Response to a Baconian

Recently Graeme Romans commented on my August blog, The Real Authorship Question, in which I explain why the AQ should be questioning, not just Shakespeare, but all the Elizabethan writers of imaginative literature. As those readers are aware who’ve heard my lectures and read my articles on this blog and elsewhere, I see a handful of writers, six to be exact, providing most, perhaps all, of the important imaginative literature of this period. The rest are mostly the names of proxies used by three or four of these writers to get their works into print.

I’ve gone into depth here a number of times on the reasons why they had to use this ruse, but the basic reason is simply the same one that writers have had to deal with, probably since writing first began, oppression by authority. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, was little more than a gleam in the eye of 16th-century writers like Christopher Marlowe, and we know where that got him.

Why is this not evident in the history of the period? Because the oppressors repressed not only the literature and those who created it, they also repressed the history of the period itself! Having control of what paper survived to later generations of readers and historians, they determined what would remain to act as the framework for history and what would be “lost.” This repression dealt largely with political matters, but in those days the world of entertainment WAS political, which is what Alec Wilder meant when he said, “Theater has always dared. It has troubled princes and prelates alike.” What Shakespeare dared was to satirize well known figures of the Court and government, something that could be hidden if his identity remained unknown. What Marlowe dared was to confront the government, daring his fellow plebes to take matters into their own hands, something that could not be tolerated.

The collected works of Shakespeare, only the second collection of English plays ever published, was a carefully calculated move by a handful of literary patrons to overcome, or rather, sidestep, this repression, at least as regards the Shakespeare canon. For that to occur, the suppression of the truth of its authorship had to continue. We got the literature, some of the best of it anyway, but at the cost of its history.

As for the literary history of the period, there are efforts now among certain academics to look more deeply into the repression of the Catholic writers, one that promises to return writers like Robert Southwell to the mainstream where they belong. This is a good thing that, we hope, will take hold and become part of the accepted history of the period. But it will take a real revolutionary somewhere in the Academy to spread this kind of second sight to see though the repression of all the poets. To crack the façade that protects what has become over time, the English Department’s holy of holies, that lifeless thing, the Stratford bio, will probably take some reckless young History post doc who sees value in placing Shakespeare where he belongs, at Elizabeth’s Court.

The super six

Among these six revolutionaries, the leading figure is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He was the oldest, he was the great Renaissance genius of the imagination, it was he who took the first steps towards getting the English to write out of personal experience and feeling (not some Petrarchan formula) and who was also the major force in getting them to publish in print. He was a moving force in creating the first fulltime commercial theaters in England; and he was also the major force in the creation of the commercial periodical press. As the author of not only the Shakespeare canon, but the Robert Greene canon, the John Lyly novels, plus works attributed to George Gascoigne, George Pettie, and Barnabe Riche (among others), he also had the longest career.

The second most important figure in this group is Oxford’s cousin by marriage, Francis Bacon, his junior by eleven years, whose contribution to the literature of this first breakout of the ELR (the English Literary Renaissance) was through the voices we know as Edmund Spenser and Thomas Nashe (and the John Lyly of the plays). Bacon admired Oxford; he shared with him the dream of creating a great English language and literary tradition modelled on the French Pleiade; he worked for him and with him through the seminal years of the 1580s, writing plays for the children’s companies and pamphlets for the periodical press. And although he assiduously created styles of his own as different from Oxford’s as possible, understandably he was unable to avoid adopting some of his mentor’s phrasing. That the two writers went their separate ways in the ’90s is the age-old story of the gifted apprentice stepping out on his own. So while Oxford continued into the late ’90s and early 17th century writing imaginative literature (i.e., plays), Bacon returned to his original dream, revolutionizing the English judicial system by becoming part of that system, and adopting its language in order to change it.

Taking Baconian Graeme Romans’s comment one sentence at a time:

Romans: These paragraphs [from my blogs on Bacon] suggest a respect for Bacon’s abilities that make it difficult to understand why you choose de Vere over Bacon in the Shakespeare stakes.

Me: I didn’t “choose” one or the other. Oxford chose me; Bacon didn’t. I have a great respect for Ernest Hemmingway, but that doesn’t lead me to suppose that, because they were working at the same time, he wrote the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (or vice versa). Like Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, Oxford and Bacon have very different voices. Oxford’s was less a conscious effort than something that evolved over time as the language around him changed, while Bacon, from the first, delighted in creating styles as different as possible from his natural voice, as seen in the pseudo Chaucerian style of The Faerie Queene, then in the pseudo Mar-prelate style of Nashe. Since this was a period when writers, Bacon among them, strove to create distinct voices (something playwrights do as a matter of course), we have to go beyond the styles to the basic beliefs and methods of particular authors, and here too, they differ in ways that style alone can’t determine.

Romans: Having acknowledged Bacon’s closeness to de Vere you acknowledge that much of your circumstantial evidence could be transposed into the case for Bacon.

Me: If what I said can be interpreted that way, I’m happy to be more plain. What I meant was: first: that Baconians were the first to realize that the author of the Robert Greene canon was also the author of the Shakespeare canon; and second: that the author of the Spenser canon was Francis Bacon. These are two separate insights. Both are true (in my view), but not as evidence that Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare and Greene canons.

Romans: Yet Bacon is the more high-minded and the more likely to have sought to give the English a history of Kings, not to mention a common tongue enriched a thousand fold.

Me: Read what I’ve posted about Oxford’s education with Sir Thomas Smith, the number of history books in Smith’s library and the fact that so many of them are the accepted sources for Shakespeare’s history plays. This is not to say that Bacon didn’t have access to these same books, he probably did, although we don’t have a record of it as we do with de Vere. Bacon and Oxford’s educations were much alike since their tutors were members of the same Cambridge-based group whose own educations were based on the work of Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, a group that remained very much a lifelong community.

Apart from very differing personalities, another cause of their differing styles was the particular approach that their tutors would have taken. Bacon’s mother (who had tutored King Edward VI ) would have started her son with Latin, the language in which most of the Reformation literature was written, with Greek coming later. (Although the early Church fathers were often in Greek, to pious reformers like Anne Bacon, Greek was a dangerous language that could lead to knowledge of lascivious pagans like Ovid and Catullus.) Smith, who was far more of a Renaissance humanist than a Reformation ideologue (and so could simply ignore what he didn’t like) was devoted to the Greek classics, and so probably followed Sir Thomas Elyot in starting little de Vere with Greek via Aesop and Apulius, then, as soon as possible, Homer.

Though Greek and Latin are closely related in many ways, there’s a considerable difference in what you might call the soul of the language. I believe this difference is reflected in the nature of the voices that came from Oxford and from the work that Bacon finally began publishing in his thirties, beginning in 1596 with the Montaigne-like Essays.

As for “high-minded,” no one was more high-minded than Sir Thomas Smith, renowned for his erudition and his honesty. Considering how long they were together, eight years, from de Vere’s age four to age twelve, Smith’s influence on Oxford would have been profound. If the reason for your comment derives from the common notion that great writers are all noble humanitarians, I suggest you read the biographies of Rousseau, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, to name just four. And however high-minded, Bacon, like most humans, had some very ignoble traits, something his promoters prefer to ignore.

Romans: I suspect you were an Oxfordian first and find it difficult to let go.

Me: No way. My awareness of Bacon and my respect for him came long before I knew anything about Oxford or was convinced of his true career by the evidence offered by Looney, Ward, Ogburn, Miller, Clark, and Bowen. Once I began to dig more deeply into the history of the period and saw how close they must have been––Oxford’s guardian William Cecil, his colleague Nicholas Bacon, Francis’s father, and his mother, Bacon’s wife and Cecil’s wife’s sister, having all been located within walking distance of each other on the Strand during the years Oxford lived with the Cecils––I realized there had to be some kind of relationship between these two budding young writers, the best in their time. Birds of a feather, don’t you know.

That Bacon returned from France at age 18 just months before the Shepheard’s Calender was published with its erudite gloss by E.K., who could only have been Oxford, the basis for their relationship came clear: a passion for creating an English literature on the level of the French Pléiade and the ancients of Rome and Greece. That Oxford was teasing Bacon as Francis the Drawer in Henry IV Part One fits so perfectly with Bacon’s situation as one who, due to his poverty, had to “draw” for clients and so was at their mercy, well, what else was there to think?

That Bacon was the author of Nashe’s Jack Wilton, The Unfortunate Traveller, so obviously based on Oxford’s adventures in Italy under the name of his famous/infamous uncle, the Earl of Surrey; and that also as Nashe he was the author of the play performed for John Whitgift, his old Cambridge Master. This, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, shows Bacon’s view of Oxford’s role in the life of the Court community: Ver, the Adonis-like lord of Nature, who dies (loses favor) only to be reborn (when the Queen needs good theater again). (Read Summer’s Last Will; you’ll see he speaks of his “cousin Ned” in the first paragraph. The whole first section about Ver (Spring) is about Oxford.) Oxford’s view of Bacon comes through in his portraits of Puck and Ariel: the devoted page, assistant to the great magician in fairyland and the magical isle, both metaphors for the Stage.

To those who adhere to the single genius theory, that only one individual wrote all the important works of the period––whether Oxford or Bacon or Marlowe––I can only point out, once again, that no revolution was ever accomplished by the efforts of one person alone. Like the Jacobins who revolutionized the government of France in the 18th century, or the Impressionists who revolutionized painting in the 19th, or the American jazz musicians who did the same for popular music in the 20th, it takes a whole village of revolutionaries to raise a culture’s consciousness. In the small tight-knit community of 16th-century London readers and writers, it took six: Oxford, Bacon, the Sidneys, Raleigh, and Marlowe. And, not least, their patrons, printers, actors, and stagehands.

Romans: I would like to hear what you would write about Bacon’s scrivenery and its likely output.

Me: I’m not sure what you mean by “scrivenry,” but I do have a great deal more to post about Bacon, and will at some point. Meanwhile, I suggest that you read Spenser’s Mother Hubberd and Nashe’s Jack Wilton or Piers Penniless. Of course I assume that you’ve already read a good deal of Bacon’s writing under his own name. His Essays are a good place to begin. They at least reveal a little hint of the humor that’s so completely suppressed in the works he published later under his own name, and that’s so wildly and delightfully rampant in “Nashe,” written in his wild youth when he was one of the lads at Fisher’s Folly.

The Two Shakespeares

The shortest answer to the Shakespeare Authorship Question is that the name represents more than one entity. There were, in the 1590s in England, two men who shared the name Shakespeare, the one who was born with it, or something close to it, and the one who used it to get his writing published. This was not what some have called an “open secret,”––it was certainly kept as secret as possible, but so few knew for a certainty who was doing the writing, that it was easy enough, with a few well-placed prevarications, to keep the truth at the level of rumor. The reason why this was felt to be necessary by those involved lies buried in the nature of the times. And as one otherwise unknown English writer once remarked, “the past is a foreign country,” one so different from today’s present that understanding it takes years of study.

