James Shapiro - Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

I gyve unto my wief my second best bed, from Shakespeares Will

This is a book about when and why many people began to question whether William Shakespeare wrote the plays long attributed to him, and, if he didnt write them, who did.

Theres surprising consensus on the part of both sceptics and defenders of Shakespeares authorship about when the controversy first took root. Whether you get your facts from the Dictionary of National Biography or Wikipedia, the earliest documented claim dates back to 1785, when James Wilmot, an Oxford-trained scholar who lived a few miles outside of Stratford-upon-Avon, began searching locally for Shakespeares books, papers, or any indication that he had been an author and came up empty-handed. Wilmot gradually came to the conclusion that someone else, most likely Sir Francis Bacon, had written the plays. Wilmot never published what he learned and near the end of his life burned all his papers. But before he died he spoke with a fellow researcher, a Quaker from Ipswich named James Corton Cowell, who later shared these findings with members of the Ipswich Philosophic Society.

Cowell did so in a pair of lectures delivered in 1805 that survive in a manuscript now located in the University of Londons Senate House Library, in which he confesses to being a renegade to the Shakespearean faith. Cowell was converted by Wilmots argument that there is nothing in the writings of Shakespeare that does not argue the long and early training of the schoolman, the traveller, and the associate of the great and learned. Yet there isnothing in the known life of Shakespeare that shows he had any one of the qualities. Wilmot is credited with being the first to argue, as far back as the late eighteenth century, for an unbridgeable rift between the facts of Shakespeares life and what the plays and poems reveal about their authors education and experience. But both Wilmot and Cowell were ahead of their time, for close to a half-century passed before the controversy resurfaced in any serious or sustained way.

Since 1850 or so, thousands of books and articles have been published urging that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays. At first, bibliographers tried to keep count of all the works inspired by the controversy. By 1884 the list ran to 255 items; by 1949, it had swelled to over 4,500. Nobody bothered trying to keep a running tally after that, and in an age of blogs, websites and online forums its impossible to do justice to how much intellectual energy has been and continues to be devoted to the subject. Over time, and for all sorts of reasons, leading artists and intellectuals from all walks of life joined the ranks of the sceptics. I can think of little else that unites Henry James and Malcolm X, Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Orson Welles, or Mark Twain and Sir Derek Jacobi.

Its not easy keeping track of all the candidates promoted as the true author of Shakespeares plays and poems. The leading contenders nowadays are Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford) and Sir Francis Bacon. Christopher Marlowe, Mary Sidney, the Earl of Derby and the Earl of Rutland have attracted fewer though no less ardent supporters. And over fifty others have been proposed as well working alone or collaboratively including Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne, Robert Cecil, John Florio, Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Southampton, Queen Elizabeth and King James. A complete list is pointless, for it would soon be outdated. During the time Ive been working on this book, four more names have been put forward: the poet and courtier Fulke Greville, the Irish rebel William Nugent, the poet Amelia Lanier (of Jewish descent and thought by some to be the unnamed Dark Lady of the Sonnets) and the Elizabethan diplomat Henry Neville. New candidates will almost surely be proposed in years to come. While the chapters that follow focus on Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford whose candidacies are the best documented and most consequential its not because I believe that their claims are necessarily stronger than any of these others. An exhaustive account of all the candidates, including those already advanced and those waiting in the wings, would be both tedious and futile, and for reasons that will soon become clear, Bacon and Oxford can be taken as representative.

Much of what has been written about the authorship of Shakespeares plays follows the contours of a detective story, which is not all that surprising, since the authorship question and the whodunnit emerged at the same historical moment. Like all good detective fiction, the Shakespeare mystery can be solved only by determining what evidence is credible, retracing steps and avoiding false leads. My own account in the pages that follow is no different. Ive spent the past twenty-five years researching and teaching Shakespeares works at Columbia University. For some, that automatically disqualifies me from writing fairly about the controversy on the grounds that my professional investments are so great that I cannot be objective. There are a few who have gone so far as to hint at a conspiracy at work among Shakespeare professors and institutions, with scholars paid off to suppress information that would undermine Shakespeares claim. If so, somebody forgot to put my name on the list.

My graduate-school experience taught me to be sceptical of unexamined historical claims, even ones that other Shakes peareans took on faith. I had wanted to write my doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare and the Jews but was told that since there were no Jews in Shakespeares England there were no Jewish questions, and I should turn my attention elsewhere. I reluctantly did so, but years later, after a good deal of research, I learned that both claims were false: there was in fact a small community of Jews living in Elizabethan London and many leading English writers at that time wrestled in their work with questions of Jewish difference (in an effort to better grasp what constituted English identity). That experience, and the book that grew out of it, taught me the value of revisiting truths universally acknowledged.

There yet remains one subject walled off from serious study by Shakespeare scholars: the authorship question. More than one fellow Shakespearean was disheartened to learn that I was committing my energies to it, as if somehow I was wasting my time and talent, or worse, at risk of going over to the dark side. I became increasingly interested in why this subject remains virtually taboo in academic circles, as well as in the consequences of this collective silence. One thing is certain: the decision by professors to all but ignore the authorship question hasnt made it disappear. If anything, more people are drawn to it than ever. And because prominent Shakespeareans with the notable exceptions of Samuel Schoenbaum, Jonathan Bate, Marjorie Garber, Gary Taylor, Stanley Wells and Alan Nelson have all but surrendered the field, general readers curious about the subject typically learn about it through the books and websites of those convinced that Shakespeare could never have written the plays.