Shakespeareâs background
At the heart of our awareness of the writings of William Shakespeare there is a great mystery, which is often known as the Shakespeare Authorship Question. For over 150 years this question â whether the actor who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616 actually wrote the plays â has continued to perplex well-educated and intelligent people. Although often dismissed by orthodox Stratfordian scholars (those who believe that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him), it shows no signs of disappearing and, indeed, in recent years has returned with a vengeance as a subject of intense debate, especially in the United States.
While William Shakespeare may well have been the greatest author the world has ever known, as a man his life has proved to be one of the most elusive and mysterious of any human being of his achievement and stature in history. Virtually everything known of the facts of his life seem to belie the transcendent genius of his plays and poems. His parents were illiterate; he grew up in a small provincial town in which lived no more than a handful of educated men; his schooling ended at around 12; there is no evidence that he ever owned a book. No manuscript definitely known to have been written by him survives, nor do any letters, memoranda or notes he wrote on any subject, let alone literary documents. Shakespeareâs only writings which survive, in fact, consist of just six signatures scrawled on legal documents, three of which are on his will. While Shakespeare is named in 75 known contemporary documents, not a single one concerns his career as an author. Most are legal and financial documents which depict him as a rather cold, rapacious and successful local landowner, grain merchant and money-lender.
Shakespeareâs life between his marriage in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and his emergence as an actor and presumed author nearly ten years later is a blank, a mystery period known as âthe lost yearsâ in which biographers, lacking any hard evidence for their views or any way to explain Shakespeareâs apparent wide erudition, have credited him with being â amongst other things â a law clerk, schoolmaster, traveller on the continent and soldier. At the age of about 47, after a quarter-century allegedly at the centre of one of the worldâs greatest cultural renaissances in London, the nationâs capital, suddenly and for no obvious reason Shakespeare retired to his home town of Stratford, living there quietly until his death about five years later. No one, it seems, marked his passing at the age of 52 in any way, let alone by the publication of memorial verses or funereal tributes.
In 1623, seven years after Shakespeareâs death, an enormous memorial volume containing nearly all of his plays, including many published in full for the first time, was edited and produced by a number of his former theatrical associates. The First Folio, as this volume is known, does not mention or acknowledge his family in Stratford, although it seems surprising that they did not retain some manuscripts or effects left by him which would have been useful to the Folioâs compilers. There is no evidence that any member of his family â or anyone else in Stratford-upon-Avon â owned a copy of the First Folio; its literary glories would in any case have been lost on Shakespeareâs two surviving daughters, who were illiterate.
Since Shakespeareâs recognition in the late eighteenth century as Englandâs preeminent national writer, hundreds of historians, researchers and archivists have pored over thousands of Elizabethan and Jacobean documents to discover anything there is to find about Shakespeare the man, and, in particular, Shakespeare the writer. Despite all their efforts, they have found little on the former and nothing on the latter.
There is thus a Shakespeare Authorship Question which has continued to perplex thousands of admirers of Shakespeareâs works over the past two centuries: or rather, there are two separate but interconnected authorship questions which, for innumerable readers of Shakespeareâs works and others, constitute one of historyâs most abiding and intriguing mysteries. The first of the two Shakespeare authorship questions is how satisfactorily to explain the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the magnitude of his achievement and the meagreness of his apparent background, while the second is why so little has been discovered about his life as a man and, particularly, as a writer, regardless of how thoroughly we research. As a result, over the past century and a half, many intelligent and perceptive persons have come to doubt whether William Shakespeare of Stratford, the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616, and who was unquestionably an actor and theatre-owner in London as well as a businessman and landowner in Stratford, could conceivably have written the plays and poems attributed to him. Over time, a variety of other authorship candidates (as they are known) have been proposed, the best-known of whom are Sir Francis Bacon (1561â1626) and Edward De Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1550â1604).
To gain a clearer understanding of why so many people have questioned whether Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, it may be useful to examine the reasons under three headings: the meagreness of his early life and background and the difficulty of explaining the complexity and erudition of Shakespeareâs works in terms of what is known of his educational achievements; the inability of scholars and historians to discover any new evidence about Shakespeareâs life, including his career as a writer; and the incongruities between what is known of Shakespeareâs life and the evolution of his plays.
