A lecture delivered to The Caxton Club, January 18, 2012
As the Newberry Library’s near neighbor over on Navy Pier, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, marks its 25th anniversary season, it seems an appropriate time to consider the persistent authorship debates that dodge the playwright whose name graces the theater. I have been working on this lecture simultaneous with developing a variety of pre-show talks for the theater season at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and wrapping up writing and editorial work on an essay collection devoted to the theater’s first quarter century. Immersed as I am in what is happening at a theater named for William Shakespeare, I have noticed a curious set of coincidences related to the seemingly endless and boundless cultural preoccupation with not only Shakespeare but also with the Queen who ruled England for most of his life and the majority of his writing career, Elizabeth I. Since we are all bibliophiles here, I will begin with the bookends, the productions of Artistic Director Barbara Gaines that begin and end her portion of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s anniversary season: Canadian playwright Timothy Findley’s play Elizabeth Rex, and Shakespeare’s (?) Timon of Athens.
I have begun to come to the conclusion that Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare maintain their cultural predominance precisely because of the co-dependent biographical lacuna they inhabit. Not only is frustratingly little known about the personal lives of these two people, who lived in the same place at the same time, but what we do know about them seems to defy explanation, or belief.
Elizabeth deftly parried numerous marriage proposals from the crown heads of Europe, the appeals of her own Parliament that she marry and produce an heir, excommunication by the Pope along with exculpation for any Catholic who might find the opportunity to assassinate her heretic self, an alleged Catholic conspiracy to assassinate her and install Mary Queen of Scots on the throne (the more plausible because Mary Queen of Scots found herself in England after being implicated in the plot to assassinate her own husband), and an attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada (among other challenges) all while ruling as a sole female monarch for an astonishing 45 years as England rose to world dominance in sea trade and imperialist expansion. As if that were not enough, she left behind an astonishing set of speeches, prayers, poems, and diplomatic correspondence that, maddeningly, offers very little insight into what went on beneath those starched skirts, cuffs and collars and that formidable bejeweled wig.
Enter Shakespeare, pursued by a bear from the Warwickshire hills of Stratford-on-Avon to the seedy theater district of Southwark in London, where citizens and visitors could indulge the guilty pleasures of watching a bear imported from the woods outside of the city stand the course of being attacked by dogs while chained to a post at an arena in easy walking distance of the Globe Theater, where they might sod off of work for the afternoon to take in a play, like The Taming of the Shrew, in which a woman must stand the course of being maritally chained to a man who denies her food, sleep and proper clothing until she manifests appropriate submission to him. Shakespeare’s plays made him and his theater company so successful that they were eventually able to afford the luxury of two theaters – the Globe in Southwark and the tonier, indoor theater on the seemly side of the Thames, the Blackfriars. A shareholder in his company, Shakespeare was ultimately able to purchase a coat of arms for his father that enabled him to style himself the son of a gentleman (in other words, “old money”) and the nicest house in Stratford for his wife, and daughters and his own all too brief retirement before his death in 1616. The house still stands, as does the curse guarding his grave in Trinity church (“blessed be he that spares these stones, but cursed be he who moves my bones”), but all traces of his personal writing have disappeared, save for some signatures on financial transactions, and a bit of the unfinished play about Sir Thomas More.
Who was this Queen, with the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king – and a king of England, too? Who was this man, who wrote such compelling lines for female characters meant to be played by boy actors and such racy Petrarchan sonnets about ménage a trois with a very un-Petrarchan “dark” lady and a winsome youth, “the master mistress of my passion”? We don’t really know.
In fact, our lack of knowledge about these things makes us call into question the things that we do know: that the powerful, indomitable Queen remained single all of her life and vowed to die a virgin, and that the poet-playwright actually wrote the works attributed to him.
