Contested Will (38 page)

More of Jonson's unguarded comments survive in the notes found after his death, edited and published in 1641 as
Timber, Or Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter
. Jonson here recalls the disagreement he had, decades earlier, with members of Shakespeare's company who thought it praiseworthy that Shakespeare never revised:

An old man now, writing long after Shakespeare's death, Jonson wants to set the record straight; he has nothing to lose and there's no point in either holding back unspoken praise or taking secret grievances to the grave. It's as generous as anything Jonson ever wrote, notwithstanding the final qualification:

Jonson concludes with praise and blame mixed in equal measure, once again remembering those old times and the differences in their styles and sensibilities:

I find it difficult to read these recollections and imagine how anyone could believe that Jonson was a double-dealer and somehow put up to writing this, his tribute intended to further a conspiracy to delude the world into thinking that Shakespeare had written the plays.

Sceptics frequently point to what they see as the suspiciously long lapse of seven years between Shakespeare's death in 1616 and the belated appearance of the First Folio in 1623. It confirms for them that nobody took any notice of Shakespeare of Stratford's death since he had nothing to do with the authorship of the plays. What they overlook is that just three years after his death a set of Shakespeare's selected plays, ten in all – including tragedies, comedies and histories – was already for sale in London, issued by a pair of enterprising London publishers, Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard. These volumes could be purchased individually or as a set, and we know that some discriminating buyers bought all ten and had them bound together as a kind of collected works. It was a legitimate enterprise, since Pavier by this time owned or had obtained the copyright to five of the ten plays, and he and Jaggard may have believed, or persuaded themselves, that the rights to other plays were derelict. By this time a dozen or so different publishers could claim ownership of one or another of the eighteen plays by Shakespeare that had already been published – and before a more ambitious
collection could be published, a syndicate would have to be formed that included them all, a time-consuming business. Pavier and Jaggard's collection may well have been intended to whet the appetite for a more comprehensive edition of Shakespeare's works, toward which end Jaggard was already working. Alternatively, it may have spurred members of the King's Men to produce such a volume. In either case, in 1619 the playing company asked the Lord Chamberlain to order the Stationers' Company to put a stop to the publication of any more of Shakespeare's plays – or as they saw it, their plays. This request may have been intended to block other publishers, for they may already have joined forces with Pavier and Jaggard (and would subsequently use Pavier's quartos and Jaggard's press in producing the 1623 Folio). Shakespeareans are still a bit mystified by the motives behind the Pavier quartos. Whatever led to their publication, it's obvious that surprisingly little time elapsed from news of Shakespeare's death to determined efforts to see his collected plays into print.

In addition to the thirty-six plays, the 1623 Folio contained a woodcut of Shakespeare, dressed in a very expensive doublet. According to Jonson, the portrait was a likeness. He added that it was a shame that the artist couldn't draw Shakespeare's wit as accurately:

The Folio also included memorial verses, most famously Jonson's own long poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr William Shakespeare, and what He Hath Left Us'. Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges and ‘I.M.' (probably James Mabbe) contributed poems as well. In his poem, Jonson links Shakespeare to his place of birth, addressing him as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon', while Digges explicitly identifies the man who wrote the plays
with the one who lies buried in Stratford:

The monument Digges mentions was already erected by 1623. If he hadn't visited it himself, he may have heard about it from the players, for in 1622, members of the King's Men were paid
not
to perform in Stratford-upon-Avon when passing through Shakespeare's birthplace while touring. They must have known that the Puritan-leaning town had long been inhospitable to players; but they nonetheless paid Stratford-upon-Avon a visit, perhaps to pay their respects at the gravestone and monument of the man who had made their fortune.

After completing most of the research for this chapter, I came across one additional bit of evidence. Had I included every stray comment about Shakespeare made by other writers at the time, this chapter would have swelled to twice its size. But I thought I'd add one more, not only because it shows that evidence confirming Shakespeare's authorship continues to be discovered, but also because it underscores that no matter how many documents turn up, there will always be those who continue to interpret them in light of an unprovable and fantastic hoax.

William Camden's 1590 edition of
Britannia
, written in Latin, contains a brief description of Stratford-upon-Avon. Camden describes (here rendered into English) how the town ‘owes all of its reputation to its two foster sons, John of Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, the magistrate of London who began the stone bridge over the Avon supported by fourteen arches, not without very great expense'. There's a copy of this book in the Huntington Library that was owned by Richard Hunt. Hunt, born around 1596
and educated at Oxford, went on to become vicar in Bishop's Itchington, ten miles or so east of Stratford-upon-Avon. In this copy a reader, in all probability Hunt himself, had come across that passage and added, in Latin, next to the words about Stratford's most famous sons: ‘
et Gulielmo Shakespear Roscio planè nostro
' (‘and to William Shakespeare, truly our Roscius'). Roscius was a widely admired Roman actor who achieved great fame and amassed a considerable fortune before retiring from the stage. To compare someone to Roscius in Shakespeare's day – as Thomas Nashe had praised Edward Alleyn of the Admiral's Men in the 1590s – was to acknowledge that he was a star of the stage.

