Bill Bryson - Shakespeare - The World as Stage

In short it is possible, with a kind of selective squinting, to endow the alternative claimants with the necessary time, talent, and motive for anonymity to write the plays of William Shakespeare. But what no one has ever produced is the tiniest particle of evidence to suggest that they actually did so. These people must have been incredibly gifted-to create, in their spare time, the greatest literature ever produced in English, in a voice patently not their own, in a manner so cunning that they fooled virtually everyone during their own lifetimes and for four hundred years afterward. The Earl of Oxford, better still, additionally anticipated his own death and left a stock of work sufficient to keep the supply of new plays flowing at the same rate until Shakespeare himself was ready to die a decade or so later. Now that is genius!

If it was a conspiracy, it was a truly extraordinary one. It would have required the cooperation of Jonson, Heminges, and Condell and most or all of the other members of Shakespeare’s company, as well as an unknowable number of friends and family members. Ben Jonson kept the secret even in his private notebooks. “I remember,” he wrote there, “the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.” Rather a strange thing to say in a reminiscence written more than a dozen years after the subject’s death if he knew that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. It was in the same passage that he wrote, “For I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any.”

And that’s just on Shakespeare’s side of the deception. No acquaintance of Oxford ’s or Marlowe’s or Bacon’s let slip either, as far as history can tell. One really must salute the ingenuity of the anti-Stratfordian enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history, without the benefit of anything that could reasonably be called evidence, four hundred years after it was perpetrated.

When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man-whoever he was.

THE FOLLOWING ARE THE principal books referred to in the text.

Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek (two volumes). Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Picador, 1997.

Bate, Jonathan and Jackson Russell (eds.). Shakespeare: An Illustrated, Stage History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language, (fifth edition). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Blayney, Peter W. M. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, D.C.: Folger Library Publications, 1991.

Chute, Marchette. Shakespeare of London. New York: E. P. Dutton and, Company, 1949.

Cook, Judith. Shakespeare’s Players. London: Harrap, 1983.

Crystal, David. The Stories of English. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2004.

Durning-Lawrence, Sir Edwin. Bacon Is Shakespeare. London: Gay & Hancock, 1910.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became, Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1987.

Habicht, Werner, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle. Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare, Association. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1986.

Hanson, Neil. The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the, Spanish Armada. London: Doubleday, 2003.

Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language (ninth edition). Garden City, N.Y.: 1956.

Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. London: Penguin, 2000.

– -. The Age of Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare’s Pronunciation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953.

Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sources: Comedies and Tragedies. London: Methuen and Co., 1957.

Mulryne, J. R., and Margaret Shewring (eds.). Shakepeare’s Globe Rebuilt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Picard, Liza. Shakespeare’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. London: Orion Books, 2003.

Piper, David. O Sweet Mr. Shakespeare I’ll Have His Picture: The Changing, Image of Shakespeare’s Person, 1600-1800. London: National Portrait, Gallery, 1964.

Rosenbaum, Ron. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups. New York: Random House, 2006.

Rowse, A. L. Shakespeare’s Southampton: Patron of Virginia. London: Macmillan, 1965.

Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

– -. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.

Spevack, Marvin. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1973.

Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935.

Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

Thomas, David. Shakespeare in the Public Records. London: HMSO, 1985.

Thurley, Simon. Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999.

Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare for All Time. London: Macmillan, 2002.

– -. Shakespeare & Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His, Story. London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006.

Wells, Stanley, and Paul Edmondson. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor (eds.). The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Wolfe, Heather (ed.). “The Pen’s Excellencie”: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Washington, D.C.: Folger Library Publications, 2002.

Youings, Joyce. Sixteenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 1984.

IN ADDITION TO THE kindly and patient interviewees cited in the text, I am grateful to the following for their generous assistance: Mario Aleppo, Anna Bulow, Charles Elliott, Will Francis, Emma French, Peter Furtado, Carol Heaton, Gerald Howard, Jonathan Levi, Jacqui Shepard, Paulette Thompson, and Ed Weisman. I am especially indebted to Professor Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon for generously reviewing the manuscript and suggesting many corrections and prudent qualifications, though of course any errors that remain are mine alone. Special thanks also to James Atlas for his enthusiastic encouragement throughout, and to the astute and kindly copy editors Robert Lacey and Sue Llewellyn. As always, and above all, my greatest debt and most heartfelt thanks go to my dear wife, Cynthia.