Profiling Shakespeare

Marjorie Garber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415964456
• eBook ISBN: 9781135891886
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di Shakespeare

The title of this collection, Profiling Shakespeare, is meant strongly in its double sense. These essays show the outline of a Shakespeare rather different from the man sought by biographers from his time to our own. They also show the effects, the ephemera, the clues and cues, welcome and unwelcome, out of which Shakespeare's admirers and dedicated scholars have pieced together a vision of the playwright, whether as sage, psychologist, lover, theatrical entrepreneur, or moral authority. This collection brings together classic pieces, hard-to-find chapters, and two new essays. Here, Garber has produced a book at once serious and highly readable, ranging broadly across time periods (early modern to postmodern) and touching upon both high and popular culture.

Contents: Preface 1. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers 2. Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost 3. Macbeth: The Male Medusa 4. Shakespeare as Fetish 5. Character Assassination 6. Out of Joint 7. Roman Numerals 8. Second-Best Bed 9. Shakespeare's Dogs 10. Shakespeare's Laundry List 11. Shakespeare's Faces 12. MacGuffin Shakespeare 13. Fatal Cleopatra 14. What Did Shakespeare Invent? 15. Bartlett's Familiar Shakespeare

1 Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers

—Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

James Joyce, Ulysses

I

Who is the author of Shakespeare’s plays? To many scholars and admirers of Shakespeare, this question has the rhetorical status of the question “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” It is greeted by orthodox Stratfordians with umbrage, derision, and contemptuous dismissal of so intense an order as to inevitably raise another question: what is at stake here? Why, in other words, has the doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship persisted so tenaciously, and why has it been so equally tenaciously dismissed?

The issue, as participants in the controversy see it, is whether the author of the plays is in fact the man who lived in Stratford, received with his father a grant of arms making him a propertied gentleman, prospered and bought New Place, one of the finest houses in Stratford, married Anne Hathaway, and bequeathed her his second best bed. No one denies that a man named William Shakespeare lived in Stratford; what is vigorously objected to in some quarters is that it was this same man who wrote the plays. It is argued that the very paucity of literary biographical material suggests that the authorship is in doubt, or, indeed, is itself a fiction, designed to obscure the “real” author, who by virtue of rank, gender, or other disabling characteristics could not with safety have claimed the plays for his (or her) own. Here, very briefly, is the case against Shakespeare as Shakespeare:

1. We know relatively little about the life, despite a significant collection of legal or business documents. Surely the greatest poet of his time would have left a more vivid record, including the comments of his contemporaries. No one in his home town seems to have thought of him as a celebrated author. Most of the encomia for “Shakespeare” were written after the death of the Stratford man, and some, like Jonson’s famous poem affixed to the Folio, praise “Shakespeare” but may not identify him with the prosperous citizen of rural Warwickshire.
2. The plays show a significant knowledge of the law, more than could have been acquired in a casual way. Francis Bacon was a lawyer; Bacon wrote the plays.
3. The plays are clearly written by someone at home with the court and the aristocracy, and could not have been written by a plebeian. Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was a nobleman; Oxford wrote the plays. (If this belief held general sway, Stanley Wells would now be presiding over the publication of “The Oxford Oxford.”)
4. The plays show a significant degree of classical learning, and also a certain witty detachment about university education. The Shakespeare of Stratford may have picked up his small Latin and less Greek at the Stratford grammar school, but we have no records proving that Shakespeare attended the school, and several rival claimants (Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford, the Countess of Pembroke, Queen Elizabeth) had demonstrably more rigorous training in both language and the classics.
5. Finally, it is pointed out that there are extant only six signatures of Shakespeare, all of which are so crabbed and illegible as to suggest illiteracy or illness. Three of the signatures appear on his will and three others on business documents, none of them in a literary connection. One scene from Sir Thomas More, a play in six distinct manuscript hands, is said to be by Shakespeare: these 147 lines, ascribed to “Hand D,” have been subjected to much scrutiny, and have given rise to elaborate conjecture about Shakespeare’s process of composition. Yet even G. Blakemore Evans, who goes so far as to include the lines in The Riverside Shakespeare, and who describes them as “affording us a unique view of what Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ may have looked like,”¹ admits that the evidence for the attribution, which was in fact not suggested until 1871, is inconclusive.

Against these latter two arguments, orthodox Stratfordians respond in a number of ways: first, by touting the excellence of the Stratford grammar school (according to James G. McManaway in the official Folger library pamphlet on the controversy, its headmaster made as much money as his counterpart at Eton, and a person with equivalent training today would, in his words, be “a Ph.D. at Harvard”²); second, by insisting that Shakespeare’s father would “never deny his first-born son the privileges of schooling to which his … position entitled him”;³ and third, by asserting that the nonsurvival of Shakespeare’s literary hand “has no bearing on the subject of authorship.”⁴ Manuscripts that went to the print shop prior to 1700 were universally discarded once the plays were set in type, and other English Renaissance authors (e.g., Spenser, Ralegh, and Webster) left similarly scanty paper trails. Yet no one quarrels about Spenser’s authorship, or Ralegh’s, or Webster’s, or Milton’s.