Timothy Findley’s play Elizabeth Rex stages a head-on collision between the alleged Virgin Queen who loved like a woman and ruled like a man, and the rurally-reared, non-University educated poet-playwright, positing that he got some of the key dialogue for one of his plays (Antony and Cleopatra) from Elizabeth herself. The facts are that on the night before the execution of the Earl of Essex for treason, Elizabeth commanded Shakespeare’s theater company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to perform at court. In Findley’s vision of this event, the play staged is Much Ado About Nothing. We don’t actually know what play was performed, but Elizabeth’s invitation to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was somewhat cheeky, since they had gotten into trouble the week previously for a command performance of Richard II before Essex. Although Richard II was a wildly popular play published numerous times during Shakespeare’s lifetime, none of those early publications of the play include a very interesting scene that appears in the First Folio, the first collected works of Shakespeare’s plays published by his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, in 1623, 7 years after Shakespeare’s death: the scene in which Richard II literally takes off and hands over his crown and his scepter to the usurper, Henry Bolingbroke – a deposition scene. However, Elizabeth is reputed to have fumed at court, after she heard about this theatrical prelude to Essex’s ill-fated parade through the streets of London toward the royal presence, armed, in the company of a band of his supporters, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” This story, if true, suggests that the deposition scene was staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime, even if not included in printed versions of the script, and that the astute Elizabeth understood all too well why Essex might have requested it before his alleged rebellion.
In Elizabeth Rex, Elizabeth is tortured by her decision to order Essex’s execution because they have been lovers; she is barely restrained from rescinding the order by her frosty chief counselor, Robert Cecil. Queen Elizabeth twits “Will” with being the anonymous author behind the sonnets she has read circulating in manuscript at court, such as, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more temperate, and more fair”; then Elizabeth demands that Shakespeare identify the man who inspired the lines addressed in sonnet 20 to the “master/mistress of my passion.” As it turns out, the inspiration for those lines in Findley’s play is Henry Wriothsley, the Lord Southampton, also imprisoned in the Tower with Essex and also due to lose his head in the morning. Southampton was a wealthy patron of the arts – in Findley’s play, he is both patron and lover to an adulterous, bisexual Shakespeare.
In Findley’s imagination, the nightlong vigil with Queen Elizabeth provides inspiration – and lines – for Shakespeare’s dramatic account of the final days of Antony and Cleopatra. As Director Barbara Gaines put it in the program, “Findley allows us to ‘witness’ the making of Shakespeare’s art” (2). Indeed, and in Findley’s vision of how this art gets made, Shakespeare is reliant upon the plots of Plutarch, and verse dialogue proposed by the Virgin Queen.
Our pile of plays is in danger of toppling over; I must get to the other bookend, the play that will conclude the 25th anniversary season at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Timon of Athens. Timon is not exactly popular fare. Richard Pasco, who played the title role at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980, describes Timon as “this still-born twin of Lear” (Players of Shakespeare 1985, 130). The play chronicles the dramatic fall of the titular character, a wealthy free-spender surrounded by freeloaders he takes for friends loyal and true, only to find, when the bottom falls out of his financial house of cards, that he actually has no one to turn to, other than his loyal servant Flavius and his acerbic, misanthropic hanger-on Apemantus, neither of whom has the financial wherewithal to help him. The play is harshly satirical in a way uncharacteristic of Shakespeare, and seems to many critical eyes unfinished, particularly with respect to a subplot involving an Athenian soldier, Alcibiades, who, like Timon, is abandoned by the state after having devoted his life to it. These two aspects of the play, along with its likely late date of composition (roughly 1605-1608), have lead scholars to regard it as, possibly, a collaborative effort between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. Like Henry VIII (or All Is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both taken to be collaborations between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure have all been nominated as potential collaborations between Shakespeare and Middleton. All five of these plays share the following traits:
- likely late dates of composition in Shakespeare’s writing career (roughly, first decade of the 17th century)
- no appearance in print prior to the 1623 First Folio (and The Two Noble Kinsmen is not included even there)
- textual difficulties that suggest revision, which stylistic and linguistic software analyses demonstrate to be the work of more than one author
Scholars have long considered the possibility that Shakespeare worked collaboratively in his later years in a sort of master/apprentice dynamic with playwrights like Fletcher and Middleton, sufficiently younger than him to suggest that they might have been being groomed to step in as principle playwrights as he moved toward retirement. As early as the 19th century, Henry VIII came under scrutiny as a likely collaboration with Fletcher. Unlike Shakespeare and Fletcher, who worked with a specific theater company for most of their careers, Middleton was a free lancer, writing for a variety of different theater companies and civic events in a wide array of genres. Also unlike Shakespeare and Fletcher, Middleton had no “collected works” until Alexander Dyce produced an incomplete version in 1840. Therefore prior to the 19th century, there was no easy means of assessing Middleton’s style vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s. Now, however, we have such means.
