Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  I quote from the introduction to Stritmatter’s dissertation at www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/intro.pdf. For criticism of his argument, see Kathman’s ‘Oxford’s Bible’, which I have drawn on and quoted above, accessible at www.shakespeareauthorship.com. See too, Tom Veal’s online critiques at stromata.tripod.com/id288. htm and stromata.tripod.com/ id459.htm. See, as well, Scott Heller, ‘In a Centuries-Old Debate, Shakespeare Doubters Point to New Evidence’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 June 1999, where Alan Nelson is quoted. For Justice Stevens, see Bravin, ‘Justice Stevens Renders an Opinion’, Wall Street Journal.

  Part of the revival of interest in Marlowe has also been spurred by director Michael Rubbo’s documentary, Much Ado About Something, created in response to seeing the 1989 Frontline documentary that had ignored Marlowe’s candidacy and focused on Oxford’s (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muchado/fine). See, too, for example, ‘The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection’ (marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com); ‘Marlowe’s Ghost’ (marlowesghost.com); ‘The Marlowe Lives! Association’ (www.marlovian.com); and Peter Farey’s home page (www2.prestel.co.uk/rey). See, too, the introduction to Hamlet, by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, ed. Alex Jack (Becket, Mass., 2005) and William Honey’s privately printed The Life, Loves, and Achievements of Christopher Marlowe, Alias Shakespeare (London, 1982). For Jarmusch on Marlowe, see Lynn Hirschberg, ‘The Last of the Indies’, New York Times, 31 July 2005.

  For Moore’s remarks, see Peter Moore, ‘Recent Developments in the Case for Oxford as Shakespeare’, Ever Reader (No. 4, Fall 1996/Winter 1997). And see William Boyle, ‘Books and Book Reviewers’, Shakespeare Matters 2 (Fall 2002). For the ‘Beginner’s Guide’, see www.shakespeareoxford.com/?p=35. Shahan’s remarks appear in Shakespeare Matters (Fall 2007). For the latest tally of those who have signed the ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’, see www.doubtaboutwill.org.

  SHAKESPEARE

  THE EVIDENCE FOR SHAKESPEARE

  For facts about editions of the plays and poems, see Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge, 2003). For Buc’s acquaintance with the Earl of Oxford, see Charles J. Sisson, Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans (Cambridge, Mass., 1933). My account of Buc’s encounter with Shakespeare draws on Alan H. Nelson, ‘George Buc, William Shakespeare, and the Folger George a Greene’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), pp. 74–83; see too, James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London and New York, 2005). For more on typesetting, see Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text’, Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), pp. 255–83; Randall McLeod, ‘Spellbound: Typography and the Concept of Old-Spelling Editions’, Renaissance and Reformation, n.s. 3 (1979), pp. 50–65; and, forthcoming, Adam G. Hooks, ‘Shakespeare and Narrative of Authorship: Biography, Book History, and the Case of Richard Field’. On the origins in the 1870s of the myth that Elizabethan aristocratic poets were averse to publishing their work, see Steve W. May’s definitive essay, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print”’, Renaissance Papers 10 (1980), pp. 11–18.

  The kind of specificity offered by the 1604 performances is highly unusual for court payments, which are usually limited to naming the sharers who came to collect the money owed them (so that, for example, Kemp, Burbage and Shakespeare are named as those who were paid in 1595 for their company’s recent performances at court), as noted in Chambers, William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems. For a helpful discussion of what dramatists knew about stagecraft, see Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co. (London, 2006).

  ‘HERE’S OUR FELLOW SHAKESPEARE’

  See Chambers, William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, for what other writers at the time said about Shakespeare. For Beaumont and Fletcher, see Aubrey’s Brief Lives, as quoted in Philip Finkelpearl’s entry on Beaumont in the new Dictionary of National Biography. And for more on the dating of Beaumont’s poem, see Peter R. Moore, ‘The date of F.B.’ s Verse Letter to Ben Jonson’, Notes & Queries (September 1995), pp. 347–52. For an illuminating discussion of the Pavier quartos, see Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge, 2007). See too John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford, 2007). I am indebted for the suggestion about why the King’s Men visited Stratford to Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee. And for the annotations on the Huntington copy of Camden’s Britannia, see Paul Altrocchi, ‘Sleuthing an Enigmatic Latin Annotation’, Shakespeare Matters 2 (Summer 2003), as well as Alan Nelson’s research into Hunt’s background, and for his translations too (see web.archive.org/web/20051226113826/socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/Roscius.html). Nelson and Altrocchi have a collaborative article on this, ‘William Shakespeare, “Our Roscius”’, forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly. And see Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.

