Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts

Monday, September 08, 2025

The Ghost in Hamlet


William Blake: Hamlet and his Father's Ghost (1806)


I remember that when we marked exams in the Auckland University English Department, we tutors were always instructed not to leave any comments - especially nasty ones - on the papers. Instead, we circulated a few stapled sheets for any thoughts we had beyond the bare grade.

The reason for this (I was told) was because there'd been a big fuss a few years before when a student made a formal request to see their script and found it covered with sarcastic marginalia.

Human nature being what it is, these comment-bundles tended to become the academic equivalent of a gag reel. They were carefully collected and burned at the end of each examination season.

Among the quotable quotes one of my colleagues recorded from our Stage 1 Shakespeare exam one year was the following remark about Hamlet: "The question is: is it a Protestant ghost or a Catholic ghost?"

He apparently thought it very risible to have to ascertain the spectre's doctrinal preferences before you decided whether or not you should pay any attention to its advice. It did sound rather funny - as stated - but I suspected at once that this phrase must have come from one of my tutorial students. It was I who had been stressing the differing views on the afterlife held by various Christian sects.



Put simply, is Hamlet's deceased father now located in Purgatory, or in Hell? If the former, his intentions must presumably be good; if the latter, the question is far more equivocal.

When the ghost speaks of the "sulf’rous and tormenting flames" to which he is condemned by day, that sounds very much like hellfire.

However, the rest of his statement would imply otherwise:
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

Ludovico Carracci: Purgatory (1610)


It's hard to read that line about his "foul crimes" being "burnt and purged away" as anything other than a reference to Purgatory. That is, after all, the place where such cleansing occurs. And Purgatory:
is a belief in Catholic theology. It is a passing intermediate state after physical death for purifying or purging a soul. A common analogy is dross being removed from gold in a furnace.
But how old is this doctrine? The idea of praying for the dead appears to have been part of Judeo-Christian practice for a very long time indeed. However:
At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, when the Catholic Church defined, for the first time, its teaching on purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church did not adopt the doctrine. The council made no mention of purgatory as a third place or as containing fire ...
Subsequent papal pronouncements have clarified that "the term does not indicate a place, but a condition of existence."

As for the various Protestant churches, opinions vary according to denomination:
The Church of England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, officially denounces what it calls "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory", but the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and elements of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist traditions hold that for some there is cleansing after death and pray for the dead, knowing it to be efficacious. The Reformed Churches teach that the departed are delivered from their sins through the process of glorification.
In other words, you pays your money and you makes your choice.



Returning to Hamlet, though: despite its generally gloomy demeanour, the prince seems convinced by the end of this first encounter that it is "an honest ghost." That was not his initial reaction, though:
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.
There is indeed something very "questionable" about this apparition. It certainly claims to come from Purgatory, but ought we to believe it?



It's thought that Hamlet was written sometime between 1599 and 1601, in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was first published in 1603. The date of composition can be ascertained (to some extent) by some references in the text to the newly-formed company of boy players at Blackfriars theatre, as well as verbal echoes of some of Shakespeare's earlier plays.

This was definitely a time of great political uncertainty. Shakespeare himself only narrowly avoided trouble when his acting company put on a special performance of the play Richard II - which depicts the deposition of a monarch - for the supporters of the Earl of Essex, who mounted an abortive coup against the Queen in early 1601.

It seems a little unlikely, then, that Shakespeare would have been actively promulgating the "Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory" in such troublous times, even if he was (as some suspect) a secret Catholic.


Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum (1514)


Denmark has, of course, been staunchly Protestant since the 1520s, when the Reformation first reached Scandinavia. But that doesn't really help us either way, since Shakespeare's knowledge of the country was probably hazy, and since the actual "events" on which the play is based (as reported in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" by Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, at any rate) took place in the legendary past of the country.

So we're left with that question: Was this ghost more likely to be regarded as a "spirit of health" or as a "goblin damned" by contemporary playgoers?

The question was definitively resolved - in his own judgement, at any rate - by Professor Ken Larsen of Auckland University. Or so he informed us in the first year tutorials I attended as a callow undergraduate.

