Breaking News:

Discovering William Shakespeare

Professor Daniel Wright, Ph.D. In the early 1780s, the Reverend Dr James Wilmot, a friend of Dr Samuel Johnson and rector of a small parish church near Stratford-Upon-Avon, went searching for the legacy of England's greatest literary prodigy, an artist of unrivaled achievement whose poetry and drama were renowned but about whose person very little was known. Dr. Wilmot searched for years in the poet's environs for information of any kind that might illuminate this prominent man (arguably the most celebrated resident in the history of Cotswolds England). He wished to learn what was known of this man as a writer, dramatist and poet by his family, neighbours, peers and other friends and acquaintances. For four years, he searched diligently for letters to or from the man; he sought records and anecdotes about his personal life in diaries and family histories; he combed the region for books and other artifacts. To his consternation, he found absolutely nothing that linked Tradition's candidate to the writing of those incomparable works that had appeared in England two centuries earlier under the name of "William Shakespeare." What Dr Wilmot found, instead, was the record of the son of a simple, untutored merchant, baptised Gulielmus Shakespeare, who apparently began life as a butcher's apprentice and later excelled in various business ventures, but who otherwise had lived a fairly non-descript life. He discovered, in short, a rather ordinary man who had no connection to the literary world and who, at the conclusion of an ostensibly uneventful life, was buried without ceremony in a grave that didn't even identify its occupant by name. His findings stunned him into dazed silence about the matter, and he confided nothing of his discovery for years. Dr Wilmot eventually confessed to a friend that despite his arduous labours in Warwickshire, he had unearthed nothing in his expeditions to connect Will Shakspere of Stratford-Upon-Avon to the works of the Elizabethan dramatic giant that Ben Jonson had apostrophised as a "Starre of Poets" and the "Soule of the Age." Serious doubts about the authorship of the Shakespeare canon followed hard thereon-doubts that continue to bewilder and puzzle readers of Shakespeare. However, the collapse of all the quixotic campaigns of the past two centuries that have attempted to establish the man from Stratford as the author of the plays (or even corroborate his reputation as a writer!) are now leading many scholars to conclude that would-be discoverers of Shakespeare repeatedly fail, not due to their lack of zeal or skill, but because, like good Dr Wilmot, they are seeking a writer where no writer (or, more accurately, another writer) exists. In contrast to the defenders of orthodox myths about Stratford Will, skeptics propose that the Shake-speare poems and plays were not the throwaway work of a butcher-turned-poet-and-playwright who, in his first foray into poetic and dramatic composition, produced such works as Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and Loves Labour's Lost. They argue, instead, that these works are the mature achievements of a worldly and urbane litterateur, a dexterous and experienced writer endowed with vast linguistic ability and an extraordinarily particularised knowledge of many arcane and specialised studies, an erudite, well-traveled, multi-lingual man of prior achievement who could not tell the world his name. One might well ask, therefore, if the writer who called himself Shakespeare were this versatile and formidable talent, why would he disguise himself and evade recognition? What possible reasons could he have had to cloak himself in obscurity? Such questions can be answered by considering the conventions that governed writing and publication in Elizabethan England. The invention of the printing press terrified absolutist regimes such as the Tudors. It created unprecedented opportunities for writers to stir up partisan constituencies and create audiences for new ideas. The capacity to anonymously publish pamphlets, books, plays, essays, tracts and other texts limited the ability of authorities to silence individuals for disseminating seditious ideas or advancing unflattering satires that exposed the government's incompetence or corruption. Because this revolutionary technology threatened to place writers beyond the effective control of the state, it led the English government to establish various civil and ecclesiastical licensing measures and censorial offices to regulate and control the press with the goal of stifling the flow of disapproved ideas. Therefore, by the last half of the sixteenth century, although the ability to communicate had been extended, the freedom to say what one would without penalty had not. Unlicensed presses were destroyed; pamphlets were seized; writers were imprisoned; theatres were closed. A writer who sought protection from discovery and persecution needed to dissemble. For playwrights, this was especially urgent, particularly as the public theatre (already much mistrusted and often suppressed by authorities for its alleged traffic in corrupt matter) was exiled in Shakespeare's day to the darker districts of London (such as Southwark) where the theatre's supposed viciousness could be restricted to people who commonly were regarded as derelicts and scoundrels. Writers of public entertainments and / or their families were likely to be impugned, therefore, by such disreputable associations if they were discovered; many had personal reputations to protect. Writers who disdained anonymity, moreover, often faced frightful consequences for their daring in sallying forth to publish under their own names. Many were hauled before the Privy Council for interrogation (as was Samuel Daniel for Philotas); others were imprisoned (as were Ben Jonson and George Chapman for Eastward Ho! and Sir John Hayward for his Life of Henry IV); others were savagely mutilated (as were John Stubbs, Alexander Leighton and Wi