Most English-speaking people heard the name Shakespeare early enough to know that it represents a writer from a long time ago who those who follow him say was a genius. Many Americans were forced to read one or two or of his plays in high school, giving them a permanent sense of dread whenever his name comes up. Luckier students learn about him by reading a play aloud in class, passing the roles around, so that everyone gets to read a particular character’s part for an entire scene (which keeps attention focussed on the action, and, with help from the teacher as to rhythm and intonation, to get the music of the language, as just reading to oneself, or hearing it read by someone else, does not). Best of all, for those who have been involved in giving a live performance, particularly one of the comedies, how the story comes to life is something they will probably never forget.

Most of us have a very vague idea of who this playwright actually was. We were taught in school that he came from a particular town where his father was a wool dealer, and where he went to grammar school, and where, while still in his teens, he got a well-to-do neighbor’s daughter pregnant, married her, and, when he got into hot water with local landowners for poaching deer (or rabbits) ran off to London where, though only in his mid-twenties, he immediately became an actor with the leading theater company while demonstrating a dazzling ability to write witty and learned dialogue for characters at his imagined Court.

Except for the part about becoming an actor and a playwright, the story is probably true enough, that is, it’s true about the younger half of the Shakespeare entity. This was William, the oldest living son of Catholic leatherworker and wool dealer John Shakspere. We pronounce his name Shake-spear today, because that’s the way it was pronounced in London, but that it had been pronounced rather differently in Stratford before it began appearing in print is suggested by some of the Stratford spellings, such as Shaxpere, Shagspere, Shackespyeer, and so forth.

In London the pronunciation came, not directly through hearing it spoken, but from reading on the title pages of published plays and in a book known as Wit’s Treasury, where it was spelled so that it would be pronounced with a long a, Shake-spear, which turns it into a pun, particularly with William’s nickname in front: Will Shake-spear, a name that sounds too much like that of a fictional character like Doll Tear-sheet to be an accident.

The other half of the Shakespeare entity was the great artist who had the problematic fate to be born into the aristocracy, which, though it gave him the education he would use to entertain his fellow courtiers, and the credit and leisure to develop his interests, also prevented him from letting the world beyond the tapestried walls of the Court connect him with what he created. This was no problem at first since––for cultural reasons that lie so far beyond our present day understanding that it’s almost pointless to name them––he really didn’t want to be seen as a poet by anyone but members of his own circle. Later, when his work began to create a public audience and publication became an issue, he would need a name for the title page. Over the first two decades of his career he used the names of secretaries, schoolmates, and needy courtiers. For the last 15, he used the name of the wool dealer’s son from Stratford.

Had it not been for the magical name that was common to a sizable population (of descendants of Norman French peasants) in Warwickshire and a pun on the nature and purposes of the playwright who used it––I will shake a spear!––it’s possible that we would not have the works today. It’s also possible, even likely, that William never knew exactly who it was that was using his name. It’s also very unlikely that these two who so depended on each other––William for the stipend from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men that kept his family afloat during hard times and the Earl of Oxford for the name that meant he could continue to publish his works––ever met.

Once Oxford is seen as the writing half of the Shakespeare entity, apart from the 38 works with which it was credited (however obliquely) by Ben Jonson, plus most of the plays now known as the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and immense as is his stature as the individual most responsible for the language we speak today, Shakespeare will be credited with even more immensely important innovations. That the first two full-time yearround successful commercial theaters in London were built within weeks of Oxford’s return from Italy in 1576 and that the great public theater built by James Burbage that year was built to specifications that Oxford was privy to from his years of study with Sir Thomas Smith, suggests that the round theaters that were the first of their kind in England, perhaps in all of northern Europe, were also primarily his creation.

Thus it will be seen that, not only did “Shakespeare” write and probably direct these innovative plays, he was largely responsible for creating the stages on which they would be performed. One thinks of Newton who, when struggling to explain the laws of motion, created the mathematical technique known as calculus; or of Alexander the Great who, when confronted with strategic problems on his military conquest of Asia, solved them by creating new weapons; or of Brunelleschi who, when confronted with the need to finish the dome on the great cathedral of Florence, invented the reversible gear by which sandstone beams weighing two tons each could be raised hundreds of feet in the air by an ox walking in a continuous circle.

Oxford not only created the Shakespeare plays, he created the language that they spoke and the venue where they could be heard, the one founding one of the world’s great literary traditions, the other the industry known as the London Stage.

What a guy!

Shakespeare’s search for silence

Writers are solitary creatures. However gregarious some may be by nature, if anything is to come of their effort they’ll need long spells of unbroken solitude on a regular basis. Unlike painters or sculptors, they need very little in the way of material things like studios or materials, what they chiefly need is privacy and time. Writers need regular chunks of unbroken time, anywhere from two to six hours at a go, day after day, week after week, to effectively ply their craft. Writers of fiction in particular need this if plots are to form and characters to take shape. (With writers of modern television serials, something else maybe taking the place of time, cocaine perhaps.)

This is not the kind of thinking that can be done in bits and pieces. It takes time to get “i’ th’ vein,” as they put it then and it also requires protection against interruption in order to stay in “the vein” (or “the zone” as it’s sometimes termed today) long enough for development to take place. For a full-length novel or a play, these spells have to occur regularly enough over several days or more likely weeks for the process to continue until the story has acquired a life of its own. A metaphor of giving birth was often used back then––literary gestation occurring in the darkness and silence of the womb of the mind.

It’s hard enough to find this kind of seclusion today, but apparently it was next to impossible in 16th-century England. For as Lawrence Stone pointedly notes, there simply was no concept of privacy in 16th-century England:

This was a society where neither individual autonomy nor privacy were respected as desirable ideals. . . . Privacy like individualism, was neither possible nor desired. . . . Privacy was a rarity which the rich lacked because of the architectural layout of their houses and the prying ubiquity of their servants, and the poor lacked because of confinement in a one or two room hovel. . . . The closest analogy to a sixteenth-century home is a bird’s nest” (4, 6, 7 Family).

His point about architecture is clear for anyone who has ventured into Hampton Palace, Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, or one of the great houses of the 16th century that remain in their original form, for the Elizabethans lived in houses where rooms circled a central meeting area, then, as the building grew, branched off in strings of rooms that opened directly each one into the next, so that to get to the last room on the chain it was necessary to go through every room in between. With halls came privacy, but it seems that what we call a hall today (a hall to the Elizabethans was a room large enough to hold many people) was a thing of the future. What privacy they got was achieved through the use of screens and the great curtained beds. Nor did wealth and rank make privacy any more attainable, since the least private dwellings were those of the aristocracy, where they were also surrounded by herds of retainers, “bed partners” and “gentlemen of the bedchamber.” This lack of privacy is one of the factors that made secrecy so important during this period.

In addition, the Elizabethans had not yet developed the respect for writing as an art that we have today. Writers were not expected to produce literature; writers were scriveners, clerks, men trained to put into simple language the thoughts of their illiterate or busy employers. The small percentage of Elizabethans who were lucky enough to be taught to read and write acquired respect for the poets of ancient times along with their studies, but these were perceived as immortals––the notion that there might be equally great writers among their own friends and family members was a concept born with the Italian Renaissance, one that, when Shakespeare and his colleagues first began had not yet made its way to Britain. As for poetry, anyone who could read and write could scribble verses for particular occasions. Some may have been seen as better than others, but rarely so much better as to be worth saving. So where and how Shakespeare got the respect and privacy he needed to create the literature he gave the world should be a major issue for authorship researchers.

With this as with so much else, we can but “see through a glass darkly”––still, as with all truths, once we know what to look for chances are we’ll find clues. For instance, it wasn’t until Philip Sidney, wounded by the way he was being treated at Court, deserted his habitual entourage for refuge with his sister Mary that he had the breakthrough that put him on the literary map for all time (“Fool! Look in thy heart and write!”). As a writer herself, respectful of her brother’s talent and aware of the struggle he was having to express himself, Mary understood that what he needed most was privacy. And as a Countess she was also in a position to see to it that he got it.

From early in his career Francis Bacon sought refuge from the noise and interruptions of London at his brother’s estate on the Thames that was eventually bought for him by the Earl of Essex, who certainly knew from his own life what it meant to need privacy. By buying this writer’s refuge for Francis, Essex was compensating for failing to talk the Queen into making him Attorney General. In actuality, the gift of Twickenham Park was the greater, at least where posterity is concerned, for it enabled the great Francis Bacon to keep on writing, something he might not have had time for had he gotten the Court job he craved.

If seen through the lens of a writer’s search for privacy, much about the Earl of Oxford’s life and nature is explained.

Early in life he would have developed the habit of solitude, living as he did with the scholar Sir Thomas Smith, who would himself have required such spells of silence and privacy for his own writing. Without, it seems, companions of his own age and rank, what could be more natural than for the solitary boy to adopt his mentor’s habits. It was only when “exempt from public haunt” and on his own outdoors he heard, speaking from within his own mind, tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and “good in everything.”

Having been transferred at twelve to the hotel-like turmoil of Cecil House in London, an atmosphere more like that of a foreign embassy than a private residence, this habit of solitude must have been sorely tried. Cecil’s penchant for spying on his associates is as good as any other explanation for Oxford stabbing the undercook, something that, if we take the events in Hamlet as reflections of events in his life, may have been a hot-headed teenager’s reaction to the realization that he and his fencing partner were being watched, not by Polonius himself of course, but by one of his household spies.

The need for privacy may well be a factor in the way he behaved when, upon arriving back in England after a year abroad, he ignored the welcoming party arranged by Cecil, and hurried off with one of his pals. If properly interpreted, his beef with Cecil seems to have been less the rumors about Anne than Cecil’s inability to keep private family matters to himself––allowing them to become, as Oxford put it, “the fable of the world.” It’s hard to deny that his need for privacy had more to do with the five-year break with the Cecils that followed than any suspicion he may have had about his wife’s fidelity.

Ensconsed in his own household at Fisher’s Folly, surrounded by secretaries, writers and composers––who of course understood that when milord was writing he was NOT TO BE DISTURBED!––he was finally able to achieve a life for himself where he could get this kind of privacy whenever he needed it––one reason why this period shines as the most likely source of so many early versions of his greatest plays. That this ideal environment was lost to him when he lost Fisher’s Folly in 1588 may help to explain Bacon’s title for Nashe’s introduction to Menaphon the following year: “Camilla’s alarm to slumbering Euphues in his melancholy cell at Silexedra,” and his reference the following year in Spenser’s Tears of the Muses to the fact that “Our pleasant Willy, Ah! is dead of late, with whom all joy and jolly merriment is also deaded and in dolour drent.” (Ugh! That godawful style!)

By 1594, remarried and so established once again in a household that could provide him with clean linen and regular meals, he began rewriting his old plays for a new generation of audiences, both Courtly and public, but one wonders how much privacy he was able to squeeze for himself from the constant call upon him for favors, interviews, etc., that were the daily business of a peer of the realm.