The recent publication of the Collected Works of Thomas Middleton by Oxford University Press in 2007 has placed Middleton’s work in direct dialogue – sometimes contentious dialogue – with Shakespeare’s plays in recent scholarship. There are two main reasons for the attention and the attendant fray: first, as I have already suggested, the Oxford Middleton performs what some perceive as a sort of “raid” on the terrain of the Collected Works of Shakespeare, claiming Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure for both volumes on the basis of the conclusion (not at all conclusive with respect to Macbeth and Measure, in the view of some scholars) that Middleton either revised these plays for their 1623 publication in Shakespeare’s First Folio, or collaborated with Shakespeare in their composition. Among the reviewers of the Middleton Collected Works who acknowledged this controversial aspect of the publication are Heather Hirschfeld in Theatre Survey, Lukas Erne in Modern Philology, and Mark Hutchings and Michelle O’Callaghan in Review of English Studies.
Second, the Oxford Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works is, purposefully, a direct aesthetic parallel to the Oxford Collected Works of Shakespeare, and the two texts have one general editor in common (Gary Taylor). Moreover, Taylor has, provocatively, presented the Oxford Middleton as supporting evidence for Middleton as “our other Shakespeare.” Middleton can be persuasively identified in this way because if one poses the question “Why Shakespeare?” to a scholar – in the sense of “why does this poet-playwright have such cultural predominance over all other writers?” – one likely answer that you will receive is that no other writer demonstrates such consummate skill in so many disparate generic categories: history, tragedy, comedy within the overarching genre of drama, as well as sonnets and long poems (like Venus and Adonis). Indeed, for many years this contrast held in contest after contest, whether it be in Shakespeare’s own era, or when his work was held up against classics of later periods. So, for example, Ben Jonson, who was named poet laureate in the early seventeenth century (not Shakespeare) excelled at writing verses short and long, court masques, and plays, but his range was considerably narrower than Shakespeare’s. On the stage, Jonson specialized in comedy – more specifically, city comedy, in which London “types” and the city itself serve as the principal characters. While he tried his hand at tragical history, I ask you: when was the last time you saw a production of Sejanus, His Fall? Panegyrics were his particular specialty in verse, be they to country estates, like the Sidney home at Penshurst, or to his own deceased children, or to Shakespeare himself, famously celebrated in Jonson’s dedicatory verses to the First Folio as “not of an age, but for all time.” Jonson could scarcely have dreamed, as he penned that line, that he was writing the epitaph to his own literary reputation. More on that anon.
In terms of the towering figure that Shakespeare cuts over writers of other generations, one has only to ask after Dickens’s poetry, or Dickinson’s drama to prove the hypothesis that Shakespeare rendered himself immortal, like any wise corporate entity, by diversifying his assets. However, all of this brings us back to Thomas Middleton, and the cage match that Oxford University Press has implicitly invited by putting his collected works on the shelf in a tome more weighty than Shakespeare’s collected works. As Gary Taylor has pointed out, the hypothesis that Shakespeare is unique in his consummate skill in a wide range of poetic genres is undermined by the range present in Middleton’s work, since Middleton not only wrote in all of the dramatic genres in which Shakespeare wrote, he also forayed into genres Shakespeare never did (city comedy), produced occasional verse for public events, wrote court masques (which Shakespeare seemingly only did in The Tempest and, perhaps, Timon), and even ventured into terrain Shakespeare seemingly never explored, namely prose.
