Battling about the Bard

BOOK REVIEW,SHAKESPEARE: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?By James Shapiro Faber and Faber, 367pp. £20, reviewed by DANIELLE CLARKE

COMPARED TO HIS 2006 hit, 1599, (and comparisons are inevitable) James Shapiro’s new book on Shakespeare struggles to locate its subject – the book is not really about Shakespeare at all, but about the array of fictions and mysteries woven around the black hole that is the lack of biographical or documentary evidence of the life. His intention is to analyse not the hoary authorship question in relation to Shakespeare’s plays (who wrote which bits? What if it wasn’t the son of a provincial tradesman? What if it was?) but to investigate the weird and wonderful by-ways of the controversy itself. And weird and wonderful they certainly are, proving that well-connected and important people will, if conditions are right, abandon all reason and invest time, money and reputation in schemes that are doomed to failure. There are many of these detailed in this diverting and entertaining book – my particular favourite is Orville Ward Owen, a wealthy Detroit doctor, who on the basis of messages derived from a complex cipher decided that the “manuscripts” of Shakespeare’s plays were buried in lead-lined boxes at the bottom of the River Severn. And yes, he did go and look.

Contested Willbrings the forensic skills of the academic researcher – Shapiro has visited archives all over the US and British Isles – to a topic within Shakespeare criticism that provided the foundational assumptions for the interpretation of the plays and poems. The question of who really wrote Shakespeare's plays was decisively abandoned by the academy in the 20th century in favour of more broadly based textual, material and historical issues. Yet, as Shapiro's book suggests, readers of Shakespeare cared not a jot for academia's dismissal of their desire to understand the man behind the texts, even if this meant countenancing acts of fabrication that surely would at least have amused the Great Man with his domed head. As Shapiro notes, on the one hand, material relating to the authorship question (and ever more novel candidates) continues to proliferate at an almighty rate outside academia, whilst on the other, those inside academia insistently ignore and appear to be embarrassed by these issues. The evidence provided in this book helps to explain why. A dazzling array of individuals, particularly in the 19th century, were drawn into mad-cap schemes to either prove or disprove Shakespeare's authorship, including Mark Twain, Emerson, Helen Keller, Carlyle (curmudgeonly and skeptical), Freud and more. The twin tracks of this story – the holy grail of bardolatry – are biographical evidence (other than documents relating to money and property) and manuscripts of the plays. And even the most dispassionate and eminent of scholars have not been immune to temptation (or subsequent ridicule) on this score – the most recent example being the Cobbe portrait from Newbridge House. The portrait surfaced in Newbridge House last year; everyone decided it was a lost portrait of Shakespeare before deciding that it was in fact of Thomas Overbury.

The American focus of this story is particularly intriguing, although Shapiro is largely uninterested in national investments in the figure of Shakespeare (he doesn’t for instance mention the Irishness of Edmond Malone, the founder of Shakespeare scholarship), especially given that attempts to “solve” the Shakespeare question coincided with a period of rapacious acquisition of English books and manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries (Henry Folger, oil; Henry Huntington, railways; Walter Newberry, banking, property).

Equally, the desire to “fix” an authentic Shakespeare to whom the complex, plural and unsettling meanings of the plays might be referred, is enhanced by the development of new technologies – that of the cipher, for example, where the substitution and transposition ciphers familiar to Francis Bacon (one of the front-runners for the mantle of author of the plays, despite any evidence in his vast extant writings that he had the slightest interest in drama) were developed and enhanced by the development of encryption machines in the 19th century and by computer- assisted statistical analysis in the 20th.

The book takes a broadly chronological approach to dissecting the false trails, made-up evidence and spurious interpretations that make up the case for each of the key candidates. It begins with a fascinating account of how Shakespeare criticism came to be auto/biographical – until the 18th century it clearly never occurred to anybody that the plays might be read in relation to the life. The key figure is Edmond Malone, born in Dublin in 1741, who maintained links with his family here all his life and is buried in Ireland.

Academically gifted, tenacious and well-connected (Goldsmith, Boswell, Johnson, Burke and Joshua Reynolds were amongst his friends), he managed single-handedly to put Shakespearian scholarship on to a professional footing through his extensive textual work on Shakespeare’s extant plays and poetry.

Shapiro admits that he has been "hard on Malone in these pages" , and indeed he is. Malone did not always behave generously to fellow scholars, and made errors that have been subsequently corrected by later editors, but all subsequent editors (and therefore, readers) are in his debt. The problem is that Shapiro does not like biographical readings, and holds Malone primarily responsible for them – yet Contested Willprovides abundant evidence of a very human desire to prefer the ballast of the life to the unreliability and inconsistency of the imagination.

However, the final section, Shapiro’s own case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems, reveals all the strengths that led readers to embrace 1599 so enthusiastically – it is accessible without being simplistic, and uses the accretion of textual and circumstantial evidence to make a compelling case, based not on spurious missing documents, batty readings and even battier readers, but on the complex tale that the textual history of Shakespeare’s plays has to tell us.

Danielle Clarke is Professor of English Renaissance Language and Literature at University College Dublin