Looking for a different installment?
Part II
Part III (w/ Poll)
“...Life’s but a walking shadow....”
.
PROLOGUE: Some of you may be stopping by only to exclaim that “Who wrote Shakespeare?” is a question as pointless as “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” while others may already have another settled opinion.
I am not here to affirm or deny and only pray you not dismiss the players without some small reward in the form of your kind attention -- or at any rate that you not shoot anyone, at least until after the Prologue.
Credit as onlie begetter of this farrago may be claimed by our own niemann here at DK, whose comments in several Shakespeare diaries prompted your servitor to pledge a something on the subject; a pledge most graciously accepted without security nor due date. But niemann equally may disclaim it, if niemann will, for how could anyone but the presenter be to blame for such an ungainly production ?
I was, indeed — another story — long waylaid and held in durance vile by a certain terrible brigand called Perfectionism. For this, apologies.
Rather than a debate, I hope you may be pleased to imagine this diary as a masque in three acts, where a series of characters parade across the stage, pageant-wise, personating various strata of society and variable fates, either rising or falling.
There have possibly been more books written about Shakespeare than anyone else but God, not to mention countless articles. I am no expert, nor claim any more than a scattering of knowledge. All errors are, of course, my own, and your corrections (and additions, and opinions) welcomed.
By your humble servant,
THE AUTHOR
%%%% Playbill %%%%
I apologetically post this diary in three parts, on successive evenings; otherwise tl/dr. Nine candidates, one after the other, could only conduce to sleep. But for your forewarning, here is a register of our cast, every one of whom has been seriously proposed at the true Bard. They will cross the stage alphabetically in three acts, with William Shakespeare of Stratford considered under “S.”
First act, Sunday:
1. Sir Francis Bacon, later Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Alban
2. Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
3. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
Second act, Monday:
4. Aemilia Bassano Lanier
5. Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland
6. Mr. Christopher Marlowe
Third act, Tuesday:
7. Sir Henry Neville
8. William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon
9. William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby
And Epilogue, with POLL.
Bare facts
Scholars date the first plays with which William Shakespeare is generally credited to 1590-1591. These were the three Henry VI histories.
The first positively dated notice of William Shakespeare as playwright, so far as we know, came in 1592. Playwright and author Robert Greene had just died when his publisher came out with a posthumous pamphlet attributed to Greene that slammed various writers.
The essential quote: "[T]here is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country."
This — referring to an Aesop tale and playing on a line from Henry VI, Part III — seems to accuse Shakespeare of plagiarism (or perhaps, niemann has pointed out, merely of being an actor-producer with an overblown ego, neglecting to credit those who supplied his lines).
Two accomplished narrative poems under Shakespeare’s name appeared in 1593 and 1594.
Also in 1594, for the first time, two of the plays attributed to him were published (without crediting the author, which was typical for the time). Starting in 1598, his name appeared on title pages of individual plays.
Shake-speare’s Sonnets were first published in 1609.
The First Folio collection of Shakespeare plays was compiled by actors and published in 1623, with an poem by playwright Ben Jonson, apotheizing Mr. William Shakespeare as translated to the heavens in constellation form, like some classical figure of myth.
In general it has been understood that the poet was the actor and theater shareholder William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1564 (his life will be discussed in more detail in our thied installment, Tuesday). A deifying process accelerated in the 1800, when private groups began to hold celebrations of “The Bard’s” birthday. The 300th anniversary was marked by a two-week extravaganza in Stratford.
A few individuals, even so, are known to have privately questioned the authorship as early as the 1700s. The first published doubts appeared in 1852, when Chambers's Edinburgh Journal came out with an anonymous piece called….“Who Wrote Shakespeare?’
This “cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” heralded what has become almost an industry.
Today — while almost all academics hold that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare" -- there are a few dissenters, and topic remains perennial in lay discussions of the playwright.
So who “Wrote Shakespeare”? The candidates. Here we go!
1. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Lord Chancellor of England, later Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Alban
Primary exponent: Delia Salter Bacon (1811-59), who stated her theory most completely in The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857). She believed that Sir Francis headed a secret anti-monarchical, republican faction who disseminated their views covertly, through the playhouses.
Other notable adherents: Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Walt Whitman.
Primary argument: The author of Shakespeare’s plays must have been someone with had a top-flight education and aristocratic connections. A tradesman’s son from Stratford-Upon-Avon could not have possessed the playwright’s knowledge of such topics as court manners, law, foreign cities, and statecraft, let alone the literary sophistication displayed.
