ON SHAKESPEARE AND REASONABLE DOUBT

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[This note was written for an experiment on persuasion. Responses from readers will be helpful.]

On Shakespeare and Reasonable Doubt by Howard Margolis, University of Chicago

A "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" (Guardian, 9 September) is the latest reminder of the persistence of controversy over who wrote Shakespeare. But the skeptics' case depends on a logical slip.

The starting point is always some close variant of the claim that while Shakspere (a common spelling outside theatrical contexts) was alive no one identified him as the author. "A great mystery lies before you," reads the Declaration. "How could William ‘Shakspere’ of Stratford have been the author William Shakespeare and leave no

definitive evidence of it that dates from his lifetime?" And indeed, while Shakspere lived no one explicitly identified him as the author. But no one explicitly doubted it either. So perhaps, as the skeptics argue, no one thought Shakspere was Shakespeare, so no one was moved to say he was. On the other hand, perhaps no one explicitly said he was because no one doubted he was. And it is not hard to see which side of this disjunction must be right.

If you go to a Woody Allen movie you will see a credit as writer/director to someone named Woody Allen. You will also usually see a credit to an actor also named Woody Allen. The credits do not tell you that the actor is the same Woody Allen as the

writer/director. But absent some claim otherwise, it would not occur to you that there are two Woody Allens.

And here is some of the evidence that the Shakspere/Shakespeare situation is not really different.

1. When Shakspere was 28, a pamphlet included an attack on a player, apparently young, who writes blank verse. This "upstart crow" thinks he is a jack-of-all-trades. The upstart is not explicitly named, but is not hard to guess. He thinks he is "the only Shake-scene in a country". And for readers dim enough to need another clue, his "tiger's heart

[is] wrapped in a player's hide", parodying a line from Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, where the queen's "tiger's heart [is] wrapped in a woman's hide".

2. The first printed works from ‘Shakespeare’ came through a printer (Richard Field) who grew up as Shakspere's neighbor in Stratford. 3. In 1595 "William Kempe, William Shakespeare, and Richard Burbage" were payees for Christmas performances before the Queen. For the next two decades Shakespeare is linked repeatedly to a small group of actors which prominently included Kempe and Burbage. Throughout, plays by William Shakespeare were never performed by any other company. As here, in lists of players, the player's name is always "Shakespeare", but in business or social contexts it is often "Shakspere" or some variant.

4. Several of the players managed to get through the College of Heralds procedure to be awarded a coat of arms, certifying them as "gentlemen". The Shakspere family in Stratford began to display the coat the arms awarded to “Shakespear ye player” and the player Shakespeare began to be labeled "gentleman". 5. By 1598 Shakespeare was treated as the pre-eminent playwright in a survey of the literary scene. The author (Francis Meres) seems to know quite a bit about him. Meres correctly identifies as by Shakespeare various plays published anonymously or never published at all. He knows Shakespeare also writes sonnets, which he reports have been circulated "among his private friends". 6. In 1599 several of the players became shareholders in a theatre built to house their performances. Public performances of plays by William Shakespeare

thereafter only occur in theatres in which William Shakespeare, sometimes spelled Shakspere or some variant in business papers, is a shareholder.

7. In 1603 James VI of Scotland became king of England. One of his first acts was to establish a group of nine actors as his personal players.

Two were given special prominence. The heading of the royal proclamation labeled it a "Commission for Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, and others". The company was thereafter known as the "King's Men". As before, no other company performed plays by William Shakespeare. 8. An official listing of players scheduled to march with the King's servants in the coronation parade is headed by William Shakespeare.

9. The most-admired classical playwright was Terrence. In 1611, a volume of light verse (John Davies' Scourge of Folly) included several affectionately addressed to

members of the King's Men, including one to "our English Terrence, Will Shakespeare." 10. In 1613, John Heminges, one of the nine original members of the King’s Men, acted as trustee for “William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon” in buying a house adjacent to the company’s Blackfriars theatre. 11. In 1615, Edmund Howe's listing of outstanding poets, which seems to claim personal knowledge, is in order of social rank. It starts with several knights, then proceeds to Shakespeare and other "gentlemen". 12. Ben Johnson published his collected plays in 1616. William Shakespeare is twice listed as performer. 13. In his will Shakspere leaves token bequests to his "fellows" (colleagues) Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage died in 1619, but Condell & Heminges lived to collect the plays and publish the First Folio.

14. Sometime prior to the First Folio (1623) a monument to "Shakspeare" in Stratford compares him to Socrates, Virgil and Cicero, and speaks of his art and "all that he hath writ." 15. The prefatory matter to the First Folio mentions the monument, refers to the author as "Mr. William Shakespeare", includes affectionate references from players to "our fellow", and lists Shakespeare as a performer in the plays. 16. Writing privately about Shakespeare, Ben Jonson says he "loved the man (this side idolatry) as much as any", but that the players overdo praise of "their friend". Shakespeare sometimes wrote carelessly, Jonson says, and in a remark that is puzzling unless based on firsthand experience says Shakespeare sometimes got so carried away by his fluency that it was necessary to stop him.

And more could be added, but we have enough to return to the question of how to interpret the absence of explicit assertions, while he was alive, that Shakspere of Stratford was Shakespeare the author. Is that more plausibly because no one thought he was, or because no one doubted he was?

But we do not have just a smoking gun here but a firing squad. There is surely no reasonable room for doubt that Shakspere of Stratford was Shakespeare the player. On the skeptics claim, then, we have to imagine that playgoers, over two decades, attending performances of plays attributed to Shakespeare, always by Shakespeare's company, in a theatre partly owned by Shakespeare, were left in doubt about who the author might be until deceived by the conniving producers of the First Folio into thinking that the author was Shakespeare.

Writing is ordinarily done in private, even in a collaborative art like the theatre. If anyone cared I could produce evidence that I really wrote my own books. I could identify people who had seen drafts, or edited manuscripts, or heard me give work-in-progress talks. But what could be available for an author 400 years in the past? How could you prove Bacon wrote Bacon's Essays or Spenser wrote his Faerie Queen? Yet the Shakespeare skeptics are not claiming only a theoretical possibility. The claim is that there are serious grounds for doubting that Shakespeare the player and Shakespeare the author were the same person. Logically this remains possible in the face of the evidence. Perhaps the actor was only a front man. But the burden of proof is different.

If indeed, as the skeptics unfailingly claim, no one thought that the player was also the author until after the player was dead, then knocking down some further reason for doubt will not help much. The situation is so suspicious that even if the argument on the table is shown to be weak or even if it is shown to be downright silly, the situation is still suspicious. So the skeptics have nothing much to lose by offering bad arguments, and the more the better. Even if the skeptical arguments were all weak, or even all silly, who would be dedicated enough to keep track of all the arguments and responses?

But if, as indeed on the record seems surely the case, no one in Shakespeare's time doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, then there is a burden on the skeptics to come forward with at least one reason good enough to justify, 400 years later, more than a conceptual possibility of doubt. So what is it?