Diana Price’s groundbreaking “Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem,” originally published in 2001, was “the first book to undertake a systematic comparative analysis with other literary biographies”. Instead of making a case for a particular writer as author of the works of Shakespeare, it simply and devastatingly contrasts the complete absence of documented authorial evidence for William Shakspere with proven ‘Literary Paper Trails’ of 24 contemporaries of the man the world calls William Shakespeare.
When Lisa Wilson and Laura Wilson Matthias, sisters and filmmakers, interviewed Diana Price in 2011, they became so inspired by her ‘Literary Paper Trails’ investigation that they dedicated an entire sequence to it in their film Last Will. & Testament. You can view the sequence here.
The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt featured it, too, highlighting Price’s comparative chart of Elizabethan/Jacobean writers one of the most compelling arguments in Shakespearean Authorship Studies.
“Long may Diana’s work encourage balanced, unbiased enquiry” say the Wilson sisters. They and Diana Price have generously given permission for the SOF to share the following transcript of their interview.
[Note on terminology: William Shakspere = William Shakspere of Stratford on Avon; William Shakespeare = The author of the works published under the name William Shakespeare]
Inspired Unorthodoxy – An Interview with Diana Price
DIANA PRICE: The purpose of my book, if I had to sum it up, is to attempt to legitimize a question that is often characterized as an illegitimate question. What I tried to do was to go back to every scrap of evidence that appears in all of the biographies focusing primarily on the documentary biographies and testing all of the evidence to see if it was contemporaneous, if it was personal, if it truly belonged in William Shakespeare’s biography or William Shakspere’s biography, and with particular respect to the literary allusions to see if they were personal, because literary allusions can be book reviews. A book review that can be written on the basis of having read what somebody wrote is not necessarily personal allusions, so you can’t say, “I think that Stephen King writes great books. Boy, what a wonderful tongue he has.” You’re speaking about his literary attributes. You are not speaking about Stephen King, the person. And so I went back to test all that evidence for one reason, and that is to see what was it that Shakespeare, Shakspere, really did for a living. Now in that sense, I am different from the orthodox biographers because they don’t have to ask what it was that Shakspere did for a living. They already know. They assume he was the writer, and everything follows from that assumption, and they then fit in all of the literary allusions and all of the biographical and theatrical and every piece of evidence as though it supported a literary biography. They don’t stop to ask that first question. What Shakspere did for a living, and in that sense, we are framing our questions in a very different way. We are looking at the same evidence, but they are not testing the evidence in the same way I am.
The Shakespeare Authorship Question
DIANA PRICE: Nobody questions whether a man named William Shakspere lived and died in Stratford on Avon. We know he did because there are dozens and dozens of documentary records that prove that, but that doesn’t answer the larger question. Did he write the works that have come down to us under the name William Shakespeare, and if we had a clear-cut answer to that we wouldn’t be here discussing an authorship question.
Orthodox Biographies
DIANA PRICE: Most of my research was delving into the orthodox biographies, and it was the orthodox biographies themselves that convinced me that there was an authorship problem because in my view, they weren’t stopping to ask what he did for a living, and they were citing all these pieces of documentary evidence, none of which supported that one statement, “He was a writer.” They all had to go to posthumous evidence to make the case. They still have to go to posthumous evidence to make the case, and when you look at, whether it’s Katherine Duncan Jones or Stanley Wells or James Shapiro or any of the authorities who have been writing biographies, they are going to quote the Stratford Monument and the First Folio. Well, they’re right. They are undeniable pieces of evidence that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Shakspere of Stratford has personal documentary evidence to prove that he was the writer the title pages proclaim him to be, and when you accept those pieces of evidence you are left with the problem that he is the only writer from the time period for whom you must rely on posthumous evidence to make your case. Shakespeare is the only one for whom you have to do that. It is a unique deficiency.
William Shakspere of Stratford
DIANA PRICE: William Shakspere was a commoner, and as a commoner, his life is extraordinarily well-documented. There are over 70 pieces of documentary evidence in his dossier. That’s comparatively speaking a pretty good scrapbook. But his life as a writer is not documented, so there’s the blank. What you have are 70 odd pieces of documentary evidence, and when you are talking about proportions as if you had 70 pieces of evidence you can expect a least a third of those pieces of evidence to reflect on his professional activities, and in Shakspere’s case that’s true. In fact, over half of his evidence relates to professional activities. Those professional activities include his shareholding in an acting company, his real estate purchases, his grain dealing, his money lending, even his acting profession. But none of those professional records provides support for one simple statement. “He was a writer.” And that’s why I call it a “well-documented blank,” well-documented but nothing to support the statement. “He was a writer. He was a writer by profession.”