Larsen told us that he'd read a book on thaumaturgy from the 1590s which gave a series of clear indications whether or not you could trust a spirit to tell you the truth or not (I'm sorry to say that I don't recall its title).

I was argumentative even in those days, and suggested that even if that was so, it didn't necessarily follow that Shakespeare himself was of the same opinion as the author of the self-help guide to necromancy Larsen was citing as evidence.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean that nowadays lots of people write lots of books about spirits and the supernatural, but just because they're contemporary with us doesn't mean that we agree with them, or that we're even aware of their conclusions. Even in a smaller cultural circle, 1590s London, there could be room for a number of views on the subject."

"What do you mean?" he repeated.

"I mean even though this book gives one clear opinion, Shakespeare may have been unaware of it, or even actively disagreed with it."

"I don't know what you're saying. Are you saying that it's a waste of time to try to gauge contemporary opinion on the subject?"

"No, not at all. I'm just saying that this book can be cited as valuable evidence, but it doesn't necessarily prove that that was what Shakespeare had in mind."

"I don't see what else I can do except what I'm doing. I've told you what the book said. You seem to be disputing that. I don't see what else I can say to make it clearer."

It was all rather frightening. The other students were glaring at me. My point seemed to me so obvious that it was hard to believe he couldn't understand it. Naturally he didn't expect any mere freshman to dispute his learned views - "What, I say? My foot my tutor?", as Prospero puts it when Miranda dares to question him similarly in The Tempest. But it was more than that. He didn't seem willing to concede the simple axiom that evidence (however interesting and relevant) isn't ipso facto conclusive proof.

I got a B+ from him on my essay - the only mark below the A's I received in my whole undergraduate career, I think.

But, as you can tell from my - no doubt somewhat biassed - account of our conversation, I still agree with myself. Larsen was a devotee of theological hairsplitting. He was always pointing out arcane doctrinal points in sixteenth and seventeenth century texts (as I discovered a few years later when I benefitted from his instruction on Spenser and other esoterically inclined poets). But he did seem, nevertheless, to lack what Keats called "negative capability": the ability to remain in doubt on a variety of thorny issues.


Jack Thorne: The Motive and the Cue (2023)


Recently, watching a cinematically projected version of Jack Thorne's stage-play The Motive and the Cue, which records:
the history behind the 1964 Broadway modern-dress production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Richard Burton in a production directed by Sir John Gielgud.
I came across yet another interpretation of Hamlet's father's ghost. Could it be, as Gielgud suggests to his turbulent star, that Hamlet simply didn't like his father? That the real reason for his apparent dilatoriness and indecision throughout the play is because he'd been bullied and belittled by him all his life, and is therefore reluctant - however subliminally - to continue this state of subordination even after the old man's death?

This is, admittedly, meant more as a guide to Burton's brilliantly moody (by all accounts) performance as the melancholy Dane than as a serious theory about the play. But even taken out of context it does help to explain the Oedipal struggle so many have sensed at the root of the drama.


John Gilbert: The Ghost, Gertrude & Hamlet (1867)


The ghost does, after all, reappear. In Act 3, scene 4, just when Hamlet seems to be making progress in explaining and even justifying his odd behaviour to his mother, Queen Gertrude, the ghost suddenly walks in and starts to chide his son for tardiness in exacting revenge:
Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
This is, at that particular moment, distinctly unhelpful advice. Gertrude can neither hear nor see the spirit, and her son's reaction to it persuades her - once and for all - that he's as crazy as a bedbug: "Alas, he’s mad."

So, once again, is this simply an act of tactlessness on the part of the impatient ghost - or is it deliberate sabotage? Is he a malign spirit, stirring up trouble for purposes of personal vengeance - or is he a genuine messenger from beyond, sent to purge all that's "rotten" in the state of Denmark.

Does he come from Purgatory, as a blessed (albeit somewhat erring) spirit - or from Hell, as a damned soul? To a strict Protestant, only the second alternative is really theologically possible. A Catholic could more easily entertain the first theory, though further proof would be necessary to confirm it.

