What Fools These Mortals Be !

In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare was buried in the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, actors John Heminge and Henry Condell published a collection of his plays that came to be known as the First Folio. Their purpose, as they wrote in words that are significant to our story, was “only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare . . . .� Prefixed to that same volume was a poem by dramatist Ben Jonson, with its famous reference to the “Sweet Swan of Avon� as being “not of an age, but for all time!� Also in the First Folio was an engraving of Shakespeare that his friends presumably found to be an acceptable likeness.

We cite these facts as evidence that those who had worked closely with Shakespeare had no doubt about the authorship of the plays that they attributed to him. About this there seems to have been no contemporary dispute. Nowhere is there any indication that the attributed authorship of the First Folio prompted any hue and cry alleging fraud or plagiarism. In fact, and importantly, hundreds of years were to pass before any serious question was raised about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. By then, of course, anyone who had original knowledge was no longer available for comment.

The reluctance by some to accept Shakespeare as the creator of the Shakespearean canon continues to this day. Currently the doubters’ favored alternative author is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, a poet as well as a notorious tosspot and a rakehell. How do the anti-Shakespeareans support their claim for De Vere? By what seem to us to be essentially negative and inescapably snobbish arguments.

What they suggest in so many words is that Shakespeare was a bumpkin from a village in Warwickshire who could not possibly have had the quality of education (only four years in a grammar school) or the sophistication to produce the remarkable insights and sublime poetry of the plays. Moreover, they note, Shakespeare is believed never to have traveled outside England, and so could have no experience of the great world beyond. (“My library,� he wrote in “The Tempest,� “was dukedom large enough.�) In the elitist view of the 17th earl’s champions, only a nobleman and courtier could possibly have been the author.

The case for the earl was made the other day before a mock court presided over by three U.S. Supreme Court justices--William J. Brennan Jr., John Paul Stevens and Harry A. Blackmun. After due deliberation the earl lost, though several of the justices did suggest that if Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, it would be nice to think that De Vere did. This judicial courtesy notwithstanding, the view held by the overwhelming majority of scholars has again emerged unshaken. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have. Edward de Vere, as it happens, inconveniently died some years before the last of the Shakespearean plays appear to have been written. One must believe in many things to accept De Vere as the real Shakespeare, but only the truest of true believers are likely to embrace the notion of posthumous creativity.