The Man Who Was Shakespeare, Part 2

'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson

(Page 2 of 8)

The best place to begin is with the name itself: Shakespeare. The hyphen appears in many of the first publications of the plays and poems. Hyphenated phrases in an author's name often suggested a concealed author in an age rife with political and religious intrigue, when picking the wrong alliance or offending the wrong official could mean imprisonment, torture, forfeiture of one's properties to the crown, or a death sentence. In the words of literary historians Archer Taylor and Frederic J. Mosher, "In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age of pseudonyms, almost every writer used a pseudonym at some time during his career." During the Elizabethan Age (the period spanning the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England: 1558-1603), hyphenated pen names included "Martin Mar-prelate," a pamphleteer who railed at Anglican prelates; "Cuthbert Curry-knave," a satirist who savaged ("curried") his knavish pamphleteering opponents; and "Tom Tell-truth," a supposedly truth-spouting polemicist.

William Shakespeare is no exception. According to ancient Greek myth, the goddess Athena divine protectress of learning and the arts was born from the forehead of her father, Zeus, fully dressed and armed for battle. At birth, she is said to have shaken her spear, and authors looking back upon this legend associated her with the act of spear shaking. As a deft allusion to the classical goddess affiliated with the theater, "Shakespeare" was in fact a perfect pen name for a playwright.

Numerous candidates for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon have been suggested over the years, including Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the countess of Pembroke, Edward Dyer, the earl of Rutland, the earl of Derby, etc. The academic establishment has largely ignored the heretics, assuming that only the incumbent could have written the plays. But the Stratford native Will Shakspere as the actor preferred to spell it is not as inevitably "Shakespeare" as he first appears. To begin with, no original playscripts exist. The greatest literary manhunt in history has yielded no manuscripts, no diaries, and no correspondence issuing from Will Shakspere's pen. The only known letter written to him, concerning a loan, was never sent. Despite the enormous economic incentive that has existed for centuries to find any scrap of paper with Will Shakspere's handwriting on it, scholars have authenticated only a few signatures on legal documents written by other people and two words, By me, signed on his will. These scratchings are all that has ever been found from the pen of the man presumed to be the greatest literary genius in the Western world.

Then there is the matter of Will Shakspere's last will and testament. In it, the Stratford actor detailed his worldly possessions down to his silver gilt bowl and second-best bed. An interlineation in the will bequeaths money to three actor friends for mourning rings. But nowhere does Will Shakspere mention any literary or theatrical properties. No books, no manuscripts, no plays the most precious things in a dramatist's life and one is to believe that not a scrap of it merited mention in his will?

Since great writers are invariably great readers, a further question emerges: Where are Will Shakspere's books? Public libraries did not exist in Elizabethan England. Unless one had access to university libraries or other private collections, what was in your household was what you read. Approximately 150 books were printed in Elizabethan England per year. (By comparison, 40,000 books per year are printed today in the United States.) A vast majority of Elizabethan titles concerned matters of religion, law, or medicine. Assembling a library of more than a hundred volumes especially a secular library containing plays, poems, and other works of fiction was an impressive, time-consuming, and costly feat. Books were cherished commodities.

More than two hundred books survive from each of the libraries of the of the early seventeenth-century playwright Ben Jonson and poet John Donne. The Shakespeare plays and poems reveal that the author was a voracious reader citing over two hundred books, some of which were untranslated works published on the Continent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Yet, scholars have never authenticated a single book, play, pamphlet, or broadsheet that ever belonged to Will Shakspere. Some Shakespeare plays, such as Hamlet and Macbeth, draw characters and story lines from unpublished manuscripts in private archives. But there is no explanation for how Shakspere could have gained access to restricted aristocratic family libraries.

The erudition on display in Shakespeare is wide-ranging and profound. Studies of the Shakespeare canon by lawyers, theologians, physicians, astronomers, philosophers, linguists, military tacticians, sailors, historians, botanists, literary scholars, musicians, and classicists conclude that Shakespeare manifests a ready knowledge of their respective fields. All find the author anywhere from competent to expert in these varied disciplines. The myth that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek" stemming from a misreading of a poem by Ben Jonson has inhibited the natural conclusion of these studies: Shakespeare was one of the most learned and broadly educated authors in history.

Even if Will Shakspere had attended the Stratford Grammar School as a child, a supposition for which there is no evidence, it would not have provided him the kind of myriad-minded expertise one finds in abundance in Shakespeare. Will Shakspere's documented biography is extensive, but it is all commercial activities, lawsuits, and entrepreneurial ventures. It reveals no formal education, tutelage, or apprenticeship in his presumed craft.

Shakespeare's works also convey a familiarity with specialized knowledge of places and cultures that could not have been found in books or taught in school. The plays and poems reveal a well-traveled world citizen one who had an intimate familiarity with Italian and French culture unattainable at second hand. Shakespeare sets as many plays in France and Italy as he does in England. Henry V contains a scene written entirely in courtly (and bawdy) French, while the characters and situations of Love's Labour's Lost reveal a familiarity with French manners, mannerisms, and courtly culture. Shakespeare knew that Florence's citizens were recognized for their arithmetic and bookkeeping (Othello); he knew that Padua was the "nursery of arts" (The Taming of the Shrew) and that Lombardy was "the pleasant garden of great Italy" (Taming of the Shrew); he knew that a dish of baked doves was a time-honored northern Italian gift (The Merchant of Venice). He knew Venice, in particular, like nowhere else in the world, save for London itself. Picayune Venetian matters scarcely escaped his grasp: the duke of Venice's two votes in the city council, for example, or the special nighttime police force the Signori di Notte peculiar to Venice, or the foreign city where Venice's Jews did most of their business, Frankfurt.

The cornerstones of the case for Will Shakspere as "Shakespeare," in fact, constitute one meager docket:

Greene's Groatsworth of Wit: In 1592, the playwright Robert Greene allegedly lashed out in print at Shakspere. Greene's posthumous pamphlet Greene's Groatsworth of Wit chastised someone nicknamed "Shake-scene" as an "upstart crow . . . an absolute Johannes factotum" who "supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the rest" of London's top dramatists. Because Shakspere "supposes" that he was as capable a composer as his fellow playwrights, Greene's Groatsworth would appear to deliver crucial testimony that Shakspere was, in fact, an author however much Greene did not like him.

A closer reading of Groatsworth, however, discredits Shakspere as a writer of any capacity. In Aesop's Fables, the crow was a figure that disguised itself in the plumage of other birds. A "Johannes factotum" in sixteenth-century usage was a braggart and vainglorious dilettante. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Elizabethans often used the word suppose to mean, "To feign, pretend; occasionally, to forge." Shakspere, Greene's Groatsworth suggests, was actually an impostor.

Copyright © 2006 Mark Anderson

About the Author

Journalist Mark Anderson has devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, publishing articles on de Vere in Harper's, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org. He has also been a contributing writer for Wired.