After long silence, I challenge his slanderers
By Herbert Rothschild
To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s plays in what has come to be known as the First Folio, Jessica Sage has arranged for Barry Kraft, Oregon Shakespeare Festival actor and dramaturge, to speak about it from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday under the auspices of her wonderful Rogue Theatre Company. In-person tickets may not still be available, but one can register at roguetheatrecompany.com for live streaming or a recording.
John Heminges and Henry Condell, who for 20 years were fellow actors and shareholders in the same acting company as Shakespeare, brought 36 playscripts in Shakespeare’s own hand to the printer. Of the plays confidently ascribed to Shakespeare, only “Pericles” was omitted. In the preface they said of their friend, who had died seven years earlier, “His mind and hand went together: and what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.”
Beginning in the 19th century, someone decided that Heminges and Condell were implicated in the biggest literary swindle in history. Today, the number who ascribe to this view is legion.
Until now, I’ve refused invitations to argue about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Partly that’s because my focus in literary studies has always been the texts; biography is of interest to me only if it illuminates the works themselves. Partly it’s been because those familiar with scholarly biographies of Shakespeare, such as Samuel Schoenbaum’s, know how extensive a record there was in Shakespeare’s own day of recognition of his authorship.
As early as 1592, Robert Greene mentioned him as an “upstart crow” who supposedly borrowed from other playwrites like himself for the Henry VI plays. Frances Meres in 1598 grouped him with the greatest of classical dramatists and gave us a valuable list of his plays staged up to then. Mentions continued — title pages of quarto editions, entries in the Stationer’s Register, tributes by fellow poets like Ben Jonson. Not many authors from so early a period have been mentioned as frequently by their contemporaries, usually in the kindest terms.
None of this evidence suffices to discourage people from claiming that the greatest writer in the English language was a consummate fraud, and that all the people in his acting company conspired with him in the fraud. Conspired so successfully that not a word of the fraud was breathed, and only after three centuries was someone smart enough to discover it.
While more than one candidate for the “real” Shakespeare has been proposed over time, the only one with adherents now is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The argument goes that since he was a nobleman and plays weren’t a fitting literary genre for a gentleman, he needed a front. He found it in Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603).
Actually, Oxford had other acting companies at his command and at a much earlier date. Like his father before him, he was patron of his own acting company, Oxford’s Men, which was active in the 1580s and perhaps in London in the late 1590s. He also had the lease on the Blackfriar’s Playhouse in London, where in 1583 he installed his private secretary, John Lyly, as head and chief dramatist for “Oxford’s Boys,” a company composed of Children of the Chapel choir and Children of Paul’s (St. Paul’s church) choir. I guess the itch to write plays, not just sponsor them, struck Oxford only at age 41 when Shakespeare began his theatrical career.
An even more awkward fact about Oxford as ghost writer for Shakespeare is that he died on June 24, 1604, and the last of Shakespeare’s plays debuted in 1612. In the way of all conspiracy theorists, Oxfordians find a solution to that seemingly insurmountable problem. Perhaps sensing his impending death, their guy rapidly composed 13 plays, including three of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, plus “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest,” then enjoined upon the King’s Men to release them at the rate of about one per year.
OK. Forget about Occam’s Razor (i.e., the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is likely to be the best). A further difficulty is that “The Tempest” couldn’t have been written before 1610 because of its indisputable connection with published reports of the shipwreck in the Bermudas the year before of a fleet of the Virginia Company under the command of Sir George Somers. I was present when a prominent local Oxfordian tried to skirt that reef upon which the entire jerry-rigged theory runs aground. I assure you there was no there there.
Shakespeare didn’t just write plays. He wrote sonnets and two lengthy narrative poems. Meres mentioned all these along with the plays. There would be no reason for Oxford to need a front for non-dramatic poetry. Gentlemen wrote poems. Oxford himself did. Some of his poetry has survived. It is merely competent. A few poems made it into anthologies of his day, none into anthologies thereafter.
Here’s a portion of Oxford’s “The Loss of My Good Name,” published in a 1576 anthology:
Framed in the front of forlorn hope, past all recovery,
I stayless stand t’abide the shock of shame and infamy.
My life, through lingering long, is lodged in lair of loathsome ways,
My death delayed to keep from life the harm of hapless days.
My sprites, my heart, my wit and force in deep distress are drowned;
The only loss of my good name is of these griefs the ground.
Compare this exercise in alliteration with the beginning of Shakespeare’s sonnet No. 30:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Oxford and Shakespeare were probably about the same age when they composed these poems. Who seems to you more likely to have written “Romeo and Juliet”?
Herbert Rothschild is an unpaid Ashland.news board member. Opinions expressed in columns represent the author’s views and may or may not reflect those of Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
To read a response to this column from Ashland resident Tom Woosnam, click here.
May 19 update: Added a missing word in the paragraph beginning “An even more awkward fact ….”
