Scott McCrea - The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question

GHOST. If thou didst ever thy dear father love

IIASILET. 0 God!

GHOST. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

-Hamlet I.v.23-25

ix

xi

Chapter 3

Chapter 16

Chapter 27

Chapter 53

Chapter 80

Chapter 89

Chapter 102

Chapter 115

Chapter 129

Chapter 154

Chapter 166

Chapter 180

Chapter 192

Chapter 208

Chapter 215

This book would not have been possible without the help, encouragement, and sometimes casual comments of the following people: my wife, Melissa; my colleagues at the State University of New York, Purchase College, especially Barbara Knowles, David Wells, Greg Seel, and Eric Nicholson; my parents, Maryann and Charles C. McCrea, Jr.; my editor at Praeger, Suzanne Staszak-Silva; my agent, Barbara Hogenson; Howard Stein; David Bevington; Albert Bernnel; Michael Shermer; Carol Galligan; Jonathan Bate; Glenn Young; Steven Rattazzi; Mace Perlman; and Larry Lang.

I'm also grateful to the staffs of the British Library, Yale University Libraries, Columbia University Libraries, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library.

Finally, I must thank all the students who have asked me why scholars think that Shakespeare wrote his own plays and poems (especially Andrew Katz, Mike Dooly, and David Ledoux). This book is quite literally for them.

The voice accosted me from behind. It was a raspy voice, deep and full of confidence, a preacher's voice. It said, "I know where ya got those shoes."

I wheeled around. Slouching against a brick wall with his arms folded was a forty-year-old black man with wild hair and a professor's goatee. He must have stepped out of the shadows because I hadn't noticed him when I walked by. Dressed in new jeans and a clean white t-shirt, he didn't seem to be crazy or drunk, but it was hard to tell-anyone can be anything on a Saturday. "I know where ya got those shoes," he said again, as a challenge.

We were in Jackson Square in New Orleans. It was a beautiful daywarm, sunny, blue-skyed-and I was on vacation. Please remember that. It was a gorgeous day and I was on vacation. I pointed at my sneakers and looked him in the eye. "You know where I got these shoes?"

He nodded solemnly. He knew the answer as well as he knew his own name. "Will ya give me five dollars if I can tell ya where ya got those shoes?"

Now, obviously I smelled a con. Obviously he couldn't really tell me where I bought my footwear. But it was a beautiful day, and I wondered how the con played out. Maybe, like Henry Higgins, he could glean something from my accent. Maybe he was some kind of shoe mystic. In any case, I wondered what his answer would be, and if he said New York or anywhere close, I would gladly pay five dollars for the miracle-and if he got it wrong, it would cost me nothing. Right?

"I'll give you five dollars," I said.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a rag and a tin of clear shoe polish. And he began reciting. Almost apologetically, he began reciting something he'd said a thousand times before: "Now, I didn't say I knew where ya purchased those shoes. And I didn't say I knew where ya acquired those shoes. I said I knew where ya got those shoes. And ya got those shoes on the bottom of your feet, which are on the sidewalk in Jackson Square in the city of New Orleans in the state of Louisiana in the country of the United States of America. That's where ya got those shoes!"

I let him smear some polish on my Reeboks and paid him his five bucks. I felt like a sucker. Not because I'd been fooled, but because the con hadn't been better. The entertainment wasn't worth the price.

A few years later I had a similar experience. And I thought of the man in Jackson Square. I was reading The Atlantic Monthly in October of 1991, and I came across an article by Tom Bethell about the Shakespeare Authorship Question-the question of whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him. I had known that since the nineteenth century there had been doubts, and I knew that, over the years, various alternative candidates had been proposed, the most famous being Sir Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher and jurist. In his essay, Bethell claims that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the True Author, and I must say, reading it the first time, it seemed like a good case. De Vere, with his documented skills and experiences, appeared to have known what the man who wrote the plays knew. His attitudes and attributes matched the Author's characteristics, while what little we knew about the man from Stratford seemed to be at odds with them. I was especially taken by an incident in Oxford's life that eerily parallels a scene in the Works. In 1573 three of Oxford's retainers robbed two men who previously had been employed by the earl. The encounter took place, according to the victims' letter of complaint, "by the highway from Gravesend to Rochester." In Henry IV Part One, when Prince Hal's friends attempt a robbery, the prince foils it at Gadshill-which is on the highway between Gravesend and Rochester. A correspondence like that sounded too specific, too genuine, to be dismissed as happenstance.

But as I reached the last paragraph, I realized that I'd been had. Bethel] very cleverly diverts the reader's attention away from the historical evidence that supports Shakespeare's authorship and toward his own conjectures about Oxford-exactly like a magician palming a card. With one parenthetical phrase, he hides the most important clues from the reader's consciousness. Here's what he says: "tremendous archival digging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned up quite a bit of information about [Shakespeare's] life. But (if we exclude posthumous testimony) none of it establishes [him] as a playwright."' Exclude "posthumous testimony"? Ignore the remarks of people who knew Shakespeare when he was alive if they made those remarks after his death? On what grounds? Imagine a murder trial in which testimony is excluded because the victim is dead! In any case, Bethell's assertion is false. There is evidence from Shakespeare's life that he was a writer. (The article, I later discovered, is brimming with misinformed and misleading statements.)

Bethell's next trick is to assume there was a conspiracy in which Shakespeare acted as a front man for Oxford. The earl, Bethell suggests, wrote the plays, and the actor put his name on them. This allows Bethell to ignore all contemporary references to Shakespeare that occur in a literary context; unwittingly, according to Bethell, the litterateurs of the time were really alluding to Oxford. But not a single document or artifact supports such a conspiracy. If you're going to discover the lost city of Troy, it's not enough to argue from passages in The Iliad; you'd better dig up some topless towers and Trojan horses. One private letter, one diary entry that mentions a rumor that the earl was the real playwright of Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare's authorship would come crashing down. Until that day comes Bethell's case is nothing but a fantasy, and the Earl of Oxford will, quite rightly, never be accepted as the True Author.