Shake /or/ Bake?
an essay into an old question by Dennis M. Hammes
I apologise for having never known the controversy closer
than third-hand before reading his exellent and Officially
Unpopular essay late in life, but Mr. Twain's demolition (1) of
the claim, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote
the poems and plays attributed to him, is utterly compelling.
Simply put, the person of the Stratford Shakespeare /as author/,
does not exist according to any of the records usual to
literature, and we are left to fill in the awful blank by
wondering who did. That Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and others,
left bodies of literature before him is well-documented. So is
the unquestionable fact that it was they who wrote their works:
it is noted of their school records, their friends and fellows,
their private readers, their publishers, their correspondence,
their wills, and indeed, by all the confetti that a writer leaves
lying around the Body of Work just by maintaining the profession
of writing. Mr. Twain assures us that /not a single scrap of
such paperwork surrounds the Stratford Shakespeare/, despite that
plenty of it surrounds any of his contemporaries.
However, Mr. Twain's (and the Baconians') claim that Francis
Bacon /did/ write these works "because" he is the only
contemporary they know of that "could have," is, at first, less
than compelling, but it collapses utterly when we find none of
his confetti around the works, either. And it is finally buried
when one reads Sir Francis himself. The man's pen is plugged
with mashed potato, and it dribbles out as whatever he writes.
To be sure, he knows all the legal terms that the writer of the
plays uses, and uses correctly. But this, almost the only real
argument asserted in his favor (if not as utter proof) applies to
any first-year law student (and most nobles) in the realm, of
whom only one in ten got before the bar; the rest had to turn to
other incomes, and generally turned to lettered incomes (not
necessarily literature). And while it is true that Bacon knew
the law of the plays, he also knew all the rest of English law,
especially that to keep Officials Official, and wrote in that
style even when he was writing a personal praise. The only
famous writings more turgid than his are those of Aristotle, whom
Sir Francis so despised for his turgidity and want of universe.
Sir Francis is, before he is anything else, a professional
political sycophant, and all his "other" writing, even the
putatively scientific, reeks of this position: he is /always/
pressing his own case to his audience -- when this voice does not
appear even in the /Sonnets/: their writer is always in
/universal/ voice. Sir Francis, on the other hand, consistently
/fails/ of the universal voice, both in his researches (he was
unaware of the advances made in medicine by his own physician,
Sir William Harvey, not to mention ignorant of -- and
uninterested in -- the work of the Royal Society), and in his
output: his "philosophy" has an axe to grind, and it is always
his own.
A single but empire-shattering instance proves the tiny
scope of his politics: Sir Francis sought, and was told off to
make, the Queen's Case against Essex after the debacle of the
Irish Campaign -- all paperwork preparing, presenting, and
subsequently justifying the case. Ultimately, this connivance
destroyed his career as completely as the Queen's refusal to
marry destroyed the House of Tudor and, shortly thereafter,
England herself. The writer of the plays /could not/ have put
his pen to such a political scheme, for the fact is that Essex
was wronged by his Queen, was sent into the field and denied
support after he was there, /abandoned by his commanding officer/
and then personally "blamed" for the loss. The man who put the
"condemning" political and "legal" arguments into the mouth of
the Queens' Court, could not have found, nor expressed, let alone
proved, /any/ of the sympathy, personal or legal, for Hamlet,
MacDuff, Antony, Posthumous, Portia, or Othello, that is the
whole basis of their plays.
The unalterable fact, available to any who have read both
Sir Francis and the works attributed to Shakespeare, is this,
that while the /knowledge/ expressed in the poems and plays was
more than available to Sir Francis (a condition that does not
prove he actually had it), /their language was not/. Mr. Twain's
own argument, that the man who wrote the Stratford Shakespeare's
epitaph (Shakespeare), a proof of only four lines' substance but
sufficient for any working poet, could have nothing in common
with the writer of the poems and plays, demolishes Sir Francis
even more quickly and absolutely.
Neither the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon /nor/
Sir Francis Bacon wrote the finest body of literature in the
history of the English-speaking peoples. So who did?
That is the question.
The question is unlikely ever to furnish us with a name in
answer: the person who wrote the plays covered his tracks too
well, for he /succeeded/ in covering his identity in an age that
would have loved to have found him out even better than we. The
politics of that age would have profited greatly by the finding,
while for us it changes only a single word in a high-school
English exam. However, we know rather much /about/ him.
We know absolutely that he was easily conversant with
contemporary and classical literature, while the want glares both
from Shakespeare's personal history and Bacon's published and
private writings. The poems /begin/ in completely-standard
literary conventions well-used and overused before, while, and
after their author made his own uses of them, but while his
contemporaries never departed the dead pasts of the conventions,
this writer breathed his then-living universe into them. The
writer of the /Sonnets/ did not invent the format called
"Shakespearian"; Sir Phillip Sidney did, and made full and public
use of it almost a generation earlier. Bacon consistently fails
of such literacy even in his expertise, law and science. Mr.
