The Cleveland Plain Dealer does not grant permission to reprint articles in their entirety on web sites, so the following is the author’s response (indented) to specific points raised in the review by Marianne Evett on Monday, December 18, 2000:

The reviewer singles out the comparative analysis of Literary Paper Trails as the “new evidence” claimed in my title, and reports that according to my book, “only Shakespeare fails the test.”

The comparative analysis of evidence supporting the literary biographies for Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries is one of five major new arguments; all are summarized on the home page. None of the other new arguments was noticed by this reviewer.

The reviewer suggests that the “sheer volume of detail and scholarly superstructure may convince some readers” but that the book is “slow going.”

This reviewer has grudgingly acknowledged the scholarship supporting my arguments. I would agree that some of the book, especially chapters 4-7 and parts of chapter 11, can be “slow going,” but that is the fairly predictable result of an analysis that attempts to be comprehensive. My decision to examine all the principal documentation for, and allusions to, Shakespeare necessarily requires in-depth analyses of historical records, prose, and verse, and a consideration of what previous biographers and historians have concluded from that evidence. The reviewer admitted that my handling of the material was “clear,” but criticized my examination in minute detail of “works no longer very accessible to the general reader.” This reviewer seems to be again (inadvertently) complimenting my research, although I hasten to point out that nearly all of the sources listed in my bibliography were accessed at The Cleveland Public Library.

The reviewer claims that many of my arguments are seriously flawed. She acknowledges that there are indeed “gaps in the historical records,” but asserts that “the explanations for those gaps are at least as plausible on the positive side as those Price offers on the negative.”

My book challenges the traditional explanations for the “gaps in the historical records.” It is up to the reader to decide whether the unorthodox narrative that I re-construct for Shakespeare is more plausible.

The reviewer objects to my criteria of rejecting hearsay and posthumous evidence in my analysis, because it results in “a very narrow and subjective interpretation of contemporary references.” The reviewer particularly objects to the disqualification of Shakespeare’s Stratford monument and inscription, and the testimony in the First Folio as evidence of Shakespeare’s career as a writer.

This reviewer implies that I summarily dismiss the testimony in the First Folio. My analysis of this testimony comprises all of chapter 10 and part of chapter 11. The reviewer implies that I likewise summarily dismiss the matter of Shakespeare’s tomb and inscription, a subject with which chapter 9 is exclusively concerned.

The disqualification, on the basis of dates, of documentation and testimony as evidence of a literary career is applied rigorously to all the writers in the comparative analysis. Shakespeare is the only individual for whom historians must rely on posthumous evidence (in the First Folio) to make their case for a career as a writer. Every other writer meets the criteria quite easily. Similarly, biographers rely on ambiguous or impersonal evidence to make their case for the authorship attribution to Shakespeare, and again, Shakespeare is the only writer for whom this stretch is necessary. The reviewer is apparently content to give equal weight to hearsay. I rather agree instead with Prof. Stanley Wells, who wrote: “Oral tradition is notoriously unreliable, but cannot be definitely disproved, while Schoenbaum may be right to dismiss it.… What is surely clear is that it belongs to a different category of evidence from that which can be documentarily supported” (“Shakespeare’s Lives: 1991-1994” in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, p. 19). In addition, as I point out in various places in the book, praise of Shakespeare as a great writer is not necessarily identification of the man from Stratford as that writer. If I postulate that “Shakespeare” was recognized as a pen name by Elizabethan critics, then a reference by a critic to “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” is good evidence that the critic thought that Shakespeare, whoever he was, wrote good poetry. But the allusion can refer to Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, or to the name on a title page that was recognized as representing some other author. One cannot draw personal conclusions from impersonal evidence without corroborating documentation. It is interesting that I was impressed with this distinction when studying the biographical records of other writers. In most cases, historians have been careful to conclude only as much as the evidence permits. It is in the Shakespearean biography that I see historians breaking their own rules in order to support the traditional attribution.

At the risk of becoming tedious, I would quote an eminent historian and biographer, Mark Eccles, who contributed an article to The Huntington Library Quarterly entitled “A Biographical Dictionary of Elizabethan Authors” in 1942, when he was engaged in a research project to supersede the Dictionary of National Biography. He considered a new Dictionary “desirable in three respects: thoroughness in searching for evidence, accuracy in presenting evidence, and determination to go to first-hand sources wherever possible instead of repeating information at secondhand” (282). He added that a biography “must also go back to the original evidence for every statement it makes, instead of resting content with information taken from secondary sources” (284). My own research plan for Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography attempted to follow these guidelines. Eccles advised any biographer to test every single link in the chain of evidence, and even cautioned the researcher to “be sure that the person mentioned [in print] is the author and not someone else bearing the name” (301). It is discouraging to find a reviewer criticizing me for respecting such standards.

This reviewer criticized me for not being ” the dispassionate researcher” I claim to be. She faults me for arguing that the author was “an aristocrat, well-read, well-traveled, conversant with the law and other languages,” whereas I describe Shakespeare of Stratford as “an uneducated, greedy entrepreneur and moneylender, ready to take the chance when some nobleman asks him to be the front man for getting his plays on the stage.”

I do argue that Shakespeare was numerate and had an incomplete grammar school education from which he emerged as an uncultured but street-smart opportunist. His activities as an entrepreneur and moneylender are documented with hard evidence, and his greedy attitude is likewise supported by both documentary evidence and allusions. In countering the traditional portrayal of Shakespeare as “sweet,” “gentle,” and self-effacing, I show precisely how orthodox biographers have manipulated the evidence to manufacture their artificial construct. I consider such manipulation of evidence indicative of orthodoxy’s bias, not mine.

She further takes exception to my argument that “noblemen, because of their rank, were permitted neither to publish poetry nor to dabble in the theater.” This reviewer faults me for “faulty logic and lack of knowledge of the broader social and theatrical milieu of the time [which] undermine her argument,” and asserts that “nobles were not prohibited from printing, for example, or from being known as playwrights. A list of them is available.”

The reviewer mis-stated my position. I did not argue that aristocrats were “prohibited” from printing. Of course they were free to print from a legal standpoint. My argument is that they chose not to publish certain genres because of a socially imposed “stigma of print.” Aristocrats did not wish to be perceived as interested in commercial profit, which was the province of the commercial class. This stigma of print applied to frivolous or commercial writing, specifically poetry and plays for the public stage. The stigma of print did not affect publication of pious or didactic works, learned translations, or the like. Aristocrats avoided being perceived as writing for public consumption by circulating their “toys” or “trifles” in manuscript to their circle of friends or associates, rather than publishing. These distinctions and supporting evidence are covered in chapter 12. It’s unfortunate that this reviewer did not specify which “list” of published aristocrats she has in mind, but I would guess that any of those whom she might name were either victims of surreptitious (i.e., unauthorized) publication, or were authors of “closet dramas,” not intended to be performed, and more properly categorized as learned translations or political treatises, genres that were considered more respectable.

The reviewer faults me for using “a double standard for evidence. It’s OK if it does not favor Shakespeare, suspect if it does.”

Any serious analysis requires a testing of evidence to determine what can be safely concluded. I do not reject any evidence, favorable or otherwise, left behind by Shakespeare. On the contrary, I accept all of it, including some evidence ignored or edited by traditional biographers. My book describes how I tested the evidence and what I concluded from it. In that process, I reject many of traditional conclusions, and provide reasons for that rejection as well as for my alternatives. That’s not applying a double standard. That’s applying a consistent standard and arriving at a different conclusion.

The reviewer argues that “Shakespeare’s plays do not show more classical learning than could be got from an Elizabethan grammar school education. The view of court life in the plays is not that of an insider. As for travel, any decent writer can acquire enough information secondhand to make a setting sound authentic (and Shakespeare gets some details about Europe quite wrong).”

These objections are unsupported assertions, and are standard issue in traditional biographies. I challenge each of those assertions with sustained evidence and argument.

The reviewer concludes by claiming that “there is not space here to go into disproving all the points on which Price founds her case, but Shakespeare, in Fact by Irvin Leigh Matus (Continuum, 1994) and the website (dead link) run by David Kathman and Terry Clark refute each of them.”

These closing remarks refer the reader to two sources, which tell me that the reviewer is not herself well-read on the subject of Shakespeare’s biography. Matus’s book is largely a refutation of the case as argued by Oxfordians, and those sections in his book are, for the most part, irrelevant to my case. However, Matus does raise many good questions about anti-Stratfordian arguments; some I agree with, some not. (I take issue with him in chapter 5.) His book, which was published six years ago, did not anticipate the new arguments I present in mine, so it cannot be useful in refuting the new case that I’ve made. The Shakespeare Authorship web site contains much useful information and provides excellent links to other sites, but as of the date of this review, Mssrs. Kathman and Ross had not yet posted any specific criticisms of my book. So it is unreasonable for the reviewer to suggest that everything in my book is refuted by them.

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Deconstructing the Stratford Man, November 29, 2000
(see also the reader’s follow-up from January 18, 2001)

Reviewer: Edward Thomas Veal from Chicago, Illinois USA

Despite the absence of the “new evidence” promised by its subtitle, this book can claim to apply a new method to the “controversy” over who wrote Shakespeare’s works.

Among the new evidence and new arguments presented in this book are:

1. Comparative analysis of literary papers trails for Shakespeare and his contemporaries (chapter 8, appendix);
2. Analysis of theatrical documentation showing that Shakespeare was a theatrical financier and business agent (pp. 104-109);
3. Introduction of Sir William Dugdale’s drawing, ca. 1634, of Shakespeare’s funerary monument (pp. 154-158);
4. Comparative analysis and interpretation of Groatsworth of Wit and Vertue’s Commonwealth (pp. 54-56); and 
5. Analysis of Jonson’s “De Shakespeare Nostrati” and the significance of Jonson’s classical source (pp. 196-209). There are several other “nuggets” throughout the book that I have not found in any other Shakespearean biography.

Diana Price uses the tools of modern literary theory to deconstruct contemporary references to Shakespeare.

My book is a re-construction, rather than a deconstruction, of the biography of Shakespeare, based on the evidence. Specifically, it is a challenge to the documentary biography of Shakespeare, not to literary theories about Shakespeare. I have taken into account the evidence used by biographers (principally Schoenbaum, Chambers, Honigmann, Bentley, Lewis, Lee, Honan, Kay, Chute, and Bradbrook), analyzed how they have used or considered evidence, and evaluated their reasons and conclusions. When I take issue with their reasoning or with their conclusions, I offer alternatives and my own reasoning. My book is not an exercise in, nor dependent upon any sort of literary theory. 

On the surface, this evidence straightforwardly attributes the famous plays and poems to an actor from Stratford-on-Avon.

