Contested Will (11 page)

It may have been taken as a jest by knowing readers at the time – but excerpts were still being republished as fact as late as 1853.

It came as a considerable relief to Shakespeare's admirers when in the 1830s the ambitious young researcher John Payne Collier began publishing pamphlets outlining a series of biographical finds, drawn especially from a new and untapped source: the papers of Sir Thomas Egerton, a well-placed Elizabethan official who had served as Solicitor General as well as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, and then as Lord High Chancellor to James I. Collier had become friends with Egerton's descendant, Lord Francis Egerton, who then employed him to publish a catalogue of the ancestral holdings. Collier's first pamphlet,
New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare
(1835), offered twenty-one new documents related to Shakespeare's life, nine of them from this collection.

At long last, someone had discovered something having to do with Shakespeare's life in London. Collier's most exciting find was a certificate listing Shakespeare as a shareholder in Burbage's company at the Blackfriars Theatre as early as 1589. The problem of the ‘Lost Years' was half-solved – so much for the old canard, beloved even by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare had spent the late 1580s holding horses for gentlemen playgoers outside the theatre. Collier's discoveries also pulled back the veil on Shakespeare's final years in London. By then, another document revealed, Shakespeare's stake in the Blackfriars Theatre had
grown to over
£
1,400, a monumental sum. Another great find was a warrant from King James, dated January 1610, appointing Shakespeare and three others to train ‘a convenient number of children who shall be called the Children of her Majesties Revels' in the art of ‘playing Tragedies, Comedies &c.' As exciting as these documents were, they were also somewhat impersonal. The same could not be said for the letter in an elegant hand, signed H.S. – most likely the Earl of Southampton – asking that Egerton ‘be good to the poor players of the Blackfriars', and mentioning in passing ‘two of the chief of the company' – Burbage and Shakespeare – the latter ‘my especial friend, till of late an actor … and writer of some of our best English plays which as your Lordship knoweth were most singularly liked of Queen Elizabeth'. The letter also contains a lovely detail: Burbage is praised as ‘one who fitteth the action to the word and the word to the action most admirably' – clearly echoing
Hamlet
.

Collier worked rapidly, publishing the finds as fast as they came to hand, following up his first pamphlet with
New Particulars Regarding the Works of Shakespeare
in 1836 and three years later with
Further Particulars Regarding Shakespeare and His Works
. The former contained transcriptions of an eyewitness account of contemporary performances of
Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale
by the famous Elizabethan astrologer and physician Simon Forman. Collier also found a document confirming that
Othello
had been performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1602 (which overturned Malone's late dating of the play), a letter by fellow poet Samuel Daniel indirectly alluding to Shakespeare, and a tax record indicating that Shakespeare resided in Southwark as late as 1609. A workhorse, Collier even found the time to publish Henslowe's papers and
Diary
, discovering an allusion there to ‘Mr Shakespeare of the Globe' that Malone had overlooked.

Collier's many discoveries in the 1830s and 1840s provided a counterweight to a documentary base weighted too heavily toward Stratford and financial preoccupations. While Shakespeare's personal life remained a mystery, evidence of his
theatrical career, both early and late, as well as evidence of some of his more important relationships with fellow writers and actors, had been greatly enhanced. Almost overnight – and we will soon see why this proved disastrous – these findings found their way into what seemed like an endless stream of popular biographies of Shakespeare. Eager to claim credit, Collier decided to write the great Shakespeare biography of his day. In the early 1840s he offered a preview of this ‘Life' as part of a planned new edition of Shakespeare's works. This edition included even more recent discoveries made in the Stratford archives, including the notes of the Stratford Town Clerk, Thomas Greene, on Shakespeare's freehold of unenclosed fields in 1614, as well as the document showing that Shakespeare's household had hoarded malt in 1598, during a period of dearth in Warwickshire.

