by Tom Regnier
Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press (2013). This 6,000-word review was originally published in Shakespeare Matters, v. 12, no. 3 (Summer 2013) (pp. 28–33), and in slightly revised form in Brief Chronicles, v. 5, pp. 193–204 (2014) (PDF available here), and republished here on the SOF website on March 26, 2018. For a more concise 2,000-word review of the same book, also by Tom Regnier, see the “Oxfordian Response” to it published on the website on July 19, 2013.
A few preliminary observations on Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (hereinafter referred to as SBD):
First, the book’s central message is that Shakespeare’s works are not to be read as having any connection with the author’s life. While the relationship between an author’s life and his works would seem to be a worthy topic for exploration and discussion, the authors of SBD are adamant that it is not debatable. Nevertheless, the book accuses its opponents of dogmatism.
Second, the man from Stratford’s authorship is taken as “given” in the book, and the evidence supporting it is mentioned only in passing, with little acknowledgement of the ambiguities inherent in it. Yet SBD accuses Shakespeare skeptics of being fanatics.
Third, the authors of SBD show little familiarity with the best anti-Stratfordian scholarship, most of which is never mentioned in the book. They focus on the craziest and least impressive anti-Stratfordians (Delia Bacon gets three chapters) and frequently misstate anti-Stratfordian scholarship when they bring it up at all. Meanwhile, SBD accuses anti-Stratfordians of ignoring the evidence.
[pullquote]Worst of all, the book makes a concerted effort to displace the word “anti-Stratfordian” with “anti-Shakespearian,” arguing that if you don’t believe in the Stratford theory of authorship, then you don’t believe in Shakespeare.[/pullquote]Fourth, SBD takes an unbearably condescending attitude toward those who doubt the traditional theory of authorship. It at least admits that some anti-Stratfordians are reasonable people but asserts that reasonable people can hold unreasonable views. Worst of all, the book makes a concerted effort to displace the word “anti-Stratfordian” with “anti-Shakespearian,” arguing that if you don’t believe in the Stratford theory of authorship, then you don’t believe in Shakespeare. And SBD accuses its opponents of being bullies.
Fifth, SBD is dripping with appeals to authority. Don’t question the professionals, who know better. “Open-mindedness” is a sin, at least when it comes to the authorship question. And SBD accuses “anti-Shakespearians” of snobbery.
Sixth, SBD does not attempt to answer the crucial question of how the Stratford man acquired the tremendous knowledge evident in the plays. SBD does not even acknowledge that the question exists. But the book compares anti-Stratfordianism to religious faith.
SBD is a book of propaganda, not scholarship. It is a web of attitudes, not ideas. Its method is to lull the reader into drowsy acceptance, not alert skepticism.
It tries to shame the reader into agreeing with it for fear that he will seem odd or eccentric. I hope that every person who has doubts about the traditional authorship theory will read this book very closely and make a list of its many logical and evidentiary fallacies.
Literature as Biography?
Consider the proposition that there was no connection between an author’s life and his works, at least in the Elizabethan age. Matt Kubus, echoing James Shapiro, argues in chapter 5 of SBD that the problem with reading the works biographically is that it assumes that there is an “inherent connection” between the author and “the content of his works.”
Before the Romantic Era, presumably, writers were more self-effacing, much too modest to write about themselves. They wrote more objectively about life, teaching parables about how to live as a member of society: not how to be a rebel, but how to successfully fit in. But is it really all that simple? Did human nature change all of a sudden during the Romantic Era?
I suspect that even before then, writers were expressing themselves, only not so obviously as the Romantics did. Doesn’t the fact that a writer chooses to write a certain story tell us something about him as a person? Maybe the story doesn’t follow the facts of his life like a thinly disguised autobiography, but a writer tells a story because it speaks to him in some way. Isn’t it conceivable that all literary writing is, deep down, self-revelatory, that authors give themselves away in their writings in ways that they aren’t always aware of?
