An Inquiry into Shakespeare’s Authorship

June 2, 2007

By Daniel Vigilante

Abstract: This project seeks to find information on the questions which have arisen regarding doubt towards Shakespeare’s authorship. Particular emphasis is placed on the so-called anti-Stratfordian theories, which I attempt to draw parallels with the philosophy of scepticism, and link these with doubts about the concept of the ‘Renaissance Man’.

Renaissance Man

The ‘Renaissance Man’ (or Universal Man) is a concept whereby man has accumulated such a wide variety of skills and attributes, to the point where he is an all encompassing creation of human virtue. Leon Battista Alberti ascribes the Universal Man as having “genius…so versatile that…all the fine arts” might be judged to be his[1], having a loathing for “material gain”, and never betraying secrets nor maliciously using information to “gravely harm” even a “vile enemy” (ibid.: 481). The Universal Man, Alberti asserts, is the epitome of righteousness, talent, and uniqueness, and he “always serve[s] genius rather than fame” (ibid.: 489), alluding to his humbleness and innate intellectualism, which is something intrinsic to his nature, as opposed to the superficiality of public recognition or praise.

It could be assumed, then, that one of the greatest writers of all time fits the description of a Universal Man quite sufficiently. William Shakespeare, as a powerhouse figure of humanity, genius, and enlightenment, could almost be characterised as the apotheosis of ‘Renaissance Man’. But how can we be certain such virtues existed in a man purely by an extrapolation of his writings? And more attackingly, how can we be certain such a proliferation of original ideas and poetic mastery came from the hand and mind of a person whom, as Mark Twain half jokingly puts it, “nobody knows anything about”?[2] Which brings us to the question about Shakespeare’s Authorship: are the works attributed to Shakespeare really from the Stratford-upon-Avon bard, or is it, as Henry James has put it, “the most successful fraud ever practiced”?.

Of the countless writers who have written about the  authorship debate regarding Shakespeare, Mark Twain is, accordingly to John Mitchell (author of one of the most highly regarded account about the Shakespeare-Authorship debate, Who Wrote Shakespeare?), by far  the finest and funniest writer. But questioning the authorship of the literary canon’s greatest figure is no joking matter. In fact, scholars have dedicated their entire lives to the question. Thousands of books have been written about, or in relation, to the issue[3]. But why the need to question it in the first place?

A bit of background information

There are, according to Mitchell, twenty-four candidates to be considered as the writer of the works attributed to Shakespeare; the man William Shakespeare is among one of those twenty-four. In order of popularity (judged by the amount of literature written in support of their claimant), the top five main contenders are:

1.      Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (supporters known as Baconians)

2.      Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Oxfordians)

3.      William Stanley, Earl of Derby (Derbyites)

4.      Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland (Rutlanders)

5.      Christopher Marlowe (Marlovians)

Leading candidate, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam

Then there are Groupists, who claim the Works of Shakespeare is a collaborative effort, and cite 42 individuals as potential collaborators. Rosicrucians, Jesuits, and Freemasons have also been put forth as group-authors of Shakespeare. Those who support Shakespeare as the true author are known as Stratfordians or the Orthodox.

Without going in the details of each theory, the important point to ask oneself is why have so many people been sceptical about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works? Is it because the level of genius displayed is above human capabilities? Above what people assume to be the level of human capability? Does such a level exist? But then isn’t this what the Renaissance Man is supposed to traverse?

The Man Who Knew Too Much?

“As a complete, all-inclusive account of nature and humanity, Shakespeare’s works have been compared to the Bible” (Mitchell, 1996: 17). Shakespeare’s writings cover an immense amount of subject matter which displays near or definate expert knowledge. A list of 31 specialities that are evident in Shakespeare’s writing is given by Mitchell, some of which include law and legal terms, in-depth constutuional knowledge, sports of the nobility, esoteric and classical philosophy, biblical scholarship, mathematics, astronomy, nuatical expertise; the list goes on and on. But how can someone whose education record is near non-existant know so much? In fact, included on the the list is “Cambridge University jargon”, but no records exist of Shakespeare ever going to Cambridge.

