The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Yes, they offer complex and well-reasoned conjectures, they offer a menu of theories, they offer three charts of potential relationships between the three texts. But they do not pretend to offer certainty on any of these questions.

  And indeed if, in the play, Hamlet himself, the character, has trouble defining himself, deciding on a course of action—on an identity—the fact that we cannot, after all this time, decide what the true identity of the text of Hamlet is or how it came to be, may well be, for want of a better phrase, poetic justice.

  Chapter Three

  A Digressive Comic Interlude Featuring

  Shakespeare’s Ambiguously Revised

  Testimony in the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit

  As you know i feel strongly that the biographical approach to Shakespeare is usually futile. I’ve sought to avoid, for the most part, making inferences from the life to the work, or vice versa. And I distrust attempts to reconstruct Shakespeare “the man” as much as I do attempts to deconstruct Shakespeare’s body of work (deconstruction of course is not exegesis, which seeks to find coherences; deconstruction is the attempt to prove that there are no, can never be any, coherences because of the self-subverting nature of language—that works of literature, like all works of speech and writing, are ultimately incoherent).

  Still … Shakespeare’s deposition in the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit is not speculation, but genuine, documentary evidence of his testimony. And documentary evidence of how he revised it. And before moving on to the weighty matter of how the revision question affects our view of King Lear’s dying words, I’d like to pause for a digression upon that testimony, those revisions.

  I’m not saying it’s evidence in the contention over whether he revised his work, but it is an instance in his life when he revised his own words under oath. And so ought to be worth paying some attention to, if only because the circumstances surrounding Shakespeare’s deposition—the comic intrigue—are entertaining. And in part because it may be the closest we can come to hearing Shakespeare speaking in his own voice—Shakespeare playing the part of Shakespeare.

  My attention was drawn to the wigmakers’ lawsuit by two disparate references to it. First from Professor Richard Wilson of Lancashire University, one of the earliest popularizers, through an influential article in the TLS, of the “Shakeshafte” theory of Shakespeare’s Lost Years. I hope you will bear with me, because Wilson and the Shakeshafte theory will require a digression within a digression that I would defend as illustrative of the perils of biographical bubbles, and will, I hope, establish the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit as a defensible limited exception to my strictures against bio-criticism.

  And not to address the Shakeshafte theory would be to ignore entirely what Professor Wilson characterized to me as “an earthquake” in Shakespeare biographical studies, “one of only two biographical discoveries in the entire twentieth century”—the other being the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit. And the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit has received none of the virtually frenzied attention the Shakeshafte theory has from fact-starved biographers (most recently Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World) who have given the Shakeshafte theory a prominence and a significance that may have no foundation in fact. Indeed, as I write, the backlash against its overreaching has already begun and it may be remembered as an insubstantial bubble deserving little more weight than the misattributed “Funeral Elegy” bubble.

  The Shakeshafte bubble, which is only now beginning to deflate, makes a grander claim—about the nature of Shakespeare’s soul—than any conclusion that can be drawn from the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit testimony. But the latter is at least based on solid evidence, not the possible identification of a certain William Shakespeare with a certain William Shakeshafte. To illustrate the point requires a further digression into the terra incognita of Shakespeare’s “Lost Years” and the way Shakespearean biographers have sought to fill them.

  “The Lost Years” is a term popularized by the respected textual scholar Ernst Honigmann to refer to the period from 1579 when Shakespeare was fifteen years old and may have completed Stratford grammar school (although no record survives of his attending) to 1593 when he becomes a celebrated poet and dramatist with the publication of the notoriously erotic Venus and Adonis and the success of his first real masterpiece for the stage, Richard III.

  The Lost Years are the longest gap in a series of gaps and absences in the fragmentary documentary record of Shakespeare’s life, particularly his early life. We don’t have many biographical documents from his later playwriting life, either (setting aside the work itself, from which inferences about the life cannot be securely made).