Besides, weren’t the seeds of the Romantic Era sown in Hamlet? Was there ever a character so aware of his own thoughts, his own struggles? I believe that it is an open question for any author how much and in what ways he reveals himself in his writings. Indeed, it should be a rich area for exploration and discussion. But the Stratfordians have decided to close that door, and the poorer they will all be for it.
The Case for Stratford
Stanley Wells (chapter 7) attempts to bolster the case for the Stratford man by listing every historical reference to “Shakespeare” up to 1642. As Wells admits, however, no reference to “William Shakespeare” before 1623, when the First Folio was published, explicitly identifies the writer with Stratford. All the references to Shakespeare up to that time are references to the written works of “William Shakespeare,” whoever that was, but not necessarily to the Stratford man who died in 1616.
Because any evidence linking the works to Stratford is posthumous, Wells argues that we can’t refuse to credit posthumous evidence. I agree that we shouldn’t refuse absolutely to consider posthumous evidence. But while we might place some reliance on it, we are surely justified in giving it less credit than contemporary evidence. In legal terms, I would say that posthumous evidence is admissible, but a jury may be correct in giving it less weight than contemporary evidence. Wells argues that “if we refused to accept posthumous evidence we should have to refuse the evidence that anyone has ever died.” This comment is ridiculous. Of course a person cannot report his own death, but evidence does not have to be self-reported to be reliable.
In looking for evidence of the Stratford man as a writer, the testimony of other people is perfectly admissible. But a report right after an incident is more likely to be reliable than a report issued several years later. In the law of evidence, a statement made at the time of an occurrence is considered more reliable than a statement made long after the event, especially when a motive to fabricate may have arisen between the time of the original incident and the time of the later statement. It is exceedingly odd that no written record clearly links the Stratford man to the works of Shakespeare until seven years after his death, and skeptics are right in seeing that as a weakness in the Stratford theory.
Andrew Hadfield (chapter 6) makes a roundabout attempt to answer Diana Price’s thesis in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography that the Stratford man, unlike all other literary men of his day, left no literary paper trail during his lifetime. While Hadfield never mentions Price, he almost completely concedes her main point by saying, “there are virtually no literary remains left behind by Shakespeare outside his published works, and most of the surviving records deal with property and legal disputes” (emphasis added). Hadfield doesn’t explain what the “virtually” refers to. He goes on to cloud the issue by pointing out that there are gaps in the historical records of many Elizabethan playwrights: we don’t know, for example, specifics about Middleton’s religion, Dekker’s or Munday’s education, or Nashe’s date of death. This may be so, but Hadfield evades Price’s point that for all of these writers there is contemporary evidence, linked to each man personally, of a literary career; for the Stratford man, there is none. This could mean that the evidence is lost, but it could also mean that it never existed. Considering the many anomalies in the existing evidence (none of it linking the Stratford man personally to the plays until seven years after his death), Shakespeare skeptics quite rightfully suggest that something doesn’t add up.
In chapter 10, authors Mardock and Rasmussen reveal the astounding discovery that the thirty-one speaking roles in Hamlet can be performed by only eleven actors who play double or triple roles because — get ready for the revelation (sound of trumpets) — certain characters do not appear onstage at the same time! This type of information is so dazzling that James Shapiro even repeats it in his Afterword because it “proves” that Shakespeare had to be a professional man of the theater. But, realistically, is a playwright who writes a play with thirty-one characters likely to put them all onstage at the same time? Isn’t it possible that an earl who had his own theater troupe (such as Oxford or Derby) might be aware of some of the practical problems of putting on a play? And the “doubling” revelation certainly does not by itself disqualify Christopher Marlowe as the Bard.
