3. Arguments Against The Authorship Question

3.1 Fundamental Invalidity

ARGUMENT

• The Shakespeare authorship question is fundamentally invalid. There is no question to answer.
• Anti-Stratfordian methods of attribution are not valid.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• Longevity: If the question were invalid, it would not have persisted, (openly) for over 150 years.
• Provenance: The first doubts over Shakespeare’s authorship were raised (covertly) within his lifetime.
• High-profile doubters include Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Ted Hughes, Orson Welles, a number of high profile lawyers including two Supreme Court Justices, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and Shakespearean actors including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Derek Jacobi, John Hurt and Mark Rylance. The existence of such widespread doubt amongst intelligent and Shakespeare-loving people suggests there is a question to answer.
• Despite a powerful academic taboo, there are now professional academics, including historians and English Literature specialists, who openly question Shakespeare’s authorship.
• Thus the Shakespeare authorship question is a valid question and worthy of serious investigation.

3.2 Argumentum Ad Hominem

An argumentum ad hominem is an attack against the person, rather than the argument. Often the first arguments that non-Stratfordians meet when broaching the subject of the authorship question are ad hominem attacks. In the past these have included accusations of insanity and comparisons with the Nazis. Though personal attacks have been somewhat toned down in recent publications,¹⁴ they remain primary responses in both personal and online discussions. In all defences of the orthodox position, the focus remains strongly on questioning the moral and rational integrity of sceptics rather than addressing the evidential causes of their scepticism. Since these arguments are so often utilised as a first line of defence, it seems pertinent to examine them and their validity before focusing on arguments relating directly to evidence.

3.2.1 Snobbery

ARGUMENT

• Shakespeare sceptics almost exclusively suggest alternative candidates who are of the nobility or have a university education.
• The Shakespeare authorship question is therefore an issue born out of snobbery.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• The two reasons why noble candidates and/or candidates with a university education have been advanced are as follows:
  • Shakespeare’s plays contain material for which even a very good Elizabethan grammar school education cannot account (see Learning, University Language).
  • The plays also display considerable in-depth knowledge suggesting the author was familiar with pursuits favoured by the nobility (see Nobility).
• Calling one’s opponent a snob is not a valid defence of the orthodox position.

3.2.2 Conspiracy theory

ARGUMENT

• For the author’s identity to have been successfully hidden and remain hidden would require a network of people to maintain secrecy i.e. a conspiracy (see Secrecy).
• Shakespeare sceptics are therefore conspiracy theorists, and to doubt the traditional attribution is equivalent to believing in alien abduction, faked moon landings, or that the US government killed its own citizens on 9/11.¹⁵

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• This is a logical fallacy known as false equivalence.
• There is a fundamental difference between the word ‘conspiracy’ and the term ‘conspiracy theory’.
• ‘Conspiracy theory’ is a derogatory and relatively recent term used to dismiss a hypothesis without consideration. It denotes something that exists only in fantasy.
• The word ‘conspiracy’ has been in use for over 600 years (OED c1386) and exists because it represents an observed component of human behaviour. It denotes something that exists in reality.
• The late 16th and early 17th century was an age of conspiracies: the Babington Plot, the Main and Bye Plots and the Gunpowder Plot being the most famous in Shakespeare’s era.
• Shakespeare wrote repeatedly of conspiracies and mistaken identities, demonstrating how and why such things can occur.
• Calling one’s opponent a conspiracy theorist (i.e. a fantasist) is not a valid defence of the orthodox position.

3.2.3 Psychology

ARGUMENT

• Since most people (and the majority of English literature academics) believe William Shakspere of Stratford is the author William Shakespeare, it is therefore a reality, a fact.
• Thus anyone who doubts the orthodox view is suffering some kind of psychological issue or pathology.¹⁶
• Alternatively it arises out of the need to challenge orthodoxies and define oneself as ‘other’.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• Shakespeare sceptics (beginning with Delia Bacon, and including the famous examples of Sigmund Freud and Mark Twain) have made it clear that their doubt arose from a fundamental mismatch between the author Shakespeare (as experienced through his works) and the known biography of William Shakspere of Stratford.
• Shakespeare entirely lacks the kind of literary evidence (personal, unambiguous, contemporaneous) that exists for other writers of the period.¹⁷
• The authorship question became popular in the 1850s when other ‘established facts’ without supporting evidence (such as creationism) were being challenged.
• It coincided with the realisation that no further significant evidence relating to Shakspere of Stratford was likely to be found.
• The absence of this evidence causes some rational people to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship.