The likelihood that his young wife and the staff she provided had more interest in running a functioning estate than in making it possible for Prosper-O to conjure up the magic on a regular basis suggests his 1595 return to begging the Queen for the stewardship of the Forest of Waltham. This in turn explains, to me at least, why the strange lack of evidence that he actually died in 1604 suggests that, with his mortality facing him, he simply took a card from his own “fantastical duke of dark corners” and “died to the world.” Having acquired from a King who understood, as Elizabeth had not, his need for privacy, he finally achieved a setting that would allow him to leave the world the masterpieces of English literature that , in some cases, it had taken thirty years to polish to perfection.

A can of politic worms

One of the problems with getting academics to pay attention to authorship research is that it’s cross-disciplinary in ways that leave it outside the various boxes into which most universities put their studies. Who has credentials in not just English Lit but European Renaissance History, plus the Psychology of Creativity, plus Linguistics? The authorship question falls not just between two stools, but three or four. As a result, no one department is properly constituted to take the issue seriously.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect for all of these is the issue of falsification. Academics can handle the idea that anomalies arise naturally in history, literature and science, but only through simple misunderstandings or misreadings arising out of ignorance. They’re not trained to accept misunderstandings created on purpose. English Lit profs are puzzled and annoyed by the problems created by the massive use of falsification in the works of the time, but like dedicated field workers deluged by rain, rather than turn their attention to the rain, they do their best to minimize or even ignore it.

The hiding of Shakespeare’s identity by his publishers is only one small example of the kind of shape-shifting that was not only not all that unusual, it was the norm during the era we study. Most of the works that concern us were published with great care taken to blur some or all of the facts about when they were written, by whom, for what purpose, and if living persons were being addressed, who they were. This was true, not only of the small percentage of published works that fall into the category of imaginative literature (plays, love poems, bawdy tales, novellas) but things like pro or anti-Catholic screeds and dissident polemics like those of Martin-Marprelate, while contemporary historians dealt with problems by simply ignoring the more sensitive issues. All this to stay out of trouble with a government that was behaving more and more like Stalin’s or Hitler’s every day. Authors, publishers, printers, later editors, all had very good reasons for hiding some or all of the facts we seek. Everything we study has to be examined keeping in mind the possibility of this kind of dissimulation.

Again and again the question in hand takes us back to the fact that the community we are discussing was so very, very small. Where none of us today are likely to know personally the authors of the books that interest us, it was the opposite then. For us today, when reading a book, even one by an author whose name we know, the thought never enters our mind that the name is a phony or that the front material has been created to distract us from the true authorship.

For the small percentage of the Elizabethan community who were capable of reading these books back then, the possibility was always in mind that, no matter what the name on the title page, it was probably written by someone they knew, if not intimately, then by sight and/or reputation. In a city of under 200,000, a best seller was one that sold 1200 copies. Imagine a publisher today being satisfied with such a number. Where today we are awash with new titles every week in mega-bookstores with miles of shelves, there was a handful of bookstalls in St. Paul’s Cathedral churchyard, run mostly by the printers or their publishers, where weeks could go by without the appearance of something new.

Yet it’s the small size of this community that’s one of the major factors that makes it possible for us to sort out who wrote what and when. Once we’ve identified the writers and come to know their dates, situations, attitudes, fears, goals and perspectives, we’ve got some real controls. Styles are helpful, but only when we keep in mind that styles were changing rapidly throughout the entire period. Some of the writers we study delighted in imitating each other; some hoped to hide their authorship by creating several completely different styles; in some a later editor may have cut or added lines for any one of a dozen reasons. Stylistic crossovers may mean the same person wrote both works, but it may also mean that one was the other’s student at the time of writing, or that the two were working closely together at the time those works were being written.

In short, it’s absolutely necessary to know as much as possible about the men and women who were writing then, and their probable reasons for writing a particular work at a particular time. This is where the Stratfordian dating has caused so much trouble, offsetting the origin of Shakespeare’s works by as much as two decades. Shakespeare’s creation is so central to everything else, plays, poetry and novels, that the misdating of his works and misinterpretation of his purposes has created a mess that’s taken centuries just to begin to unravel.

We not only need to know the writers, we need to know how they related to each other. Since they (or their descendants) left us next to nothing by which to judge, we have to rely on what is revealed by their recorded actions and by clues in their works. We also need to know who were their enemies, who was out to stop them, whom they were praising or attacking in their works, whom they loved or hated and who loved or hated them.

To understand how individuals came to hate or depend on each other in that far off time it’s necessary to understand the social and political forces in play. Persons who shine as enemies in the histories were often in close contact with each other and so shared many moments of apparent good fellowship, a necessity for the dispense of business. Underlying animosities might come to the fore and should be kept in mind, but not everything can be explained by them. Shakespeare explores once such dichotomy in Coriolanus where the personal attraction between the Roman general and the Volscian Aufidius overwhelms their enmity as military adversaries. Shakespeare revels in the attraction of opposites. He is a past master of the romance of passion, something that thrives on opposition and the thirst for forbidden fruit.

On the level of the Court and the great gentry families, if you go back far enough, everyone was related to everyone else––so merely finding a family connection or an ancient family enmity says nothing about the potential relationship between two individuals. It can add weight to more solid evidence, but by itself it means very little. Brothers could become just as bitter enemies as two men who were taught to hate each others’ families in the nursery. Lawrence Stone identifies the innate enmities between eldest and younger brothers created by the system of primogeniture, where boys grew up knowing that the oldest brother would inherit most of the wealth and all the titles. He claims that the only family relationship that wasn’t stressed in any way was that of brother and sister (Family xx), but even they were often strangers to each other, having been separated early on and raised apart, sometimes at birth.

A number of forces worked to create enmities as well as alliances. Common interests, beliefs, educations, sexual biases and the simple emotional response of true friendship, could play as much of a role as could ambition, jealousy, envy, and paranoia which, given the rigid traditions that bound them all, were certainly rife at the time.

Shakespeare and “don’t ask don’t tell”

An important article, “The Bisexuality of Shake-speare’s Sonnets and Implications for de Vere’s Authorship” by Richard M. Waugaman, MD, is to be published in the upcoming October issue of Psychoanalytic Review, 97 (5). Dr. Waugaman is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine, and Training & Supervising Analyst Emeritus at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. His 98 scholarly publications began with an article stemming from his senior thesis on Nietzsche and Freud. He and his wife, Elisabeth Pearson, scholar of Medieval French Lit and an award-winning children’s book author, live in Maryland, near Washington DC.

Dr. Waugaman’s path to Oxford runs from Freud (doctoral dissertation) to William Niederkorn (NYTimes article, Feb. 2002), to Roger Stritmatter (Oxford’s Geneva Bible) to a readership at the Folger. Now this prestigious academic journal has agreed to publish simultaneously not one, but two of his articles on authorship issues, one on Samuel Clemens’s use of the pseudonym Mark Twain, the other on the psychology of Shake-speare’s Sonnets and their connection to Oxford’s biography, the accusations of pederasty made against him made by his enemies, plus the fact that his daughter was being promoted as a wife to the Earl of Southampton, the Fair Youth of the Sonnets.

News of the publication of Dr. Waugaman’s articles in an academic journal is a sign that the wall surrounding Fortress Academia may be weakening. “Things seem to be changing among my analytic colleagues,” says Waugaman. “I now find them far more receptive. They react as though there is at least “reasonable doubt’’about the authorship, which is a fine place to begin. And I’m optimistic about the historians as well.” That Waugaman speaks from and to the psychology community is a double plus, since that’s one of the two arenas that we can conceivably hope will help us salvage the truth about the authorship, the other being the historians. Once post docs in the less fiction-based Humanities departments begin delving in the English archives we’ll have to rely less on conjecture.

It’s with gratitude that I read Dr. Waugaman’s essay since, as he emphasizes, the nature of the Bard’s sexuality has been so denied, distorted, ignored, or misinterpreted by so-called Shakespeare experts (including some Oxfordians) over the centuries that a straightforward approach to the obvious by someone of authority is clearly in order. Waugaman asks why Shakespeare commentators have consistently avoided the obvious, that since the Sonnets reflect that the Poet was having (or at least desiring) concurrent sexual relations with a man and a woman––ipso facto, Shakespeare was a bisexual, or at least was behaving like one. As he states: “One solution to this cognitive dissonance for the past four centuries has been denial or avoidance of Shakespeare’s bisexuality, and of his actual identity.” By connecting this massive “blind spot,” as he calls it, to the Academy’s refusal to dig any deeper than the unlikely Stratford biography, Waugaman makes an important connection. We’ve been subjected to James Shapiro’s efforts to psychoanalyze the authorship community, now lets see what a psychoanalyst has to say about Shapiro and his colleagues. For any who wish to read his argument in full, Dr. Waugaman will email you a pdf; contact him at rwmd at comcast dot net.

Don’t ask don’t tell

When we add to the evidence in the Sonnets all the gender-bending in the plays, the passionate “male bonding” in Coriolanus, and the obvious homosexual love of the Antonios in Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice, it would seem that at the very least, homosexual desire was something the author understood. This may have been shocking to the Reformation clergy who acted as censors for what got published in the early 17th century, to the Victorian literary critics, and apparently also to persons who grew up in the 1950s in America, but that some readers today are still grasping for some other interpretation, desperate to avoid the fact that––Gasp! Choke!––Shakespeare had a sex life!––well, what can I say? If it wasn’t so deplorable it would be funny.

As a professional in the field of human psychology, Waugaman himself is not afraid to think rationally about same-sex attraction, understanding through his years of training and professional experience that male-male love and sex is, and has always been, a factor in human nature. So he does not attempt, as some Oxfordians have, to equate the hiding of Oxford’s name with shame over his sexuality. Certainly the Poet is ashamed of himself for any number of unspecified misdeeds, but had he been so ashamed of his sexuality as to hide his identity solely for that reason, he would never have displayed it with such abandon in both the Sonnets and the plays, nor would he have defended it as he does in Sonnet 121:“Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d . . . .”

No, it isn’t Shakespeare who’s ashamed, nor whoever it was who first dared to publish his poems, male pronouns and all, in 1609. It’s been the censors, scholars, critics and publishers of his works ever since who, writhing in shame, refuse to face the vital truth about the creation of the language we speak, hiding like a herd of nerdy nincompoops behind the Stratford fable. The question is not––should not be––was Shakespeare gay, straight or bi? Though interesting in the same way it’s interesting where he lived or what he liked for dinner, it’s hardly important enough in the grand scheme of things to bury his identity for three centuries. The real question is, or should be, why are we as a society so frightened by something that a small community of men do in private, something that hurts no one and that obviously gives them pleasure?

Blame it on the Reformation

From the dawn of time until the Reformation the English were just as sexy and life-loving as any other European culture, celebrating the turn of the seasons with carnival-like holidays that lasted for several days on end, much as they had done, as all of Europe had done, in rituals that went back to the Stone Age. Despite the very real benefits to the community from these moments of psychological release, those reform ministers of Church and State who took power under Elizabeth were bound and determined to rid the nation of this “merry-making” and everything else that brought the people pleasure. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, it was the loss of these communal celebrations that contributed most to the success of the London Stage and Shakespeare’s early plays, and it was the constant pressure of the animosity of this newly established Protestant Church and State fraternity that throughout Elizabeth’s reign was the greatest threat to both Shakespeare and his Stage.

