Class War Over Shakespeare's Identity

THE outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and his ebullient successor have clashed over the true identity of the playwright.

Mark Rylance, who leaves the Globe at the end of this year, has always doubted that the author was William Shakespeare. He recently endorsed a theory that Shakespeare’s work was composed by a team of writers led by Francis Bacon.

Dominic Dromgoole, who will join the Globe from the Oxford Stage Company, has branded Mr Rylance’s favoured theory “baloney” and its supporters “snobs”.

“I think that all this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney,” he told The Times. “There is a mass of historical evidence that shows there was a working-class playwright from Stratford writing the plays. All of this other stuff is nonsense. It says more about the people who are putting forward the theories than Shakespeare himself.”

He believes that supporters of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, are motivated by snobbery. “People can’t accept that he was working-class. They can’t accept that his father was illiterate, and that he wasn’t posh.”

Mr Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, last year credited Francis Bacon as the author. “I became more and more convinced that Francis Bacon was the doorway into it and had to be involved in some way,” he said. “Undoubtedly the Stratford actor (Shakespeare) is involved in the creation of the plays because he is a shareholder in the Globe but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays.”

In a foreword to The Shakespeare Enigma, a book by Peter Dawkins that proposes a team of writers led by Bacon, Mr Rylance wrote that he had difficulty reconciling the Stratford actor’s access to learning with the intellectual references in the plays.

“The amount of learning in the plays has been downplayed and the opportunities that the actor Shakespeare had to learn have been played up,” he wrote. “I do argue that there is cause for reasonable doubt that Shakespeare the actor wrote the Shakespeare plays and poems, and alternative theories should be weighed fairly without resort to slander of the individual proposing the theory — an all too common occurrence in the media.”

Mr Rylance has not limited his authorship theories to Bacon. He is listed by the Shakespeare Oxford Society as endorsing Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. “I find that the unfortunately limited evidence of the Stratfordian authorship theory seems to reveal little more than monetary motivation,” he wrote in a 1997 society newsletter.

“I find the work of the Shakespeare Oxford Society reveals a character, in Edward de Vere, motivated to use the mask of drama to reveal the true identity and nature of his time, as only someone in his position would have known, and as was the well established habit so clearly demonstrated in Hamlet.”

Sceptics of the Oxford attribution mention that De Vere’s poems are not of a high standard and that his death, in 1604, is inconvenient for a playwright who went on to write 11 plays after that date.

Professor Anne Barton, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, described De Vere’s death as “an insuperable problem”. “It is like the attempt to attribute Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon. Like that one, this (theory) is a product of snobbery, that a Stratford grammar-school boy could not have written the plays, and I’m thoroughly fed up with it.”

FOR ‘All this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney. People can’t accept that his father was illiterate and that he wasn’t posh’

‘Shakespeare was involved, but I have not seen a convincing argument that he was capable of writing the plays’

How to explain differnces in play dating: How could Oxford be the author since some of the plays were written after 1604, the year he died.

There is no such thing as an unambiguous, standard chronology of Shakespeare's works. Consider the chronology published in the Riverside Shakespeare. In it, eleven plays are dated after 1604: Lear (1605), Macbeth (1606), Antony & Cleopatra (1606-7), Coriolanus (1607-8), Timon of Athens (1607-8), Pericles (1607-8), Cymbeline (1609-10), Winter's Tale (1610-11), The Tempest (1611), Henry VIII (1612-13) and Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). On the other hand, the Pelican Collected Works (1969) lists alternative dates going back to before 1604 for all these plays except two The Tempest (1611) and *Henry VIII (1613).

As this discrepancy illustrates, there is considerable variety of opinion within the ranks of orthodox scholars regarding the actual dates of composition of many plays. Setting such variation aside, let's consider the four plays which have the strongest claim to be dated after 1604: Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest and Henry VIII.

Chronology: Lear Stratfordians often argue that Lear cannot be dated before 1603 because it mentions the names of demons apparently derived from Harsnett's Egregious Popish Postures (1603). This argument makes two assumptions which are both open to serious question. First it assumes that no alternative source could supply the names in question. Second, it assumes that the author could not have seen a copy of Harsnett in manuscript or Harsnett's source, the Catholic "booke of Miracles." And as Charlton Ogburn points out (The Mysterious William Shakespeare, p. 385), Oxford in fact had ample access to the "booke of Miracles" through an acquaintance and neighbor of his throughout the 1580s and 90s. Additionally, the diarist Phillip Henslowe recorded a performance of a King Leare in Easter of 1594. Would it not be the most straightforward conclusion that in fact an early version of Shakespeare's Lear was already kicking around during the 1590s?