[pullquote]Different stylometrics analyses come out with different answers as to who collaborated with whom on what…[/pullquote]The general reader may be most impressed by MacDonald P. Jackson’s discussion of stylometrics (chapter 9), which “proves” by computer analysis of grammatical patterns and word usage that the Stratford man wrote the vast majority of Shakespeare’s plays with a little help from other playwrights of his time. Many readers will readily believe anything a computer tells them, but a computer is only as good as the data and programs that go into it. If the program is flawed, the result will be flawed. Stylometrics, while it uses computers, still has its glitches. How do we know? Different stylometrics analyses come out with different answers as to who collaborated with whom on what, as Ramon Jiménez has demonstrated.1 Several years ago, Donald Foster attributed a poem called “A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter” to William Shakespeare based on a stylometric computer analysis. Later analyses by Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers showed Foster’s attribution to be flawed and that the true author may have been John Ford. Foster admitted his error in 2002.
Besides, the most that stylometric studies show, as Jackson describes them, is that the person who wrote the bulk of the plays sometimes collaborated with others. They cannot prove that that central figure was the Stratford man because there is no known writing unquestionably belonging to the Stratford man to be used as a standard. As Ramon Jiménez has said, stylometric analysis “can never be more than a portion of the evidence needed to [identify the work of an individual author]. External evidence, topical references, and the circumstances and personal experiences of the putative author will remain important factors in any question of authorship.” SBD urges us not to doubt the Stratford man just because Shakespeare scholars don’t always agree among themselves about such matters as who the Bard’s collaborators were. Apparently, disagreement is acceptable as long as everyone agrees that the Stratford man was the main author — a premise that SBD never questions.
Battling Pygmies, Ignoring Giants
Stratfordians have always been skilled at the sophistic “straw man” technique of restating one’s opponent’s argument in its weakest form and then demolishing that argument to make plausible-sounding, but inherently flawed, arguments. Here, they raise this ploy to an art form, usually by attacking the weakest spokespersons for their opponents’ views. Their preferred target in SBD is Delia Bacon, who wrote an unreadable book about the authorship controversy and later went mad. SBD has three whole chapters (1, 2, and 15) mainly devoted to Delia Bacon. While no serious authorship skeptic of the past century relies on Delia Bacon’s work, the Stratfordians can’t get enough of her. They want to paint all doubters with the same brush as Delia Bacon and make the reader think she is a beacon to other anti-Stratfordians. The book even admits, in a condescending way, that Ms. Bacon was right about a few things, except that she was grievously wrong in thinking that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him.
The condescension gets even worse. Poor Delia, SBD laments, she was denied a university education because she was a woman. Then she wrote a book in which she argued that a powerful woman, Queen Elizabeth, suppressed some brilliant men such as Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, who then secretly wrote plays about democratic ideals while hiding their identities behind the name “William Shakespeare.” Andrew Murphy (chapter 15) sees through Delia Bacon’s narrative, however, and reveals that she was really complaining about how she, as a woman, was suppressed. Ms. Bacon merely reversed the genders in her book and made it about a woman suppressing men, rather than men suppressing women! I am not making this up. Murphy really says this. Murphy even claims that you can’t understand Shakespeare from his biography but you can understand Shakespeare doubters from theirs. Apparently, anti-Stratfordians are just working out their inner neuroses by doubting Shakespeare, while the Stratford man wrote impersonally, from his imagination — no sweat, no personal involvement necessary.
But do the Stratfordians address any serious anti-Stratfordian scholarship in SBD? Diana Price, Tony Pointon, George Greenwood, Joseph Sobran, Ramon Jiménez, Richard Whalen, and Roger Stritmatter, to name just a few, are not mentioned. The Ogburns get a few sentences, but nowhere does SBD address the gist of their thesis. Thomas Looney, who first promulgated the theory that Oxford was Shakespeare, also receives several nods along the way, but no one does a serious, thoughtful critique of his method for determining that Oxford was the real Shakespeare.