This is the very premise that I challenge throughout the book. To pre-suppose that this evidence of attribution is “straightforward” is to employ circular reasoning.

Miss Price will have none of that. She searches for ambiguity and coded meanings, predictably finds them, and thus feels justified in substituting an implausible scenario, supported by no positive evidence at all, for Shakespeare’s orthodox biography.

If the reviewer does not find any ambiguities in places where I do, that is his interpretation. However, he is ignoring the numerous orthodox critics whom I cite, both Shakespearean and Jonsonian, who have likewise found ambiguities in the allusions.

Among the positive evidence that I cite to support the unorthodox Shakespeare is his prominent position in the theatrical documentation, the passage from Vertue’s Commonwealth reinforcing my interpretation of Groatsworth of Wit, and the documentary records of Shakespeare bearing on and reinforcing his financial interests and skills (such as the Quiney letter, Shakespeare’s will, his various real estate investments, etc.) The comparative analysis of literary paper trails shows the absence of evidence supporting the statement “Shakespeare was a writer.”

Her thesis, in brief, is that William “Shakspere” of Stratford was an actor, theatrical investor and moneylender - but not a writer. Among his activities were arranging the printing of, and taking credit for, other men’s plays. One of his victims was an anonymous nobleman, a supplier of scripts to the acting company with which Shakspere was associated. This author - just by coincidence - had adopted “William Shakespeare” as a pen name for his published poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”.

I do not argue that the author “just by coincidence” adopted “William Shakespeare as a pen name. I outline several scenarios and conditions, among which I propose is to be found the point of intersection between the name “William Shakespeare” as representing an unnamed aristocratic author in print, and the name of “William Shakespeare,” the man from Stratford. In particular, the allusions to “Battillus” and the precedent in the case of Terence, bears on the “coincidence” of the pseudonym and the name of the man from Stratford.

When his pseudonym’s namesake expropriated his works, he could not complain, because identification as a writer for the popular stage would have led to social stigmatization. The literary world was conscious of the imposture, however, and Miss Price finds the truth hidden in many a coded epigram, including the dedicatory poems to the First Folio.

For readers who are familiar only with the unfortunate theories about Great Cryptograms and other mystical ciphers proposed by some anti-Stratfordians, the above criticism may set off alarm bells. I do not argue that there are “codes” waiting only for a decoder ring to reveal their secrets. Rather, I argue that ambiguity is present in the prefatory material in the First Folio, and I support that argument with citations from numerous Jonsonian critics. Nor do I claim to “find the truth,” since that implies that I have solved the entire mystery and identified who wrote the works of Shakespeare. I claim to find sufficient ambiguity to cast doubt on the traditional attribution. I demonstrate that the First Folio material is not the straightforward testimony it is purported to be in traditional biography, and further demonstrate that because it is replete with ambiguous statements, its evidentiary value as “proof” of Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship is questionable. I also show that allusions to Shakespeare collectively reflect ambiguity, whereas allusions to other writers of the day are often straightforward.

Like many creators of alternative Shakespeares, Miss Price seems to bear a grudge against the claimant from Stratford.

I have no grudge against Shakespeare, but his contemporaries did, and I report that without apology. Much of the evidence for Shakespeare is unflattering (including Groatsworth, the 1598 grain hoarding record, the warrant for arrest with Langley, the last will, the notes concerning his position regarding the Welcombe enclosures). It is interesting that this reviewer did not mention the passages in my book where I expose outright bias or distortion in the orthodox biographer’s treatment of evidence.

Her account of his career is jaundiced to a high degree, and she sees him as the figure behind practically every Elizabethan lampoon of braggart actors, plagiarizing poets or unscrupulous impresarios.

Nearly every satire or lampoon in which I identify Shakespeare as the target has been identified by orthodox scholars. I cite them when I introduce the satires.

“Facts” collected from such caricatures form much of the basis of her reconstruction of “Shakspere’s” life, though the probability that they actually allude to him is generally small. For example, she is confident that the buffoon Sogliardo in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man Out of His Humour” is a hit on Shakspere. She does not note that the play was written for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, of which the Stratford man was a principal shareholder. One somehow doubts that Shakspere was so tolerant as to finance a parody of himself.

The Sogliardo lampoon is not a particularly good example of an improbable satire of Shakespeare. It was first noticed as a “hit’ at Shakespeare by orthodox scholars and is cited by many biographers. Using that identification as a starting point, I extended the analysis.

To animus is joined partial scholarship. The author has read extensively but declines to confront evidence or analysis inconsistent with her views. To take a few instances:

The “stigma of print” is vital to her case, as it furnishes her sole explanation of why not only the noble author, but also every other contemporary, failed to unmask “Shakspere” as a fraud. In fact, this stigma was supposedly so powerful that the editors of the First Folio kept up the pretense after both Shakspere and the real playwright (who, Miss Price believes, died before 1609) were gone from the world.

But was there any such stigma? Steven May, the leading authority on the literary works of Tudor courtiers, lambasted the theory in “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ’Stigma of Print’” (Renaissance Papers, 1980). Miss Price takes no notice of this article. Conceivably she overlooked it, but her bibliography does list Professor May’s book “The Elizabethan Courtier Poets”, which contains ample evidence that aristocrats of the era had no qualms about seeing their literary works, including their plays, in print under their own names.

I have read Prof. May’s article, and it has been on David Kathman’s Shakespeare Authorship Web page for some time. I do not view Prof. May’s article on this subject as the final word, nor do I agree with it entirely. Nor do the authorities whom I cite concerning the conception of a “stigma of print.”

More to the point, the evidence that I cite in support of a “stigma of print” is, in my view, sufficiently strong as to leave the reader with no doubt that just such a social convention existed as an effective restraint in Shakespeare’s day. I would question Prof. May’s conclusion specifically on two counts. One, the very evidence that he cites to demonstrate how the “myth of the stigma of print” was first postulated is, in my view, evidence proving, not disproving, the “stigma of print.” (Among that evidence is the testimony found in The Arte of English Poesie, which I also cite.) Second, while May argues that there was more of a “stigma of verse” than a “stigma of print,” I would respond by suggesting that he does not sufficiently distinguish between genres, in particular the genres of poetry (considered “literary trifles”) and plays written for the commercial stage, as distinct from the more serious, pious, or didactic works and translations, which were published with less restraint and/or less apology by the upper classes. Again, please refer to the works by Arthur Marotti and Richard Helgerson (see my fn. p 218).

Miss Price thinks that the real Shakespeare was dead by 1609, because the publisher’s dedication to the Sonnets refers to “our ever-living poet”. She cites Don Foster’s article, “Master W.H., R.I.P.”, to prove that the adjective “ever-living” was not customarily applied to people who were still alive. She does not cite the article’s conclusion: that “ever-living” is applied most frequently to God, the “ever-living poet” Who is asked to bless the (living) sonneteer.

The reviewer has proposed an alternative reading to the dedication to the Sonnets. I have proposed mine.

Miss Price derides the notion that Shakespeare could have acquired classical and literary knowledge through private reading. Yet Ben Jonson did precisely that. Jonson’s works are vastly more erudite than Shakespeare’s, but his formal education did not go beyond a few years of grammar school.

Historians are able to trace at least part of Jonson’s education through his two explicit tributes to his mentor, William Camden. Jonson received an honorary degree from Oxford University noting that he was “happily versed in all humane literature” (Riggs, 262). For Shakespeare, there are no comparable records.

Moreover, Jonson pursued his independent studies in the face of dire poverty, whereas Shakespeare of Stratford appears always to have been at least modestly affluent (besides which, a family friend was one of London’s most important booksellers). The facts about Jonson’s self-education are set forth in a book cited several times by Miss Price in other contexts (David Riggs, “Ben Jonson: A Life”, pp. 57-58).

This criticism only underscores my point. If Shakespeare had the means and the access to educational and cultural opportunities, why aren’t there any paper trails to trace his progress as a developing writer, as we can trace Jonson’s? This reviewer hardly mentioned the argument in my book that I consider the strongest: the comparative analysis of evidence supporting the literary biographies of Shakespeare and two dozen of his contemporaries. I found personal literary paper trails for everyone except Shakespeare.

To buttress her contention that Shakespeare left no “literary paper trail”, Miss Price states flatly that no manuscripts in his hand survive. As a student of Elizabethan literature, she is surely aware of the famous “Sir Thomas More” manuscript, a portion of which is widely believed to be Shakespeare’s autograph. That belief may, of course, be mistaken, but it should be refuted with arguments rather than silence.

The reviewer must have missed my reference (p. 127, also listed in the index) to the possibility that Hand D in Sir Thomas More is that of Shakespeare.

The reviewer, in introducing the pages from Sir Thomas More as possibly being in Shakespeare’s hand, tacitly acknowledges the deficiency of personal literary paper trails in Shakespeare’s traditional biography. As the reviewer seems to be aware, the evidence for Shakespeare’s as “Hand D” in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More is inconclusive. I note in passing that Anthony Holden identified -- without qualification -- the facsimile of a page of Sir Thomas More as the only fragment of a manuscript in Shakespeare’s handwriting ( William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius. A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1999).

Any reader who is impressed by Miss Price’s facade of scholarship should bear omissions like these in mind. Consciously or not, she has fashioned a brief for a preconceived opinion, not a fair-minded evaluation of facts and circumstances. She is less incoherent than Charlton Ogburn, Jr., and less bizarrely speculative (but also less entertaining) than Joseph Sobran, but her case against the Stratford man, like theirs, amounts to nothing more substantial than bile and overheated air.

The Review of English Studies (RES) occasionally recommends previously published articles in their “Instructions to Authors” as a model to follow in terms of Style. The RES has cited my article (“Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument,” May 1997) several times in such “Instructions.” I expect if the editors of this highly respected journal considered my article merely a “facade of scholarship,” they would not have accepted it in the first place, much less recommended it to prospective contributors.

Finally, I should be grateful if the reviewer would direct my attention to the particular pages on which he finds “bile and overheated air,” since he did not specify which passages gave offense.

Following is the AUTHOR’S RESPONSE (indented) to the same reader’s review (PART 2) posted on Amazon.com (www.amazon.com.)

PART 2. A Correction, January 18, 2001

Reviewer: Edward Thomas Veal from Chicago, Illinois USA

Diana Price has complained on her website that the last bullet point in my earlier review ignored her “reference (p. 127, also listed in the index) to the possibility that Hand D in Sir Thomas More is that of Shakespeare”. Though my oversight was inadvertent, she is correct. By way of atonement, I reproduce in its entirety what “Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography” says about Sir Thomas More and Hand D:

The poor quality of Shakspere’s penmanship is as suspicious as is the paucity of extant handwriting for a man who supposedly lived by the pen, and scholars continue to search for more specimens. Some have pored over manuscript pages of the play Sir Thomas More, hoping to find Shakspere’s handwriting in it. Yet there remain only six inconsistent, blotchy signatures against which to make any comparisons. At best, the six signatures support the conclusion that Shakspere could sign or at least scrawl his name, but they do not support the conclusion that he was a professional writer.