Lack of learning
Perhaps the most striking way to approach the sheer inadequacy of William Shakespeare as the author of the plays and poems which bear his name is to consider the following: if the First Folio and the other works attributed to him had been published anonymously and, like The Letters of Junius, their author remained genuinely unknown and a matter of continuing controversy and debate, no one anywhere would regard, or ever have regarded, William Shakespeare of Stratford as their likely author. Virtually everyone (including assuredly most of todayâs experts who have no doubts that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him) would certainly believe that their author was an aristocrat or some other well-connected member of the Elizabethan upper classes, and debate would in all likelihood centre, and have centred for generations, on those figures like the Earl of Oxford and Sir Francis Bacon who have long been the leading alternative authorship candidates. Almost certainly Shakespeare of Stratford would never have been proposed as an authorship candidate; if someone today were somehow to propose the Stratford-born actor and theatre-owner as the likely author, he or she would be greeted with ridicule, with critics of the suggestion quickly pointing out the extent to which Shakespeare lacked the educational background or Court and political connections which the author of the plays must obviously have possessed. The meagreness of Shakespeareâs background, and the lack of any documented fact in his life which might lead one to believe that he was a playwright or poet, would rule him out as an authorship candidate among the overwhelming majority of scholars and historians. It is, indeed, safe to say that no one would ever have proposed him as the author of the plays and poems at any time from their original publication to the present day.
The many people who have, for the past 150 or 200 years, doubted whether William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and poems which bear his name have focused on a number of striking inadequacies and inconsistencies in what we know about the life of the Stratford man, which seem to call into question whether he could have been the real author. Probably the most serious is the extraordinary inconsistency between the verbal facility of Shakespeareâs work and the limited educational background of the man from Stratford. We have no certain knowledge of where Shakespeare went to school; the assumption is that he attended the local grammar school in Stratford (the Kingâs New School on Church Street), since his father, John Shakespeare, was entitled, as a burgess of the town, to send his son to this school. (No sixteenth-century enrolment records survive for the school; apart from pure supposition, our only evidence that Shakespeare attended this school comes from the 1709 remark of Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeareâs earliest biographer, that he was educated âfor some time at a Free Schoolâ.1) If Shakespeare did attend this school, he would only have done so between the ages of about 7 and 12. In 1576, when Shakespeare was 12, his father experienced financial difficulties and ceased serving on the Stratford council. Many historians believe that Shakespeare was withdrawn from school at this time; this was the belief of Nicholas Rowe. John Aubrey suggested that young Will often worked alongside his father as âa butcherâ during his teenage years.2
The education Shakespeare would have received at Stratford Grammar School, though wide-ranging in some respects, would be viewed with despair by modern educational theorists. It would have consisted of endless hours of repeating memorized Latin grammar and texts, in a classroom full of bored local boys of radically unequal ability from perhaps 6.00 a.m. until 5.30 p.m. (with breaks).3 Recalcitrant scholars would have been beaten at the drop of a hat by the schoolmaster. Although â perhaps â young Shakespeare would eventually have read Latin classics by the likes of Cicero and Virgil, and the Bible, the experience was infinitely stultifying and narrowing, with no opportunities for individual expression or recognition of personal ability except at mastering Latin grammar. Nothing taught in the school touched in any way on any of the liberal arts or any of the remarkably wide range of subjects with which the author of Shakespeareâs plays was evidently familiar, from the new sciences to the law. Perhaps the most crucial point is that all, or virtually all, the lessons the young Shakespeare would have experienced were in Latin and designed to ensure that students mastered Latin, at least after a fashion. It is unnecessary to point out that Shakespeare is not known for his ability in the Latin language, but for his mastery of English, a subject which was not taught at his school and was not used in lessons. How on earth could such a school conceivably have equipped Shakespeare to become the worldâs greatest writer? This is for Stratfordian biographers to explain: some speculate that one among the (rapid) turnover of schoolmasters at the school, recognizing the remarkable talent of his young charge, gave him special lessons. Thus, according to Park Honan, it was schoolmaster Thomas Jenkins, an Oxford graduate who worked in Stratford from 1575 to 1579, who âapparently ⌠introduced William to Ovidâs Metaphorphoses and perhaps to Arthur Goldingâs famous [translation].â4 There is no evidence for this piece of speculation.5 As Stratford schoolmasters taught dozens of boys via rote-learning for eleven hours a day, six days a week; the likelihood that such a schoolmaster would have found the necessary time for private tutoring seems very remote.6
