[In the following essay, Marder reviews the arguments against Shakespeare and—after disputing the cases of Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford as authors—argues that "there is nothing in the plays that was beyond the powers of an alert Elizabethan intimately connected with the stage, a reader of books, a friend to gentleman and travelers. . . . "]

It is one of the ironies attendant on the growth of Shakespeare's reputation that even the most diligent scholarship has been able to uncover very little of the background of the poet's personal or public life. However, the poverty of detail has merely spurred his biographers to increased scholarly, inferential, and imaginative activity.

Although some minor biographical accounts were published in the seventeenth century, the first regular life of Shakespeare was written by Nicholas Rowe as a preface to his 1709 edition. Edmond Malone in his edition of 1821 disparaged the work of Rowe, claiming that of the eleven "facts" the earlier editor had set forth, eight were incorrect, one doubtful, and only the remaining two satisfactory because taken from the Stratford parish register. Yet despite its inaccuracies, Rowe's "Life" gave the basic information on which all succeeding biographies have been based: that William was the son of John Shakespeare and was born in April, 1564; that he died in 1616; that John had other children (Rowe said ten in all; actually there were eight, some of whom died early); that John was a woolman (glover seems more correct); that William was driven to London after poaching deer from Sir Thomas Lucy's park; that in London he was received in "the company" of players (there was more than one company); that he was "an indifferent actor"; that the descendants of Sir John Oldcastle, the probable original of Falstaff, forced Shakespeare to change the name of the character; that Lord Southampton gave him £1,000 to make a purchase (a figure that strains credulity, because it is equivalent in modern terms to about $50,000); and that he left three daughters (in fact, he left two). Rowe adds some other details, such as that Shakespeare was sent to the free grammar school; that he was married when young to the daughter of one Hathaway; that he praised the Queen in A Midsummer Night's Dream; that she asked him to write a play with Falstaff in love; that he was friendly with Ben Jonson; and that he did not steal from the ancients. The "Life" traces the lineage of Shakespeare's daughters, mentions the existence of plays doubtfully Shakespeare's, praises his imagery, notes some sources, and mentions Betterton's acting of Hamlet. While it is not true, as has often been said, that everything known about Shakespeare's life can be summarized in a single paragraph, the essentials remain as Rowe gave them over 250 years ago.

As interest in Shakespeare grew, additional details were uncovered. Theobald found that Shakespeare had used Plutarch and other sources, Pope had heard that Davenant was Shakespeare's "son," Warburton felt that Holofernes was Shakespeare's caricature of John Florio; the will of Shakespeare was discovered by Joseph Greene in 1747, the horse-holding story was made public in 1753, Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1766 discovered Francis Meres's references to Shakespeare, and two years later George Steevens published the first extensive transcripts from the Stationers' Register; in the same year Albany Wallis found the mortgage deed of the property Shakespeare bought in Blackfriars and the subsequent Conveyance of the same property. The year 1833 was especially fruitful, for it was then that Sir Thomas Phillips discovered the bond covering Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway in November, 1582, in the archives of the diocese of Worcester. Joseph Hunter in 1845 discovered that John Shakespeare was once fined twelvepence for not keeping his walks clear of refuse. In 1905 the discovery was made that Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare had made an impressa (shield) and inscription for the Earl of Rutland. A great discovery of a new signature of Shakespeare was made in 1910 when Charles W. Wallace found the deposition of Shakespeare in the Bellot-Mountjoy case, which threw light on Shakespeare's residence with the Huguenot Mountjoy family in London. Wallace also found other important documents pertaining to Shakespeare's shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. The remarkable researches of Leslie Hotson in 1931 established that Justice Shallow was not a caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy but of William Gardiner, a justice of the peace with whom Shakespeare had been involved; and in 1938 Hotson discovered the identity of the Thomas Russell who was one of the overseers of Shakespeare's will.

With these and other minor details mounting up, lives of Shakespeare grew apace. Malone's "Life" in his 1821 edition ran to 287 pages, or to 468 when his attempt to establish the order of the plays is added to it. From Malone's notes Boswell added to this edition another 50-odd pages of biography. Halliwell-Phillipps' first "Life" in 1848 ran to 336 pages, with the documents, but his 1887 edition ran to 850 pages. Sidney Lee's biography started with 476 pages in 1898 and ended with 776 in 1923. Edmund K. Chambers' William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) totaled 576 pages of text and over 400 pages of documents and commentary. Edgar I. Fripp's two volumes—Shakespeare: Man and Artist (1938)—ran to over 900 pages.

Much in these volumes is of course not biography but conjecture, discussion, and criticism. And much of what has been said in them has of course been attacked. This may be illustrated in the case of Sidney Lee's 1898 Life of William Shakespeare. Lee, knighted in 1911 for his biographical accomplishments, expanded the life of Shakespeare he had prepared for the Dictionary of National Biography. He digested Halliwell-Phillipps' two-volume Outlines, which he considered as a source book, and brought together information from a great many other sources. His volume of almost 500 pages contains much that cannot be found elsewhere unless one has access to a large library, and some of the information, by his own account, had never been published in any life before his. In 1909 Charles F. Johnson gave credit to Lee's industry, writing in his Shakespeare and his Critics that "Mr. Lee's book leaves nothing to be desired and is indispensable to the student." But there were at the same time critics like the disparaging one in a 1905 issue of New Shakespeareana who regarded the man "who writes under the name of Sidney Lee as a rechauffeur, who had nothing to add to the stores of information which any tolerable encyclopedia could have furnished him." (Whether some of the attacks on Lee were due to his writing "under the name of Sidney Lee"—as New Shakespeareana suggests—is open to speculation. While he was at Oxford the noted classical scholar Benjamin Jowett had suggested he change his name from Simon Lazarus Levi, and "Sidney Lee" was the result. But as late as 1911 William Jaggard in his monumental Shakespeare Bibliography refused to accept the official change, listing him as "Levi, Simon Lazarus" with his anglicized name following in italics.)

Lee's Semitic origin may also have been the ground for attack by other critics, who charged him with fostering the notion that Shakespeare cared nothing for his plays except as a means of making a living and then retiring to Stratford. Sir George Greenwood in 1916 published a 50-page pamphlet entitled Sir Sidney Lee's New Edition of a Life of William Shakespeare: Some Words of Criticism, attacking Lee's new edition, and in 1933 Lee was under attack from Logan Pearsall Smith, who wrote in his On Reading Shakespeare that for Lee to say that all Shakespeare cared for was to make money for himself and daughters and to flatter his patron was to rave as much as the "maddest sentimentalist and blatherskite of them all."¹ Yet the 1923 "Life" by Joseph Quincy Adams virtually adopted Lee's point of view, setting Shakespeare up not so much as "a genius apart" but as "a busy actor associated with a leading stock-company of his time; as a hired playwright—often, indeed, a mere cobbler of old plays—writing that his troupe might successfully compete with rival organizations; and, finally, as a theatrical proprietor, owning shares in two of the most flourishing playhouses in London."