3.2.4 Amateurs

ARGUMENT

• Very few, if any, professional scholars of English Literature (i.e. tenured academics) doubt the Stratford man’s authorship of the works attributed to him.
• Shakespeare sceptics are amateurs ignorant of the period and of the methods and standards of scholarship.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• This situation arises from a professional taboo.
  • The Shakespeare authorship question has for many years been taboo in the English Literature departments of UK & US universities.
  • Academics in the humanities understand that to openly espouse Shakespeare scepticism is to risk their professional standing.
  • Thus the professional scholars who accuse authorship questioners of amateurism are responsible for creating and maintaining the state of affairs they criticize.
  • Until the authorship question is accepted as a valid research topic in UK & US universities it will remain largely the province of independent scholars.
• Professionalisation is nevertheless underway.
  • Despite a general taboo, the authorship question has been studied at Concordia in the US; Brunel, Goldsmiths and Sussex in the UK.
  • In recent years, several English Literature PhDs focused on the Shakespeare authorship question have been awarded.
  • The Spring 2016 edition of the Journal of Early Modern Studies entitled ‘Shakespeare: Biography, Authorship and Collaboration’ featured articles by both Stratfordian and non-Stratfordian scholars. |
  • Thus the study of the authorship question is no longer entirely the province of amateurs.
• Shakespeare studies have never been entirely the province of professional scholars.
  • The foundations of Shakespearean biography were built by ‘amateurs’ - antiquarians such as Edmond Malone, whose authoritative opinions, hardened over time into ‘facts’, have become unquestionable even though in some cases they are patently wrong (see, for example, Chettle’s Apology).
  • There are plenty of amateur enthusiasts on both sides of the authorship debate with limited grasp of the period, the literary texts, historical method and the importance of arguing from evidence.
  • The same Stratfordian scholars who accuse non-Stratfordians of amateurism flout scholarly standards by ignoring key contributions to the authorship debate. ¹⁸
• Shakespearean scholars are usually literary specialists without expertise in either historical methods or the analysis of evidence.

3.2.5 Anti-Shakespearians

ARGUMENT

• ‘To deny Shakespeare of Stratford’s connection to the work attributed to him is to deny the essence of, in part, what made that work possible … Shakespeare was formed by both Stratford-upon-Avon and London.’
• Therefore ‘anti-Stratfordians’ should be referred to as ‘anti-Shakespearian’.¹⁹

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• The contested connection between William Shakspere of Stratford and the work attributed to him is the authorship question. Were that supported by incontestable evidence, the authorship question would not exist.
• The term ‘anti-Shakespearian’ is fundamentally inaccurate: the person Ben Jonson referred to in the First Folio as ‘the AUTHOR William Shakespeare’ is esteemed as highly by those who question the current interpretation of his identity as by those who don’t.
• The adoption of the term ‘anti-Shakespearian’ is an attempt to invalidate the question and close down debate through semantics, by pre-supposing the correctness of the orthodox position. If the author simply went by the pen-name William Shakespeare, traditionalists themselves may yet be shown to be the ‘anti-Shakespearians’.
• Name-calling is not a valid defence of the orthodox position.

3.2.6 Deniers

ARGUMENT

• Shakespeare sceptics can reasonably be called ‘Shakespeare deniers’.
• Shakespeare sceptics deny evidence and/or deny history.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• The use of the term ‘denier’ is inflammatory, subconsciously linking ‘Shakespeare deniers’ and ‘Holocaust deniers’.
• Some high-profile Stratfordians have indeed made this link explicit.²⁰
• The association of Shakespeare sceptics with Holocaust deniers through the use of this term is an example of the logical fallacy of false equivalence.
• Apparent denial (or ignoring, or re-interpretation) of ‘inconvenient’ evidence is apparent on both sides of the debate.

3.3 Arguments Relating to Evidence

3.3.1 No authorship doubt before 19th Century

EVIDENCE

• Delia Bacon’s 1857 book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded was the first book to openly question the authorship of the Shakespeare canon.²¹

ARGUMENT

• Since open doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship did not arise until the traditionally-ascribed author had been dead for 241 years, the Shakespeare authorship question is invalid.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• Evidence that some Elizabethan writers doubted the authorship of the Shakespeare canon begins with the very first publications to bear the name ‘William Shakespeare’; see the entries for Gabriel Harvey (1593) and Marston/Hall (1598/99).
• The doubts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries were not expressed openly because it was an age of repression and censorship, and many authors wrote anonymously or pseudonymously in order to avoid getting into trouble for their writing (see Censorship and Repression).
• It is possible that there was official stifling of the authorship question from the outset. Several of the works doubting Shakespeare’s authorship appear on the 1599 Bishops’ Ban list of books to be brought to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London to be burnt.
• If the identity of the author or authors of the Shakespeare canon was deliberately masked, there is no question that masking was successful, and that for 400 years the majority of people have believed the traditional attribution to William Shakspere. That does not mean, however, that the masking did not occur.