Charles Nicholl (chapter 3) quotes Looney’s contention that the true author of the plays was not “the kind of man we should expect to rise from the lower middleclass population of the towns.” Nicholl responds that Looney is wrong because many Elizabethan playwrights sprang from the lower middle-class. But Nicholl takes Looney’s comment out of context. What Looney actually said is that Shakespeare’s “sympathies, and probably his antecedents, linked him on more closely to the old order than to the new: not the kind of man we should expect to rise from the lower middle-class population of the towns.” Nicholl entirely misses Looney’s point: Shakespeare’s works evince an aristocratic viewpoint that is inconsistent with a lower middle-class upbringing. Looney was speaking about Shakespeare specifically based on the content of his works, not about playwrights in general. This is typical of the failure of the authors of SBD to truly engage with and respond to the writings of anti-Stratfordians.
Nicholl at least does us the service of explaining that spelling found in the published plays may not be the author’s spellings, but may be those of compositors, whose spelling choices were often controlled by such factors as lineation and availability of type. Nicholl mentions this as part of an anti-Marlowe argument, but I wish he would explain the principle to Alan Nelson, who argues (not in SBD, but elsewhere) that Oxford couldn’t be the true author because he used different spellings in his letters than are used in Shakespeare’s plays.
Matt Kubus (chapter 5) argues that the sheer number of candidates destroys the anti-Stratfordian argument and that, mathematically, every time a new candidate is suggested, the probability decreases that it is the true author. If ever there were a facile argument, this is it. If your name is one of many to be drawn at random from a drum in a lottery, then, yes, the more names in the drum, the less likely it is that your name will be chosen. But the authorship question is not about randomly drawing names from a drum. It is about examining the evidence for specific candidates. One should go about this through the standard scientific method, which Kubus describes as starting with a hypothesis, analyzing the data, and making a logical conclusion based on the facts. Once one actually does that, however, the number of serious candidates dwindles to a precious few.
In line with the modus operandi of SBD, Kubus examines only bad examples of anti-Stratfordian “research,” such as wacky cryptogram theories and some pathetically stupid blogger he finds on the web, and then argues that alternative candidate theories are all the same. Again, this shows the lack of care and critical attention that the authors of SBD have paid to the arguments of the better anti-Stratfordian scholars.
[pullquote]“Misdirection” … this book … spends an inordinate amount of time on subjects that have nothing to do with serious authorship evidence or scholarship…[/pullquote]Indeed, “misdirection,” of the kind that a pickpocket uses to take your attention off his hand while he steals your wallet, abounds in this book. It spends an inordinate amount of time on subjects that have nothing to do with serious authorship evidence or scholarship, including one chapter (16) on fictional treatments of the authorship question and another chapter (18) on the film Anonymous. Again, it’s all part of a not-so-subtle attempt to leave the reader with the impression that all anti-Stratfordian writings are fictional and that the scenarios put forth in films and novels are exactly the ones believed by all anti-Stratfordians.
Douglas M. Lanier says of Anonymous that its “claim to historical authenticity is crucial to its case for Oxford as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.” To knowledgeable Oxfordians, who were more adept than anyone else in pointing out historical inaccuracies in the film, this is a howler. Oxfordians saw Anonymous as merely a fiction that melded historical fact with fantasy. Yet Lanier would try to pawn off this film as the summit of anti-Stratfordian thinking. With Lanier, as with most of the authors of SBD, it is difficult to tell if he has simply never read any serious anti-Stratfordian scholarship or if he is purposely trying to throw the reader off the scent. I suspect that he has never read us. Many Stratfordians are probably wary of reading their adversaries’ works for fear of being seduced by the sirens’ song.