Biographical controversy was nothing new among the scholars. Two years before the first edition of Lee's "Life" was published, John Pym Yeatman had written a large volume entitled The Gentle Shakspere: A Vindication in which, in the very first paragraph of his preface, he boldly proclaimed, "I have written this book with very little preparation, and with only a previous very general knowledge of the works of Shakspere." After he had discovered an Alice Shakespeare (the name Shakespeare was rather common in the Midlands), a month of research prepared him to write a volume of 300 pages, in three weeks. Even with the inclusion of four acts of Henry VII in toto, the task would seem impossible. The purpose of the volume was to prove Shakespeare a Catholic. To publish a volume on this subject was daring, to do it with only three weeks of consideration and writing marvelous, but to announce on the first page that the object of the book was "to place before the reader a true account of a great poet"—this was to invite attack, and the attack was not long in coming.

No attempt can be made here to summarize all of Yeatman's "proof," which was genealogical as well as literary. He maintained that the Catholic sympathies shown in the first four acts of Henry VII assure Shakespeare's authorship of them, but that the last act was written by another to make the first four acceptable to the audience, "to tickle the Protestant palate." King John, Yeatman claimed, is not by Shakespeare at all. Nor can the often sacrilegious Sonnets be accepted as Shakespeare's. Meres's evidence cannot be accepted, he declared, because Meres died in 1598. (Actually Meres died in 1647!) Yeatman overreached himself completely when he began changing Shakespeare's lines to suit his argument. In John of Gaunt's notable eulogy on England in Richard II, Yeatman found the repetitious use of "dear" in

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land
Dear for her reputation through the world. . . .

"not only absolute nonsense, destructive of the sense of the passage, but ungrammatical." A simple change, he said, would give "the highest possible meaning to the words"—namely the substitution of "OUR MOTHER'S DOWRY" at the end of the first line quoted, making it:

This land of such dear souls, OUR MOTHER'S DOWRY,
Dear for her reputation through the world. . . .

The "her" in the second line would then refer to the Blessed Virgin and it would be "simply perfect" as proof of Shakespeare's religious belief!

Needless to say the reviewers would not accept such arguments, nor would they accept the misspelling of names and words, the errors in dates, and the nebulous genealogy. Nor would they accept the dictum that Shakespeare hated Queen Elizabeth though he gave her lip service. Replying to his critics in the Literary World on September 16, 1896, Yeatman had to object to being held up "to public scorn" because he was a Catholic, as well as having to defend his theories. So hot grew the argument in the Saturday Review that Yeatman eventually sued for libel.

That Yeatman should claim Shakespeare for Catholicism is in itself no more fantastic than many other assumptions that have been put forth about the Bard. Almost any kind of Shakespeare can be reconstructed from facts collected, interpreted, and arranged by clever scholars. Thus we may find that the Bard was a poor student for leaving school early, a poor husband because he ran away from his wife and left her in his will only a second-best bed, a poor son because he provided no tombstone for his father, a poor father because he deserted his children, a poacher for stealing other men's game, a deserter of women for not marrying Anne Whateley, a fornicator for his relations with Anne Hathaway and Burbage's girl friend, a lecher for writing Venus and Adonis, an adulterer with the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, a drunkard from his Bidford days to his death—caused by drinking too much, a homosexual for his devotion to the young man in the Sonnets, a usurer for demanding interest on his money, a hoarder for keeping grain during a famine, an oppressor of the poor who owed him money, a literary thief and upstart crow for borrowing the plots of others, a liar for putting his name on plays not all his, a forger of pedigrees to substantiate a request for a coat of arms, unpatriotic for not commemorating the Queen's death in verse, a poor actor fit only for such parts as the Ghost in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It, an anti-Semite for creating Shylock, a perjurer for conveniently forgetting the amount of the dowry promised to Stephen Bellot, stupid because of anachronisms and poor grammar in his plays, a poor dramatist for not blotting enough lines in his plays, illiterate because he mentioned no books in his will, an egotist for thinking his poems would bestow immortality, and so on ad infinitum. According to the point of view, Shakespeare appears as either a human poet or an unsocial monster.

Those who have tried to make of Shakespeare a homosexual are a remarkable group. The devotion to the friend of the Sonnets is so strongly worded that writers from the time of Malone onward have had to explain that Elizabethan convention in such matters was quite different from that of the eighteenth century and after. Oscar Wilde brought into the open the charge that Shakespeare was a homosexual and loved his patron better than his mistress, and ten years later Samuel Butler expressed the same idea, saying that for a short time the love between the two men was "more Greek than English." Another writer apologized for the vice in Shakespeare by saying that it was a vice of the time and that even King James was accused of it; and still another says that it was the widespread knowledge of their corruption that made the Sonnets unpopular in the seventeenth century. The controversy has persisted into the twentieth century: in 1937 H. McC. Young wrote a whole book on The Sonnets of Shakespeare: A Psycho-Sexual Analysis, aimed at proving conclusively that Shakespeare was not guilty of homosexuality.

However, Hesketh Pearson still had to counter the charge in his 1949 "Life" and Edward Hubler in 1952 devoted an appendix in his The Sense of Shakespeare 's Sonnets to a survey of the controversy, noting in passing, as others had, that many of the proponents of the theory were themselves—like Oscar Wilde—homosexuals who were anxious to include Shakespeare among their number.

The Sonnets have always been a particular playground for biographical scholars. The order of the sonnets in the original quarto of 1609 was changed by Benson when he republished them in 1640, and since Tieck's edition in 1821 they have been reshuffled at least two dozen times in order to make them tell—for their editor at least—a more coherent story of Shakespeare's relationship with his "patron" and his lady love. Also, like the attempts to replace and re-pose the arms on the Venus de Milo, new solutions are continually being offered to the problem of the identity of the mysterious "Mr. W. H." of the dedication. Certainly it would be biographically significant to know whether he was William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke; Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton; William Hewes; William Himself; or any of the numerous other candidates, whose identity is as much in question as is that of the Dark Lady.

Except for the "Life" by Rowe, who relied on the researches of Thomas Betterton, and the work of Malone, Collier, Hunter, Halliwell-Phillipps, Lee, Charlotte Stopes, Chambers, and Fripp, most biographies of Shakespeare are merely rearrangements and reevaluations of the same material. It is the range, the approach, the criticism, and the interpretation that make the differences among them: the details are virtually the same in all. When S. W. Fullom wrote in 1861 that he had followed "every vestige" of Shakespeare's steps and declared that nothing more could be discovered, he may have been close to the truth, as regards the historical Shakespeare. But where facts are unknown, opinion must flourish; and who would be permanently satisfied with the newest opinion on whether Shakespeare loved his wife or whether or not he had slighted her in his will? Who would be willing to discard or accept definitively the deer-stealing story, or the imputed begetting of William Davenant? Each generation has found it necessary to restate, reassess, and set forth its own views. The deer-stealing story persists though Malone and Mrs. Stopes have proved that Sir Thomas Lucy had no deer park. More significant is the hotly contested tradition that Shakespeare was born on April 23. All we have is the baptismal date of April 25. Even though children were usually baptized on the third day, some unknown factor may have delayed the baptism, and an earlier birthday may be possible. Chambers asserts coldly that "there does not seem to me to be enough material for an opinion as to the exact birthdate." Yet traditions die hard among the biographers, and each seems to find it necessary to record everything, lest he be accused of omitting some cherished detail.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century a new impetus, based on the work as a whole, was given to biographical studies when Edward Dowden, in his Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), but more particularly in his Shakspere Primer (1878), popularized a theory, arrived at by means of verse tests and "biographical" factors, that Shakespeare's life was divided into four periods. These Dowden designated "In the workshop," "In the world," "Out of the depths," and "On the heights," following F. J. Furnivall's four classifications of the versification, or "with reference to Shakspere's supposed condition and state of mind in each." The theory gave strength to that school of criticism that tended to seek in the life of Shakespeare the reason for his writing particular kinds of plays, though Dowden himself did not place great emphasis on this.