Literary Paper Trails
DIANA PRICE: I want to start with an apograph that I chose for my chapter entitled ‘Literary Paper Trails’. And this is by H.N. Gibson who wrote the Shakespeare Claimants, which is a rebuttal to people like me who think someone else wrote the works of Shakespeare. He writes, “Most of the professional dramatists of the time are in exactly the same position as Shakespeare. There are no records to connect them with authorship, not even a letter to show that they had anything to do with books and writing.” Now that’s a categorical statement and I had read several statements similar to that and I wondered if it was true. In fact, as far as I knew, when I first got into this subject . . . we’re talking about a guy who lived 400 years ago, the Globe Theatre burned down, there was the Great Fire of London, who knows what kind of records decayed over time, there was probably not anything for anybody. So trying to decide whether a statement like that was true or not told me, well, I’ve got to go looking at what kind of records other writers left behind because probably they didn’t leave anything either. So I went looking specifically for what I call ‘literary paper trails’. These are pieces of evidence that can support the statement, “He was a writer by profession.” That’s the order.
So, my two dozen writers included the best documented of all who would be Ben Jonson to some of the worst documented who would include Thomas Kyd and John Fletcher, and Christopher Marlowe. And yet from Ben Jonson, down to John Fletcher, I found some sort of evidence. Even if it was just one book or one letter, or one payment, I found something to prove that they wrote for a living. It was actually pretty astonishing. When I started off, I was going to do both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis. I had to give up on the quantitative analysis because I was overwhelmed with pieces of evidence. All that’s fine and good until you get to William Shakspere of Stratford. I could not find any contemporaneous evidence that qualified as a literary paper trail to support that one simple statement, “He wrote for a living.” You have to go to the posthumous evidence to make your case. So to me, that comparative chart, going back to what I quoted where this guy said that no other writer had anything, any evidence to connect them to writing their books or anything, that’s patently false. It’s patently false. It’s demonstrably false. And not only do I have little checkmarks in little boxes, I’ve got the footnotes with the actual documentary record or the book or whatever it is that proves that this writer was a writer by profession.
Genius
DIANA PRICE: People like me are often accused of being snobs because we cannot conceive that William Shakspere could not have overcome these shortcomings of a provincial upbringing and an education of whatever sort it was and have gone on to write these works of genius, and I would say if you’re saying I’m a snob that’s an appeal to an egalitarian sensibility that, it’s completely misplaced. I would never ever say Shakspere could not have overcome these deficiencies in his surroundings and education. I’m not saying that at all. Could he have done it? He sure could have. But if he did he would have left some records behind him to show how he did it! The life and development of a genius may be incomprehensible to us mere mortals but it shouldn’t be untraceable! We can trace the lives and development of an Einstein or a Mozart or even a Dante who lived before Shakespeare. You can’t use his genius to explain away the educational gaps. If he was the genius he’s supposed to have been, he should have left some paper trail behind him to show how he developed that genius, how he got that education. Where are his books? Where is his access to other people’s books? We don’t have to guess where Ben Jonson got a book. We don’t have to guess if Thomas Nashe ever had a book in his hands. We don’t have to guess if Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser exchanged books. We know because we’ve got the documentary evidence to prove it. There are no books in Shakspere’s dossier, period.
Now they are going to explain that away by saying they might have been included in the inventory in his will. And if you look at say Samuel Daniel’s will, well he didn’t have any books in his will, and Richard Hooker the theologian, he didn’t have any books in his will. Well Richard Hooker did have an inventory and there are books in that inventory. In Samuel Daniel’s case, he mentions his publisher in his will. In Shakspere’s will, there is no inventory. If there was one filed at the time, who knows what was in it. But in his will there is no hint, not only no books, there is not one mention of anyone in the literary circles he supposedly traveled in and the will itself is not the expression of a literary man.
First Folio Prefatory Material
DIANA PRICE: It’s important that anyone who reads through any of prefatory material in that First Folio that first collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Pay close attention to the wording of how they are identifying this man from Stratford as a playwright. It’s absolutely incontrovertible. It’s straightforward. Where you run into the trouble is when you read all the rest of the information in that prefatory material because what you’re going to find is a lot of ambiguity and a lot of conflicting signposts. They are going to be pointing like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz in two different directions.
Ben Jonson
DIANA PRICE: Honest Ben is one of the most difficult characters in the Shakespeare biography and if I could reach across the ages, I would love to strangle him. He is the best witness for the prosecution and he is also the best witness for the defense. He is a master of ambiguity, and even when he comes out with categorical statements, if you read a few lines later, you are going to find something to get you to scratch your head and reconsider what you just read. He is a master at crossing the signposts, pointing in both directions, he is also a master at using the classics to underscore the point he is trying to make.
Permission granted by Diana Price and Lisa Wilson.
The Diana Price Interview, February 4, 2011 in New York City, 1604 Productions,
First Folio Pictures, Last Will. & Testament ©2012
First Folio Pictures
Produced and Directed by: Lisa Wilson and Laura Wilson Matthias.
