Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

Now stop talking about this

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Who wrote Shakespeare?

I mentioned recently that the question of whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare rouses tempers like no other question in Shakespeare scholarship. Recently, the former editor of the Shaksper forum encountered an anti-Stratfordian who was proclaiming the conspiracy theory that the Earl Of Oxford wrote Shakespeare. Naturally, the editor told the Oxfordian to go and fuck himself. I wasn’t going to write about these ideas because they are ludicrous. But they have re-surfaced in the Guardian recently. So here we are…

The next Shakespeare Book Club is ***Sunday 23rd June, 19.00 UK time***. We will be discussing As You Like It. There will then be a summer break. I update the schedule for Shakespeare here. All Shakespeare posts are here. (These links work better in your browser than in the Substack app… I don’t know why.)

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Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

Genius attracts the menacing plague of conspiracy just as great beasts are pestered by clouds of insects. The passions of the deranged never rest as the buzzing of flies will never cease. And so the crank ideas of pattern-seekers and the ever-suspicious are never still. The greatest genius inevitably attracts the greatest menace, which is why there is a constant crowd of amateur literary detectives “discovering” Shakespeare’s true identity.

The idea that the establishment, the academy, a league of scholars and a den of archivists, have been concealing the truth about Shakespeare animates some people so persistently that they devote decades to their cause. And they have nominated half the world as alternatives to the one true bard: John Florio, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby…

The Oxfordians are the most persistent in their cause, like soldiers patrolling remote islands unaware the war has ended years ago. Most recently Derek Jacobi and Margo Anderson wrote to the Guardian defending the Oxfordian cause. Michael Billington, the Guardian theatre critic, had written that The Merry Wives of Windsor shows that Shakespeare must have written Shakespeare because no aristocrat or scholar could have written such a rambunctiously middle-class play. He provoked Jacobi, and, as everyone who uses the internet knows, conspiracists need very little provoking.

The hinge of Jacobi and Anderson’s response is that the Earl of Oxford stayed in Windsor in 1570, and was therefore able to write about it from personal experience. The fact that Oxford got married there, and that his marriage went awry due to his wife’s infidelity is proof that The Merry Wives, which is about a love triangle, is biographical.

The idea that such a clichéd plot could ever be evidence that it was authored by a man who stayed in a town more than a quarter-century before the play was written is laughable. England was full of adulterers, cuckolds, fornicators, and all the rest of it. These are standard plots for a reason. The fact that Oxford’s life “resonates” with Shakespeare’s plays in many other ways, they argue, is why this theory has persisted for over a century. This is the small beer that froths a league of such believers.

One thing they forgot to mention is that the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, a decade before Shakespeare stopped writing, which puts him underground for the writing and performances of Othello, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest,Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen. Nor do they include the fact that, as an aristocrat, Oxford’s life is known in more detail than someone like Shakespeare’s. The fact that Oxford’s life resembles in some major details the work of the writer globally recognised as the most universal and insightful of authors is proof of nothing.

But the bigger mistake, I am sorry to say, is Michael Billington’s. His reasoning is just as faulty as the Oxfordians. Shakespeare is not presumed to be the author of Shakespeare because one of his comedies has the attitudes of a “smugly ascendant bourgeoisie”.

We know Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because there is enough documentary evidence to prove the claim.

First, let’s deal with the basic details of the plays. Macbeth, as Jonathan Bate says in The Genius of Shakespeare, cannot have been written before 1605 because it is a gunpowder plot play. This isn’t a question, as the Oxfordians hilariously claim, of the play being written before 1604 and then topical references added in later (yes, they truly believe this). The whole play is a response to the gunpowder plot. It is simply unthinkable before 1605. Similarly, The Tempest relies on a source only translated in 1603 and a real shipwreck that happened in 1609. They ignore, too, the technical changes made possible by the move to an indoor theatre and the stylistic changes that occur later in his career. Is Oxford supposed to have divined all this before he died? Indoor theatres require candles to be changed between the acts, and Shakespeare’s later plays have much clearer five-act structures. Oxford is supposed to, what?, have guessed that a few such plays would be needed later on?

Then there is the fact that no contact was ever recorded between Oxford and the King’s Men. And yet we do know that Shakespeare worked for them. We know he owned part of the theatre. We know where he lived. We have his leasehold agreements, records of his court cases, his will, his coat of arms; we know who his parents were, where he was christened, that one of his children died; we have accounts of him as a writer from his contemporaries; there are many, many published books with his name on them; a large consortium of people who knew him got together after he died to publish the First Folio and wrote huge praises of him. We don’t just know a lot about his life, we know about documents which were later lost—for example, we know there used to be an inventory attached to his will, which would have listed what books he owned. There is just too much evidence of the real Shakespeare, who we can trace from Stratford to the Globe and back again, to make the Oxfordian claim anything other than elaborate nonsense.

A major premise of the Oxfordian argument (and the other lunatics’ claims) is that a rural boy could not have been a splendid genius. Oxford (or Bacon, or whoever) had the education to write such plays. This ignores the fact that Shakespeare was a grammar school boy, at a time when grammar schools had been expanded so much that Francis Bacon, and many others, complained of elite over-production—too many bookmen, not enough labourers. That’s part of why there was such an audience for his work.

Grammar school education was rigorous and expansive. It is entirely consistent with the historical record that Shakespeare’s school gave him the Latin grounding that informs so many of his plays. It is entirely consistent with the curriculum he followed that he would have been a literate, enquiring person, who went on to read Plutarch and Montaigne and others in translation, works which informed his plays. To be an Oxfordian, you do not have to doubt the historical record, you have to doubt the very idea of a non-aristocrat, a mere school-boy, being a genius. There are no mysterious gaps to explain in Shakespeare’s education. The Oxfordian movement is a conspiracy of snobs.

Then there is the problem of direct testimony. Jonson and Shakespeare became friends and Jonson left many direct accounts of the bard. As did Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator. As did several others. Indeed, so obvious was to it to Shakespeare’s contemporaries that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare that the first speculations that someone else might have written the plays didn’t appear for two-hundred and fifty years. To be an anti-Stratfordian, you have to wilfully ignore the mass of evidence about Shakespeare and start piecing together speculations, coded interpretations of the sonnets, and contorted explanations of the timeline. You have to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

To go any further into the history of these strange and clotted ideas would be to dignify fantasy. The idea that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare is a kaleidoscope of error and naivety, believed only by people who find it credible that grand conspiracies are not just possible but the only true explanation for what happens; it is akin to thinking that human civilization is capable of defrauding itself while the evidence walks among them in the street; it is like believing today that there is code in the Bible which, when deciphered, will reveal the true date of the apocalypse.

The weight of evidence, which is carefully laid out in Bate’s book, is very clear: Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It’s time to stop talking about this false question unless and until someone comes up with some new evidence, rather than hypothesis, speculation, or class-based hand-waving “theories”. Stop wasting your time.

Here’s one coded message we can read into Shakespeare’s work. “Take no care who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are!”

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The next Shakespeare Book Club is ***Sunday 23rd June, 19.00 UK time***. We will be discussing As You Like It. There will then be a summer break. I update the schedule for Shakespeare here. All Shakespeare posts are here. (These links work better in your browser than in the Substack app… I don’t know why.)

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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. NOT SHAKESPEARE.