The marginalia were discovered by Paul Altrocchi. But for Altrocchi, a committed Oxfordian, they only served to confirm, rather than refute, the idea that someone other than Shakespeare had written the plays:

Debating such a conclusion is pointless, given the radically different assumptions governing how this document ought to be read.

Virtually every piece of evidence offered by Shakespeare's fellow writers has been similarly explained away. Sceptics now produce a handy chart, which first appeared in Diana Price's
Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography
, that migrates from book to book, and from arguments for one new candidate for the authorship of the plays to another, denying that any literary evidence exists for Shakespeare's authorship. It has taken on iconic status – now known simply by the acronym CLPE, ‘Chart of Literary Paper Evidence'. Price and her followers define authorship in such a way that Shakespeare is always narrowly excluded, if need be on
semantic grounds. According to the CLPE, there's no evidence of Shakespeare having had a
direct relationship
with a patron, though he wore the livery of the Lord Chamberlain, served King James both as a King's Man and as a Groom of the Chamber, and directly addressed a patron, the Earl of Southampton, in the letters prefacing both
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
. Price's CLPE also insists that Shakespeare had no ‘Notice
at death
as
a writer
'. I'm not sure how those who wrote memorial tributes to him, or paid for or carved his monument, or laboured to create the Pavier editions or the First Folio, might feel about that. But according to the CLPE, time had apparently expired before all these memorial efforts were realised. And though Price knows that Shakespeare was a shareholder and therefore not paid directly for each play by his playing company (and knows about the
imprese
payment as well), her CLPE assures us that there is no evidence of his ‘having been paid to write'. Readers are invited to make up their own minds.

I was in London on 5 November 2008, Guy Fawkes Day, that time-honoured celebration of King James's miraculous escape from a terrorist plot. There had been fireworks exploding in the skies of London all week, a legacy of four hundred years of bonfires and bells, though I wondered how much those setting off these explosives knew about what they were commemorating. I thought I'd pay my own respects to King James more quietly by viewing his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. I passed through the Tudor galleries, rich in portraits of Elizabeth I and her courtiers, but became confused when I entered the next gallery and couldn't find the familiar images of James and his courtiers, where they had long been displayed. I walked around in circles before finally asking a guard to direct me to the Jacobean portraits. He explained that they were temporarily in storage, their place now taken up by ‘Shakespeare and His Circle'. The King's Men
without the king felt a bit like
Hamlet
without the prince.

Discouraged, I headed to Foyles, that wonderful bookshop, in search of recent books about King James – also in vain; only one was in stock. I couldn't understand why historians, commercial publishers and booksellers had largely given up on someone who ruled in England for twenty-two years (after having reigned in Scotland for thirty-six). Adjoining shelves sagged under the weight of books about the Tudors, especially Queen Elizabeth. It was the same everywhere I turned: there was a popular television series on ‘The Tudors' and any number of lavish films I could rent about Elizabeth – but not one sequel on her royal successor (the very subject, I later learned, of Ronald Hutton's witty essay ‘Why Don't the Stuarts Get Filmed?').

Shakespeare in Love
is one of the most delightful movies ever made about Shakespeare. In one of its best scenes we get to watch Queen Elizabeth, played by Judi Dench, sitting in the galleries at the outdoor playhouse at a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
, and telling Shakespeare afterwards to come by the palace, ‘where we will speak some more'. Imagine replacing her in this scene with, say, Simon Russell Beale in the role of King James. It wouldn't work. Though almost half of his creative life was spent as a King's Man, Shakespeare has for the longest time been powerfully and irrevocably linked with Queen Elizabeth, so much so that we seem to have forgotten Ben Jonson's even-handed recollection of how Shakespeare's plays ‘so did take Eliza, and our James!'

Things have been this way since at least the early eighteenth century, when writers began inventing an intimacy between playwright and queen that had no documentary foundation. In 1702, John Dennis claimed that
The Merry Wives of Windsor
‘was written at her command'. A few years later, Nicholas Rowe added that Elizabeth ‘without doubt gave him many gracious marks of her favour'. The last time anyone tried to establish a direct connection between Shakespeare and his other monarch was 1709, when Bernard Lintott wrote that ‘King James the First was pleased with his own hand to write an amicable letter to Mr Shakespeare;
which letter, though now lost, remained long in the hands of Sir William D'Avenant, as a credible person now living can testify.' No such letter has survived and it's unlikely that it ever existed (D'Avenant also bragged that he was Shakespeare's illegitimate son). By the end of the eighteenth century, letters from James to Shakespeare were long forgotten; as the Ireland forgeries confirm, those from Elizabeth now captured the popular imagination. When it has been an article of faith for so long that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan writer, who can blame the Oxfordians for succumbing to the widespread conviction that Shakespeare's plays were the creations of a Tudor playwright and restrict their story almost entirely to life under Elizabeth?