fajrdrako | Who Wrote Shakespeare?

"Who wrote Shakespeare?" by John Michell is a stupid book. But like many stupid books, it has a certain insidious charm.

I disagree with his basic premise which is, "Where there is smoke, there's fire" - that is, because people have doubted the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, there must be good reason for that doubt. Michell purports to be 'objective' and not to favour one theory over another, but examining the different theories in itself is implication that they are worth examining.

If this doesn't make it clear, I'll spell it out that I am a Stratfordian - I believe that the man who lived in Stratford on Avon and acted in London was the man who wrote the plays attributed to him. And I found all the arguments to the contrary progressively feeble.

The arguments tended to centre around snobbish negatives - "Shakespeare couldn't have known about courtly manners, he was a nobody from the country", or "Shakespeare couldn't have known so much, he never went to university". So it is argued that he was really the Earl of Southampton (who was a nobleman) or Christopher Marlowe (who went to Cambridge). But each theory has its flaws - the person involved died too young, or was born too late, to have written all of Shakespeare's plays, so we get the notion of different people using the same pseudonym.

I thought another set of arguments cancelled themselves out. There was the idea that Shakespeare the author knew too much about Italy, so he must have been there - posit that he was actually a nobleman who is known to have been to Italy. (Why always a nobleman? Why not one of his entourage, a servant or secretary? A soldier, a pilgrim, a traveller?) Then it is argued that "Love's Labours Lost" shows too much knowledge of the court of King Henri of Navarre, so the author must have been there. Lord Strange was
there for a while - therefore, Lord Strange must be Shakespeare. Likewise, "Hamlet" shows a good knowledge of Denmark, so the author must have been there. The Earl of Oxford visited Denmark, therefore he must be Shakespeare. But neither of these gentlemen was in both Denmark and Navarre, let alone Italy as well.

Doesn't it ever occur to them that Shakespeare must have talked to people? We may well be looking at his sources - he talked to Lord Strange about Navarre, or someone in his entourage. He asked the Earl of Oxford (or one of his theatre-loving attendants) about Denmark.

Michell comments in passing that there is no one 'of the stature of Shakespeare' about whom so little is known. This begs the question of who else is of the stature of Shakespeare. Homer? We know much less about him (or her) than we do about Shakespeare, but perhaps it's unfair to go so far back into protohistory for a name, however illustrious. Aesop? Sophocles? Virgil? Dante? Okay, we know more about him. Moliere? Goethe, Dumas? We're slipping here into authors who are mostly read in their own nations. Of the great works of the past, many are anonymous, or written by a number of people - the Mahabharata, the Bible, the Greek myths, Arabian Nights. I'd say Shakespeare is unique in stature, globally, and the lack of information about him in his time may indicate (as per Greenblatt, in "Will in the World") that he
deliberately kept a low profile, but the lack of infomation isn't remarkable. Queen Elizabeth was doing her best to head a thriving legalistic bureaucracy, but that wasn't a computerized age and paper perishes.

Look at Marlowe, for example, in comparison. Shakespeare's exact contemporary, born two months before Shakespeare - or at least, before the actor in Stratford was born. We have information about him in various ways, and then periods of silence and mystery. There are records of his studies at Cambridge, his scholarship, his student's stipend. We don't have that from Shakespeare, because he didn't go to Cambridge. We have records of Marlowe's arrests, trouble with the law, time spent in prison or in being interrogated by the Privy Council, or his friends being interrogated about him - there's nothing like that for Shakespeare because he was never in trouble with the law for anything. There are records of Marlowe's death and inquest, but not for Shakespeare, because he wasn't murdered. In contrast, the records of Shakespeare's life we do have - his marriage license, his buying of property, and his will - are things we don't have for Marlowe, since Marlowe never married, never bought property, and never made a will.

I don't see too much of a mystery about any of that.

Michell didn't convince me that there was any reason to doubt the accepted history of the life of Shakespeare of Stratford, and he made me conclude that the evidence that anyone else wrote a large number of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, is too feeble for serious consideration.