3.3.2 Gaps in the Historical Record are Normal

EVIDENCE

• After 400 years, the historical record is not complete.

ARGUMENT

• Gaps in Shakespeare’s record are to be expected and entirely normal when compared with other writers of the period.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• Though gaps are expected, Shakespeare’s literary biography is a ‘man-shaped hole’.²²
• Diana Price demonstrated that this is not at all comparable with other writers of the period: when compared with the top 24 writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, William Shakespeare alone lacks a personally, contemporaneous literary paper trail.
• Although Diana Price’s book was the first on the authorship question to be published by an academic press (2001), it has been entirely ignored by the second academic book on the subject, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013).
• This unscholarly treatment suggests that orthodox scholars do not have answers to the questions posed by Price’s research.

3.3.3 Negative Evidence

ASSERTION

• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.²³

ARGUMENT

• Just because there is no evidence from his lifetime that William Shakspere was a writer, it does not mean that he was not.²⁴

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ is a well-known logical fallacy, known as ‘argument from ignorance’. It is often invoked to argue for the existence of God.
• When evidence is absent where we would fully expect it to exist, this is itself an important piece of evidence that any explanatory narrative must account for.²⁵

3.3.4 Occam’s Razor

ASSERTION

• All non-Stratfordian theories fall foul of Occam’s Razor, since they involve unnecessarily complex hypotheses.

ARGUMENT

• The simplest solution to the authorship question – that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him – is, by Occam’s Razor, the correct one.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• This is a simplification and/or misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor.
  • Occam’s Razor states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. One proceeds to simpler theories until simplicity can be traded for greater explanatory power.
  • The Stratfordian hypothesis contains easily as many assumptions as non-Stratfordian hypotheses. The considerable anomalies (evidence which cannot be easily explained under the Stratfordian hypothesis) suggests it is ripe for substitution by a hypothesis with greater explanatory power.

3.3.5 Collaboration

EVIDENCE

• Certain plays in the Shakespeare canon show signs of co-authorship.

ARGUMENT

• Shakespeare therefore sometimes worked in collaboration with other writers.
• Collaborative working is one of the strongest arguments against a hidden or secret author of the Shakespeare canon.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT ²⁶

• Collaboration is an inaccurate term, suggesting a process of working together that may not have happened.
• Co-authorship can come about in a number of ways: an unfinished play, for example, being handed over to another to finish.
• The plays that have been suggested as being co-authored are largely at the beginning and end of the canon and might easily be viewed as apprentice pieces (early plays) and unfinished works (late plays).
• Since we do not know the means of transmission of the manuscripts for either Quarto or Folio versions of Shakespeare’s plays – and whether or not they have been altered by writers or editors in the process – it is not necessarily meaningful to analyse them for ‘other hands’ in this way.
• The inaccurate term ‘collaboration’ is used specifically to undermine the validity of the authorship question, but for high standards of scholarship to be upheld, only ‘co-authorship’ can be considered a valid term in this discussion.
• The practice of stylometry used to uncover evidence of co-authorship is in its infancy and unreliable. ²⁷

3.4 Arguments Related to Plausibility

3.4.1 Secrecy impossible to maintain

ARGUMENT

• If someone other than William Shakspere of Stratford wrote the Shakespeare canon, it would have entailed a number of people keeping this secret.
• Those required to keep quiet would include printers and members of the acting company.
• The idea that numerous people would co-operate to keep the author’s identity secret is implausible.
• Even if such a secret was kept for a while, there is no plausible reason why secrecy would continue after the real author’s death.

