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Who Actually Wrote Shakespeare?

"Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done"

Over the centuries there has been much debate (which still continues today) on scholars' claims that Shakespeare actually wrote all of the works which have been accredited to him. The idea that Shakespeare's plays and poems were not actually written by William Shakespeare of Stratford has been the subject of many books and is widely regarded as at least an interesting possibility. The source of all doubts about the authorship of the plays lies in the disparity between the greatness of Shakespeare's literary achievement and his comparatively humble origin, the supposed inadequacy of his education and the obscurity of his life. In Shakespeare's writings, people have claimed to discover a familiarity with languages and literature, with such subjects as law, history, politics and geography, and with the manners and speech of courts, which they regard as inconceivable in a common player, the son of a provincial tradesman. This range of knowledge, it is said, is to be expected at that period only in a man of extensive education, one who was familiar with such royal and noble personages as figure largely in Shakespeare's plays. And the dearth of contemporary records has been regarded as incompatible with Shakespeare's eminence and as therefore suggestive of mystery. That none of his manuscripts has survived has been taken as evidence that they were destroyed to conceal the identity of their author.

If Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, then who did?

Since Shakespeare's four centuries' ago, hypotheses put forward are that: Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare, Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) wrote Shakespeare, William Stanley (Earl of Derby) wrote Shakespeare, Roger Manners (Earl of Rutland) wrote Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, several of these (and others) wrote Shakespeare or that Shakespeare himself stole others' works!

The outward events of Shakespeare's life are ordinary. He was hard-working, sober, and middle-class in his ways. He steadily gathered wealth and took good care of his family. Many people have found it impossible to believe that such a man could have written the plays. They feel that he could not have known such heights and depths of passion. They believe that the people around Shakespeare expressed little realisation of his greatness. Some say that a man of his little schooling could not have learned about the professions, the aristocratic sports of hawking and hunting, the speech and manners of the upper classes.

However, some men around Shakespeare for example, Meres in 1598 and Jonson in 1623 did recognise his worth as a man and as a writer. To argue that an obscure Stratford boy could not have become the Shakespeare of literature is to ignore the mystery of genius. His knowledge is of the kind that could not be learned in school. It is the kind that only a genius could learn, by applying a keen intelligence to everyday life. Some great writers have had even less schooling than Shakespeare.

The claims put forward for Bacon 

The first suggestion that the author of Shakespeare's plays might be Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, seems to have been made in the middle of the 19th century, inquiry at first centring on textual comparison between Bacon's known writings and the plays. A discovery was made that references to the Bible, the law, and the classics were given similar treatment in both canons. In the later 19th century a search was made for ciphered messages embedded in the dramatic texts. In Love's Labour's Lost, for example, it was found that the Latin word "honorificabilitudinitatibus" is an anagram of Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world."). Professional cryptographers of the 20th century, however, examining all the Baconian ciphers, have rejected them as invalid, and interest in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy has diminished.

Other candidates 

A theory that the author of the plays was Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford, receives some circumstantial support from the coincidence that Oxford's known poems apparently ceased just before Shakespeare's work began to appear. It is argued that Oxford assumed a pseudonym in order to protect his family from the social stigma then attached to the stage and also because extravagance had brought him into disrepute at court. Another candidate is William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby, who was keenly interested in the theatre and was patron of his own company of actors. Several poems, written in the 1580s and exhibiting signs of an immature Shakespearean style, cannot well have been written by Shakespeare himself. One of these is in Derby's handwriting, and three of them are signed "W.S." These initials are thought by some to have been a concealment for Derby's identity (for some such motives as were attributed to Oxford) and to have been later expanded into "William Shakespeare."

Shakespeare has also been identified with Christopher Marlowe, one theory even going so far as to assert that Marlowe was not killed in a tavern brawl in 1593 (the corpse of another being represented as his own) but was smuggled to France and thence to Italy where he continued to write in exile--his plays being fathered on Shakespeare, who was paid to keep silent.