But this was only one manifestation of a puritanical attitude towards pleasure that gripped the nation, and in fact all of Europe, beginning in the late 15th century. In England it caused the reformers under Elizabeth’s forerunner Edward VI to shift from the more life-affirmative Lutheran theology to the grim tenets of Calvinism with its focus on sin and damnation. Nor was it a product of the Protestant Reformation alone, for the European countries that remained Catholic went through much the same revolution, beginning with Savanarola in Florence at the turn of the 16th century, and continuing in bursts with the Inquisition in Spain and Rome and the witch burnings in Scandinavia and France, all part of a reaction against the life-loving humanism, art, and intellectual excitement of the Renaissance. And at the heart of this reaction was a harsh new attitude towards sex, particularly homosexual sex.

The early pagans, far from seeing sex as dangerous or disgusting, worshipped it––male-female sex, that is––as the source of life, a view that lasted throughout the medieval period in works like the Roman de la Rose, the Courtly love tradition passed on in the Arthur and Orlando tales, and the worship of Mary and other female saints. So far as we know, no past or present culture has ever openly condoned homosexual behavior. As Philip Slater shows in his brilliant The Glory of Hera, even the ancient Greeks, who made it the cornerstone of their culture for several centuries weren’t all that comfortable with it. But whatever shame was attached to it then was mainly directed towards the humiliating position of the men who played the “feminine” or passive role, the “ingles” and “ganymedes,” with little or no shame attaching to the dominant partner. It must also be noted that, whatever the official attitude, male-male sex has been the primary means for societies throughout the ages to maintain population control. Nevertheless, simply frowning on something is not the same as fearing and hating it or reviling to the extreme that drove the 19th-century Victorians to hang accused homosexuals or tie them to posts where crowds of hundreds of screaming fanatics were encouraged to stone them to death (Crompton 21-2).

What caused the English to turn from sin-forgiving Catholicism to to the fiery furnace of Calvinism, which held such dark views of God and life that because human beings are brought into being through sexual intercourse they’re damned from birth, that is, unless they withhold themselves from any kind of sensory pleasure, including, of course, sex for pleasure. What on earth could have driven the merry English, and other nations as well, to fall prey to such a wretched belief system, one that, despite the incursions of secular science and modern existentialism, continues to drive many of our communal societal fears and prejudices to this very day?

Syphilis

I believe this fear and hatred of sex had its origins in the spread of a deadly new strain of syphilis that was first documented in Naples in 1494, and that spread rapidly through the ports of Europe in the 16th century as sailors and travellers transported the deadly microbe from the whorehouses and bathhouses of one seaport to another.

The people of ages past were not ignorant fools. They did not need to study medicine to understand from direct experience that this was a venereal disease unlike any they’d ever known. It would have taken several generations, say three, taking us into the mid-1500s, for people to realize just how terrible was this “great pox” (as opposed to the “small pox,” that only killed or disfigured) ; how it not only destroyed the person who had it, but how it could be passed through intercourse to that person’s mate, rendering her sterile, or if she managed to have children, made them susceptible to any number of dangerous illnesses, the girls sterile, or if they gave birth, possibly to diseased or stillborn babies. The most terrible disease until that time, the black plague, either killed within days of contracting it or allowed recovery, while syphilis acted slowly over months and years, rotting the body, and the mind, from within. Many cures were tried, but nothing seemed to work but mercury salts, which had such terrible side effects that it was arguable which was worse, the disease or its cure. In fact, no sure cure would be found until the 20th century.

What were the 16th-century Europeans to think? Believing as so many did that God was still taking a close personal interest in their behavior, what other reason could they come up with than that He was punishing them, and of course, because it it was through sex that the disease was spread, with its first appearance occuring on the genitals, that they were being punished for their sexuality. Fear spread like wildfire through Europe, focusing on the most vulnerable, prostitutes and homosexuals.

Probably because the issue was sex and the disease could be hidden as other diseases could not, there are not the contemporary references to syphilis that there are to the plague, malaria, etc., and because we’re so used to the pervasive anti-sex attitude bequeathed us by the Reformation, and in America by the emigrating Puritans, we tend not to notice it in the texts from the period. It wasn’t until I began reading the works of Protestant reformers and pedagogues that I realized that their use of the word “filthy” invariably referred to sexual behavior of every sort (Calvin did except the need for married couples to produce children, but God forbid they should have any pleasure in the process). What’s inherently filthy about sex? Waugamon quotes David Bevington on the horror Elizabethan England displayed towards sodomy, how they described it with words like “leprous,” “cancerous,” a “plague spot,” the same words used to describe the symptoms of syphilis.

Déjà vu all over again

In a sense this issue is where I came in. My first literary love was Lord Byron (yes, it’s possible to fall in love with a long dead writer). Byron in his letters and journals gave himself to the world of letters in a way that few have ever done. For three or four years in the late 70s and early 80s I read everything I could find by him and about him. I own most of the volumes of his letters and journals as edited by Leslie Marchand and am the proud possessor of a personal letter from Marchand, typed by his own hand. Finally discovering in 1985 that Byron’s self-exile was the only way (other than suicide) that he could escape the terrible fate of men accused of sodomy; that his memoirs were burned by his friends out of anxiety over what he’s revealed about their sexuality; and most of all, that the truth about him was buried by his biographers until it was revealed by Louis Crompton (in 1985) in Byron and Greek Love, makes this issue over the Sonnets and their author’s identity seem like the conclusion to a story that, for me, began with Byron, but for English Literature, began with Shakespeare.

It’s sad that I feel it necessary to add that I myself was married to a (male) jazz musician and composer for 20 years by whom I had four daughters, that I’ve had two long-term sexually fulfilling relationships, both with men, one my husband, which is not to say that I never had to withstand the kind of passing attraction to a “lovely” guy or two that the Poet documents in the Sonnets.

The hellish focus on sin and damnation that that accompanied the Reformation and that threatened to destroy all merry-making (and surely would have if not for the courage of Shake-spear and his patrons), deserves a more thorough examination than is possible here, but I think it should at least be mentioned, for what else could have caused the frenzy of fear and hatred that has fueled English (and American) homophobia ever since. Surely this and only this is the ultimate reason for the denial of Shakespeare’s nature by the Academy, and by extention, as Dr. Waugaman has realized, coming from his own perspective, their continued refusal to examine the truth about his identity.

Was Shakespeare a woman?

From time to time I’ve stated my opposition to the idea that Shakespeare could have been a standin for a woman. In response to a request from a reader (Howard Schumann), I’ll go into a little more detail.

One can’t argue that “Shakespeare is such an obviously masculine voice,” because many women have written believably as men. The best evidence for this is Mary Shelley, who once beat two very masculine writers in a three-way contest to tell the best horror story––her husband Percy and their friend Lord Byron––when she created the still popular Dr. Frankenstein and his monster in 1816. So it’s not because a woman can’t write believably in a male voice or create believable male characters. They can, and do, every day.

Shakespeare has given us interesting women, but they are all seen from a male point of view. It’s a thoughtful view, but it is still an outsider’s view. Had Shakespeare been a female, she would have revealed more deeply the inner workings of a woman’s mind. Her women would have been as witty as her men, and been given as memorable speeches, One would think that in her 38 plays she would have featured at least one major female protagonist or told at least one woman’s story. Apart from giving them good lines, true of most of his characters, Shakespeare did none of these.

Good lines and understandable motivations are true of most of his leading female characters, but even plays that derive all or most of their thrust from a woman’s predicament, plays like As You Like It, Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well, or Measure for Measure, show little more than one side of their characters, however attractive (or repellent) that side. And some behave in most unnatural ways, like Lady Anne who allows herself to be won over by her husband’s murderer, Richard III, in a matter of minutes, or Kate, whose anti-feminist speech at the end of Shrew continues to make problems for modern directors. In contrast to the finely tuned portrait of Hamlet, a masterpiece of character development, Ophelia got short shrift from her creator. Possibly the result of several revisions, or even posthumous editing (though some tempting hints remain in her mad speech), Ophelia is an almost impossible role for the young, still inexperienced actress who’s required to give it a coherence that’s not in the text, something that would not be true had she been created by a woman who had teenage griefs of her own to draw on.

Shakespeare’s stories

The question of story goes a little deeper. There have always been stories that speak most clearly to one or the other sex. We see this in fairy tales, Jack and the Beanstalk for boys, Cinderella for girls, and in folk tales like the Iron John stories for men, as noted by poet Robert Bly, and for women, stories like Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady or the Thousand and One Nights of Sheherazade. Had Shakespeare been a woman, one would think that at least one play would be told from a woman’s point of view as Chaucer did with his “Tale of the Wife of Bath” and Christopher Morley did with Kitty Foyle.

But although the Bard created a few strong, multi-dimensional female characters like Juliet, Kate, Rosalind, Beatrice and Cleopatra, all but Rosalind are paired with an even stronger male character, and like most female characters created by men, in terms of the story being told, most are largely adjuncts to their lovers’ stories. The exceptions, Rosalind, Imogen (from Cymbeline), Julia (from Two Gents), Helena (from All’s Well), and Viola (from Twelfth Night), are basically all variations of the same persona, and while it is how they deal with their predicament that drives the action in either the main or the subplot, they do most of it pretending to be men.

All of Shakespeare’s plays are in fact gender specific, the gender being that of a 16th-century male aristocrat. Ah, you say, although 16th-century London was a male-dominated society, since women can write like men, a talented woman could have faked a male voice. But Shakespeare’s first audience was the Elizabethan Court audience , which was dominated by women; the Queen of course, plus her corps of female attendants, set the tone for all the entertaining done at Court. In fact, most, perhaps all, of Shakespeare’s comedies were written originally for this audience, which helps to explain why so many of them have girls or women as important characters. The tragedies were written for the masculine West End audience known as “the gentlemen” of the Inns of Court.

Shakespeare’s male bias is quite evident in his two long narrative poems. Though both are focussed on a woman’s predicament, both are clearly written from a male viewpoint. Unless our female Shakespeare was a lesbian it’s hard to see a woman describing the goddess Venus in so enticing a state of sexual arousal. It’s also hard to see a female writer suggesting that, following her rape by Tarquin, Lucrece’s only decent option was suicide. Even today, when roughly one out of five, four, possibly even three women suffer rape at least once during their lives, if all since Shakespeare had taken the course suggested by his “graver” effort, the human race would have vanished long since.

The Jacobean playwrights

Ignoring the skewed dating of the plays preferred by academics and listening only to his voice, it’s clear that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan first, last, and always. Nor was the revising that he did for his Jacobean audiences after 1603 a great deal different in tone from the nature of his earlier work. By 1603, the (53-year-old) leopard did not, could not, change his spots. But, Shakespeare––and Ben Jonson––aside, the rest of the Jacobean stage was much different from what it had been in Elizabeth’s time, and interestingly one of the ways that it differed most obviously was in this very area, for a number of Jacobean plays look at life from a woman’s point of view.