The excesses of this view, which linked the actual life to the dramatic work, were not long in appearing. Georg Brandes used the convenient four periods and A. C. Bradley himself insisted in 1909 that even if all the characters in the plays and Sonnets are fictitious, they must still tell us something about the personality of the author. Yet the method was attacked, and as early as 1888 we find Appleton Morgan laughing, in Shakespeare in Fact and Criticism, at the possibility that Shakespeare would have refused a request by his company for a comedy with the excuse that he was now in his tragic period. In an address delivered at Harvard on April 23, 1916, George Lyman Kittredge attacked as "desperately wrong" the biographical approach which attempted "to read exclusively or principally .. . the riddle of Shakespeare's personality in his works." The results of such efforts, he continued, were their own refutation. But Kittredge used the word "exclusively," leaving the necessary loophole for any valid conclusions that might be drawn by less exclusive reading.

Despite attacks by such sound scholars as Charles Jasper Sisson, who in 1934 deplored the biographical method in his Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare—those sorrows that some scholars presumed had colored Shakespeare's literary output—Harold C. Goddard in his Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) attempted to move in and out of Shakespeare's mind as he discussed the plays, and Harold Grier McCurdy in his Personality of Shakespeare: A Venture in Psychological Method (1953) ventured to write one of the most methodical of the psychological biographies, based on "a reasonable sense" that the plays are "a record of Shakespeare's experience; not all of his experience, and not a chronicle of events which would interest a court of law, but . . . a revelation of precisely those contents, tensions, and resolutions which are of greatest moment to the psychologist."

In 1950, before McCurdy's volume was published, Ernest Brennecke reviewed several of the recent biographies of Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Quarterly and described them with tongue in cheek as "factual; encyclopaedical-factual; factual-stylistical, commercial, dogmatical, inferential, and lexicographical; inferentiallunatical, autobiographical, fantastical, and fictional." One may agree with John Keats, who said that "Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are the commentary on it." With more than 100,000 lines available for commentary and interpretation, it may be a long while yet before a definitive biography is written.

The scarcity of the biographical facts beneath the abundance of speculation early gave rise to the question whether it is really possible that a man with such a background could be the author of the plays. Seeds of doubt were continually springing up in the minds of those who could not marry the fact of Shakespeare's meager biography to his immortal work. Could a boy from a dirty market town in central England have produced the mightiest literature of mankind? Could a young man who was registered at neither Oxford nor Cambridge be familiar with Latin, Greek, court life, the customs of Italy, the pomp of heraldry, the intricacies of law—could he have taken all knowledge for his province? Assuredly not, some have thought; a scholar or a titled gentleman must have written the plays. Only by postulating some nobler and more informed person could they explain the authorship to their satisfaction.

To trace the rise of this iconoclastic theory is to marvel at the human capacity for the ridiculous. Can we take seriously a presumed scholar and a judge in a court of law, John H. Stotsenburg, who entitles his book An Impartial Study of the Shakespeare Title (1904) and then opens his preface with the biased remark that he has "undertaken to present facts to show, first, that William Shaksper, of Stratford-on-Avon, did not write the plays and poems heretofore attributed to him"? Can we credit the sanity of those others who insist that Bacon did not die on April 10, 1626, but lived on to write the works of Milton, Swift, Addison, Steele, and even Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century? Yet these enthusiasts claim to have investigated every possible avenue of approach to get at the heart of the mystery. Even the spirit world has been consulted. Percy Allen, a respected author of numerous volumes espousing the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, records that for many years he felt as though he were being impelled to write his books at the "urge of some higher power working through me."

Allen's most remarkable book, Talks with Elizabethans, is "an attempt to elucidate, once for all, by direct communication with three great Elizabethans .. . the complex mystery. . . . " If all of us could be as certain as Allen that there is "personal survival of the spirit," then the mystery has been solved and we must accept his "evidence"—barring any possibility that the three spirits, Bacon's, Shakespeare's, and Oxford's, had forgotten anything in the 300-odd years since their death. Fortunately or not, the Elizabethans spoke to Allen through Hester Dowden, a well-known medium who was the daughter of the noted orthodox Shakespearean Edward Dowden. She knew her Shakespeare, but . . .

Allen learned, for example, that Oxford wrote the Sonnets. Since this information came directly from the mouth of Shakespeare, Allen was able to announce his hope that for him, and for his readers, the problem of their authorship was "now conclusively and permanently settled." Bacon himself—from the spirit world—admitted to Allen on October 5, 1944, that he wrote "none of the plays," but was "fortunate in being consulted frequently," and contributed parts of other plays. Shakespeare admitted his hand as "producer and partial writer" of Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and "Romeo and Julietta. " He "produced" Macbeth, but did not have a hand in Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare and Oxford testified to Allen that some of the manuscripts of the plays—mostly in Shakespeare's own hand—were in the Shakespeare tomb under his head, in his hands, and at his feet. The spirits made Allen "free" of the curse on the tombstone, permitting him to open the grave to investigate further, but he never made use of the permission—which indeed would have required official and mundane sanction.

For those who did not believe in spiritual communication, Allen's Talks with Elizabethans must have seemed like the most gigantic of all the hoaxes attempting to bring "definitive" evidence to bear on the authorship of the plays. But this was not the first time such means had been tried. Alfred Dodd, a confirmed Baconian, also had sought access to Sir Francis Bacon through the medium of Mrs. Dowden. His conversations were reported in The Immortal Master, published in 1943. Percy Allen, however, being an Oxfordian, was able to discredit the previous conversations completely through personal contact with Bacon, who admitted that Dodd had not had "direct" contact but was operating on a lower plane.

A more conventional, if no less extreme, method was that of Mrs. Henry Pott, who in 1883 published a 628-page volume entitled The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies by Francis Bacon illustrated and elucidated by passages from Shakespeare. This remarkable book took the 1,680 entries in the then unpublished notes of Bacon and found passages parallel to them in the works of Shakespeare. To fortify her case Mrs. Pott listed "upwards of 6,000" works of 328 other authors and commented that she had found but little of the Promus in them. Thus the ideas in Bacon's notebook were common to Shakespeare but to no other dramatist. Mrs. Pott should have had some indication of her success when she was not even able to convince Dr. E. A. Abbott, noted as the author of the still standard Shakespearian Grammar (1869), who wrote her a preface. Nor was she able to convince the reviewer for the New York Tribune, who wrote a column-and-a-quarter review on March 11, 1883, in which he declared that after "candid . . . examination" he had not "found an instance, not one, in which a passage in the plays is shown to have its origin in the Promus."