  JACOBEAN SHAKESPEARE

  For the Jacobeans on film, see Ronald Hutton, ‘Why Don’t the Stuarts Get Filmed?’ in Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York, 2009), pp. 246–58. I quote from the script of Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (New York, 1998). For more on Elizabeth and Shakespeare, see Helen Hackett, Elizabeth and Shakespeare: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton, 2009), as well as Rowe’s Life of Shakespeare. For King James’s letter to Shakespeare, see A Collection of Poems … by Mr William Shakespeare, ed. Bernard Lintott (London, 1709). For the boys’ companies, the impressing of choristers, and their repertory, see Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels (Cambridge, 2005). For the quotation on the boy players from scene 7 of the 1603 Quarto of Hamlet, see The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge, 1998). For King James’s angry reaction, see the letter from Sir Thomas Lake to Lord Salisbury, 11 March 1608, quoted in Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse (New York, 1964). For more on Blackfriars, see: Gerald Eades Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948), pp. 38–50; Leeds Barroll, ‘Shakespeare and the Second Blackfriars Theater’, Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005), pp. 156–70; Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol. 6 (Oxford, 1968); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company: 1595–1642 (Cambridge, 2004); and Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove, 2006).

  For dance in the Blackfriars plays, see, for example, the elaborate satyrs’ dance sequence followed by the dance of the shepherds and shepherdesses of The Winter’s Tale, the Morris dance of Two Noble Kinsmen, the dance of the celestial spirits in Henry the Eighth, and especially, again, The Tempest, with its dance of the ‘Strange Shapes’ in Act 3 and dance of reapers and nymphs in Act 4. My discussion of music and dancing in the Blackfriars plays draws on the invaluable work of Irwin Smith. See too Alan Brissenden’s excellent overview in his Shakespeare and the Dance (London, 1981).

  It seems that the entertainment of The Two Noble Kinsmen in Act 3 is lifted from the second anti-masque of Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, which had been performed at Whitehall on 20 February 1613 in celebration of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine (see Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance). James liked it enough to ask to see it again. For the anti-masquers of the King’s Men, see Richard Proudfoot, ‘Shakespeare and the New Dramatists of the King’s Men 1606–1613’, in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), pp. 235–61. For anti-masque in The Tempest, see Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975). For Frank Kermode on the knotty language of the late plays, see his Shakespeare’s Language (London, 2000). See too Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2006), and Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing.

  Strachey’s full sentence reads: ‘He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find a place for a faultless lyric, or a new unimagined rhythmical effect, or a gran
d and mystic speech’; see Strachey, ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, The Independent Review 3 (August 1904). For contemporary accounts of the burning down of the Globe, see for example, the reports quoted in Gordon McMullan’s Arden edition of Henry VIII (London, 2000).

  For Chambers, see his chapter on ‘The Problem of Authenticity’ in William Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, as well as his famous British Academy lecture on The Disintegration of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1924). And see Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. R. B. Parker (Manchester, 1983). I quote Field’s letter from Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: An Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, 2002). The story of Fletcher’s tavern affair is told in vol. 2 of Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662). For a full discussion of the division of labour between Shakespeare and his collaborators, see Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author. See too, Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Co., and C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge, 1936). And for a fascinating account of Shakespeare and George Wilkins, see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (London, 2008).

  EPILOGUE

  For the underlying autobiographical assumptions shared by those who deny Shakespeare’s authorship, see, for example, Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Hank Whittemore, The Monument (Marshfield Hills, Mass., 2005), and William Boyle, ‘Can Literature Be Evidence?’ in Shakespeare Matters 3 (Summer 2004).

  See Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (London, 2003); Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York, 2004); see too, Greenblatt ‘A Great Dane Goes to the Dogs’, New York Review of Books, 26 March 2009; and René Weis, Shakespeare Revealed: A Biography (London, 2007). See, too, Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman N. Holland, Sidney Homan and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley, 1989). For Bate’s remarks and Niederkorn’s response, see Jonathan Bate, ‘Is This the Story of the Bard’s Heart?’, The Times, 20 April 2009; and William S. Niederkorn, ‘The Sonnets at 400’, in ‘Paper Cuts’, the blog of the editors of the New York Times Book Review, papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/the-sonnetsat-400/. And see Hank Whittemore, The Monument. T. S. Eliot adds, ‘I am inclined to believe that people are mistaken about Shakespeare just in proportion to the relative superiority of Shakespeare to myself ’ in his ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, in Selected Essays, second edition (London, 1934).

  Much of this social history can be found in E. A. Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997) and E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981). For more recent overviews, see Will Coster, Family and Kinship in England 1450–1800 (London, 2001); The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007); and Naomi Tadmore, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 151 (1996), pp. 111–40. On early modern autobiography, see Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969); Meredith Skura, Tudor Autobiography (Chicago, 2008); Henry Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607); and Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife. See too, Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, 2004), and Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia, 2004).

  For the story of the Mark Lawson interview, see Susan Elderkin, ‘Gullible’s Travels’, Financial Times, 23 June 2007; my thanks to Rosie Blau, who commissioned the review and shared it with me. For Giles Fletcher’s work, see his Licia, or Poems of Love (n.p., 1593); The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, 1964); and Gordon McMullan’s excellent Dictionary of National Biography entry. And for the story of the young scholar who bragged of sleeping with Licia, see Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, ed. Alan H. Nelson, 2 vols (Toronto, 1989), as well as Nelson’s ‘Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles,’ where the story is told of young William Covell (a future clergyman and early admirer of ‘sweet Shakespeare’) who reportedly boasted to a Cambridge friend (who in turn told this to a married woman with whom Covell was having an affair) that Covell ‘lay with Licia, and by what means he got to her bed’. For what Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Illinois, 1944). For Shakespeare’s vocabulary, see David Crystal, ‘Think on My Words’: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language (Cambridge, 2008).