The subject deserves the kind of detailed treatment that I can’t give at this point, not having given it sufficient study. Suffice it to say that the trend is most obvious in John Webster’s two masterpieces, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614), both so obviously written by a woman that when I first read them back in 2002 I was astonished that no one, so far as I could see, had ever noticed it before. Having been inundated with male literary notions of women for most of my life, the realization that this, whatever the name on the title page, was the work of another woman hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. That that woman had to be Mary Sidney became evident as soon as I began comparing the plots and characters of the two plays to incidents and situations in her own life.

The style of these plays, and other works attributed to Webster, are so idiosyncratically Mary Sidney’s that there’s simply no possibility that she could also have written Shakespeare. No one in his or her right mind could suggest that the same person wrote both canons. I do hear the Webster style in a play attributed to John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, one that, as George Swan shows, was written as a satire on Oxford. I also think it’s likely that Mary did some editing of Shakespeare’s plays before her sons got them published, but like most accomplished writers she would have been a sensitive editor and so refrained from tampering with what, by then, the rascally author being long departed, she must have realized were masterpieces of English literature.

Throughout 2003 I devoted all lectures and articles to showing why these works had to be, not only by a woman, but specifically by Mary. Coming to know her as I have, I feel certain that she would be furious to think that she was being “accused” of writing the works of Shakespeare, and not the ones she actually did write. Her credentials as a writer have probably been well-covered by those who promote her as a candidate for Shakespeare, but even with only the few things that she published under her own name to go by, it should be obvious that her very unique style is so unlike his that such an identification is, or should be, moot at the outset.

Where Shakespeare is copious in his poetry, she’s spare, reflecting the puritannical nature of her upbringing. In fact her verse can be so condensed that it’s hard to grasp her meaning. Shakespeare’s style in his plays is a magnficent blend of the styles admired by his tutor with, probably, street talk from his early years. Mary (Webster) on the other hand, speaks in a kind of London slang that must reflect the kind of talk she heard around her, both at Court and in the streets surrounding her London establishments, a style that had changed considerably, as styles tend to do, since Oxford began writing. It’s almost as though she purposely set out to write in as opposite a style to his as she could, a motivation that could have sprung from the long-standing literary antagonism between her brother and the Earl of Oxford.

Mary Sidney played a hugely important role in the creation and development of the Elizabethan/Jacobean Stage, one I’ll go into detail about in a separate essay, but it was not to write the plays of Shakespeare. Much like Francis Bacon, her friend and near contemporary (he was her elder by only nine months), she played a dangerous game, contributing for 30 years to the underground English Literary Renaissance, using her prestige to remain well under the radar of official repression. Her sons carried on the work she began in the 1590s, culminating in the publication of her own work as John Webster (possibly her coachmaker’s son) and of Oxford’s work under the name Shakespeare. The two families, though at odds under Elizabeth, came together in 1604 with the wedding of her son Philip Herbert, EArl of Montgomery, to Oxford’s daughter Susan Vere.

Mary was probably not the only woman writing plays during the Jacobean period. The Yorkshire Tragedy, c.1608, is in a woman’s voice, though not in Mary’s style. In 1611, Emilia Bassano Lanyer, the Dark Lady of Shake-speare’s Sonnets, published the first book length poem in English by a woman, its introduction giving her the added distinction of the first Englishwoman to publish a feminist tract. Elizabeth Carey, another member of the Court community, is known for the first play written by a woman (published under her own name) in 1613. In 1621, Mary’s niece, Mary Wroth, published the first English novel by a woman. These may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Much needs to be done to sort out who wrote what during this period (1612-1640) not only by women but by male courtiers as well. Protected by the theater-loving Queen Anne, the great patron of the period, Lady Lucy Bedford, and by Mary’s oldest son, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, after 1615 when he took over as Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, female courtiers had opportunities to write and publish that they did not have under Elizabeth nor would in later times, though almost always, of course, under a masculine name. Who were they? Hopefully time will tell.

Okay, let’s look at Shapiro

I said I wouldn’t, but a reader has asked about three particular points in the last section of Shapiro’s book, where he explains his personal view of the authorship question, so I figured I might as well deal with as many of his points as seemed worth discussing.

The main problem with Shapiro’s defense of William of Stratford as author of the Shakespeare canon, is the same problem all Stratfordians have, namely an unshakable belief that the name Shakespeare as used in publications could not possibly mean anyone or anything other than the man who was born with it. This makes it impossible for them to respond to the Authorship Question in any real way because it prevents them from seeing that, at that time in history, such a name could rather easily have been used for another purpose.

Over and over Shapiro’s points are useless as arguments because to him the word Shakespeare can only mean William of Stratford. Of course this works for readers who share his blind spot, but for those who have done enough reading or had enough experience of life to see that the man with the punnable name could not possibly be the real author, it’s all just wasted space.

Take for instance his point regarding the many comments on Shakespeare by his fellow writers, that “stretch without interruption from his early years in the theater to his death in 1616” (234). This falls by the wayside because he’s assuming that in praising the author they mean William when what they so obviously mean is the author. Apart from Greene’s “Shake-scene,” which wasn’t about either William or the author, Shapiro quotes one writer after another, all their praise of Shakespeare utterly and totally beside the point, since not one of them touches on anything that would lead us to think that they knew or believed that the author originated in Stratford, had a father named John, dealt in wool, or anything that might connect the author in any way, subtle or obvious, with William of Stratford. Not that the London writers would necessarily have mentioned Stratford even if the author had been William, but the point here is that this rehearsal of praise by Shakespeare’s fellow writers carries no weight whatsoever in the authorship debate. Of course they praised their great contemporary, but where’s a single point that shows that the Shakespeare they were praising was the one who came from Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire?

This brings us to Ben Jonson, whose dedicatory Ode in the First Folio is a classic example of the sort of fudging that cries out for disambiguation. As evidence, Jonson’s Ode does more for the opposition than it does for its putative author, since the only thing that connects it to William is the phrase “sweet swan of Avon.” This contributes nothing to the apparently difficult business of directly identifying the author for although a river by this name flows through the Stratford in Warwickshire, another Avon flows past the Wiltshire estate of Jonson’s great patron, the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain of the King’s Household, patron of Shakespeare’s Company, the King’s Men, and the book’s dedicatee.

There is one more reference to Stratford in the introductory material in the First Folio, though no less ambiguous. Leonard Digges, Jr. provides a poem that contains the line, “thy Stratford moniment.” During the final years of Oxford’s life, his official residence was a manor in Hackney, three miles from Stratford-at-Bow where the ancient Roman Road crosses the River Lea, continuing northeast to Oxford’s childhood home with Smith at Theydon Mount and beyond that to lands ruled by his ancestors. If, as I believe, Oxford escaped domesticity once again to finish his writing during the final four years of his life in the Forest of Hainault, he must needs have crossed the river at Stratford, that being the only crossing over the River Lea, and headed northeast another 12 miles to Havering-at-Bower.

So which Stratford does he mean? Which Avon? And why doesn’t he make it more clear?

As for Jonson “proudly” listing Shakespeare first as one of the actors in his first play for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, please note, again, that this information comes from someone whose entire career was spent working for Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, from whence cometh every single piece of evidence linking the name Shakespeare to the London Stage and the works that made them wealthy men.

Shapiro’s mention of William Camden, who listed “William Shakespeare” as one of eleven “pregnant wits” (237) in 1605 is even more ironic, for among Camden’s comments on the important personnages from the various towns and counties throughout English that make up the bulk of his Britannia, the only names he mentions from Stratford-on-Avon are John de Stratford, Hugh Clopton, and George Carew (Jiménez 1). But, how could he not mention that pregnant wit, Will Shakespeare? How indeed? Shapiro likes the term crushing for what he considers a potent thrust. I’d call this crushing.

Even more crushing is the evidence from Michael Drayton, whom Shapiro characterizes as a “fellow native of Warwickshire and a leading poet and dramatist” who “may have known Shakespeare longer than most” (238) and whose admiring verse about him he quotes. But what Shapiro fails to note is how Drayton ignored his supposed friend in his book Poly-Olbion. Published in 1612, this description in verse of England, while it comments on the important personages from each county, ignores both Stratford and William Shakespeare (Jiménez 3).

If Shapiro’s got an explanation for either of these gargantuan lacunae I’d like to hear it.

Shakespeare’s familiar face?

Shapiro points to the number of Shakespeare’s plays published from 1594 on (a genuine fact), from which he leaps to the conclusion that Shakespeare was “one of the most familiar faces in London” (224), a logical fallacy if ever there was one. I read The New Yorker and am well-acquainted with the names of the more frequently published contributors, but I could pass any one of them on the street without recognizing them in person. And as it turns out, the man who was born with the name William Shakespeare was anything but well known in London. In his article Ten Eyewitnesses, historian Ramon Jiménez outlines in devastating detail how William of Stratford remains a total blank as either a playwright or an actor throughout the entire period of Shakespeare’s popularity, utterly unremarked by the actors who produced the plays, utterly unremarked by his own townsfolk and relatives!

Buc’s “testimony”?

As witness to Shakespeare’s Stratford identity, Shapiro calls upon George Buc, Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622, who knew (and honored) the Earl of Oxford, and who also wrote that “Shakespeare” told him that The Pinner of Wakefield was written by a minister who enacted the leading role himself. Again we see the strange Stratfordian blindness to the central issue, since, again, to theater people like Buc, “Shakespeare” would have meant the author!

Committed to protecting his friend’s privacy, of course an insider like Buc would refer to the source of this information by the name he used for theater matters, not by the name he was bound to protect! Now, whether or not we Oxfordians are right, the fact that Shapiro and his colleagues think this is any kind of an argument shows better than anything we can say how utterly clueless they are about the argument itself. It’s like a six-year-old arguing with a four-year-old over whether or not there’s a Santa. He simply doesn’t want to believe it.

We see the same problem with his next argument, i.e., that Shakespeare had no control over his plays because in those days plays were owned, not by their authors, but by the acting companies that purchased them. This again is an argument with little foundation, for even Ben Jonson had enough control over his own plays by 1616 to publish them as a collection. In any case, since Oxford was a peer of the realm and a lifelong patron of acting companies with relatives and patrons of his own on the Privy Council, were he also the author of the plays that bore the name Shakespeare, then of course he (and his relatives on the Privy Council) had considerably more power over what happened to his creations than would a yeoman’s son.

Again, the argument only works if you believe that William could write, which we don’t––based on the evidence of the six shaky signatures and the utter lack of any evidence of letters, etc.. So there goes that argument, round and round in the usual circle: William was the author, the author could write, therefore William could write and the signatures were lopsided and close to illegible because he had the palsy, or was dying, or, or, or, or . . . . Anything to keep from facing the truth.

The hyphen?

The argument about the hyphen is interesting but hardly compelling one way or the other. It’s true that hyphenation was largely controlled by the printer’s compositor. It’s also true that fictional names were often hyphenated, but then they were also often left unhyphenated. One facet of this argument that hasn’t been mentioned anywhere but here is that hyphenating Shakespeare between Shake and speare forces a particular pronunciation that turns the name into a pun: “shake spear,” whereas most of the spellings from Stratford suggest the name, if hyphenated as pronounced in Stratford, between Shaks (or Shax, or Shags) and peer, would have been “shax peer,” which implies nothing.