Nevertheless subsequent Baconians continued to seek parallelisms through the succeeding years and to present them as primary evidence for Bacon's authorship. That some parallelisms are curious it may be admitted, but no literary scholar as well acquainted with Shakespeare as with Baconian literature has ever accepted them as being more than coincidental. Moreover, when the German scholar H. R. D. Anders investigated the poet's reading, in his Shakespeare 's Books, of 1904, he traced about 2,000 passages to other originals but not one to Bacon, of whose work he specifically declared that he had "not been able to discover any traces."²

These unusual claims for Bacon or for Bacon and other collaborators called forth streams of invective from the literary world. Frederick J. Furnivall, of the New Shakespere Society, used such terms as "crakt, idiotic, tomfoolery." Readers of Scribner's Monthly Magazine in 1875 were told that acceptance of the Baconian theory "demands a brain so addled with theory as to be incapable of literary judgment." Richard Grant White, the American Shakespeare editor, called it lunacy and recommended that an asylum be provided for those who gave evidence of the craze, where they could write and have their work consigned to the flames, and thus the world would be "protected against the debilitating influence of tomes of tedious twaddle."

Edwin Reed, a militant Baconian whose 885 parallelisms were called by another confirmed heretic "good . . . bad . . . and indifferent," in 1905 collected in a volume of Noteworthy Opinions, Pro and Con. Bacon vs. Shakspere some 325 pros and cons, among which were many from known Stratfordians. A letter to the frequently and easily aroused Dr. Frederick Furnivall provoked the reply that "providence is merciful, and the U. S. folk tolerant; you'd have been strung up on the nearest lamp-post else." But by this time the mass hanging of heretics might have decimated the population. The Baconian heresy had drawn attention to Shakespeare from many who were as much interested (if not more so) in the controversy as in the plays. Hundreds of articles were written, debates held, and entertainment provided. Even a moral effect was suggested: Reed saw in "the effects of such debates as this among citizens of different nationalities, compared with the barbarisms of war and equally barbarous preparations for war, now universal" a movement which "cannot fail in some measure to fraternize mankind." Another skeptic told an assembled audience, that same year of 1905, that he wanted to do nothing to end the controversy, that he derived a great deal of pleasure from it, and that the theories should be discussed "if not for the sake of the facts elicited, then for the gaiety of nations."

The Baconian heresy appears to have begun as far back as 1781, when the Reverend James Wilmot was struck by the "similarity" of the ideas of Bacon and Shakespeare. In 1803 Wilmot confided these views to a Mr. James C. Coxwell, who lectured on the subject to the Philosophic Society at Ipswich on February 7, 1805. But it was Delia Bacon—encouraged by no less a personage than Ralph Waldo Emerson—who first gained widespread notice for the heresy with her nineteen-page article entitled "William Shakespeare and his Plays. An Inquiry Concerning Them," published in the American Putnam's Monthly in January, 1856. Miss Bacon had made a trip to England in 1853 to gather material for her "Inquiry." She went armed with letters to various people, chief among them Carlyle. The latter, when she described her theory to him, "turned black in the face," stared, was first speechless and then "began to shriek," so that "you could have heard him a mile," wrote Delia describing her visit.

Her article in Putnam 's was nevertheless reviewed in the London Athenaeum, and in 1857 her 582-page Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded was published simultaneously in London and Boston. Meanwhile, shortly after the publication of her article, William Henry Smith, who later wrote that he had read neither Miss Bacon's original article nor the London review of it, published a little pamphlet addressed to Lord Ellesmere with the questioning title Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? This pamphlet was followed by about a dozen reviews and in 1857 by an enlarged version of the letter, now called Bacon and Shakespeare, by then totaling 162 pages.

It was the work of Miss Bacon and William Smith, together with the reviews of their work, that gave to the heresy the impetus which has kept it a moving force ever since. By 1866 Nathaniel Holmes was able to write a two-volume study, which in its fifth edition in 1886 ran to over 800 pages. The labors of Mrs. Pott on the Promus also stimulated the controversy. But Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram of 1888, with its 998 pages, surpassed all the previous works in audacity.

From evidence of the irregularity of pagination, italics, brackets, and hyphenation in the First Folio, along with other numerical and verbal factors, Donnelly had deduced a strange history linking Bacon with Shakespeare. In contrast with the scholarly opinion that the First Folio was a rather ill-printed volume, Donnelly's readers were asked to believe that it was the most correctly printed book of all time. They were asked to believe that Bacon wrote out by hand every one of the plays, from the early 1590's into the first decade of the seventeenth century, on very large sheets of paper, each sheet corresponding precisely to a page in the Folio eventually printed in 1623—that is, he wrote in his large script the necessary 66 lines per column and 132 lines to the double-columned page. What is more fantastic, Donnelly claimed that Bacon first wrote out his secret story, then "proceeded to arrange it by the cipher, scattering the words around according to an inflexible rule. . . . Then he took his play and proceeded to adjust it to these cipher words" (Italics ours). Imagine this: spreading the desired number of key words over a large page of blank paper and then writing the play in around them. And what is more, having the pages printed with deliberate typographical errors in such a manner as to carry out the cipher plan!

So great was the discussion of Donnelly's forthcoming work that a year before its publication a book-length Prospectus containing sample pages and illustrations was issued to give to a demanding public some inkling of the contents. From this volume, from articles, from interviews in the press, the cipher theory became widely known. It was greeted with some alarm by the Bacon Society, whose members, among them Mrs. Pott, feared that Donnelly's work might bring discredit to the labors of the Bacon Society, already flourishing without the aid of ciphers.

Needless to say, what the majority expected and what the minority feared became a patent reality when the Great Cryptogram finally appeared. "This book is a fraud," began the review in Shakespeariana for June, 1888. "It is difficult," continued the reviewer, E. A. Calkins, "to determine whether the author is a mere enthusiast, cheated by the tricks of his own invention and misled by the false lights that he himself kindled, or whether he is an industrious, ingenious, and impudent impostor." Nothing was proved; much of Donnelly's argument was as ludicrous as his assertion that Shakespeare could not have been educated because the first English grammar was not published until 1586! On May 6 the New York World carried an article by Appleton Morgan proving that the cipher was in nineteenth-century English. And soon other attacks on the very substance of the cipher collapsed the entire work. In Donnelly's home state of Minnesota J. G. Pyle of the St. Paul Pioneer Press wrote a little pamphlet of 29 pages in which he used Donnelly's own method and came up with a sentence reading, "Don nill he, the author, politician and mountebank will worke out the secret of this play." In Leamington, England, the Reverend A. Nicholson found that the odds were 3,309,000 to 1 for Donnelly's "picking up from the column any words required for the manufacture of stories." Challenged by Donnelly to use other prescribed numbers to elicit a cogent idea, Dr. Nicholson, with extraordinary cleverness, wrote his No Cipher In Shakespeare (1888) and using Donnelly's method was able to turn up many such sentences as "Master Will I am Shak'st spurre writ the play and was engaged at the Curtain."

