Who Really Wrote Shakespeare?
From time to time in the course of an ordinary writing career you may see a need to attribute your writings to another person entirely.
It may be that small feature you put together for the newspaper highlighting the lady on the outskirts of town, “Pennies From Heaven.”
It turns out that she was in fact enthusiastic about her peonies, a species of flower as it turns out, not pennies, though the two words sound exactly alike, which explains why she kept talking about bulbs and fertilizer and what-not, and why she insisted on posing in front of some blooming something-or-others at the side of the house for her photo.
For your part, you had stitched together what you would call a pretty darned good summary of the coin-collecting business, with special attention given to the special role of the American penny, figuring that the gal was just tongue-tied when it came to her passion, these pennies that I speak of, and you were going to create for her a few choice quotes as a favor.
So that’s one you wouldn’t mind seeing go down in history under someone else’s byline.
It may be – being given one last chance in the Homes and Gardens section of the paper – it may be that you followed up the pennies story, or peonies if you prefer and are some kind of nut for a level of accuracy that no normal person can actually achieve, with another, where this time you didn’t stint on the research and really dug in, but were undone by a simple typo which you repeated 72 times in the course of a five paragraph article.
Salvia is apparently another kind of flower still – who knew there were so damn many kinds of flowers? – but you headline ‘’Proud of Her Saliva” and the accompanying prose makes her seem to be some nutty woman with an especially high regard for her own spit.
In another stage of your career entirely you looked on hopelessly as total sales for your collection of humorous urban tales – Unspeakably Funny Stories in the Oral Tradition – entered negative territory as people brought back the few that had been sold, saying they couldn’t get past the title which ‘made their heads hurt,’ according to feedback from marketing department surveys, and your foray into naturalist writing, Your Friend and Mine, Hero of the Slime, The American Hagfish, failed to catch on with a fickle reading public.
Oh, and there were various Hollywood scripts, learned essays, a lengthy (three-volume) poem on pitching pennies, 200 pages in rhymed couplets on the history of pinball, a full-blown five act drama centered on the seedy underbelly of the glamorous world of miniature golf, passionate odes and what-not to girls who definitely did not as it turned out want a passionate ode from you of all people — ‘of all people,’ mind you – and so on.
Oh, and that one book of humorous essays that you had such high hopes for, Helpless Laughter, which prompted one reviewer to remark, “well, he got at least one word right.’
That humor magazine you founded and folded after one issue, almost forgot that, “Who’s Laughing Now?” which prompted a completely different reviewer to say, briefly, ‘nobody,” and then just left it at that. Just left it at that.
Oh, and then when you turned to horror fiction and churned out your Dammed Trilogy – One Damned Thing After Another! (zombies on parade as it were), Out, Out, Damned Spot! (demon-possessed dalmatian), and It’s The Damnednest Thing! (demon-possessed zombie dalmatian), they went nowhere, absolutely nowhere.
Thinking quick, you swapped out the cover and title page of your earlier already-referenced collection of urban humor, Unspeakably Funny Stories in the Oral Tradition, and peddled it as a collection of horror vignettes, Unspeakable Tales of Terror in the Oral Tradition, leaving the contents untouched on the chance that no one would notice. Which they didn’t. Because no one bought the book.
Oh, just a lot of stuff.
How great would it be, upon gathering these examples in one place, and instead of ceremoniously lighting a bonfire and tossing each item in turn into the little inferno, how great would it be to look upon them and remark casually to anyone around at the time, “you know, a lot of people are saying I didn’t really write these.”
It is a bold statement and requires some follow-on commentary.
“No, look closely. You see the way that the commas are used in the one story, and the semi-colons are used in the other? Stylistically that is completely contrary to my ordinary methods of composition. Do you further observe in the one poem the way that June rhymes with moon, and in the other lark with dark? Based on my other works, works whose authorship isn’t in question, I would ordinarily have rhymed June with loon and lark with quark. Little things like that. They add up, they add up,” you comment with authority.
Well who would know better?
You go on.
“Do you notice too how paragraphs are started and ended, and the typical word count of the paragraphs? Such details are like literary fingerprints to the professional scholar. Recent scholarship has revealed that these particulars are stylistic touches that I would never employ. Wouldn’t be caught dead using! Most likely they are the work of other writers of the time, who were trying to latch onto my fame. Pass the mashed potatoes, could you?”
And that is that.
You may be asked who specifically would churn out such ratty stuff, and at that point you could mention several contemporaries that you don’t particularly like as possibilities and move on to another topic.
The light touch, you see.
You have put the topic out there and planted a little seed of doubt, now you must give the delicate sproutling time to grow.