To further illustrate the kind of relationship in which Middleton’s work seems to stand to Shakespeare’s, I would like to briefly summarize the work of Gary Taylor and John Jowett on another play that you are likely to know better than Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure. In Shakespeare Re-Shaped, Jowett and Taylor consider the evidence of Shakespeare’s collaboration with other playwrights (not only Middleton), and include a lengthy essay making the case for Middleton’s hand as the reviser of Measure for Measure ultimately reprised more succinctly in the Textual Companion to the Collected Works of Middleton. These arguments were taken into consideration in the most recent edition of the Oxford Collected Works of Shakespeare, which proposed three modifications by Middleton to Measure for Measure:
- a revised version of 1.2 which makes topical reference to military actions relevant in the early 1620s , when Shakespeare was already resting under a stone slab in Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon. One clue that this material has been revised is the repetition of a conversation about the fortunes of the “fornicator,” Claudio, which creates the curious problem of a character who has just announced Claudio’s arrest seeming, a few dozen lines later, unaware of it.
- the exchange of two soliloquies delivered by the Duke in the end of Act 3 and the first scene of Act 4
- and the addition of a song at the beginning of Act 4.
Consequently, the suggestion that these three aspects of the lone text of Measure for Measure that we possess were actually Middleton’s revisions was also incorporated into all subsequent editions of the Norton Shakespeare under the editorial leadership of Stephen Greenblatt (with Katherine Eisamann Maus preparing the text of the play and introducing it). So, for example, in an “Additional Passages” section at the end of the text of Measure for Measure in the Oxford and the Norton, readers can see the end of Act 3 and the beginning of Act 4 with the proposed exchange of the Duke’s soliloquies enacted, and the song that Jowett and Taylor argue was interpolated by Middleton removed. Moreover, recent productions of Measure for Measure have begun to enact these changes, which directors and some reviewers have found effective on stage.
Now that I have set up my bookends, I would like to fill in the shelf space between them by suggesting that the presence of an “other Shakespeare” (if, indeed, Middleton can be considered such an entity) not only does not damage Shakespeare’s helpless texts, it actually helps us to answer the question implicitly posed in Elizabeth Rex: how did he do it? How did “gentle Shakespeare,” the unassuming “upstart crow” from the sleepy hamlet of Stratford write Hamlet, among other cultural touchstones? To close the gap between our bookends, we must shelve the intertwined stories of Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.
The records of attendance at the King Edward VI grammar school in Stratford do not survive for the years that Shakespeare would have been studying there. However, it would have been exceedingly odd that a man as successful in business and local government as his father, John Shakespeare, was would not have sent his son to the grammar school less than a five-minute walk from the family home, which doubled as the family business. The records of attendance at Oxford and Cambridge do survive for the years that Shakespeare would have been in attendance, however, and his name does not appear among them. Neither, however, does Ben Jonson’s, and he rose to sufficient prominence as a writer of courtly entertainments to be named poet laureate by King James I. Thus, Jonson’s own career demonstrates that, in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London, one did not need to be University-educated to be an extremely talented and greatly admired writer.
