Who Shakespeare wasn't but is. Or is that was but isn't?

Traditional Shakespeare scholars often found themselves in one particular quandary. At first, many had freely assigned the Stratford man personality traits based upon his plays and sonnets. They signed onto a rumor that he taught in a country school. Perhaps it was after that, they averred, that he must have worked in a legal office in order to pick up the knowledge of the law apparent in the plays. All of the plants mentioned in his plays were declared to have been particularly associated with Warwickshire where he grew up. Any of his vocabulary that seemed unique was again declared to have been taken from local Warwickshire dialect. In one of many comical shifts to find some connection between the purported Stratford author and the plays it was asserted that mention of gloves in the plays indicated that he was the son of a glover as John Shakespeare sometimes was employed.

It took almost 100 years — from the Shakespeare Jubilee that super-charged the field — for a third rate scholar to decide that the only possible explanation for the sonnets was that they were written to the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare had dedicated his two major poems to the earl, after all. The title page of the 1609 quarto edition of the sonnets featured the mysterious initials W.H. (Southampton's given name — Henry Wriothesley — featured the same reversed.) This to protect his privacy.

It had already long been a sensitive topic that the tone of the sonnets was affectionate, even intimate, in spite of the fact that they appeared to be written to another male. Soon the reversed initials came to confirm a homosexual relationship between the two. This could not possibly be allowed to stand for which reason one after another scholar declared that the sonnets were not autobiographical. It was ridiculous to think they were.¹

This, in turn, resulted in one of the great on-going squabbles around Shakespeare scholarship. Nothing in the works seemed to fit anything known about the Stratford man. A pattern soon formed and has persisted to this day: what a scholar didn't want to be true of Shakespeare he or she declared to be clear fiction. What he or she wanted to be true, on the other hand, was equally clearly autobiographical.

The public, however, wanted to know more about this famous man. They wanted it so much that they were willing to pay meaningful money to satisfy their desire. Like all fiction novels, they were eager to buy historical-fiction Shakespeare biographies by the pound. Thus began the scholarly tradition of putting aside professional rigor in order to cash in on the lucrative Shakespeare historical-fiction genre.

If the First Folio had identified the son of a cobbler from Cheshire as the author of the works the novel would have been for all intents and purposes the same. The names of the children would have been different. A beloved son named Athel who died young would have provided the name for the character Othello. An unmistakable reference to the cobbler's wife's best friend's 5^th cousin once removed would have been discovered in As You Like It. The Sly family name would be discovered to have been common in a nearby town where local tradition verified that an ale house was tended by a Marian Hacket (or Hiccough, close enough). An unmistakable pattern of reference to shoes would have been detected rather than gloves.

It is not hard to imagine how convenient all of this would prove to be once someone with the biography that fit the works showed up one day and the whole sweet gig threatened to become very problematical. The cry would go up. “For hundreds of years the scholarly community has verified again and again that the Stratford man was the author!”

Yet another pseudo-scholarly genre would surely spring up to declare that centuries of scholarship have proven that autobiographical content simply doesn't exist in the works. A regular-guy-Shakespeare-Ph.D. could expand the historical-fiction genre and bask in the the wine and cheese and book-signing circuits.² “The evidence strongly suggests,” he could write,

that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare's day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation. Those who believe that Elizabethan plays were autobiographical ought to be able to show that contemporaries were on the lookout for confessional allusions, as we know some were for topical ones. Yet not a single such contemporary observation survives for any play in the period, including Shakespeare's;...³

This a main theme of a whole book he could write entitled, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Add a tour of the podcast circuit and he could spread the good word.

There are certain assumptions about the relationship between a writer and his work. And these tended [sic] to be autobiographical assumptions. We live in an age of memoir in which we assume everybody whether a fiction writer or a non-fiction writer is telling his or her own story in the works and to a large extent that's true of 20th century and much 21st century literature. But that wasn't true of Shakespeare's day.⁴

Those who cherished the unreformed worship of the traditional Shakespeare would reward this as they had (and continue to do) the Shakespeare historical-fiction novel.

Also like the historical-fiction audience, they would be entirely oblivious whether or not Tudor writers actually indulged regularly in considerable amounts of autobiography. The word of the preacher would be the final word. 

It would simply cease to be true that Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit is expressly a work of creative autobiography. That Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff begins with several pages of autobiography and scatters more throughout. That his Pierce Penniless is entirely autobiographical. Gabriel Harvey was much “on the lookout” for these authors' autobiographical references as they, in turn, were “on the lookout” for his. Harvey even published a number of his own letters. These works and authors only head a long list.

Virtually every sonnet sequence from the time is and was thought to be autobiographical. Ben Jonson was quite clear that he portrayed himself as Horace in one of his plays and almost as clear that he was the character Asper in another. He and the other London playwrights were clear that they were actively “on the lookout” for autobiographical and biographical references in each other's plays. They, in turn, wrote plays in reply filled with autobiography and biography.

If more popular playwrights had been higher up in the social structure, or had been studied with the same exhaustive persistence we collectively study Shakespeare, we would be aware that their works include regular references to their lives. Regular observations taken from their immediate life experiences. If there were serious mismatches between life and work (as there are in some instances) we would be left with questions. How could anything else be possible?

Thanks to our regular-guy-Shakespeare-Ph.D.s, readers on the Authorship Question could be taught by experts in the field that these authors and these works just didn't exist. Thanks to centuries of irrefutable Shakespeare scholarship readers could be taught that they never did — or, more precisely, that they did if it should serve the purpose at hand, didn't if not.

1 Of course, now it is anti-LBGT to think they weren't. Shakespeare was out and proud.

2Not that the wine ever comes to much.

3Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?(2010). 268-9.

4Blackwell Podcasts. April 16, 2010. James Shapiro - Contested Will - Part 1 of 2. 1:30ff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB4_vR9C2YU

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
• Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.