A reader will not learn here that scholars have assembled an impressive (though not uncontroverted) body of evidence in support of the identification of “Hand D” with that of William Shakespeare. I’m sorry that I overlooked this passage, because it neatly illustrates my main point: Time and again, Miss Price, instead of seeking to refute inconvenient analyses, pretends that they don’t exist. I noted a few examples in my review.

If I wanted to pretend that the case for “Hand D” in Sir Thomas More case did not exist, I would not have mentioned it in my book. However, the reader’s criticism is that I did not offer a more complete discussion of the relative merits and demerits of the case for “Hand D” as Shakspere’s. In retrospect, I have to agree with him. [Update March 2016: I’ve addressed this subject in my research paper on the Sir Thomas More manuscript, titled “Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail,” which was published in the Journal of Early Modern Studies, Jems 5 (University of Florence, 2016), online here.]

If Amazon allotted infinite space to reviewers, I could add more, as well as describe other departures from scholarly practice. (One of my favorite instances: George Chalmers, an eccentric defender of William Henry Ireland’s Shakespearean forgeries, is cited as a sound “orthodox” authority (p. 93)! Curiously, though Miss Price relies on him, she doesn’t list his work in her bibliography.)

I mention Chalmers as a critic with whom an early Jonsonian editor, William Gifford, takes issue. (Chalmers is the orthodox critic who proposed Shakespeare as the target of Jonson’s “Poet-Ape.”) Gifford’s work, which I quote, is duly listed in the bibliography. Gifford shares the reader’s opinion of Chalmers as an unreliable critic. After citing Gifford’s outrage at Chalmers’s proposal, I go on to present my own reasons for accepting Shakespeare as the target of the allusion.

The anti-Stratfordians who have rallied around Miss Price’s book should ponder whether gaining converts through the tactic of suppressio veri is a good long-run strategy. Their cause would be far better served by an author who was willing to confront, rather than shut her eyes to and sneer at, the other side of the case.

The identity of the reviewer on Amazon from Santa Fe is unknown to me, but from his or her comments, that reader was not pre-disposed to an anti-Stratfordian position. So it is not necessarily committed “anti-Stratfordians who have rallied around” my book. That reader describes his/herself as someone with an open mind who was persuaded by rational argument. And on a point of semantics, I do not consider the anti-Stratfordian position a “cause.” Nor am I looking for “converts.” I consider the authorship question essentially an academic issue that requires critical analysis and further research if it is to be resolved.

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Your group or forum can schedule presentations by the author on the following topics:

1. New Evidence of a Shakespeare Authorship Problem

For audiences with a general interest in the subject, the author offers an overview of the questions and issues raised in her book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.

 

2. Shakespeare and Documentary Evidence

This three-part lecture series (with slides) is ideal for anyone interested in Shakespeare, critical thinking, literature, history, and specifically Shakespeare’s authorship. Is The Shakespeare Authorship Question a crackpot issue — or a real problem that the orthodox would prefer to sweep under the carpet? This analysis of literary evidence for Elizabethan writers is both entertaining and instructive, and is bound to make you more skeptical. You’ll be surprised to learn that both sides of the Shakespeare authorship issue have advanced bad arguments or fiddled with the evidence. Which side has made the better case? These lectures encourage you to decide for yourself. Whether you are considering Shakespeare’s authorship or some other controversial topic, these lectures can help you to question what the authorities tell you — and to test the evidence yourself. Running times: approximately 40-50 minutes each.

Part 1
Primary Evidence for a Literary Biography

What is primary evidence? The author examines types of documentation that underpin literary biographies. She investigates primary evidence for Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries.

Part 2
Secondary Sources: Can you trust them?

The author questions the experts. She analyzes specific issues as reported by Shakespearean scholars as well as those who have challenged the traditional biography, to determine whether the conclusions are supported by the primary evidence.

Part 3
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries:
A Comparative Investigation.

Is Shakespeare the odd man out? The author rounds up primary evidence for Shakespeare, and two dozen of his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund Spenser. She compares the quality of evidence used to support each of the respective literary biographies, and her results are surprising.

 

To schedule a presentation, e-mail the author (address on Home page)

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Responding to the claim that “we have no paper trail of Shakespeare as a playwright or poet, no correspondence, manuscripts, personal library or ephemera," David Kathman writes:

By “paper trail” I assume you mean the things you mention - “correspondence, manuscripts, personal library, or ephemera.” Actually, we do have one letter written to Shakespeare by his townsman Richard Quiney, and a book (William Lambarde’s Archaionomia) with a signature that is now widely, but not universally, accepted as William Shakespeare’s. (Kathman, HLAS, 7 March 2002)

A letter written to Shakespeare by Quiney, a Stratford man in search of financing, is hardly evidence that Shakespeare was a writer, so we move immediately to Kathman’s claim for Shakespeare’s signature in the Lambarde book. If the signature were genuine, it would not only count as the seventh authenticated signature, it would effectively put a book in Shakespeare’s hand and qualify as a “personal literary paper trail.”

On his website in his section on Hand D, Kathman directs readers to Giles Dawson’s 1992 article, “A Seventh Signature for Shakespeare.” In a message to the “Shaksper (dead link)" discussion group on 19 June 1995, Kathman cited some authorities concerning “the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copy of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia, a treatise on Anglo-Saxon law.

This has a signature on the title-page which many, many very knowledgeable people believe to be that of William Shakespeare. I will not attempt to summarize the evidence here, but it is summarized by Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: Records and Images (1981), and by Giles Dawson in an article he wrote for Shakespeare Quarterly a few years ago (1992?), a couple of years before his death. Schoenbaum, a notorious skeptic, believes that the signature is more likely to be genuine than not (and for him, that’s saying a lot), and Dawson believed flat-out that the signature is genuine. I think the evidence is pretty persuasive; if the signature was forged, the forger was one of the best ever.

This information provides a place to start, and I begin by inquiring how Mr. Kathman would quantify his phrases “many, many very knowledgeable people," and “widely, but not universally accepted.” If the alleged seventh signature is “widely” accepted, we should expect to find numerous “very knowledgeable” authorities quoting it as evidence after the initial reports of its discovery in 1942, and only a few hold-outs. What we find, however, are a few lone voices of acceptance, versus “wide" non-acceptance.

The Folger acquired the Lambarde book in 1938 and it was examined by Giles Dawson, James McManaway, and Edwin E. Willoughby. Scholarship has therefore had the opportunity to examine, question, accept, or reject, the signature in Archaionomia since 1942, when Dawson reported his findings and Joseph Quincy Adams published on the subject. Both accepted the signature as genuine. Very few subsequently followed their lead, and the subject dropped out of sight for awhile.

In 1973, W. Nicholas Knight rekindled the subject and got some media attention with his book, Shakespeare’s Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595. The signature in Archaionomia was one of his principal “new” pieces of evidence. The appearance of Knight’s book prompted comments concerning not only his disqualification as one of Kathman’s “knowledgeable people” but also the genuineness of the signature.

N.W. Bawcutt, for example, criticizes Knight’s “use of evidence [as] surprisingly careless. … Even if we accept that the Lambarde signature is genuine,” it does not support Knight’s additional claims (164-65). So Bawcutt does not seize the opportunity to accept the signature as genuine.

In the Shakespeare Quarterly review, R.J. Schoeck criticized “Knight’s lack of scholarly objectivity” and arguments built on “a host of assumptions,” including the Archaionomia signature, a signature “known to Shakespearean scholars for three decades … [and] blown up into ’this new fact about Shakespeare’s private life’” (305-7).

In his review in Renaissance Quarterly, Ronald Berman commends Knight’s “fine detective work on the authentication of Shakespeare’s signature” but has very little else good to say:

The question of Shakespeare’s autograph is clearly stated in a fact sheet assembled by the Folger Library on William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568). Professor Knight has attempted to identify a signature in that book as that of William Shakespeare. Current scholarly opinion on the matter is summarized by the Folger in purely descriptive terms: no ascription has at this time been generally accepted. (99)

In his 1992 article, Giles Dawson argues that there “is an overwhelming probability that the writer of all seven signatures was the same person" (79). But there is no proof that even the first six signatures were written by the same person, since Jane Cox has argued, and Jonathan Hope has recently reminded us all (on the Shaksper news group), that some of the allegedly genuine signatures on Shakespeare’s will may not be that of the testator:

At the risk of appearing willfully mischievous, could I point out that the authenticity of the signatures on the will is not certain. David Thomas’ Shakespeare in the Public Records (1985: Public Record Office), page 34, notes that signatures were often ’supplied’ in a different hand from their own by the scribe - wills were proved by executor’s oath not by the signature. (Hope, Feb. 27, 2002)

As for the “wide” acceptance of the seventh signature by recent biographers, Park Honan doesn’t mention it. Neither does Duncan-Jones. In his discussion of Hand D, Dennis Kay notes that “the only other examples of his hand are six [emphasis added] signatures” (180). In his biography of Shakespeare, Schoenbaum (Compact, 215) compares Hand D to “the six [emphasis added] authenticated signatures,” and he was writing years after Dawson’s and Adams’s articles. The Reader’s Encyclopedia describes the signature as “disputed.”

Another place to seek the extent of “wide” or scant acceptance is in discussions of Shakespeare’s possible handwriting in Sir Thomas More. Numerous scholars have revisited the Hand D arguments subsequent to the proposed addition of a seventh signature to the control sample of handwriting. R.C. Bald, writing seven years after Dawson’s initial report, accepts “only six signatures” in the control sample (54). I.A. Shapiro likewise refers to six signatures, and Michael L. Hays doesn’t mention the Archaionomia signature.

So where are all the authorities who justify Kathman’s claim that there is “wide acceptance” among “many, many” authorities of the signature in Archaionomia. The group would seem to consist of Giles Dawson, Joseph Quincy Adams, Hereward T. Price (per Schoenbaum, Records, 107n, who describes H.T. Price’s paper as “special pleading"), and David Kathman.

It is possible that, by unhappy chance as I checked through articles on Hand D, recent biographies, and relevant articles, I have unintentionally missed all the “very knowledgeable” scholars who accept this signature. At the least, the seventh signature has not permeated Shakespearian scholarship to any significant degree, as far as I have been able to ascertain. On the contrary, it has been roundly ignored.

