Shakespeare authorship question

• 1. Introduction

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  The Shakespeare authorship question asks whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually wrote the plays and poems that bear his name. For most of literary history, that question was not asked at all. Shakespeare died on the 23rd of April 1616, and for the next two centuries nobody openly challenged the attribution. Then, in the middle of the 19th century, something changed. Shakespeare had become more than a playwright; he had become a symbol of transcendent genius, the English national poet, a figure George Bernard Shaw would later call the object of "bardolatry". And the more extraordinary that genius seemed, the harder it became for some people to believe it could have originated in a market town of around 1,500 residents where the local industries included sheep slaughter, hide tanning, and wool trading. Over the years that doubt would spawn a vast literature, more than 80 alternative candidates, mock jury trials, cipher wheels, tomb raids, and a Supreme Court moot court. What does this controversy reveal about how we read literature, how we imagine genius, and what counts as evidence?

• 2. The Doubter's Case

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  Shakespeare was born, brought up, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, about 100 miles north-west of London. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and town official who signed his name with a mark. His mother, Mary Arden, also signed with a mark, and no other examples of either parent's handwriting survive. Anti-Stratfordians point to this as evidence of an illiterate household. Shakespeare's daughter Judith signed a legal document with a mark too, and her sister Susanna's two signatures appear to have been drawn rather than written with a practised hand.

  The free King's New School in Stratford, established 1553, stood about half a mile from Shakespeare's boyhood home. No student registers of the period survive, so no documentation confirms that he attended, though the school was staffed by Oxford graduates including headmaster Thomas Jenkins and would have provided intensive training in Latin grammar, the classics, and rhetoric at no cost. Anti-Stratfordians argue that the absence of any documentary proof of attendance is damning. They also point to Shakespeare's six surviving authenticated signatures, which they characterise as an illiterate scrawl.

  No personal letters or literary manuscripts certainly written by Shakespeare of Stratford survive. His will, executed on the 25th of March 1616, mentions monetary gifts to fellow actors for mourning rings but says nothing about personal papers, books, poems, or the 18 plays that remained unpublished at his death. No public mourning of his death went recorded, and no eulogies were published until seven years later, as front matter in the First Folio. Anti-Stratfordians take the vocabulary found in the plays, calculated to be between 17,500 and 29,000 words, as one more thing a man from Stratford could not plausibly have possessed.

• 3. The Scholars' Reply

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  Academic Shakespeareans hold that the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship follows exactly the same methodology used to attribute works to any other writer of the period. The name William Shakespeare was given as that of a well-known writer at least 23 times during his lifetime. In 1598, Francis Meres named Shakespeare as a playwright and poet in his Palladis Tamia, referring to him as one of the authors by whom the "English tongue is mightily enriched" and listing twelve plays, four of which were never published in quarto.

  Two official stationers' entries name him directly. One, dated the 23rd of August 1600, refers to texts "Wrytten by mr Shakespere". Another, dated the 26th of November 1607, records the licensing of King Lear as written by "Master William Shakespeare". The historian Sir George Buc, who served as Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622 and was meticulous in attributing works correctly, personally licensed King Lear for publication in 1607 as written by Shakespeare. Contemporary poets and historians cited him by name; John Stow's Annales listed him among "Our moderne, and present excellent Poets" as "M. Willi. Shake-speare gentleman".

  Actors John Heminges and Henry Condell knew and worked with Shakespeare for more than 20 years. In the 1623 First Folio they wrote that they published it only to keep alive the memory of "so worthy a Friend, & Fellow". Ben Jonson, who criticised Shakespeare as lacking "arte" and faulted him for giving Bohemia a coast in The Winter's Tale, nonetheless wrote in his private notes: "I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions." Scholars note that the gaps in Shakespeare's personal record are typical of the period; of some playwrights, next to nothing is known.

• 4. Stylometric Evidence

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  Beginning in 1987, Ward Elliott, who was sympathetic to the Oxfordian theory, and Robert J. Valenza supervised a continuing stylometric study known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic. Using computer programs to compare Shakespeare's stylistic habits with the works of 37 proposed alternative authors, the study ran until the spring of 2010. It found that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting patterns, suggesting a single individual rather than a committee. Shakespeare used fewer relative clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines than most writers with whom he was compared. Crucially, none of the tested claimants' known works could have been written by Shakespeare, nor could Shakespeare have been written by them, eliminating Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe among others.

  In a 2004 study, Dean Keith Simonton examined the correlation between the thematic content of Shakespeare's plays and their political context. He found that when the mainstream chronologies were backdated two years they yield substantial correlations, whereas the alternative chronologies proposed by Oxfordians display no relationship regardless of the time lag. Scholars also note that the late plays, including The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, are written in a style radically different from the Elizabethan-era plays and similar to that of other Jacobean playwrights. After the King's Men began using the Blackfriars Theatre for performances in 1609, the plays were written to accommodate a smaller stage with more music, dancing, and more evenly divided acts to allow for candle trimming. Textual evidence also indicates that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights who were not always aware of what he had done in a previous scene, suggesting live collaboration rather than a finished script left by an already dead author.

