Book of the Week: "Who Wrote Shakespeare?"

'Who Wrote Shakespeare', by John Michell is an overview of the controversies surrounding who actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. It's real conspiracy theory stuff, and no doubt mostly cobblers, but it’s fun to read and there are some parts that are not entirely unpersuasive.

On the more conspiracy-oritented side, there's peculiar facts such as:

In the 46th year of Shakespeare's life, the 46-member committee responsible for producing the King James Bible (possibly overseen in part by Francis Bacon, who many believe was the real author of the plays) released their Bible, and in this version (though in none previous) in the 46th Psalm, the 46th word from the top is 'shake' and the 46th word up from the bottom is 'speare'.

Then there's Ben Johnson, who was notorious for writing poems purportedly in praise of some public figure, but which contained subtle puns that meant their subject was actually being ridiculed. His famous poem praising Shakespeare, which appeared at the front of the first Folio, refers to him as 'thou starre of poets'. But Johnson had often slagged Shakespeare off in private, and had even written a play called The Poetaster (a poetaster is a writer of inferior verse) which some think mocks a thinly-disguised Shakespeare as such. Back to 'starre of poets': poet is a word of Greek origin, and the Greek for star is 'aster'. Of course, this may only mean that Johnson didn’t really rate Shakespeare’s plays rather than that he thought Shakespeare too inferior a writer to be their real author.

But the most interesting arguments don’t involve numerology or weird coincidences:

There's what little details are known about Shakespeare's life, all of which suggest not an artistic genius but a crafty businessman, in later years pursuing petty claims through the courts and never honoring his debts. In his will he scrupulously itemised all of his possessions (he left his 'second-best bed' to his wife) but he bequeathed no books or manuscripts! This at a time when books were a rare and valuable possession. And several decades later when a scholar who intended to write a biography on Shakespeare visited the libraries of the country houses in Stratford and environs and interviewed all the locals he found that there was zero correspondence relating to Shakespeare and that none were in possession of, or aware of, any books owned by him (there were no family books either because his parents were both illiterates who couldn't even write their own names - not the usual kind of household for fostering great talent.)

There also exists no record of him ever having written a letter, whereas a great writer surely would do so, and a famous writer’s letters would tend to be preserved by those to whom they were written. Also, very strangely, when he died there was absolutely no comment or praise from the artistic community, whereas the deaths of really minor playwrights around the same time resulted in such things as books of tribute being released. The plays were very much admired, but not, it seems, their 'author'. All of which would fit in with the argument that Shakespeare was a frontman for authors who wished to remain anonymous (and who was presumably well recompensed for this service).

Most intiguing of all was a test for determining authorship which was developed a while ago by an American scientist. Apparently if you break a work down into how many 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 letter words it contains, the proportional difference between them is like the artistic equivalent of a fingerprint. An advocate of Bacon as the real author heard about this and contacted the inventor of the process asking him to compare the plays to Bacon's prose. They were completely different. But as part of the process other contemporaneous writers were analysed as well, and one of them was an exact match - Christopher Marlowe, who was involved with espionage, and who supposedly had been stabbed to death in a bar in 1593, just as Shakespeare's career was taking off (Shakespeare’s name appeared as author of a printed work for the first time thirteen days later). Amazingly, no one has yet followed up on this with more thorough computerised comparisons of the texts of the times. (Or so the book says…)