Whenever I’m in conversation with people and suggest that the works of ‘Shakespeare’ were not written by the man from Stratford, I’m immediately asked, ‘Then who did?’ My response is that I don’t know. Baconians, on the other hand, and the supporters of Marlow and De Vere, etc, come up with a host of ‘maybes’, but unfortunately no acceptable proof. This results in them defending their chosen candidate when we should be concentrating on whether or not Shakspere was the author. We need to drill down deeper into the conundrum to find out more about the credentials of William Shakspere. We have a good starting base in that, as pointed out earlier, he himself never claimed to being the author. All we need to do now is to dissect what’s been fed to us by the Stratfordians and the so-called experts, remove what’s fiction, and then marry this up to the known facts to discern whether it was possible for Shakspere to have produced this collection of literary works
What is not in dispute is that the vast and detailed array of knowledge contained in these works meant that the person would have been well-educated, have had a detailed knowledge in the practice of medicine and the law, and was conversant and well-read in Greek, French, Italian, Latin and Danish. He (or she) would have been knowledgeable of the Italian legal process, customs and geography and familiar with the workings of the French and English courts. Did Mr Shakespeare possess or acquire this knowledge?
This is not another ‘whodunit’ book. This, as I have said beforehand, is not the route that should be taken for, when an alternative author is put forward, it deflects attention away from the real issue. This book is more of a ‘who didn’t do it’. Did William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon possess or acquire the knowledge to be the writer? Let’s try and unfold the myths and see if it was possible.
Shakespeare’s Biographers
The so-called ‘New Labour’ government under the leadership of Mr Tony Blair, at the time, was often accused of ‘spin’. This spin pales into insignificance when compared to the spin and rhetoric dished out by Shakespearian biographers and those financially benefiting from supporting him.
Shakspere has had numerous biographers, the three main and earliest ones being Sir Sidney Lee with his Life of William Shakespeare in 1898, O Halliwell-Phillips with his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare in 1882 and Nicholas Rowe who published the first short biography in 1709, called Some account of the Life of Mr William Shakespeare written 93 years after Shakspere’s death. By describing each of these works as a biography, which is supposed to be an account of a person’s life, is wrong. How can you write a book about someone you know little about?
Almost all other so-called biographers, and there have been many, have used the same material but with a different spin. Little new information, if any, has surfaced since these three ‘biographies’ mentioned above were first produced. These biographies are based largely upon inferences from the works, assumptions and guesswork.
It’s not that Lee, Halliwell-Phillips or Rowe were short of spin, facts or evidence. Imagination was needed in abundance and these biographers certainly had plenty of imagination. Maybe we should class them as clairvoyants instead of biographers, as they seemed to see things not present to the senses of ordinary mortals. A reviewer in the LondonTimes once wrote, when referring to Sir Sidney Lee’s biography, ‘that it had been twisted by a master artificer into a cunning resemblance of a biography’. Unfortunately, this could be true of many of the outpourings about Shakspere.
Another such comment about Lee’s biography was made by a former British prime minister, Herbert (Lord) Asquith, who was quoted as saying ‘Few things in life are more interesting to watch than the attempts of great scholars and critics, like Sir Sidney Lee for instance, to reconstruct the life of a man so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets.’ Asquith is far from being a lone voice with these sentiments. The plain fact is that the traditional biography of William Shakspere and much of what we are told of him cannot be substantiated. His biographers give us hype over reality; as a result, more facts need to be brought into this conundrum, not more conjecture.
Lee’s contribution, which forms the basis of just about everything Shakespeare, can only be regarded as astonishing in its portrayal of Shakspere the person. He had previously promised to keep the ‘conjecture to the smallest dimension’ and, once again, failed miserably. The extent of the misinformation regarding the so-called author’s life is exceptional; his portrayal of Shakspere the person is a figment of his imagination and is strewn with supposition and inaccuracy.
As will become apparent, a great deal of knowledge was needed to compile the Works of Shakespeare and would have included having access to the great literary classics, most of which had yet to be translated into English. Lee would have us believe that there were copious amounts of English language literature around in Shakspere’s day, even available at the likes of Stratford grammar school. This could not be further from the truth and is said to give the impression that Shakspere had access to this literature in order to enhance his education. A number of libraries were catalogued in the early 1600s, one being the Bodlean Library and the other belonging to a Thomas Smith, an orator at Cambridge University. His library contained over 1000 volumes and not more than five were found to have been printed in English. It’s complete drivel and an allusion to imply that Shakspere’s knowledge could have come from English literature, as there was none.
It was only recently that I managed to obtain a copy of the Nicholas Rowe biography, entitled Some account of the Life of William Shakspere, published in 1709. It is equal to, if not worse than, Lee’s fictitious account of Shakspere. The following are some of Rowe’s assumptions, along with my observations:
That he went to Stratford grammar school where he probably acquired a little Latin. Why only a little? This is because, as Rowe says, ‘his father removed him from the school to help in his business’, which Rowe summarises by saying that this ‘unhappily prevented his further proficiency in this language’.
He then has the cheek to say that ‘it was certain that he understood French’ because he used it ‘in many of his plays’. So, he has no time to learn Latin at school but, by some miracle, he learns to speak fluent French.
Rowe continues by saying that it was a good idea that Shakspere was convicted for stealing deer, otherwise he wouldn’t have been forced to leave Stratford and he might never have written the plays. Oh, so we got the works of Shakespeare by accident and a quirk of fate!
He pontificates further by saying that, ‘Shakspere had without controversy no knowledge of the ancient poets’. Why does he say this? It’s because he can find no traces in his plays that ‘look like imitations’. You should have looked a little harder, Mr Rowe.
Rowe tells us that he was also ‘a man of great sweetness in his manners and a most agreeable companion’. How on earth would he know this? There is only one reason why Rowe would come up with this fiction and that is to have Shakspere appear elegant enough to infiltrate the nobility ‑ which, in any case, could never have happened.
Rowe, along with other biographers after him, is trying to make the man fit the part, which is not how a biography should be constructed.
Various people have collected and listed the known ‘facts’ about William Shakspere. A Ms Jane W. Beckett appears to have captured the majority of them, which I have listed at the back of the book. Ms Beckett’s effort in compiling this list should not go unnoticed, as it is exceptional and was done with a degree of accuracy that we rarely see today. The information given by Ms Beckett lists every relevant piece of information that has come to light. They can be categorised into four headings:
Births/deaths/marriages/wills - 11 facts
Financial transactions - 26 facts
Miscellaneous - 3 facts
Acting and theatre related - 14 facts.
With regards to the last category, these fourteen