, that Hamlet was written as late as 1602.
This sort of speculation has become commonplace in popular biographies of Shakespeare, filtering down to the classroom and serving as a model for studies of other Renaissance dramatists. It’s clearly an occupational hazard, and I flinch when I think of my own trespasses in classrooms and in print, despite my best efforts to steer clear of biographical speculation. Nobody describes this problem better than Jonathan Bate in his recent reflections on the Sonnets, published in The Times:
Don’t be drawn into the trap of supposing that they are autobiographical: that is an illusion of Shakespeare’s art. But it’s very hard to stop yourself. When I worked on them for my book The Genius of Shakespeare in the 1990s, I became convinced that I had identified the dark lady: she was the wife of John Florio, the Italian tutor in the household of the Earl of Southampton. When I returned to them recently for my book Soul of the Age, I became convinced that I had identified the rival poet: he was John Davies of Hereford, the greatest calligrapher in England and a hanger-on in the circle of the Earl of Pembroke.
‘Each time,’ Bate concludes, ‘the poems had worked their magic: they had made me project a story of my own into their narrative. They work like love itself by making you want to join your story to that of another.’
Bate’s remarks were seized upon as a direct challenge to those who doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. William Niederkorn immediately responded to Bate in a New York Times editors’ blog: ‘Why do exalted Shakespeare scholars want us to think the Sonnets are purely imaginative invention?’ For Niederkorn, professors who refuse to accept that the Sonnets ‘depict the life of the author’ as well as those who ‘cast their lot with the biography of Shakespeare as an unmatched literary genius arising from undistinguished circumstances’ have ‘good reason to deny the Sonnets’ reality’. Niederkorn coyly leaves this good reason unspoken – that the man from Stratford had nothing to do with the Sonnets’ composition – choosing instead to steer New York Times readers to a rival paper’s story about prominent Shakespeare sceptics as well as to the weblink to the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’.
The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the plays and poems, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays. And every step scholars have taken toward embracing such readings has encouraged their adversaries to make even more speculative claims. The recent publication of Hank Whittemore’s Oxfordian reading of the Sonnets, The Monument, offers a glimpse of where things may be heading. Even other Oxfordians (as William Boyle, the editor of Shakespeare Matters, put it when news of Whittemore’s work first circulated) saw that they were ‘undoubtedly journeying into new territory’, one that was both ‘controversial – and risky’. The Sonnets could now be read not as primarily fictional creations but as ‘documentary evidence every bit as important and potent as any letters, any diary, or anything to be found in the Calendar of State Papers. In fact, in some instances the Sonnets provide historical information that exists nowhere else.’
In November 2008, I joined ninety or so people gathered at London’s Globe Theatre to hear Whittemore share his work. It turned out to be an elegant revival of the Prince Tudor theory. The story of the Sonnets could be traced back to when Elizabeth, enamoured of the young Earl of Oxford, slept with him. The product of their union was the Earl of Southampton. The Sonnets – especially numbers 27 through to 126 – turn out to be a series of missives from Oxford to their royal child. This sequence of poems was written from 1601, in the aftermath of the abort
ive Essex rebellion (for which Southampton, a friend of Essex, was imprisoned), through to 1603 and the accession of King James, who displaced Southampton, the true heir to the throne. Interwoven with this suppressed history was an imaginative reading of the Sonnets in which Oxford serves as an advocate for his son, securing his release from prison in exchange for renouncing any claims to the throne. For Whittemore, ‘Oxford used the sonnets as a genuine outlet for his grief, expressing the personal torment of having to blame himself for Southampton’s fate.’
It was a spellbinding performance, as perfect a marriage of conspiratorial history and autobiographical analysis as one could imagine. If the enthusiastic response of the audience that evening was any indication, Oxfordian concerns about the riskiness of Whittemore’s approach were misplaced. I looked around the room and saw the same kind of people – middle-aged, sensibly dressed, middle-class – who regularly attend lectures about Shakespeare, nodding their heads in agreement and laughing aloud at the funny parts. I found it all both impressive and demoralising, a vision of a world in which a collective comfort with conspiracy theory, spurious history and construing fiction as autobiographical fact had passed a new threshold.
Contested Will Page 32