Shapiro notes that only 600 of the estimated 3,000 plays produced during the Elizabethan era were printed, and that none of these, “so far as anyone knows,” were printed under someone else’s name (226). Ah, there’s the rub! True, the valiant authors who took such risks to get great works of fiction into print managed to cover their trails to the extent that there are many things that “so far as anyone knows” can’t be documented. But it’s also true that “truth is truth though it be hid at the center,” and there is always a way to get at it by digging a little deeper and using one’s God-given common sense, not to mention that most indispensable of all tools when dealing with Shakespeare and his audience, one’s God-given sense of humor!

How “typical” was anonymity?

Ignoring his own statement that Shakespeare was “one of the most familiar faces in London,” Shapiro suggests that a playwright anxious about being identified could simply have let the play be published anonymously, for “nobody would notice and nobody would care” (226). It may well be that this was what the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were hoping at first, since beginning in 1594, all the Shakespeare plays published until 1597 were published anonymously.

And it’s just as obvious that, for whatever reason, this wasn’t satisfactory since from 1597 on, almost everything published had the Shakespeare name on it (or at least W.S.). What reason does Shapiro give for the first three-and-a-half years of anonymity before switching to a name in 1597? None, beyond the statement that anonymity was “typical. ” How “typical” was it in 1565 when Gorboduc, a first in English theater history, was published along with the names of both its authors? Ten years later, when the next two plays of importance in literary history, The Supposes and Jocaste, were published in One Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the (supposed) author of both plays was also identified. So I guess publishing plays anonymously wasn’t all that typical after all.

Shapiro scoffs that a writer who craved anonymity would dare to attribute his published plays to a well-known actor who could be hauled in for questioning, thus supposition is supported by more supposition, for the truth is that Shakespeare was not well known as an actor either. Facts are facts, and the fact is that nowhere is there a dependable reference of any sort to Shakespeare as an actor––that is, again, except on statements issued by the LC/King’s Men or by clerks simply writing down what they’d just been told. Compare these with the number and kind of anecdotes about about the genuinely important and well-known actors of that time: Bentley, Tarleton, Alleyn, and Kempe come to mind, it’s clear that William Shakespeare’s acting, whether fictional or real, was insignificant, since the only comment on it ever discovered states that “he was said to have played old men,” hardly a recommendation for the kind of talent that Jonson awards him by putting his name first in his list of actors in several of the plays he wrote for Shakespeare’s company. More likely, it suggests a dodge on their part, since no role played by an actor would disguise a man so completely as that of an old man’s wig, beard, and shambling affect.

Shaxberd? Who dat?

Shapiro wants to see the name of the author of the plays given at Court in 1604 (for Oxford’s daughter’s marriage), inscribed as “Shaxberd,” as “powerful evidence” of William’s authorship (228), but if William was “one of the most familiar faces in London,” how is it that the Court scribe in 1604 not only didn’t know how to spell his name, he didn’t know the name itself well enough even to make a good guess. “Shaxberd” is not only a misspelling, it’s a mispronunciation, for Shaxberd sounds nothing like Shakespeare! Clearly there was a Court scribe in 1604 who knew so little about the author (or his standin) that he could only write the name as he heard someone else pronounce it, someone who also, it seems, either did not know the author and/or did not how his name was spelled or how it was pronounced.

A man of the theater?

Shapiro makes a big thing out of the fact that Shakespeare had to be a man of the theater, skilled in writing for particular actors. This of course is true, but where are the facts to back his knee-jerk assumption that the writer was William? Where are the facts that go beyond the handful of documents created by or about the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the sole source of evidence that he was either an actor or a sharer? And how are we to compare William’s connection to the theater when his name shows up nowhere in any record of an acting company until he’s 26 years old, and who, it seems, leaves London at the peak of his career to return to suing neighbors in his hometown for piddling amounts of money, whilst apparently ignoring the publication of his plays?

How then does William as a man of the theater compare with Oxford, who created entertainment for the Court in his early twenties; had his name on the lease of the Children’s theater at Blackfriars in his thirties; was listed as “best for comedy” by Meres in his forties; had his life story touched on in almost every play that bears the Shakespeare name; and had every reason to hide his identity as author of plays that tell, not only his and his family’s story, but damaging insider views of the leading personalities at Court and in the government?

The Court epilogue?

The Court epilogue to Henry IV Part Two that Shapiro believes was spoken by the author himself to a Court audience at some point in the latter half of the ’90s decade:

First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last my speech. My fear is your displeasure. My curtsy, my duty. And my speech, to beg your pardons. If you look for a good speech now, you undo me. For what I have to say is of my own making. And what indeed (I should say) will (I doubt) prove my own marring. But to the purpose and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if (like an ill venture) it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely. And so I kneel down before you, but indeed, to pray for the Queen. (232)

Where is there any evidence that this or any other such epilogue was ever intended to be spoken by the play’s author? And even if playwrights ever did speak such epilogues themselves, why on earth would this one include his personal remarks in a playscript given to the entire company? For that matter, why even bother to write it down? Surely such a moment would be more conversational than programed. Point being: Shapiro profers no evidence that this speech was intended to be spoken by the author of the play, first because it would make no sense, and second because there’s no evidence!

What we do have in the way of evidence are twelve Shakespeare plays in which such an epitaph is included in the playscript, and in every one it is an actor who is to remain alone onstage at the end in order to address the epilogue to the audience. Among such are Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pandarus in Troilus, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Prospero in The Tempest. So the actual probability is that the Court epilogue was written for the same actor who spoke a similar epilogue for the public, published just before this one in 1600, namely Will Kempe, a comedian familiar at Court since the early ’80s at least.

Written in Kempe’s style, the wording suggests that the actor who was intended to speak it was the lead in whatever play had recently displeased the Court. This, as Shapiro suggests, was most likely its immediate predecessor, Henry IV Part One, a play that caused a Court scandal over its use, or rather misuse, of the name Oldcastle, the original name for Falstaff and the role played by Kempe in both plays.

The most displeased courtier would have been William Brooke, a descendant of the original Oldcastle, who was regarded as a regular Reformation saint by his Cobham descendants. William Brooke, Ld Cobham was also at that time Lord Chamberlain of the Queen’s household and thus the patron and overseer of Shakespeare’s company. Since Cobham, for reasons of his own, was acting against the interests of the company he was supposed to be patronizing by blocking their use of the theater at Blackfriars, it’s understandable that the angry author struck back by sticking his ancestor’s name on the naughty fat knight, an act of defiance perfectly understandable if commited by someone of Oxford’s exalted status, but near suicidal if by someone like William.

As for “all that begging and curtsying” noted by Shapiro, while not appropriate for a courtier, how does it better suit William of Stratford than Will Kempe, who having played the role in Henry IV Part One, played the same role in Part Two, gave the first version of the epilogue in the public performance of Part Two, and who, if in trouble over “Oldcastle,” would have been required to make amends with just such a statement? And it was Kempe, not the author, whose portrayal of the naughty knight would have reduced the Court audience to the kind of hysterics that would have infuriated Cobham, and so it would, again, have been Kempe, speaking for the whole company, whose job it was to make the necessary apology.

Shapiro finds significance in the line: “What I have to say is of my own making . . . .” What this actually suggests is that with Kempe’s tendency to extemporise in mind, the author was doing what he could to force the comedian to take responsibility for any ill-considered departures he might make from the script while directly addressing the Court audience. That Kempe left the LCMen at about this time and took off on his own comedy tour is a known fact, though it is not known whether he did so by his own choice, or whether his departure was a decision made for him by the company, or perhaps by some higher authority––the Lord Chamberlain perhaps?

In any case, there’s absolutely nothing in the nature of this anecdote to suggest that it was the author of the play who spoke the epilogue. Nothing, that is, but a desperate desire on the part of a Stratford apologist to find something, anything, that shows William as a participant in the London theater scene––the same desperate desire that fuels the constantly repeated claim that Robert Greene had William in mind as the “Johannes Factotem” and “Shake-scene” of Groatsworth. As we’ve explained at length over the past twenty years, there’s no one who could possibly have filled that role in 1592 but the actor Edward Alleyn, England’s first superstar and recently turned stage manager at the Rose.

Rutland’s impresa?

Shapiro shares his gullibility in these points with most Stratfordians, but he’s largely on his own with the contention that it was “Mr. Shakespeare and Richard Burbage” who created the impresa for the Earl of Rutland in 1613 (231), for most orthodox Shakespeareans are inclined to take this with salt. The notion that either Shakespeare or Burbage would step out of their exalted roles as playwright and leading actor of what was by then the King’s own royal company to do something so lowly as make something with their hands for a mere handful of shillings, or that the earl would request it of them, is patently absurd. Rutland may have turned to his friends at the theater knowing that they had the connections for getting props made for plays, but that they made it for him themselves makes no sense.

Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that attempting to base a theory of identity on such dissociated bits smacks of desperation. Consider the kind of rich and authentic background we have for Ben Jonson, or even Christopher Marlowe, as compared to puzzling little fragments like this, and you can see how void is the the history of the period with anything supportive of the Stratford claim.

An example of Stratfordian fudging

Shapiro: “Shakespeare had been writing plays for five or six years before one of them, Titus Andronicus, was finally published in 1594. Its title page advertised the names of the playing companies who had performed it, not who wrote it. This was typical. Even the most celebrated plays by the most popular Elizabethan dramatists appeared anonymously. We have no documentary evidence that Christopher Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine, and if not for a casual allusion by Thomas Heywood in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Kyd’s name would not be linked to his masterpiece from the late 1580s, the Spanish Tragedy” (226).

This is an example of how events can be misread when seen without the necessary background. February 1594, when Titus was published, was the beginning of the end of the chaotic period––1588-1594––when the newborn theater industry was in most danger of being destroyed by its government and church enemies. Marlowe, author of London’s first superhit, had just been assassinated, while within four months Marlowe’s patron and patron of the company that produced it, would be poisoned to death. That Titus and the two other Shakespeare plays published that spring were published anonymously just then can’t be seen as “typical” of anything.

The statement that “even the most celebrated plays by the most popular Elizabethan dramatists appeared anonymously,” blandly ignores the fact that Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, or, more accurately, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Lyly, were not just the most popular Elizabethan dramatists in 1594, they were the only Elizabethan dramatists in 1594!

Fact: there was no such thing as a professional playwright in Elizabethan England in 1594, nor would there be until Ben Jonson arrived on the scene later in the decade! This was the dawn of the English Renaissance! This brief period (from 1587 when Marlowe had his huge success with Tamburlaine) was the real birth of the English commercial stage as something more than a rich man’s toy. In fact, if we eliminate Lyly, (whose biography places him in the company of empty names like Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe), we have only two “most popular Elizabethan dramatists,” during the short period of 1594-1597: Shakespeare and Marlowe. And since we know how Marlowe’s attempts to function as a professional served him, we’re left, between 1593 and 1597, with only one: Shakespeare!

