Introduction
On Thursday, 25 April 1616, William Shakespeare’s mortal remains were laid to rest. It was a bright, warm spring afternoon in Stratford upon Avon; a few high clouds provided an ironically cheerful counterpoint to the melancholy mood below. Inside the Church of the Holy Trinity, crowded around a fresh grave, stood the playwright’s many admirers, who had been following his career in London since he first arrived on the theatrical scene a quarter-century earlier. Some in the back jockeyed for position to see what was going on. Closer to the front were some of the most distinguished theatrical men of the day: the actor Richard Burbage, the playwrights Philip Massinger and Thomas Heywood, and Shakespeare’s partners in the King’s Men theatre company, John Heminges and Henry Condell. By far the most important guest was Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s friend and patron from the beginning of his career. The mourners took turns reading passages from his poems and plays, their voices quivering with emotion. Ben Jonson even contributed a poem of his own to mark the sad occasion.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it was a cold, dark morning. Shakespeare had died suddenly, and few of his London friends had received the news that his end was imminent. Even fewer were able to make the trip to Stratford: the spring rains had washed out many of the roads from the capital. Only his local friends, including a few who had known him since childhood, made it to the service. The center of attention was Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway, her eyes red as she wept over her husband’s casket and received comforting embraces from their daughters, Susanna and Judith.
Or maybe it was an uncommonly warm late April day, with a few mourners standing uncomfortably in the hot church, their eyes nervously scanning the entrance. The number of mourners was deliberately kept small because the priest reading the burial service was a crypto-Catholic. It was not long since England had officially embraced Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism was regarded as a serious threat to the nation. Plenty of Catholics had been executed for their plots against Queen Elizabeth, and Shakespeare, a secret Catholic himself, had been a friend to many of them. In his final days he called on the local Catholic priest to read the last rites, and now he was being interred in secret in the old religion.
Or, once again, maybe not.
The fact is no one knows what William Shakespeare’s funeral was like. Church records show that he died on 23 April 1616 and was buried two days later. After a very successful career as an actor, playwright, and theatrical shareholder in London, he had retired to the town of his birth, Stratford upon Avon. He had been living there with his wife and two daughters, probably since 1610 or 1611. But the cause of his death is a mystery. No record of who attended the funeral survives. No one knows what sympathies he might have had for Catholicism. This hasn’t stopped people from speculating about all of these matters, but hard facts are frustratingly few. As critic Paul Fussell writes, with only slight exaggeration, “What we actually know about Shakespeare as a person can go on a 3 × 5 card without crowding. But the writings confidently telling his life story and delineating his personality, morals, temper, and character would fill moving vans.”
There were no newspapers to speak of in 1616; they wouldn’t come into being for decades. But the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages were meticulous about record-keeping, and plenty of letters and journals from the early seventeenth century survive. And yet not one contemporary scrap of paper contains anything about Shakespeare’s death or his funeral. How can this be?—how could it happen that the death of England’s greatest writer created no public stir? The simple fact is that no one thought it was newsworthy.
Some people today think this silence is significant. There are those who suspect that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare—that the man from Stratford was not the author of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet—and that someone else deserves the credit for the finest plays in the English language. The first inklings that the Stratford man might not have been the author of the works attributed to him came in 1857, when an American ex-schoolteacher named Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. That eccentric work suggested that the plays were actually written by her namesake Francis Bacon, in collaboration with Sir Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, and others. Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was impressed enough to contribute a preface. Since then, the number of candidates proposed as the “true” Shakespeare has multiplied staggeringly. Some have suggested it was Christopher Marlowe, a rival playwright most famous for Dr. Faustus. Marlowe’s death in a brawl at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career—a knife wound above the right eye, an inch wide and two inches deep, ended his life in 1593—hasn’t deterred “Marlovians” from attributing plays to him written nearly two decades later: he must have faked his own death and continued writing in secret. Some have even suggested Queen Elizabeth herself had a secret knack for writing plays, and used a pseudonym to conceal her dramaturgical passion from the rest of the world.
The favorite candidate proposed by today’s “anti-Stratfordians” is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The theory was first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920 and given new life in 1984, when Charlton Ogburn published The Mysterious William Shakespeare. “Oxfordians” have shown considerable ingenuity in linking the plays with the Earl—surely the line “That euery word doth almost fel [“tell”? “spell”?] my name” in Sonnet 76 is a coded reference to his own name, since “euery word” is almost a kind of anagram for Edward de Vere, and “envious silver” in Hamlet is almost an anagram of the Oxford family motto, “Nil vero verius”—although the earl’s well-documented death in 1604, long before many of Shakespeare’s plays were first produced, is a problem his supporters have struggled to explain in various ways. They also disagree over Oxford’s relation to the Stratford man: some say he had an agreement with Shakespeare to use his name as a pseudonym on the plays, while others believe the Stratford man had nothing to do with the plays at all, and that Oxford’s use of the name was just a coincidence. There is plenty of disagreement over the details, but all the anti-Stratfordians agree that the uneducated and untraveled commoner from the provinces, William Shakespeare, could not have written the masterpieces that now circulate under his name.
Fantasies about faked deaths and undercover noblemen certainly make for an exciting story, but there’s nothing to them. Virtually no professional student of literature takes any of this seriously, and it’s not because of some conspiracy among hidebound academics determined to maintain a unified front. Up-and-coming young critics adore taking potshots at their seniors, and would like nothing more than to make their reputation with a revolutionary new thesis—but the evidence just doesn’t support the case for anyone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford. Yes, there are gaps in the documentary record, gaps that are often infuriating for us today. There’s every reason to assume Shakespeare went to the King’s New School in Stratford, for instance, but the record books from the 1560s and ’70s don’t survive, so biographers can only guess about the kind of education he had. Almost nothing is known about his life during a seven-year stretch from 1585 to 1592. No one knows when he arrived in London or how he worked his way up the ranks from a bit-part actor to a major playwright and shareholder in the company. No letters he signed and no books he owned have been preserved.