Monstrous Distortions
Professor Alan H. Nelson, author of the anti-Oxfordian biography of Oxford, Monstrous Adversary (reviewed here), was the obvious choice to write the SBD explanation of why Oxford couldn’t have been Shakespeare (chapter 4). Nelson argues that Oxford couldn’t be Shakespeare because he killed a cook, was a spendthrift, was mean to his wife, and lived for a while with an Italian choirboy. But maybe Nelson didn’t read other chapters in SBD in which his co-authors chastise some anti-Stratfordians for saying that the Stratford man couldn’t be the Bard because he was a grain-hoarder and money-lender. If there is one lesson to be learned from SBD, it is that one’s life has nothing to do with one’s writing. Apparently, Nelson didn’t get the memo. If a grain-hoarder could have written the plays, then so could a playboy.
But Oxfordians have never claimed that Oxford was a saint. They see him as a temperamental, mercurial personality, and the character flaws that Nelson enumerates are actually evidence of Oxford’s connections to the works of “Shakespeare.” Nelson comes dangerously close to admitting this: He claims at one point that Oxford was “apparently” homosexual (or bisexual) and later links this to the homoerotic overtones of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, many of which were written to a fair young man, thought to be the Earl of Southampton. Traditional scholars are stumped when trying to explain how William of Stratford, a commoner, could have had the gall to write such intimate poetry to a nobleman, but an older nobleman might have more easily gotten away with it.
Nelson points out that Oxford, when he was a young man, killed a cook and escaped a murder charge on the questionable finding that the cook “committed suicide” by deliberately running on the young earl’s sword. Oxford would eventually use this as self-parody in Act Five of Hamlet, where one of the Gravediggers supposes that a person might be blameless for committing suicide, and thus eligible for Christian burial, if the act were done in self-defense.
Nelson criticizes Oxford for his extravagant lifestyle, but Nelson doesn’t mention that this behavior is mirrored in the plot of Timon of Athens, in which the hero gives away his fortune. Oxford was also, admittedly, estranged from his wife for some time, thinking she had been unfaithful to him. This became fodder for Hamlet’s estrangement from Ophelia and Othello’s distrust toward Desdemona, not to mention Leontes’ jealousy in The Winter’s Tale. Oxford’s wife was rumored to have gotten him back by using a “bed trick” — that is, making him think he was being led into the dark bedchamber of another woman, when actually it was his own wife’s room. Such “bed tricks” are used in two Shakespeare plays — Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.
Nelson devotes only passing remarks to “Shakespeare” by Another Name (2005), Mark Anderson’s thoroughly researched, copiously documented biography of Oxford, which receives only one other mention in all of SBD. Nelson has nothing to counter Anderson’s meticulous research but a shallow quip: “For Anderson, scarcely an incident in Oxford’s life remains unconnected to the Shakespeare canon; and scarcely a detail of the Shakespeare canon remains unconnected to Oxford’s life.” Actually, that’s a fairly accurate description of Anderson’s work, which demonstrates an astounding number of parallels between Oxford’s life and Shakespeare’s works. Nelson doesn’t bother, however, to specify any points on which Anderson’s book might be wrong.
Nelson tells us that Francis Meres listed Oxford and Shakespeare as two different people in Palladis Tamia (1598), as if this were proof that they were not the same person. But Don C. Allen, the editor of the modern edition of Meres’ book, called Meres’ chapter on poetry, “pseudoerudition and bluff.” Meres derived his information on poetry from numerous, conflicting sources. Besides, if Oxford was hiding his identity behind the pen name “Shakespeare,” why should we think that Meres would be privy to the secret? Nelson notes that Oxford is mentioned in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) but neglects to tell the reader that that book also reveals that “Noblemen . . . have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford.”
Nelson argues that Oxford couldn’t have written The Tempest because he died in 1604 and the play refers to a 1609 shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda. Some scholars believe, based on imagery and word choices in the The Tempest, that it was influenced by William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea-Venture, which happened in 1609. But shipwrecks near Bermuda, an island surrounded by reefs, were common. In fact, one occurred in 1595, when Oxford was still alive. Furthermore, Stritmatter and Kositsky’s book, On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, demonstrates that much of the language of Strachey’s narrative about the Sea-Venture was borrowed from earlier works, such as Richard Eden’s The Decades of the New World (1555). Thus, there is no reason to believe that the author of The Tempest had to have read Strachey’s account. In fact, Strachey’s account was not actually published until 1625, long after the Stratford man was dead, so Stratfordians are left to speculate, based on no external evidence, that their man somehow had access to Strachey’s manuscript.
