Hi, I'm Jennifer Reid,
and I am the course mentor
on Shakespeare and His World.
I'm here today with Jonathan
to talk about the authorship
question.
We're in week one of
Shakespeare and His World,
and it's bound to
have come up by now.
So we'd like to just address
the question in person
and put it to bed
once and for all.
Jonathan.
OK, thanks very much, Jen.
Yeah, this is the one that if
you're a Shakespeare scholar,
and you get in a taxi
anywhere in the world,
first question's, "So, was
Shakespeare really Shakespeare?
Was it the man from Stratford?"
Well, the answer to that is yes.
The thing about any
kind of scholarship
is that you begin
with the evidence.
And there is ample evidence
that William Shakespeare,
a man from Stratford-upon-Avon,
and born in this place,
became an actor, became a
playwright, then eventually
returned to Stratford and died.
Behind me on the
wall is a facsimile
of his bust in
Holy Trinity Church
here in Stratford,
in which he's got
his hand on a piece of paper.
In the other hand,
there would have
been a quill, although, over
time, the quill tended to be
stolen and had to be replaced.
And underneath that bust,
there's also an inscription.
This was the bust put there,
his monument above his grave,
put there very soon
after his death.
And on that inscription,
it describes him
as having the greatest
intellect since Socrates
in ancient Greece, and being
the greatest poet since Virgil
in ancient Rome.
There's pretty strong evidence
that Stratford, his family,
his neighbours remembered
him as a great writer.
And there's so much
more evidence than that,
that the writer was
the actor, the actor
was the man from Stratford.
I've got In front of me here a
facsimile of the First Folio.
We'll be talking more
about Shakespeare
in print and the First
Folio throughout the course.
But early on in the
book is a wonderful poem
in praise of Shakespeare
by Ben Jonson.
Ben Jonson-- friend,
rival, fellow actor,
fellow playwright.
And he describes Shakespeare
there in that poem
as "the sweet swan of Avon."
He makes it clear that
his fellow writer,
the author of these
36 plays, is a writer
from by the river, Avon.
Shakespeare, known as
a man from Stratford.
And what's more, Jonson
was very involved
in the production
of the First Folio.
He worked closely with
Shakespeare's fellow actors,
John Heminges and Henry
Condell, the leading surviving
actors from his time.
They're the ones who put
together the First Folio.
And they talk about
Shakespeare as a writer.
And indeed, Jonson talks
in his conversations
with other writers in his
notebooks about Shakespeare's
techniques of writing.
And of course, Heminges and
Condell, the fellow actors,
are remembered in the will
of Shakespeare, the man
from Stratford.
So there's a tight
nexus of relationships
between these people.
There are all sorts of
other local details as well.
For example, the fact that
Shakespeare got into print
with "Venus and Adonis",
his narrative poem,
the most popular
poem of the age,
the poem that made his name.
That was printed
by Richard Field,
a fellow schoolboy
from the grammar
school here in Stratford.
The First Folio was published
after Shakespeare's death.
Are there any references
to him during his lifetime
by other authors?
Yes, indeed.
Throughout his life,
there are a range
of people who refer to
Shakespeare as a writer,
and indeed, as a great writer.
I've got a
fascinating book here.
It's called Wits Commonwealth.
It was published in
1598, so quite early
in Shakespeare's
career, by a man
called Francis Meres, who
was very keen on literature.
And he wanted to give a sense
of the greatness, the dignity
of all the new English
literature being written
in the 1590s in his time.
And he wants to say that British
writers are as good as those
of classical antiquity.
So we find him
here, for example,
saying that just as
the Latin tongue,
the Latin language was glorified
by great writers like Virgil,
and Ovid, and Horace, so the
English language has been
glorified by the wonderful
poetry of Sir Philip
Sidney, Edmund Spenser,
Samuel Daniel, Michael
Drayton, William Warner,
Shakespeare, Marlowe,
and Chapman.
So Shakespeare there, in the
company of other writers.
And indeed, Meres goes
on a few pages later
to say that "The greatness
of Shakespeare as a writer
was the range of his work."
Not only his poems,
which Meres suggests
are like those of
the Roman poet Ovid,
but also his comedies
and tragedies.
