Bronwyn's brother and sister-in-law came to visit us the other day. In the course of a very cordial - and wide-ranging - conversation, my sister-in-law asked me if I thought Shakespeare had really written the plays published under his name. I said that I did. She explained that she'd just finished reading Jodi Picoult's latest novel, which argues otherwise.
I hadn't actually heard of the novel, but what she told us about it did enable me to identify Picoult's principal candidate for authorship of the plays. In fact, I felt quite chuffed to be able to produce my own copy of the book below, A. L. Rowse's edition of The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Emilia Lanier.
Picoult refers to Emilia Lanier under her maiden name, Bassano, but she certainly is the lady in question.
Whether she really was Shakespeare's "dark lady" of the Sonnets, let alone the author of his plays, is of course a matter for speculation, but she was definitely "the first woman in England to assert herself as a professional poet" by publishing the volume above - surely quite an encomium in itself!
It's also, alas - in my view, at least - the biggest stumbling block to Picoult's theory. That is to say, the theory Picoult admits borrowing from journalist Elizabeth Winkler, who argued it in a 2019 essay in the Atlantic, and subsequently in her 2023 book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature.
This hypothesis has now earned its own Wikipedia page: "The Emilia Lanier theory of Shakespeare authorship", which traces the idea back to John Hudson's article "Amelia Bassano Lanier: A New Paradigm", in the anti-Stratfordian journal The Oxfordian, 11 (2009).
Let's look at a few lines from Lanier's book, which can be found reprinted in its entirety on the Renascence Editions website. This passage is taken from the description of "Cooke-ham" which concludes her work:
Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtain'dIt's not that these verses are bad. On the contrary, they seem to me very accomplished of their kind. They're regularly end-stopped, conventional in metre, and pious in their overall effect.
Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain'd;
And where the Muses gaue their full consent,
I should haue powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palate will'd me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.
Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest,
And all delights did harbour in her breast:
Neuer shall my sad eies againe behold
Those pleasures which my thoughts did then vnfold:
Yet you (great Lady) Mistris of that Place,
From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace;
Vouchsafe to thinke vpon those pleasures past,
As fleeting worldly Ioyes that could not last:
Or, as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasures,
Which are desir'd aboue all earthly treasures.
The fact that the book they come from was published in 1611 does not mean that they were actually written then, but there is a sense in which they belong to a tradition of writing which predates even the first publications of - let's refer to him/her as [Shakespeare] from now on, given the identity questions which continue to bedevil ... them.
Here are the opening lines of Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593, some twenty years before the appearance of Lanier's book:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd faceEven in this most conventional of [Shakespeare]'s early publications - probably the closest in style to Emilia Lanier's set-piece poems - we note the rhythmic variety ("Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn"), and galloping energy of the lines ("The field's chief flower, sweet above compare, / Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man"). They could, I suppose, have been written by the same hand, but it doesn't seem very likely to me.
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.
'Thrice-fairer than myself,' thus she began,
'The field's chief flower, sweet above compare,
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves or roses are;
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.
Moving forward to 1611, the date of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum - what was happening in actor / producer William Shakespeare's life then? It's the year he retired from London and the life of the theatre to return to his roots in Stratford-on-Avon. So what did the writing produced by [Shakespeare] in that year sound like?
Here's a passage from The Winter's Tale, one of [Shakespeare]'s "late Romances", which can either be seen as a retreat from the great tragedies of the early Jacobean period - or, alternatively, as a step on from them into a sense of balance and forgiveness of human frailty. The speaker here is the play's chorus, Time:
I, that please some, try all — both joy and terrorLike Emilia Lanier's poem about Cookham, this one is written in rhyming pentameters - or heroic couplets, as they're commonly known. There, however, the resemblance ends. Even at their simplest, as here, [Shakespeare]'s verses are distinguished by complex, at times almost baffling, syntax, together with flights of linguistic derring-do.
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error —
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now received. I witness to
The times that brought them in. So shall I do
To th’ freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing,
I turn my glass and give my scene such growing
As you had slept between ...
Once again, it's not absolutely impossible that the author of these lines also authored the poems in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, but if so the latter must have been early experiments - perhaps an adolescent's first attempts at formal verse. It's as close to impossible as makes no matter when you consider the sheer extent of Lanier's book, though. Who on earth would authorise such a publication at such a late stage in their literary career? And if it was unauthorised, why was she so keen to promote it?
If you have a tin ear for verse, which appears to be the case with most anti-Stratfordians (the collective noun for all the various sectaries who doubt Shakespeare was [Shakespeare] - instead favouring a bewildering list of some 80+ other candidates), I suppose that one set of heroic couplets sounds much like another. It doesn't really matter to you whether they were written by [Shakespeare], Jonson, Dryden, or even Alexander Pope. I imagine it's a bit like being tone-deaf in music.
