CHAPTER SIX, part one

The Case Against Shakespeare, Part Two

The Looneations

The anti-Stratfordians' main tactic against Shakespeare is to attack
his known biographical record for not containing the data that the
biography of a person considered The World's Greatest Author, and
recognized as such from the age of eight, would have had to have had.
I call this tactic Looneyism after J. Thomas Looney, the man I consider
its greatest exemplar (though Baconians and others accomplished
prodigious feats of idiocy with it long before he).  Primary Looneyism
consists of making up one highly subjective list of the qualities The
True Author would have had to have had, then trying to determine if the
Stratford man had any of them.  Using this method, the Looneators-as
we shall see-triumphantly show that such things as the man from
Stratford's lack of lengthy formal education, noble blood and record
of wide travel outside England prove he could not possibly have been
The True Author.

A supporting variation (Secondary Looneyism) consists of compiling a
highly  subjective summary of how the True Author would have had to
have been treated by his contemporaries, and then showing how unlike
the way the Stratford man was treated by his contemporaries that was.
By this method, the Looneators triumphantly point out such things as no
one's having published an elegy for Shakespeare of Stratford within a
year of his death (so far as we know), or saved letters from him for
posterity.

The Primary Looneations

I've been able to isolate 13 significant primary looneations (i.e.,
results of primary looneyism) from the anti-Stratfordians' writings.
No doubt I'll be scolded for leaving out some of their favorites.
All I can say is that I only have time and room for the ones that seem
the most important, and  that I've sincerely tried to list those
here.  They fall into four main categories: (1) looneations of working
life; (2) looneations of private life; (3) looneations of class and (4)
looneations of education.

(1) Looneations of Working Life

There are four instances of Shakespeare of Stratford's not acting as
he would have in his working life had he been the poet Shakespeare:

(a)  He did not write certain poems: we have no love poems to his wife
from him, according to the anti-Stratfordians, nor any poems to Queen
Elizabeth, even so much as an elegy when she died, "such as," in
the words of Neo-Ogburnian Paul Crowley, "poured from the pens of his
fellow poets."

To this, as to so many of the looneations, I have to say, "So
what?"  So what if he didn't write poems to his wife?  Assuming he
didn't, and many believe that Sonnet 145, which puns on "hate
away" for "Hathaway" (which was commonly pronounced Hat uh way)
and "and" for "Ann" was indeed written for his wife-not to
mention the more than small possibility that any poems he wrote to Ann
have been lost by now.  Or maybe she wasn't big on poetry.  Maybe he
was too drained by writing verse calculated to win a patron or
entertain theatre-goers to write many, or any, household poems.  Maybe
he fell out of love with her (though his returning to spend his last
years with her suggests otherwise).  Maybe he didn't feel he could do
her justice in poetry, or wanted to wait until he was truly inspired.

The great problem for anti-Stratfordians is that they have trouble
understanding that life is variable and complex, and no individual life
follows any set rules however carefully worked out by some theorist,
even one without the ax to grind that they have.

The same kind of reasoning can be used to show why, "So what?" is a
proper response to our not having any poems from Shakespeare to or
about the queen (although she is eulogized in Henry VIII, and one
sonnet may refer to her.)

(b)  He did not mention Stratford, or its surroundings or inhabitants,
or his day-to-day life experiences there, in the plays he supposedly
wrote.

To this my retort is again, so what?  Shakespeare was writing about
long-ago history, or stories taking place in faraway lands, and he was
writing for a London, not a Stratford-upon-Avon, audience.  But the
Induction to the Taming of the Shrew does mention several towns and
real people from the area right around Stratford in Warwickshire: Scene
I,  line 18 says, "...I, Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of
Burton-Heath" (Barton-on-the-Heath-for which "Burton-Heath" is
a perfectly acceptable variant-is a village sixteen miles from
Stratford); and in lines 21-22, we have, "Ask Marian Hacket, the fat
ale-wife of Wincot..." (Wilmncote-or "Wincot," in one
16th-century spelling-is a village four miles from Stratford where
Hackets are known to have lived in the 1590's).

(c)  He did not capture a patron the way so many writers of his time
did-according to the anti-Stratfordians.

This is a vexed question. In the first place, there is strong evidence
that Shakespeare did win patronage from Southampton.  We know for a
fact that he fished for such patronage with the dedication to Venus and
Adonis, which I will give again:

To the Right Honourable Henry Wriosthley, Earl of Southampton, and
Baron of Titchfield. Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in
dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, not how the world will
censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen:
only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised,
and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you
with some graver labour.  But if the first heir of my invention prove
deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after
ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest.  I
leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart's
content; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the
world's hopeful expectation.  Your Honour's in all duty, William
Shakespeare.

