Just Leave Shakespeare Alone, Already
By: Odessa Denby
Tags: Shakespeare, Literature, Authors, Writing, Renaissance

Every few years, it seems another theory crops up about who the “real” Shakespeare was. But maybe that says more about us than about the author.

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

Whether you love the lyrical philosophizing of a Shakespearean play, or you were scarred by a public school education of Shakespeare (so very few teachers recognize that it’s meant to be seen not read and that even the tragedies have such a great deal of playfulness in them!), you have probably heard the theory that William Shakespeare wasn’t the true author of his plays.

Essays, books, films, and documentaries have put forward many other possible candidates. Interestingly, none of his contemporaries seemed to question the validity of Shakespeare as an author. Most of these theories didn’t start cropping up until the mid-1800s, some two-hundred years after the author’s death. One of the most popular alternative-Shakespeares to be revisited in recent years, being Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. A well-traveled and sophisticated aristocrat, he fell out of favor in the English court, spent several years in Italy, and was known to be a writer of plays and poetry among court circles.

To me, the renewed interest in de Vers smacks of something other than historical sleuthing, it smells distinctly like elitism. William Shakespeare had relatively humble beginnings. His family was a member of the growing middle class, tradesmen. He was educated at a public school and married a local woman (who was slightly older than him, which wasn’t as uncommon as you might think), had a few children, losing one in childhood. He died of possible alcohol poisoning after going on a binge with a few other writers. If his literary works hadn’t survived, one would say it was an unremarkable life.

To say that this unremarkable man couldn’t be a genius is dangerous. Even his peers in the theatre world at the time likely felt something similar. Many of them were university educated, urban men. Christopher Marlowe, another prominent playwright of the time is also put forward as a candidate for many of Shakespeare’s plays. As a popular writer of the time, Oxford-educated, and possibly involved in espionage, he’s an attractive option. But we have many plays by Marlowe that survive and the style is quite different.

There is something that we must understand about the fundamentals of theatre at that time. A company worked together to produce plays. One or two writers would be tasked with the major writing work, but just as playwrights today workshop new pieces with actors and directors, the same was true then. Besides that, once a play was performed, that didn’t mean it was “finished.” Plays would be performed by the company over and over again — even after the writer had moved on or even died. Plays could go through many phases of revision. Scenes that don’t get a response could be cut or changed, beloved characters are given more stage time.

It is very likely that Shakespeare did collaborate with Marlowe on several plays, as they were working for the same company for a time. Collaboration was very common in the Tudor theatre world. In fact, some editions of the history plays Henry VI parts 1–3 credit Marlowe as a co-writer on the title page. Some also believe that Richard Burbage, the director of the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare mainly wrote and worked, may be the true author. Undoubtedly, he had a lot of influence on that workshopping process. But the evidence seems thin that he would have allowed the credit for the plays to be given to Shakespeare since it was his troupe. Evidence seems thin, too, that Marlowe who became a rival of Shakespeare’s would allow him to take credit for plays he did not write.

The “why” of what would drive someone to let another take credit for their work is thin in many of these circumstances. With de Vere, some use his position in society as the reason or his possible bisexuality. The strongest “why” initially seems to give credit to the female authors presented as the possible “real Shakespeare.” Women ranging from Shakespeare’s own wife, Anne Hathaway, to Elizabeth the first, herself.

When you dig into many beloved writers of the Western canon, it does become clear that there were many male writers “borrowing” from their wives and female family members. As men, they had the ability to seek out the business of writing more than these women did, and they very rarely credited them at all. Sophia Tolstoy was famously snubbed by her dying husband who handed over the rights to his works to a friend, not her. This was after spending nearly two decades editing and rewriting his works for him, many of which found their initial inspiration from stories she had written and shared with him. Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, and Henry James “borrowed” from their sisters’ and wives' journals regularly.

So, the idea that poor Anne, left behind in Stratford most of the time raising their children alone while her husband made a career in London, was the true author of the plays may seem attractive. Especially because so many of these plays feature intelligent and witty women who keep their presence of mind in trying circumstances and engineer situations to work in their favor. Or, the idea that Elizabeth the first, a well-educated woman who was the first to rule England alone, might have been moonlighting as one of the most beloved writers of the English language is an interesting idea to play with. She did offer patronage to The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s troupe.

Still, the evidence is rather thin. Thinking of either of these women as the secret writer of Shakespeare’s plays is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it probably can go no further than that. And, quite honestly, throwing around such unsupported claims only takes more attention away from the other women who we can decidedly prove were plagiarized by their husbands and brothers.

Still, there may be some evidence that among the many collaborators Shakespeare worked with, there may have been a woman among them. Emilia Lanier, sometimes credited with being the “Dark Lady” mentioned in Shakespeare’s sonnets was one of the first women to publish a book of verse in the English language. She was an accomplished poet in her own right, and there is evidence that the two were connected. Some extrapolate her influence or even collaboration with several of his plays, but again, it’s hard to find a definitive answer.

So, how did a man who knew so relatively little of the world write so many works that have touched audiences through the centuries? There are several influences that may have contributed. The era in which Shakespeare came of age as a writer was the English Renaissance. Education was growing, art was being supported, texts from ancient writers were becoming available, and England was establishing itself on the world’s stage. It was an exciting time of growth. This atmosphere and the availability of art and literature from elsewhere in Europe no doubt helped create conditions in which a middle-class writer could flourish.

There is also speculation that perhaps Shakespeare did travel outside of England. There are several “lost years” in his biography before he established himself in the London theatre scene where the historical record isn’t quite sure where he was or what he was doing. But it was after that time that he started his career as a writer. Was he traveling as a skilled worker? Working on a trade ship? Embarking on a self-guided study of the classical texts which were becoming more available? Some evidence may even point to him being a schoolmaster for a time, or maybe he was running the family business. We can’t be sure, but there may have been some influences that affected him during that time.

Perhaps it is partly because he didn’t have as extensive a formal education as many of his writing contemporaries that gave him license to be more playful. He invented new words and new word usages. No matter your feelings about his dramas, you owe him a debt for helping bridge the gap between middle and modern English, shaping many parts of the language we still speak. He wrote for the common people with bawdiness and humor, not morality plays to appease the nobility. Yet, his plays still have a sense of morality.

When we look at the body of plays attributed to William Shakespeare, it’s safe to say that there were other people involved in their creation. That cannot be doubted — it’s simply the nature of how theatre worked at that time. The same can be said for any other writer of the era (in fact, Shakespeare has come up as a possible co-author for several works that aren’t in his acknowledge 37 play cannon, most scholars believing he worked on 40–44 plays that still survive). But if we dwell on trying to crack the code and find someone else who is somehow more acceptable as “the real Shakespeare,” it misses the point.

Shakespeare was one of the first English writers to dig into what it means to be a human, not a character teaching a moral lesson, but a fully-formed, flawed person. His plots are still recycled, his poetry still quoted. Something about his grasp of humanity still resonates today even though the language seems more remote to us now. The question of authorship isn’t an easy thing with one answer, just as being human is infinitely complicated. Why fixate on other candidates as possible authors, unless you have difficulty believing that genius can come from even a humble background and that the observation of human nature is attainable for us all?