  The later documents mainly testify to his involvement in petty Stratford lawsuits and various land transactions involving the theater company ownership in London. But the record of his youth and early years is largely, well, lost.

  Lost in the Lost Years is any reliable account of transformation: how the provincial glover’s boy from Stratford became the sophisticated cosmopolitan poet and playwright of London.

  The Lost Years exemplify what I once characterized as “evidentiary despair.” The phrase is a way of summarizing the argument made to me (in Explaining Hitler) by Yehuda Bauer, then head of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. He was attempting to counter various “mystifying” explanations of Hitler that relied on the absence of contradictory evidence—of any evidence—for their persistence. Especially the trope that Hitler is “inexplicable” because he represented some numinous form of superhuman evil. No, said Bauer, Hitler is not inexplicable—in theory.

  Rather he may be inexplicable in practice to biographers, in part because Hitler’s own Lost Years, the thirty years before he suddenly became a public figure in 1920, left behind a similar mystery of transformation: How exactly did this nonentity develop into the charismatic world-war-making mass murderer?

  Yehuda Bauer argued forcefully that we view this as mysterious not because of some occluded, occult mystical cause, but because there are just too many gaps in the evidence, too many missing or dead eyewitnesses, too few documents, too many contradictory or unreliable anecdotes. Too much lost in the Lost Years. Thus: “evidentiary despair,” which applies even more to Shakespeare’s irretrievable four-centuries-old Lost Years.

  The man who popularized the term in Shakespeare studies, Ernst Honigmann (in his 1985 book Shakespeare: The Lost Years), was not the first to argue that the Shakeshafte theory was a “solution” to the Lost Years (a Jesuit scholar, Father Peter Milward, deserves credit for that). But Honigmann was the first influential scholarly insider to start people talking about the Shakeshafte theory.

  Of course the documentary record before the Lost Years is not exactly rich with indisputable evidence. Even the day of his birth is a little slippery. People like to say it was April 23, 1564, in part because it was registered then and in part because of the symmetry: April 23 (1616) is the day he died. How neat! Dare we say mystical? Almost too perfect, the twinned birth and death moments. And April 23 also happens to be the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov. An added bonus for those of us who like to see him as the only contemporary analogue of Shakespearean genius.

  But the problem with this all-too-convenient date of birth is that, as biographer Peter Ackroyd summarizes the controversy, “the date may have been April 21 or April 22,” but only assigned to April 23 because that was the day it was registered and it was an important national feast day.

  This slipperiness is symptomatic of the uncertainty that pervades the entire fragmentary biographical record. We know the date of Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six, although there’s a troubling record of a William Shakespeare being betrothed in a nearby village to one “Anne Whately,” and entire comic-romantic biographical fantasies about “the other woman” have been spun out of what may be a clerical error in spelling the name of the same person.

  And entire cloud castles of unfounded, or certainly unprovable, biographical fantasies have been b
uilt upon the slender foundation of the age disparity between Shakespeare and his bride and the fact that she must have been three months’ pregnant before they married since she gave birth to their first daughter, Susanna, in May of 1583.

  Urgent love, or forced marriage by a scheming older woman? Unfounded inferences about this question have been put to service as lenses through which to look at Shakespeare’s attitude toward love and sex in the plays and poems.

  We know that his wife gave birth to twins in 1585, and we know that one of those twins, Hamnet, died at age eleven in 1596, and that James Joyce spent more than fifty pages ofUlysses spinning out a theory of Hamlet on the basis of it (as does Stephen Greenblatt among many others). But the sad truth about such inferences is reflected in Peter Ackroyd’s hopeless locution: “We know that Shakespeare either was or was not inconsolable upon his son’s death.” Precisely: he either was or was not many other things in many other biographies. A schoolteacher in the countryside? A deer poacher? A lawyer’s clerk?