Kathman cites Schoenbaum as believing “that the signature is more likely to be genuine than not.” But Schoenbaum’s discussion appears in a section subtitled “Doubtful and Spurious Signatures” in Records and Images. Schoenbaum concludes that Dawson “thinks there is a better chance that the signature is genuine than that it is not. That strikes [Schoenbaum] as a fair statement of the position. Handwriting analysis alone cannot resolve the question, and it seems unlikely, so long after the event, that evidence of another sort will be forthcoming. The Lambarde signature makes a better claim to authenticity than any other pretended Shakespeare autograph, but it is premature, to say the least, to classify it as the poet’s seventh signature” [emphasis added] (Records, 109).

Mr. Kathman’s claim that this signature is “widely accepted” by “many, many” people as the poet’s seventh signature, is likewise premature.

Bibliography

Bald, R.C. “The Booke of Sir Thomas More and Its Problems.” Shakespeare Survey (1949): 44-61.

Bawcutt, N.W. “The Year’s Contributions to Shakespearian Study,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 164-5.

Berman, Ronald. Review of Shakespeare’s Hidden Life by W. Nicholas Knight. Renaissance Quarterly (spring 1974): 99-100.

Campbell, Oscar James. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966.

Dawson, Giles. “A Seventh Signature for Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (spring 1992): 72-79.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

Hays, Michael L. “Shakespeare’s Hand in Sir Thomas More: Some Aspects of the Paleographic Argument” Shakespeare Studies (1975): 241-253.

Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kay, Dennis. Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era. New York: William Morrow, 1992.

Knight, W. Nicholas. Shakespeare’s Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595. New York: Mason & Lipscomb, 1973.

Schoeck, R.J. Review of Shakespeare’s Hidden Life by W. Nicholas Knight. Shakespeare Quarterly (summer 1975): 305-7.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare: Records and Images. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

─────. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. 1977. Revised Edition with a New Postscript, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Shapiro, I.A. “The Significance of A Date," Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 100-105.

Thomas, David, and Jane Cox. Shakespeare in the Public Records, Public Record Office. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1985.

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Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography has been criticized on an internet news group (humanities.lit.authorship.shakespeare) for unfairly characterizing Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna as “functionally illiterate.” While most on the group are familiar with Shakspere’s six signatures, they can be at a disadvantage if they have not had an opportunity to examine other evidence concerning literacy amongst members of his family.

The statements in question are:

• Shakspere’s daughter Judith grew up illiterate; she signed with her mark. His eldest daughter, Susanna, made a “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen” (Thompson, 1:294), and she was unable to recognize her own husband’s handwriting. (p. 237)
• Shakspere’s closest distaff relatives are, without exception, functionally illiterate. (p. 237)
• Shakspere’s own children grew up functionally illiterate. (p. 270)

The evidence for these statements has been available for years, but many of the books are out-of-print or require a trip to an academic or reference library. This page is to set forth evidence concerning the literacy of Shakspere and members of his family.

Judith Shakspere’s mark

Shakspere’s younger daughter signed with a mark. The pigtail shape in the middle of the image is the “mark.” A scribe or attorney wrote the name Judith “Shakespeare.”

Susanna Hall’s signature

Shakspere’s elder daughter was able to sign her name. One example survives. This is the image given in Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines. Paleographer E. Maunde Thompson describes this as a “painfully formed signature, which was probably the most that she was capable of doing with the pen.”

Note how the letter u is out of place compared to the following letters. The three a’s are all different, as are the two n’s and the two final l’s.

John Hall’s medical case-book

Susanna Shakspere married John Hall, a respected physician. Dr. James Cooke translated Hall’s casebook from Latin into English and published it. In his introduction, Cooke gives an account of his interview with Susanna and describes how he obtained the manuscript:

…to see the Books left by Mr. Hall. After a view of them, she told me she had some Books left, by one that professed Physick, with her Husband, for some mony. I told her, if I liked them, I would give her the mony again; she brought them forth, amongst which there was this with another of the Authors, both intended for the Presse. I being acquainted with Mr. Hall’s hand, told her that one or two of them were her Husband’s and shewed them her; she denyed, I affirmed, till I perceived she begun to be offended. At last I returned her the mony.

From an edition of Hall’s case-book, we read:

“As the notes were in abbreviated Latin, Cooke sent them to London to ‘an able doctor’ to obtain an opinion about publishing them. The opinion offered was that the abbreviated Latin would cause the translator some difficulty. Cooke, however, had some ’spare hours’ and a conviction of their worth for he set about translating Hall’s condensed Latin. This he accomplished with the help of Hall’s apothecary, Richard Court, and in 1657 one of the notebooks appeared in print” (Harriet Joseph, Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law, [1964], 31).

One can conclude from the first account that Susanna did not recognize her own husband’s handwriting. Various excuses have been offered, including the suggestion that all the notes were in abbreviated Latin, which Susanna would not have been able to decipher.

The sample page of Hall’s journal here shows that such an excuse is without foundation. Readers can clearly make out names (“Hall” on the top line, “Mrs Herbert” at the line marked by the marginal no. “20”, “Maria Wilsune” in the first line of the final paragraph), and ailments (such as “colica” in the second and final lines of Susanna’s paragraph).

Peter Farey kindly pointed out that the first line reads: “Generosa Hall uxor mea” (Gentlewoman Hall, my wife).

John Hall’s signature

His signature is what one would expect from a man who wrote in a clear Italian hand. Would that his father-in-law’s signatures had had such clarity and consistency.

Shakspere’s six signatures

Shakspere’s six surviving signatures demonstrate that he could write. They are all affixed to legal documents dating from the last four years of his life.

Jane Cox of the Public Records Office raises the possibility that some of the signatures may have been prepared by scribes. In my book (p. 125), I accept all the signatures as authentic, noting Cox’s reservation.

Gerald E. Downs has pointed out that the words “by me William” in the last signature appear to be written by a scribe.

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Price reviews Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, ed. Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

1. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy is a collection of essays that purports to put an end to the so-called Shakespeare Authorship Question, once and for all. Its editors, Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, recruited 20 contributors, most of whom also contributed to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s “60 Minutes with Shakespeare,” a project that provided 60 seconds each to 60 scholars addressing various topics, most with significance for the authorship question.

The essay collection was prompted in part by the release of Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film Anonymous (a box office flop dramatizing a fringe version of a “royal birth” theory positing the earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeare) and the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” (now signed by over 2,700 individuals) published on the website Shakespeare Authorship Coalition. The substance of the declaration is, in some measure, based on the research in my own book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem. It was the first book challenging the traditional biography to be published by a mainstream publisher in a peer-reviewed series (Greenwood Press, 2001, “Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies” no. 94; now revised and published in paperback by shakespeare-authorship.com, 2012). A major argument in the book is based on a comparative analysis of documentary evidence left behind by Shakespeare and two dozen writers active during his lifetime. The results of that analysis demonstrate that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period who left behind no evidence that he wrote for a living, or even as a vocation.

At the April 2013 launch of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt in Stratford-on-Avon, Ros Barber (author of the prize-winning The Marlowe Papers, a fictionalized case for Marlowe’s authorship) criticized the editors of the essay collection for failing to contend with their peer-reviewed opposition. In this review essay, I focus on particular contributors who defend the traditional biography, with the hope that my critique will move the debate forward.

As a general comment, it is unfortunate that a decision on nomenclature was made in this collection to re-label authorship skeptics as “anti-Shakespeareans,” rather than the more accurately descriptive “anti- Stratfordians . “Anti-Shakespearean” is unnecessarily pejorative (and it was a relief to read James Shapiro’s reversion to the term “anti- Stratfordian” in his Afterword). Also, in several places, some contributors assert that the authorship question first emerged, not during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but in 1856-57, when Delia Bacon published her unreadable tome (2, 87, 246). But Miss Bacon was not the first to ask questions about Shakespeare’s authorship. She was the first to formalize the question. Expressions of confusion about Shakespeare’s authorship were recorded during Shakespeare’s lifetime by Thomas Edwards, the Parnassus authors, Gabriel Harvey, and John Davies of Hereford, among others.

Now to particulars.

ii. Andrew Hadfield is the author of the recent and well-received biography of Edmund Spenser. Spenser left behind good evidence of his literary interests and activities, the evidence that I call personal literary paper trails. These include books exchanged with his friend, Gabriel Harvey, his handwritten transcription of a Latin poem, and records of his education. Despite such evidence for Spenser, in his essay “Theorizing Shakespeare’s authorship,” Hadfield attempts to lower his reader’s expectations for evidence surviving for writers from the time period, essentially excusing the absence of literary paper trails for Shakespeare:

Even a superficial trawl through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will reveal how little we know about many important figures, making the gaps in the biographical records of Shakespeare seem typical rather than unusual and therefore in no need of explanation… What are left are scraps, fragments, and clues in parish registers, court records, and probate offices” (65, 66).

To which list I would add personal literary paper trails.

Hadfield admits that “there are virtually no literary remains left behind by Shakespeare” (66), but he also claims that in that sense, Shakespeare is no different than other writers, such as Henry Chettle, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Nashe, among others (66). While the canons of these writers, like Shakespeare’s, present various attribution or authenticity problems, unlike Shakespeare, these writers left behind solid records of their activities as writers. To take one example (chosen here because Hadfield singled out Nashe in his 60 seconds contribution to the SBT program), among the personal literary paper trails for Nashe are an autograph poem from his days at Cambridge; a record of how much he was rewarded for writing by one of his patrons, as specified in a letter from Sir George Carey to his wife (the dedicatee of the pamphlet in question); and a letter to Carey’s servant describing his difficulties “writing for the stage and for the press.” Despite the survival of that letter, Hadfield claims that “personal letters did not survive in an age when paper was scarce and expensive” (64). Yet additional autograph letters DO survive for, among others, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Michael Drayton, and all of them contain reference to literary topics (Price, Unorthodox, 314-18). There are no comparable records for Shakespeare, so Hadfield’s claims do not hold up. The deficiency of personal literary paper trails for a writer from the time period is not an expected or common phenomenon; the deficiency is unique to Shakespeare.

iii. David Kathman’s essay “Shakespeare and Warwickshire” attempts to situate Shakespeare in the intellectual and literary communities in Stratford-on-Avon, investing him with intellectual credentials in a sort of literacy-by-association. Yet his sections on Shakespeare’s Stratford associates do nothing to establish Shakespeare as a man interested in literary matters. Identifying neighbors, such as Richard Quiney or Abraham Sturley, who read books or wrote letters, sometimes in Latin, is not evidence that Shakespeare read books or wrote letters. Indeed, the reason Kathman can state categorically that Quiney or Sturley read books or wrote letters is because letters survive to support those statements (124-27). No comparable evidence survives for Shakespeare.