Nelson claims that Oxfordians “fantasize” that Oxford left drafts of plays that were released after his death. But anyone who believes that William of Stratford was the real Shakespeare must also indulge in such “fantasies.” About half of Shakespeare’s plays were never published until the First Folio appeared—seven years after the Stratford man died. If he indeed made his living as a playwright, why would he have withheld half his output from publication during his lifetime, especially after he retired to Stratford? Such a practice seems more consistent with a nobleman who wrote privately and couldn’t allow his name to be connected to his writings.
Both Stratfordians and Oxfordians have long noted that Polonius in Hamlet appears to be a satire on Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s power-behind-the-throne. Oxford had a long, and often strained, relationship with Burghley. Burghley became Oxford’s guardian when Oxford’s father died. Later, Oxford married Burghley’s daughter, Anne Cecil. Lord Burghley wrote out a set of rules for his household that includes maxims such as, “Towards thy superiors be humble yet generous; with thine equals familiar yet respective.” As Polonius says to Laertes, “Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.” Burghley’s rules were not published until 1618, long after Hamlet was published. The scene in which Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes strengthens the similarity to Burghley, who maintained a network of spies. In the first edition of Hamlet, Polonius’ name was “Corambis” — perhaps a pun on Burghley’s Latin motto, “Cor unum, via una,” which means “One heart, one way.” “Corambis” could be translated as “double-hearted,” i.e., two-faced. Just as Hamlet was captured by pirates and left naked on the shore of Denmark, Oxford was captured by pirates and left naked on the shore of England. In 1573, Oxford, who was a patron of the arts, wrote a preface to an English translation of Cardanus Comfort, a book of consoling advice that likely influenced Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
Nelson, however, makes a tortured attempt to dissociate Hamlet from the facts of Oxford’s life: Oxford was twelve when his father died, whereas Hamlet was an adult when he lost his father; Oxford married Burghley’s daughter, whereas Hamlet rejected Ophelia and consigned her to a nunnery. One half-expects Nelson to add that Oxford didn’t stab Lord Burghley while he was hiding behind an arras. Nelson’s analysis insults the reader’s intelligence. While artists often use real-life people and situations as raw material for their creations, they transform their materials into something new, mixing fiction with real life to create a higher reality. For example, while we know that Charles Dickens was writing somewhat autobiographically in David Copperfield, the novel does not follow Dickens’s life in all respects. Any literate reader of fiction understands this. It is surprising that Nelson, an English professor, doesn’t understand it, or pretends not to. Although Oxford didn’t stab Burghley in real life, the murder of Polonius may well have been Oxford’s revenge fantasy.
Finally, Nelson insists that Oxford couldn’t have been Shakespeare because Oxford, as owner of his own theater troupe, would never have let the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a “rival” theater company, perform his plays. Nelson’s theory rests on the assumption that noblemen’s companies competed jealously against each other and never shared their works. Yet this assumption is brought into doubt by the title page of the 1594 First Quarto edition of Titus Andronicus. (Like all “Shakespeare” plays published before 1598, it is anonymous, i.e., no author is named on the title page.) The title page states that the play is “as it was played” by the servants of the Earls of Derby, Pembroke, and Sussex. This shows that various noblemen might have passed plays around from one to another rather than jealously guarding them. Historically, Oxford had strong ties to these other noble families — two of his daughters would later marry into the Derby and Pembroke families, and the Earl of Sussex was something of a mentor to Oxford. If the Earl of Oxford was indeed the author of Titus Andronicus, why wouldn’t he have shared his play with other noblemen?