Pierre Porohovshikov, a Russian lawyer-turned-American professor of History classified Shakespearian allusions and listed them in order of frequency[4]:

Lord Penzance

Shakespeare’s parents were illiterate to the point of not even being able to sign their own names, and his own daughter, Judith, whom William was close to, was not given an education, and could neither read nor write (ibid.: 97). In all the extensive research performed by scholars to locate evidence of Shakespeare’s learning, nothing has shown up. Studies of Shakespeare’s legal terminology by many legal bigwigs (including Lord Penzance and Nathanial Holmes of the US Supreme Court) convinced them that he was an expert lawyer, or at the very least worked as a legal clerk, yet not a single signature has been found (signing legal documents would have been a daily task for even a low grade legal clerk) (ibid.: 20-21).

The list of problems continue, but put simply, one of the main problems against Orthodoxy is the “apparent discrepancy between the life and character of Will Shakespeare, and the noble, refined, educated mind behind the works” (ibid.: 17).

A Renaissance of Scepticism

Marsilio Facino suggests that even to be able to understand genius, he must possess some qualities of genius himself, alluding to his main thesis that the human race is the by far the most intelligent species on earth, and in a sense, ‘God-like’[5]. On a similar plain of sacred connections, Caroline Spurgeon, author of Shakespeare’s Imagery, concludes that Shakepeare’s character was “Christ-like” (cited in Mitchell, 1996: 19). But the idea of Shakespeare being holier-than-thou, or assuming a kind of deitous divinity almost immediately has the sceptic’s alarm bells ringing.

An El Greco painting of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Sukanta Chaudhuri suggests that scepticism flourished during the Renaissance, but not in contrast to the “optimism and expansion of knowledge conventionally associated with the Renaissance”, but rather it is in association with “the general spirit of the age” in that the Renaissance not only represented a glorious ‘rebirth’, but also brought about the collapse to many long-standing value and belief systems (Chaudhuri, 1981: 2). In contrast with many enthusiastic ‘human achievement’ Renaissance artists and writers (Pico, Erasmus, da Vinci, Michelangelo), Chaudhuri reminds us that there were other great thinkers, such as the writings of Montaigne and Cervantes, or the art of El Greco and Il Rosso, which cast “doubt about the capacities of man and his importance in the universe” (ibid). Again, this is an illustration of how scepticism contributes to the advancement of human knowledge and epistemological inquiry rather than negating it. But it is not necessarily a methodology unique to Renaissance thought; indeed the idea is borrowed from the ancient Greeks—Socrates claiming to know that he knows nothing (ibid.: 19), or Sextus Empiricus  (pictured below) taunting “intellectual scepticism [as] the best route to peace of mind” (Solomon, Introducing Philosophy, 2005: 241). And picking up from the Greeks—which is in many ways precisely the idea behind the ‘rebirth’ of the Renaissance—a Renaissance scholar named Cornelius Agrippa (his fabled career thought to have provided much material for what became the Faust legend) borrowed wisdom from ancients and came up with a philosophy of knowledge, laconically generalised as: virtually a total dismissal to the possibility of knowledge; instead preaching “a complete reliance on the word of God” (Chaudhuri, 1981: 5).

Then there was Rebelais (pictured bottom left), twisting some of Aristotle’s philosophy to declare, almost with exultation, the folly of man: “Everyone is foolish…the number of fools is infinite”[6]. His critcisms of human learning go as far as suggesting that its capabilities foster neither “our understanding of the world nor teach us to live in it happily and virtuosly” (ibid.: 15). For Rebalais, life is gloriously and primitively simple, and he warns that all complex formulas are suspect (ibid.).