Kathman claims that the plays “include numerous offhand references to people and places from the area around stratford” (129). but those “numerous” warwickshire characters and locations appear in only two plays, Henry IV (2) and The Taming of the Shrew. He further claims that the plays “are peppered with dialect words from Warwickshire and the West Midlands” (129). He cites three sources in his endnote, primarily C.T. Onions, and also R.C. Churchill (actually Ivor Brown’s introduction) and Hilda M. Hulme . Not only do these sources fail to verify all his claims, he omits other resources that would compromise or invalidate several of them. After consulting Joseph Wright’s still valuable six-volume The English Dialect Dictionary, James Orchard Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic Words, James Appleton Morgan’s Warwickshire Glossary, and the OED, I would propose that at least five of the nine words Kathman mentions don’t belong on his list.

For example, Kathman defines a “ballow” as a ‘cudgel,’ which Onions locates in the north Midlands (12). But the texts of King Lear (IV.vi.238) read, variously, “battero” (Qq), “bat” (Q1 and Q2), and “ballow” (F), so there is not even a secure basis for accepting “ballow” as the intended word. The OED elaborates:

Only in the Shakes. Folio of 1623, and subseq . editions, in loc. cit., where the Quartos have battero, and bat (stick, rough walking-stick); besides which, batton, battoun, ‘stick, cudgel’ obs. f. baton n. (q.v.) is a probable emendation. Bailey (1742) has ‘ Ballow, a pole, a long stick, quarter-staff, etc. Shakesp .’ (quoted by Halliwell as ‘Northern’): but no such word seems to exist, or to have any etymological justification.

The Arden 2 editor goes with “ballow” and cites Wright’s entry (1:145) for the word as common to Nottinghamshire (Muir, 173; Wright also specifies the word as in use in the shire of Kent). The Arden 3 editor goes with “baton,” rejecting the Folio reading of “ballow” since he could find “no convincing parallels” (Foakes, 346).

According to Onions, “potch,” meaning to thrust, “survives in Warwickshire” (165). Wright lists the word “potch” as a variant form of “poach” (4:562), defines “poach” (and its variant spellings) as “to poke, esp. with the fingers; to thrust, push suddenly,” etc., and locates the variant “potch” not only in Warwickshire, but also in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Gloucestershire. The Arden 2 editor of Coriolanus glosses potch as “jab, poke” but is silent on the matter of dialect (Brockbank, 149), as are the editors of recent Oxford and Cambridge editions, as well as Halliwell . Morgan’s Glossary contains neither “poach” nor “potch .”

The word “batlet,” meaning ‘club (for washing)’ is described by Onions as “current recently in Yorks [hire] and Warwick[shire] (13). “Batler” is in the OED with reference to the modified word “batlet” in modern editions of As You Like It, but no dialect is mentioned. The word in the Arden 2 edition of As You Like It (II.iv.46) reads “batler .” Halliwell lists “batler” but does not assign a shire of origin or use (149). The New Variorum editor (Knowles, 93) cites [John R.] Wise’s list of Warwickshire words, but also cites Wright, who specifies Yorkshire and Warwickshire (per Wise’s list) and adds a disclaimer: “not known to our correspondents in Warwickshire” (1:186). Morgan’s glossary contains only “batten,” defined as “a stick used in washing clothes” (76), but provides no examples in the Shakespeare canon.

At least two other words in Kathman’s list, “pash” and “tarre,” fare no better. Of the nine dialect words cited by Kathman, only four may withstand scrutiny. Kathman acknowledges that while the dialect words that he cites “don’t prove anything,” they are “consistent” with the Stratford man’s authorship (129). But they are not. In order to make that case, he would need to show (1) that Warwickshire and West Midlands dialect words are particular to, or better yet, usually exclusive to, those shires, and (2) that the Shakespeare canon contains disproportionately higher numbers of dialect words from those regions. When a word such as “batlet” is found in Yorkshire as well as (possibly) Warwickshire, Kathman’s argument is weakened. It is further diluted as the known use of a word is discovered in additional shires or regions. It is difficult to give credence to words that he claims as Warwickshire dialect, even those found in Onions’s Glossary, when there is no further support or corroboration from Halliwell, Morgan, the OED, various critical editions, or especially Wright.

It is puzzling that Kathman cites Hulme’s research in his endnote. Her examples of Warwickshire or Midlands dialects are either qualified or introduced as speculative. She also shares the skeptical opinion that future research will likely “establish as more widely current such elements of apparently ‘Stratford’ language as occur in his text” and cites G.D. Willcock’s opinion that the Shakespeare corpus “shows no sign of surviving local patriotism” (316, 315). Hulme cites some idiosyncratic Shakespearean spellings consistent with, if not unique to, Warwickshire spellings (316, 318), but some of her citations depend upon the unfounded assumption that the printing house’s orthography faithfully followed the author’s manuscript (the hypothetical ‘foul papers’), when spellings are more likely scribal, compositorial, or editorial.

The last section in Kathman’s chapter is about “Shakespeare and Stratford after 1616,” in which he claims that “a wealth of evidence from the decade after Shakespeare’s death illustrates Stratford’s fame” (130). That “wealth of evidence” is, by definition, posthumous. The first testimony in the historic record explicitly identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist appeared in the 1623 First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Kathman failed to establish any significant connection between the author of Shakespeare’s canon and Warwickshire during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

iv. Addressing Shakespeare’s alleged education, Carol Chillington Rutter has briefly covered some of the same territory as T.W. Baldwin in his two-volume Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, a 1944 survey of educational institutions, curricula, etc. in Elizabethan England, including the varying educational capabilities of provincial schoolrooms, such as the one in Stratford. And like Baldwin, Rutter is unable to cite one document to support the statement that Shakespeare attended school, or expressed gratitude to a mentor, or attended university or one of the Inns of Court, or owned a book, or wrote a word of dialogue, a line of poetry, or even a letter concerning his business affairs. Shakespeare remains a man of no recorded education. The best that can be said is that if Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays, then he must have attended the Stratford Grammar School. His assumed education is therefore the result of circular reasoning. Further, Rutter’s essay fails to take into account the playwright’s familiarity with Italian, French, and Spanish, languages not taught at the grammar school.

v. In recent decades, and using increasingly sophisticated methods to identify stylometric features and patterns, scholars have been able to identify more co-authors in plays such as Titus Andronicus (with George Peele), 1 Henry VI (with Thomas Nashe), and Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton). In “Shakespeare as collaborator,” John Jowett attempts to identify Shakespeare, the theatrical shareholder, with Shakespeare, the dramatist. There is ample evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford was a shareholding member of theatre companies, but when Jowett claims that “Shakespeare [the playwright] was evidently participating as a member of the theatre company” (99), he is assuming that which has yet to be proved.

MacDonald P. Jackson specializes in the “evidence of stylometrics,” developing tests and using data to map out sections of texts by particular authors. However, when Jackson asserts that Shakespeare and Fletcher “clearly planned their collaborative plays as a joint enterprise” (106), he is stating more than we know. Jowett claims that “careful scrutiny of the Shakespeare collaborations shows him both writing a draft for someone else to complete (as is clearly seen only in Timon of Athens) and (as is more common with Shakespeare) completing a play begun by another dramatist” (98-99). In her edition of Two Noble Kinsmen, Potter advances her theory of collaboration: “the two dramatists began writing concurrently, but … Fletcher constructed the final draft. In [certain scenes], he seems to have been working on, or in the light of, Shakespearean material; nothing suggests that Shakespeare was ever working on Fletcher’s” (32). These competing theories do not exhaust the possible dynamics of collaboration, but since we do not have anything for Shakespeare’s plays comparable to the evidence of collaborations in Henslowe’s papers (Henslowe’s, 125; Stern 23-24, 25), thus far, the nature of Shakespeare’s collaborations remains a matter of speculation, and no consensus has emerged.

Whether Shakespeare, the author, whoever he was, actively collaborated with other dramatists is certainly a matter of interest. Obviously Jowett, Jackson, and others prefer to envision Shakespeare as all-around man of the theatre, steeped in playhouse practices, and immersed in all aspects of the theatre company activities. It is tempting to extend this characterization to include the role of company dramatist, both solo and in collaboration. But such a conception of Shakespeare, however attractive it may be, still lacks any evidence that could prove that Shakespeare of Stratford was a writer. In addition, there are reasons to question the nature of Shakespeare’s commitments to the acting and theatre companies, and one of them concerns schedule conflicts. Although most biographers separate conflicting evidence into different chapters, when examined chronologically, the documentation shows that Shakespeare, the actor-shareholder was absent from London in 1597-98, during the all-important Christmas holiday season when the company performed at court, and again in 1604, after the theatres re-opened (Price, Unorthodox, 32 -35). Any such absences during busy performance seasons raise questions about just what Shakespeare’s responsibilities were with those companies, making it more difficult to build on the traditional biographical narrative.

vi. Jowett’s essay is one of two in the collection to introduce the Hand D manuscript additions to the play Sir Thomas More as not only composed by Shakespeare but also in the handwriting of Shakespeare of Stratford. He claims that D’s handwriting can be positively identified as Shakespeare’s by comparison with the six extant signatures (93). In their essay “What does textual evidence reveal about the author ?,” James Mardock and Eric Rasmussen also accept the Hand D additions as in Shakespeare’s handwriting (113). The argument cannot be made on the available evidence. Even if the Hand D additions fall close to, or within the Shakespeare universe from a stylometric standpoint, the absence of an adequate control sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting with which to make a comparison constitutes an insurmountable obstacle (Hays, esp. 241, 248-49).

None of the contributors claiming the Hand D additions as evidence for the man from Stratford cites Michael L. Hays’s important paleographical examination or Paul Werstine’s research. (In addition to Werstine’s 1999 article, his recent Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and The Editing of Shakespeare exhaustively retraces the search for authorial ‘foul paper’ and devotes a section to the Sir Thomas More manuscript, including the Hand D additions. Even though Shakespeare Beyond Doubt probably went to press before Werstine published in January 2013, among those who are named in the acknowledgements are John Jowett and Eric Rasmussen, so they were undoubtedly aware of his research.) Jowett is understandably persistent in his acceptance of Hand D as Shakespeare; his 2011 critical edition of Sir Thomas More appears in the Arden Shakespeare series, which itself gives the argument the appearance of legitimacy. Yet Werstine criticizes Jowett’s “summary of scholarship on the Shakespeare attribution [as] bent on marginalizing what it demonstrates to be widespread recent skepticism about his authorship of the Hand-D pages” (Early, 345, n 29).