In his dedication to The Rape of Lucrece a year later, he says:

To the Right Honourable Henry Wriosthley, Earl of Southampton, and
Baron of Titchfield.  The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without
end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous
moiety.  The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the
worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance.  What I
have done is yours, what I have to do is yours; being part in all I
have, devoted yours.  Were my worth greater my duty would show greater:
meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long
life, still lengthened with all happiness, Your Lordship's in all
duty, William Shakespeare."

For me, what we learn from the second dedication is that Shakespeare
believed he had 'the warrant' of Southampton's 'honorable
disposition'-he knows Southampton is honorable and therefore will
accept Shakespeare's "pamphlet."  One way he could know is that
Southampton accepted his previous poem.  We can be fairly sure this was
the case because now Shakespeare is writing a second poem for him,
which he said he would not if the first had not gotten a good
reception.  That Southampton accepted the first but did not reward
Shakespeare in money for it is possible but not likely because (1)
again, why would Shakespeare waste a second poem on him had he gotten
nothing for the first (and accompanied that second poem with a
dedication so extremely adoring)? (2) why would Southampton, a patron
of poetry, not have patronized the writer of such a good one as Venus
and Adonis? and (3) Shakespeare has the warrant of Southampton's
honorable disposition, and honorableness more fits rewarding a man for
a good work than being able to appreciate poetry (Does "he is
honorable, therefore he will like my pamphlet" make sense?  Compare
that to, "he is honorable, therefore he will accept my
pamphlet-which is what the dedication literally says-as an
application for patronage-as it implicitly says, like just about all
poems' dedications to wealthy poetry patrons.)

Moreover, the second dedication's words and tone strongly suggest a
change in the relationship between poet and dedicatee.  Whereas in the
Venus and Adonis dedication Shakespeare spent most of his text
apologizing for his poem, obviously unsure how it would go over with
Southampton, in his second dedication, a year later, he hardly mentions
the poem it precedes but is all wishes for the happiness of
Southampton-from the very start, since it jumps right into the
poet's love for Southampton, without the "Right Honourable" the
other dedication had, which is surely a lessening of distance between
the poet and the aristocrat, however subtle.  In any case, we go in one
dedication to the next from a focus on Shakespeare's poem to a focus
on Southampton's person.  This, to me, suggests increasing
friendship, which supports my reading that the first poem was taken
well by Southampton.

Certainly, it is possible that Shakespeare may only have been told by
one of Southampton's men that the earl liked the poem without the
poet's meeting the earl, a go-between passing on the earl's
warrant, that is.  But Southampton was said to have liked poetry.  I
don't know if he knew any poets personally but one would think he
would have, and that one of them would have been so good a poet as
Shakespeare, who had actually dedicated a poem to him that he seems to
have enjoyed.

Nor can it be said that this view is entirely unsupported since there
is the anecdotal evidence from Aubrey that Will got two thousand pounds
from Southampton.  There is also the coincidence that it was within two
or three years of the two narrative poems that Shakespeare began to
seem affluent, helping his father get a coat of arms and buying the
second most expensive house in his hometown.

At the same time, there is very little hard evidence that any other
specific writer of the time won patronage for a literary work, though
we know many must have.    Diana Price, researching 25 literary figures
of the time, found only one piece of evidence that explicitly indicated
any of them got money from a patron for a literary work.  She did find
evidence that 16 of them won patronage, but almost all of it could be
rendered as problematical as Shakespeare's dedications for showing
that by anyone using her variety of anti-Stratfordian ambiguation.  The
record Price uses to claim that Spenser had a patron, for instance, is
a dedication of Spenser's in which he only speaks of the "infinite
debt" he owes Sir Walter Raleigh for "singular favours and sundry
good turns."  If the "warrant of an honourable disposition" that
makes Shakespeare say Southampton's acceptance of his poem is
"assured" doesn't make Southampton a patron of Shakespeare's,
how can favours and good turns but no specific amount of money,
particularly money for literary work (Raleigh could have given him
gifts of money just because they were friends), be considered an
indication of patronage?  Another Pricean piece of evidence for a
writer's having a patron is just a letter by Gabriel Harvey asking
for help in getting an academic position from Burghley.

