Four (Five) Shakespeares: The Documentary Lives

Ben Jonson and the Folio: Chapter 2

Before attempting to understand what Jonson has to tell us about Shakespeare it will be useful to review what is actually known about the author, and about the man from Stratford conventionally identified with him. We will see that while both are fairly well documented in surviving period records, the threads connecting the two are perilously thin. We will also find in official records two more William Shakespeares connected with the company of players but not directly identified with either Stratford or the author, the actor William Shakespeare, unremarked during his lifetime but remembered in the cast lists provided by Jonson in his own 1616 folio and the list of players in the Shakespeare folio, and a fourth William Shakespeare who was a sharer (investor) in the acting company and the Globe theatre where they performed. It is the lack of documentary evidence connecting these distinct identities sharing the name William Shakespeare that opens the door to questions about the identity and biography of the author and leads some people to consider whether there was a fifth William Shakespeare, a writer who used the pen name Shakespeare to conceal their true identity for social, political or legal reasons, and if so, who was this person and what was their story.

William Shakspere - the man from Stratford.

There are more than seventy extent records for the man baptised as Gulielmus filius Iohannes Shakspere in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. Parish records show he received a license to marry Agnes Watley of Temple Grafton on November 27, 1582, but that a marriage bond was made to Anne Hathaway of Stratford on the following day. They might be the same person, but Anne Hathaway had no known connection to Temple Grafton, so might not. Anne was eight years older than William, and three months pregnant so there was some urgency to get her married, but plenty of room for speculation about how 18 year old William got to the altar that day. Teenage grooms were unusual, Stratford had only three in a span of 70 years. Because of the hurry, the normal procedure of publishing the marriage banns for three successive weeks was dispensed with and instead friends of the couple guaranteed the match was legally unencumbered with a £40 bond. Six months later a daughter, Susanna was born and baptised. The couple had twins Judith and Hamnet two years after that. Hamnet died at age 11.

There is no record of education for William. He might have attended the town grammar school, one of many established by the boy king Edward VI, but the records for the period are now lost. His whereabouts for the period from 1585 until 1592 are entirely unknown. Biographers refer to these as “the lost years” and speculate about how he might have acquired the skills to emerge as the great dramatist and poet so soon after. Evidence of William Shakespeare the writer first appears in 1592, and it is only by assuming he is the writer and actor that Shakspere can be located until well into the 1590s. He appears to have prospered as a merchant buying and selling wool and grain and eventually acquiring property around Stratford that yielded sufficient rent to purchase New Place, the largest home in the town in 1596. He lent money and sued borrowers who did not pay. At some point he resided in London, there are records of fines for nonpayment of taxes, and he is called to testify in a lawsuit concerning his 1601 landlord and a marriage arrangement he had witnessed. In 1613 he purchased the lease on the gatehouse of the old Blackfriars complex in central London. One of the four trustees on the lease was John Heminges, a grocer who was also an actor and business manager for the King’s Men. Shakspere’s will, written in the months before his death in 1616 mentions the property. It also contains a line in different ink, squeezed in between the original text and not properly signed, making a bequest of 20s 6d each for rings for Heminges, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage, three leading (and surviving) members of the acting company. These represent the only documentary connections between William of Stratford and the world of the London theatre.

William Shakspere died in Stratford on April 23rd 1616, St. George’s day. Since the precise date of his birth in unknown it is poetically assigned to the same day, so that he lived exactly 52 years (reasonable given he was baptised three days later). In addition to the bequest for memorial rings to the actors there were similar grants to Stratford friends who witnessed the will (these were properly in the text of the document) and provisions for the distribution of his property. Most of the estate went to his elder daughter Susanna, married to prominent physician John Hall, in trust for a prospective son. William was keen to protect the interests of his younger daughter Judith from the man she had just married amidst accusations of infidelity. He famously left to his wife his “second best bed” but her marriage share of the estate was probably settled separately and this constitutes a sentimental bequest rather than an intentional slight. There is no notice of any of the trappings of a life as a writer or in the theatre in the will, no mention of shares in the company or theatre buildings, no books, no manuscripts or claims for payments still due.

