Culture

Who didn’t write Shakespeare? The evidence suggests other hands in the plays

The attribution of the First Folio can no longer be trusted

May 21, 2018
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Earlier this month Jonathan Healey said there is no good reason Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays. Below Barry R Clarke offers a different view

In September 2009, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance presented an online petition known as The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt to William Leahy of Brunel University. Its aim was to urge academia to investigate the prevailing paradigm that William Shakspere of Stratford was the sole author of the works under his name. Those who advocate Shakspere’s exclusive claim to the work commonly rest their case on two main assertions:

(1) the First Folio (1623) collection of 36 plays, which only credits “Mr. William Shakespeare,” is a reliable document for attribution,

(2) there is no evidence that anyone else contributed to the plays

However, there are convincing facts that support the contrary position.

There were several plays published under Shakspere’s name in his lifetime, ones that were clearly not his. The 1608 quarto of A Yorkshire Tragedy declares it to have been “Written by William Shakspeare” but in the 1970s, on the basis of stylistic evidence, both David Lake and Macdonald P Jackson independently attributed it to Thomas Middleton. The 1619 quarto of The first part […] of the life of Sir John Oldcastle also has “Written by William Shakespeare” on the title page, but the diary kept by Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Fortune Theatre, clearly identifies “mr Monday mr Drayton & mr wilsson and haythway” as its writers. One cannot help but wonder then, what else didn’t Shakspere write?

Now one need not be a conspiracy theorist to show that points (1) and (2) cannot be upheld. In the first place, the First Folio publisher William Jaggard had a reputation for being a rather dubious operator. According to the English biographer Sidney Lee, his “fraudulent methods of work as an anthologist are capable of almost endless illustration.” In fact, there are several First Folio plays in which modern attribution specialists such as Gary Taylor, John Burrows, and Brian Vickers have identified other hands: for example, Thomas Nashe has been implicated in 1 Henry VI, Christopher Marlowe in 3 Henry VI, and Thomas Middleton in Macbeth. None of these writers are given due credit in the First Folio.

There is also evidence that appears to disassociate Shakspere from certain plays. A contemporary document, Gesta Grayorum [The Affairs of Gray’s Inn] reveals that in December 1594 the Gray’s Inn law students witnessed the first known performance of The Comedy of Errors. Evidence from parallels with the Gesta Grayorum suggests that Love’s Labour’s Lost was also intended for enactment at their Christmas festivities but, unfortunately for them, it was cancelled. Unfortunately for us, Alan Nelson from the University of California has opined that “All Inns of Court plays subsequent to 1587/8 seem to have been performed by professionals, including Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors,” that is to say, Shakespeare’s company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men must have enacted it with Shakspere in the cast. There are several reasons why this is inaccurate.

(a) There is a document at the Public Records Office that shows that William Shakspere and his company were performing before the queen at Greenwich on the evening that The Comedy of Errors was being presented at Gray’s Inn.

(b) There is no record of a payment for this play to any professional company in either the Gray’s Inn Pension book nor Ledger book, both of which were recording payments to outsiders at the time.

(c) Special admittance had to be granted to non-members of the Inns of Court such as Shakspere in order to gain entrance. It turns out that 11 people are on record as having been granted this permission during the 1594–5 revels season, but William Shakspere was not one of them.

So the evidence suggests that not only was Shakspere and his company absent from the performance of The Comedy of Errors, but that he seems not to have been associated with the play at this time.

The Tempest had its first known performance at the court of King James in November 1611. Largely based on events surrounding the shipwreck at Bermuda in July 1609, the survival of the entire crew was sensational news when word arrived back in England a few months later. The Sea Venture was a ship from the third supply that was bound for the new Virginia colony, but was tossed onto the rocks at the so-called Isle of Devils by a raging storm. There are allusions in the play to the crab apples, hazelnuts, and rare birds at Bermuda and Virginia, facts that were only known to Virginia company insiders and were only published years later.

Nevertheless, they still managed to find their way into the play. Oaths of secrecy imposed on the colonists and council members prevented information from the colony being freely advertised. In fact, the actor William Shakspere would have had great difficulty obtaining this information because in February 1610, the Reverend William Crashaw gave a sermon to Virginia Company members cautioning that “As for Plaiers [actors …] they abuse Virginea […and] Vengeance awaits for them.” This rather sinks the notion that Shakspere was closely involved with this play.

It is possible that those of Shakspere’s contemporaries who praised his writing, most notably Francis Meres in Palladis Tamis (1598), were unaware of the reality, because there are others who accuse him of literary theft. For example, the “War of the Theatres” was a dispute between Ben Jonson on the one side and a number of other writers including John Marston on the other. It reached its highest intensity at the turn of the 17th century when the protagonists delivered poisonous veiled attacks on each other through the lines of characters on the stage. In The Return from Parnassus, Pt. 1, presented at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Gullio, who claims to employ scholars to write for him, starts to recite lines from Shakspere’s Venus and Adonis. In response, Ingenioso, who has been employed to write for Gullio, protests that “We shall have nothinge but Shakespeare and shreds of poetry he hath gathered at the theators!” Ben Jonson in his Works (1616) describes a “Poet-Ape [actor], that would be thought our chiefe […] From brocage is become so bold a thief” and in a later edition (1641) hints directly at Shakspere’s incompetence as a writer with the declaration “would he have blotted a thousand [lines].”

So there are several plays in the First Folio that either contain other hands or to which Shakspere might not have contributed at all, yet only Shakspere receives credit. It should be clear from all this that the attribution evidence of the First Folio can no longer be trusted, and that there is now ample evidence of other hands in the Shakspeare work. With extant documents showing that the Stratford man traded in malt, property rentals, and money-lending, the picture is gradually emerging of an opportunist businessman who bought and sold the plays of other pens then added inferior lines of his own.

 

Barry R. Clarke has a Ph.D, in Shakespeare authorship studies (available online) and has published several academic articles on this issue