You wouldn’t think it by looking at the long line of Shakespeare biographies on the library shelves, but everything we know for sure about the life of the world’s most revered playwright would fit comfortably onto half-a-dozen pages.
Yes, we know that a man named Will Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. We know that someone of pretty much the same name married and had children there (the baptismal register says Shaxpere, the marriage bond Shagspere), that he went to London, was an actor. We know that some of the most wonderful plays ever written were published under this man’s name – though we also know so little about his education, experiences and influences that an entire literary industry exists to prove that Shaxpere-Shagspere did not write – indeed, could not have written – them. We know that our Shakespeare gave evidence in a single obscure court case, signed a couple of documents, went home to Stratford, made a will and died in 1616.
And that’s just about it.
In one sense, this is not especially surprising. We know as much about Shakespeare as we know about most of his contemporaries – Ben Jonson, for instance, remains such a cipher that we can’t be sure where he was born, to whom, or even exactly when. “The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position at that time,” says David Thomas of Britain’s National Archives. “It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him.”
To make matters worse, what does survive tends to be either evidence of dubious quality or material of the driest sort imaginable: fragments from legal records, mostly. The former category includes most of what we think we know about Shakespeare’s character; yet, with the exception of a couple of friends from the theatrical world who made brief mention of him around the time he died, most of the anecdotes that appear in Shakespeare biographies were not collected until decades, and sometimes centuries, after his death. John Aubrey, the noted antiquary and diarist, was among the first of these chroniclers, writing that the playwright’s father was a butcher, and that Shakespeare himself was “a handsome, well shap’t man: very good company, and of a very redie and pleasant smoothe Witt.” He was followed a few years later by the Reverend Richard Davies, who in the 1680s first wrote down the famous anecdote about Shakespeare’s leaving Stratford for London after being caught poaching deer on the lands of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote Park. Yet the sources of both men’s information remain obscure, and Aubrey, in particular, is known for writing down any bit of gossip that came to him.
There is not the least shred of evidence that anybody, in the early years of the Shakespeare cult, bothered to travel to Warwickshire to interview those in Stratford who had known the playwright, even though Shakespeare’s daughter Judith did not die until 1662 and his granddaughter was still alive in 1670. The information that we do have lacks credibility, and some of it appears to be untrue; the most recent research suggests that Shakespeare’s father was a wool merchant, not a butcher. He was wealthy enough to have been accused of usury–the loan of money at interest, forbidden to Christians–in 1570.
Absent firsthand information about Shakespeare’s life, the only real hope of finding out much more about him lies in making meticulous searches through the surviving records of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. The British National Archives contains tons of ancient public records, ranging from tax records to writs, but this material is written in cramped, jargon-ridden and abbreviated dog Latin that cannot be deciphered without lengthy training. Only a very few scholars have been willing to devote years of their lives to the potentially fruitless pursuit of Shakespeare’s name through this endless word-mine, and the lack of firm information about Shakespeare’s life has had important consequences, not least for those who attempt to write it. As Bill Bryson puts it:
With so little to go on in the way of hard facts, students of Shakespeare’s life are left with essentially three possibilities: to pick minutely over…hundreds of thousands of records, without indexes or cross references, each potentially involving any of 200,000 citizens, [in which] Shakespeare’s name, if it appears at all, might be spelled in 80 different ways, or blotted or abbreviated beyond recognition…to speculate…or to persuade themselves that they know more than they actually do. Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition–that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals–and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty. The urge to switch from the subjunctive to the indicative is… always a powerful one.
As for the debate about Shakespeare's works – this is a minefield many people (including me) are either reluctant to get involved with, or unqualified to comment on. But the bottom line is that a good number of scholars and, especially, autodidacts have, over the years, looked at the incredible range of subjects that the playwright seems to have known about – from life in Italy or Greece to soldiering to witchcraft and so on and on – and presumed it is not credible that one man, from a relatively modest background and with an apparently relatively modest education - could possibly have mastered so many different things. There is, to be honest, also often an aura of snobbery about all this; supporters of the idea that "Shakespeare" was someone else often presume that this "someone" was a person of far greater social standing and, hence, sensibility: the Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon are two perennially popular suggestions.
There is a vast literature on the subject (and a scholarly consensus that strongly deprecates all the efforts of the Shakespeare-was-written-by... industry) but, personally, I enjoyed John Michell's Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) as a relatively balanced introduction to the controversies, written by someone who was not a professional literary scholar, but retained a sense of humour about the whole field that is sorely lacking in most other contributions to the endless and still-ongoing authorial debate.