Two days after his death William was buried in the chancel of Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. The stone slab covering his grave carried the admonition:

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.

Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones

There is no surviving public acknowledgement that the great writer had passed. It was not noted in the London papers or in the surviving correspondence of the actors or nobility that saw the plays and cherished the poems. There was no public ceremony or effort to see him entombed in Westminster with Chaucer and Spenser. An elegy for William Shakespeare attributed to William Basse which did all these things was apparently composed some years later and does not contain any explicit link to William of Stratford.

At some point, a half figure monument was erected on the wall of the church. There remain no documents to identify exactly when it was installed or who arranged and paid for it, but it was drawn in 1649 so was in place by that date. Below the figure is a cryptic inscription comparing him to Nestor, Socrates and Virgil, and noting that “all that he hath writt leaves living art but page to serve his witt.” In a dedicatory poem in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio, Leonard Digges mentions a “Stratford moniment” which is taken as a reference to this monument (more about this later) which would establish it by that date, but without more information about its origins, it is possible that it was installed later in response to Digges.

The next two Shakespeares encompass William Shakespeare’s involvement in the London theatre as and investor and actor.

William Shakespeare – sharer in the Burbage acting company.

Sometime after quarreling with Edward Alleyn in May of 1591, James Burbage helped form a new company of actors around his son Richard. James was the great theatre impresario of the 1580s who staged performances at court and at the Theater in Shoreditch (northeast of the city proper) under the patronage of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (and favorite of Elizabeth). After Leicester’s death in 1588 his actors found temporary work in the Queen’s Men under Secretary of State Frances Walsingham, but after Walsingham died in 1590 there was a great shuffling of actors and companies complicated further by the unexpected death of Ferdinando Stanley who sponsored a company as Lord Strange but perished to unexplained illness (or possible poisoning) just after advancing to Earl of Derby. The group headed by Richard Burbage was probably originally sponsored by the Earl of Pembroke or more likely his wife Mary Sidney Herbert, but brought with them scripts from their previous companies. When the Pembroke patronage ended in October 1593 they probably had another patron briefly before finally landing with Henry Carey the Lord Chamberlain as the Lord Chamberlain’s men. Around this time the first plays later attributed to Shakespeare begin to appear. Early printings do not bear the name Shakespeare but instead indicate “as performed by” some combination of Pembroke’s, Strange’s, Derby’s, Sussex’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Efforts to track the players through this rapidly evolving scene have helped sort out but not settled the confusion. One thing they have not done is discover the whereabouts of William Shakespeare, who is thought to have been an actor by the late 1580s but does not appear in any of the documents related to the companies, their travel or their performance. After the name is attached to the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece in 1593 and 1594 it also shows up connected to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. A 1595 record of payments for the court entertainments of the previous Christmas season includes payments of £20 each to Richard Burbage, William Kempe (the company clown) and William Shakespeare for plays performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men. There are concerns about the provenance of the record (I will discuss this later) but if genuine this establishes a William Shakespeare as a business partner (formally a sharer) in the company. There are a handful of other surviving records of the company, mostly concerned with their lease of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, but also a document from the accession of King James which establishes the company under royal patronage, makes the principals (including Shakespeare) gentleman of the chamber and grants them red cloth with which to make livery in the royal colors. The name William Shakespeare is included as a sharer in the Globe lease from 1599. Most of the remaining documents of the company were the result of a lawsuit disputing the distribution of receipts from 1635 after Shakespeare and Burbage were long dead. Again, Shakespeare is mentioned as an original sharer.