The case for Shakespeare 

In spite of recorded allusions to Shakespeare as the author of many plays in the canon, made by about 50 men during his lifetime, it is arguable that his greatness was not as clearly recognized in his own day as one might expect. But on the other hand, the difficulties are not so great as many disbelievers have held, and their proposals have all too often raised larger problems than they have resolved. Shakespeare's contemporaries, after all, wrote of him unequivocally as the author of the plays. Ben Jonson, who knew him well, contributed verses to the First Folio of 1623, where (as elsewhere) he criticizes and praises Shakespeare as the author. John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and theatre owners with Shakespeare, signed the dedication and a foreword to the First Folio and described their methods as editors. In his own day, therefore, he was accepted as the author of the plays. Throughout his lifetime, and for long after, no person is known to have questioned his authorship. In an age that loved gossip and mystery as much as any, it seems hardly conceivable that Jonson and Shakespeare's theatrical associates shared the secret of a gigantic literary hoax without a single leak or that they could have been imposed upon without suspicion. Unsupported assertions that the author of the plays was a man of great learning and that Shakespeare of Stratford was an illiterate rustic no longer carry weight, and only when a believer in Bacon or Oxford or Marlowe produces sound evidence will scholars pay close attention to it and to him.

Linguistic and historical problems 

Since the days of Shakespeare, the English language has changed, and so have audiences, theatres, actors, and customary patterns of thought and feeling. Time has placed an ever-increasing cloud before the mirror he held up to life, and it is here that scholarship can help.

Problems are most obvious in single words. In the 20th century, "presently," for instance, does not mean "immediately," as it usually did for Shakespeare, or "will" mean "lust" or "rage" mean "folly" or "silly" denote "innocence" and "purity." In Shakespeare's day, words sounded different, too, so that "ably" could rhyme with "eye" or "tomb" with "dumb." Syntax was often different, and, far more difficult to define, so was response to metre and phrase. What sounds formal and stiff to a modern hearer might have sounded fresh and gay to an Elizabethan.

Ideas have changed, too, most obviously political ones. Shakespeare's contemporaries almost unanimously believed in authoritarian monarchy and recognized divine intervention in history. Most of them would have agreed that a man should be burned for ultimate religious heresies. It is the office of linguistic and historical scholarship to aid the understanding of the multitude of factors that have significantly affected the impressions made by Shakespeare's plays.

Textual and editorial problems 

None of Shakespeare's plays has survived in his handwritten manuscript, and, in the printed texts of some plays, notably King Lear and Richard III, there are passages manifestly corrupt, with no clue to the words Shakespeare once wrote. Even if the printer received a good manuscript, small errors could still be introduced. Compositors were less than perfect; they often "regularized" the readings of their copy, altered punctuation because they lacked the necessary pieces of type, or made mistakes because they had to work too hurriedly. Even the correction of proof sheets in the printing house could further corrupt the text, since such correction was usually effected without reference to the author or to the manuscript copy; when both corrected and uncorrected states are still available, it is often the uncorrected version that is preferable. Correctors are undoubtedly responsible for many errors now impossible to right.

Overcoming some difficulties 

The contribution of textual criticism 

The early editors of Shakespeare saw their task chiefly as one of correction and regularization of the faulty printing and imperfect texts of the original editions or their reprints. Many changes in the text of the quartos and folios that are now accepted derive from Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Alexander Pope (1723-25), but these editors also introduced many thousands of small changes that have since been rejected. Later in the 18th century, editors compiled collations of alternative and rejected readings. Samuel Johnson (1765), Edward Capell (1767-68), and Edmond Malone (1790) were notable pioneers. Their work reached its most comprehensive form in the Cambridge edition in nine volumes by W.G. Clark, J. Glover, and W.A. Wright, published in 1863-66. A famous one-volume Globe edition of 1864 was based on this Cambridge text.

Each major editor had added to the great number of annotations on textual problems and on linguistic and historical difficulties, and in 1871 was published the first of a series of large volumes, one or two for each play, called "A New Variorum Edition," which aimed at bringing all previous textual scholarship together. The series remains incomplete, but A.W. Pollard published his Shakespeare Folios and Quartos in 1909 and, together with R.B. McKerrow, Sir Walter Greg, and Charles Sisson, began a concerted study of the manuscript plays surviving from Elizabethan theatres and the practice of Elizabethan printers. Their work was summed up in Greg's study The Shakespeare First Folio (1955) and Fredson Bowers' On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists (1955). By this time a new phase of bibliographic and textual inquiry had begun, and Bowers, with Alice Walker, Charlton Hinman, and others, began studying the minutiae of each substantive early edition. Computers will analyze the huge mass of their detailed information and make available the full results of their investigations. Also, individual compositors who set in type the early editions are being identified, and already something of their work habits and habitual errors is known. Processes of correction in the Elizabethan printing houses are also being studied more intensively. Before the end of the 20th century, a new edition of Shakespeare may appear in which a multitude of small errors have been removed. But even then, nothing will compensate for the loss of Shakespeare's manuscripts, and numerous important readings and details of presentation will still have to be supplied by educated guesses.