Montaigne, on the other hand, used his ‘unrelability of the senses’ theory as a means to search for a “new…philosophy of man” (ibid.: 18-19); that is, using a form of scepticism to further intellectual inquiry. But the extent of his philosophical output still renders him a “sceptic”—so it must be asked, how is the measurement of scepticism assessed when the alleged objectivity of measurement and its supposed neutrality is, as Paula Blank suggests, “nothing but an illusion or self-deception”?[7] Measurement, then, is futile, but the act of doubting is again extolled by another French Renaissance philosopher, Rene Descartes, with his mind/body thought experiments, suggesting that doubt is a primary tool to broaden self-knowledge. His famous motto: “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum” (Latin for: “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”)[8] in many ways epitomises the necessity of doubt in the hierarchy of thought processes.

Shakespeare Authorship Doubts: Plausible Scepticism?

Bacon writes Shakespeare: Max Beerbohm’s caricature in popular journal

The theories put forth on behalf of the candidates listed earlier are certainly very attractive. Bacon’s intellectualism, penchant for poetry (which he kept “hidden”), and legal knowledge makes him a qualified candidate. However, his “addiction to ciphers  and coded messages” (Mitchell, 1996: 116) becomes utterly fascinating when you learn that he was on King James’ Privy Council who orchestrated an Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611, where, by a mere coincidence, in Psalm 46, the 46th word from the beginning is ‘shake’ and the 46th word from the end is ‘spear’. Note also, that a year earlier, in 1610, Shakespeare had died at the age of 46 (ibid.: 11-13).  A ‘coincidence’, Baconians, will tell you, it certainly isn’t. There are various other coded “messages” noted, all of which are handsomely plausible.

Oxfordians have an equally appealing draw card, which is the juxtaposing of the Earl’s biography with story lines from most of Shakespeare’s play. The line of fiction and the life- history of a man who died at the approximate time that Shakespeare’s plays started to get published is practically indistinguishable. He also had underlined passages in his Bible that correspond to quotations in Shakespeare’s plays (ibid.: 161-189).

Marlovians will tell you that he was the most ‘professional’ candidate, intensifying the fact that he is known to have written several parts of Shakespeare’s plays (ibid.: 227). Even Shakespearian scholars have had to concede this, after identifying Marlowe’s hand  in several plays, and as solely, principally, or at least partly responsible for Titus Andronicus, Richard 2nd and 3rd (ibid).

Penguin Classics have included 'Richard 2nd' in a publication of Marlowe’s complete plays

Dr. Thomas Mendenhall’s scientific analysis of word usage between the two playwrights provided the astonishing conclusion that their word-frequencies were an “exact match”, which is “as rare a coincidence as finding two people with the identical fingerprints” (ibid.: 229). That was in 1901, but the debate about Marlowe’s hand in Shakespeare has been going on since the eighteenth century when Edmond Malone acknowledged him as the author of Titus Andronicus (ibid.: 227).  But even the eighteenth century is at least a century after Shakespeare’s death.  The wonder, then, as Calvin Hoffman ponders (who is seen as the ‘godfather’ to the Marlovian cause, and author of The Murder of the Man Who Was “Shakespeare”, which is the strongest and most creditable claim to Marlovian Theory), is not so much that disbelief exists about Shakespeare’s genuine authorship—this he calls “inevitable”—but more the fact that “the awakening came so late”[9].

Baconian Theory didn’t arise until 1856. And the case for Oxford’s authorship, first presented in the 1920s, wasn’t substantially expanded until the 1980s. It gained outspoken support from high profile intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, and other theories, or at least strong doubts, have been expressed by the likes of Dickens, Emerson, Henry James, Malcolm X, Charlie Chaplin, Sir John Gielgud, Orson Welles and Walt Whitman[10]. So why the hype of authorship scepticism?