An Anglo-Catholic, in the 1590s, could well be in doubt on such a matter. It's important to stress that Anglicanism is not, strictly speaking, a Protestant denomination. It's always existed in a complex and uneasy negotiation between the two extremes of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. That's still the case now, and it was certainly the case then.

Hamlet is not generally listed among the Shakespearean Problem Plays. As conceived by critic F. S. Boas in 1896, these are:
All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. Some critics include other plays that were not enumerated by Boas, most commonly The Winter's Tale, Timon of Athens, and The Merchant of Venice.
However, Boas did adds that Hamlet links Shakespeare's problem-plays to his unambiguous tragedies.

The term itself (borrowed from Ibsen) was meant to denote plays "uneasily situated between the comic and the tragic." That's not really the case with Hamlet, which has all the hallmarks of Shakespearean tragedy (a fatally flawed hero, a tragic dilemma, and the curtain coming down on a stage full of corpses). But the play is profoundly problematic, all the same.


Laurence Olivier, dir.: Hamlet (1948)


The other great tragedies all exemplify a clear flaw in their protagonists: jealousy in Othello; ambition in Macbeth; pride in King Lear. But what's the moral deficiency in Hamlet? Laurence Olivier's film referred to it as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."


T. S. Eliot: The Sacred Wood (1920)


T. S. Eliot's notorious 1919 essay "Hamlet and His Problems" called the play an "artistic failure" because the character's emotion does not accord with the external machinery of the play. It fails (he claims) to find an adequate "objective correlative" — a set of external objects or situations which could evoke that specific emotion in the audience.


C. S. Lewis: Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem? (1942)


C. S. Lewis, in his riposte "Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem?" creates an amusing thought experiment to explain his own reactions to the play:
Let us suppose that a picture which you have not seen is being talked about. The first thing you gather from the vast majority of the speakers ... is that this picture is undoubtedly a very great work. The next thing you discover is that hardly any two people in the room agree as to what it is a picture of. Most of them find something curious about the pose, and perhaps even the anatomy, of the central figure. One explains it by saying that it is a picture of the raising of Lazarus, and that the painter has cleverly managed to represent the uncertain gait of a body just recovering from the stiffness of death. Another, taking the central figure to be Bacchus returning from the conquest of India, says that it reels because it is drunk. A third, to whom it is self-evident that he has seen a picture of the death of Nelson, asks with some temper whether you expect a man to look quite normal just after he has been mortally wounded. A fourth maintains that such crudely representational canons of criticism will never penetrate so profound a work, and that the peculiarities of the central figure really reflect the content of the painter’s subconsciousness. Hardly have you had time to digest these opinions when you run into another group of critics who denounce as a pseudo-problem what the first group has been discussing. According to this second group there is nothing odd about the central figure. A more natural and self-explanatory pose they never saw and they cannot imagine what all the pother is about. At long last you discover — isolated in a corner of the room, somewhat frowned upon by the rest of the company, and including few reputable connoisseurs in its ranks — a little knot of men who are whispering that the picture is a villainous daub and that the mystery of the central figure merely results from the fact that it is out of drawing.
It's not unreasonable to suppose, Lewis goes on, that "our first reaction would be to accept, at least provisionally," the last of these views. However:
‘Most certainly,’ says Mr. Eliot, ‘an artistic failure.’ But is it ‘most certain’? Let me return for a moment to my analogy of the picture. In that dream there was one experiment we did not make. We didn’t walk into the next room and look at it for ourselves. Supposing we had done so. Suppose that at the first glance all the cogent arguments of the unfavourable critics had died on our lips, or echoed in our ears as idle babble. Suppose that looking on the picture we had found ourselves caught up into an unforgettable intensity of life and had come back from the room where it hung haunted for ever with the sense of vast dignities and strange sorrows and teased ‘with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’ — would not this have reversed our judgement and compelled us, in the teeth of a priori probability, to maintain that on one point at least the orthodox critics were in the right? ‘Most certainly an artistic failure.’ All argument is for that conclusion — until you read or see Hamlet again. And when you do, you are left saying that if this is failure, then failure is better than success. We want more of these ‘bad’ plays. From our first childish reading of the ghost scenes down to those golden minutes which we stole from marking examination papers on Hamlet to read a few pages of Hamlet itself, have we ever known the day or the hour when its enchantment failed? That castle is part of our own world. The affection we feel for the Prince, and, through him, for Horatio, is like a friendship in real life ... When we want that taste, no other book will do instead. It may turn out in the end that the thing is not a complete success. This compelling quality in it may coexist with some radical defect. But I doubt if we shall ever be able to say ... that it is ‘most certainly’ a failure. Even if the proposition that it has failed were at last admitted for true, I can think of few critical truths which most of us would utter with less certainty, and with a more divided mind.
Lewis is, I hope you'll agree, quite right. Hamlet is a magnificent play - almost the magnificent play. It's the mountain peak all others aspire to. "If this is failure, then failure is better than success," as he so eloquently puts it.