Kinder, Gentler Stratfordians
Stuart Hampton-Reeves in chapter 17 departs from the recent Stratfordian strategy of labeling all doubters as crackpots or mentally deranged. He appears as kinder, gentler, and less fanatical, admitting that it is no longer possible to dismiss anti-Stratfordians as “ill-informed cranks.” He understands that reasonable people can hold unreasonable opinions.
Except that the book doesn’t call doubters “anti-Stratfordians.” Instead, it calls them “anti-Shakespearians.” As Edmondson and Wells explain in their introduction, the authors employ that word because “anti-Stratfordian … allows the work attributed to Shakespeare to be separated from the social and cultural context of its author.” How’s that for circular reasoning? We cannot doubt that the Stratford man was Shakespeare because we know that Shakespeare was from Stratford. According to SBD, to speak of “anti-Stratfordians” would be wrong because “to deny Shakespeare of Stratford’s connection to the work attributed to him is to deny the essence of, in part, what made that work possible.”
Got that? Shakespeare just wouldn’t have been Shakespeare without Stratford. So, if you’re against Stratford, you must be against Shakespeare. Or something like that. I guess this means that clues of a Stratfordian life are all over the plays and that’s how we know the man from Stratford wrote them. Not that we read the works biographically, mind you. SBD is very clear about that. But, still, the works are full of Stratfordian words and references, as David Kathman argues in chapter 11, apparently oblivious of Michael Egan’s devastating rebuttal in 2011 to similar claims by Kathman.2 Undaunted, Kathman says that words like “ballow” and “mobbled” are unique to Warwickshire, despite Egan’s having explained that the words were either from other places or were simply misreadings. As Egan pointed out, the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (of which Stanley Wells is an editor) notes that “It is somewhat strange that Shakespeare did not … exploit his Warwickshire accent, since he was happy enough to represent, in phonetic spelling, the non-standard English of French and Welsh speakers, and the national dialects of Scotland and Ireland.” Kathman does admit that the alleged presence of Warwickshire words in the plays “doesn’t prove anything.” At least he’s right about something.
Kathman’s big point, however, is that Stratford was not a cultural backwater, but had many educated, cultured people. Some of the evidence for this is that many Stratfordians left long lists of book bequests in their wills. Kathman passes over in silence the anomaly that Shakspere mentioned no books in his will. Shakspere’s friends, such as Richard Quiney, Thomas Greene, and Thomas Russell, all left documentary paper trails showing that they were literate and educated. To Shakspere, however, as Kathman admits, “No specific surviving books can be traced.” Right again. It’s strange how all the evidence of Shakspere’s purported education vanished while that of his friends didn’t.
And by the way, SBD hardly ever uses any other spelling than “Shakespeare” to refer to the Stratford man. When it does mention another spelling, such as “Shakspere,” it is for the purpose of showing how those bad old “anti-Shakespearians” are always trying to denigrate good old Will by misspelling his name, making it seem as if he was a different person than the one who wrote the plays under the name “Shakespeare.” The purpose of this tactic is to make the reader come away thinking that the Stratford man always spelled his name “Shakespeare,” the way it was spelled in the plays, when in fact there is no record that the Stratford man ever spelled it that way.
Don’t Question Authority
The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt is derided in SBD as a declaration of faith, and also a declaration of loss of faith — faith in Shakespeare! Hampton-Reeves notes that the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition criticized James Shapiro for not engaging with the Declaration’s arguments and then states that he will also disappoint readers by not offering a point-by-point rebuttal. But if these people won’t, then who will? SBD has it backwards about who is operating on faith. Its authors believe that they are the high priests and we have “lost the faith” by failing to believe their self-evidently correct interpretation of the sacred texts.