Twain shows that Shakespeare is unlikely ever to have acquired
the conventions, let alone the perfection they achieve at the
hand of the writer of the poems: he had to go from being a young
butcher of calves in a town with only a grade school (which he
did not attend, according to its records) and no library, to
being the writer of the /Venus and Adonis/, in one year; it was a
feat not possible even for Keats, who /had/ the education. The
conversation of the plays is obvious: most of the tragedies are
lifted bodily from Plutarch's /Lives/, the histories from
contemporary histories -- but /not/ official academic histories;
they are romances -- while the /Hamlet/ and some of the comedies
are rewritten from plays known to be in contemporary Continental
circulation.
We know, if we care to, that he was a Roman Catholic, a
secret Catholic in an Anglican world (and thus already habituated
to secrecy to keep his life), for the remaining contemporary
English Catholic was so moral that he practiced both his religion
and his morality under pain of having his guts ripped out of his
belly and burned before his living face. Catholic doctrine
requires moral practice; Anglican doctrine consists entirely in
political expediency, starting with the very event that founded
that church. The poems and plays are about moral practice, if
not moral dilemma; there is almost no political expediency in
them, save that practiced by the antagonists against the (we may
say) overly-moral protagonist: they are written from the living
viewpoint of the victim, and it is this that gives them their
eternal interest. It is not a viewpoint that an Anglican could
afford, or would particularly put up with in his own case.
We know that he could also not afford, whether Catholic or
Anglican, to be associated with the theater, for the contemporary
theater was practically "unclean," to borrow a term: James was
the first English king to endow a theatrical company, and
Cromwell made political meat of him and Charles for doing so.
But it was /these plays/ that gave theater standing enough to be
endowed at all, that kept it there, and returned it there after
Cromwell's proscription. Elizabeth went to no theater, however
many players (including Shakespeare) performed in the palace.
Indeed, it is in this relation of English theater to English
society that we have William Shakespeare of Stratford's "onlie"
connection with the plays: he produced them, and he kept his
monopoly only by keeping them secret: the Quarto was published
after he left the theater business. But not only did he not
write them, he did not recognise their literary value even while
producing them at the /Globe/, for he produced their
"competition" down the street at his /other/ theater. He did not
know who wrote them; their writer used a cutout man to deal with
Mr. Shakespeare, that actor-turned-impresario, who would have
sold the writer's identity for a shilling for that it would have
increased the draw no end. Nor, despite being so successful a
businessman that he went from vagabond to manager of two theaters
in a year, did he dare claim their authorship: he hadn't the
legal knowledge to imagine the suit, let alone win it, not even
the one he could have won easily had he written them, the one
that /should/ have arisen when "Mr. W.H." stole the /Sonnets/
from private circulation, and published them for pay without
arrangement even with the Shakespeare to whom he attributed them,
that the flak fall on Shakespeare, and not on "Mr. W.H."
And there's the rub. Shakespeare the businessman left /no/
commercial copyrights in his will, yet he was already so
associated with the theater, and without political onus, that he
produced the plays from the second year of his career until he
retired to Stratford -- with cash from his productions but with
not a copyright. Sir Francis did not copyright them, either --
and he certainly could have. His political favor was never
dependent on his lack of any commercial association, for he was a
civil servant, not a noble or courtier, and he was born to a High
Anglican family, son of the Lord Chancellor, with never any
question as to his alliegience. Too, he began his career in debt
and without position at the same time the plays began to be
produced, when he could not only have survived being known as
their author, /he had the law to keep the commercial property
without public knowledge/. He did not: he stayed poor until his
preferment, and he died poor after losing it.
Actually, almost /any/ Anglican could, within the other
restrictions, have claimed the copyrights at no hazard to his
position. But no Catholic could have done so, for Catholics
could own no properties, /especially/ commercial.
Now, for the first time, we may /surmise/ something about
him, to wit, that he was a Catholic, long-established and
unimpeachable in the nobility but /not/ in the Court, for neither
Henry nor Elizabeth ever succeeded in deposing all the Catholic
nobility, and his association with the theater would have been
excuse enough (poems were not only "acceptable," they were
practically expected). But who? At this point, I must hand the
question over to one who knows more of the Tudor nobility than I
do, and especially the unofficial, near-secret histories of such
Catholic nobility as remained to the period. We know only that
the man who wrote them did not want to be known for writing them,
that he was superior at what he put his hand to, and so he will
never be known. And we know from these two items alone that he
did not make his living from the pen.
__________
(1) Mark Twain, "Is Shakespeare Dead," in /The Complete Essays/,
ed. Charles Neider, Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
(1963).
Mr. Hammes is Chair of Poetry at FISHHOOK Academy of Natural
Philosophy.