COUNTER-ARGUMENTS

The counter-arguments fall into two parts:

1) Hidden author

• It is incorrect to assume a large number of people would need to know about the hidden author.
• Printers and publishers could receive their texts from anyone; not necessarily the author.
• Many of the Shakespeare texts published in Shakspere’s lifetime are poor versions, considered to have been printed without the author’s permission.
• Authorised texts could be received from the author’s representative; for example William Shakspere in a brokerage role.
• There is evidence that can be read as certain writers of the period expressing their suspicions that the author was hiding their identity (see Marston and Hall). This is not the same as those people being ‘in the know’; in the possession of any secret they could potentially spill.
• Though the number of people ‘in the know’ need not have been more than a handful, there is no reason to think that even large groups of people cannot keep secrets.
  • ‘Ultra’ for example, though it involved hundreds of individuals, was kept secret for 29 years after the end of the Second World War; no-one broke the silence on this secret until the ban on doing so was lifted in 1974.
  • Several of the early texts that have subsequently been discerned to contain doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship were on the Bishops’ Ban list. This could be coincidental, or it could be an indication of official involvement in wishing to keep the author concealed. Francis Bacon’s 1603 letter to John Davies can also be read in this capacity.
  • If this were the case, the successfully kept secret should not be a surprise; Governments (and repressive regimes in particular) can be effective at controlling the information and maintaining an ‘official’ version of events.

2) Broker established as author

• There is evidence supporting William Shakspere’s playing a brokerage role in more than one capacity (grain, a marriage) and a possibility that the works by other writers that appeared under his name did so as a result of his being a playbroker.
• In his Poet-Ape Epigram, Ben Jonson writes of a play broker who represents the work of others under his own name.
• If Shakspere is the broker, no great secrecy is required, only (for reasons of personal safety), discretion.
  • Those texts by Marston and Hall, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon that are addressed to the issue of hidden authors, do so without directly naming names.
  • This can be read as a symptom of the repressive regime under which they were living; an attempt to keep both themselves, and any anonymous author, out of trouble.
  • It is these conditions that would create the ‘open secret’ which some Stratfordians say is implausible.

3.4.2 Multiple Candidates Prove the Authorship Question is Invalid

EVIDENCE

More than seventy candidates have been advanced as the ‘true author’ of Shakespeare’s works.

ARGUMENT

• The proliferation of authorship candidates is proof that the question itself is inherently absurd.
• ‘Mathematically, each time an additional candidate is suggested, the probability decreases that any given name is the true author’.²⁸
• No candidate has a better claim than any of the others.²⁹

COUNTER-ARGUMENT

• The ‘probability’ argument is rhetoric, and not based in mathematics /probability.
  • Even if this were mathematically true, it must apply to all candidates including the incumbent.
  • But it cannot be true, since despite multiple candidates, for the canon to exist, at least one person must have written it.
• An unbiased review of supporting evidence shows that some candidates have a considerably better claim than others.
• The proliferation of authorship candidates merely indicates a central problem of historical research: evidence is open to multiple interpretations.
• The proliferation of authorship candidates also indicates there is a significant problem with the traditional attribution.
• Authorship questioners may field different candidates, but they do agree on the most important point: there is insufficient unambiguous personal contemporaneous evidence supporting William Shakspere’s authorship.

3.4.3 No Use of Fronts in Period

ASSERTION

• We have no evidence that writers of the period used the names of other real people to protect their identities.³⁰

EVIDENCE (TO THE CONTRARY)

• Sir Thomas More published his work Responsio ad Lutherum (1523) under the pseudonym Guilielmus Rosseus (‘William Ross’). There was more than one living person of the name William Ross at the time it was published.
• Robert Greene, in Farewell to Folly (1591), wrote of certain authors who ‘get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses. Thus is the ass made proud by this underhand brokery. And he that cannot write true English without the aid of clerks of parish churches will need make himself the father of interludes.’ [Interludes = a 16th century term for stage plays]
• Joseph Hall (1598) in reference to the first two works published under the name William Shakespeare, stated that the author was concealing his identity ‘under another’s name’. Whether or not his suspicions were right, this is reasonable evidence that the practice occurred.
• 11 July 1599 John Hayward was interrogated before the Star Chamber. The Queen “argued that Hayward was pretending to be the author in order to shield ‘some more mischievous’ person, and that he should be racked so that he might disclose the truth”³¹

COUNTER ARGUMENT

• There is more than one mechanism by which William Shakspere might have come to be regarded as author of the works now associated with him without being the author:
  • by directly pre-arranged brokerage (as described by Robert Greene) via Stratford-born publisher Richard Field
  • by Field’s suggesting or choosing the name of a childhood associate as a pseudonym, and William Shakspere, following curiosity about his namesake, subsequently adopting the role of front (or broker) to protect the writer’s anonymity in return for a share of profits.
• It would not be unusual for a chosen pseudonym to coincide with the name of a real living person.
  • There was more than one person named William Shakespeare in the period. Many scholars argue that the William Shakespeare who loaned £7 to John Clayton in London in 1592 and sued for its return in 1600 was not William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
• See further evidence of authors of the period hiding their identities.