In the same way we conservatives are up against Big Government, I find myself up against a “Big Shakespeare” blue wall, chock full of sneering Democrats ridiculing anyone who questions the traditional narrative on Shakespeare’s life. Our absent friend, Justice Scalia knew of it. Now I want you to know of it too.
To be clear: it’s not that ridicule stops any of us heretics from speaking. It’s that the academy’s compulsive, performative, Alinsky-tinged ridicule stops them from listening and giving the facts of Shakespeare’s life, such as they are, proper oxygen. Indeed, they smother them with puffery and propaganda, and I’ll give you an example of it before we’re through.
If you’ve read this far, you haven’t puckered at the mere thought of Shakespeare and that’s good, though this isn’t even about the plays and poems. It’s about the genuine mystery — and a long-simmering controversy — surrounding Shakespeare’s biography. Rest assured you needn’t recall or even understand a thing about Shakespeare to appreciate what I am about to tell you. All you have to do is appreciate a good mystery. And know that you will be in the esteemed company of late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who dove into the scant, few provable facts we have about Shakespeare and agreed that the man who went on to be linked with the works, the William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, was not, in fact, the William Shakespeare who authored the works.
Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many, many others including four other Supreme Court Justices (Powell, O’Connor, Stevens, and Blackmun) have also considered the traditional Shakespeare biography and concluded that we’ve been sold a pile of bunk.
Did you know there’s never been a single scrapof paper ever found of a Shakespeare draft or letter? Nothing in his own hand survives other than some signatures which we will shortly examine, but that’s it. Absolutely nothing survives which shows that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon lived and worked as a writer. And if you are wondering, yes, other (lesser) writers of the time have such a documentary record. See here.
Traditional biographers insist he was a “legend in his own time.” Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Johnson called him “the soul of the age,” having authored 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a number of long narrative poems, but what is below is all the writing we have of this writer. Indeed, the evidence we do have of a Stratford-Upon-Avon writer is dispositive. Let us examine the most obvious to anyone with eyes.
Six scraggly signatures from a man born Guilielmus filius Johannes Shakspere in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Note the spelling of the surname: the first “e” and the second “a” are missing.
These garbage signatures, this chicken scratch, are the sum total we have of this giant of English letters. Gaze upon them, because this is it. It is all we have.
Remember: the quill was itin 16th century England. No typewriters, certainly no computers. Just your hand.
You’d think he’d have a more practiced signature, eh? After all those plays and poems? Compare to Ben Johnson’s, for example.
Do these honestly look like the signatures of a writer? Sure of his hand? Or do they look barely more literate than William Shakespeare’s entire illiterate family? (Shakspere’s father, mother, wife, and even his children were all illiterate. This is non-controversial, mainstream history.)
The signatures alone demand pause; beg reasonable doubt. As does the generational illiteracy and much, much more, but for our purposes today, this will have to do.
So why is Big Shakespeare so closed to simple inquiry?
The most obvious reason is the most banal: people’s livelihoods. Should the time-worn tale of Guilielmus filius Johannes Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon crater, there too go the sweet sinecures these sneering faculty enjoy in the holy halls of academe. And it’s not just academia. The entire architecture of “Big Shakespeare,”those who profit from the traditional biography, would crack at its foundations. From a book on the First Folio by a British author, Chris Laoutaris [Brackets added]:
“Today a host of industries — universities, colleges and schools; theatre and film companies; actors’ guilds; arts organisations and academic societies; publishers and online platforms; tourist sites and countless forms of merchandising — benefit from the [traditional] legacy [of] the First Folio.”
There’s also a very simple human reason: they’ll have been made to look a fool.
We must pause for a moment to define a term which is common in the Shakespeare authorship studies world and which we are about to discuss. In politics, our adversaries are Democrats. In Shakespeare authorship studies, they are “Stratfordians.”
A “Stratfordian” is one who believes that the Shakspere from Stratford-Upon-Avon wrote Shakespeare. “Stratfordians” absolutely, positively, will not entertain any idea contrary to the accepted narrative. (Sound familiar?)
Here is Stratfordian Shakespeare biographer Jonathan Bate with some choice propaganda:
“What people who want to construct fantasies about [some other] author behind the plays, what they do is they, they take little coincidences, arbitrary parallels, and try to weave them together into a coherent narrative.”
Well, since very little is known of the “writer” from Stratford much beyond the signed documents we just examined, that is, ironically, an apt description of what Jonathan Bate himself has done in his Stratfordian biographies of the bard! Mr. Bate has taken “little coincidences, arbitrary parallels and [woven] them together…”
In fact, the entire Stratfordian biography industry is built on little coincidences and arbitrary parallels and none other than Stratfordian Sir Stanley Wells will tell you so. Who is he? He was a long-time Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-Upon-Avon. He said:
“Somebody who’s written a book about Shakespeare’s life once said that Shakespeare’s biography is 5% fact and 95% fiction.”
Bates and Wells are saying the same revealing thing though they surely didn’t mean to. Traditional biographies on Shakespeare can be written year after year not because we know anything new about Shakespeare; rather, they can be written because they’ve simply interwoven new or newly interpreted knowledge of the 16th century and Shakespeare’s contemporaries: 5% knowledge of the man himself (if that), and 95% knowledge of Tudor England and its inhabitants.
That’s how you get a biography a year about a “writer” almost nothing is known about.
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If you’d like to do further reading on the general subject of authorship you can do so in Elizabeth Winkler’s recent, marvelous book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature here, and in an earlier work, Diana Price’s book of positively surgical forensic detective work, including spreadsheets, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography here and here.
If you’d like to read about Justice Scalia’s and my favorite candidate for authorship, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere (making us “Oxfordians”), I simply cannot recommend Charlton Ogburn’s magisterial The Mysterious William Shakespeare here highly enough. Mark Anderson’s more recent tour de force is also a must read (exceptionally well narrated by Simon Prebble in Audible, by the way): Shakespeare By Another Name: A Biography Of Edward De Vere, Earl Of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare here.
There are also two societies devoted to the 17th Earl of Oxford as author: in the U.S. here, and in the U.K. here. (Full disclosure: I belong to both.)
Finally, there are two exceptionally well produced films, the 2011 Roland Emmerich Oxfordian drama, Anonymous, and the companion documentary, Last Will and Testament. Both highly recommended.