My Shakespeare: The Authorship Controversy

William Leahy

• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781911454540
• eBook ISBN: 9781911454564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Who really wrote the Shakespeare plays? This important literary and cultural controversy is livelier and more widely discussed than ever before. Here, nine leading experts offer their version of who wrote the plays. Why does this issue matter? Because a full understanding of the author can make a huge difference to our wider appreciation of the life and times, the literature, and the culture of the period. William Shakespeare is universally regarded as the greatest writer who ever lived. He remains a man who seems to have understood humanity so well but whose life as a writer is absent in records of the time. This truth has led to many questions about the real author behind the title-pages, the real nature of Shakespeare the man, and how this nature relates to Shakespeare the writer. In new essays especially written for this book nine leading 'Shakespearean' authors present their version of the man. Ros Barber, Barry Clarke, John Casson with William Rubinstein & David Ewald, William Leahy, Alan H. Nelson, Diana Price, Alexander Waugh and Robin Williams each offer their ideas. Each essay is founded in scholarly research and provides a positive case for why the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy needs to be taken seriously. These versions of Shakespeare are realistic and compelling. Each in its turn will provoke the reader to see various aspects of Shakespeare in a different light. And they will help us understand the enigmatic fascination that Shakespeare (and the authorship question) continues to generate.

Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Co. Ltd.,

30 New Road, Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1BN, England.

www.eerpublishing.com

[email protected]

My Shakespeare: The Authorship Controversy

First published in Great Britain in 2018

© William Leahy and contributors 2018

This edition © Edward Everett Root Publishers 2018

ISBN 9781911454540 Paperback

ISBN 9781911454557 Hardback

ISBN 9781911454564 eBook

The editor and the contributors have asserted their right to

be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as the owners

of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Cover designed by John Tollett.

Typesetting by Head & Heart Book Design

Printed in Great Britain by Lightning Source UK, Milton Keynes.

Contents

The Contributors

Introduction: The Wonderful Doubt of Galileo

William Leahy

Chapter 1: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and London

Alan H. Nelson

Chapter 2: My Shakspere: “A Conjectural Narrative” Continued

Diana Price

Chapter 3: My Shakespeare Rise!

Alexander Waugh

Chapter 4: My Shakespeare: Christopher Marlowe

Ros Barber

Chapter 5: Our Shakespeare: Henry Neville 1562-1615

John Casson, William D. Rubinstein and David Ewald

Chapter 6: Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke

Robin Williams

Chapter 7: My Shakespeare – Francis Bacon

Barry Clarke

Chapter 8: My (amalgamated) Shakespeare

William Leahy

Bibliography

The Contributors

Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His specializations are palaeography, bibliography, and the reconstruction of the literary life and times of medieval and Renaissance England from documentary sources. He is author of Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (Liverpool University Press 2003). He has contributed essays to “Shakespeare Documented”, an online project sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Diana Price is the author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem (Greenwood Press 2001), the first book on the subject to be published in a peer-reviewed series; the updated paperback edition was released in 2013. Price’s bibliography can be found at her website at <http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com>.

Alexander Waugh is the author of several books including Fathers & Sons (2004) and The House of Wittgenstein (2008). He is Senior Visiting Fellow of the University of Leicester; General Editor of a 43-volume scholarly edition for the Oxford University Press; co-editor of several books on Shakespeare; Honorary President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition and Chairman of the De Vere Society.

Ros Barber is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of Research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. Publications include Shakespeare: The Evidence (leanpub.com/shakespeare), 30-Second Shakespeare (2015) and The Marlowe Papers (2012). She is twice joint winner of the Calvin Hoffman Prize for a distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe.

John Casson retired after 30 years’ practice as a psychotherapist. His ground-breaking research, Drama, Psychotherapy and Psychosis: Dramatherapy and Psychodrama with People who Hear Voices, was published in 2004 by Routledge. He began researching Henry Neville in 2005 and has published four books culminating in 2016 with Sir Henry Neville was Shakespeare: The Evidence (with W. D. Rubinstein, Amberley).

William D. Rubinstein was Professor of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University in Melbourne. He was the co-author, with Brenda James, of The Truth Will Out (2005), which first made the case for Sir Henry Neville as Shakespeare.

David Ewald is a Shakespeare scholar specifically engaged in research supporting the Neville/Shakespeare authorship. He contributed to the book, Sir Henry Neville Was Shakespeare: The Evidence by John Casson and William D. Rubinstein, especially with his discovery of the Ring Composition in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Robin Williams spent twenty-five years writing computer books, then formalized her lifelong immersion in Shakespeare with a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Shakespeare studies from Brunel University London. She cofounded the International Shakespeare Centre and is Director of iReadShakespeare.org and the ISC Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is founder and president of the Mary Sidney Society.

Barry Clarke has published journal articles in Shakespeare studies and quantum mechanics, as well as an academic treatise The Quantum Puzzle (2017). Columns in The Daily Telegraph and Prospect magazine have furnished mathematics and logic puzzle books for Cambridge University Press and Mensa. His PhD explored Bacon’s contribution to three Shakespeare plays. His book The Bacon-Shakespeare Connection: A Scholarly Study [with a Preface by Sir Mark Rylance], will be published by Edward Everett Root Publishers in 2018.

William Leahy is Professor of Shakespeare studies at Brunel University London. His book Elizabethan Triumphal Processions appeared in 2005. He has published widely on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, most notably in his 2010 edition of collected essays Shakespeare and his Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question and as co-editor of The Many Lives of William Shakespeare, a special edition of the Journal of Early Modern Studies (2016).

Introduction

The Wonderful Doubt of Galileo

William Leahy

In scene 3 of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, in response to Galileo’s desire, having invented the telescope to convince the Church of his revolutionary discoveries concerning the universe, his friend Sagredo says: “Do you imagine the Pope will hear the truth when you tell him he is wrong, and not just hear that he’s wrong?” (1980, 33). In many ways, this could sum up the overarching reality of the field of study generally known as the Shakespeare Authorship Question, where excellently researched theories are often dismissed out of hand not because of their lack of plausibility or robustness of approach but because they contend that long held truths are highly questionable and built upon myth, anecdote and supposition. A book such as this current one, constituted as it is by a number of different versions of the author of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and which are each presented as equal, is naturally founded in a rather different reality, one which could be defined by something Brecht’s Galileo says of himself later in the play in scene 9: “My object is not to establish that I [am] right but to find out if I am” (80-81). It is in this spirit...

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