[In the following overview, Micheli outlines the authorship controversy, noting that while Shakespeare 's life is for the most part a mystery, there is no evidence against his claim as author. Micheli also illustrates the primary thrust of the anti-Stratfordian argument, that there exists a tremendous disparity between the life of Shakespeare and "the mind of the person" who authored the plays and poems.]

Shakspere as Candidate: The Pros, Cons and the Silences

The case for William Shakspere of Stratford has classical simplicity, giving it an initial advantage over the more complicated cases for all rival candidates. The name, with adapted spelling, appeared on the title-pages of plays and poems and, even though neither he nor anyone else in his lifetime clearly identified the actor with the author, no one openly challenged the attribution. Two of his poems were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton who never acknowledged the honour, but neither did he repudiate it. Shakspere's family and neighbours neither acclaimed nor disclaimed the great poet in their midst. His fellow actors and impresarios must have known whether or not he was the real author of the plays they were staging. They never expressed doubts about Shakspere's claim, and two of them, Heminge and Condell, certified his authorship of the plays in the First Folio.

The Folio of 1623 is one of the twin pillars of Stratfordian orthodoxy. The other is the poem inscribed below Shakspere's bust in Stratford's Holy Trinity church which was put there soon after his death, and records that Shakspere was the greatest writer of his age. No matter that the bust may have been changed or tampered with; the inscription beneath it is early and unequivocal.

Everyone concerned with the First Shakespeare Folio—the printers who saw the original texts, the two players who edited it, the two earls who received its dedication and the four poets, including Ben Jonson, who wrote verses for it—openly or tacitly accepted the declared authorship. Jonson addressed his poem. 'To the memory of my beloved, the Author. Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us', and he was specific with his pun on the author's name ('shake a lance') and his 'Swan of Avon' epithet. Leonard Digges with his reference to Shakspere's Stratford monument plainly acknowledged his authorship of the Folio's contents.

The most powerful and compelling defence of William Shakspere is that none of the actors and theatre people who must have known him in London ever openly disputed his authorship of plays. This is a serious problem for the anti-Stratfordians, and their responses to it reveal a serious discrepancy in their argument. The true identity of Shakespeare, they say, was a close secret, known to very few people and thus easily maintained. Yet the conspiratorial group inevitably widens. Many cryptic references to the Authorship mystery by many contemporary writers are detected by the Heretics. If they are right, it would seem that almost every writer of the time was in on the secret, and in that case, if the secret was so widely known, it was really no secret at all. The idea of a concealed Shakespeare, someone other than the man from Stratford, is thus made ridiculous.

The orthodox teaching is that, although Shakspere's life is largely a mystery, there is no evidence worth looking at against his traditional claim to the Authorship. Shakspere's twin pillars stand intact. The Heretics may make mysteries, raise doubts and quibble as they please, but unless they can find proof for some other candidate, Shakespeare is respectably identified as Will Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It is only when Stratfordians descend into the arena and argue the matter on the Heretics' grounds that perplexities arise. These are inevitably caused by the central paradox of the Authorship question, the discrepancy between the life of Shakspere and the mind of the person who wrote Shakespeare. On the one hand a bookless provincial trader, on the other a universal genius of refined education. How can the two possibly be matched?

This question splits the Stratfordians into two opposite camps, one of which includes the romantics and mystics. These make light of Shakspere's educational deficiencies. They follow Jonson's line, that though Shakspere was far from being a classical scholar, he could defeat the Romans at their own game and outdo all the ancient poets and philosophers. He was a born genius, a child of nature, and such people need no great stock of book learning to be capable of inspired writing, far exceeding anything that a mere pedant or scholar could produce. Shakspere's knowledge came to him directly through mystical channels.

The other, more modern approach to reconciling Shakspere with Shakespeare is by taking a high view of the education provided at the Stratford grammar school, while playing down the classical, legal and other types of rarefied knowledge found in the plays. The Stratford school syllabus has not survived, so if Shakspere went to that school, there is no telling what he might have learnt there. Nor is there any indication of where or what he might have studied during his the 'lost years' of his early manhood. This gap allows room for any amount of speculation, and Stratfordians can take advantage of it to explain any special knowledge attributed to the writer of Shakespeare. Aubrey claimed that Shakspere was once a country schoolmaster, and so he might have been; that would explain his familiarity with the classics. Then again, he could have worked in a lawyer's office, or served in a nobleman's household, studied medicine or theology, enlisted in the army, served in the navy, travelled in Italy. . . . Shakspere could hardly have done all those things, but it is not impossible that he did one or two of them in his early twenties, and with a certain amount of specialized knowledge combined with a quick ear for the characteristic speech of other social and professional types, he could perhaps have qualified himself as a versatile dramatist.