I don't have a solution to the problem of the ghost in Hamlet. But I don't think that this is because I haven't looked hard enough - or am just too dumb to find it. I'm fairly sure that the point of the ghost in Hamlet is that we're being forced to remain in doubt about it.

It seems that the murder the ghost is so anxious Hamlet should revenge did indeed take place as described: Hamlet's uncle's actions at various points in the drama reveal as much. It also seems that the posthumous fate it describes for itself: "Doomed for a certain term to walk the night / And for the day confined to fast in fires" does indeed closely resemble the contemporary understanding of Purgatory. So it may well have been intended to be regarded by Shakespeare's immediate audience as "a spirit of health" rather than as "a goblin damned."


William Salter Herrick: Hamlet in the Queen’s Chamber (1857)


But it's impossible to be sure. Its second appearance is so unhelpful that it inevitably gives rise to doubts. Which leads us to go back and think again. Doesn't it make sense for Hamlet to question its bona fides, given the stark doctrine of pagan revenge this ghost is preaching?

It would indeed be nice if we could solve just this one little vexed point in the play, as Ken Larsen thought he had done. But to claim that is to miss the point. The reason Hamlet remains alive for us is because it defies easy analysis. It may be a "failure" if you measure it against the inexorable certainties of Oedipus Rex - but not if you see it as the root of all things modern in literature: uneasy, equivocal characters; unresolvable dilemmas; action as the root of harm as well as good.

The problems with Hamlet, then, are like so many of the other problems that beset us. As Dr. Johnson said, when asked to resolve the question of the existence of ghosts: "all argument is against it; but all belief is for it". There's definitely a ghost in Hamlet, and we're told that it's a role Shakespeare liked to reserve for himself, but who or what that ghost is, and whether or not it's seeking relief from damnation or purgation is beyond final construing. Perhaps that's the real significance of Hamlet's famous remark:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.



King James I: Dæmonologie (1597)



Tuesday, January 07, 2025

The World of Shakespeare


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


I'm not sure if four times in a row constitutes a tradition, but this is the fourth time Bronwyn and I have seen the New Year in with a (for us, at least) maniacally difficult jigsaw puzzle.

In 2022 it was The World of Charles Dickens:




In 2023 it was The World of Dracula:




Last year, 2024, it was The World of Hercule Poirot:




This year, 2025, it's Shakespeare in the hot seat:


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


I've already written a number of posts about Shakespeare - one about the sources for his plays; another about the differences between the quarto and folio editions of his works; and, most recently, one about that perennial question whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare - or somebody else of the same name.


The World of Shakespeare
Photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd (5/1/25)


To tell you the truth, it's a bit of a relief to get out from under that last question and down to the nitty-gritty details of Shakespeare's London: complete with rebel heads on pikes, Gloriana on a floating barge, and a variety of theatrical troupes performing his plays.


Adam Simpson: The World of Shakespeare (2019)


As you'll have gathered, Shakespeare for me has mostly been a matter of books: biographies, collected editions, contextual "interpretations" ... Watching Kenneth Branagh's absurd adaptation of As You Like It the other day on Neon, though, I was struck by just how much fun Shakespeare can be.