This, of course, is precisely the point. Why is it different for Shakespeare? Why is so much apparently invested in finding the “real” ghost writer, or in resisting and marginalizing all attempts to prove any authorship other than that of “the poacher from Stratford” (to cite the title of a recent book on the Shakespeare authorship)? “Without possibility of question,” maintains the Folger ghost-buster, “the actor at the Globe and the gentleman from Stratford were the same man.”⁵ Then why does the question persist? That is the question, or at least it is the question that I would like to address. I would like, in other words, to take the authorship controversy seriously, not, as is usually done, in order to round up and choose among the usual suspects, but rather in order to explore the significance of the debate itself, to consider the ongoing existence of the polemic between pro-Stratford-lifers and pro-choice advocates as an exemplary literary event in its own right.

One of the difficulties involved in taking the authorship question seriously has been that proponents of rival claims seem to have an uncanny propensity to appear a bit loony—literally. One of the most articulate defenders of the Earl of Oxford authorship is one John Thomas Looney. (An “unfortunate name,” commented Life magazine in an article on the authorship question—but, his defenders say, “an honorable one on the Isle of Man, where it is pronounced “Loney.”⁶ It was Looney, appropriately enough, who won Freud to the Oxford camp.) Nor is Mr. Looney the only contender for unfortunateness of name: a zealous Shakespearean cryptographer, who proves by numerological analysis that the real author could be either Bacon or Daniel Defoe, is George M. Battey (“no more fortunately named than Mr. Looney,” comments an orthodox chronicler of the controversy, and, “quite properly, no more deterred by it”⁷). Batty or loony, the ghost seekers’ name is legion, and they have left an impressive legacy of monuments to human interpretative ingenuity.

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the full energies of the authorship controversy declared themselves, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the 1857 publication of Delia Bacon’s 675-page The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, arguing the case for Francis Bacon (no relation) and of William Henry Smith’s Bacon and Shakespeare, shortly followed by the first impassioned defense, William Shakespeare Not an Impostor, by George Henry Townsend.⁸

Out of these diverse beginnings has grown a thriving industry, which to this day shows no signs of abating. Some sense of its magnitude can be gleaned from the fact that when, in 1947, Professor Joseph Galland compiled his bibliography of the controversy, entitled Digesta Anti-Shakespeareana, no one could afford to publish the 1500-page manuscript.⁹ And that was forty years ago. The flood of publications has continued, culminating in the recent and highly acclaimed version of the Oxford case, The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality, by Charlton Ogburn, Jr.

What, then, can be said about this strange and massive fact of literary history? It is significant that the Shakespeare authorship controversy presents itself at exactly the moment Michel Foucault describes as appropriate for appropriation: the moment when the “author-function” becomes, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an item of property, part of a “system of ownership” in which strict copyright rules define the relation between text and author in a new way. It is not until there is such a thing as property that violations of property can occur; it is not surprising that the claims for rival authorship arise at the moment at which, in Foucault’s words, “the transgressive properties always intrinsic to the act of writing became the forceful imperative of literature.”¹⁰ It may well be, therefore, that an analysis of the Shakespeare case will shed light on the general question raised by Foucault: “What is an author?”

Instances of the appropriative, even mercantile nature of the controversy abound. Described by one observer as a kind of “middle-class affair,¹¹ the debate has largely been waged by lawyers and medical men, followed by members of the clergy and retired army officers. Not surprisingly, it became a popular forensic topic and inevitably the subject of litigation. In 1892–93, the Boston monthly magazine The Arena sponsored a symposium which took testimony for fifteen months. Among the pro-Baconian plaintiffs was Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota Congressman who had written a book called The Great Cryptogram, in which he attempted at great length to apply a cipher invented by Bacon. Donnelly had come across the cipher in his son’s copy of a children’s magazine entitled Every Boy’s Book. By means of Bacon’s “Bi-literal cipher,” a secret “infolded” message could be placed within an innocent “infolding” text. The twenty-five-member jury in the case, which included prominent Shakespearean scholars and actors, found for the man from Stratford. A different verdict, however, was forthcoming in the 1916 courtroom battle on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. Two convinced Baconians, the cryptographer Elizabeth Wells Gallup and her financial backer Colonel Fabyan, were sued by a motion picture manufacturer, William N. Selig, who hoped to profit from the tercentenary by filming some of the plays, and felt that the slur on the Stratfordian authorship would lessen the value of his product. In this case the judge, finding that “Francis Bacon is the author,” awarded Colonel Fabyan $5000 in damages. Although the verdict was later vacated, the case made legal history.