My own interest in all this is, anyway, not the question of who wrote Shakespeare, but the evidence for Shakespeare's involvement in contemporary organised crime, which is [one thread that emerges, tentatively, in this blog article of mine] (https://mikedashhistory.com/2011/11/07/william-shakespeare-gangster/), from scholarly efforts to investigate the unexplored heaps of Tudor documents in the British archives for more evidence of the playwright's life. So I will leave further comment on the authorial debate to others who are much better qualified than I am to discuss it.
Conspiracy theories about who Shakespeare was or wasn't are quite common; they have been kicking around since the 18th century in one form or another. There are various motivations for saying Shakespeare wasn't who we think he was, most of them pretty shady and all of them academically very doubtful. "Shakespeare was a group pseudonym" is an extension of a tradition that includes "Shakespeare's works were written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford", "Shakespeare's works were written by Elizabeth I", "Shakespeare's works were written by Christopher Marlowe" (either from secret exile or by ouija board), "Shakespeare's works were written by Sir Francis Bacon"... you're getting the picture, and you're also getting the picture of what kind of people are most commonly deemed more likely candidates for writing Shakespeare's work than Shakespeare the man -- candidates who are wealthy, university-educated, or both. There's been so much time and effort put into outlining why Shakespeare's apparently small education would not have been the impediment to authorship these theorists sometimes claim that I won't go over it here, and in general there's as much material to debunk these conspiracy theories as there is to support them. These theories spring up from a distorted imagination of Elizabethan class structures and the landscape of Elizabethan drama. But this theory, "Shakespeare was a group pseudonym", isn't quite the same as that -- the multiple playwrights using his name don't have to be aristocrats, do they? They could be anybody, really, and we can deduce who they might be from Shakespeare's plays! They could be other playwrights who just wanted to put all their eggs in one literary basket, or to capitalize on an already-lucrative name. But how and why would this take place?
People identify Shakespeare's name as a possible pseudonym because it's written and spelled multiple ways in Shakespeare's own lifetime, including with a hyphen -- "Shak-speare", "shake-speare", and so on. The claim by people who think the name is a pseud is that this is in compliance with the norms of Elizabethan drama regarding fictional descriptive names. This is interesting to me, but it doesn't hold a ton of water -- isn't it also possible that the people responsible for compiling those editions of those plays and sonnets were theater people, and they were following that convention as a matter of style or habit with Shakespeare's name given that it's so obviously compounded between two common words? This doesn't happen to Jonson or Middleton because those names both follow standardized forms, rather than being rare surnames. People liked making plays on Shakespeare's name enough ("shake-scene") to suggest they were well aware of it being two freestanding words when divided with a hyphen. Furthermore, Shakespeare's name was also spelled without a hyphen with greater frequency. (Here I'll defer to Kathman and Ross' Chronological List of References to Shakespeare as Author/Poet/Playwright -- where we see "Shak-spear", sure, but also Shakspere, Shakspeare, Shaxberd, Shak, Shaksperr, and Sheakspear.) Contemporary conspiracy theorists also interpret a reference Shakespeare makes in his dedication to Venus & Adonis to the "first heir of his invention":
But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest.
Could "his invention" be his pseudonym, his false identity that he's invented for himself, or rather, the false identity of the true author? This sounds plausible but only if you ignore how Elizabethans used the word "invention", or how Shakespeare's works use the word "invention".
I say she never did invent this letter: / This is a man's invention, and his hand. (As You Like It, 4.3)
Or:
Let them accuse me by invention, I / Will answer in mine honour. (Coriolanus, 3.2)
Or maybe most famously, from Henry V:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
There's numerous other instances -- I hit up a Shakespeare concordance to find these, and you can go on the hunt too if you like. The sense in these uses is "the faculty of invention", the ability to come up with things (such as lies, or poetry and, not "the thing which I've invented".
Pseudonyms themselves were not unknown in the world of Elizabethan letters, but their use is different from how we might think of pseudonyms and pen names now -- it's not an attempt to conceal authorship formally, it's generally a token gesture at dodging legal fallout for what one might have written, or a stylistic flourish meant to reveal authorship as well as reveal the author's good taste. It wasn't an attempt to elaborately fabricate an alternate identity, either. Would this be possible in Early Modern England? Yeah, I guess. Would it have been likely, and is it more likely than Shakespeare-from-Stratford being the same person who wrote the works of Shakespeare-the-dude? Absolutely not. But Shakespeare conspiracy theories are all about constructing a narrative of extraordinary rarity, and framing the vanishingly unlikely as in fact the only likely and reasonable explanation.
