Actually, even 100 years before the Jubilee, Shakespeare's work had begun growing more popular. The puritans had shut down the theaters for some 18 years before the restoration of the English monarchy, in 1664, in the person of King Charles II. With the Restoration, the theaters opened once again much to the pleasure of the utterly bored English public. But, at first, there were few playwrights left to supply the demand. To fill out the theater schedules old plays were brought back on stage.
By then Shakespeare's plays were particularly old. They were considered to have great potential but to require considerable revision in order to meet the standards of the time. Rewritten, they were indeed highly popular. But no one knew anything of his life. He was a blank waiting to be filled in. The stories began to flow.
Antiquarians kept eye and ear open for new information concerning him. Scouts made modest amounts of money seeking out information to sell to them. Old men provided stories of having met the man. Old retired actors were especially attractive sources and suddenly found themselves a center of attention again. As time passed, sons recounted stories they were sure they remembered their fathers had told them their grandfathers had told about the man.
In short order, thick biographies began to appear, based upon a small number of surviving business and legal records and these stories from actors' tales and sons of sons of sons. These coming to quite little, however, the primary source of biography was his plays. His poems, at first, seemed problematical to the experts, and were left to quietly molder, but, after the Jubilee, the demand for new information was so great that they too were eventually culled for information. The popularity of these biographies made their authors quite famous, in their own right, and served admirably to pay household and seaside vacation expenses.
For all of this, during the years 1578-1585 — the years a young Tudor commoner must be learning a trade — there existed no detail at all. It was in 1790 that the dominant scholar in the Shakespeare Industry at the time, Edmund Malone, “supposed that he might have been a clerk in an attorney's office, thus killing two birds with one stone, and accounting not only for the barren seven years, but for the legal expressions to be found in his works.”1
For another 100 years, Shakespeare scholarship would make its discoveries after this fashion. Scholars would bid to fill each troublesome void with the most promising conjecture that satisfied the requirement that the Stratford man be unquestionably the author of the works. The one fact that was unquestionable, after all, was that the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays declared the Stratford man was their author.
So then, Shakespeare had been a law clerk. Well, after he'd been a country schoolmaster, anyway, boning up to teach little tousle-headed monsters Latin. Soon he would be in London valet-parking the horses of wealthy theater-goers and writing Romeo and Juliet at night by romantic candle-light.
Fellow Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, on the other hand, also left behind only very limited biographical material. He was also a great writer. But not a single thick biography was being written on his life. His plays were fewer, his grasp of human-nature neither as profound nor as various. Had there been a Jubilee for him it would have begun and ended at that.
Ironically, for these reasons no industry grew up around his works. His scholars could hope for only normal rewards, a normally cloistered academic life. If they invented the slightest thing they would eventually be chastised by their fellows and lose even that much.
Shakespeare scholars, on the other hand, had struck the mother load. Anything they published, so long as it adhered strictly to the Stratford man, and portrayed him as the paragon of all that was admirable in human nature, it hardly mattered what or how much they wrote. If their work was discovered to be contradictory it only required a conjecture or two more to patch matters up. It just meant more words for each of which they received an additional penny or two and the prospect of invitations to speak at the finest universities and ladies auxiliaries.
The situation being as it was it is truly surprising just how much exceptional Shakespeare scholarship was done during the 19th century. While the biographies were abysmally bad and the fraudulent “discoveries” mislead scholars to this day, a dozen or two of names, imperfect though they were, in their own right, were absolutely rigorous about their work. Their efforts have left us an impressive collective work product.
As for the others, it could only be a matter of time before the Shakespeare biography grew so ridiculous that even the general public challenged it. The Industry itself, of course, stood unflinchingly behind the biography. Nevertheless, it lost a large chunk of its market-share to the Bacon Industry.
The problem was that there was no legitimate evidence — except for the letters in the front material of the First Folio — that there was the least connection between the texts of the plays and the life of the Stratford man who lay beneath the floor of Trinity Church, Stratford, in a grave featuring a bit of doggerel verse and a placard above in Latin. The plays that provided most of the playwright's biography were, in fact, seriously at odds with the documented facts of the Stratford man's life.
Fate rarely being kind, a few dissenting voices over the centuries could not begin to turn the momentum of the Shakespeare Industry. Only a famous alternative candidate as author of the plays might manage the feat. Sir Francis Bacon's name was offered. It was a documented fact that he was formally educated in the classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and law at Gray's Inn where Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors had later been played. His name featured prominently in a manuscript that showed signs of once having contained Shakespeare manuscripts.
Bacon, it was said, hid behind a front man in order to avoid the damage his reputation would suffer from being associated with the immorality of the theater world. While all these factors argued in his behalf, Bacon's life was well and heavily documented and far more from the documents argued against his authorship than for it. Baconians resorted to “discoveries” of codes and ciphers in the Shakespeare text in order to bring the biographies into line.
In the midst of all of this, traditional scholars found themselves having to take up defensive positions on various topics. Shakespeare identified with the noble and ruling classes in his plays, it was determined, because his genius gave him a sense of natural nobility. His plays had French, Italian and Latin sources because he was provided cribs of the original texts from the likes of Ben Jonson and John Florio and because there must have been available English translations records of which have not survived to our day. Shakespeare knew surprising amounts about Italy and the law through tavern conversations with sailors and lawyers.
Bacon's candidacy became untenable for the simple reason that he was not the author. But, still, the wide-ranging inconsistencies of the Stratford biography remained and the authorship question they provoked. The vague and conveniently untestable replies developed by the Industry scholars also remain — bolstered by pop-psychology diagnoses of mental degeneracy in those who express doubt.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”
The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- 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...”
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 V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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