Chronology: MacBeth The comic porter scene (II.3) in Macbeth makes several passing references to the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation and the "equivocator who could not equivocate his way to heaven." According to scholars like Henry N. Paul (The Royal Play of Macbeth), equivocation did not become a significant subject of political controversy until after the spring 1606 trial of the Jesuit martyr Father Henry Garnet, convicted for his role in the Gunpowder Plot. However, Henry Paul is quite mistaken in his conviction. The doctrine of equivocation was well known in England at least by the mid-1590s (and much earlier on the Continent) when Father Robert Southwell was executed in 1595 for practicing Catholic rite. Indeed, the manuscript Treatise on Equivocation confiscated from Garnet in 1606 most likely dates to the early 1590s, before Southwell's execution. The Porter's remarks and with it the main reason for dating Macbeth after 1600 could in fact just as easily refer to Southwell. Once more, the Stratfordian chronology hangs by a spider's thread of so-called "documentary evidence."

A secondary argument for a post-1604 date of Macbeth, also advanced prominently by Henry Paul, holds that the play was composed in honor of King James' ascension to the throne. As Riverside editor Frank Kermode summarizes the argument: "Although J. Dover Wilson in his New Cambridge Edition of the play argues for an Elizabethan version of Macbeth (performed in Scotland), it seems obvious that the play celebrates the establishment of the first Stuart King of England, and that it cannot, therefore, be earlier than 1604." (p. 1308) But what is "obvious" to Professor Kermode may perhaps seem less than obvious to others. There is not a scintilla of evidence for any such performance of Macbeth to celebrate James' coronation. And of the plays in the Shakespeare canon, Macbeth is the darkest and most disturbing, presenting a brutal and purposeful murder of the Lord's anointed king. It is to this day regarded with such anxiety that theater tradition superstitiously forbids the use of its name - you must refer to it as "the scottish play". What could be more improbable than staging such a play to celebrate the coronation of the new monarch?

Chronology: The Tempest like Lear, is dated after 1604 almost exclusively because of a putative "source", Sylvester Jourdain's A Discovery of the Bermudas (1611). However, Jourdain's supposed influence on The Tempest is a phantom of Shakespearean orthodoxy. Not only is the play devoid of any substantive influence from Jourdain (i.e. by borrowing specific phrases or images), but several alternative sources describing shipwrecks in the New World or the Bermudas were extant much earlier.

Richard Hakluyt's 1600 Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation Vol. III records an eyewitness account by a Captain Henry May of the shipwreck of the Edward Bonaventure in Bermuda in 1593. This ship, it turns out, was at one point owned by Edward de Vere himself: a 1582 letter from the explorer Martin Frobisher to the Earl of Leicester states that Oxford "bares me in hand he wolle beye [will buy] the Edwarde Boneaventar" (Miller, Vol. I p. 449). Considering the hordes of Stratfordians who blindly believe The Tempest to be their trump card, the above bears repeating: not only were there several pre-1604 source texts for the play's shipwreck imagery, but one of the ships wrecked in the Bermudas was previously owned by the man the Oxfordians suggest was the author.

Chronology: Henry VIII Shakespeare, it is often claimed, came out of retirement to collaborate with John Fletcher by writing Henry VIII in 1613. The Riverside, among other prominent authorities, pays credence to this story. In the 18th-19th centuries, however, almost every major scholar (among them Johnson, Theobald, Steevens, Malone, Collier and Halliwell and Elzi) dated the play to Elizabeth's era (i.e. pre-1603). The 1613 date depends on the sole authority of Sir Henry Wotton, who records seeing a performance of a play of Henry VIII presumably Shakespeare's as a "new" play in a 2 July 1613 letter. In the 20th Century, perhaps in response to the need to shore up a chronology which would *prima facie* exclude the possibility of Oxford's authorship, the Wotton letter has been accepted as definitively establishing the play's date of composition. But was Henry Wotton in any position to know whether the play, even if it was staged for the first time in 1613, had not actually been written ten or fifteen years earlier? Stratfordians ask us to assume he was. Yet, of three other accounts of the burning of the Globe theatre during the staging of Henry VIII in June 1613, no one else refers to the play as new. Like with the other "post-1604 plays," the documentary link Stratfordians claim to put Henry VIII beyond 1604 turns out to be an ever-fraying thread.

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