In the second place, it is foolish to compare Shakespeare's writing
career to others of his time.  Why?  Because of the direct evidence
previously discussed that Shakespeare the writer was the same man as
Shakespeare the actor.  This evidence is also both contemporaneous and
personal, a fact I add for the benefit of those like Diana Price who do
not recognize posthumous evidence and/or the testimony of those who did
not know the person they were testifying about as valid.  That
Shakespeare was both actor in and writer for an acting company, a very
successful acting company, in which he was a partner, made his
situation as a writer unique in his time.  For one thing, it gave him
greater security than almost all other writers.  That meant he did not
need a patron after the early nineties.  So even if it could be shown
that neither Southampton nor anyone else became Shakespeare's patron,
it could cause only a fanatic predisposed to do so to doubt he was a
writer.

(d)  He did not protest the piracy of his plays

Of course, we don't know which, if any, of Shakespeare's plays were
actually pirated. Even if we assume at least a few were (and I do),
let's turn to Irvin Matus, discussing Sir George Greenwood's view
that Shakespeare, had he been our litigious bumpkin from Stratford,
would have tried to obtain justice had a play of his been
pirated-although Greenwood had conceded earlier in his book that
there was no record of any author's ever having successfully stopped
something he had written from being pirated (but shrugs off because
most of the pertinent official documents were lost;  in that case,
though, how can he be sure Shakespeare did not go to court?)  But
here's Matus on the stationers' company, which had total control
over the (legal) publication of books: "there is no evidence there
was in Shakespeare's lifetime any concept of author's rights.  How
a stationer came by the work he was entering, whether or not his copy
was corrupt, whether or not the author wished it to be published, had
been compensated for it, or could in any way be damaged by its
publication, were not questions asked by the wardens of the company
when licensing a work.  What Greenwood found impossible to
believe-"that a publisher might, without let or hindrance, publish
a stolen manuscript if only he had obtained the license of the
Stationers Company for such publication"-turns out to be precisely
the case, as we hear from the poet and pamphleteer George Wither, in
his Schollers Purgatory (1624):

Yea, by the laws and orders of their corporation, they can and do
settle upon the particular members thereof a perpetual interest in such
books as are registered by them at their Hall, in their [the printers
and booksellers]  several names: and are secured in taking the full
benefit of those books, better than any author can be by virtue of the
King's grant, notwith-standing their first copies were purloined from
the true owner, or imprinted without his leave.

Matus follows this with several pages of supporting evidence and
commentary thereon, including a quotation from the preface Thomas
Heywood wrote to a play he had published long after it had been
pirated.  In it, he declared that he was now presenting the play as it
was meant to be read, not in the mangled form that the pirates had
published it in-indicating the he, like Shakespeare, was powerless to
do anything about the earlier piracy.  In any case, it is absurd to
believe that Shakespeare necessarily would have lept to the law against
piracy.  Maybe he didn't have time to.  More likely, it would have
been up his company, which would have owned his plays.

A question now occurs to me.  If, as the anti-Stratfordians contend,
Shakespeare's plays were pirated because The True Author, not wanting
anyone to know he'd written them, couldn't prevent it (through some
behind-the-scenes pressure, or even violence, and it is a matter of
record that Oxford, for one, had street-fighting ruffians in his
employ), why weren't more of "his plays" pirated?  Why wasn't
Twelfth Night pirated, for instance?  Or the unpublished Comedy of
Errors?  Or Macbeth?  Surely they would have been popular.

Be that as it may, a portion of Shakespeare's plays were printed, and
some were probably pirated editions  (as Heminges and Condell suggest
in one of their two prefaces to The First Folio).  Other plays, such as
As You Like It, were merely registered for publication but never
printed.  This was a way of keeping others from printing unauthorized
editions of a book.  After James I assumed the throne, and the Lord
Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, few of the Shakespeare
plays were published.  Sane scholars assume that this was because the
players now had the clout generally to prevent such publication.
Furthermore, they probably didn't need the money they could have
gotten from having them printed with their permission.  Oxfordians
believe, however, that the death of Oxford, a year or so before
Elizabeth died, was the reason the plays stopped being published.  But
plays of Shakespeare's not known to have been published kept being
performed, which would have made them available to pirates, so I
don't really see why Oxford's death would have made a difference,
assuming he had written them.

(2) Looneations of Private Life

The previous looneations are concerned with what was absent in
Shakespeare of Stratford's alleged writing career, according to the
anti-Stratfordians; the next three primary looneations have to do with
what was inexplicably missing from his day-to-day life that couldn't
have been missing had he been the World's Greatest Writer, and
recognized as such from the age of eight.  Hence, we have no record of:

(e) personal effects of the kind proper to a writer, such as
manuscripts, letters and books.