There's no more and no less documentation of the life of Shakespeare-the-dude than of any other randomly-selected person of his social status and background in Early Modern England, which is to say, that there absolutely is some. It's not the wealth of documentation we have regarding, say, Elizabeth I, or even Marlowe given that Marlowe got in trouble wherever he went, but it's also not nothing, and it's not somehow suspicious. We don't have a detailed diary of Shakespeare-the-man's day to day actions, for instance, or a record of where he got his reference materials, even when that would be helpful. But there are abundant contemporary references to William Shakespeare the person, son of John Shakespeare and husband of Anne Hathaway, and also to William Shakespeare, the actor turned playwright. We can chart a continuity through the life of this William Shakespeare from Stratford that matches the output and influences of "Shakespeare's plays". (Arguments that you'd have to have been to Italy to write about Italians like the Shakespeare-playwright does really don't hold water. They're a case where conspiracy theorists insisting that the real author of Henry V etc. must have been Oxford or somebody like him are betraying their lack of familiarity with the conventions of Early Modern writing. You don't have to sail from England to Italy in this period to "know" lots of stuff about what Italians are like -- they're Catholics, right? Just start from there, maybe read some books or crib from other playwrights. That's the Early Modern drama way.)
Okay, so maybe some clever guys (or girls?) approached Shakespeare the guy from Stratford in a bar one night and asked if they could do some collaborations under his name. Okay, cool. But a collective of authors formally arranging to ghostwrite under a lucrative name with the okay of its original bearer wasn't a thing people really did in the 16th and 17th centuries -- there was no Elizabethan version of V.C. Andrews. It would have been a fairly daring literary venture to undertake, and all the more daring to get everyone involved (how many people would be sharing this pseud? two? three? five? ten?) to keep their mouths shut. Furthermore, if Shakespeare himself was such an unaccomplished rube -- why use his name? Why not construct an entirely false identity, Tyler Waggledagger or Punche Manne-Fiste, rather than the identity of a guy who, apart from the reputation of his skill as a playwright and the success of his plays, would supposedly be just another unremarkable actor from someplace other than London who didn't go to college? If the real writers were trying to dodge detection -- because they were supposed to be dead and buried, like Marlowe, or because they wanted to write spicy stuff and not get slammed by the authorities, like Jonson -- why put out plays in a way that required a personal relationship with impresarios and acting companies, rather than publish works in text form first? Why did none of the Lord Chamberlain's Men ever smell a rat, or did they already know and manage to keep quiet?
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Just to add to the always excellent /u/MikeDash, here are some older threads:
How old is the Shakespeare Authorship Question?, tackled by /u/Harmania. We have no record of anyone in Shakespeare’s lifetime questioning him and the idea was only popularized by Delia Bacon in the 19th century (she thought it was Sir Francis Bacon who wrote them).
What do we know about Shakespeare's personality? Do we have any accounts from people that interacted with him that shed some light on this issue? by /u/texpeare, which interestingly talks about what people have tried to learn about his personal life from his plays and poems.
Is there any solid evidence that Shakespeare's works were written by others?, again by /u/texpeare, offers short summaries of the other so-called candidates, as well as mentions of when the different candidates become popular.
The debate as a whole seems to be mostly a product of 19th century classism. It’s also worth noting that (according to these posts) the 19th century was about the period when Shakespeare’s literary legacy goes from being a playwright (alongside contemporaries like Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe and Beaumont and Fletcher) to the playwright. It’s also worth noting that potentially one of the reasons we may have so few papers of Shakespeare’s is not so long after his death in 1616, (literal) Puritans closed all of England’s theaters (first in 1642, with the ban more strictly enforced from 1648). Theaters only reopened with the Restoration in 1660, and demand for plays was apparently quite weak for several decades (for a while, I believe there was only one theatrical company, the United Company). As the above threads mention, Restoration tastes were bit different from pre-Restoration tastes (two new genres emerged: the Restoration comedy and the Restoration spectacular). During this period, when Shakespeare’s plays were performed, they were often performed altered for local tastes—for instance, some tragedies were given happy endings.
This doesn’t really have to do with anything, but my favorite example of Shakespeare being altered for local tastes happened not in the Restoration, but with mid-century British anthropologist trying to tell Hamlet and her local Tiv interlocutors correcting her so that it fit local norms. For example, when hearing that Hamlet saw his dead father’s ghost (she called him the “former chief” in her retelling), her Tiv interlocutors responded, “Impossible. Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.” “Shakespeare in the Bush”. It has essentially zero connection with this question but it’s one of my favorite things.
So I did a debunking of a guy that I think sums up the anti-strafordian position pretty well here. Spoilers: Shakespeare, I can say with 99% certainty, wrote the cannon.
Anyways let’s explore this question: who was (were) Shakespeare? Did he know things? What did he know? Let’s find out.
So the anti-Stratfordian (people who believe Shakespeare’s cannon was in fact not written by the man from Stratford-on-Avon) comes down to a few main points:
So truth be told very little is known about the man William Shakespeare. We know he was born and he died. Some people will tell you he died on his birthday, but we’re, in actuality, not even sure of that. We know that his father was given the title of Gentleman due to the fame of his son. We know that he signed his name (at least) 11 times. We know he had a daughter. And we know that he left his second best bed to his wife in his will. Beyond that nothing. No original manuscripts of the plays, no elaborate autobiography, no secret fortune hid beneath Stratford-on-Avon the only map to which is hidden on the Magna Carta (although this won’t stop me from looking).