Unlike the man he memorialized as “gentle Shakespeare,” Ben Jonson was an irascible, drunken brawler, imprisoned repeatedly over the course of his life for killing a fellow actor in a duel, for outrageously offensive portrayals of the Scots in his plays The Isle of Dogs and Eastward Ho, for converting to Catholicism in Protestant England. Infamously, he informed William Drummond that if the Virgin Queen did, in fact, live and die a virgin, it was only because she “had a membrane on her, which made her incapable of man.” I have always maintained that the main stumbling block to those who argue that William Shakespeare is not the author of the plays who bear his name is Ben Jonson, since, had he been privy to a secret such as the one with which he is burdened in Roland Emmerich’s recent film Anonymous – that the author of the plays was actually Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford – he not only would never have participated in the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, for which he wrote those dedicatory verses, so packed with praises that still echo today, but he would likely have delighted in revealing the secret.
Indeed, we likely have Jonson to thank for the existence of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in the first place. In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, Jonson published his Works, a massive collection of his writings, including, to the incredulity of his peers, the plays he had written for performance in public theaters like the Blackfriars. Up to this time, plays were only ever published in small quarto editions, the equivalent of the paperback novel versions of popular films that you find in racks next to the check-out counter at Dominick’s, purposely published to capitalize on the popularity of their blockbuster counterparts. They were ephemera, not meant to be memorialized in collections of “real” literature, like poetry. One smart aleck quipped, “Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play, you call a work?” (qtd. in Longman Anthology of British Literature vol. 2, 1467).
However, Jonson’s gamble proved successful; his Works played very well indeed in the London bookstalls, perhaps prompting Heminges and Condell, two of Shakespeare’s theatrical partners, to bring out a collection of his plays, the First Folio of 1623. The oxymoronic title page of the First Folio promises that the plays included in it have been “Published according to the True Originall Copies.”
Now, I ask you, how can something be both an original, and a copy? Generally speaking, the phases of textual production specific to play texts went something like this: foul papers (authorial manuscripts of the plays, likely heavily annotated with revisions), fair copy (a clean copy of the script prepared by a professional scribe, probably usually held by the early modern equivalent of the stage manager), part books (cue lines and parts distributed to the actors, who were never given the full text of the play) and, ultimately, published versions of many of the plays in quarto with type set mostly likely from the fair copy (perhaps including the marginal production notes of the stage manager which at times, charmingly, surface in published versions of the plays in the form of, for example, an entry indicated for a specific actor rather than the character he was playing).
Which of these texts did Heminges and Condell use to produce the First Folio? Shakespeare’s own manuscripts? The fair copy prepared by a scribe? The marked-up fair copy that indicates, in some measure, what actually happened in performance? Previously published quarto editions? The answer, it seems, is a mix of all of the above. However, for those who want to push aside the veil that stands between Shakespeare’s plays as they have come down to us, in print, and the writing of the man himself, this answer is maddening. Where, they ask, are the ink-blotted first versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest? Why on earth don’t letters home to Anne survive? Why wouldn’t every syllable ever committed to paper by Shakespeare have been treasured?
The answer is simple: paper was still relatively expensive in early modern England. There were no factories like Reynold’s cranking out parchment paper for baking, nor Charmin cranking out paper for the water closet. Unless you were the Queen of England, and what you penned got stamped with the royal seal, the true original copies of what you wrote likely ended up, as John Dryden puts it in his wickedly funny satirical poem “Mac Flecknoe,” as “martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum” (Longman Anthology of British Literature vol. 3, 2105).
Enter Thomas Middleton, “our other Shakespeare.” Rather than issuing a challenge to Shakespeare’s primacy, or even authenticity, there is a paradoxical way in which the presence of an “other Shakespeare” from the same place and roughly the same time ought to reinforce our belief in the possibility of the true original Shakespeare. If one of the principle theses of the Oxfordians, likened to the Obama birthers in Ron Rosenbaum’s scathing review of Anonymous for Slate, is that it is implausible that a grammar-school educated actor could have written so deftly and eloquently about complex political matters and court intrigues, why, then, is it any more plausible that Jonson, the son of a London bricklayer, could have written both such scabrous political satire that his plays were censored and he was imprisoned and, subsequently, court masques so laudatory of the Jacobean court that he was made poet laureate? Why, then, should we believe that Middleton, trained for the law, could both write the most wildly popular and politically incendiary play in the history of the early modern stage, A Game at Chess, and hilarious, earthy, highly realistic portraits of the pregnant wives of city merchants in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside?