  But until the Shakeshafte theory, the Shakeshafte “earthquake,” came along there was little to found even a cloud castle upon in the Lost Years.

  Thus the popularity of the Shakeshafte theory as adumbrated by Milward, Honigmann, Richard Wilson, Park Honan, Anthony Holden, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Ackroyd, just about every recent biographer except the relentlessly and refreshingly skeptical Katherine Duncan-Jones, the Oxford-based author of Ungentle Shakespeare.

  All of it founded on the discovery of someone called William Shakeshafte—in a will registered two hundred miles north of William Shakespeare’s Stratford, during the Lost Years.

  Back in the 1920s and ’30s two archivists called attention to the will of one Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, who had made a special request in his will that his “players’ clothes” be given into the care of a local Lancastrian lord named Hesketh, along with a request that Hesketh take care of two of his attendants, one of whom was named “William Shakeshafte.”

  Voilà! The Shakeshafte theory: William Shakeshafte is identical to young William Shakespeare and he was a player in the household theater troupe of someone who turned out to be a secret Catholic sympathizer. But was this Shakespeare? Was Shakespeare Shakeshafte? Spellings were fluid and variant then, but there were a number of Shakeshafte families in Lancashire, so the similarity of spelling is in no way conclusive.

  Undaunted, Shakeshafte theory has forged a link between the alleged identity of Shakeshafte/Shakespeare and the theatrical world since Hoghton and Hesketh had connections with Lord Strange, later a patron of William Shakespeare’s theatrical company. But there is no record or testimony of Shakespeare’s association with Lord Strange’s company until the 1590s, more than a decade later.

  Connections have been found or forged between the Lancashire barons and the underground of secret “recusant” Catholics in Elizabeth’s Protestant theocracy. And between those secret Catholics and Shakespeare’s father, John, who may have been a secret Catholic and may have been in possession of a “spiritual testament” circulated by an underground Jesuit operative, Father Edmund Campion, who may have met William Shakespeare in the household of the northern baron if Shakespeare was the same person as William Shakeshafte, the attendant in the Lancastrian household.

  But was Shakeshafte Shakespeare? No way of telling. Utterly unprovable four hundred years later. And was William Shakespeare a secret Catholic who wove into his plays secret Catholic allegories, Da Vinci code style, as some of the more extreme Shakeshafte theorists have argued? No way of knowing, or proving it.

  But given the poverty of evidence in the Lost Years, few biographers have been able to resist making the Shakeshafte connection. Even if they hedge it heroically with might-have-beens and could-have-beens, they proceed to run with it. And yet it all depends on assuming an identity between the “shafte” and the “speare.” An all-too-shaky foundation upon which to make all too many assumptions about what Shakespeare’s personal religious beliefs were and what was reflected in the plays. As the author of a recent study, Shakespeare’s Religious Language, R. Chris Hassel Jr., put it, “various readers have tried to argue Shakespeare’s faith as well as his position on Reformation controversies. Yet … most readers, myself included, still reserve judgment on just what and how Shakespeare believed.…” The plays can supply evidence for almost every point of view about such beliefs, but, again, nothing indisputable.

  How unsatisfying, compared with the all-too-neat Shakeshafte theory, which solves so many questions at once: how he became a dramatist, what his secret faith was, what the plays are really about. No wonder Richard Wilson called it “an earthquake” when I spoke to him. But alas it’s an earthquake built on a fault, one might say, an absence of proof. (Professor Wilson, to his credit, does not take the line that the Shakeshafte theory proves Shakespeare was a secret Catholic in league with Catholic martyrs like Campion or that the plays contain secret Catholic messages. In fact Wilson told me he believes, if anything, the plays offer a “critique of martyrdom,” of fanatical true believers.)

  Which brings us to the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit. To me, by far a more interesting and significant and well-founded, if not well-known, biographical fragment by comparison. It came up indirectly in my conversation with Wilson when he spoke of the Shakeshafte discovery as one of “only two” new biographical discoveries about Shakespeare in the twentieth century.