Nor is it very likely that Shakespeare had much educational encouragement from his family. Shakespeareâs father was illiterate, indicating that it is unlikely that his childhood home contained a single book. Nor is there any clear evidence that Shakespeareâs mother, Mary Arden, could write: on a land deed of 1579 which survives, she made her âmarkeâ by âsigningâ the initials S.M. instead of M.S., next to the place where the scrivener had written her name. A âsmall, neat, rather complex designâ, âthe âSââ Honan states, âis exampled in the handwriting of literate persons; the âMâ (if such was intended) lacks a final stroke or minimâ.7 Among all of Stratfordâs 1,300 or so inhabitants, it is likely that only the vicar and the schoolmaster could remotely be described as educated men, and almost certainly a majority of its adult inhabitants were illiterate. The town did not possess a library, bookshop or newspaper, nor even a school above the elementary level.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, the fundamental and guiding aim of Stratfordâs local elite in its educational policy was to instil and enforce conformity among its youth. The 90 years or so preceding Shakespeareâs education had seen the overthrow of a dynasty and dynastic turmoil, the replacement of one national religion by another, economic crises, numerous foreign wars and treasonous threats, and a continuing sense of insecurity and potential danger to everyone in authority, especially to local officials of no national consequence. Its aim was to enforce intellectual, political and religious conformity in the local community by any means, in particular to avoid being noticed as a hotbed of nonconformist or seditious sentiment. In startling contrast, Shakespeareâs works are driven by precisely the opposite animating force: the authorâs unprecedented ability to empathize with all his characters, among them foreigners, Catholics, Jews, Moors and women, and to bring them all to life. This belies rather than supports the black-and-white view of English society he would have received in his youthful lessons in Stratford. Some biographers have suggested that Shakespeareâs Catholicism â he may well have been a Catholic, though this is far from certain â made him sensitive to the plight of social outsiders, but Shakespeareâs plays, as most critics agree, were emphatically Protestant in orientation throughout his career, becoming even more markedly Protestant in his latter years.8
Perhaps, however, Shakespeareâs verbal facility and wide knowledge were the product of some formal education he received after Stratford Grammar School? Unfortunately for this theory, there is no record that Shakespeare received any formal education past the age of about 12. Comprehensive admission records survive for Englandâs two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and for the Inns of Court, the lawyersâ training institutions in London often regarded as a âthird universityâ. Shakespeare attended none of these. If he wrote the plays attributed to him, the educational sources of his incredible range of knowledge remain largely unknown.
This is the sum total of Shakespeareâs known educational background, what was formally implanted into the supposed writer. The outcome â what Shakespeare actually produced â is so totally different as to be at the very heart of the Shakespeare authorship question. First of all, Shakespeare had the largest vocabulary of any writer who ever lived. His works employ nearly 18,000 different and separate words, about twice as many as Milton used (although Milton was one of the most accomplished graduates of his time at Cambridge University), and perhaps five times as many as the average educated person today. Shakespeare also coined more new words than any other writer in the history of the English language, about 1,500 in all, among them not merely archaisms but dozens of common words in everyday use today, such as âaddictionâ, âassassinationâ, âbirthplaceâ, âcircumstantialâ, âcold-bloodedâ, âcourtshipâ, âdawnâ, âdenoteâ, âdialogueâ, âdiscontentâ, âdivestâ, âdownstairsâ and âdwindleâ, to cite only those words he coined which begin with the letters A to D, to say nothing of âalligatorâ, âamazementâ and âbanditâ. Further along the alphabet there is, if one prefers, âembraceâ, âemployerâ, âeventfulâ, all the way down to âwell behavedâ, âwidenâ, âworthlessâ and âzanyâ, while along the way there is everything from âeyeballâ to âoutbreakâ, âhurryâ, âluggageâ and âretirementâ. It may well be that no educated English-speaking person goes more than (at most) a few hours without using one or more words coined by Shakespeare, almost certainly without knowing it. It is quite possible that no book, newspaper or magazine published in English in the past century or more fails to contain at least one word coined by Shakespeare, and probably a great many. Then there are the innumerable common phrases coined by Shakespeare, which most people would assume to be proverbial, but which first occurred in Shakespeareâs works: âinto thin airâ, âtime-honouredâ, âbe-all and end-allâ, âpith and marrowâ, âseamy sideâ, âshooting starâ, âthe dogs of warâ and literally dozens of others.
Even this, however, is only a small part of the story. Not only was Shakespeare unique in his coining of new words and phrases, he was profoundly learned in the Western worldâs scholars...