To most of the points raised by the Heretics the Stratfordians have managed to provide more or less reasonable answers. On other points they confess to being mystified. The status quo perpetuates their advantage. Unless their opponents can produce new, conclusive evidence, discrediting Shakspere or proving the claim of one or other rival candidate, Stratford has nothing to fear. Even in the barely imaginable event of such evidence coming to light, the Stratford cult is so gainfully established that Shakspere's home town would probably adapt itself to remaining the shrine of whoever was acclaimed as our National Poet.

The life of William Shakspere himself is the main reason why there is a Shakespeare authorship problem. A review of all the known, documented facts about his career gives a picture of a fairly successful local business man who dealt in land, property and rural commodities and arranged small loans upon security. He was also known on the London stage and speculated in the theatre. His will mentioned no books, manuscripts or any other sign of literacy. No one in Stratford ever acknowledged him as a writer, and he never pretended to be one.

There is nothing particularly disgraceful in this life. The anti-Stratfordians are often accused of wilfully denigrating Shakspere, and in some cases that is undoubtedly true. But the point is not that Shakspere was a bad man. Apart from his mysterious years in London, he lived much as his father had before him, and died as a respectable man of property in his own small town. Shakspere's known career was unremarkable, quite consistent with his birth and upbringing; but it is not at all consistent with his posthumous reputation as England's finest, most highly cultured poet and playwright.

This raises a paradox, and one way round it is to suppose that there was a conspiracy. It was designed to conceal the true authorship of Shakespeare by fastening it upon a former actor, living far from London in obscure retirement, who died forgotten and uncelebrated in 1616. Ben Jonson, of course, took part in that conspiracy, and also in it or aware of it were Shakspere's fellow actors and many of the leading people in literature and state affairs.

This idea has several obvious drawbacks. Conspiracy theories have a bad reputation, and respectable people are often unwilling even to consider them. Moreover, in this particular case there are such difficult questions as who organized the conspiracy, why it was necessary in the first place and how it was so efficiently kept secret.

Since there is no agreement on who Shakespeare really was, the chief player in the alleged conspiracy is unidentified. If he was a powerful nobleman or statesman, silence might have been necessary to protect his reputation. Writing plays for public performance was not a respectable occupation for such a person. That does not really explain why and how, if the authorship was a secret, that secret was so effectively maintained. A possible reason is that Shakespeare's plays had a hidden meaning and purpose, and that some group or movement used them as a means of instilling their influence secretly into the public mind. The Rosicrucians have been suspected, so have the Jesuits, and some have seen Shakespeare as conveyor of government propaganda.

The greatest difficulty with the conspiracy theory is that many people must have been in the secret, yet no one ever spoke out about it and no reference to it has been found in any private, official or state document. In dealing with this, the theorists emphasize the dangers of free speech in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Theatres, plays and players were all licensed and subject to strict control. Plays were more or less the 'media' of the time; they were censored and made to reflect government policy. Writers and dramatists were constantly under threat of imprisonment or painful death for anything in their works that might be thought seditious. In 1597 Thomas Nashe was sent to the Fleet prison for his part in writing a 'slanderous' play, The Isle of Dogs; all copies of it were destroyed and the theatre that showed it was closed. Marston and Chapman, Kyd, Jonson, Daniel and others were arrested on similar charges. It was far easier to enforce silence on a forbidden topic in Elizabethan London than it has ever been since, even in Stalin's Russia.

One way of perpetuating a secret is by the destruction of tell-tale documents. A significant feature of Shakspere's life-history, which has often been commented on, is that virtually all the records that would have referred to him have mysteriously vanished. That is why so little is known about him. No scrap of his own letters or manuscripts has survived, nor have the records of his school years, his theatrical tours or anything he ever said to anyone. The deeds of his Stratford properties are missing, and so is that part of his son-in-law John Hall's diary covering his lifetime. Time and again, as Charlotte Stopes found when she combed the public records in London for evidence of Shakspere's acting career, there are gaps in the record just where his name might be expected to appear. The suspicion is that someone or some agency, backed by the resources of government, has at some early period 'weeded' the archives and suppressed documents with any bearing on William Shakspere and his part in the Authorship mystery.

Then there are the silences, most disconcertingly Philip Henslowe's. According to his biographers, Shakspere probably made his name in the theatre by writing and acting for Henslowe, owner and manager of the Rose and other playhouses. It was therefore an exciting moment when Malone at the end of the eighteenth century discovered Henslowe's working diary, a folio manuscript covering the years 1592 to 1603 with memoranda from before and after those dates. Recorded in it were details of all his theatrical enterprises, his receipts from performances and the sums he paid to dramatists. There were frequent entries for payments to Jonson, Dekker, Chetile, Marston, Middleton, Drayton and a dozen others among the leading theatre-writers of the time, yet Shakspere received not a single mention. This was at the height of Shakespeare's literary career. Henslowe bought and staged a number of plays with the same titles as those later printed in the Shakespeare Folio, including Titus Andronicus, Henry V, Henry VI, King Lear, Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew, but none of these was attributed to Shakespeare, nor did William Shakspere receive money for them. For Troilus and Cressida Henslowe recorded two part payments to Thomas Dekker and Henry Chetile whom he took to be its co-authors.