Additional arguments: Alleged codes found in the published works matched Bacon’s interest in cryptography.
Brief bio: Son of Sir Nicholas and Anne (Cooke) Bacon, Francis Bacon entered Cambridge University at age 12. He studied and traveled in Europe, spent a legal apprenticeship at Gray’s Inn, London, and went on to serve in Parliament.
Bacon authored an extraordinary array of political tracts, religious commentary, legal treatises, philosophical works, letters, volumes on the sciences and technology, including cryptography, and essays on miscellaneous topics. He composed as well occasional court entertainments, and some poetry.
Bacon’s continued literary prominence has been largely due to his Essays, published between 1597 and 1625. (These were much admired and well known to educated people, into the 20th Century.) In The Great Instauration (1620) and other treatises, Bacon sought to catalog all human knowledge and establish a scientific method.
Money problems followed the death of Bacon’s father. Under King James, Bacon’s star finally ascended. In 1613, he became attorney general and in 1617, Lord Chancellor. The next year he received the title of Lord Verulam, and in 1621, Viscount St. Alban.
Disgrace, however, followed rapidly; in the same year, 1621, Bacon was tried and convicted for taking bribes. He retired from official life and died five years later. Another famous work, his utopian New Atlantis, appeared posthumously.
Francis Bacon was probably gay. Married for the first time at 45 to Alice Barham, age 14, he later disinherited his wife, citing infidelity. There were no children. (Such child marriages, and worse, were distressingly common, as we will see.)
Websites/publications: The Francis Bacon Society, founded in 1886.
Surprise: Delia Bacon was not “just some nut,” but a formidably gifted woman.
Forced to leave school at 14, she nevertheless supported herself handily as popular lecturer. Her claim about Francis Bacon was inspired not by any imagined family connection — which she never claimed -- but by the example of Higher Criticism, then being applied to Biblical and Homeric texts.
Delia Bacon also wrote. She beat out Edgar Allen Poe for a $100 short story prize. She was encouraged by actress Ellen Tree to compose a play for her (unfortunately never finished).
She enjoyed the friendship and respect of such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired her as a critic, but required more solid evidence for the authorship theory; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote the introduction to her book; Catherine Beecher, her former headmistress at school, a sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and author in her own right; and Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph.
Multiple stresses likely contributed to a nervous collapse at the end of Delia Bacon’s life. She had always suffered from self-doubt about the compatibility of her religion and career. A romantic betrayal shamed her before her minister brother and her whole church, probably contributing to the breakdown. She began behaving oddly on a trip to England, and died in an asylum.
Fun facts: Delia Bacon’s belief that a code could be found embedded in the plays was taken up and expanded by others, including Ignatius Donnelly in The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) and Dr. Orville Ward Owen, who invented a decoding machine, in Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (6 vols., 1893-95).
Dr. Owen (mentioned above), believing he had broken the Shakespeare code with his machine, went on to attribute to Bacon the works of several other Elizabethan and Jacobean authors.
Further, Owen concluded that Sir Francis was actually the son of Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Owen went digging for evidence in England, to no avail. He died broke. (Not so fun.)
Although modern cryptographers point out elementary misconceptions in Owen’s method, his efforts did contribute indirectly to advancements in the field during both World Wars.
Leading counterargument: Where on earth could a man as busy as Bacon have found time to “write Shakespeare”?
Further counterargument: Thinker, yes; prose stylist, agreed; as a poet, rather plodding.
Bacon poetry sample
The Translation of the CXLIXth Psalm
O sing a new song to our God above,
Avoid prophane ones, ’tis for holy quire:
Let Israel sing songs of holy love
To him that made them, with their hearts on fire:
Let Sion’s sons lift up their voice and sing
Carols and anthems to their heav’nly king….
O let the saints bear in their mouth his praise,
And a two-edged sword drawn in their hand,
Therewith for to revenge the former days
Upon all nations that their zeal withstand;
To bind their kings in chains of iron strong,
And manacle their nobles for their wrong.
Expect the time, for ‘tis decreed in heav’n,
Such honor shall unto his saints be given.
The works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban and Lord High Chancellor of England. London: Printedfor C. and J. Rivington, 1826. Retrieved from GoogleBooks. [Originally printed in1625, with a letter from Bacon to George Herbert.]
2. Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604)
Primary sponsor: Provincial English schoolmaster John Thomas Looney [pronounced “Loney”] (1870-1944), in “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1920).
Other notable adherents: Sigmund Freud. (His disciples were less convinced.)
