Michael Delahoyde
Washington State University

Attempts to disprove that this Stratford grain-merchant Shakspere wrote the works of Shakespeare are typically sneered at as resulting either from snobbery -- that we are reluctant to think that works of genius can have come from someone without a university education or travel experience -- or from a post-romantic disappointment when a poet's life is not as dramatic as his or her work. Alternate biographical investigation is labelled "bardolatry for paranoids" (Paster 38).

But we have no manuscripts, no working notebooks, no letters, no direct information on his private life from "the Warwickshire gentleman," typically spelled Shakspere or a short-a variant in the records we do have. Give me a break! I've got my cherished photo of myself standing next to Agnes Nixon, and no one even knows who she is! (The creator of All My Children.) Shakespeare, in his own lifetime, was bigger than Agnes Nixon, yet nobody proudly decided in 1615 to hang onto a short personal letter by the great William Shakspere? (And this notion of celebrity culture is not anachronistic: witness the demand for portraits of Elizabeth, and the opening scene in Antony and Cleopatra.)

No one even attempted to write a biographical sketch of Stratford Will until a century later. "The evidence does not establish that he was the author of anything, let alone the erudite works of 'Shakespeare.'" We have six "quavering and ill-written" signatures on legal documents. His wife and daughter signed their names with an X. So, "the author of King Lear was a litigious businessman" (Bethell 36)? Shakspere left London in 1604 at the age of forty -- odd that that would make him the only great writer in history to "retire" young and triumphant. He shows up almost immediately in a Stratford small claims court, suing a neighbor for a malt debt of 35 shillings, soon after the publication of Hamlet?!

Ben Jonson sniped that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," but he knows classical material and classical rhetoric and certainly the spirit of Ovid and Virgil. It's argued that Elizabethan grammar school could be impressive, beginning at 6:00 am, centered on Latin language and literature, etc. (Shakespeare has assumed the place that these formerly occupied in schooling.) The Stratford grammar school was, in fact, a one-room schoolhouse for farmers' sons of all ages. We have no record that William attended.

Noblemen did not use their names when writing for public theatre, so pen names were the rule. The printing press threatened absolutist regimes such as the Tudor. Attempts to control ideas included destruction of unlicensed presses; pamphlets seized; theatres closed; writers interrogated (Samuel Daniel), imprisoned (George Chapman, Ben Jonson), mutilated (John Stubbs, Alexander Leighton, William Prynne), maybe even assassinated (Marlowe?). The majority of plays before the Elizabethan era are anonymous. Sidney and Surrey were published under their names only after death.

References to the playwright frequently read "Shake-speare" with the hyphen. As a pseudonym, this would work most appropriately. Pallas Athena was the mythological patron of theater arts (patron goddess of Athens), and wore a helmet that made her invisible; but she carried a spear and, for example, invisibly influences the spear-throwing scene between Hector and Achilles in The Iliad. So, a "spear shaker" is an invisible writer for the theater.

FRANCIS BACON

A mid-nineteenth-century hypothesis looked to Bacon, based on a comparison of the works and references to the law ("Shakespeare" knows it too well to be identified with Stratford Will), the Bible, classics, etc. But the theory became "encrusted with absurdities: ciphers, buried manuscripts, excavations by moonlight" (Michell 37). Bacon is an essayist, not a poet-playwright.