Valid or not, the cipher method quickly caught on. A Mr. Hugh Black of Kincardine, Ontario, inspired by the coming revelations of Donnelly's cipher, had published an article in the North American Review for October, 1887, revealing that from the four lines on Shakespeare's tombstone were easily decipherable the line "Fra Ba Wrt Ear AY." Transliterated, said Mr. Black, this was "solemn affirmation" that "Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare's Plays." When editor Edward Gordon Clarke first read this he thought Mr. Black "had perpetrated a grim but very scholarly joke" on Donnelly. But Clarke later found Black's fantastic interpretation to be correct in every detail and went on to write his own 227-page book, The Tale of the Shakespeare Epitaph (1888), elaborating on the proof—even to the extent of spelling the inscription backward and making from that an Anglo-phonetic script. Thus the final line, to give but a brief example—"and curst be he ty [that] moves my bones" becomes "S E NO B: Y'M S. E VOMYTE HE B'T. S, R, U, CD, N A!," and this transliterated by means of phonetics results in the remarkable line: "Shakespeare—He is no Bacon; I'm Shakespeare. He vomits out the claim that HE be it. Shakespeare, Ah, You Seed, Nay!" And so on throughout the entire book!

New ciphers on behalf of Bacon continued to be derived until, in May, 1889, W. H. Wyman, who had spent years making a bibliography of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, announced that he had given up because the movement had collapsed into "cipher obscurity." To continue the investigation listing such works would be, he said, "to encourage further amateur discussion of a bootless question." How wonderful it might have been if, as New Shakespeareana said when the seventeenth cipher was announced in 1909: "At this all orthodox Shakespeareans will duly rejoice! Every one such idiocy disproves not only itself, but the possibility of any of the others." Still the Baconians continued to discover and invent new ciphers, acrostics, and anagrams, not seeing that one nail was driving out the other, and that there could be no better way of exploding the case for their candidate than by this means.

A remarkable example of the canceling out of Baconian scholarship occurred after Isaac Hull Piatt announced that he had discovered in the word honorificabilitudinitatibus (Love's Labour's Lost, V. 1. 44) the Latin anagram "Hi ludi, tuiti sibi Fr. Bacono nati"—"These plays originating with Francis Bacon are protected for themselves." In 1910, in his Bacon Is Shakespeare, Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence took the same word and made another anagram, this time reading, "Hi ludi F Baconis nati tuiti orbi"—"These plays F. Bacon's offspring are preserved for the world." But Durning-Lawrence had neglected to point out that, three years before, Neal Henry Ewing had spelled the long word backwards and come up with the sentence—some letters omitted and transposed—"Subitat nid utili bacfron." By changing the last word to Fr. Bacon, we translate, "Suddenly into a useful nest steals Francis Bacon." Which is just what seems to have happened. Will the Baconians admit that Dante too may be the author? The same long word can be made into another sentence—"Ubi Italicus ibi Danti honor fit"—which translated reads, "Where there is an Italian, there honor is paid to Dante."

Even after the devastating exposure of all previous cryptologists by Colonel and Mrs. Friedman in The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957), the cryptologists did not surrender. Edward D. Johnson of the Francis Bacon Society in England was certainly not deterred and in 1961 published still another cipher system with the title Francis Bacon's Maze, proving once again, by means of "The sixth line word cipher," that Bacon is the author of Shakespeare's plays.

The anti-Shakespeareans have always aspired to find conclusive evidence by discovering authentic Shakespearean manuscripts. Delia Bacon made serious overtures to the Stratford authorities to have Shakespeare's grave opened but apparently never got closer than testing the weight of the tombstone. Dr. Orville Owen's ciphers led him to believe that Shakespeare's manuscripts were hidden in boxes near Chepstow Castle, on the river Wye. But the rock formations of Chepstow revealed nothing, and those who financed the expedition were disappointed: Bacon had apparently feared disintegration of the rocks by weathering and had moved them. When some unknown correspondent later pointed out to Dr. Owen that the second line of the verses "To the Reader" facing the portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio, "It was for gentle Shakespeare cut," formed a perfect anagram for "Seek, sir, a true angle at Chepstow," Owen induced Colonel George Fabyan to finance a venture which in 1910 took him back to the banks of the Wye where the river ran through the Duke of Beaufort's property. The shafts sunk into the ground at Chepstow revealed the foundation of a Roman bridge, but nothing of the manuscripts. Colonel Fabyan decided that enough had already been spent and the project was halted, though as late as 1924 there was more digging, again to no avail.

Owen's elaborate cipher machine, which analyzed thousands of pages of books presumably written by his candidate (the books were pasted together and rolled on a thousand-foot continuous belt), told a remarkable story of Baconian authorship by means of 10,650 key words. Poor Owen! He produced half a dozen volumes, but nothing credible. Even his machine to defy the laws of gravity was refused consideration by the United States Government!

The subject of his researches was not forgotten, however. In 1916, when William N. Selig was producing a motion picture to honor Shakespeare on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, he sought action to block the publication of several anti-Shakespearean books that were being produced under the sponsorship of the same George Fabyan who had sponsored Owen's fruitless excavations at Chepstow in 1910, and who was currently sponsoring Elizabeth Wells Gallup's biliteral ciphers, which were equally fruitless. Mr. Selig claimed that the showing of his film would be measurably hurt by Fabyan's heresies and wanted it publicly proved that William Shakespeare was the true author of the plays. The action was tried in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, before Judge Richard S. Tuthill, who brought in the remarkable verdict that "the proofs submitted herein, convince the court that Francis Bacon is the author." For the trouble that Fabyan had been caused, the judge awarded him $5,000 in damages. Needless to say, the Baconians exulted and issued propaganda leaflet No. 1 to herald to the world the remarkable decision. Two weeks after his original verdict, however, the same judge entered an order vacating and setting aside the decree, apparently on the grounds that "this proceeding was instituted to exploit and advertise a moving picture involving the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy then being displayed upon the screen and that the question of the authorship of the writings attributed to William Shakespeare was not properly before the court." This admission, which the court made public many years later, in 1935 led the Baconians to withdraw leaflet No. 1 from circulation "in the common interest of truth and fair-play."

Much more spectacular than any antics of the Baconians were the stories and notoriety that accumulated around the resuscitated notion that Christopher Marlowe was the author of the plays. For nineteen years prior to 1955, when he published his The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, Calvin Hoffman had been developing this thesis, but despite his thorough research it took him twelve of those nineteen years to discover that he had been anticipated! Like Donnelly, Hoffman reveled in publicity; he gave interviews, wrote articles, and had articles written about him for three years before his book was finally published and the millions who had read about his ideas were able to see for themselves that once again they had been treated to a fantasy of biased scholarship. If vague parallelisms may be accepted, if what scholars say may be Marlovian echoes in some places is true of all of Shakespeare, if Walsingham is equivalent to the "W. H." of the Sonnets, if the use of the name Sir Oliver Martext in As You Like It can be presumed to prove that the works of Shakespeare are "Marlowe's text," if Walsingham's scrivener was employed to transcribe Marlowe's manuscripts, and if, to make a long story short, Marlowe was not murdered in 1593, then he could have written the plays. When, on May 1, 1956—again after much publicity—Calvin Hoffman induced the Canon of Scadbury Chapel in Chislehurst to open Sir Thomas Walsingham's tomb, the skeptics sat on the edges of their chairs. Those who had followed his articles and his searchings with mine detectors for the inevitable documents that would prove everything would also like to have been there, if only to see the look on Hoffman's face when he discovered nothing but dust.³

Hoffman still managed to gain a headline or two after the fiasco at the tomb. In fact, in the very same year, one of his staunchest backers offered a reward of £1,000 for the "first person to furnish proof that Christopher Marlowe was alive after his supposed murder in 1593." An unnamed English peer was reportedly on his way to northern Italy to seek clues of Marlowe, because, since ten of Shakespeare's plays have Italian settings, the author must have traveled there! A portrait too was turned up at Oxford which Hoffman declared to be Marlowe-Shakespeare. Needless to say, the money offered has not been claimed, nor is it likely to be.