Historical, linguistic and dramatic studies 

Since the end of the 19th century, many other problems that hinder the understanding of Shakespeare's texts have been at least partly overcome thanks to extensive investigation into, for example, his syntax, vocabulary, and word usage--especially with regard to other Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. Such technical works, as well as studies of current theories of composition (the use of rhetoric, metaphor, and simile), have provided material for critical analysis, as have works that examine the ideas and life-style of Shakespeare's contemporaries. An increasingly large proportion of research is devoted to an investigation of contemporary literary and dramatic conventions.

Literary criticism 

Literary critics and the theatre 

Shakespeare criticism must take into account the certainty that Shakespeare intended his plays to be acted, that he was the professional playwright of a repertory company, that the success of a play in performance by his company was what determined his income, and that during his lifetime he apparently made no effort (or perhaps was too busy) to gain a "literary" reputation from his plays. Yet, his contemporaries had no doubt about his literary eminence. Heminge and Condell, his fellow players, and Ben Jonson, his fellow playwright, commended the great Folio of 1623 to "the great variety of readers."

The situation has been complicated by the fact that the history of Shakespeare criticism and the stage history of his plays have run parallel but separate courses. It is fair to say that, from about the mid-18th century onward, there has been a constant tension between the critics and the theatres regarding treatment of Shakespeare. Although Dr. Johnson was the contemporary of David Garrick, Coleridge and Hazlitt the contemporaries of Edmund Kean, Dowden of Sir Henry Irving, and Bradley of Beerbohm Tree, the links between these critics and actors were not notably strong. Theatregoers were usually impressed by character impersonations rendered by virtuoso actors, while readers became more and more impressed by an awareness and admiration of the special artistic form of the plays. Rather than by stage performances, Shakespeare criticism was influenced by the dominant literary forms of each age: by the self-revelatory poem of the Romantic period, the psychological and ethical novel of the Victorians, the fragmentary revelations of the human condition in 20th-century poetry. It is a platitude that each age finds what it wants to find in Shakespeare. It will only see what it can. It can only see what it must. But Shakespeare critics, if criticism is to be in a healthy condition, must pay more than lip service to that fact. However deeply embedded in its contemporary situation, good criticism, like all intellectual feats, is a leaping out of the situation. The history of Shakespeare criticism is a subject of more than scholarly interest. It is a cautionary tale. Sometimes it is an awful warning.

The progress of Shakespeare criticism 

As a basis for the criticism of an author's work, it is reasonable to begin by inquiring how his contemporaries assessed his achievement. But contemporary literary criticism was surprisingly silent about the plays actually being written (though critics were reasonably articulate about the plays they thought ought to be written). Collections of references made to Shakespeare later, during the 17th century, show that many important writers paid little attention to him. Ben Jonson's reputation was, for a variety of reasons, probably superior for the first half of the century. He was, moreover, the most vocal literary critic of the early 17th century, and he thought of Shakespeare as a naturally gifted writer, who failed to discipline himself. From his criticism derived the distinction between "nature" and "art" that for long proved to be a pertinacious and unproductive theme of Shakespeare criticism. It was further encouraged by John Milton, when he contrasted Jonson's "learned sock" with Shakespeare's "native wood-notes wild" (which refers to the comedies but came to be treated as a general statement, especially the epithet "wild"). A good deal of the spirit of Ben Jonson's cavillings, rather than his magnificent praise in the poem prefixed to the Folio of 1623, was continued by later 17th-century and 18th-century critics, censuring Shakespeare's carelessness, his artistic "faults."