Of course I can't simply ask you to take my word for it, but imho, it's about as likely that the poet of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum wrote the surviving corpus of [Shakespeare]'s works, as that Picasso secretly designed the early Mickey Mouse cartoons: the clash in style and tone is as blatant as that. On the one hand, Steamboat Willie; on the other, Guernica. Both very good of their type, mind you - but, well, different.
It's salutary to note, though, that even the most belaurelled experts can get it wrong. In 1986, prominent Shakespearean Gary Taylor announced his conviction that a poem ascribed to Shakespeare in a manuscript collection of verses probably written in the late 1630s was indeed an authentic addition to the canon. He and his co-editor Stanley Wells therefore decided to include "Shall I die?" in the New Oxford Shakespeare, their revisionist edition of the Complete Works of [Shakespeare].
Judge for yourself:
Shall I die? Shall I flyWhatcha reckon? I remain unconvinced, I'm afraid. If [Shakespeare] did write it, then it must have been during some drunken game of Bouts-rimés at the Mermaid Tavern. It's certainly no adjunct to the bard's diadem: 90 lines of pointless rhyming signifying next-to-nothing.
Lover's baits and deceits
sorrow breeding?
Shall I tend? Shall I send?
Shall I sue, and not rue
my proceeding?
In all duty her beauty
Binds me her servant for ever.
If she scorn, I mourn,
I retire to despair, joining never.
[and so on in the same vein for another eight 10-line stanzas] ...
I suppose Taylor may have been inspired by some fancied resemblance to the clearly genuine "Phoenix and the Turtle" (1601):
Beauty, truth, and rarity,Once again, it's chalk and cheese, I'm afraid. [Shakespeare]'s knotty rhymes foreshadow the kinds of paradoxical reasoning familiar to us from the work of such metaphysical poets as John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The lines are both marvellously intricate in style, and deceptively complex in their implications.
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd, in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix' nest,
And the Turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
"Shall I die?", by contrast, is as about as closely argued as "Rock around the Clock" - far less lyrically interesting than Richard Berry's "Louie, Louie", in any of its various versions. But there you go. Great scholar he may be, but it turns out that Gary Taylor has no ear for verse. "It's not a sin" - as an old TV toothpaste jingle familiar to me in youth was wont to assert - "it's how you grin!"
In a previous post on the (fictional) debate between C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud on the probability of the existence of God in the 2024 movie Freud's Last Session, I mentioned Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume's blunt claim about miracles:
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless it is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact that it tries to establish.One could perhaps rephrase this axiom more simply as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", a pithy restatement of Pierre-Simon Laplace's principle that “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”
Hume's point is that it's always more probable that the witnesses to an apparent "miracle" were mistaken - or lying - than that the laws of nature were suddenly suspended at that particular place and time.
Did the sun "stand still over Gibeon" when Joshua asked God to suspend the rotation of the earth so that the children of Israel could complete yet another massacre of their enemies (Joshua 10:12-14)? I don't know. I wasn't there. But neither were you, so if you assert that it did, then the burden of proof is on you. Q.E.D.
Another version of this is the famous "Occam's Razor". The original principle argued by 14th-century English monk William of Ockham was (more or less): "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem' [Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity]. This is often paraphrased as "The simplest explanation is usually the best one."
Devotees of secret conspiracies and hidden knowledge are quick to point out that the simplest explanation is not always correct. And of course they're quite right. The popularity of Occam's razor - and the reason that it forms the basis for all scientific method - comes from the fact that you have to begin your investigations somewhere: and the most obvious place is generally the best place to start.
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The Many Faces of William Shakespeare:l-to-r: the Cobbe portrait (1610), the Chandos portrait (early 1600s), & the Droeshout portrait (1622)
Perhaps a more interesting question than "Was Shakespeare a woman?" [or Sir Francis Bacon - or Christopher Marlowe - or the Earl of Oxford - or ... the list goes on and on], then, is "Why do so many people feel the need to dispute that the well-known theatre professional whose name is so clearly printed on the titlepage of his works was actually their author?"
British novelist Amanda Craig, in her rather acerbic review of Jodi Picoult's By Any Other Name, is in little doubt of the answer:
The conviction that Shakespeare wasn’t posh or pretty enough to have written Shakespeare is a favourite joke to those who satirise conspiracy theorists.Posh, yes. Most of the arguments against the "Stratfordian" being the real Slim Shady boil down to ill-concealed sneers at his lack of breeding, social status, or a university education. And yet there's little in William Shakespeare's background which differs substantially from that of other contemporary playwrights such as the bricklayer Ben Jonson or the shoemaker's son Christopher Marlowe.