For skeptics interested in prize money, $500 is or was available from the proponents of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the author of Shakespeare's plays. This amount was offered by novelist William McFee for any information dating from before the death of Shakespeare definitively connecting the Shakespeare of Stratford with the Shakespeare who was the author of the plays. To take Ben Jonson's later remark about the "Swan of Avon" as proof of Shakespeare's authorship is not justified, say the Oxfordians, because Oxford himself had several properties along the Avon. Although Baconian societies exist both in England and the United States, the Oxfordians are the most ambitious of the skeptics at the present time, gather the most headlines, and are most vociferous in trying to extinguish the reputation of Shakespeare of Stratford.

The Oxfordian theory was given to the world by J. Thomas Looney, who in November, 1918, told the librarian of the British Museum, Sir Frederick Kenyon, of his discovery and gave him a sealed envelope that would establish his priority to the claim while his book was in progress. In 1920 he published his "Shakespeare " Identified in Edward de Vere the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford⁴ Looney's ideas were not as fantastic as some of the Baconians', except in some minute but all-important particulars, and he himself modestly admitted that "much remains to be done before the Stratfordian hypothesis will be sufficiently moribund to be neglected."

Since his book was published, Oxfordians have frequently debated their claims with the orthodox Shakespeareans. Among the most recent of such debates was one held in 1953 at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey, when Samuel F. Johnson, then of New York University and on the staff of The Shakespeare Newsletter, accepted a challenge from the most influential of American Oxfordians, Charlton Ogburn. The debate was conducted in the form of a trial, even to the point of having a young man dressed and made up to match the Droeshout engraving seated in the docket. After Professor Johnson and Mr. Ogburn each had spoken for half an hour, the jury deliberated and returned with a verdict of eight votes for Shakespeare and four for the Earl of Oxford.

Charlton Ogburn and his wife wrote the more-than-1,300-page This Star of England (1952), which is still the most elaborate attempt to prove that the Earl of Oxford was the author of the plays. Strangely, these American scholars do not have the full support of their English brethren, a group of whom published the Shakespeare Fellowship News-Letter, and have dared to take issue with some of the more unusual of the Ogburn assertions. When the English publication rejected the Ogburn claim that the Earl of Southampton was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Oxford, Mrs. Ogburn called the attack "irresponsible," and continued: "So long as English men and women insist on the virginity of Elizabeth Tudor, they will never establish the authorship of Edward de Vere." No wonder the English were embarrassed!

In 1957, a number of American Oxfordians formed the Ereved (De Vere spelled backwards) Foundation. They lecture, publish, distribute offprints, sponsor scholarship on their thesis, and admit that "the deification of Shakespeare is a tough thing to combat." The English Oxfordians too are strengthening their forces and in the spring of 1959 superseded their 1936-58 Shakespeare Fellowship News-Letter with a little magazine called the Shakespearean Authorship Review. Its members and friends issue a continual stream of books and pamphlets, none of which, except by rationalizing, comes to grips with the real issue of how Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and the romances were written after the death of Oxford in 1604! Attempts have been made at redating these plays, or at pushing the whole work of Shakespeare back about a dozen years, better to fit the dates of the Earl, who was born in 1550. Eva Turner Clark in 1930 produced a tome of almost 700 pages, Shakespeare 's Plays in the Order of Their Writing, accomplishing, to her own satisfaction at least, this latter task, and H. H. Holland, in his Shakespeare through Oxford Glasses (1923) also revised the chronology—but the problem of dates remains unsolved.

It is also the all-important question of dating that virtually demolishes the case for William Stanley, Sixth Earl of Derby. While browsing among the papers of George Fenner, a Jesuit spy whose letters dated June 30, 1599, he came on in 1891, James Greenstreet discovered that William Stanley, son-in-law to the Earl of Oxford, had spent a lot of time in 1591 "busyed only in penning comedies for the commoun players." Subsequently, on the basis of this very slender evidence, Greenstreet wrote three articles maintaining that the plays Stanley was writing were those now attributed to William Shakespeare. Remarkably, for anything so startling, the theory lay dormant until Professor Abel Lefranc, of the Collège de France in Paris, also seeking an author, hit on Derby without knowing of Greenstreet's work.

The "proof offered for Derby's authorship includes the facts that his name was William, that he was an aristocrat, traveled, and knew all about falconry; he is said to have written Love 's Labour's Lost out of his own intimate knowledge of the French situation in Navarre from 1577 to 1584 and A Midsummer Night's Dream to celebrate his own wedding, and so on. By an extremely minute analysis of the handwriting of those lines in Sir Thomas More usually attributed to Shakespeare (the manuscript is in five different hands), Dr. A. W. Titherley, another Derby enthusiast, "proved" in his Shakespeare's Identity (1952) that the hand was that of none other than Derby himself!

But simple incontrovertible facts, such as dates, stand in the way of any rational acceptance of such "proof." The Earl of Derby was born in 1560 or 1561, which makes him approximately Shakespeare's age. But he died in 1642, nineteen years after the First Folio was issued by Shakespeare's personal friends to "keep the memory of so worthy a Friend and Fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare." Dr. Titherley would have us believe that Heminge and Condell were not to be trusted in what they said in their dedication; that Ben Jonson, who Titherley presumes edited the plays, was in on the secret of their authorship and was equivocating in his eulogy "To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare"; and that the three other eulogists in the Folio were not in on the secret. Why didn't Derby correct his plays for publication? He was not much interested in the work and cared little except that his incognito should be retained. "The Earl, himself, the soul of sincerity," says Titherley, "would hardly condone the flagrant deception of the prefaces, but he would not see them, and being as usual indifferent simply permitted the name Shakespeare. . . ." One must indeed be "indifferent" to spend twenty years writing 36 plays and then not bother to edit them or to see them when they are in print in a fine folio—and to permit the name and the portrait of another to be put on the title page!