And so, without plunging into deep background, suffice it to say that with Shakespeare’s plays getting no accreditation, it’s no surprise that whoever published Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in 1590 left his name off the title page for the same reasons, whatever they were. As for Kyd, it’s so doubtful that he wrote anything but (perhaps) the translation of Tasso that’s the only thing that actually bears his name, that any comments on the authorship of The Spanish Tragedy belong to a separate discussion.

Shakespeare’s death

Shapiro’s argument that we authorship folks make too much of the lack of response to William’s death once again is utterly beside the point, as once again he confuses William’s person with the works of Shakespeare. Pointing to the publication of several of the plays three years after Williams’s death, in what way does this show concern for the man himself? After a description of the success of this publication and details, all beside the point, he makes what is a much more cogent comment:

Shakespeareans are still a bit mystified by the motives behind the Pavier quartos. Whatever led to their publication [in 1619], it’s obvious that surprisingly little time elapsed from news of Shakespeare’s death to determined efforts to see his collected plays in print” (241).

One might almost guess that the Grand Possessors had been waiting for the proxy to pass out of reach of any questioning before they moved to publicize his connection with the canon. And how about the fact that the finished book didn’t reach the bookstalls until a few months after Stratford’s wife too had passed on in August of 1623?

Shapiro’s comments on the dedicatory poems raise the issue of Leonard Digges, Jr., author of one of the poems in the Folio, and of another in one of its later editions. Digges was the grandson of the scientist Leonard Digges, an in-law of Sir Thomas Smith, Oxford’s tutor for the most formative years of his life.

No doubt there is more grist for my mill in Shapiro’s book, but this has gone on long enough. I must admit he has put one thing better than anyone else I’ve read, namely the paragraph on the “syndicate” that formed to produce the First Folio (241). I’m also pleased to note that he mentions my name as the author of an article published in Shakespeare Matters and makes frequent reference to articles published in The Oxfordian during my tenure as editor. His list of Oxfordian scholars, articles, books, etc. in the final Bibliographic Essay is perhaps the most complete anywhere in hardback. Like Alan Nelson and so many other orthodox scholars, we’d be a lot less well informed without him.

Too bad however that the right hand still remains so ignorant of what the left hand is doing; or perhaps I should say, that the left brain of English Literature (the Lit Crit crew) remains so utterly ignorant of what the right brain does (the artists themselves), then, now, and forever, world without end.

The Real Authorship Question

The Authorship Question is a lot bigger than just who wrote the Shakespeare canon. Bigger, wider, broader, and deeper. The problem isn’t just who wrote the works of Shakespeare, it’s more like who wrote everything that qualifies as fiction during the English Literary Renaissance? We have half a dozen genuine candidates for the role of Shakespeare, what about them? They can’t all have been Shakespeare.

Forget about the group theory, that is, any idea that a group of writers worked together on the plays the way they do today on screenplays. That’s nonsense. No great and unique work of literature every got written that way. That’s just as idiotic as the idea that Marlowe came back from the dead or that a 16th-century woman wrote Shakespeare. Let’s be serious.

And what about the other writers who have biographies just as weak as William’s? What about Robert Greene, whose later works sound so much like early Shakespeare, yet who has almost nothing in the way of a biography? Why should we know so much about Ben Jonson and nothing about Greene, whose career was only a little shorter than Jonson’s? What about Edmund Spenser who somehow managed to escape Marlowe’s fate despite his transparently anti-establishment beast fables? Or Thomas Nashe, who simply vanished after the Isle of Dogs disaster, unlike his co-authors who both wound up in jail?

What about John Lyly, who despite the popularity of his plays and Euphues novels, never published or produced another thing for the last 18 years of his life? Or Francis Bacon, who published nothing for the first 36 years of his life? What about the playwright John Webster, who has absolutely nothing in his documented biography to suggest that he was anything but the son of a coachmaker? What about George Gascoigne, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Riche, George Pettie, Thomas Kyd, and all the other authors with dodgy or nonexistent writer’s bios? And this is only the merest glance at the true size and scope of a question in which Shakespeare’s role is only one small factor, however large it’s loomed over time.

Since it seems the English Lit folks won’t, or can’t, make sense of this, it’s time to have a go at it from the History side. Fitting together personalities, biographies, dates and locations, I’ve pieced together a broad overview that explains this mess, one that fills in the gaping anomalies and creates a scenario that accounts for almost all the problems that the authorship scholars denote, be they Oxfordians, Stratfordians, Baconians, or Marlovians.

But first it’s necessary to understand why it happened the way it did.

The nature of the Reformation

It always boils down to terminology, to words. Much as they avoided the truth about the 20 years of war that tore the English society apart in the 17th century by calling it, or part of it, The Interregum, English historians have sugar-coated what should be called the English Revolution by calling it the Reformation. Yes, it was the English version of the Reform movement that was sweeping northern Europe at that time, but it was also, perhaps even more so, a political revolution. And although it didn’t reach the chaotic depths of the French or Russian Revolutions in later centuries, for those who were most at risk, it was just as devastating.

Hundreds of English families were torn apart, sons fled to the continent, parents imprisoned, their properties confiscated. Hundreds were burnt at the stake, or hanged, drawn and quartered, for the crime of wishing to pursue the religion of their fathers, or of attempting to create a new one with only minor differences from that chosen by the State, or for assisting friends and family members who were in trouble.

Church properties were given away, churches and other religious buildings were torn down, their stone used to build houses for the reformers and their friends. Law were passed, taking away the rights and prerogatives of those who refused to join the revolution, penalizing them with heavy fines, rewarding those who turned them in to authorities, thus opening the way for blackguards to destroy their neighbors and take their properties through false accusations. Where is there a difference here between what happened during the Elizabethan era and what happened in France and Russia and is still happening in places like Somalia, Burma, and East Timor?

What happens to important writers during times like these? Consider the atmosphere in 1775 when the members of the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence, the witticisms that accompanied the signing of what many believed would be their death warrant. Others who believed in the new nation refused to sign out of fear of British vengeance, of what it would do to their families were they to fail. Consider the fates of writer Alexander Solzenitzen and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov during the Stalin years, of playwright Vaclav Hamel during the Russian attack on the Czech Republic, of Chinese writers under Chairman Mao. Consider the fates of Rousseau, Ovid, Cicero, the list goes on. Why would England during its great revolution be any different?

Revolutions make changes in many other arenas than politics or religion. Consider how the French called each other “Citizen” during the Revolution, how the Russians called each other “Comrade”; how Stalin banned all art but the monumental worker style, or the Nazis burned the paintings of the “decadent” German expressionists, allowing only a cheap calendar style based on German folk sentiment; how they allowed only works by “Aryan” composers to be played at concerts.

When Oxford began writing, the atmosphere wasn’t all that different from the attitudes of the German “reformers” of the 1930s and ’40s towards anything but sentimental folk art. Fear of self-expression is evident in the works of Reformation pedagogues like Sir Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham. The standards during Oxford’s youth were different, but they were equally low––C.S. Lewis calls it the “drab era.” That Oxford used his status to create an opening for Renaissance ideals and ideas, not only for himself, but for other younger writers in whom he saw talent, is demonstrated in the prefaces he wrote for Clerke’s Latin translation of The Courtier and Bedingfield’s translation of Jerome Cardan. He knew from early on that he would have to dissociate himself and his name from the works he published. He simply had no choice. And thank God he did, or the English we speak today would be a different language.

Oxford used an age-old trick, publishing his and others’ works (chiefly Bacon’s though perhaps others as well) as though by someone who was not in any position to know the persons they were satirizing or the issues they were addressing. Those in a similar position who came after him used the same tactic, Bacon until the late 1590s and Mary Sidney until 1621. There may have been others as well. This continued for a relatively brief period, beginning with the earliest publications in the 1560s, and ending at about the time the First Folio was published.

Which is not to say that no one ever used this ruse again, or that no one during the period ever published under their own names. However, once the pattern is revealed, it becomes clear that those writers who wrote creative, original fiction, poetry, plays, pamphlets, novellas, and who stood to suffer if their identities were known, used pseudonyms or the names of persons they paid to act as proxies. Those who refused to conform, either to a style that the government would accept or to the use of phony names, were doomed to suffer, as witness Christopher Marlowe and to a lesser extent, Ben Jonson.

This, then, is the reason for the mares nest that is the literary history of the English Literary Renaissance, and nothing that the adherents of the Stratford story have to say will make a particle of sense until they begin to accept this as the background to the creation and publication of the works of Shakespeare, Robert Greene, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, and a dozen others with similar problems.

Oxford and Bacon

Many Oxfordians try to ignore Francis Bacon, probably out of rivalry for the Shakespeare crown, but there’s no way he can be dismissed. He was certainly a genius with words, as all of Europe but the English still recognize, and the second most famous English writer of the Reformation period, up there with Shakespeare on a pinnacle that far exceeds any others of their time. Given that the writing community was small, that they were cousins and neighbors in youth, only 11 years apart in age, Bacon is not only a big part of the story of the English Literary Renaissance, he’s got to be part of Oxford’s story too. The question is, how much and in what way?

As the first anti-Stratfordians, the Baconians did a lot of important preliminary work on the Authorship Question. They were the first to strip William’s biography of its fantasy trappings and the first to question the anomalies that have stumped orthodoxy ever since. They were wrong about Shakespeare (most of this research took place before Looney’s book on Oxford), but they were right about just about everything else, including Bacon’s authorship of at least two other canons that he, and only he, could possibly have written.

The 1910 book by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bacon was Shake-speare, gives the major arguments both against Stratford and for Bacon. Durning-Lawrence provides a short list of the leading lights he knew of then who scorned the Stratford authorship, among them Prince Bismark, who found it unlikely that someone of William’s background would have known, as Bismark himself certainly knew––and as he could see that Shakespeare knew––what life was really like at the Court of a Prince, not something that anyone, genius or otherwise, could possibly pick up from books or conversations in pubs. Durning-Lawrence discusses the paltry evidence for William’s presence in London, the six signatures, the damning (to William) preface to the 1609 publication of Troilus and Cressida, and other key points in the anti-Stratfordian argument.

Some of the most obvious anomalies in the Stratford story Baconians could explain via Sir Francis. Unlike William, Bacon was a courtier and had every reason to hide his identity. Unlike William, he had the kind of education that explained the Bard’s erudition. They could explain Shakespeare’s knowledge of France by Bacon’s two years in Paris in his teens. He was responsible for the Court’s entertainment at Gray’s Inn in 1595 where a version of A Comedy of Errors was performed, as he was also responsible, all or in part, for several Court masques under King James. Certain intriguing manuscript documents have survived that connect him with Shakespeare, more directly through the Northumberland MSS, less directly though also intriguingly through his notebook, Promus. Most significant is his comment in a letter to poet John Davies, on his way north to connect with King James VI, soon to be King of England, in which Bacon hopes that James will be kind to “concealed poets.” (Stratfordians quibble over his intentions, but fail to explain why else he would bother with this in a letter that was obviously meant to promote himself.) Luckily there’s no need to prove wrong most of the arguments on either side.