Not pretty enough? Well, that's what really gets Craig going:
One problem is that Picoult’s Tudor heroine is basically a 21st-century American feminist who notices “pops of colour”, but nothing about the human condition. One never feels the roil of a gifted writer’s language, observation and ideas ... Nothing explains how or why Shakespeare’s work became a mirror in which we each see our own selves.But surely Picoult's playful thought experiment could still yield some useful ideas about female empowerment? What's wrong with giving the patriarchy a bit of a jolt from time to time? Craig apparently thinks otherwise:
Had this novel’s 500-plus pages been ruthlessly edited, it might have been a diverting romp. As it is, the modern-day parts of By Any Other Name add nothing but polemic. Like Emilia, modern Melina hides her work, in her case behind the identity of her gay Black best friend, leading to predictable professional and romantic complications. In Tudor England, Emilia’s life has a more compelling arc. Sold as a concubine at 13, conducting a passionate affair with Lord Southampton, forcibly married to the abusive Alphonso Lanier, she has a son, fights off the plague, and writes sublime plays and sonnets before dying in obscurity.Ouch! One can't help wondering if Amanda Craig would trade her own position as a respected Guardian critic and well-regarded middle-brow novelist for some small percentage of those 40 million sales per title. I suspect she would. You'd have to be crazy not to, really ...
If [the theory that Shakespeare was a woman] helps to combat the sexism that has serious female authors fighting not to have headless torsos in pink on our jackets, it is welcome. However, anyone who writes such sentences as “she drank from him as if he were an elixir” has not, perhaps, read even their own work attentively.
Picoult’s descriptions of Emilia’s silver eyes, clothes and orgasms plus her campaigning sense of social justice and propulsive storytelling are why she sells 40m copies worldwide ... Commercial or literary? Only a genius gets to be both.
What Craig seems to resent most is Jodi Picoult's usurpation of the underdog role in this conversation:
In 2010, the bestselling American novelist Jodi Picoult complained that her work was suffering from sexism. Her 30 novels address weighty subjects from gay rights to gun control, and if they were written by an author such as Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides, she believed they would not be perceived as beach reads.But, counters Craig, Picoult is not writing "the same kind of fiction as Eugenides or Franzen." They may not aspire to "genius", but they are - in Craig's view, at least - better writers than Picoult is. It's not because they're men that they get critical attention (look at Margaret Atwood, look at Ursula Le Guin), it's because they write books that demand such scrutiny.
In short, Craig concludes, content yourself with those mega-sales and your status as a worldwide literary superstar, and let posterity sort out whether or not you've written anything that will survive you.
But is all there is to it? Is it just snobbery and sexism which explains the continuing vogue of what Wikipedia coyly refers to as the "Shakespearean authorship question"?
Kingsley Amis's bitterly satirical novel Jake's Thing anticipated a number of the points raised by Picoult's book some half a century ago. In particular, he clearly foresaw - or already found himself living in - the world of "alternate facts" which we now definitively inhabit. It doesn't really matter what evidence you have for a thing - whether it makes sense or not. What matters is that you believe it.
There's a rather telling scene in his book where two curmudgeonly old Oxford Dons are discussing the kinds of things students get up to nowadays. The English literature professor, Lancewood, mentions that one of his female students unveiled an interesting hypothesis the day before: Hamlet was a woman.
'Even I know that's not very new,' said Jake [who teaches Ancient History]. 'Didn't Sarah Bernhardt play him, or her?'
But Jake has missed the point. Not that Hamlet can be played by a woman, but that "since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there's nothing else for him to be."
Lancewood continues:
I was ready to come back smartly with what about the way he treats Ophelia, male chauvinism if there ever was such a thing, but she'd thought of that - that was how all the men went on in those days, still do really, and it would have been suspicious if she, Hamlet, had behaved differently. What about old Hamlet and Gertrude? - you'd have expected them to notice. Old Hamlet had noticed, but he needed an heir, so he got Polonius to rig things, which gave Polonius the leverage he needed to be kept on at court when all he was fit for was talking balls ...That is the terrifying thing. Not the actual theory that Hamlet is a woman - that's rather fun. And you can hear the two old pricks sounding more and more interested by what you could do with an idea like that as they go along.
I shouldn't be going on like this because it'll only feed your prejudices, but, well, I said, what about the rest of the play, there's nothing in it that suggests that things are any different from what they seem. She didn't know about that, she said; she thought Hamlet was a woman.
What she also thought, in a different sense, was that Hamlet was a woman in some other ... realer sphere than the play or Shakespeare's sources or anything that might historically have taken place at Elsinore or any other actual spot. Some third domain beyond fiction or fact. That's the terrifying thing.