Maybe you didn’t write all that drek that you are referencing, your audience hopefully is thinking; literary scholarship has turned up some pretty weird things over time.
After all, someone far better than you may have led the way in this regard.
Shakespeare has advantages over other writers: a notably vast vocabulary, unequalled insight into human nature, an uncanny facility with language, the ability to create countless true-to-life characters from thin air, unerring instincts… the complete ball of wax.
One advantage not mentioned above but which has proved invaluable to his reputation over time is that a fair number of people don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
They will grant you, these people, that somebody wrote all those plays, sonnets, and long-form poems, they just don’t happen to think that it was this lad from Stratford-upon-Avon.
Full knowledge of the details of court life with all its intrigues, familiarity with the law, philosophy, Roman and Greek classics, mathematics, astronomy, art, music, military tactics, exotic foreign capitals, and aristocratic pastimes such as falconry, simply could not be attached to this simple lad with a grade school education. The plays simply must have been written by Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, or any of another hundred names put forth each year as the more likely candidate.
History does not confirm this clearly — and here we get to the heart of the matter — but some researchers have the suspicion that the source of all this doubt is Shakespeare himself.
After all, if you had written the following:
A man may, if he were of a fearful heart,
stagger in this attempt; for here we have no temple
but the wood, no assembly but horn-beasts. But what
though? Courage! As horns are odious, they are
necessary. It is said, 'many a man knows no end of
his goods:' right; many a man has good horns, and
knows no end of them. Well, that is the dowry of
his wife; 'tis none of his own getting. Horns?
Even so. Poor men alone? No, no; the noblest deer
hath them as huge as the rascal. Is the single man
therefore blessed? No: as a walled town is more
worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a
married man more honourable than the bare brow of a
bachelor; and by how much defence is better than no
skill, by so much is a horn more precious than to want.
…wouldn’t you have found a way – any way! – to distance yourself from it? It doesn’t mean anything now! It very likely didn’t mean anything then! It looks like someone backstage carrying one script collided into someone else carrying a different script from an entirely different play and the pages went all over the place and got picked up and put back together in the wrong order!
It’s no crime, these occasionally wretched passages. We don’t blame Shakespeare. Writing is a chancy endeavor. The result of your time with parchment and quill at the end of the day may be glorious indeed.
It may not be too.
In fact, though the data is sketchy, the ratio of glorious outcomes to the opposite runs in the 1-to-7 range, some say 1-to-8.
The quality comes and goes, my friend, and goes more often than it comes.
By this I don’t only mean that the output of the afternoon may not be equal to that of the morning, but that it can shift radically from hour to hour, minute to minute, even word to word.
Upon pushing back his chair from the table holding the typewriter and reviewing the day’s work, no sooner does the author congratulate himself on putting rather neatly the feeling that comes over the viewer upon seeing a glorious sunset, ineffable beauty tinged with the essential sadness of life itself, you know, that feeling, than he goes on to read, again in his own words, that it is a bit like having accidentally swallowed an entire strand of blinking holiday lights which are now setting up a glow, sometimes steady, sometimes in attractive recurring patterns of on-and-off, illuminating his own insides.
This is enough to bring the writer up short, and if he ever did think he was any good at all, he has to now give some quality time to the opposite point of view.
Not only is he not good; he is actively bad.
He has to now consider that he may be draining all that is good and beautiful from the world every time he sits down to a typewriter.
And it is not a simple matter of scissoring out the wretched stuff and keeping the good stuff and patching it up somehow, as you might do with an ink spill upon the knee of your jeans.
No, in one of the most interesting points in this discussion, the writer really has no earthly idea of what is good and what is bad among his stuff. He had written the whole strand of Christmas lights thing in a kind of transport, a glorious fury of creativity, sure that no had ever, ever, quite described a sunset and its effects so wonderfully.
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, though it really is no contest for the writer himself, who often sits there in his garret sobbing once the full realization comes upon him. This is what he left Stratford for?
This, my friends, is writing.
To offset these horrible realizations, it is best for the novice writer — from the very beginning of his career! — to follow some simple rules to protect himself from the dire results of his own writing. Follow Shakespeare’s lead:
Drop clues in remote passages that hint that you are in fact a different person than the guy named on the cover of the book
Make reference to countries, professions, habits of the higher classes, and court intrigue that you couldn’t possibly know about
Invite speculation as to your underlying intelligence, stability, and emotional health
Have your friends artfully suggest that you might not be who you say you are
Such simple precautions can pay enormous dividends down the line.
One word of caution however: name literary luminaries of your day as the true authors if you prefer, but try not to give yourself airs. Remember, this is your worst stuff that you are talking about. Be kind is always good advice.