  Acknowledgements

  Researching and drafting a book is a solitary business, revising and seeing it into print a deeply collaborative one. I have been blessed in my friends and colleagues – James Bednarz, Mary Cregan, Robert Griffin, David Kastan, Richard McCoy, Gail Kern Paster, William Sherman, Alvin Snider and Stanley Wells – who have been patiently reading and improving my work, some of them for decades. Collectively, they have made this a much better book than the one I first shared with them and have spared me from many errors of fact and judgement.

  I have benefited greatly from the guidance of a pair of brilliant editors, Bob Bender and Julian Loose, as well as from the suggestions and support of my literary agents, Anne Edelstein and Rachel Calder. I’m also grateful for the help I’ve had along the way, in matters large and small, from Rosie Blau, Warren Boutcher, Jerry Brotton, Tim Brearley, Maurice Charney, Ashley Combest, Barry and Mary Cregan, Becky Fincham, Clive Fisher, Andrew Hadfield, Adam Hooks, David Kurnick, William Leahy, Hermione Lee, Zachary Lesser, Laurie Maguire, Russ McDonald, John McGavin, Gordon McMullan, James Miller, William Monroe, Alan Nelson, David Norbrook, Anne Owen, Tom Paulin, Douglas Pfeiffer, Trevor Poots, Ross Posnock, Martin Puchner, Eleanor Rees, Jacqueline Rose, Richard Sacks, Herbert and Lorraine Shapiro, Jill Shapiro, Michael Shapiro, Kevin Sharp, Laurie Sheck, Patrick Spottiswoode, Alan Stewart, Jean Strouse, Daniel Swift, Sam Swope, Jeff Talarigo, Jeremy Treglown, Pierre Walker, René Weis, Linda Woodbridge, Terence Wright and Georgiana Ziegler.

  One of the unspoken arguments of this book is that electronic resources can only take scholarship so far; libraries, and their largely untapped archival riches, remain as crucial as ever. Libraries have been a second home for me while researching this book, and I’m grateful for the help provided by the following archivists and institutions: the New York Public Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the British Library; the National Library, Dublin; Karen Attar at Senate House Library of the University of London; Columbia University Libraries; the Huntington Library; Dartmouth College Library; Brunel University Library; Neda Salem at the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; University of Tennessee Library; Harry Miller at the Wisconsin Historical Society; Helen Burton at Keele University Library; Helen Selsdon at the Helen Keller archives, American Foundation for the Blind; and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

  I could not have written this book without the generous support provided by a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London; and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, an unrivalled literary community, thanks in large part to the guidance of Jean Strouse. I’m grateful, too, for the helpful feedback from audiences that have heard my work-in-progress at King’s College, University of London; Penn State University; the Sun Valley Writers Conference; the Early Modern seminar at Oxford University; and Queen Mary, University of London. I’m also keenly aware of how much I have learned over the past quarter-century from my students at Columbia University.

  Once again, my greatest debt is to my wife and best critic, Mary Cregan, and to our son Luke, to whom this book is dedicated.

  Index

  Abraham, Karl, 1

  Ackner, Lord, 1

  actors, 1, 2

  Adams, Henry, 1

  Addenbrooke, John, 1, 2

  Admiral’s Men, 1, 2,
3

  All’s Well That Ends Well, 1, 2

  Allen, Ernest, 1

  Allen, Percy, 1, 2, 3

  Alleyn, Edward, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Altrocchi, Paul, 1

  The American Scene (James), 1

  Angerianus, 1

  Anna of Denmark, Queen, 1

  Anne Boleyn, 1

  Antony and Cleopatra: authorship, 1; dating, 1, 2, 3;

  Looney on, 1

  Apology for Actors (Heywood), 1

  Arcadia (Sidney), 1

  Archer, Jeffrey, 1

  Arden of Faversham, 1

  Arden Shakespeare series, 1

  Ariel (Plath), 1

  Aristotle, 1

  Armin, Robert, 1

  Arnold, Matthew, 1

  As You Like It: Adam’s character, 1; autobiographical readings 1;

  dating, 1;

  setting, 1

  Ashbourne portrait, 1, 2

  Aspley, William, 1

  The Athenaeum, 1

  The Atlantic, 1, 2

  Aubrey, John, 1, 2

  Austen, Jane, 1

  Austin, Al, 1

  authorship: early modern conventions, 1, 2, 3; expectation that fiction is autobiographical, 1, 2;

  nature of, 1;

  personae, 1

  autobiography: development of genre, 1, 2; expectation that fiction is autobiographical, 1, 2