The 1830s and 1840s were boom years for historical and antiquarian societies committed to researching England's past. The Hakluyt Society began disseminating English travel narratives; the Parker Society, religious texts; the Camden Society and Percy Society literary ones. In 1840, Collier, along with twenty or so others, founded a Shakespeare Society, dedicated to ‘the purpose of collecting materials, or of circulating information, by which [Shakespeare] may be thoroughly understood and fully appreciated', drawing on materials ‘in private hands and among family papers, of the very existence of which the possessors are not at present aware'. Three of the leading members were also Collier's rivals as biographers of Shakespeare: Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps. All three knew how deeply they were indebted to Collier's finds, especially Halliwell-Phillipps, who chose as the frontispiece for his first biography,
The Life of William Shakespeare
, published in 1848, a facsimile of the letter found by Collier in which ‘H.S.' pays tribute to Shakespeare as his ‘especial friend'.

But it wasn't long before these competitors began to question some of Collier's discoveries. To charge someone with forgery was a sensitive business, and it wouldn't be easy proving the case
against so prominent a figure. Dyce was the first to do so in print in his
Memoir of Shakespeare
(1832). Knight expressed his scepticism a decade or so later in his
William Shakespere: A Biography
(1843). Halliwell-Phillipps chose to publish his
Observations on the Shaksperian Forgeries at Bridgewater House
privately, in 1853. For Halliwell-Phillipps, this was an especially delicate matter, as he himself had been accused of tampering with and then reselling manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge in his younger days – and even of stealing and disfiguring one of the two extant copies of the First Quarto of
Hamlet
.

By now the word was out. Collier was an incredibly skilled forger. How much had he faked? Some of his finds, such as Forman's playgoing accounts, were without question genuine. Yet Collier had handled virtually every key document in Stratford as well as London and Dulwich, indeed had got to many of them first, making it next to impossible to determine whether he had added materials to otherwise genuine documents (and, in fact, he had). Every Collier discovery had to be suspected – and scholars would spend decades going over every biographical claim he had advanced. As a rule of thumb, the claims that Collier made regarding Shakespeare of Stratford, or Shakespeare's business transactions, were true; those having to do with Blackfriars, or Southampton, or the Globe, or in fact anything to do with Shakespeare's creative life were fabricated, especially all that rubbish about Shakespeare's early affiliation with Blackfriars, yet one more effort to satisfy the bottomless need to provide the evidence, now all but lost, of Shakespeare's early years and professional associations. The rest – and there are many other finds – are genuine. Collier had discovered more documents about Shakespeare than anyone before or since; they just weren't the ones he had hoped to find. Those, he made up.

Collier hadn't left much to discover, and most of the remaining scraps were just what researchers least hoped to find. Joseph Hunter learned that Shakespeare defaulted in 1598 on taxes of thirteen shillings four pence, while Halliwell-Phillipps discovered
that Shakespeare had taken the apothecary Philip Rogers to court in 1604 for repayment of twenty bushels of malt as well as a small sum. Apparently, Rogers, who had many mouths to feed and was often in debt, had only paid back six shillings on a bill of
£
2.

Much was made of Shakespeare's dealings in malt, revealing how little Victorians understood about daily life in late sixteenth-century Warwickshire. When viewed through a nineteenth-entury lens, Shakespeare's financial activities made him appear to be a rapacious businessman. The hoarding of malt is a particularly good example of what's lost when actions are severed from their cultural contexts. For in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town's principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible. Shakespeare's holdings were about average; a dozen men, including the local schoolmaster, had stored more. When local officials protested at restrictions made on their hoarding malt, they explained that ‘our town hath no other special trade, having thereby only time beyond man's memory lived by exercising the same, our houses fitted to no other use, many servants among us hired only to that purpose'. Their defence was self-serving, but it was also true. In addition, it's likely that a good many of the local records concerning Shakespeare's business activities in Stratford were actually the affair of his wife, Anne Hathaway, who would have been responsible (though as her husband, Shakespeare would have been officially involved in cases going to court). This is not to exonerate the Shakespeares for hoarding malt while impoverished Warwickshire neighbours starved. It is to say that biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment. If Shakespeare was a ‘grain merchant', as some now began to call him, what man or woman from the middling classes in Stratford wasn't?