Many others followed Looney, supporting and tweaking the hypothesis. Some claimed to find embedded codes in the works, indicating not Bacon, but De Vere.
Montague Williams, in The Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare (1931), proposed that De Vere led a consortium of writers, tasked by the Queen with producing propaganda.
Another offshoot of the De Vere theory claimed the Earl was in fact the son of Queen Elizabeth I by a former guardian, Thomas Seymour. According to this scenario, the plays and poems are believed to carry messages begging for royal acknowledgment.
Under a further elaboration, Edward De Vere in turn slept with his own mother, the Queen, producing a son, who was raised as Henry Wriothseley, 3th Earl of Southampton (dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis).
Websites/publications: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship
The De Vere Society (UK)
Primary argument: Shakespeare’s poetry and plays–-often cited, Hamlet–-must not only come from someone with higher education and connections, but reflect the author’s personal, emotional and spiritual history. Shakespeare of Stratford, as an uneducated, petty, provincial businessman, fails to fit the bill; De Vere would do so. Quite a few incidents in De Vere’s life chime with the plays and sonnets.
Additional arguments: De Vere’s involvement with theater as a patron, and his skill as a poet and playwright, are attested, though little so-identified work of his survives.
Brief bio: Heir to an earldom, Edward De Vere lost his father and succeeded to the title at age 12. He became a ward of Queen Elizabeth’s counselor, William Cecil (one of several underage heirs Elizabeth placed in this position, a profitable deal for Cecil and herself). His mother remarried. On coming of age at 21, De Vere found favor at court, entered the House of Lords, and married Cecil’s daughter Anne, 14.
De Vere traveled widely in Europe, brought Italian fashion to the English court, and jousted before the Queen. He was a generous patron of the arts, including theater; his own poetry and playwriting earned praise.
He also proved a quarrelsome spendthrift. At different times he stabbed a servant to death, deserted his bride, offended the Queen, got crosswise with numerous other courtiers, impregnated a royal maid of honor, was wounded in a street brawl, and briefly suffered imprisonment. He dissipated his estate.
After bearing several children, including one son who died young, Anne De Vere went to her grave in 1588, age about 30. De Vere quickly remarried and produced an heir. His final years were marred by debts and legal struggles.
With the advent of James I in 1603, De Vere’s fortunes seemed on the mend, but within the next year, he was dead.
Leading counterargument: Edward de Vere died in 1604, after which Shakespeare produced some ten more plays, including Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.
Counter-counter-argument: De Vere wrote a stock of plays before his death, which were brought out on stage afterwards. And/or some attributions and dates are wrong.
Surprise: Looney, the original De Vere adherent, was a religious skeptic, deep-dyed social conservative, follower of Auguste Comte, and former official in the Church of Humanity --an English sect described by a detractor as “Catholicism minus Christianity.” Shakespeare had been one of his Church’s saints.
Fun fact: A panel of three Supreme Court justices (Brennan, Blackmun and Stevens) found for De Vere during a stunt Shakespeare authorship “trial” in 1987.
De Vere poetry sample:
.
Were I a king I might command content
Were I obscure unknown would be my cares.
And were I dead no thoughts should me torment,
Nor words, nor wrongs, nor love, nor hate, nor fears.
A doubtful choice of these things which to crave,
A kingdom or a cottage or a grave. Vere.
.
More poems attributed to Edward De Vere
3. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621)
Primary sponsor: Robin Williams, Ph.D., in Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? (2006)
Primary argument: Williams argues for her candidate not as certain, but as possible. Mary Sidney Herbert had the extensive education, access to books and manuscripts, the talent, connections, early encouragement, practice in poetic art, and lifelong interest in theater that could have allowed her to write the plays.
Strong female characters and relationships in the plays suggest a woman’s perspective. Many of the Shakespeare sonnets, including those addressed to a young man, could have been written by a woman (others might have been penned only as exercises, or by someone else).
Additional arguments: Ben Jonson’s tribute in the First Folio of Shakespeare contains oddities. Among others, he refers to THE AUTHOR as the “sweet swan of Avon,” which seems to make little sense; the swan, however, was an emblem used by Sir Philip and Mary (punning on Sidney and cygne, the French for cygnet). Further, another Avon river flowed past the Herbert estate.
Brief bio: Mary Sidney ranked among the most brilliant and educated women in Elizabethan England, with knowledge of numerous languages and with interests ranging from alchemy to archery.
Sister and close companion of courtier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney was married off at age 15 to the 43-year-old Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. She bore him four children and was widowed by age 40, in 1601.
