By Tom Woosnam
On June 16th Henry Oliver published this on his blog: https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/shakespeare-wrote-shakespeare.
It deserves a response.
During the lifetime of the man from Stratford on Avon whose 1564 baptism entry reads Guilielmus filius Johannes Shakspere (emphasis mine), plays and poems were published under the name William Shakespeare. That fact is not in dispute.
A problem arises, however, when we find that not one of the 70+ documents attached to Shakspere’s life i.e. the primary source evidence of his family records and business dealings, gives even a hint that the Stratford man was an author of plays or poems. Even Sir Stanley Wells, the honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, acknowledges that fact. This is in stark contrast to 24 contemporaries of William Shakespeare’s (the author) from Ben Jonson to Christopher Marlowe for whom we do have documented evidence of literary authorship. See Diana Price’s brilliant book Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography for primary source evidence.
This makes William Shakespeare the only author since the invention of the printing press for whom all evidence of authorship is posthumous and, as it turns out, ambiguous. This is why people have questions.
A case can be made that the Stratford man with associations to London theatres had some connection with the publication of the First Folio in 1623 but assuming a priori that Shakspere and Shakespeare had to be the same person is as questionable as saying that the Canadian actor Graham Greene and the English novelist and playwright Graham Greene were the same person because they were both active in theatre in London in the 1970’s.
Now on to some responses to Mr. Oliver whose blog comments below are in italics:
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.
Time for another piece of primary source evidence – no one knows when any of the Shakespeare plays were written. For many of them we have evidence of publication, registration, performances etc. but no primary source evidence of when they were quilled. There’s a simple reason for that – there are no manuscripts or notebooks to tell us. We can, however, rely on Stratfordian scholarship using the productive lifetime of the Stratford man as bookends. Hence Mr. Oliver’s insistence that Oxford’s death removes him as an authorship candidate. For a full primary source reference, see Kevin Gilvary’s Dating Shakespeare’s Plays
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.
Mr. Oliver is correct. Life resemblances are not proof, but the staggering number of them is overwhelming and when taken in the light of Occam’s Razor which says that given all the evidence from two choices the one with the fewest assumptions is likely to be true, the Oxfordians’ one assumption – the name ‘William Shakespeare’ was a pseudonym – is hard to refute. See Oxfraudfraud.com for a more complete overview of this point.
To the heart of the matter from Mr. Oliver:
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.
We notice that Mr Oliver doesn’t actually say why Macbeth is a gunpowder plot play, which is that a Jesuit defense tactic used by the Gunpowder Plotters, ‘equivocation’, is mentioned several times in it. So far so good. But what Mr. Oliver fails to tell us is that same defense tactic was central to high profile Jesuit trials in 1581 (Edmund Campion) and 1595 (Robert Southwell), so why does the use of ‘equivocation’ mean the play has to be linked exclusively to 1605? Similarly, there is mention of the low price of wheat in Macbeth but wheat prices had been low many times before 1605. As for the voyage of the ship the Tiger to Aleppo, Tiger was a common name for a ship: “John Eldred …was already a well-to-do merchant when ‘upon Shrove Monday 1583’ he ‘departed out of London in the ship called the Tiger, in the company of Mr. John Newbery, Mr. Ralph Fitch, and six or seven other honest merchants.’ ” Wikipedia from the DNB.
Similarly, The Tempest relies on a source only translated in 1603 and a real shipwreck that happened in 1609.
Time for more primary source evidence. Mr. Oliver must tell us why the shipwreck in question was the only possible one. He fails to point out that in Principal Navigations (1598-1600) by Richard Hakluyt there is an account of a 1593 shipwreck in Bermuda, and a decade earlier the Earl of Oxford himself had invested in—possibly even owned—the Edward Bonaventure, one of the ships involved in that wreck. Another one of those “Small coincidences and arbitrary parallels” that Sir Jonathan Bate is fond of pointing out.