Halliwell-Phillipps, more than any of his predecessors, had a knack for finding uninspiring facts about Shakespeare's business dealings, including an assignment of an interest in a lease of tithes from Ralph Huband to Shakespeare in 1605, records of
Shakespeare's involvement in land enclosure in Welcombe in 1614, and a pair of letters by Stratford neighbours that mentioned Shakespeare in connection with other financial dealings. Things hit rock bottom when Halliwell-Phillipps came upon yet another lawsuit, brought by a William Shakespeare in 1600 in the Court of the Queen's Bench against John Clayton; he had lent Clayton
£
7 in May 1592 and now wanted his money back.

Scholars still can't agree whether this was our Shakespeare and not another who sued Clayton; whether or not it was, it fitted the pattern of a tight-fisted Shylock all too well. There would be a few more dramatic discoveries made in the early twentieth century – including information about Shakespeare's life in a Huguenot household on Silver Street in London in the early years of the seventeenth century (a story wonderfully told in Charles Nicholl's
The Lodger
) – but as matters stood in the 1850s, a biography so heavily weighted to financial dealings profoundly influenced how Shakespeare's life was imagined. Halliwell-Phillipps conceded as much in the most influential biography of the age: ‘It must be admitted that nothing whatever has yet presented itself, which discloses those finer traits of thought and action we are sure must have pervaded the author of
Lear
and
Hamlet
in his communication with the more cultivated of his contemporaries.' In the absence of such disclosures, it was best to accept what the evidence does confirm, that Shakespeare was ‘a prudent man of the world, actively engaged in the promotion of his fortune, and intent on the foundation and preservation to his posterity of the estates he had won by his writings'.

Halliwell-Phillipps knew how hard this would be to swallow, how it would ‘tend to destroy the finely drawn appreciation of Shakespeare's life, which owes its existence to the fiction of later days'. But he chose not to emphasise that all we could
expect
to find at this late date were legal records, rather than more personal ones, so that too much weight should not be placed on quite partial evidence. Unlike his fellow biographers, Halliwell-Phillipps wasn't in the least uncomfortable with his portrayal of his subject
as preoccupied with money; that was precisely how he himself experienced the world of the professional writer, and it's telling that late in life he compiled a list of ways in which he was just like Shakespeare. Once again, biography and autobiography were not easily untangled.

Halliwell-Phillipps's verdict was that no doubt ‘can exist in the mind of any impartial critic, that the great dramatist most carefully attended to his worldly interests; and confirmations of this opinion may be produced from numerous early sources'. Alexander Dyce put matters even more bluntly in his biography: ‘from his earliest days' Shakespeare's ‘grand object' was ‘the acquisition of a fortune which was to enable him eventually to settle himself as a gentleman in Stratford'. By 1857, when Dyce wrote these words, an unbearable tension had developed between Shakespeare the poet and Shakespeare the businessman; between the London playwright and the Stratford haggler; between Shakespeare as Prospero and Shakespeare as Shylock; between the kind of man revealed in the autobiographical poems and plays, and the one revealed in tax, court and real-estate records; between a deified Shakespeare and a depressingly mundane one. Surely he was either one or the other. Less than a century had passed since Dr Johnson, who would have found the very idea of having to choose between these alternatives ludicrous, had said that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' The writing life may not have changed much, but assumptions about it certainly had.

A tipping point had been reached; it was only a matter of time before someone would come along and suggest that we were dealing not with one man, but two. An essay called ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare?' appeared in 1852 in
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
. Surveying the field, its anonymous author acknowledged the obvious: ‘Is it more difficult to suppose that Shakespeare was not the author of the poetry ascribed to him, than to account for the fact that there is nothing in the recorded or traditionary life of Shakespeare which in any way connects the poet with the man?'
The biographical facts reveal only a ‘cautious calculating man careless of fame and intent only on money-making', while the ‘unsurpassed brilliancy of the writer throws not one single spark to make noticeable the quiet uniform mediocrity of the man'. Nothing connects this Shakespeare to
Hamlet
‘except the simple fact of his selling the poems and realizing the proceeds, and their being afterwards published with his name attached'. We are left, the anonymous author concludes, with equally unhappy alternatives: either Shakespeare employed a poet who wrote the plays for him, or the plays were miraculously conceived, with Shakespeare resorting to a cave to receive by ‘divine afflatus' the sacred text.