Last night, in association with Sony Pictues, I took part in a debate at The English-Speaking Union in London: ‘This House Believes that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him.’ Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson joined me in proposing the motion. Speaking against were the Hollywood director Roland Emmerich, whose forthcoming film Anonymous will put over the view that Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare, Charles Beauclerk president of the De Vere Society, and William Leahy of Brunel University. We were allowed to speak for up to five minutes each.
I thought you might like to read what I said….
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening we have been entertained by a post-modern cocktail of historical fact, and historical fiction.
First, the historical facts. From Stanley Wells we have heard about the positive evidence which in any court of law would be enough to prove that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a writer, a share-holder in a theatre company, who was much written about by his contemporaries during his lifetime and just after his death. And from Michael Dobson we have begun to understand some of what has motivated people from 1856 onwards to turn those facts on their heads and into melodramatic fiction.
Roland Emmerich’s exciting new film is the latest expression of such fiction. Charles Beauclerc wants the greatest body of literary achievement the world has thus far known to be attributed to his ancestor, Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Alas, none of De Vere’s plays actually survive, though some poems, not without merit, do. And you’ve just heard William Leahy evoke moral arguments about Shakespeare’s private life. If the works are only to be read autobiographically, as the anti-Stratfordians would have us believe, then let us remember that in Sonnets 134, 135, 136 and 143, Shakespeare puns on his first name (Sonnet 136 even ends with ‘my name is Will’).
It’s an embarrassing fact, isn’t it, that the work of the (to date) 77 alternative candidates sounds different. Any actor will tell you that Christopher Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ is that of a different writer. Francis Bacon’s work – much of it in Latin – shows genius, but not that of a playwright. The suggestion that De Vere was able to release fourteen plays after his death in 1604 (including one co-authored with Thomas Middleton, another co-authored with George Wilkins, and three co-authored with John Fletcher) beggars belief. Perhaps there’s material here for a Hollywood sequel showing that Shakespeare’s collaborators were also the front men for aristocratic geniuses: Anonymous Too. All proponents of alternative candidates have to ignore authorship tests, because they can’t countenance the possibility of co-authorship. Allow one brick to be removed from the edifice of conspiratorial fundamentalism, and the entire wall collapses.
So, why create fictions about Shakespeare’s authorship? Actually, I do think an implicit snobbery is an important factor. Nearly all of the alternative candidates are aristocratic, university educated, or both. Their proponents look down on William Shakespeare as an uneducated commoner, a theory which ignores the high quality of Elizabethan grammar school education. With the snobbery comes iconoclasm, the desire to topple a reputation which far exceeds anyone else’s. The earliest reference to Shakespeare is a veiled and bitchy remark by Robert Greene which looks down on his presumption to be a writer and calls him a Jack of all trades. Some people are just jealous, and the spirit of Greene lives on. Roland Emmerich’s film depicts Shakespeare as an inarticulate actor, and De Vere as an isolated genius.
Shakespeare had an aristocratic patron, the Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of his two hugely successful narrative poems, printed by Shakespeare’s Stratford neighbour, Richard Field. The companies with which Shakespeare worked performed regularly at court for Elizabeth I and James I. But even this kind of social status – along with the coat of arms Shakespeare secured for his father in 1596, and later inherited – is not aristocratic enough for most of the anti-Shakespearians.
Shakespeare’s works reek of the theatre. There were thirty-seven separate Shakespeare play editions published in his life-time; twenty-seven of these bear his name on the title-page, those that don’t give the name of the companies of which Shakespeare was a shareholder and for which he wrote. These books are very revealing about a theatrical mind at work in the process of writing. Sometimes the names of the actors with whom Shakespeare worked appear in stage-directions and speech prefixes. This is the work of a man whose deep knowledge of the theatrical craft was acquired only by practical experience.
This work is not anonymous, still less is it by the Earl of Oxford, or Derby, or Rutland, or Daniel Defoe, or Mary Sidney, or Henry Neville, or even Queen Elizbeth I. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. His authorship was not even questioned until 1856. If he didn’t then we have to believe that thousands of people during his life-time – readers, publishers, printers, booksellers, actors, audience members, courtiers, and Stratford-upon-Avon residents who put a church monument to Shakespeare comparing him to Virgil and Socrates – were in on a terrible conspiracy. I think not.’
Stanley Wells’s speech will be posted here on Thursday.
Last night our team who spoke up for Shakespeare won the debate by acclamation. Let’s hope some of our arguments do some good.