Unfortunately none of the documents associated with the business of the company specify which William Shakespeare is meant. Historical summaries of each document from official repositories claim that we know that it is William of Stratford from some other document but following the link invariably finds only the name William Shakespeare and direction to yet another document which purportedly provides the crucial link. Occasionally, the connection to Stratford is identified as the Blackfriar’s gatehouse lease of 1613 or Shakspere’s will, but neither or these is directly associated with the company. Thus, while the record is clear that someone did business with the Chamberlain’s (and later the King’s) Men under the name William Shakespeare it is only by inference that we identify that individual with the man from Stratford.

Shakespeare the Actor

The documentary case for Shakespeare as an actor on the public stage is much simpler. There is no record of William Shakespeare performing during his lifetime. No existing letter which says “saw Shakespeare in Hamlet today – outstanding.” No record of him on tour with the company, something they were required to do when the London theaters were closed and the court was away as regularly happened in the summer. The only evidence that Shakespeare ever acted in a play is from Ben Jonson who included William Shakespeare in the cast list of Everyman in his Humour and Will. Shake-speare in the list for Sejanus in the versions of those plays printed in his own 1616 Folio and in the list of actors from the preface materials of the Shakespeare folio of 1623 also probably provided by Jonson. In these Shakespeare is listed first or second, complicating efforts to reconcile his failure to make an impression on the stage with the narrative that he was first and foremost a leading actor. Again we only have Jonson’s word, and the suspicion that his meaning is not always intended to be straightforward.

Which leads us to the man we came to see. The greatest writer in the history of the English language, possibly any language, the myth, the legend, the author William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare – famous author of plays and poetry

As noted previously, the name William Shakespeare entered the literary world with the publication of the semi-pornographic narrative poem Venus and Adonis published in 1593. The name was not on the title page but rather signed the dedication to the young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. This was followed by a promised “graver work,” the Rape of Lucrece, a year later, and also dedicated to Wriothesley. Despite exhaustive efforts (Charlotte Stopes published a book on the subject in 1922), scholars have failed to establish any relationship at all between Southampton and Shakespeare (any Shakespeare). Although records found centuries later place William Shakespeare as a sharer in the acting company that performed the Henry VI plays as well as Richard II, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet, the early printings of those plays as quarto texts (sort of individual pamphlets not unlike modern play scripts) did not carry the author’s name, only indicating the patronage of the companies that performed them, sometimes proudly adding “for her Majesty.” However, in 1598 a cleric named Francis Meres provided a list of twelve plays from the same William Shakespeare who had penned the poems, in his commonplace book Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury. After the 1598 quarto of Loves Labors Lost, Shakespeare’s plays would carry his name. Indeed, the brand proved so attractive that a dozen or so works demonstrably not by Shakespeare were also attributed to the bard. These are known today as Shakespeare’s “apocrypha.” Meres also made reference to Shakespeare’s “sugred sonnets” circulating among his private friends. Although a number of manuscript copies of individual poems (none believed to be authorial) survive in period collations, the entire sonnet sequence we know today as Shakespeare’s sonnets descends from a 1609 quarto printing cryptically dedicated to Mr. W.H. “the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets.” The 1609 printing is incredibly rare, and was probably suppressed (prevented from sale and remaining copies destroyed by order of the state), but we don’t know why, or whether it was authorized by Shakespeare or not. New publications of Shakespeare plays also stopped after the 1609 publications of Troilus and Cressida and Pericles. An order from Lord Chamberlain William Herbert made this a policy around 1615 and William Pavier’s attempt to circumvent the order by backdating plays in 1619 was stopped resulting in a few copies of a so called “false folio.” All of these publications share a common feature, they reveal nothing about the author except, sometimes, the name. There are no poetic dedications from friends or rival poets, and nothing from the author himself after the first two narrative poems.

