Contested Will

In our story Road to Starohrad swordswoman Kaila goes undercover in a theater troupe, and crashes the stage as it would have appeared in Shakespeare’s time. I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the theatre, from its ritualistic origins in ancient Greece onward, and were it not for bus tickets back home, I’d have seized the opportunity to see Macbeth performed on an authentic Elizabethan stage, in Prague’s castle in 1998.

This article first appeared in Northern Ireland’s Verbal Magazine in 2010. As if there’s merit in debate, the Shakespeare Question goes on unabated, as do a whole raft of other crackpot theories, for which we don’t have to look further than our word leaders. As Ben Shapiro already had it, a decade ago: “we live in an age when authority and knowledge are suspect and devalued.”

What’s in a name: Would Shakespeare by any other name smell as sweet?

Everyone knows Shakespeare. We saw Leonardo DiCaprio as star-crossed lover Romeo, wonder with Hamlet whether to be or not to be, we toil and trouble with Macbeth’s three witches. Shakespeare’s influence on our language beggars belief: without him no brave new world, foregone conclusion or household words.

After almost 400 years, Shakespeare is alive and well. Some, however, maintain that someone else wrote the plays, and that the Stratford actor was merely a front. The list of suggested bards is a Who’s Who of Elizabethan England, and amongst many others we find Walter Raleigh (between importing the potato and wooing the queen), Christopher Marlowe (in the small hours after writing his own – inferior – plays), Francis Bacon (and Drake), the Jesuits, and last but not least: Good Queen Bess herself.

Top contender for Shakespeare’s quill is undoubtedly Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, his authorship championed by such luminaries as Jeremy Irons, Keanu Reeves and sir Derek Jacobi. James Shapiro, author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is not surprised. “We live in an age of conspiracy,” he told us, “everything is contested and wild theories advanced. Weren’t the moon landings filmed in Morocco? Was the Mossad or the CIA behind 9/11? When so many love The Da Vinci Code, it’s no surprise that they would buy into a theory that Oxford wrote the plays and inserted secret codes confirming his authorship.”

We know very little about Shakespeare’s life, and what personal documents have survived are largely financial: he persistently chased a neighbour’s small debt, and only bequeathed his wife his “second-best bed”. The image arises of an uncharitable and mean man, not at all the Gentleman of Stratford we like to think of. But we don’t know that neighbour – perhaps lending him that small sum was already overly generous. The best bed probably was automatically Mrs. Shakespeare’s due. Suddenly, we get a different story. And unfortunately, stories, conjecture and hearsay are all we have regarding Shakespeare. In this vacuum, there’s space for wild theories to flourish.

In contrast, the Earl of Oxford is a well-documented figure, and he comes with a heady background of scandal and intrigue: rumour has it that he was Elizabeth’s bastard son, her lover, or both. Candidate bards are often wheeled out to support one theory or the other, and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets combed for supporting evidence. According to Shapiro: “J. T. Looney, who in 1920 came up with the notion that Oxford wrote the plays, did so because he was looking for a politically reactionary figure who embodied what he saw as the right-wing, some might say fascist, values of the plays. Delia Bacon, who proposed Sir Francis Bacon as the true author in the 1850s, read the plays as revolutionary and left-wing.”

A video we found on the website of The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, the document at the centre of the Oxford theory, resembles a religious conversion testimony in its language, tone and air of persecuted faith. Shapiro agrees: “For those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, the cause takes on religious dimensions.” Oxfordians and Baconites are as entrenched as the religious camps we’re so familiar with here, and accord themselves equal authority to bona-fide Shakespearean academics. But: “I for one would like to hear them explain how Oxford, who died a year before Don Quixote was written, was able to write a collaborative play that draws on Cervantes’s plot, called Cardenio.” It’s hard to disagree with Shapiro.

Oxford theorists claim “Shakespeare” writes too convincingly of court intrigue not to have been in the thick of it himself. But Shakespeare performed at court, and in the streets and taverns of London he encountered all the sailors, Moors, Jews, fools, peasants, idle young noblemen and old philosophers his plays required. Shakespeare’s face was well known there, and it’s inconceivable he could be someone else’s sock puppet. Besides, most plays then were published anonymously: a perceived slur to a person in power could land you in prison, or worse. So, what courtier would bother with a pseudonym, and why would Shakespeare the actor risk attaching his name to scribblings he’d have no control over?

Shakespeare’s authorship is also supported by the original manuscripts. The texts are not completed works in themselves, but merely the blueprint for a performance by an actors’ company. “Take a familiar play, Romeo and Juliet,” Shapiro explains,” The earliest surviving printed quartos make clear that whoever wrote the parts for the actors knew those performers and their strengths intimately. When writing the part of the hilarious sidekick to Juliet’s Nurse the author wrote Kemp rather than Peter in the speech headings, because he was writing for and thinking about the star comedian of the company, Will Kemp.”

In the King Lear production that recently wowed Belfast, we saw first-hand the difference between writing for the page and for the stage: when someone dies on the boards, there’s a body to dispose of. Therefore, until the final scene, Shakespeare’s characters die offstage, are carried off, or survive to limp to the “infirmary” in the wings. In Shakespeare’s words, the play’s the thing. To Shapiro, those who argue that the plays could have been written by anyone who was not actively involved in stage craft are ignoring the world out of which these plays emerged. “But we live in an age when authority and knowledge are suspect and devalued. I live in a fact-based reality; if others choose not to, I can’t help them.”

The Internet has also democratised the authorship question, amplifying and equalizing Shakespearean and Oxfordian, lay reader and literature professor alike. Shaky theories get equal prominence to careful scholarship, and to other popular pseudo-revelations on subjects like Leonardo’s paintings. Dissenting positions have become mainstream via frequent uncritical repetition. Shapiro knows to pick his battles: “I didn’t write Contested Will to change the minds of those who don’t believe in historical evidence; their minds can’t be changed. I did it to show how the Shakespeare authorship controversy reveals some disturbing things about how we read and understand evidence today.”

It’s strange that we need so much convincing about Shakespeare when we know so little of modern dramatists. Do you know who wrote The King’s Speech? We know the actors, sometimes a big-name director. But even the writers of Oscar-winning screenplays remain obscure. Indeed, often there’s more than one unknown name. Collaboration is also documented in Elizabethan times, yet apparent collaborations by Shakespeare are dismissed by scholars as either “Shakespeare as script doctor” or “with additions by a lesser hand”. It may be unglamorous, but when all’s said and done, writing was a means to an end for Shakespeare, a way to earn a living.

Derek Jacobi meanwhile is lending his voice to the conspiracy thriller Anonymous out of zeal. In pure Dan Brownish fashion, the film makes the case for Oxford, and no doubt it will spark many a conversation starting with: “Did you know that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare?” But why shouldn’t he be? Surely creativity is not restricted to a social elite? To deny that the plays were written by Shakespeare himself is to deny that a man from an ordinary background, given the chance, can rise above his rank to delight, inspire and move millions of people for four centuries now.

But there’s the rub: sometimes, the truth is just too boring.

James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare? is published by Faber and Faber, and is now available in paperback.

A list of words and phrases coined by Shakespeare can be found here, while all 70+ candidate Shakespeares are listed on this page.