"Shakespeare, among the
English, is the most excellent
in both kinds for the stage",
both comedy and tragedy.
"For comedy, witness his
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
his Comedy of Errors,
Love's Labours Lost,
Love's Labours Won"
(that's a lost play)
"Midsummer Night's Dream,
Merchant of Venice.
And for tragedy, his
Richard II, Richard III,
Henry IV, King John,
Titus Andronicus,
and Romeo and Juliet."
Now, you might say, if
you're a conspiracy theorist,
well, that's only saying that
these works were performed
and published with
the name William
Shakespeare on the page.
Maybe he was just a
stooge, just a front man,
and someone else
actually wrote them.
And, of course,
over the years there
have been a number of
theories of this sort.
People like Christopher
Marlowe and, indeed,
a variety of aristocrats, Lord
Bacon, the Earl of Oxford,
have been proposed as the
true author of Shakespeare.
But the intriguing
thing about Meres
is that he does mention
Christopher Marlowe, Francis
Bacon, the Earl of Oxford
elsewhere as writers.
Yes, these other men did write.
But Meres, who seemed to
know everybody in the London
literary world, is quite clear
that they're different people
from Shakespeare.
So the evidence of
Meres, and, as I
say, a number of other
people publishing books
in Shakespeare's lifetime
praising his poetry,
make the connection
with the actor,
with the man from Stratford.
So what is the strongest
piece of evidence
we have that Shakespeare the
actor from Stratford-upon-Avon
was the Shakespeare
that wrote the plays?
OK, well, we've seen the
evidence from Stratford
itself-- the bust.
We've seen the evidence
of his fellow actors.
But in terms of
external verification--
again, scholarship always looks
for external verification.
That's a way of obviating
the idea that, oh, it
was all a conspiracy, and Ben
Jonson and Shakespeare's family
were all in on it.
But I think the most fascinating
piece of external verification
is the combination of these two
things, a document and a book.
As we'll discover
later in the course,
Shakespeare was very
concerned with the fact
that his father's
reputation had decayed
as a result of
financial problems.
And Shakespeare was
very keen to restore
the good name of his family.
So acting on behalf
of his family,
he managed to get a coat
of arms for the family
so he could call
himself a gentleman.
And there's a long process,
getting a coat of arms.
You had to go to an office
called the heralds' office.
But he duly got it, and the
coat of arms is reproduced here.
But one of the officials
in the heralds' office
who gave out these
coats of arms said
that various people
from vulgar backgrounds,
sort of insufficiently
high-class people,
were getting coats of arms.
And among them, he said,
was Shakespeare the player.
Now, there were two other
men in the heralds' office
who disagreed, and they
defended Shakespeare's right
to have a coat of
arms on the grounds
that his father and
mother had a good pedigree
in Stratford-upon-Avon.
So the complaint about the
coat of arms for Shakespeare
the player is intimately
linked to the references
back to Stratford.
So nobody doubts that
Shakespeare the player,
came from Stratford, was the
son of John Shakespeare and Mary
Arden.
But the really
interesting thing is
that one of the two men
in the heralds' office
who defended
Shakespeare the player's
right to a coat
of arms also spoke
about Shakespeare the
writer, Shakespeare the poet
and dramatist.
And what's more, that man was
William Camden, one of the most
learned men in England.
And he'd been Ben
Jonson's schoolmaster
at Westminster School.
He knew the literary
scene inside out.
And in one of his books, which
is a kind of overflow from his
history of England-- it
was called "The Remains
of a Greater History"-- he
talks about the great writers,
the pregnant wits, as he
calls them, of his own time.
And there's a list
of the writers there,
and William Shakespeare is
bang in the middle of it.
Camden defending Shakespeare
the player, coat of arms,
Camden saying
Shakespeare the writer.
That's the golden bullet.
Well, you certainly
convinced me.
If there is such
strong evidence,
why is there this controversy,
and when did it start?
Well, that's a great question.
I think the way
to begin an answer
to that is to think about
other conspiracy theories.
Was there a second gunman
assassinating John F. Kennedy?
Was Marilyn Monroe
secretly murdered?