Since both of these cases involved claims for a secret cipher, this may be the moment to say something about the role of codes and ciphers in the anti-Stratfordian cause. The purported discovery of a latent message encrypted in the manifest text provides the grounds for a startling number of cases for alternative authorship. The proliferation of ciphers can be seen as another transgressive correlative to the conception of literature as property. Here, the property violation happens not to the text but within the text. While copyright laws attempt to demarcate the bounds of literary property, cryptographers set out to uncover ghostlier demarcations, to show that the text itself is haunted by signs of rival ownership. Such codes, ciphers, anagrams, and acrostics can be as fanciful as Mrs. C. F. Ashmead Windle’s assertion that proof of the existence of a cipher was to be found in Othello: the island of Cyprus clearly was meant to be read by those in the know as “cipher us.”¹² Or they can be as complex as Dr. Orville Ward Owen’s wheel, a remarkable contraption the size of two large movie reels, across which some 1000 pages of Renaissance literary texts could be wound and stretched for the better application of the cipher. Strictly speaking, Owen was not the inventor of the wheel—he credits that achievement to Bacon himself, in Bacon’s “Letter to the Decipherer,” which Owen found “infolded” in the text of the so-called Shakespeare plays. The letter to the decipherer, which is in code, contains instructions for cracking the code—useful, of course, only to one who has already done so. Owen’s commitment to the truth of his method ultimately compelled him to believe that Bacon was the author not only of the works of Shakespeare, Greene, Marlowe, and so on, but also of a posthumous translation of one of his own Latin works, heretofore credited to his literary secretary and executor, Dr. Rawley. During the writing of his book on Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story, Dr. Owen received periodic visitations from Bacon’s ghost, thus becoming perhaps the first to pursue his research under the aegis of the ghost of a ghost writer. Convinced that tangible proof of Baconian authorship was to be found in a set of iron boxes, he obtained financial backing from the ever-optimistic Colonel Fabyan, and began excavations for them in the bed of the River Wye.

The search for buried treasure indeed often accompanies the unearthing of encrypted messages here, just as it does in Poe’s Gold Bug. Delia Bacon is notorious for having waited, shovel in hand, in Shakespeare’s tomb, suddenly assailed by doubts about what she was digging for. On that occasion, the ghost of Shakespeare (whoever he was) declined to unfold himself.

But if, on the one hand, the isolated Looneys and Batteys always seem to be out there with their shovels, on the other hand examination reveals a significant degree of institutional as well as financial investment in the question. As recently as 1974, the most articulate contemporary spokesman for the Oxford case, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., created a scandal by publishing an article urging his views in Harvard Magazine, the alumni bulletin of his alma mater. The outcry was intense and prolonged. Harvard Professors Gwynne Evans and Harry Levin published a scathing reply in a subsequent number of the magazine, and letters deploring the threat to veritas continued to pour in for months. (“I’m amazed, shocked, and disgusted that THE magazine of the world’s greatest university should actually publish more of the stale old spinach on the Oxford lunacy”; “I am certain that Professor Kittredge is turning over in his grave”; “Charlton Ogburn is a fool and a snob,” and much more in the same vein.¹³) Reviving the notion of legal recourse to proof, Ogburn called for a trial to settle the issue. Philip S. Weld, a prominent newspaperman and former president and publisher of Harvard Magazine, offered to defray the costs of litigation, including “box lunches and sherry for the opposing players,” and proposed that “If no one at Harvard wishes to argue the case for the Stratfordian, perhaps you could engage someone from the Yale English Department.”¹⁴

In fact, a survey of the available literature on the “Shakespeare question” produces an uncanny number of references, often seemingly superfluous, to Harvard as an institution. The rhetorical role assigned to Harvard in the authorship controversy is not adventitious. The University itself becomes in effect a Ghost Underwriter, guaranteeing the legitimacy of whatever side invokes its name as a sign of power and authority. This is one reason why the outcry over Ogburn’s article in Harvard Magazine became so heated, moving one letter writer to characterize the published defense of the Stratford man by the Harvard professors as “paranoid, shrill, and even hysterical.”¹⁵ Something else is being defended—or attacked—here. What is the ghost that walks?

At this point it might be useful to hazard a few conjectures about the kinds of investment that motivate the controversy on both sides:

1. Institutional investments. Anti-Stratfordians accuse the “orthodox” of economic and egocentric commitment to such establishments as the Shakespeare Birthplace and the thriving tourist industry in Stratford, England; the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, with its handsome building, theater, and gift...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Shakespeare’s Profile
• 1 Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers
• 2 Hamlet: Giving Up the Ghost
• 3 Macbeth: The Male Medusa
• 4 Shakespeare as Fetish
• 5 Character Assassination
• 6 Out of Joint
• 7 Roman Numerals
• 8 Second-Best Bed
• 9 Shakespeare’s Dogs
• 10 Shakespeare’s Laundry List
• 11 Shakespeare’s Faces
• 12 McGuffin Shakespeare
• 13 Fatal Cleopatra
• 14 What Did Shakespeare Invent?
• 15 Bartlett’s Familiar Shakespeare
• Notes