In addition, the Hand D pages contain instances of eyeskip, a characteristic consistent with scribal transcription (Downs, “Book,” 5-15). So there can be no certainty that the Hand D additions are authorial; they could as easily be scribal copy (Werstine, Early, 252). Jowett’s “greater confidence” in the Hand D additions as Shakespeare’s (93) would seem to be as yet unwarranted.

vii. Jowett’s “man of the theatre” argument linking Shakespeare of Stratford with the playwright is also advanced by Mardock & Rasmussen, even though they cannot cite any evidence to prove that the actor was also a playwright, either. However, they identify names of actors such as Will Kemp, Richard Cowley, and John Sincklo, that appear in a few printed texts (e.g., Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado, and 3 Henry VI) in some of the speech prefixes, in place of character names. They cite these actor names to argue that Shakespeare, the actor-playwright “often seems to have had specific members of his company in mind” for various roles he wrote (115), even though the majority of such roles are bit parts. But the dramatist, whoever he was, is not the only possible source for such speech prefixes. Indeed, those speech prefixes are more likely scribal, of playhouse origin, or the result of a memorial report. As co-editor with John D. Cox of the Arden 3 edition of King Henry VI (3), Rasmussen himself cites those who argue the cases for non-authorial origins of such speech prefixes (169-73; see also Werstine, Early, 118). Cox and Rasmussen begin their section on character names:

3 Henry VI was set into type from an authorial manuscript rests largely upon the appearance in that text of three names — Gabriel, Sinklo and Humfrey — thought to refer to specific Elizabethan actors. (166-67)

The theory that compositors who set type had before them an “authorial manuscript” — the so-called ‘foul papers’ — still enjoys considerable currency, even though no ‘foul papers’ have ever been found, so the features they may have contained, such as speech prefixes that specify actors instead of characters, remain unknown. As H.R. Woudhuysen dryly put it: “The argument is a circular one: ‘foul-paper’ texts can be identified by the presence of those features which are characteristic of ‘foul-paper’ texts” (320). Quite recently, Werstine expanded on the subject, not only dissecting W.W. Greg’s unsuccessful attempts to identify characteristics in the hypothetical ‘foul papers’ by comparing extant theatrical manuscripts to printed texts, but also demonstrating that such imagined characteristics, as enumerated by Greg and others, are not unique to the imagined ‘foul papers,’ or, in the words of Barbara A. Mowat :

the very stigmata used by bibliographers to demonstrate that a play was printed from shakespeare’s autograph can be found in scribal and theatrical manuscripts as well. (133)

Which brings us back to the texts in which speech prefixes name players rather than characters. According to Andrew Gurr, “the naming of players in playscripts is a vexed question that depends heavily on what sort of manuscript is identified as the source for the printed text, and when the names were inserted in the manuscript” (72n); “the source” could be an authorial manuscript, but it also could be a scribal transcript, edited copy, a reported text, a playhouse script, or some other descendent copy. However, since no ‘foul papers’ by Shakespeare or anyone else have ever been discovered, the arguments proposing that Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy for this or that printed text are sheer speculation. The related argument that Shakespeare, as author, wrote those actor names instead of speech prefixes, is also speculation.

It would have saved Greg years of frustration if he had succeeded in discovering any ‘foul papers’ from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Several additions in the Sir Thomas More manuscript, such as those by Thomas Dekker and possibly Thomas Heywood, are autograph, and therefore would seem to be good candidates for ‘foul papers’ categorization, yet Greg had difficulty reconciling them with characteristics that he considered essential to his definition of ‘foul papers,’ such as illegible handwriting. The main part of the Sir Thomas More manuscript is in the hand of Anthony Munday, who is also identified as the principal author of the play. However, Werstine explains that “it is impossible to know whether Munday authors the play in whole or part, or simply transcribes it, there being no plays of his undisputed authorship to use for comparison.” Munday could even have been copying his own composition. There is similar uncertainty as to whether the Hand D additions are authorial (whether in the act of composition or as copyist), or scribal. Despite the problematic evidence and the absence of consensus of opinion about most aspects of the Sir Thomas More manuscript (Werstine, Early, 251-52, 255), the Hand D theory, as confidently advanced by Jowett, Mardock, and Rasmussen, seems to be taking on a new life of its own.

viii. In 2011 and 2012, Brian Vickers furthered the argument that the 1602 additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy can be attributed to Shakespeare. In August 2013, The New York Times (Schuessler) announced a forthcoming paper proposing that Shakespeare’s handwriting can explain textual problems in those additions, as printed in 1602. That case rests entirely on accepting the Hand D additions as authorial and in Shakespeare’s handwriting, essentially promoting the Hand D additions to the status of ‘foul papers,’ the first ever discovered. Such wishful thinking is reminiscent of Greg’s search for ‘foul papers’ containing features that could explain problems found in many of the “good” Shakespearean texts. All the ‘foul papers’ that he thought he had identified turned out instead to be, for example, scribal transcripts or fair copies. Now Douglas Bruster is going down much the same path, adopting the Hand D additions as a control sample of Shakespeare’s handwriting and compositional habits that can be used, as Greg had hoped, to solve problems in a printed text by inferring how letter formations, spelling patterns, and other authorial idiosyncrasies may explain mistakes or confusions in the printing house.

Bruster is proposing that in 1602, those printers had before them Shakespeare’s handwritten manuscript additions to The Spanish Tragedy. Bruster is careful to qualify his thesis by allowing for the “possibility that an author’s unpunctuated foul papers served as copy-text, at however close a remove ” [emphasis added], but if ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy, then the copy-text was not at one remove from those ‘foul papers.’ A manuscript once or more removed from those ‘foul papers’ — such as a fair copy of the ‘foul papers’ — is obviously less reliable as an indicator of an author’s preferences or idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, Bruster builds his case on the assumption that features in the Hand D additions also would have been present in the printer’s copy for the 1602 additions. In other words, like Jowett, Mardock, and Rasmussen in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Bruster accepts the Hand D additions as Shakespeare’s authorial manuscript, even though the Hand D additions are written in an unknown hand and could be scribal copy.

ix. Stanley Wells surveys the Shakespearean allusions from 1592 to 1616 (the year of Shakespeare’s death) and on to 1642 (the closing of the theatres and the start of the Civil War). He challenges anti-Shakespeareans (or, as I would say, anti- Stratfordians) at the outset: In order to “suggest alternative nominees for the authorship” a skeptic would need “to disprove everything that goes to show that they were written” by William Shakespeare of Stratford (73). On the contrary, one does not need to disprove everything about Shakespeare of Stratford; rather, a skeptic needs to re-evaluate everything about Shakespeare of Stratford to determine if he and Shakespeare the writer were one and the same. Reconsidering the evidentiary value of testimony is not the same thing as denying that testimony, and that distinction is often ignored in favor of accusing anti- Stratfordians of being wholesale deniers of evidence.

As mentioned earlier, the first testimony in the historic record explicitly identifying Shakespeare of Stratford as the dramatist appeared in the 1623 First Folio, seven years after Shakespeare’ death. Wells admits that “despite the mass of evidence that the works were written by a man named William Shakespeare, there is none [i.e., allusions recorded up to 1616] that explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies him with Stratford-upon-Avon” (81). If, by that, Wells means that none of the Shakespearean literary allusions or evidence can be directly and personally linked to the actor-shareholder from Stratford, then Wells has identified the problem. He tries to get around the problem by uncritically accepting posthumous allusions as equal in weight and reliability with contemporaneous testimony. Thus, in a tribute to Shakespeare in 1638 (twenty-two years after Shakespeare died), William Davenant refers to “The banks of Avon.” Wells claims that this, like the First Folio tribute to the “swan of Avon,” “again associates the poet with the River Avon” (85), thereby reinforcing the identification of Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as the poet. But Wells misses the more likely explanation: Davenant’s association of Shakespeare with the river “Avon” is derivative of the 1623 First Folio front matter. Surely, Wells would not stretch this reasoning to claim that the preface to the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio, referencing “the then expired sweet Swan of Avon Shakespeare” was reliable primary testimony, rather than derivative.

Does Wells have a cut-off date to differentiate contemporaneous and/or firsthand testimony from posthumous hearsay, legend, or derivation? He asserts that “to refuse to credit the considerable amount of posthumously derived evidence linking the writer with the Stratford man is totally illogical. To put it at its most basic level, if we refused to accept posthumous evidence we should have to refuse the evidence that anyone has ever died” (81). These objections are incorrect on several levels. One, Shakespeare is the only alleged writer from the time period for whom one must rely on posthumous evidence to make the authorship case. As I have said elsewhere and repeatedly, the absence of contemporary personal literary paper trails for Shakespeare’s biography is a unique deficiency. Two, and again to repeat, questioning the evidentiary value of testimony, both contemporaneous and posthumous, is not the same thing as “refusing to accept” that testimony. And three, Wells claims that on the basis of this criterion, we should “have to refuse the evidence that anyone ever died.” So, Wells would “refuse” all the affirmative evidence of death routinely cited in biographies (burial registers, epitaphs, eulogies, correspondence, diary entries, probated wills, litigation, deeds and other legal documents, etc.). Such records demand scrutiny, of course, but despite whatever license or whitewashing may be present in, e.g., eulogies, tributes, or litigation, such records are generally useful in documenting a death.

Regrettably, Wells does not put the allusions under the microscope. Each reference to Shakespeare, or to a Shakespeare play, poem, character, or quotation, presents an opportunity to interrogate the allusion, for example, to attempt to determine if its author demonstrates personal knowledge of Shakespeare, as distinct from familiarity merely with the printed page or performed dialogue. Such distinctions are important, since the contemporaneous literary allusions to Shakespeare that Wells cites are either “cryptic” and “obscure” (79), or they are essentially book or theatre reviews, necessitating no firsthand knowledge of the author. Anyone can write a review, or cite a Shakespearean line, without personally knowing the author.

An epigram by John Davies of Hereford illustrates the importance of such interrogation. Wells introduces the epigram as “explicitly addressed to Shakespeare” (79). While Wells describes the epigram as “somewhat obscure,” he does not examine Davies’s choices of words and possible intended meaning(s). Instead, he asserts that the title (“our English Terence”) “compares [Shake- speare ] to one of the greatest of Roman playwrights.” But Terence was also well-known to Elizabethans and Jacobeans as freed slave who took credit for plays written by the aristocrats Scipio and Laelius, and other language in the epigram suggests deliberate ambiguity. In 1995, Wells supposed that the sobriquet Terence “seems to imply that Davies thinks of [Shake- speare ] primarily as a comic playwright, but goes on to speak of him in cryptic terms as an actor.” After quoting the first four lines, Wells concluded that the verse is “too vague to be helpful” (Drama, 26).

Yet in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, he is content merely to identify “our English Terence” as “one of the greatest of Roman playwrights,” without further analysis. Should an analysis of Davies’s poem be limited to the title, or should the vagueness of the poem prompt questions? Is the epigram straightforward or ambiguous? Is it a literary allusion or a theatrical allusion or both? Is it personal or impersonal testimony? It is easy enough to cite an epigram, but it should be incumbent on anyone attempting to defend — or challenge — the traditional biography to re-examine the testimony to determine what may or may not be concluded (see Price, Unorthodox, 60-63).

x.