Like Hamlet, these writers seem to have been able to “eat the air, promise-crammed” (3.2.85-86). Although Middleton attended Oxford, he did not earn a degree, and he was not born into the aristocracy, either. And yet, all of the people who have been proposed as the “real” author of the man from Stratford’s works since Delia Bacon championed the rights of Sir Francis Bacon (no relation) or J. Thomas Looney (that’s really his name, and it is apt) put in for the Earl of Oxford have been aristocrats. Whence this pervasive inferiority complex? Why this continued insistence that aesthetic greatness must stem from one’s pedigree?
Spoiler alert: if you’ve not yet seen Anonymous, and have it saved in your Netflix queue, I am about to give away a major plot point. Because no theatrical or film treatment of Elizabeth can accept that she lived and died a virgin, she must, it seems, of necessity be depicted as the complete opposite end of the spectrum: a tempestuously passionate, amoral wanton. Elizabeth embodies, within herself, the Madonna/Whore complex. Anonymous is no different; indeed, early in the film, Elizabeth shoves the randy Earl of Oxford into her throne, and mounts him. For you see, in the words of Shakespeare, “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em” (Twelfth Night 2.5.126-127).
In this instance, the person who has greatness thrust upon him is the Earl of Essex, the product of this illicit union in the twisted minds of director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Jeff Orloff. But don’t worry; Emmerich and Orloff don’t miss the opportunity taken by Findley in Elizabeth Rex to heighten the pathos of Elizabeth’s ultimate decision to order Essex’s execution. Emmerich’s Essex and Elizabeth are lovers, too. Now we’ve left Twelfth Night for Pericles, Prince of Tyre – but Shakespeare had the decorum to avert incest in the 11th hour that Orloff and Emmerich, apparently, lack.
If you want to read a lively and witty refutation of every theory put forward in support of any alternative author of the tragedies, comedies and histories of William Shakespeare, allow me to suggest James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? If you want to read a fantastic review of Anonymous, enumerating every absurdity the film commits, allow me to suggest “10 Things I Hate About Anonymous: And the stupid Shakespearean birther cult behind it” by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate. One example from the film offers excellent support for my ultimate point: Shakespeare has, paradoxically, so dominated the cultural landscape from which he emerged that he has come to seem impossibly extraordinary when, in fact, if we situate him back within his cultural context, full of “Renaissance men” – and women – who demonstrate virtuosity in an astonishing range of accomplishments and skills, we would find that it is not at all implausible that the man from Stratford wrote King Lear, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Henry V, and The Tempest, and all of the rest.
At one point in Anonymous, a group of playwrights are gloomily discussing the wild theatrical success of “Shakespeare” (Oxford, in Emmerich’s film) and when Christopher Marlowe insists in a huff that all of them are capable of writing as well, the response that comes back is: “But he writes whole plays in iambic pentameter. Can you do that, Marlowe?” Why yes, as a matter of fact, he could. Is anyone who worked on this film familiar with Doctor Faustus? Tamburlaine? Edward II, then? Come on – that one was even made into a movie!
But we needn’t search exclusively among the Elizabethan playwrights for skill at iambic pentameter. Why would it be so astonishing that Shakespeare/Oxford was capable of sustaining iambic pentameter verse for the two hours’ traffic of a stage, when Geoffrey Chaucer was capable of sustaining it for the length of an epic poem two hundred years earlier? The Canterbury Tales, anyone? Chaucer wasn’t a member of the aristocracy, either, but there is a knight among his Canterbury pilgrims. He tells the first tale. How was Chaucer able to impersonate a knight, and a widow with a quintet of marriages under her belt, and a nun’s priest, never having been any of those things? Well, I guess he used his imagination…