The Sceptic’s Relation to Shakespearian Authorship

In the research conducted on this project, by far the most interesting hypothesis I found relating to the rise of scepticism towards Shakespearian Authorship was from Jonathan Bate, in his book in defence of Stratfordism, The Genius of Shakespeare. He suggests that the increasing interest in the case at hand can be related to the rise of British detective fiction towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly with the popularity of Sherlock Holmes. He says that people became fascinated by the idea of investigating and “deducing brilliant solutions to every problem” (Bate, 1997: 101). But what makes his case all the more interesting, is that he then relates it to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, with the proposition that the detective is an “embodiment of man’s unconquerable mind”, and hence “proof of our superiority to Darwin’s apes” (ibid). This, mixed with the fact that Dawin’s Origin of Species “cast doubt upon God’s authorship of the world”, laid out the foundation for scepticism towards authorship issues, which was subsequently taken up by Delia Bacon (no relation to Sir Francis) who two years later wrote what is regarded as the first substantial anti-Stratfordist book, The Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Plays Unfolded.

A Final Word

Bacon is quoted as saying: “All perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe” (cited in Chaudhuri, 1981: 68). This essentially means that perceptions are subjective measurements, which rejects Universalist philosophy in favour of Relativism.

This echoes Paula Blank’s thesis (refer to page 6) of objective measurement as “nothing but an illusion”. Who, then, has the right to label someone a ‘Renaissance Man’? Alberti pontificates his own brilliance in his “self-portrait”, as does Girolamo Cardano. Yet Ficino seems to exclaim the entire human race is worthy of praise and admiration. And Nicholas Harpsfield puts Sir Thomas Moore on a pedestal so high he may as well be from another universe.

Scepticism has its own life force. And so does the ‘Universal Man’. The works of Shakespeare are only as brilliant as they are criticisable. If Bacon wrote them, then are we supposed to look at them differently? What if Marlowe did? His version on the ‘good’ of man, which is line with a lot of Renaissance thought, is that “achievement appears admirable only in the context of the moment. In its actual impact upon the working of the universe through time, it is insignificant and futile” (Chaudhuri, 1981: 115). So if it was Marlowe, then there is an ironic conjecture in the sentence: “Man cannot influence the universe outside of him in any meaningful way” (ibid), by the fact that he himself, as the person Christopher Marlowe, the writer, not his characters, is still talked about and studied four centuries after his death. Is that irony? Or a declaration of his worthiness as a Renaissance Man?

It may not make any difference as to who wrote Shakespeare, and indeed it is something that will perhaps never be known. But the fact that it is debated, and the fact that sceptics have thrown open the possibilities to at least contemplate, let alone devote enormous amounts of energy, time and money into, I believe can only have benefits to the furthering of human knowledge. Kant has said that we live in an age of criticism, and “to criticism must everything submit”[11], so where do we draw the line between criticism and scepticism? And further to my point, does there need to be one?

 

Bibliography

  • Bate, J. (1997). Ch. 3 ‘The Authorship Controversy’ & Ch 4. ‘Marlowe’s Ghost’. In The Genius of Shakespeare (pp. 65-100, 101-132). London: Picador.
  • Battista, L. (1460). Self-Portrait of a Universal Man. In J. B. Ross, & M. McLaughlin, The Portable Renaissance Reader (1953) (pp. 480-492). Middlesex: Penguin.
  • Blank, P. (2006). Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Cardano, G. (1575). On Himself and His Life. In J. B. Ross, & M. McLaughlin, The Portable Renaissance Reader (1953) (pp. 512-524). Middlesex: Penguin.
  • Chaudhuri, S. (1981). Shakespeare and the Renaissance Image of Man. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Ficino, M. (1474). The Soul of Man. In J. B. Ross, & M. McLaughlin, The Portable Renaissance Reader (1953) (pp. 387-391). Middlesex: Penguin.
  • Harpsfield, N. (1555). St. Thomas Moore. In J. B. Ross, & M. McLaughlin, The Portable Renaissance Reader (1953) (pp. 492-500). Middlesex: Penguin.
  • McCrea, S. (2005). The Case for Shakespeare: the end of the authorship question. Westport: Praeger.
  • Mitchell, J. (1996). Who Wrote Shakespeare. London: Thames and Hudson.
  • Solomon, R. C. (2005). Introducing Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Wilson, I. (1993). Shakespeare: The Evidence. London: Headline.

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