It's never exactly an easy proposition, but if you can set aside for a moment Kingsley Amis's characteristic sneering condescension towards women and, well, the young in general, his exposition of the "Hamlet is a woman" hypothesis really does repay a little scrutiny.
Both Hume's theory of miracles and Occam's razor presuppose a world where people think it important to gather persuasive evidence to substantiate their ideas. Once you throw that antiquated notion out of the window, though, your horizons open up considerably.
You can say anything! You don't need to prove it, just assert it. And if you can find somebody famous who thinks the same thing, well, that just confirms it. It doesn't matter what they're famous for - just that they're click-bait of some sort.
Let's take as a test-case the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the works of [Shakespeare]. The long lists of luminaries who have (allegedly) agreed with the Baconian theory at one time or another would stagger you: they include Isaac Asimov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, and a variety of other wiseacres.
And yet, have you ever read any of the works of Sir Francis Bacon? One problem is that there are so many of them. As well as conducting an active political career, he was also an experimental scientist and philosopher and wrote a large number of published works in each of these areas - as well as a massive corpus of letters and notebooks. How could he have had time to write all of [Shakespeare]'s almost equally voluminous corpus as well?
There's also the problem that none of his other works sound even in the slightest bit like [Shakespeare]. Try them. Sit down this minute and start reading The Advancement of Learning (1605), or The New Atlantis (1626), or even his alltime bestseller The Essays (1597-1625). Is there any resemblance in style between them and [Shakespeare]'s poetry or plays? No? How surprising!
Unfortunately for the Baconians, their hero, like most of his contemporaries, wrote some verse of his own. Prominent nineteenth-century literary scholar Sir Sidney Lee concluded: "such authentic examples of Bacon's efforts to write verse as survive prove beyond all possibility of contradiction that, great as he was as a prose writer and a philosopher, he was incapable of penning any of the poetry assigned to Shakespeare."
So where did the idea come from in the first place? Well, Baconians are understandably anxious to play down the fact, but the chief proponent and prophet of their theory was a rather eccentric American writer called Delia Bacon (no relation). You can read more about her in the book pictured above, Samuel Schoenbaum's invaluable compendium of three centuries of Shakespeare biography, Shakespeare's Lives.
Delia Bacon's sole research trip to England to test her hypotheses on the spot ended somewhat inconclusively:
In 1853, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Delia Bacon travelled to England to search for evidence to support her theories. Instead of performing archival research, she sought to unearth buried manuscripts, and unsuccessfully tried to persuade a caretaker to open Bacon's tomb. She believed she had deciphered instructions in Bacon's letters to look beneath Shakespeare's Stratford gravestone for papers that would prove the works were Bacon's, but after spending several nights in the chancel trying to summon the requisite courage, she left without prising up the stone slab.Those nights hiding in the church at Stratford appear to have taken a toll on her health, however:
Delia Bacon died in 1859, having in 1858 been placed by her family in the care of a lunatic asylum at Hartford, Connecticut. According to her nephew, Theodore Bacon, she had been seized by a "violent mania" while in England, and had been "removed to an excellent private asylum for a small number of insane persons" at Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, before being brought back to America.To do her justice, Delia Bacon's Shakespearean authorship theory did involve a syndicate of prominent Elizabethan writers, helmed by Sir Francis Bacon, but also including Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, each of whom provided particular sections of the plays ... for various nebulous reasons to do with Francis Bacon's status as the unacknowledged son and heir of Elizabeth 1st, among other things.
The second great proponent of Baconian theory was a certain Ignatius L. Donnelly, whose book The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in Shakespeare's Plays (1888) popularised the idea of finding encrypted messages in the First Folio of [Shakespeare]'s works, as well as the various quarto editions of individual plays which preceded it. Donnelly is, of course, better known for his contributions to the burgeoning fields of pseudoscience and pseudohistory, which included the still popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), which argued that all known ancient civilizations were descended from this high-Neolithic culture.
One begins to see the relevance of Amis's comment about "some third domain beyond fiction or fact", where anything can be asserted by anyone without blame or consequences. And that, I'm afraid - along with Area 51, the Loch Ness monster, posthumous sightings of Elvis Presley, and other old chestnuts - seems to me an appropriate place to shelve the [Shakespeare]-wasn't-Shakespeare controversy.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: so far no actual proof of any kind has been forthcoming. And that's despite repeated rummaging through sites clearly indicated by encoded documents: the bed of the River Wye near Chepstow Castle; behind the panels of Canonbury Tower in Islington; even in the tomb of the poet Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey (nothing was found there, astonishingly, but "some old bones").
It's fine to live in hope - but probably best, eventually, to come back down to earth.
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