Finally, sometime late in 1621 efforts began in earnest to produce a complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays in the prestigious Folio format, perhaps inspired by Jonson’s 1616 Works. It took the primary publisher Edward Blount and printer William Jaggard at least a year to secure all the rights to works which had been previously published. Others had to be reconstructed from working play scripts but at least five were delivered in newly written “fair copies” by the scribe of the King’s Men Ralph Crane. In the end the production of the folio took two years, about 18 months of actual printing time to produce 750 copies of the 900-page work. It contained 36 plays, omitting only Pericles and Two Noble Kinsman from the currently accepted cannon. The folio differs from the other published works in that it does contain extensive preface materials: the famous portrait of the writer, accompanied by a Ben Jonson poem ironically suggesting the reader “look not upon his picture but on his book,” a dedicatory epistle to the “Incomparable Brethren” William and Phillip Herbert, and an oddly commercial letter “to the Readers” imploring them to read but mostly to buy the book, both ostensibly by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, an 80 line elegy from Jonson, “To the Memory of my Beloved, the AUTHOR WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE” and a few minor dedicatory poems from Blount contract writers Hugh Holland, John Mabbe and Leonard Digges.

Again we are back to Jonson, and the need to sift his writing for poetic hints and clues about the author. There is no encomium to a glover’s son from Stratford. To get to Stratford-upon-Avon the reader has to put together Jonson’s “Sweet Swan of Avon” with Digges’ “Stratford moniment” three pages later. The players’ letter identifies the author as their fellow and celebrates the cleanliness of the manuscripts they received in which he hardly blotted a line, but the language strongly suggests those too were ghost written by Jonson who barely concealed his own distinctive style and filled them with allusions to his own published works. In the end all we really have is Jonson “and what he hath left us.”

Not quite all though, other writers, like Francis Meres, commented on Shakespeare as early as 1593 when Gabriel Harvey claimed his “gentlewoman patroness” was prepared to release the “that fair body of the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva.”

William Covell: All Praiseworthy Lucretia Sweet Shakespeare Wanton Adonis, Watson’s heyre (from Folger Library Shakespeare Documented)

In 1595, William Covell mentions Shakespeare’s Lucrece and ‘Wanton Venus” in a printed marginal annotation to a work praising the universities of England. Around the turn of the 17th century a print war of playwrights, the “Poetomachia” engaged Shakespeare and was in turn satirized in Cambridge student “Parnassus Plays.” Still, none of these helps connect the writer William Shakespeare, clearly their subject, to the other incarnations, certainly not to the man from Stratford.

The business of Shakespeare biography is to connect these pieces into a coherent narrative. For traditional scholars who accept that William of Stratford was the writer all that is needed is to stitch the four documented Shakespeares into one Frankenauthor, inventing or inferring biographical details to cover over the cracks and contradictions between the various parts. Once attuned to the language it is impossible to read modern Shakespeare biography without tripping over the “must haves,” “would haves,” “surely’s” and “certainlys” that cover the sutures and to begin to wonder what might be if all the things that must have been true to make the Stratford business man into a great author had not been after all. Stratfordians (people committed to the Stratford identification) like to point out that no one questioned the identity of the author until poor crazy Delia Bacon (more on her later) in 1850. But they are obscuring the objective reality that the only biographical information that appeared in print for almost century after Shakespeare’s death was “died April 1616” appended to William Basse’s elegy in a 1640 volume of Shakespeare’s poems widely reviled for its errors and emendations of the works.

For doubters these cracks and discrepancies are points of entry into the greatest mystery in literature; who wrote Shakespeare? And who covered it up? To answer these questions, they offer biographical details of a fifth Shakespeare, the “True Author”, hoping to find a better match for the life experiences and academic training so evident in the writings.

I cannot hope to do justice to the documentary evidence which does exist for Shakespeare in this post, let alone the others proffered as alternative candidates. My intention instead was to clarify how much the construction of any narrative biography of Shakespeare hinges on interpreting a few cryptic words from Ben Jonson, the one man who must have known the real story and is central to the production of the First Folio.

Continue reading: Reading with Understanding: the Hermeneutic Circle