One of the most obvious things about Francis Bacon is his intellectual energy. From 1596 on he turned out a cornucopia of written works, some in English, some in Latin, some published, many not. He seems determined to put England on the world map, not only of literature, but of jurisprudence, science and philosophy as well. To rest content with the idea that this intellectual dynamo spent his youth doing nothing of note is more absurd than anything the Stratfordians have ever conjured up about William. Most geniuses begin their careers in their youth, many in their childhood or teen years; most people are at their peak of energy in their twenties and thirties. What was Bacon doing between 18 when he arrived back in England and 35, when he finally got a Court position? Absence of information hardly means he was doing nothing! Not Francis Bacon!

My scenario

Putting all the pieces together, both literary and historical dates, their shared high level of literary genius, their similar educations in Greek literature, English law and biblical studies, their family connection (Bacon was Oxford’s wife’s first cousin), their attitudes towards Essex and Southampton, Oxford’s passing reference to his “cousin Bacon” in a letter to Robert Cecil, plus a number of other clues from my own research that I intend to detail in later blogs and pages. Through these I hope to show how close they were at times, and how involved with each other’s lives and fates.

By combining Oxford’s data with Bacon’s, we hear, once again, the swish of Ockham’s razor, simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, leaving us with two cousins, one, the elder, the leader, the other, his student and amanuensis who began his own great career by trying his hand at every form of writing that was the great adventure of the reading class in his time, in poetry, plays, and pamphlets. This he did partly to impress his Court community, partly just for the fun of it and to extend his wings, but the forms used and the subjects chosen were chiefly to impress the “King of the Paper Stage.” During this process of learning and development, how could he help but adopt in any number of instances, the language of his brilliant older cousin?

I believe that we can see where Bacon enters into both the literary history of the time, though under assumed names, and also where he appears in the plays, put there, not by himself, but by his cousin. Most enlightening of all are the exhilarating exchanges published under cover of their adopted pamphlet identities in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a virtual feast of “Pickle Herring” that continued well into the mid-’90s, when finally, with Oxford silenced by his loss of credit and Bacon finally able to begin working his way into what he felt was his true calling, the retooling of the English legal system, their literary partnership came to an end.

Forced into ever deeper cover, Oxford would continue to fulfill his own unique literary destiny via the London Stage, using it to create and disseminate a modernized English language while Bacon continued his climb to high office. Someday, further study may suggest one final “collaboration” in 1622-’23 when the Earl of Pembroke, following his mother Mary’s death and Bacon’s fall from grace, gave Francis the task of editing those remaining Shakespeare plays that required the master’s touch before they could be set in type. If in so doing the weary wordsmith tucked in a few subtle references to himself it was as much for love and reverence of their author as his own battered ego.

Keep in mind that this is my scenario only (though borrowing much from the Baconians), and that I make no claims for it, other than the same one I keep making, which is that, whether true or not, my version accounts for most of the anomalies in four arenas: Shakespeare, the Stratford biography, Bacon’s biography, and the Nashe Harvey pamphlet war, along with a myriad of lesser confusions in the general history of the times, both political and literary. Unfortunately, Oxford and Bacon are being portrayed today more as opponents in the struggle for the Shakespeare Crown than as the partners and teammates that they actually were in putting English at the forefront of world literatures.

The smoking canon

We hear all the time from both sides that we have no firm proof of Oxford’s hand in Shakespeare’s plays, no “smoking guns.” The fact is that we have dozens, scores, hundreds of perfectly acceptable facts, the kind that in a less controversial inquiry would never be questioned. Some are more obvious than others, but when they’re all connected they provide a perfectly understandable picture of Oxford’s creation, not only of the plays and poems of Shakespeare, but of the London Stage and the English periodical press that bore them. The problem is not finding answers, we have the answers, it’s getting the media to pay attention. Hey, this guy created you! Aren’t you curious?

Lacking direct evidence, we turn, as does every historian working earlier than printing, with proximity, timing, identification, anomalous absence or a combination of these. Here are a few of our “smoking guns”:

Proximity and identification: Shakespeare’s metaphors reflect all the special interests of Oxford’s tutor, Sir Thomas Smith, with whom he lived and studied from age four to twelve. The Law, Greek and Latin literature, English history, horticulture, distilling, medicine, astrology/astronomy, falconry, have all been noted by scholars as areas in which Shakespeare showed an unusual level of knowledge.

Proximity and identification: Shakespeare’s primary sources reflect titles in Oxford’s tutor’s library list. Even some of the more arcane sources are to be found there.

Proximity and identification: Half of Shakespeare’s plays take place in the towns in Italy that Oxford visited in 1575, a personal experience reflected in the numerous references to things that only someone who had been to those towns at that time could possibly have known. (Oxfordian scholars have provided all the evidence for this that anyone could ever require; hopefully some day some of it will be available in hardback).

Proximity and timing: The London commercial Stage, the venue in which Shakespeare’s genius took form, was created within months of Oxford’s return from Italy in 1576. It came to life in two locations, the small private indoor theater for the wealthy in the Liberty of Blackfriars, which Oxford must have known from his documented involvement in Court entertainments in the 1560s and early ’70s; and at Burbage’s big public theater, located on land still largely controlled by his companion from Cecil House days, the Earl of Rutland.

Proximity and timing: The innovative round wooden theater built by Burbage in Norton Folgate in 1576 was based on a design by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius (as shown by mainstream scholar Frances Yates). During Oxford’s childhood with Smith he was privy to a Latin edition of this ancient work that he could easily have researched again on his return from Italy. In a visit to Siena he may even have seen such a round wooden theater in action, built by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio as a dry run for his great marble indoor Teatro Olimpico, built a few years later on the same Vitruvian principles of sound amplification. The Italians were immersed at the time in creating the most beautifully resonant wooden stringed instruments ever made.

Identification: Shakespeare’s plays reflect events in Oxford’s life, most notably seven that focus on a situation that reflects the breakup with his wife that took place on his return from Italy in 1576. Pericles, Cymbeline, All’s Well, Much Ado, A Winter’s Tale, and Othello, all involve a villain who breaks up a marriage or engagement by suggesting to a highly suggestible man that his wife has been unfaithful. There’s even a hint of this scenario in Measure for Measure (Angelo’s cruelty towards Mariana) and in Hamlet (his otherwise mysterious harassment of Ophelia). In Oxford’s life this villain was his cousin, Ld Henry Howard.

Identification and anomalous absence: Several early history plays that are commonly regarded as sources for Shakespeare’s history plays, feature Oxford’s antecedents in speaking roles: The True Tragedy of Richard the Second features the 9th Earl, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth features the 11th, and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third features the 13th; all of them playing, to a greater or lesser extent, the roles they actually played in history. While rewriting these plays in the 1590s As Richard II, Henry V, and Richard III, the author kept the characters based on the ancestors of other well-born patrons of the London Stage like the Stanleys (Ld Strange’s Men, Derby’s Men), the Pembrokes (Pembroke’s Men), and Howards (Ld Admiral’s Men). He eliminated all the speaking roles for the ancestors of only one of these patrons, the Earl of Oxford.

Proximity: After returning from Italy in 1576, Oxford left his former residences in the West End and Central London, moving north and east to Bishopsgate where he renovated a manor walking distance from all four of the commercial theaters then in operation in London, to the south, the two City theater inns, the Bull and the Cross Keyes, to the north in Norton Folgate, Burbage’s big outdoor Theatre and the smaller Curtain.

Proximity and timing: By 1580, when Oxford set up housekeeping at Fisher’s Folly in the theater district of Shoreditch, he happened to be located one door from where 14-year-old Edward Alleyn lived and worked at his parent’s Inn, the Pye (later known as the Dolphin). Later, as the lead in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Alleyn would become the first superstar of the London Stage.

Proximity, timing, and identification: In the 1580s, during his early years at Fisher’s Folly, Oxford’s secretaries included the authors of poetry, plays and novellas Anthony Munday (author of Zelauto, dedicated to Oxford), John Lyly (author of plays for Paul’s Boys), Thomas Watson (author of Hekatompathia, A Passionate Century of Love), and George Peele (author of The Arraignment of Paris) all known by historians as members of what they term the “University Wits.” Other members of this group can be connected to the Fisher’s Folly group though less obviously, among them Thomas Lodge (author of Rosalynde, the source for As You Like It), Robert Greene (author of Pandosto, the source for The Winter’s Tale), Thomas Kyd (whose Spanish Tragedy has a close relation to Hamlet) and Christopher Marlowe, whose plays contain a number of shared tropes with Shakespeare.

Proximity and identification: All the other candidates for Shakespeare that one hears bruited about were individuals closely connected to Oxford in some way. Francis Bacon was his cousin and his neighbor during his teen years; the Earl of Derby was his son-in-law; Mary Sidney was his youngest daughter’s mother-in-law; Emilia Bassano was his neighbor in her childhood and was raised and educated by his sister-in-law. With Oxford as Shakespeare, all of these, most notably including Marlowe, can be even more closely connected.

Identification: The one identification that most mainstream scholars is that Ld Burghley, the Queen’s Lord Treasurer, was the model for Polonius in Hamlet. They fail to mention that he was also Oxford’s guardian and father-in-law, which suggests that his daughter, Oxford’s wife, was the model for Ophelia, that Queen Elizabeth was the model for Gertrude, and the Earl of Leicester was the model for the murderous Claudius. Would you eager that everyone know that you had written something accusing one of the most powerful men in England of murdering a rival, or the Queen of complicity? And these are only one example of other identifications of important Court figures that can easily be made if Oxford is seen as the author.

Timing and identification: The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s Sonnets are known as the “marriage sonnets” because they urge the “Fair Youth” to marry. That the Fair Youth was the young Earl of Southampton has been agreed upon by enough scholars to accept it as fact. These seventeen sonnets have been dated (by scholars unknown to each other) to the early 1590s at a time when the teenaged Southampton was being pressured by his guardian, Ld Burghley, to marry Oxford’s daughter.

Identification: Emilia Bassano, whose profile perfectly fits that of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, grew up near Fisher’s Folly. In her teens she lived with and was educated by the Countess of Kent, Oxford’s sister-in-law. In her late teens and early twenties she was the mistress of Ld Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who founded The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the acting company that grew rich on Shakespeare’s plays. That the Lord Chamberlain’s Men could also be seen as the company of the Lord Great Chamberlain is the kind of double meaning that Shakespeare was so fond of. There are a number of contemporary documents in which the Lord Great Chamberlain is referred to simply as “the Lord Chamberlain.

All the world of London knew Oxford as the Lord Great Chamberlain, a title he was born to, one that represented 17 generations of support for the English Crown. They knew he’d been the Queen’s ward, that he was the son-in-law of the Queen’s Lord Treasurer, that he’d had the temerity to break off with his wife, Burghley’s daughter, and that he’d gotten one of the Queen’s maids of honor with child for which he’d been banished from the Court for three years. All of London knew this about him. So let’s consider how the Queen, Burghley, and the many other Court figures he portrayed, many in a less than kindly light, some as out and out villains, might have felt about all of London knowing that it was the Lord Great Chamberlain himself who, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra put it, had thus “boyed” them on stage for all the world to hiss or laugh at.

Really now, how much more smoke do we need?