When Wells belatedly read my book in response to Ros Barber’s criticism, he shared his comments on Blogging Shakespeare, a website for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. But he failed to address the single most important argument I make in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography : that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of consequence from the time period who left behind no evidence during his lifetime to support the statement that he was a writer. And I pointed that out in the Comments section.

To my surprise, Professor Wells responded:

My reason for not commenting on this impressively researched section is that I find it irrelevant to the discussion of the case that Shakespeare’s works were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Even allowing that Prof. Wells disagrees with my conclusion, it is unsettling that he considers a comparative analysis of evidence “irrelevant to the discussion.” Because evidence and criteria are relevant; they do matter to historians and biographers. In my book, and more extensively on my website, I quote various historians and scholars on the subject of criteria, including distinctions they make between contemporaneous and posthumous evidence. Now theoretically, Wells could have argued that the absence of contemporaneous literary paper trails is “irrelevant” — if Shakespeare had left behind perhaps only 3 or 4 documents during his lifetime. In that case, Wells could have stretched the odds to argue that too few records survive to expect any of them to document his alleged literary activities. But Shakespeare left behind over 70 records. As I point out elsewhere, all of Shakspere’s undisputed personal records are nonliterary, and that is not only unusual. It is bizarre. Statistically, it is also a virtual impossibility:

As far as i have investigated the biographies of shakespeare’s literary contemporaries, the deficiency of contemporaneous evidence for shakespeare’s career as a writer is unique. Yet his life is, comparatively speaking, quite well-documented. He left behind over seventy records. Even the most poorly documented writers, those with less than a dozen records in total, still left behind a couple of personal literary paper trails. Based on the average proportions, I would conservatively have expected perhaps a third of Shakespeare’s records, or about two dozen, to shed light on his professional activities. In fact, over half of them, forty-five to be precise, are personal professional paper trails, but they are all evidence of non-literary professions: those of actor, theatrical shareholder, financier, real estate investor, grain-trader, money-lender, and entrepreneur. It is the absence of contemporary personal literary paper trails that forces Shakespeare’s biographers to rely — to an unprecedented degree — on posthumous evidence. (Price, “Evidence,” 146-47)

Acknowledging the priority of contemporaneous evidence is not a deviant anti- Stratfordian obsession. A few years ago, in the Journal of American History, Michael F. Holt commented on Matthew Pinsker’s essay “Lincoln Theme 2.0”:

I heartily agree with Pinsker’s assessment that one of the most important developments in Lincoln scholarship since the appearance of David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln in 1995 has been the willingness of Lincoln scholars to give credence to oral and written testimony about Lincoln given after, and often long after, Lincoln’s assassination. I studied as a graduate student with Donald a quarter of a century before Pinsker did, but at that time we were trained to regard such post hoc testimony as toxic .

In this regard, however, I am puzzled by Pinsker’s assertion that Michael Burlingame’s massive new two-volume biography … “will force scholars to confront their increasing reliance on recollected material in ways that might alter the ongoing reinterpretation of Lincoln’s private life.” Burlingame does reject some recollections as spurious, but as I read him, … his modus operandi is not to reject recollected evidence but rather to pile quotation upon quotation from these posthumous witnesses. The implicit rule of evidence implied here, as I see it, is that if eight or ten “witnesses,” as opposed to only two or three, recall essentially the same thing, then it must qualify as historical fact. [emphasis added]

Holt is pointing out some of the hazards of treating contemporaneous, posthumous, and derivative testimony as equally reliable.

Wells includes “Publication Evidence” at the end of his essay to prove the Stratford man’s authorship. It is a list of plays and poems published with title-page attribution prior to the 1623 First Folio. The title-page attributions constitute excellent circumstantial evidence for the man from Stratford. They do not necessarily constitute reliable evidence of authorship (consider Pericles, Lover’s Complaint, Passionate Pilgrim, A London Prodigal, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, as well as plays now known to contain sections by co-authors, such as Titus, Timon, or 1 Henry VI), nor can they be used to demonstrate that which has yet to be proved: that the man from Stratford wrote the works so attributed.

xi. Hardy M. Cook prepared “A selected reading list” as an appendix, and I am sorry to note that he included Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography in a paragraph listing books arguing the case for the earl of Oxford (247). I do not argue for or against any alternative candidate. I do not know how he became aware of my book, but Cook cannot possibly have glanced at it or my website, or checked the Amazon listing, or consulted Hope and Holston’s history and bibliography of anti- Stratfordian studies. Unfortunately, contributors to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt likewise were either unaware of my research or made a decision to ignore it. Either way, Dr. Barber was right to call them out on it.

xii. To conclude, the evidence and arguments that I have considered, as presented by some of the contributors to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt fail to put an end to the authorship question, and indeed, too many of the claims prove to be vulnerable or untenable. Wells’s opinion that the unique deficiency of personal literary paper trails for Shakespeare is “irrelevant” to the debate suggests to me that the orthodox biography is more in doubt than ever.

Select bibliography of works consulted or cited

Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

Barber, Ros. https://rosbarber.com and https://rosbarber.com/home/blog/, accessed 17 Aug. 2013.

Bliss, Lee, ed. Coriolanus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Brockbank, Philip, ed. Coriolanus. The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. 1976. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1988.

Bruster, Douglas. “Shakespearean Spellings and Handwriting in the Additional Passages Printed in the 1602 Spanish Tragedy.” Notes and Queries at https://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/07/19/notesj.gjt124.full (19 July 2013), accessed 19 Aug. 2013.

Cox, John D. and Eric Rasmussen, ed. King Henry VI (3). The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2001.

Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, at https://doubtaboutwill.org/declaration, accessed 17 Aug. 2013.

Downs, Gerald E. “Memorial Transmission, Shorthand, and John of Bordeaux.” in Studies in Bibliography 58 (2007-8): 109-34.

─────. “Hand D and The Book of Sir Thomas More : By The Nature of Your Error.” Undated pamphlet. (A version of this paper was published without permission in Shakespeare Yearbook, 2007; the paper had already been accepted and announced by Studies in Bibliography.)

Duncan-Jones, Katharine. “Jonson’s Epitaph on Nashe.” Times Literary Supplement (7 July 1995): 4-6.

Foakes, R.A., ed. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 1997.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Halliwell, James Orchard. Dictionary of Archaic Words. 1850. Reprint, London: Bracken Books, 1989.

Hays, Michael L. “Shakespeare’s Hand in Sir Thomas More : Some Aspects of the Paleographic Argument” in Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 241-53.

Henslowe’s Diary. Edited by R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Holt, Michael F. “Lincoln Reconsidered” in Journal of American History 96 (Sept. 2009): 451–55, at https://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/lincoln/contents/holt.html, accessed 17 Aug. 2013. (Dead link),

Honan, Daniel. “Computer Software Proves Shakespeare Co-Authored Plays,.” at https://bigthink.com/how-to-think-like-shakespeare/computer-software-proves-shakespeare-co-authored-plays, (Dead link) (6 April 2011) accessed 19 Aug,. 2013.

Honigmann, E.A.J. John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599) . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Hope, Warren, and Kim Holston. The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories. 2nd ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.

Hulme, Hilda M. Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language. 1962, Reprint, New York: Longman Group Limited London, 1977.

Ingleby, C. M., Lucy Toulmin Smith and F. J. Furnivall. The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700 . 2 vols. 1909. Reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.

Jackson, MacDonald P. “The Date and Authorship of Hand D’s Contribution to Sir Thomas More : Evidence From Literature Online.” Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 69-78.

Jowett, John, ed. Sir Thomas More. The Arden Shakespeare Third series. London: Methuen Drama, 2011.

─────. Shakespeare and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Knowles, Richard, ed. As You Like It. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. New York: The Modern Language Assoc., 1977.

Latham, Agnes, ed. As You Like It. The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. 1975. Reprint, London: Methuen, 1989.

Morgan, James Appleton. A study in the Warwickshire dialect; with a glossary and notes touching the Edward the Sixth grammar schools and the Elizabethan pronunciation as deduced from the puns in Shakespeare’s plays . Third Edition. New York, 1899.

Mowat, Barbara A. “The Problem of Shakespeare’s Text(s).” In Textual Formations and Reformations. Edited by Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses (1998): 131-48.

Muir, Kenneth, ed. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. 1964. Reprint, London: Metheun, 1975.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition. CD 3.0 including Additions Series Volumes 1-3, 2000.

Onions, C.T. A Shakespeare Glossary. 1911. 2^nd edition. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Parker, R.B. ed. Coriolanus. Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Pinsker, Matthew. “Lincoln Theme 2.0.” in Journal of American History 96 (Sept. 2009), 417–40, at https://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/projects/lincoln/contents/pinsker.html, accessed 19 Aug. 2013 (Dead link).

Potter, Lois, ed. The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., 1997.

Price, Diana. Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem. Paperback: shakespeare-authorship.com, 2013.

─────. “ Evidence For A Literary Biography ” in Tennessee Law Review 72 (fall 2004): 111-47.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “Much Ado About Who: Is It Really Shakespeare?: Further Proof of Shakespeare’s Hand in ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/arts/further-proof-of-shakespeares-hand-in-the-spanish-tragedy.html?pagewanted=all , (12 August 2013) accessed 19 Aug, 2013.

Vickers, Brian. “Identifying Shakespeare’s Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach.” in Shakespeare 8:1 (2012): 13-43, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17450918.2012.660283#.UhU5-ZKkpFs , accessed 20 Aug. 2013.

───── . “Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62:1 (spring 2011): 106-42.

Wells, Stanley “Beyond Doubt For All Time,” https://bloggingshakespeare.com/beyond-doubt-for-all-time on Blogging Shakespeare (13 May 2013), accessed 18 Aug. 2013. Now, his review can only be found using the Wayback Machine.

───── . “An Unorthodox and Non-definitive Biography,” at https://bloggingshakespeare.com/an-unorthodox-and-non-definitive-biography (8 May 2013), accessed 18 Aug. 2013. Now, his review can only be found using the Wayback Machine

─────. William Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. New York: Norton, 1995.

Wells, Stanley, Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. 1997. Reprinted with corrections, New York: Norton, 1987.

Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

───── “Shakespeare More or Less: A. W. Pollard and Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Editing.” Ottawa, Canada. Florilegium 16 (1999): 125-45.

─────. “Narratives About Printed Shakespearean Texts: ‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Bad’ Quartos.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (spring 1990): 65-86.

Woudhuysen, H.R., ed. Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Walton-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1998.

Wright, Joseph, compiler. The English Dialect Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1898-1905).

