Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A few weeks ago, I reported that a book I was reading made me question my long-held belief that William Shakespeare, the man, and William Shakespeare, the playwright, were one and the same. Now before your eyes glaze over (“O, by Heav’n!” you say. “Not again!”) let me say that as a writer, I found this of great interest. Several people have tried to interpret aspects of my writing and deduce things about my background and history; this is exactly the same…except with a genius writer instead of me.

The book was The Truth Will Out, by James and Rubinstein, and I read it because–to be honest–I have learned that it is never good to believe anything for too long without investigating the arguments against. This particular book promotes Sir Henry Neville as the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays, which is new. There have been plenty of other candidates, from the plausible to the ridiculous, but Neville is a newcomer and, to be fair, if you have to find someone who wrote the plays instead of Shakespeare, he’s a good candidate.

But I followed that book with Shakespeare: The Biography, by Ackroyd. Like all of Ackroyd’s work it is meticulously researched and yet very accessible to the lay-reader (i.e., me). It does not deal directly with the authorship question, and throughout the book the unspoken attitude is: Don’t be silly; of course Shakespeare wrote the plays.

While the first book raised questions and pointed out problems concerning the ability of Shakespeare to be the actual author, these were all general and rather far-reaching. He wasn’t a gentleman and yet he knew of courtly manners. He never went to Italy and yet he had specific knowledge of the cities he used as settings. He never went to university and yet he had read Ovid, Juvenal, Cicero, and the rest. There is never any evidence of his owning a book. Etc., etc.

In contrast, the second book is full of detail–corroborating detail. It paints a picture of a young man, full of energy, gifted with words, thrust into a world where the modern theatrical drama was being invented, living cheek-by-jowl with the best actors and playwrights of the day, learning from them, borrowing lines from them, competing with them each and every day. It describes a world where actors and playwrights tussled and fought, scrabbling for patronage, nursing bruised egos, castigating one another in pamphlet print. It shows us a society where the actor and the noble were in close proximity, and where a quick, observant mind could learn much more of the world than what a man could see.

There are so many examples of the congruence of Shakespeare’s life with the growth of his work, that I cannot list them, but one example that stands out to me is when, in 1592, Shakespeare’s father, John, was named on a list of recusant Catholics. There were nine names from Stratford on the list and, along with John Shakespeare, we find the names Fluellen, Bardolph, and Court…three names of characters in Henry V. To find one name in that manner is a coincidence. To find two is a rare chance. To find three? I’ve used names of from my life in my work (the name of Vincent D’Avignon was provided by a good friend, who knew a boy of the same name when he was growing up), so it is the most natural thing to see Shakespeare do it as well.

Overall, though, my argument is this: using Ockham’s Razor, I do not find it more plausible that there was a great conspiracy, that all of the Shakespearean plays–in all their various renditions over time–were written by some “ghost writer” and handed to Shakespeare surreptitiously, without the knowledge of anyone else, and that the secret was kept until all parties were dead. It simply stretches credulity too far. Moreover, those who look at Shakespeare’s early plays and say “That’s too mature a work for a man who just started writing drama,” are ignoring the fact–willfully, I would say–that what we have in the Shakespearean canon are not the plays as first written, but the plays as he finally left them. Shakespeare’s plays were under constant revision during his working years. Parts and scenes were changed, dropped, or added as times changed and as players joined and left the company. Parts that started small were made larger as characters gained favor with the audience. It is impossible to believe that, in the “write it as we go along” world of Elizabethan theatre, there could have been a nobleman who created and revised all these plays, all in secret. 

William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote all of the plays we ascribe to him today, and undoubtedly more, including ones lost to time. He collaborated with his fellows, modified his work to fit the needs of the day, and made each work better with each iteration. To say otherwise is to ignore the mechanics of Elizabethan life, and ignore all the thousand details, born in the dales of Warwickshire and the forest of Arden, that are strewn throughout Shakespeare’s work, like breadcrumbs that lead us back to Stratford. 

k