This lack of evidence has caused many to say, well how can a man so great leave so little evidence. And the answer is that we’re looking back from the image of Shakespeare as the greatest English writer in history without understanding the context of Shakespeare in his time.
First and foremost few could have predicted that the plays would later be regarded as some of the greatest works of literature. Theater at the time was entertainment for the masses, where the common man could pay a penny to see a play and at worse throw rotten produce at the players. The theater district was also the prostitution district. There are some truly dirty jokes in Shakespeare, such as jokes about impotency in MacBeth.
Plays weren’t literary, they were entertainment. Complete scripts, like what we have today, didn’t really exist. Paper was an expensive commodity, and actors were given their lines and cues to memorize, and these alone, if even that, because so many players were illiterate. Therefore the earliest versions of Shakespeare’s cannon we have is the first folio, which was published posthumously in 1623. It should be said we have 18 plays in quarto published before then, but as far as a collection the first folio is all we got. This isn’t unusual for the time, Marlowe, a ridiculous though oft cited possible Shakespeare, had none of his works published until after his death.
Take the low class of literature and the lack of original scripts from his contemporaries, at least in the business of plays, and it’s easy to see how little evidence of Shakespeare exists outside of legal documents.
Shakespeare wrote on many a subject. From Moorish mercenaries in Venice to lovers in Hellenistic Egypt to court intrigue and incest in Denmark, there seems no subject that the “son of a Glover” from a pastoral English town did not know and speak about.
But under closer examination, this falls apart. Shakespeare doesn’t know anything about the world outside of the British Isles. The Two Gentleman of Verona mentions people sailing from Milan to Verona. In a Winter's Tale he gives Bohemia a coast line. Merchant of Venice has no mention of canals. The people of Vienna in Measure for Measure have Italian names. And Delphi is an island in Corliolanus. He confuses history, has men in the Trojan war discussing Aristotle. His Latin is high school level, which Ben Jonson even comments on in a tribute to him.
Any of the most popular candidates, such as Edward De Vere, who lived in Italy, or Francis Bacon, famed for his education, or Christopher Marlow, who was dead for Christ’s sake, had the education and experience not to make these mistakes, while a common man likely wouldn’t have known better.
The one area of knowledge that Shakespeare gives incredible insight and knowledge of is common speech. Characters in Shakespeare speak like his audience would as far as word choice goes, a topic which revered authors of his time had trouble with. In the same way that Lil Yatchy has a knowledge of slang that David Foster Wallace could never pull off, Shakespeare has knowledge of how common people in London spoke that courtly authors could not emulate. Leading us to the simple conclusion that Shakespeare was faking it til he made it as a common man making entertainment for common people.
Surprising no one, Elizabethan sedition laws were significantly stricter and carried harsher punishments then modern England. Thomas Kyd, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries was tortured for blasphemy, and Marlowe was awaiting a similar punishment when he was killed in a bar fight. This has lead some to believe that Shakespeare became a pseudonym for those seeking anonymity and therefore safety from persecution.
This would make sense if Shakespeare’s plays were not rotten with pro-state posturing. Let’s look at Richard III. Possibly one of the greatest villains in history, the image of the nephew murdering hunchback has been parodied, reproduced, and stained in the memory of the English speaking world. Of course Richard III was also defeated by Elizabeth’s grandfather giving the throne to him and his descendants, but that is surely simply coincidental. And certainly when King James came into the throne, and Shakespeare’s company became the official court company of the crown, Shakespeare just coincidentally wrote MacBeth, a play about how King James’s ancestor overthrew an Evil murderous maniac of a king who associated himself with witches to become king of Scotland. No surely these were tales dying to be told filled with a secret seditious narrative.
Okay so I got a little sarcastic at the end there, but seriously, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and I got one last piece of evidence that proves it.
There's a study which set to prove that the 29 plays attributed solely to Shakespeare were written, in fact, by the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere, and found that they were dead wrong. Analyzing the subtler points of writing (use of compound words, feminine endings in meter, etc) and found that indeed one individual wrote these 29 plays, and against some 20 possible candidates for Shakespeare, none of them matched said profile. Quite frankly, either Shakespeare wrote his works, or some unknown person wrote the canon under the assumed name William Shakespeare.
If I may bother u/mikedash and u/cdesmoulins some more, I was wondering if we have any informations about "Shakespeare"'s relations with his peers. Did fellow contemporary writers and poets know him, did THEY ever write anything about him?