  As it happened he didn’t name the other one, but I was familiar with what he was referring to. My attention had recently been drawn to the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit by a thread on SHAKSPER, the Shakespeare scholars’ electronic discussion list. Someone had posted the question: Where, if anywhere, do we find a credible record of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice? Not necessarily, or provably, in the characters in the plays—those are staged voices. Not necessarily the voice of the Sonnets, whose narrator may be as much literary convention as personal confessional. Wordsworth thought the Sonnets were the key to unlock Shakespeare’s heart. Perhaps, although they may more likely be a key to unlock Shakespeare’s art. There’s no evidence he’s speaking in his own voice as opposed to that of a persona in them. Nor can his voice be found necessarily even in his will, where some would like to find it, but which might be just so much lawyers’ boilerplate.

  So is it possible we have no reliable record of Shakespeare in his own voice? Well, there is that one unverifiable anecdote, the “William the Conqueror’s Story.” In which an ardent female fan was said to be so mesmerized by Richard Burbage’s portrayal of seductive evil in Richard III that she sent a note or proposition backstage, suggesting Burbage come to her abode following the play. A proposition which was, according to the anecdote, intercepted or overheard by Shakespeare, who showed up first at the woman’s lodging and talked her into letting him serve in Burbage’s place in her bed. At which point, or in the midst of which, Burbage banged on the door braying, “It is I, Richard the Third.” To which, we are told by tradition, Shakespeare replied, “William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third!” Talk about a self-serving anecdote. Perhaps it happened and perhaps it’s Shakespeare’s voice, but a more extensive and less suppositional place to find that voice is in the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit.

  That was the conjecture of one of the scholars on the electronic discussion list. Perhaps someone could recover Shakespeare’s testimony in that lawsuit, she suggested. In fact someone had, and as it turns out the Wigmakers’ Lawsuit is a useful counterbalance to others’ speculation about the secret spirituality, because it gives us something, the texture of the life led by “someone writing at the time transcendent tragedies”—but not above getting involved in some seedy domestic comedy, what sounds like a tawdry sex farce. And it suggests a link between something going on in Shakespeare’s voice and something that goes on in Shakespearean language.

  The suit was brought, Shakespeare’s testimony was taken, in 1612 when he was forty-eight years old, four years away from his death, close to the time when he’d virtually abandone
d his solo playwriting career, shortly before retiring (as much as we can tell) to Stratford to indulge in the petty litigation that came with his new gentrified landowner status.

  The Wigmakers’ Lawsuit, however, referred back to a cryptic episode in the past, eight years earlier in 1604 when he had been a lodger in the home of the wigmaker Christopher Mountjoy and his wife Lucy and their daughter Mary and their servant/apprentice Stephen Belott. This cast of characters produced some kind of secret farce beneath the surface of their domestic arrangements that would later result in litigation—and in Shakespeare giving a deposition. The seventeenth-century Litigation Roll record did not surface until 1910 and the transcript of the Elizabethan legal-hand document by C. W. Wallace was published in modern type the following year; I found it in a 1911 issue of University of Nebraska Studies in the NYU Library.

  In the years he was living with the Mountjoys Shakespeare was producing dramas such as Hamlet and Lear and some of his trickiest comedies such as All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. At the time his own wife and family were living in Stratford, the Mountjoy house was a pied-à-terre in London, although he’s portrayed in the depositions as a full-time resident rather than a commuter.

  From the evidence available it is tempting to see the Mountjoy establishment as a hotbed of sexual intrigue. The Mountjoys were Huguenots who had fled anti-Protestant persecution in France. Christopher Mountjoy, the head of the family, was not so much a wig- as a “tire-maker,” someone who crafted ornate, often-bejeweled frameworks and headpieces for women who wore elaborate wigs. His clientele were wealthy women who cared about attractiveness.