Are the followers of Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, better supplied with evidence?⁵ The usual elements of nobility and knowledge are offered, to which Claude Sykes, in his Alias William Shakespeare (1947), adds the fact that "it is conceivable that most, if not all," of the over a hundred books that Shakespeare must have read "might have been in Rutland's wellstocked library." (The italics are ours.) Furthermore, a manuscript copy of the song "Farewell, dear love" from Twelfth Night was found in the Manners home at Belvoir Castle, and "no such link with any of Shakespeare's plays can be found at Stratford-on-Avon or in association with any other claimant." The fact that the song was included in the widely available "Booke of Ayres" compiled by Robert Jones in 1601 does not appear to Mr. Sykes to undermine the validity of this shattering evidence. Naturally, the Rutland partisans explain, there is no evidence that the Earl was a poet! The nobleman's "anxiety to leave no clue" that he might have written for the "common Plaiers" is understandable.

The whole theory of Rutland's authorship starts from the simple connection of Shakespeare and Burbage, who presumably worked together on a decorative shield that was carried by Francis Manners, the sixth Earl of Rutland (Roger's brother), on King James's Accession day, March 24, 1613. Mr. Sykes tells us that the sum of 44 shillings Shakespeare received for the shield was an obvious overpayment for the little work entailed, and that it was merely camouflage for some amount that the Earl's late brother, the author of the plays, had owed Shakespeare.⁶ For proof, these theorists point out that in Hamlet Roger Manners revealed the hatred his brother Francis felt for him. Actually, there is a remote possibility that Francis poisoned Roger in 1612, and perhaps his wife too a few weeks afterwards; the Rutlandians maintain that Roger anticipated this in Hamlet, written about ten years before his death, and prefigured it also in the other brother-versus-brother plays, As You Like It, King John, Much Ado, King Lear, and The Tempest.

But this theory, like some others, utterly falls flat on the evidence of dates alone. Roger Manners was born in 1576—which simple fact would make him sixteen years old when he wrote Henry VI, if he did, and just slightly more when he composed Richard III, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, and so on. One Rutlandian expert, Pierre Porohovshikov, attempts in Shakespeare Unmasked (1940) to get around this difficulty by attributing the early poems to Bacon but having Rutland write the plays while at Cambridge, perhaps with some help from others. This hardly lessens the improbability of the claim that at least half a dozen great plays were written by a boy in his teens!

For those who could not be reconciled to the possibility that any one man, even a titled nobleman, was capable of writing the plays, there are numerous group theories that take the best features of each of the candidates and combine their various qualities to justify the particular play or poem under discussion. Delia Bacon herself first leaned to this idea and thought that Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the collaborators. Later William D. O'Connor pointed out that the still unsolved riddle of "the onlie begetter" of the Sonnets, "Mr. W. H.," is easily answered by taking Sir Walter RaleigH to be the mysterious person. The presumed collaborators were later joined by Bacon, Oxford, and the other leading candidates discussed earlier, as well as by Robert Greene, George Peele, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, and virtually every other poet contemporary with Shakespeare. The Sonnets were attributed not only to Raleigh, but even to Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586. H. T. S. Forrest in The Five Authors of 'Shakespeare's Sonnets' (1923) set forth the novel theory that the 154 sonnets were the result of "competitive sonneteering," in which five authors—one of whom was John Donne—each wrote poems on thirteen assigned subjects. Among the propositions Forrest asks his readers to accept is that the series was a "literary contest" conducted by specific rules. If the reader cannot swallow this—or if indeed any one of his basic propositions cannot be accepted—Forrest says, "then the whole thing is rotten right through, and the sooner it is carted away to limbo along with The Biliteral Cipher and honorificabilitudinitatibus the better."

To the same limbo some critics have also thought it necessary to consign A. J. Evans' Shakespeare 's Magic Circle (1956), which held that the syndicate that produced the plays had for its head Francis Bacon; for its most active member, Lord Stanley; and for other members of this "magic circle," the Earl of Rutland, Mary Pembroke (Sidney's sister, at whose home the circle met), Sir Walter Raleigh (for the sea storms), and the Earl of Oxford. A comparable theory, put forth in jest by James M. Barrie in the St. James Gazette for March 2, 1886, was that the plays were the product of a Bacon syndicate the initials of whose members, Spenser, Harvey, Alleyn, Kempe, Sly, Peele, Elliman, Atlow, and Raleigh, spelled "Shakspear."

The roll of those put forth, on the flimsiest of evidence, as the author of Shakespeare's plays includes many of the minor as well as major names in the annals of Elizabethan literature and politics. The year that saw the publication of Donnelly's massive volume in behalf of Bacon also saw, for example, the publication of a thin pamphlet by Scott Surtees expounding the claim of Sir Anthony Sherley (1565-1635). What were Sherley's qualifications? He had traveled extensively, especially in Italy, he knew the lore of hunting, he had been educated at Oxford, had a knowledge of the sea, and was acquainted with the Court. His connection with the theatre is presumed to have been through William Kempe, the actor, because Sherley's mother was the daughter of Sir Thomas Kempe. In the play The Travels of Three English Brothers by John Day, George Wilkins, and William Rowley, Kempe's actual meeting with Anthony Sherley in Venice is made part of the action. Sir Anthony sent his "Shakespeare" plays to Kempe and maintained his anonymity. Typical of the proof are the "facts" that at the ancient family seat of the Ferrer family, to which he belonged, a carved oaken chimney piece tells the story of Venus and Adonis, and that the Ferrer family motto, "Only One," is presumably echoed in Sonnets cv, cxxxv, and cxxxvi. If these qualifications of Sir Anthony's are sufficient to make a case for him as the author of Shakespeare's works, we may well wonder why it is that no more than five dozen names have been put forward, singly or in groups, as the author!

Is there a better case for Sir Walter Releigh? When Henry Pemberton, Jr., began studying Shakespeare in 1905 his researches led him to believe that only Raleigh could have written the plays. The method Pemberton followed in his Shakspere and Sir Walter Raleigh (1914) was to find topical allusions in Shakespeare that fit Raleigh. That Raleigh wrote the Sonnets (as others had maintained) is "proved" by the references to "Bath" in Sonnets CLIII and CLIV, which refer to Raleigh's visit to that resort in 1602; references to lameness in Sonnets xxxvn and LXXXIX allude to the disability that Raleigh incurred in the battle for Cadiz in 1596; the despondency expressed by the Sonnets in general is due to Raleigh's illness and later imprisonment in the Tower of London! The "smiling damnèd villain" in Hamlet is none other than James I, who imprisoned Raleigh from November, 1603, until 1616, and again later after an ill-fated voyage to the Orinoco. Measure for Measure, on the theme of justice and mercy, was Raleigh's attempt at reconciliation. After it failed, the period of gloom began, in which the tragedies were written, followed at last by a period of serenity when Raleigh "made up his mind to adapt his life to a confinement that had earlier contrasted so sharply with his former active career."

In the year that Pemberton was beginning his researches Latham Davis had already finished and published his, in a book that is a miracle of ingenuity and imagination. His Shakespeare England's Ulysses (1905) proposes that the Sonnets are the missing Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres in 1598. Davis begins by breaking down the Sonnets into five acts whose subjects are symbolically the CrowE (emblem of nature—the "Dark Lady" of the Sonnets), IcaruS (Folly), DaedaluS (Art), Father TimE (Time), and The Phoenix (Truth). Then, by taking the final letter of each symbol, he arrives at the conclusion that the Earl of Essex (1566-1601) must have been the author of the plays!

