Our Own History Tells Us Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays
by John Aquino on 06/28/12
As an attorney, as a writer, as a student of the theatre and films, and as a husband of a Shakespeare scholar, I have never understood those who claim that the plays should be attributed to someone other than William Shakespeare. The most prominent candidate, as elaborately dramatized in the 2011 film Anonymous, is the Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Some people I respect fervently believe this. I have heard the actors Derek Jacobi, who appears at the beginning and end of Anonymous, and Michael York argue that “actors know the type of man who wrote these plays, and it was not this uneducated fellow from Stratford-upon-Avon.”
Shakespeare as Woody Allen?
That’s what the “Oxfordians” are claiming. They say Shakespeare was De Vere’s front—just as Allen played a man who took the credit for the work of blacklisted television writers in the 1975 movie The Front. These claims reflect the conspiracy theories that are part of U.S. history in the late 20th century. But it is the same history that clearly shows that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Shakespeare himself.
Oxfordians contend that the poorly-educated Shakespeare basically “fronted” for De Vere, who could not lend his noble name to products of such a disreputable enterprise as the theatre. Those who insist that Shakespeare wrote the plays—Stratfordians--claim that the Oxfordians are being elitists by arguing that only a formally-educated person could write these plays. In our own time great 20th century playwrights such George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neil, and Neil Simon did not graduate from a university either. These Stratfordians observe that De Vere died in 1604 while Shakespeare’s plays continued to premiere for nearly ten more years—in response, the Oxfordians suggest—as shown in Anonymous--that either De Vere may have had a stockpile of manuscripts that his friends dribbled out for performance over the decade or that the dates Stratfordians give for Shakespeare’s later plays are simply wrong. The Stratfordians note that no one questioned Shakespeare’s authorship in his lifetime and not for over two centuries after his death.
Finally, the Stratfordians ask why, since De Vere published poetry under his own name in his lifetime and the poetry that was published under Shakespeare’s name—including Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece—and the poetry of the plays--is so superior to De Vere’s, wouldn’t a man publish his best poetry under his own name and not his worst?
But the case for Shakespeare and not De Vere is really proved by a reasonable assessment of the actions of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and a look at how similar situations were handled in our own time.
For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare’s colleagues had to either be in on the “conspiracy” or not very bright. The Oxfordians argue that De Vere arranged for Shakespeare to take credit for De Vere’s plays. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death and 20 years after De Vere’s, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and partners in the Globe Theatre John Heminge and Henry Condell published 36 of the plays under Shakespeare’s name in what is now called the First Folio; until then, the plays had either lain in stacks in a backroom of the theatre or been issued in quarto--similar to a paperback--editions. If De Vere wrote the plays, Heminge and Condell would have had to be “in on” the conspiracy with De Vere or ignorant of it. But if they were indeed in on it, why did they continue to honor the conspiracy two decades after De Vere died? If they were in on in, they weren’t just complicit, they went out of their way to perpetuate the Shakespeare fraud by gathering the plays together and attributing unpublished plays to Shakespeare. Why would they do this after so long? Did De Vere’s estate continue to pay them off? Why would De Vere’s estate care one way or the other?
Or Heminge and Condell could have been ignorant of the conspiracy, but they certainly acted as if they believed that Shakespeare wrote the plays. They described his writing process at length in the First Folio preface: “And what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” As actors, they were part of the process of plays being performed there. Either Heminge and Condell were telling the truth based on their knowledge or they would have had to have been making all this up for reasons unknown.
Heminge and Condell and Shakespeare’s other fellow actors would have known if this William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Otherwise, it would mean that in the 20 years that Shakespeare made believe he had written these plays, no actor ever asked him, “What did you mean by that line?” or “Would it work better if my character did this rather than that?” or, if they did ask these questions—which any actor can tell you usually come up in the first production of a new play—Shakespeare would had to have been smart enough to fool them but not smart enough to write the plays.
And not only would Heminge and Condell had to have been conspirators, but so would Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary dramatist, who wrote the epistolary dedications to the First Folio—or he would have to have not been smart enough to detect it. Jonson was many things, but he was not stupid. So, again, if Jonson was in on the conspiracy, why did he perpetuate it after both Shakespeare and De Vere’s deaths in his poems for the First Folio and even do so in his private papers? In these papers, published after his death, Jonson makes fun of some of Shakespeare’s lines, derides his “little Latin and less Greek,” and, drawing on Heminge and Condell’s claim that Shakespeare never blotted a line, wishes that he had “blotted a thousand.” But while Jonson, a rival of Shakespeare, privately makes sport of him, he never for an instant indicates that Shakespeare did not write the plays and instead gives every indication that he did.
For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare would have had to fool virtually all of London and our history with 'Fronts" suggests how hard that is. Shakespeare lived in London. Undoubtedly, just as they do today, people would have come up to this playwright and ask him, “Why did Ophelia have to die?” For 20 years, from 1593-1613, Shakespeare would have had to have answered convincingly about things that he did not write.
But do fronts stay secret? During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, certain Hollywood screenwriters and actors were blacklisted on the claim that they were communists and so could not be hired. Some blacklisted screenwriters paid ‘fronts” to take credit for their work, just as the Wood Allen movie shows. The thing about these fronts is that people in the film industry knew about them. Ian Mclellan Hunter "fronted" for the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and received an Oscar for best story for Roman Holiday in 1953. Anyone who was acquainted with the writer Pierre Boule knew that he didn’t write the screenplay that was based on his book The Bridge on the River Kwai because Boule didn’t speak English; the screenplay was written by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. If fronts weren't used, pseudonyms were. A Robert Rich received screen credit and the 1956 best story Oscar for the movie The Brave One; at the awards ceremony, Jesse Lasky Jr., vice president of the Writer’s Guild, accepted for Rich, claiming that Rich could not be there because his wife was having a baby. There was no baby, no wife, and no Robert Rich. Rich was a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter. Lasky and the Writer’s Guild knew this, and within a week the deception was all over the trade press.
The point is, the film industry knew at the time about these and other fronts and pseudonyms, and now, sixty years later, everyone knows since the screen credits in all prints for many of these films have been changed to reflect their actual authors. But the Oxfordians will have people believe that the Shakespeare-De Vere conspiracy fooled Shakespeare’s contemporaries for nearly 400 years.
For the Oxfordians to be right, Shakespeare would have had to fool Queen Elizabeth and King James and their spies. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Queen Elizabeth herself asked Shakespeare to write a play about the fat knight Sir John Falstaff--from Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV--in love, and this became the play the Merry Wives of Windsor. Whether or not that happened, Shakespeare did mix with royalty: he and his company were invited to perform his plays at court.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were a time of court intrigue and spies. There were concerns that the Catholics would rebel—and in 1605 renegade “papists” plotted to blow up Parliament and the Royal Family—or that court secrets would be leaked to England’s enemies. The ministers of Queen Elizabeth I and her successor King James I developed an elaborate network of spies. The Oxfordians would have us believe that the Shakespeare-De Vere conspiracy fooled these spies or that the court, informed of the deception of its spies, allowed this Stratfordian fake to mingle with royalty.
In short, the Oxfordian conspiracy would have had to have been so vast that it included actors, other playwrights, audiences, an elaborate spy network, and the crowned heads of England and to have succeeded far better than the “fronts” conspiracies of our own history. The alternative makes more sense. Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare’s plays.” His contemporaries thought so. Why don’t we?
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino. This article does not constitute a legal opinion and is intended solely for educational purposes
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