I think the answer
is wherever there
is great fame and
a kind of cult,
then inevitably, heresies,
alternative views,
conspiracy theories
tend to emerge.
Elvis is alive and well,
and that kind of idea.
So if we ask when
did this begin,
the idea that Shakespeare,
the actor from Stratford,
was not the author of
the plays, the answer
is round about the
Victorian period.
That's to say,
for over 200 years
after Shakespeare's
death, nobody
questioned that Shakespeare, the
man from Stratford, Shakespeare
the player, was
Shakespeare the writer.
For 200 years, the question
didn't occur to anybody.
Nobody had any doubts.
What then happened in
the Victorian period
is there was a rather
eccentric American lady called
Delia Bacon who became convinced
that Shakespeare couldn't have
been Shakespeare, and
that maybe someone called
Francis Bacon, a famous
writer, a famous politician,
was Shakespeare.
And she started finding
all sorts of hidden codes
that led her to believe
that Bacon was Shakespeare.
She ended up in a private
lunatic asylum not far
from Stratford, actually.
She had hoped to dig
up Shakespeare's bones
and find some secret document.
But that was sort
of where it began.
And then it was really
in the early 20th century
that other theories emerged.
There was a schoolmaster
called Thomas Looney who
accepted it wasn't
Bacon, but again
thought, how could this grammar
schoolboy from the provinces
have known so much about
courts and aristocracy?
And so he suggested that
it was Edward de Vere,
the Earl of Oxford.
And then all sorts of
other people came forward.
Maybe it was the
sixth Earl of Derby,
or the fifth Earl of Stanley,
and so the list goes on.
Or even people suggesting maybe
Queen Elizabeth or King James
wrote the works of Shakespeare.
I'm rather disappointed in both
Delia Bacon and Thomas Looney.
Delia Bacon was an American.
She came from a
country where it was
supposed to be possible
to go from a log cabin
to the White House.
And equally, Looney
was a schoolmaster.
And he should have known
that the great grammar school
education that was
available to Shakespeare
in Stratford, as it was
to other middle-class
boys in Shakespeare's
time, meant
that you could become a great
and sophisticated writer
without going to university.
How did Shakespeare know
about the life of the court?
Because the acting
companies were invited
to perform at the court.
That was the very rationale
of having acting companies.
So it does seem that
a lot of the arguments
come down to a kind of
snobbery-- the idea that such
a great mind could not have come
from such a humble background.
But I do also think
that the other factor
is to do with the Romantic
movement of the 19th century.
That's to say, it was
with the Romantic poets,
with people like Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Lord Byron, John
Keats, that you got the
idea that a great poet must
have a rather glamorous,
romantic kind of life.
And the evidence about
Shakespeare's actual life
is really rather boring.
There are all these
documents concerning
property transactions, a sort
of Shakespeare the businessman.
For the Romantics, that wasn't
really glamorous enough.
You know in the Romantic period,
the most famous poet in Europe
was Lord Byron.
And so I think it sort
of became inevitable
that people would
think well, we need
Shakespeare to have a bit
of glamour, to be a lord.
So in a way, I think
it's a kind of offshoot
of the Romantic movement.
Because, of course, it
was with the Romantics
that the great cult of
Shakespeare took off.
It was the Romantics who
were the first to say,
Shakespeare is the greatest
genius there has ever been.
So in a way, I think the
authorship controversy emerged
out of a kind of disappointment
that the hard evidence
of the documents didn't quite
have the colour and the glamour
to go with the
idea of Shakespeare
as the quintessential genius.
I think by the later 20th
century, the phenomenon,
the controversy was dying away.
But then, of course, with
the advent of the internet,
it came back in a big way.
Because marvellous thing
that the internet is,
the problem is that
there isn't a system
of independent
verification where
you can discover which websites
are actually based on evidence,
and which are based
on conspiracy theory.
So I'm afraid it's
not going to go away.
But from our point of
view, from the point
of view of the course,
we feel, on the basis
of the evidence we've
laid out, other evidence
that's available in
a number of books
that we'll be listing on
the course site, the matter
is settled.
And it's not a
matter that we want
to discuss further,
either within the films
or in the forum.