An equally imaginative exploit was that of William Ross, who in The Story of Anne Whateley and William Shaxpere (1939) attempted to prove that an Anne Whateley wrote the works of Shakespeare, even though it is more than likely that such a person never existed. It is a fact that a license for the marriage of Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton and William Shakespeare was issued at the Episcopal Registry at Worcester on November 27, 1582, but the next day a bond was issued with the name Whateley changed to Hathaway. Imaginative biographers have deduced that William loved and intended to marry Anne Whateley, but when friends of Anne Hathaway's turned up with the story that she was already pregnant by him, the first Anne was forced out of the picture. Scholars agree, however, that the name Whateley was merely a clerical error, the clerk having written it absent-mindedly because the case of a William Whateley was on that very date before the consistory court.

From this theory of another Anne, Ross reconstructed the tale that is unfolded in the Sonnets—of Anne's unrequited love for Shakespeare, to whom she gave the poems, with later references to a "Dark Lady" who is none other than Anne Hathaway. A Midsummer Night's Dream reveals a similar mixed-up courtship, and Love's Labour's Lost reverses the situation in Anne's own life, in which it is the women who have retired to study. Such a reversal is merely part of the deception, for even in the Sonnets Anne Whateley wrote "she" and "her," which Ross neatly turns to "he," "him," and "his" to unravel the mystery! One would think that such a theory would have only one supporter—the author himself—but W. J. Fraser Hutcheson in 1950 continued and elaborated his friend Ross's story in Shakespeare's Other Anne, crediting Anne Whateley with even more Elizabethan works than his predecessor had and assigning to her virtually all the anonymous work of the period, as well as Spenser's Faerie Queene!

From attributing Shakespeare's works to a nonexistent woman it is but a step attributing them to the best-known woman of the period—Queen Elizabeth herself. To prove that Elizabeth was the author takes some remarkable adjustment of the facts, but George Elliott Sweet, in Shakespeare the Mystery (1956), faced the challenge. Since the Queen died in 1603, it naturally became necessary to squeeze the complete works into the years before the date. Shakespeare had suffered on this variety of Procrustean bed before. With a colossal disregard of all studies of Shakespearean versification and dramatic development, Sweet makes Timon of Athens the first play—written, he says, in 1580—and declares its theme of ingratitude is based on the fact that in 1579 Elizabeth learned that Lord Leicester, whom she loved, had married Lettice Knollys. The distortion of other evidence follows the usual pattern of Shakespearean heresies: the lameness suggested in Sonnet XXXVII ("So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite") is here interpreted as sexual lameness, and Sweet repeats the story told by Ben Jonson of Elizabeth, that she "had a membrane on her, which made her incapable of man." Elizabeth had the courtly knowledge, the knowledge of the sea from her mariners, the superb vocabulary; she knew all classes and conditions of men, she was "myriad-minded." How wonderful of Mr. Sweet to have delivered her up to the attention of the literary world!

Shakespeareans themselves are partly to blame for the claims of the heretics. When the biographical facts are summarized briefly or slurred over, it is no wonder that the mild skeptics say that even though Bacon or any of the others may not have written the plays, there is no proof that Shakespeare did. Mark Twain shows the general confusion in his Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909). Shakespeare, he says, is like the colossal Brontosaur that was constructed by Professor Osborn out of nine bones and plaster of Paris: there is too much fiction and not enough fact. The "Supposers, the Perhapsers, the Could-Have-Beeners, the Must-Have-Beeners, the Without-a-Shadow-of-Doubters, the We-are-Warranted-in-Believingers," have so overextended themselves that Twain calls them Stratfordolaters, Shakesperoids, thugs, bangalores, troglodytes, herumfrodites, blatherskites, buccaneers, and bandoleers. Because no facts are known of, for example, the years after Shakespeare's marriage (1585-92) until his appearance in London, Twain considers this period a blank. But even if we do not know all that we would like to about these years, must we think that Shakespeare was totally inactive? Was he living in a vacuum, not reading or writing, or observing, or listening? Was an ignorant and illiterate Shakespeare living in London surrounded by wits of all kinds, in an age of gossip and dramatic competition, and yet, for some strange reason, never having anyone question for a moment how such a boor could be writing the plays to which his name was attached, or how as an actor he could memorize the lines of the plays if he could not read?

This is perhaps the place to say, in the face of all the theoretical "proof that has been introduced, that there is absolutely no need to posit from the evidence of the plays that the author was a born gentleman, an aristocrat and all that this implies; that he was intimate with the court and foreign affairs; that he was university-educated; that he must have traveled to Italy or elsewhere; that he had to have been a lawyer; that his personal biography is mirrored in the plays and poems. There is nothing in the plays that was beyond the powers of an alert Elizabethan intimately connected with the stage, a reader of books, a friend to gentleman and travelers, and, what is not evident in the known works of any other contemporaries except possibly Marlowe, with an insight into humanity and a skill with words and thoughts that has never yet been surpassed.

But so long as there are those who refuse to consider all the facts available, who distort the evidence to prove untenable hypotheses, and who indulge in iconoclasm as a sport, there will be heretics among us. The mere existence of the dozens of candidates for the Shakespearean title—many of them supported by the same evidence—is enough to nullify each of the claims. It cannot be said that all the proponents of other Shakespeares are uninformed amateurs, but certainly most of them would renounce their disbelief if they studied more of the information available. Were the dozen-odd editions of the poems published during Shakespeare's lifetime, and many more of the plays (most of them with his name on them), ever doubted in his time? Was Shakespeare the butt of ridicule because his name was on plays and poems not his? Could a man then, or now, be an uneducated imposter and deceive friends and colleagues into thinking him the author of the best plays being shown in London? "What fools these mortals be."

Notes

¹ Lee was of course speaking of Shakespeare's "personal" aims. He also quoted Alexander Pope to the effect that Shakespeare "For gain not glory winged his roving flight, / And grew immortal in his own despite."

² Dr. James Spedding, one of the foremost authorities on Bacon, was undisturbed by the parallelisms, and declared that after twenty-five years of study he could easily perceive the difference in the two styles. See Nathaniel Holmes's The Authorship of Shakespeare (5th ed., 1886).

³ With Stratford preparing for the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964, skeptics of the Stratford tradition are once again agitating the Birthplace Trust to prove its claims of Shakespeare's authorship. In the summer of 1962 a Shakespeare Action Committee was organized in London for the express purpose of promoting the opening of Shakespeare's grave to ascertain once and for all whether there were any documents there concealed. Letters have appeared in the London Times and The New York Times, articles in Past and Future, and summaries of most of these and a historical article in The Shakespeare Newsletter (September 1962 and following). The current controversy began when Francis Carr, editor of Past and Future, wrote a strong letter to the London Times on August 30. The Birthplace Trust is ignoring the agitation.

⁴ A source high in Oxfordian circles once informed the present writer that the first publisher to be offered Looney's volume refused to bring it out unless the author changed his name!

⁵ Célestin Demblon, Lord Rutland est Shakespeare (1915), claimed to have read 5,000 books on the authorship question before he decided on Rutland.

⁶ E. K. Chambers, in his William Shakespeare (1930), doubts that the Shakespeare mentioned in connection with the shield is William Shakespeare.