But why Bermuda? Because of Ariel’s lines from the play in the First Folio:
Safely in harbour
Is the King’s shippe, in the deep Nooke, where once
Thou calldst me up at midnight to fetch the dewe
From the still-vext Bermoothes, there she’s hid;
“Bermoothes” was the name for The Bermudas in early modern England. What Mr. Oliver fails to point out is that The Bermudas was also the name of a vice-ridden part of London well known enough to be mentioned by Ben Jonson in his play The Devil is an Ass, Act 3 scene 3. It was an area where one could obtain, amongst other things, alcohol made in stills. So, whereas the orthodox story is that Ariel’s line means the Bermudas are still vexed by a tempest
Thou calldst me up at midnight to fetch the dewe
From the still-vext Bermoothes…
one could pose a more reasonable interpretation recognizable to all London audiences of the time that it would have meant an order to get dewe (liquor) from a part of town (the Bermoothes/Bermudas) that was plagued by liquor stills i.e. still-vexed.
And how likely is it that dew is on the ground at midnight (or shortly thereafter given that Ariel could travel so fast he could “…drink the air before me, and return Or ere your pulse twice beat.”)?
More, and this is paraphrased. Please see Mr. Oliver’s original for what’s missing
… And yet we do know that Shakespeare … 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;
All true but then we get to Stratfordian logic
…we have accounts of him (i.e. Shakspere according to Stratfordians) as a writer from his contemporaries;
No we don’t. We have contemporaries writing play reviews and comments on not the man but the author Shakespeare who, with no primary source evidence confirmation, is assumed to be the man from Stratford. Remember that this chap is, as stated above, the only writer since the invention of the printing press for whom all the evidence is posthumous. And ambiguous.
… there are many, many published books with his name on them;
Well only by the circular logic whereby Shakspere of Stratford, the man with not a scrap of primary source evidence of being an author, becomes Shakespeare because posthumous evidence shows he acted on London stages and primary source evidence proves he was an investor in a theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were performed.
A major premise of the Oxfordian argument (and the other lunatics’ claims)
Ad hominem attacks (lunatics’) are what one uses when one has no primary source evidence to refer to, so you attack the person. You will notice there is no such language in this reply.
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’s repetitious to keep using the phrase “primary source evidence” but two things have to be pointed out – Elizabethan grammar school curricula were not uniform, though we do have curricula from some schools, and we have no idea what the Stratford grammar school curriculum was. We do know that it didn’t include Greek, though, so one must ask how the author was able to use Greek sources unpublished in England in many of his plays. See Tanya Pollard’s Greek Tragic Woman on Shakespearean Stages, Oxford University Press 2017.
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.
Oh dear, the ad hominem snob argument again. Walt Whitman and Malcom X, both Oxfordians, were snobs apparently. Who could have guessed?
Then there is the problem of direct testimony. Jonson and Shakespeare became friends and Jonson left many direct accounts of the bard.
The reader will know by now where we’ll go with this – primary source evidence. In contrast to many other authors Jonson wrote about, he never wrote a word about Shakespeare while Shakspere was alive. The first record we have of this friendship comes in the preface to the First Folio seven years after Shakspere’s death. Hardly direct testimony.
Many direct accounts of the bard? Please provide them. A personal friendship is indicated in the extract from Jonson’s commonplace book, ‘De Shakspeare Nostrat’, in which he declares ‘I loved the man’, a phrase used equally well for people we love but don’t actually know, like George Clooney, but Jonson gives no personal or biographical details. At no point does Jonson link the author to Stratford on Avon.
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.
No, Fletcher left no direct evidence of William Shakspere being an author. As for the two-hundred and fifty years chestnut, see Bryan Wildenthal’s Early Shakespeare Authorship Doubts in which he documents, with primary source evidence, that the first doubts actually surfaced during the playwright’s lifetime.
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.
To ignore the mass of evidence one has to first be shown it, of course.
You have to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
As for six impossible things, Stratfordians might recognize a projection of themselves in: The Tale of Wondrous William