John Dryden (died 1700) was the first great critic of Shakespeare. Much concerned with his own art as a dramatist, he judged Shakespeare in a practical spirit. For 100 years after him, the best literary criticism of Shakespeare was an elaboration and clarification of his opinions. Dryden on some occasions praised Shakespeare in the highest terms and boldly defended the English tradition of the theatre, maintaining that, if it was contrary to the revered classical precepts of Aristotle, it was only because Aristotle had not seen English plays; had he seen them, his precepts would have been different. Dryden nevertheless at times attributes artistic "faults" to Shakespeare, judging him according to Neoclassical principles of taste that derived from France and soon prevailed throughout Europe. Shakespeare's dramatic art was so different from that of the admired tragedy of the times (that of Corneille and Racine) that it was difficult for a critic to defend or interpret it in reasonable terms. The gravest charge was the absence of "poetical justice" in Shakespeare's plays. Although some of the better 18th-century critics, such as Joseph Addison and Dr. Johnson, saw the limitations of "poetical justice" as an artistic theory, they nevertheless generally felt that the ending of King Lear, especially, was intolerable, offending all sense of natural justice by the death of Cordelia. The play was thus given a "happy ending"--one congruent with "poetical justice"--by the poet and playwright Nahum Tate: Lear was restored to his authority, and Cordelia and Edgar were to be married and could look forward to a prosperous reign over a united Britain. This change was approved by Dr. Johnson, and the revised play held the stage for generations and was the only form of King Lear performed on the stage until the mid-19th century.

In the early 18th century the cumbrous folio editions were replaced by more convenient editions, prepared for the reader. Nicholas Rowe, in a six-volume edition of 1709, tidied up the text of the plays, adding scene divisions, lists of dramatis personae, indications of locality, and so on. Rowe was himself a practicing and successful dramatist, and on the whole he gave a good lead to the dramatic criticism of the plays. The preface to Alexander Pope's edition of 1725, however, had an unhappy influence on criticism. Shakespeare's natural genius, he felt, was hampered by his association with a working theatre. Pope fully accepted the artistic form of Shakespeare's writings as due to their being stage plays. But he regarded this as a grave disadvantage and the source of their artistic defectiveness. Lewis Theobald took the opposing view to Pope's, claiming that it was an advantage of Shakespeare that he belonged to the theatrical profession. Dr. Johnson similarly realized that methods of producing the plays on the stage influenced the kind of illusion created. In the splendid preface to his edition (1765), Johnson dismissed, once and for all in English criticism, the Neoclassical theories of "decorum," the "unities," and the mutual exclusiveness of tragedy and comedy--theories now seen as irrelevant to Shakespeare's art and as having confused the discussion of it. In many ways Johnson was the source of the notion of Shakespeare as a realistic dramatist, whose mingling of tragic and comic scenes was justified as "exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature," in which laughter and tears, rejoicing and misery, are found side by side.

Johnson censured Shakespeare as a dramatic artist for his lack of morality. Shakespeare, he wrote, "sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose." Later critics have felt compelled to controvert or to circumvent such a judgment. But Johnson's preface, if it did not give the discussion of Shakespeare's artistry a fresh start, cleared away some of the dead or irrelevant doctrines.

During the rest of the 18th century, after Johnson, it was scholarship rather than criticism that advanced in England. The best of literary criticism of the time was in the discovery of new subtleties in Shakespeare, especially in characterization; indeed, the acceptance of Shakespeare as a dramatic artist largely came about through his evident powers of characterization (to which probably the growth of the realistic novel in the 18th century had made readers more sensitive), and inadequate attention was paid to other aspects of his dramatic craftsmanship. There was nothing in England comparable to the brilliant Shakespeare criticism of Lessing, Goethe, and August von Schlegel in Germany. The latter's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797 demonstrated that, apart from a few witticisms, nothing could be taken away from the play, nothing added, nothing rearranged without mutilating the work of art and confusing the author's intentions. Here modern Shakespeare criticism begins. Indeed, from the time of Lessing, in the 18th century, to the mid-19th century, German critics and scholars made substantial and original contributions to the interpretation of Shakespeare, indicating Shakespeare's superlative artistry, at a time when in England he was admired more as a great poet and a brilliant observer of mankind than as a disciplined artist.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the greatest English critic of Shakespeare, vigorously denied that he had been affected by Schlegel (though he acknowledged the influence of Lessing), but there are many similarities between the two. His criticism--which has to be put together from reports of his lectures, from his notebooks, and from memories of his conversation, for he never succeeded in writing an organized book on Shakespeare--at first censured Shakespeare's lack of artistry, but in his lectures, given from 1810 onward, and in his Biographia Literaria (1817), he demonstrated that Shakespeare's "irregularities" were in fact the manifestations of a subtle intelligence. It was the purpose of criticism to reveal the reasons why the plays are as they are. Shakespeare was a penetrating psychologist and a profound philosopher; but Coleridge claimed that he was an even greater artist, and his artistry was seen to be "unconscious" or "organic," not contrived. Thus the dominant literary forms of Coleridge's age, which were those of self-revelatory poetry, influenced the criticism of the age: Hamlet was felt to speak with the voice and feeling of Shakespeare, and, as for the sonnets, William Wordsworth, whose greatest achievement was writing a long poem on the growth of his own mind, explained that Shakespeare "unlocked his heart" in his sonnets.