The play is, admittedly, a rather silly one - and Branagh's decision to set it in Meiji-era Japan made literally no sense at all - but it was all still so delightful: exiled maidens running around in drag (for no obvious reason), pinning their love poems on the poor, long-suffering trees; melancholy Jaques spouting long speeches about nothing in particular. What's not to like?


Kenneth Branagh, dir.: As You Like It (2006)


It reminded me of the good old days when we used to sit down dutifully to watch each new instalment in Cedric Messina's (then Jonathan Miller's) long-running BBC Television Shakespeare (1978-85). There were some real revelations there. Who would have thought that his early Henry VI trilogy could be made into so gripping a Brechtian presentation on the roots of power? Who knew that the long-neglected Pericles could be made into such a profoundly beautiful and moving drama?

I ended up writing a poem about it, in fact:


William Shakespeare (with George Wilkins?): Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1984)


The Late Romances: Pericles


We have reached the 3rd Act
& Pericles
is ranting on the deck

the young Marina
lies in her mother’s arms
(still cold & dark
before revival)

which is coast
which sea?
the billows surge
up to the heavens

bodies bound below
by mortal surges
&how fares the dead?


[8/6/86]



What can I say? I was young at the time ...

It's easy enough to get the chance to see the great tragedies, or the Roman plays, or the Richard II / Henry IV / Henry V tetralogy, but the virtue of this BBC version was that they did everything. Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, King John - you name it, it was there. The productions were wildly various in quality, mind you. Some were pretty hard to sit through, others delightful - but they gave you a sense of what each of those 37 plays could be.

As you can guess from the above, it was the late romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - which were the real thrill for me. You see the last two performed sometimes, but hardly ever the first two.


Michael J. B. Allen & Kenneth Muir, ed.: Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto (1981)


I spent a good deal of time poring over the volume above in the Auckland University Library. So much time, in fact, that I eventually had to buy a copy for myself: a doorstopper if ever there was one!



It's almost unreadable, to be honest - but if you need to track some errant detail of wording, there it is.



The Shakespearean First Folio is a different matter. There are various facsimiles to choose from - it's unlikely that any of us will ever have the money (or the hubris) to purchase one of the few surviving copies of the original edition. You'd have to keep it in a bank vault, in any case!



It's a very handsome volume - colossal, yes, but clearly laid out and printed, with a host of important creative and critical issues hanging on virtually every line.

In any case, if you're looking for an absorbing way to pass a few idle hours, I'm afraid I can't recommend The World of Shakespeare. It's by far the most difficult of the puzzles we've done to date. There are few tell-tale blocks of colour once you've laid down the blue of the Thames, and a ridiculous number of tricky spires, towers, turrets, gable rooftops and leafy gardens to fill in one by one.

There's certainly some satisfaction in getting it done, but I'm afraid that it's back to the grindstone now for me - as well, I fear, as the rest of you.






A Happy New Year to All in
2025!




Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Was Shakespeare a woman?


Jodi Picoult: By Any Other Name (2024)


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.


Emilia Lanier: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611 / 1979)


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).




Stanley Spencer: View from Cookham Bridge (1936)


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'd
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.

It'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.

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.


William Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis (1593)


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 face
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.

Even 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.




Emilia Lanier: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611)


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?


William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale (First Folio, 1623)


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 terror
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 ...

Like 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.

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.


Erró: Homage to Picasso (1998)


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.




William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Gary Taylor & Stanley Wells (1986)


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 fly
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] ...
Whatcha 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.


William Shakespeare: The Phoenix and the Turtle, 1601 (2nd ed., 1611)


I suppose Taylor may have been inspired by some fancied resemblance to the clearly genuine "Phoenix and the Turtle" (1601):
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
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.

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.

"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!"




James Shapiro: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010)


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.




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?"


Charlie Hopkinson: Amanda Craig (1959- )


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.

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.
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 ...

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?'

Kingsley Amis: Jake's Thing (1978)


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 ...
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.
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.

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.




Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)


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."


Samuel Schoenbaum: Shakespeare's Lives (1970 / 1991)


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.