Did doubts over the authenticity of authorship of William Shakespeare’s works actually started in the Victorian Era – as opposed to a 21st Century movement?
By: Ringo Bones
Contrary to popular belief – the non-Stratfordian movement, a school of thought casting doubt on the authenticity of authorship of William Shakespeare’s works wasn’t started in 2011 with the release of the Roland Emmerich film titled Anonymous whose plot revolves around the insinuation that it was Edward de Vere The Earl of Oxford – as opposed to William Shakespeare himself – is the true author of Romeo and Juliet and other plays and works attributed to Shakespeare. The truth is, for more than two centuries after his death in 1616, the belief remained unshaken that the great bard himself – William Shakespeare of Stratford, a prominent member of the King’s Company, wrote the poems published under his name and the plays assembled in the Folio by his fellow-actors.
Suddenly, about 1850, a doubt arose which has persisted in some quarters to this day. It is hard to determine the cause of this “Victorian Doubt”. Possibly it sprang from the Victorian belief in the necessity of formal education, linked with the notion that Shakespeare of Stratford was illiterate. The Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) was well-known in labeling William Shakespeare as a “poor Warwickshire peasant”.
The notion of William Shakespeare’s “illiteracy” goes back to a well-known comment by the English dramatist and poet laureate Ben Jonson (1573 – 1637) that goes: “Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek”; it should be remembered, however, that Ben Jonson was a great Classical scholar, accustomed to express himself as easily in Latin as in his native tongue. There is every reason to believe that the young Shakespeare received at the Stratford Grammar School a sound Classical training, even though from Ben Jonson’s perspective, Shakespeare seemed to have “small Latin”.
However, since learning was assumed to be a prime necessity in the creation of literature, the Victorian era skeptics naturally settled on the most learned of the Elizabethan era bards – i.e. Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) – as the probable author of the works passing under Shakespeare’s name. It was an unfortunate choice, since of all Elizabethan era “men of letters”, Francis Bacon was probably the least capable of writing these works, a fact which may easily be verified by comparing Bacon’s essay Love with Romeo and Juliet or the Sonnets. This theory, bolstered by the supposed discovery of cryptograms in the First Folio, ran to fantastic extremes, culminating in the alleged discovery that Francis Bacon was the unacknowledged son of Queen Elizabeth I and an English courtier named Robert Dudley the 1st Earl of Leicester (1532 – 1588), and therefore the true heir to the English throne – as well as the author, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the great body of Elizabethan literature. It may be stated with a degree of assurance that this particular theory is no longer acceptable.
To advance the claim of any other than William Shakespeare of Stratford to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is, to speak plainly, to disregard the weight of all contemporary evidence. This evidence culminates in the testimony of the English dramatist and poet laureate Ben Jonson. Jonson knew the actor Shakespeare, who had performed repeatedly in Jonson’s plays. Jonson was well-known in criticizing the extravagance of Shakespeare’s style and noted some of his mistakes, yet Jonson hailed Shakespeare as a dramatist who might challenge “all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome” had done. If there were any mystery about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, Jonson would have known of it. If Jonson knew and yet hailed Shakespeare in such terms as these – he – the most independent and self-respecting Elizabethan man of letters, would have been a common liar.
