MICHAEL WOOD ON… THE SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP QUESTION
EVERY NOW AND AGAIN IN HISTORY, CERTAIN things need restating. It’s an obvious point, but like journalists, historians build their picture of the past using sources. They distinguish between primary and secondary sources, sources you can trust, others maybe you cannot. And primary sources – first hand, contemporary, authoritative, corroborated – are the basis of any historical narrative. This is a key principle of historical research. It all comes down to interpretation of the evidence. What does this document tell me? What is the authority of this text? Can I be sure that what it tells me is true? Am I reading it to corroborate a picture I’ve already decided on?
Recently, the Shakespeare authorship controversy – the idea that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems – has been getting an airing again, even in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
The authorship question is a modern phenomenon. It was not something that occurred to the author’s contemporaries, and does not appear in 16th or 17th‑century discussions of Shakespeare – its first manifestation is in the mid‑19th century. Recent suggestions that contemporaries like the author Francis Meres or the poet John Marston are teasing us with coded references to the alternative identity of The Talented Mr S are fantasy.
A whole web of connections in primary sources – the wills of Shakespeare and his colleagues, property leases, share documents, notes in the College of Heralds, the biographical details in the First Folio dedications – show beyond doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford‑upon‑Avon was also the actor, poet and playwright, member of the Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, shareholder in the Globe Company and ‘Gentleman and Groom of the King’s Most Honourable Privy Chamber’ whom we can identify in primary sources in London. It is the same man. This picture is based entirely on primary sources, and any attempt to argue otherwise necessarily involves an attack on the authenticity of contemporary historical documents, not least Shakespeare’s will.
Let’s focus on just one issue that has long obsessed the doubters: the author’s education. How could someone from this ordinary background have acquired the learning to write such plays, given their breadth of vision, their conversance with different social classes and their phenomenal range of sources – some indicating at