Paul Edmondson’s closing chapter (19) is particularly repugnant when it questions how anyone can be open-minded “given the positive historical evidence in Shakespeare’s favour.” He says that “open-mindedness” is merely a rhetorical maneuver and should be allowed only after the evidence for Shakespeare has been disproven, not (as Edmondson says) “merely ignored.” “There is, too,” says Edmondson, “the loaded assumption that even though one may lack the necessary knowledge and expertise, it is always acceptable to challenge or contradict a knowledgeable and expert authority. It is not.” This is probably the least subtle of the many appeals to authority that pervade the book. Edmondson also compares anti-Stratfordians to bullies. Near the end, he says, “One likes to think that if there were any actual evidence that Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him, then it would be Shakespeare scholars themselves who would discover and propagate it in their quest to know as much as possible about him.” And may the fox guard the henhouse!
Shakespeare’s Knowledge
Finally, SBD completely ducks (by never mentioning) the question of how the Stratford man acquired the vast knowledge of law, medicine, Italy, and a great many other subjects that is evident in the plays. In 1942, Paul Clarkson and Clyde Warren noted that: “Books by the score have been written to demonstrate [Shakespeare’s] intimate and all pervading knowledge of such diverse subjects as angling, hunting, falconry, and horsemanship; military life, tactics, and equipment; navigation, both of peace and of war; medicine and pharmacy; an almost philological erudition in classical mythology; folklore, and biblical lore; and a sweeping knowledge of natural history, flora as well as fauna…agriculture and gardening; music, heraldry, precious stones, and even typography … jurisprudence — civil, ecclesiastical, common law, and equity.”3
[pullquote]That they have chosen instead to assert authority, disparage open-mindedness, and belittle adversaries says a great deal about the mindset and the state of scholarship … of the Shakespeare establishment[/pullquote]Clarkson and Warren listed at least one book or article for every subject and noted that they could have listed many more. That was in 1942. Surely a much longer list could be compiled today with many more subjects — Italy, philosophy, astrology, and Greek drama, for example. The lesson to be learned from all these books about Shakespeare’s knowledge in a vast array of subjects is that the author had a thorough and broad-ranging education and experience, which he often called upon to advance his dramatic purposes. The author of Shakespeare’s plays had to be one of the most literate people who ever lived. He very likely had extensive formal education, easy access to books, abundant leisure time to study on his own, and wide experience of the world gained through travel. This makes authorship by a nobleman more likely than that of the Stratford man. SBD fails to deal with this question because it simply can’t.
One might have thought that, given the chance to put the authorship controversy to rest once and for all, the authors and editors of SBD would have laid out their evidence in all its glory, with clear, cogent explanations of its significance and coolly reasoned rebuttals to any arguments questioning its authenticity. That they have chosen instead to assert authority, disparage open-mindedness, and belittle adversaries says a great deal about the mindset and the state of scholarship, as it regards the authorship question, of the Shakespeare establishment.
Endnotes
- Ramon Jiménez, “Stylometrics: How Reliable is it Really?” in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? Exposing an Industry in Denial (John Shahan & Alexander Waugh, eds. 2013), p. 235.
- Exposing an Industry in Denial (2011), reprinted in Part II of Shahan, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (pp. 164–66).
- Paul S. Clarkson & Clyde T. Warren, The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama (1942), p. xvi (footnotes omitted).
About the Author
Tom Regnier (1950–2020) earned his J.D. summa cum laude in 2003 at the University of Miami School of Law, where he taught “Shakespeare and the Law” for many years as an adjunct professor. He earned his LL.M. in 2009 at Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. He also taught at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School. He became a prolific independent Shakespearean scholar, combining his interests in Shakespeare and the law. He served as President of the SOF (2014–18) and was honored as Oxfordian of the Year in 2016. You can read here about his final public lecture, on the centennial of the Oxfordian theory, with links to his obituary, his major writings and speeches, and much additional information.
[published on the SOF website March 26, 2018, updated 2021]