The absence of manuscripts might be mildly odd if it weren't that
almost no writer of the time left behind any manuscripts.  According to
the very biased Diana Price, surveying her group of twenty-five men,
including Shakespeare, we have no manuscript from Jonson but a masque;
we have just a Latin verse written while in Cambridge from Nashe; from
Massinger we have an autograph copy of one play; Gabriel Harvey left
some verses; Daniel left portions of a poem; Peele left one manuscript
of a poem; William Drummond left behind one sonnet; Anthony Mundy
contributed to Sir Thomas More; Middleton left behind one play
manuscript as did Heywood; from Greene, Lodge, Dekker, Lyly, even
Spenser, Drayton, Chapman, Marston, Watson, Marlowe, Beaumont,
Fletcher, Kyd, Webster: no manuscripts of any kind.  In short,
considerably less than half of these men, by Price's reckoning, left
behind any kind of literary manuscript, and only one left behind more
than one literary manuscript!  And from all the dramatists of the time,
we seem to have only three or four play manuscripts.  How, then, can
any sane person think it at all notable that we have none from
Shakespeare?

And many scholars think we do have one from him: a portion of Sir
Thomas More.  Charles Boyce, in Shakespeare A to Z, reflects the
scholarly consensus about this work: "Play attributed in part to
Shakespeare.  Sir Thomas More presents episodes from the life of Thomas
More, a Catholic martyr who was executed by King Henry VIII for his
refusal to accept the English Reformation.  It was probably written
around 1593 or 1600 (scholarly opinions differ) for the Admiral's
Men.  The manuscript of Sir Thomas More, which was assembled around
1595 (or 1603), is mostly in the handwriting of Anthony Munday, but
with additions in five different hands, one of which-known as 'Hand
D'-is generally accepted as Shakespeare's.  If so, this is the
only surviving sample of the playwright's handwriting aside from six
signatures on legal documents.  For Sir Thomas More, he wrote three
pages of script comprising one scene of 147 lines, in which More
subdues a riot with a moving oration.

"That this is Shakespeare's compostion is demonstrated through
several lines of evidence.  First, the handwriting is very like that of
the playwright's six known signatures.  Further, peculiar
spellings-such as "scilens" for "silence"-occur both in
Hand D's pages and in editions of Shakespeare's plays that are
known to derive from the author's foul papers (manuscripts in his
hand).  Perhaps most tellingly, the imagery used in Hand D's text
resembles Shakespeare's, especially in lines that are very similar to
passages in both Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida.  Lastly, the
political ideas expressed in Hand D's scene agree with what we know
of Shakespeare's thinking, for they demonstrate a respect for social
hierarchy combined with sympathy for the common people and stress the
malleability of the commoners through oratory.

"The odd manuscript of Sir Thomas More was the result of government
censorship; apparently, the play was orignally submitted to Edmund
Tilney, the Master of the Revels, who refused to permit its performance
without major revisions.  Accordingly, several pages were torn from the
original manuscript and replaced with others."

Again, though, even if Shakespeare had nothing to do with the Hand D
(and no one has found another writer whose handwriting matches it as
well as Shakespeare's--although some feebly argue that it was some
scribe's, a scribe who made a number of unscribelike cross-outs and
revisions in what he wrote), and we have absolutely no manuscripts from
him, why should anyone be shocked?  Anyone, that is, who knows, for
instance, how neglected so many of  Johann Sebastian Bach's
manuscripts were after his death, despite his having zillions of sons
who, as composers themselves, should have had some interest in
preserving their father's work.

As for letters by the writers of the time, they are less rare than play
manuscripts-still, even Diana Price found that just fourteen of her
sample of 24 writers and Shakespeare left posterity any letters, and
most of them left only one or two.  So what, then, if Shakespeare was
one of the eleven who left behind none?
Nor, really, would it have been any big deal had he written no letters
(as opposed to leaving behind some).  Some people hate writing letters,
especially some who have to write for a living.

Then there is the matter of his books.  His will mentions none, but
Francis Bacon's will, among the wills of more than a few other
writers of the time, mentions none, either.  Shakespeare's will does
mention "household goods," which could have included books,
however, and a lost inventory was originally attached to his will which
would probably have mentioned his books, had he had any.

A final missing personal effect ought to be mentioned in this section,
too, although it is quite minor.  It is Shakespeare's not leaving
behind any record of the shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres
that Shakespeare the actor was known to have owned.  Those shares also
fail to turn up in the records of any of his heirs.  If this were the
case with anyone other than Shakespeare, and being considered by anyone
other than a crank, the conclusion would be that he sold these shares
before he died.  Just what the anti-Stratfordians make of it, I don't
really know-except that they consider it suspicious.  

--Bob Grumman