But the surviving evidence, even with all its frustrating holes and mysteries, shows convincingly that William Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name, and the evidence for his authorship is at least as strong as that for any author of his era. There’s no doubt that he was born in Stratford upon Avon, in the county of Warwickshire, shortly before 26 April 1564, the day on which church records show he was baptized. (It’s customary to observe his birthday on 23 April, St. George’s Day, but that’s just a guess.) He married Anne Hathaway late in 1582, and that she gave birth to the first of their three children, Susanna, around six months later. He moved to London in the late 1580s and became an actor, playwright, and shareholder in an acting company. His earliest plays, including some of the Henry VI cycle, had been acted by 1592. He had remarkable successes early in his career, including comedies, tragedies, and histories (The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III were all early works). An outbreak of plague closed the theatres in 1592 and ’93, leading Shakespeare to try his hand at nondramatic verse. He published Venus and Adonis with a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. He began writing for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later known as the King’s Men) in 1594, producing works like Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the late 1590s came The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Henry V. His only son, Hamnet, died young on 11 August 1596, and in 1597 he bought New Place, probably the second largest house in Stratford, demonstrating that he had already become a rich man. The early 1600s were marked by the great tragedies: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear. In 1609 there appeared Shake-Speares Sonnets, a collection of 154 poems he had written over the years. Late in his career he wrote “romances” like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, around the time that the King’s Men began performing in the upscale Blackfriars Theatre. Some time after 1609 or 1610 he stopped writing full-time, and spent more time back in Stratford. He died there on 23 April 1616. We know these things as well as we know any fact about any Elizabethan author.
That’s not to say every question about Shakespeare’s authorship has been resolved. Experts continue to puzzle over how close the published plays are to Shakespeare’s originals: the works that survive were almost certainly revised for performance, with actors and others adding and deleting passages to suit the dramatic occasion. It was also common in Shakespeare’s day for playwrights to work with one another, and critics are now trying to figure out who else might have had a hand in the plays now attributed to Shakespeare. He probably collaborated with George Peele on Titus Andronicus and with George Wilkins on Pericles. He may also have contributed passages to plays by others: it may be his handwriting in a few scenes of the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, for instance, along with that of several other playwrights.
But insofar as anyone in the Elizabethan era can be said to have written plays, Shakespeare of Stratford wrote plays. As critic Jonathan Bate has pointed out, the only mystery about Shakespeare’s identity is why there’s any mystery about Shakespeare’s identity. We can say confidently that Shakespeare was really Shakespeare.
In another sense, though, the question of whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare is more interesting, more profound. There’s no reason to doubt that the man from Stratford wrote the plays. But was he really the great genius he’s now made out to be?
His contemporaries didn’t think so. That’s not to say they didn’t appreciate his work: his plays were very successful at every level of society, from the commoners who paid a penny to stand in the courtyard of the Globe to the monarchs who ordered Shakespeare’s company to play before them. His Venus and Adonis was one of the most popular poems of the Elizabethan era. Several of his friends and colleagues wrote poetic tributes to his talents in the years after he died. But appreciating his skill as a popular poet and playwright isn’t the same as worshiping him as a kind of secular deity—that happened much later.
An important milestone came seven years after the funeral: in 1623, two members of Shakespeare’s company, Heminges and Condell, decided to collect his surviving plays and to publish them in a deluxe edition, in the large format usually reserved for serious literature. The result was the “First Folio,” now the most famous book in the English language (and, after the Gutenberg Bible, probably the most famous book in the world). Owning a First Folio moves a book collector into the big leagues: copies recently sold at auction have fetched more than £3 million or $6 million. Shakespeare’s ephemeral popular entertainments had been given a lasting form and made available to new generations. And once the plays were available in a collected edition, people were able to start reading his works, editing them, annotating them, giving them scholarly attention, and eventually teaching them to young people. Actors were able to present them to new audiences born long after the author had died. These are some of the people who helped turn the Shakespeare of fact into the Shakespeare we know today. This “Shakespeare” isn’t just the man from Stratford—Shakespeare is now an institution. Most books about Shakespeare stop, naturally enough, with that man’s death in 1616. But while his grave is where one story ended, it’s also where another story begins.
This book is therefore a kind of biography that begins with Shakespeare’s death and runs to his three hundredth birthday, focusing especially on what happened to him between about 1660 and 1830. I hope that the selection of stories is illuminating for those who have never thought about what happened after the death of the immortal Bard. To say Shakespeare’s greatness depends on the collective efforts of later generations takes nothing anything away from his own achievements. The man from Stratford wrote Hamlet and King Lear more or less on his own, but it took the combined efforts of countless actors, editors, scholars, readers, and teachers to turn Shakespeare, the provincial playwright and theatrical shareholder, into Shakespeare, the universal bard at the heart of English culture.
The result is a book about an afterlife, but there’s nothing mystical about it. It’s a book about sex comedies with no sex, about tragedies where everyone lives happily ever after, about a Shakespeare festival where not a line of Shakespeare was spoken. It’s a book about a king’s teenage mistress and a prudish doctor afraid of blood, about the almost religious adoration for a writer whose works were rewritten from top to bottom. It’s about a classic of children’s literature written by a murderess, a war fought in scholarly footnotes, and foreign affairs being conducted on the London stage. It’s about a regicide and a forger contributing toward the production of a genius. It’s about a provincial bumpkin who became the great portraitist of the human condition. It’s only fitting that it should be a book about paradoxes, because it’s about one of the greatest paradoxes in all of world literature—how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