Equally silent was Edward Alleyne, Henslowe's stepson-in-law and business partner. He was an educated actor, a theatre owner and the founder of Dulwich College. In his notes and papers he wrote down the names of every notable actor, poet and dramatist of Shakspere's time, and he noted every payment to and transaction with everyone connected with his theatre enterprises. Yet here again, the name of Shakspere or Shakespeare is entirely absent.

Another unexpected silence was Michael Drayton's. Born the year before Shakspere, in the same county of Warwickshire, he was his contemporary in the London theatre world, a poet, dramatist and writer of sonnets. While Shakspere was in Stratford, Drayton often stayed with friends at Clifford Chambers, a village only two miles away. He certainly knew Shakspere's family, for he was a patient of Dr John Hall, who once treated him for a 'tertian' (fever) by dosing him with syrup of violets. Drayton wrote many letters to and about other literary figures, made verses to his fellow poets and received their verses to commend his own works. He should have known Shakspere, but he gave no sign of it and, during the lifetime of his Stratford neighbour, never mentioned his name. Finally in 1627, when Shakspere was many years dead, he produced four lines of tepid, impersonal praise in the Elegies which ended his poem, 'The Battaile of Agincourt'.

SHAKESPEARE, thou hadst as smooth a comic vein,
Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain,
As strong conception, and as clear a rage
As any one that trafick'd with the stage.

This says little more about Shakespeare than that he 'traficked' or had dealings in the theatre. It contrasts with the Elegies in which Drayton celebrates the genius of Spenser and other poets.

Only at the very end of Shakspere's life is there any hint of a link between him and Michael Drayton. Fortysix years after Shakspere's death, the new Stratford vicar, John Ward, noted in his diary a story he had heard locally, that Shakspere had succumbed to a fever after a drinking bout with Drayton and Ben Jonson. Drayton was in fact noted for his temperance; neither he nor Jonson ever referred to the incident, and it is generally supposed to be apocryphal.

The silence of a little-known man, John Chamberlain the letter-writer, is perhaps the strangest of all. His lifespan (1553-1627) bracketed Shakspere's (1564-1616), and he was very interested in the London theatre and its personalities. Many of his letters are held in the British Library and Public Record Office. They were written to keep his friends informed about every aspect of life in the capital, and they are valued by historians because they often give details of events otherwise unrecorded. It is almost incredible that Chamberlain said not a word about Shakespeare. James Spedding remarked on his silence in his Life and Times of Francis Bacon.

In the long series of letters from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, scattered over the whole period from 1598 to 1623—letters full of news of the month, news of the Court, the city, the pulpit and the bookseller's shop, in which court masques are described in minute detail, authors, actors, plot, performances, reception and all—we look in vain for the name of Shakespeare.

Also in vain has been the search for Shakespeare's name in the letters and writings of Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), the poet, diplomat and traveller who ended up as Provost of Eton. Throughout his life he was a prolific correspondent, and a great many of his letters to Francis Bacon and other interesting people have been preserved. Among his published works was a 'Collection of Lives, Letters, Poems, with Characters of Sundry Personages etc.' with extensive allusions to the wits and writers of his period, but with the glaring exception of Shakespeare. Even in his detailed account of the burning of the Globe Theatre in 1613, during a performance of Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, Wotton never mentioned the playwright.

In this and other cases, where Shakespeare's name was surprisingly omitted from lists of contemporary writers and poets, the Stratfordians offer explanations, and sometimes plausibly. No single silence is entirely fatal to the Orthodox belief. It is the unanimity of silence that is so impressively disconcerting. This has never been explained. Apart from Jonson, whose remarks on Shakespeare are strangely inconsistent, none of his literary contemporaries seems to have known much about him, and whatever they did know they kept to themselves.

The life of William Shakspere, factually examined, gives no independent support to his traditional identification as Shakespeare. Yet successive waves of anti-Stratfordian theorists have broken in vain upon the rock of Orthodoxy. Shakspere may seem an unlikely candidate, but no conclusive case has yet been made for any of his rivals. . . . The truth about Shakespeare may one day emerge, but only when new evidence is discovered; and that is most likely to happen when scholars diversify their efforts, and research the lives and claims of other possible candidates with the same obsessive attention that they have devoted to William Shakspere.