Mary and her brother Philip remained exceptionally close, even after her marriage. She was always his first audience. After his tragic death on a military campaign, age 31, Mary completed some of his unfinished work and saw his writings through the press.
Henry and Mary Herbert were exceptionally generous patrons of the arts. Beneficiaries included a theater troupe who acted Shakespeare plays. Mary herself performed in masques at Court. As a widow, Mary continued lending support to writers.
She became a published author herself. Most of her known works are translations, one of them of a French play about Antony and Cleopatra. (For a woman, translation was deemed more respectable than self-expression, which could get you labeled as promiscuous.)
Her sons William and Henry, though unfavored by Queen Elizabeth, gained immense power under James I. Older son William sponsored Shakespeare’s acting company; the First Folio is dedicated to him.
Websites/publications: The Mary Sidney Society
www.poetryfoundation.org/...
Surprise: The two distinguished sons of Mary Sidney Herbert appear in some ways shady characters. William Herbert, for instance, admitted getting a lady at court pregnant but refused to marry her. Younger son Henry wheedled his own separate earldom out of King James by exploiting the monarch’s attraction to handsome young men. Robin Williams suggests that William Herbert could have had a role in suppressing the truth about his mother’s writings and may even have destroyed her will.
Fun facts: As a widow Mary Sidney Herbert lived openly with a 10-years-younger lover. Letters give a wonderful glimpse of the 52-year-old Countess at a health resort in Belgium–“taking the waters,” partying, smoking tobacco, shooting pistols, and altogether leading the life of Riley.
Leading counterargument: Whoever “wrote Shakespeare” needed an intimate practical knowledge oftheater, including the actor’s craft, stage machinery, and particular capabilities of the particular acting troupe. This would demand a close, day-to-day personal involvement in the low-class entertainment business—a thing hardly possible for a Countess.
Further counterargument: Several of the sonnets would unlikely for a high-born lady, comfortable in her own skin, to have composed. (Just one example, Sonnet 71, indicates the lover is of lower social status than the beloved, whose reputation could be tarnished by the connection.)
Counter-counter argument: The Sonnets might be by more than one person; mixtures and misattributions by publishers were common in the period, when no copyright existed.
Mary Sidney Herbert poetry sample
To the angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney
To thee, pure spirit, to thee alone addressed
Is this joint work, by double interest thine,
Thine by his own, and what is done of mine
Inspired by thee, thy secret power impressed.
My Muse with thine, itself dared to combine
As mortal stuff with that which is divine:
Let thy fair beams give luster to the rest…
Oh, when from this account, this cast-up sum,
This reck’ning made the audit of my woe,
Sometime of rase my swelling passions know
How work my thoughts, my sense is stricken dumb
That would thee more than words could ever show,
Which all fall short. Who knew thee best do know
There lives no wit that may thy praise become….
Receive these hymns, these obsequies receive,
(If any mark of thy secret spirit thou bear)
Made only thine, and no name else must wear.
I can no more: Dear Soul, I take my leave;
My sorrow strives to mount the highest sphere.
To be continued — tomorrow — same time, same place
…
Note: Midsummer not necessarily limited to the actual day of the summer solstice but can refer to “the period of time centered upon the...solstice...[T]he northern European celebrations...take place on a day between June 19 and June 25….." (Wikipedia)
Elizabethan diarist John Stow about traditional midsummer in London:
[T]he wealthier sort also before their doors near to the said bonfires would set out tables on the vigils furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbours and passengers also to sit, and to be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for his benefits bestowed on them. These were called bonfires as well of good amity amongst neighbours that, being before at controversy, were there by the labour of others reconciled, and made of bitter enemies, loving friends, as also for the birtue that a great fire hat to purge the infection of the air. On the vigil of St John Baptist [tonight, June 23] ... every man's door being shadowed with green birch, long fennel, St John's Wort, Orpin, white lillies and such like, garnished upon with garlands of beautiful flowers, had also lamps of glass, with oil burning in them all night, some hung branches of iron curiously wrought, containing hundreds of lamps lit at once, which made goodly show.
Continue to Part II
Bibliography
James, Brenda and William D. Rubenstein, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare. Los Angeles: Regan (HarperCollins Publishers), first U.S. edition, 2006.
Lynch, Jack. Becoming Shakespeare: The Unlikely Afterlife That Turned a Provincial Playwright Into The Bard. New York: Walker & Co., 2007.
Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Williams, Robin P. Sweet Swan of Avon: Did A Woman Write Shakespeare? Berkeley, Calif.: Wilton Circle Press, 2006.