These critical opinions were inclined to degenerate in inferior hands in the course of the 19th century: the belief in Shakespeare's all-pervading artistry led to over-subtle interpretations; the enthusiasm for character analysis led to excessive biography writing outside the strictly dramatic framework; and the acknowledged assessment of Shakespeare's keen intelligence led to his being associated with almost every school of thought in religion, politics, morals, psychology, and metaphysics. Nevertheless, it was the great achievement of the Romantics to have freed criticism from preoccupation with the "beauties" and "faults" in Shakespeare and to have devoted themselves instead to interpreting the delight that people had always felt in the plays, whether as readers or theatregoers. Shakespeare's "faults" now became "problems," and it was regarded an achievement in literary criticism to have found an explanation for some hitherto difficult or irreconcilable detail in a play. Many of the most brilliant writers of Europe were critics of Shakespeare; and their utterances (whether or not they may be regarded as having correctly interpreted Shakespeare) are notable as recording the impressions he made upon great minds.

Shakespeare's influence 

Today Shakespeare's plays are performed throughout the world, and all kinds of new, experimental work finds inspiration in them: " . . . in the second half of the twentieth century in England," wrote the innovative theatre director Peter Brook, "we are faced with the infuriating fact that Shakespeare is still our model."

Shakespeare's influence on English theatre was evident from the start. John Webster, Philip Massinger, and John Ford are among the better known dramatists who borrowed openly from his plays. His influence is evident on Restoration dramatists, especially Thomas Otway, John Dryden, and William Congreve. John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and George Bernard Shaw are among 20th-century writers in whose works Shakespearean echoes are to be found. Many writers have taken over Shakespeare's plots and characters: Shaw rewrote the last act of Cymbeline, Tom Stoppard invented characters to set against parts of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968), and Edward Bond used King Lear as the starting point for his own Lear (1971).

Shakespeare has also influenced dramatists and theatre directors outside his own country. In Germany, English acting troupes were welcomed early in the 17th century, and the German version of Hamlet, Der bestrafte Brudermord ("Fratricide Punished"), testifes to the immediate influence of that play. His influence on later European dramatists ranges from a running allusion to Hamlet in Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull to imitation and parody of Richard III in Bertolt Brecht's Arturo Ui, adaptation of King John by Max Frisch, and André Gide's translation and simplification of Hamlet.

Shakespeare's influence on actors since his own day has been almost as widespread. Many European and American actors have had their greatest successes in Shakespearean roles. In England very few actors or actresses reach pre-eminence without acting in his plays. Each player has the opportunity to make a part his own. This is not because Shakespeare has created only outlines for others to fill but because he left so many and varied invitations for the actor to call upon his deepest, most personal resources.

Theatre directors and designers after Shakespeare's time, with every technical stage resource at their command, have returned repeatedly to his plays, which give opportunity for spectacle and finesse, ritual and realism, music and controlled quietness. Their intrinsic theatricality, too, has led to adaptations into very different media: into opera (as Verdi's Otello) and ballet (as versions of Romeo and Juliet from several nations); into sound recordings, television programs, and films. Musicals have been made of the comedies (as Kiss Me Kate from The Taming of the Shrew); even a tragedy, Othello, was the inspiration of a "rock" musical in 1971 called Catch My Soul, while Macbeth has yielded a political-satire show called Macbird! (1967).

Shakespeare has Hamlet say that the aim of theatre performance is to "hold the mirror up to nature," and this is what the history of his plays, from their first production to the latest, shows that he has, preeminently, achieved.

Although interesting, the debate cannot be studied in depth here but it would be wise to mention a recent book on the subject written by John Michell: "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996).  Part of the book's review - written by a Bob Grumman - is reproduced here (more can be found at Shakespeare Authorship) and in the links and 'works' sections of this site.

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