• 5. Bacon, Ciphers, and Tomb Raids

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  Shakespeare's authorship was first openly questioned in the pages of Joseph C. Hart's The Romance of Yachting in 1848. The first alternative candidate to be proposed in print was Sir Francis Bacon, named by William Henry Smith in a pamphlet published in September 1856. Four years later, in 1848, Dr. Robert W. Jameson had already expressed similar doubts anonymously. Ohio-born Delia Bacon had theorised as early as 1845 that the plays were written by a group under Bacon's leadership, with Walter Raleigh as the main writer. In 1853, with help from Ralph Waldo Emerson, she travelled to England to search for evidence. She never found any. She tried to have Francis Bacon's tomb opened and spent several nights in a church chancel trying to summon the courage to prise up Shakespeare's gravestone before leaving without doing so.

  Ciphers became central to the Baconian case. Dr. Orville Ward Owen constructed a cipher wheel, a 1,000-foot strip of canvas on which he had pasted the works of Shakespeare and other writers, mounted on two parallel wheels for rapid decryption. In his multi-volume Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story, published in 1893, he claimed to have found Bacon's autobiography embedded in the plays, including the claim that Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth. In 1907, Owen announced he had decoded instructions revealing that a box of proof had been buried in the River Wye near Chepstow Castle. His dredging machinery retrieved nothing.

  That same year Owen's former assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, financed by George Fabyan, travelled to England believing she had decoded a biliteral cipher pointing to manuscripts hidden behind panels in Canonbury Tower in Islington. None were found. American cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman won the Folger Shakespeare Library Literary Prize in 1955 for a study that disproved all claims that the works contain hidden ciphers, later condensed as The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined in 1957. By 1884, the authorship question had already produced more than 250 books; two years later the Francis Bacon Society was founded in England, and it still survives today, publishing a journal called Baconiana.

• 6. Oxford Ascends

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  With the appearance of J. Thomas Looney's Shakespeare Identified in 1920, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, quickly displaced Bacon as the most popular alternative candidate. Oxford was Lord Great Chamberlain of England, a courtier poet praised as a playwright by Francis Meres, and a literary patron: between 1564 and 1599-33 works were dedicated to him, including works by John Lyly and Robert Greene. Oxfordians point out that examples of his poetry but none of his theatrical works survive, and they believe literary allusions indicate his hand in the Shakespeare canon. In 1923, two years after Looney and Greenwood founded the Shakespeare Fellowship to promote debate, Archie Webster argued in The National Review that the Sonnets were an autobiographical account of Marlowe's survival, further illustrating how rival theories sometimes borrowed each other's methods.

  In 1952, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr. published the 1,300-page This Star of England, proposing that the "fair youth" of the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the offspring of a love affair between Oxford and the Queen. This became the "Prince Tudor theory", framing the entire Shakespeare canon as an Elizabethan state secret. In 1957 the Shakespeare Oxford Society was founded in the US; by 1974 its membership stood at 80.

  Charlton Ogburn Jr., elected president of the society in 1976, launched a campaign to bypass academia and appeal directly to the public. In 1984 he published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare. On the 25th of September 1987, three justices of the Supreme Court of the United States convened a one-day moot court to hear the Oxfordian case. The justices determined that the case was based on a conspiracy theory and that the reasons given were both incoherent and unpersuasive. A retrial held at the Inner Temple in London on the 26th of November 1988, presided over by three Law Lords, confirmed the American verdict. In September 2011, a feature film called Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, bringing the Prince Tudor theory to a mass audience.

• 7. A Controversy Without End

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  By the 1990s, anti-Stratfordians had moved to the Internet in force. A 2010 survey of the field judged that their presence on Wikipedia "puts to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". On the 14th of April 2007, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition issued a petition called the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare". By the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death on the 23rd of April 2016, the document had been signed by 3,348 people, including 573 self-described current and former academics. The coalition's stated goal of forcing the academic establishment to acknowledge legitimate doubt by that deadline was not achieved.

  A survey of 265 American Shakespeare professors published by The New York Times on the 22nd of April 2007 found that 6 per cent answered "yes" and 11 per cent "possibly" when asked whether there is good reason to question Shakespeare's authorship. Sixty-one per cent chose "A theory without convincing evidence" and 32 per cent chose "A waste of time and classroom distraction".

  Public figures throughout history have been drawn to the question. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Justice John Paul Stevens, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Charlie Chaplin all found the arguments against Shakespeare persuasive. In 2010, James S. Shapiro surveyed the controversy in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, linking the Oxfordian revival to the cultural changes following the Watergate scandal and connecting the later spread of anti-Stratfordian ideas to the proliferation of conspiracy theories after the 9/11 attacks. Shapiro's observation points to something the controversy has always been about: not just who wrote Hamlet, but what kind of proof we trust, and why we find it so hard to believe that genius can come from an ordinary place.