‘…the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.’
William James
When I imagine the intelligent, educated, alert faces of my readers, I am nevertheless made uneasy by the suspicion that there may be one or perhaps even two of you who are still holding the belief that the peasant from Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the works of Shakespeare. I’ve been there. I was young when I heard the story about a schoolboy who wrote that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare but by someone else of the same name. That seemed to me to encapsulate the absurdity of questioning the authorship. I can be depressingly incurious.
That Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, went to London for a time, became an actor and wrote plays is treated by many as settled history. All the evidence against this is too great to cover here but let me give you the outline. First, no one named Shakespeare ever lived in Stratford. A William Shakspere was born in 1664 and a William Shakspeare died in 1616. His purported signature can be found six times on four documents, though you are more imaginative than I if you can make out the spellings. They may be Shaxper, Shakper, Shagspere, Shakpere…. but not even his strongest partisans can say he wrote “Shakespeare,’ or wrote as if he’d ever before held a pen.
And the spelling of Shakespeare, or Shake-speare as written in the first works to appear under that name, is no trivial matter. Known as Spear Shaker in classical mythology, Pallas-Athena, goddess of war and the arts, including poetry and playwriting, was born from the head of Zeus, full-grown, full-armed, wearing a helmet and shaking (brandishing) a spear. Shakespeare’s first name, William, derives from the German Wilhelm, invoking protection with a helmet. The helmet had the power to make Athena, of all things, invisible! “William Shakespeare” can be comfortably assumed to be an erudite pseudonym.
And was it used by a writer named Will Shakspere? A writer? It can’t even be shown that he could competently sign his name, much less that he was literate. His father, mother, brothers, sisters, and children were illiterate. There is not a page, paragraph or line that can be attributed to him and even those signatures are disputed though I think they must be his since no scribe could make a living with such illegible penmanship.
There was a school in Stratford, but the attendance records are lost, so we can say nothing of Will’s possible education. He was scheduled to be apprenticed to a butcher but there is no record of whether that actually happened. He was married to an eight-year older and very pregnant wife at 18 and became the father of two more children by 21. His supporters have to contort themselves to explain how he knew of specific streets and buildings or even groves of trees in Italy where many plays are set, without having traveled beyond the road between Stratford and London, or how he derived his plots from sources untranslated from other languages, as Shakespeare did. He would even have had to learn the Queen’s English since he spoke Warwickshire dialect. And how did he guess what life was like among kings, queens and nobles, how he knew the law inside and out, and also warfare, falconry, idiomatic French, the works of Ovid… It does give one pause.
Leaving behind—deserting—wife and children, he appears to have been in London from 1592-1596. In 1598 he was being sought there for tax arrears and not being found. There is no proof that he became an actor and was certainly not making his money that way. There is no playlist out of more than 70 extant that shows him in any part. I’m skipping (or rather I’m not) the record that does describe him holding horses outside the theater.
Even if his name was noticed and he was paid as frontman for the real Shakespeare author, which it seems he was, we have no evidence that the London literary community was fooled. In correspondence from the poets and playwrights of the day, we have this, rather contemptuous, mention: Ben Jonson said of Shakspere that he was “so enamored of the name of a gentleman, that he will have it though he buy it.” He obtained a coat of arms, under false pretenses, in 1597.
The name Shake-Speare became known with the publication of the run-away best-seller successes of the poems Venus and Adonis in 1592 and The Rape of Lucretia in 1594. Plays were being published one after another from 1597-1604. But 1597 was the date at which Shakspere returned to Stratford and purchased his fine new home. Had he been hustled out of sight when the curiosity about Shakespeare soared, taking his hush money and his shares in a couple of theaters and income from a rooming house in London to live well out of sight in Stratford for the rest of his life?
Nor did family or acquaintances ever associate Will Shakspere with plays or poems when he got back. Records show only that he remodeled his home, purchased land, sold malt and got involved in lawsuits until his death in 1616. He hoarded grain during a famine and conspired to fence off some of the village common. If not literate, he was surely numerate in spades and always kept an eagle eye on financial aggrandizement, but no mention of literary activity has ever appeared. One William Camden who knew all the great poets wrote in 1607, after the plays had appeared, that “the small market town of Stratford-upon-Avon owed all its consequence to two natives of it,”—an Archbishop of Canterbury and a Lord Mayor of London.
When Stratford’s William died in 1616, no one in London noticed. No odes written, no site prepared in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey with Chaucer and Spencer and where a number of his contemporaries did and would lie. The body in Stratford’s church has been shown by ground-penetrating radar to be buried only in a shroud, and the grave to be shallow and shortened by a head which, by the way, is missing. So much for the threat: “And cursed be he that moves my bones,” found today on the grave. But he was important enough to get a memorial on the wall of the church, right?—or, wait, was that his father, wool merchant John Shakspere, up there? A drawing of the monument made in 1634 shows someone named Shakspere holding a sack of wool.
In the mid-1600s the English monarchy was overthrown by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan. He shuttered the theaters for 18 years. By the time they reopened in 1664, all of those with first-hand knowledge of the authorship had died, and Shakspere as Shakespeare began to shine. People turned to the First Folio, the first compellation of Shakespeare’s works (1623), edited by Ben Jonson, prominent playwright, for confirmation. Why Jonson obfuscated the identity of the author is a topic for another time, but he did obfuscate and many an hour has been spent analyzing his very peculiar introduction to the plays. In a poem, Jonson calls Shakespeare “Sweet Swan of Avon,” which seems to many to point irrefutably to Stratford-upon-Avon and Will Shakspere. But others note that it could refer to Hampton Court where Shakespeare plays were often performed before Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James. Avon was another name for Hampton Court, where the Thames provides swan habitat, swans being the souls of poets. Also, in the frontispiece engraving Shakespeare actually seems to be wearing a mask.
Still in 1704, the church monument showed a sack of wool, but at some later date the sack became a cushion with tassels, a peculiar writing surface for the figure, which, behold! then held quill and paper. The change may have occurred in 1749 when a curate records that the image had deteriorated and that it had been “repaired.” The spelling of the name was, shall we say, corrected.
The definitive anointing occurred at the Shakespeare Jubilee festival in Stratford in 1769, 153 years after Shakspere’s death. It was organized by the famous Shakespearian actor and theatrical impresario David Garrick and the festivals have never stopped since.
Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This may account for the town of Stratford-upon-Avon and its entrenched Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s refusal to understand that there is doubt as to authorship or to stop insulting those who do. It costs £27.50 to enter the Birthplace, the same for Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. You will also want to pony up to see the Schoolroom, Shakspere’s mother’s farm, and daughter’s home. None of these are, in fact, authentic. Then, you may choose among the 50 best restaurants and the plethora of hotels, B&Bs, guesthouses, and glamping sites. Academicians have staked their endowed chairs on not understanding, trustees their sinecures. About six million people visit annually.
It’s always worth listening to Mark Twain: “The Stratford Shakespeare is a brontosaurus: Nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster.” We may have found some more complete brontosauri skeletons since but never a word written by William Shakspere.
Who done it to follow.
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I have been trying to find you for decades. We are now all geezers but still, hopefully making art and wondering about it all? Please contact me. I left New Orleans due to hurrianes and such, then moved to Hammond, then another hurricane made me move to Mississippi! Where a dozen or so friends also moved after Katrina. I think of you often and wish we could be in contact! Sandra Blair 985 351-0582 Text me