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Book

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem

•   Paperback edition with corrections and additions (shakespeare-authorship.com, 2013)

•   Hardback Edition. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 94, Greenwood Press (2001)

Articles

“Literary Paper Trails”: based on chapter 1 and the comparative chart in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biographyy. In Critical Stages 18 (February 2019).

“My Shakspere: ‘A Conjectural Narrative’ Continued.” A chapter in My Shakespeare: The Authorship Controversy. Ed., William D. Leahy. Brighton, UK: Edward Everett Root Scholarly Publishers (February 2018).

“William Shakespeare: Syrian Refugee Advocate?” in American Thinker (April 6, 2016).

“Hand D and Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Literary Paper Trail” in  Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS vol. 5, March 2016) PDF.

Review essay of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy. Ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  Amazon US ,  Amazon UK, and this  website.

“Shakespeare’s Authorship and Questions of Evidence” in Skeptic Magazine, vol. 11:3 (2005).

“Evidence For A Literary Biography” in University of Tennessee Law Review (fall 2004).

“Henslowe’s ‘ne’ and ‘the tyeringe-howsse doore’” in Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 42 (2003): 62-78.

“Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument” in Review of English Studies 48 (May 1997): 168-82.

“Shaxicon and Shakespeare’s Acting Career: A Reply to Donald Foster” in Shakespeare Newsletter (spring 1997): 11, 14.

“Shaxicon and Shakespeare’s Acting Career” in Shakespeare Newsletter (summer 1996): 27-28, 46.

“Shakespeare, Shake-scene and the Clayton Loan” in Elizabethan Review 4 (spring 1996): 3-13.

“A Fresh Look at the Tudor Rose Theory” in Elizabethan Review (fall 1996): 4-23. Response to reader comments (spring 1997): 9-11, 15-17.

Research cited or challenged by

Al Hirschfield on Maybe Shakespeare Really Didn't Write the Plays (March 30. 2021)

Elizabeth Winkler’s “Was Shakespeare A Woman?” in the June 2019 Atlantic.

Oliver Kamm’s Quillette review (“Conspiracism at the Atlantic”) of Elizabeth Winkler’s Atlantic article (June 2019).

Joseph Hewes reviews Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography on YouTube (April 2019).

Price’s “Comparative Chart of Literary Paper Trails” appears in David Gowdey,  “Secret Whispers: Searching for the Truth of Shakespeare”  Amazon Digital Services LLC (August 2017). See also this customer review.

Hard Thinking blog,  “Scipio Who?” (August 2017)

Hard Thinking blog,  “Scary Question: Did Shakspere Write Shakespeare?” (July 2017)

Hard Thinking blog,  “A Rational Person Reads Shakespeare” (May 2017)

Michael L. Hays. “Shakespeare’s Hand Unknown in Sir Thomas More: Thompson, Dawson, and the Futility of the Paleographic Argument.” In Shakespeare Quarterly 67:2 (summer 2016): 180-203.

Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi discuss the authorship question in a YouTube video. At approximately 3:02 into the video, Mark holds up his copy of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography and recommends it to viewers. See his blurb on the back cover of the paperback edition on the homepage of this website.

Criminal Thought blog,  “ It Matters That People Who Have Been To School Come Out Believing Myth Is Reality ” (March 23, 2016)

Waugaman, Elisabeth Pearson, Ph.D.   “What’s in a Name?”  in   Psychology Today  (Mar 09, 2016)

Criminal Thought blog,  “Direct From The Waiting Room, Here’s Something Fun” (Feb 24, 2016)

Margreta De Grazia cites RES article in Shakespeare Quarterly 65:4 (winter 2014)

Keir Cutler’s Shakespeare Crackpot video on YouTube (June 2014)

James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010)

Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question, ed. William Leahy (London & New York: Continuum, 2010)

Warren Hope and Kim Holston, The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories (2^nded., Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2009)

Brandon S. Centerwell, “Who Wrote William Basse’s ‘Elegy on Shakespeare’?: Rediscovering A Poem Lost From the Donne Canon” in Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006)

Jonathan Bate (letter to the Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 2006)

Peter Beal (letter to the Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 2006)

William Niederkorn, “Seeing the Fingerprints of Other Hands in Shakespeare” (New York Times, Sept. 2, 2003)

Brian Vickers, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

William Rubinstein, “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” in History Today (August 2001)

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (2001)

Sotheby’s catalogue for the auction of a Shakespeare portrait (December 1997)

Ward Elliott & Robert Valenza, “Glass Slipper and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare” in Shakespeare Quarterly (June 1997)

Lectures for academic audiences

California State University, LA

Cleveland State University

Cuyahoga Community College

Griffith University, Brisbane

John Carroll University, Cleveland

Lorain County Community College, OH

Rose Institute for Life Long Learning, OH

Shakespearean Research Symposiums: Los Angeles, Detroit

Smithsonian Institution, Resident Associates Program

University of North Carolina, Greensboro

University of the Third Age, Brisbane (AUS)

University School, Cleveland

Media

WCPN (NPR) radio “The Sound of Applause”

PBS broadcasts of  Last Will. and Testament

The Naked Shakespeare, a 2012 documentary by Claus Bredenbrock, Florian Film Group (ARTE, various European venues)

Australian Broadcasting Co. “Nightlife” (radio)

“Chautauqua Books,” Ch. 5 TV, NY

Fox TV news, Ch. 8 Greensboro

WCPN (NPR), Cleveland

WETA (NPR), “The Program,” D.C.

WFDD-FM (NPR), Greensboro

WJTN Radio, Jamestown, NY

WKYCTV news, Cleveland

Lectures for general audiences

Barnes & Noble, Greensboro

Borders Books & Music, various northern Ohio locations

Cheshire Cheese Club of Cleveland 

Cleveland Public Library

College Club of Cleveland

Cosmos Club, D.C.

DACOR Newberry Lecture Series, D.C.

Delta Kappa Gamma, Cleveland

English-Speaking Union, Greensboro

Greensboro Public Library

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Cleveland

Judson Manor, Cleveland

Kiwanis Club of Starmount, NC

Lakewood Public Library, OH

North Carolina Shakespeare Festival

Rotary Clubs of Cleveland, OH; Rockville, MD ; Downey and Redondo Beach, CA

Rowfant Club, Cleveland

Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable, LA

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Stanley Wells reviews the paperback (“an Unorthodox and Non-definitive Biography) of the paperback on Blogging Shakespeare 8 May 2013. Now, his review can only be found using the Wayback Machine. The author responds on her website.

At the April 26 Stratford-on-Avon launch of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, Ros Barber, author of The Marlowe Papers, debated the authorship question with Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson. She’s posted the transcript of the webinar. Here’s a short extract:

PE: Theorising Shakespeare’s authorship by Andrew Hadfield, the University of Sussex. That chapter really is incredibly helpful, I think, because it’s, its about helping us all to relax about that fact that we shouldn’t be worried about there being gaps in the records of people’s lives, or, that the kinds of records that we would most wish to see in someone’s life don’t in fact survive and aren’t there.

RB: I did have a problem with that chapter, I mean Andrew is someone I know rather well as my PhD supervisor, but he’d already been challenged on this point, I believe, when he put this in 60 Minutes, and challenged with the data of Diana Price, because it is actually unusual: the number of gaps, the amount of gap that there is, if you like, this man-shaped absence of data, is actually extraordinary, and I thought it was problematic for me in that chapter, that he – I would like to see an answer to Price, I haven’t yet seen an answer to Price’s data, showing that Shakespeare’s … the gap in Shakespeare evidence that actually shows he was a writer – because we have a huge amount of evidence about him, more than any other writer, but not related to writing, so -

PE: It’s how you approach evidence, isn’t it -

RB: Yes.

PE: – it’s what you decide to do with that evidence, and Diana Price has a different agenda, I think, there, with her telling history. Andrew Hadfield is right in saying we shouldn’t be worried about -

RB: Well, is he? Is he, is he? Because they are extraordinary gaps, they’re not usual gaps, they are exceptional gaps, and that hasn’t yet been answered, and I’d love to see an answer to that.

Barber highlights Shakespeare Beyond Doubt and Price’s paperback.

 

From The Guardian April 23, 2013:

“I receive hate mail for questioning the authorship of Shakespeare plays On William Shakespeare’s birthday, the establishment wants authorship questions to be put ‘beyond doubt’. Is it rattled?”

by William Leahy

Today marks William Shakespeare’s 449th birthday and celebrations are being planned to commemorate this special occasion. There is nothing new in the observation of Shakespeare’s birthday, but this year there is a difference, a problem perhaps of Stratford’s own making.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – the guardian of Shakespeare’s global image – will publish a book of some 20 academic essays that sets out to prove definitively that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marks a radical development in the Shakespeare Authorship Question, for it is the first time that the “establishment” has felt the need to acknowledge its existence and importance.

In the past, they have dismissed this question as only of interest to fantasists and, in one famous analogy, as comparable to Holocaust denial. They have portrayed those who suggest that Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon wrote the plays as either snobs, attention seekers or psychologically deranged. This is the first time that the subject is being taken seriously as “an intriguing cultural phenomenon”. Why are they so worried?

One reason is the publication in paperback of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography by American scholar, Diana Price, in which she analyses every piece of evidence in existence concerning Shakespeare and concludes that the case for Shakespeare writing all of the works attributed to him is quite weak. As with my own research, Price does not argue for an alternative author but rather shows how the case for Shakespeare is built on misreadings, mythologising and, often wilful deception.

Prof. Leahy’s article is a challenge to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy. Edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, April 2013) . Previews have appeared in The Guardian UK. (Shakespeare scholars unite to see off claims of the ‘Bard deniers: As the academic debate gets personal, new book aims to prove William Shakespeare was the author of his own plays) and The Times (UK) “Academic book aims to place Shakespeare authorship beyond doubt” (picked up by The Australian (dead link).)

 

On Instapundit April 13, 2013: IN THE MAIL: From Diana Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem.

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In its June 2019 issue, the Atlantic published Elizabeth Winkler’s article describing the case for a relatively recent candidate for Shakespeare’s authorship: Emilia Bassano. Bassano was mistress to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon; she was described in Simon Forman’s notes as ”somewhat brave in youth“ (an entry that A.L. Rowse misread as ”brown in youth“ and therefore prompted his nomination of Bassano as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady); she subsequently married Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. In the course of her article, Ms. Winkler favorably cited my research. The Atlantic recruited some reactions, mostly criticism from orthodox scholars but also constructive words from Sir Mark Rylance, an authorship skeptic. These responses were duly published (click here).

Ms. Winkler’s article was promptly attacked by Oliver Kamm at the Quillette blog and Dominic Green at The Spectator USA. Since Ms. Winkler cited my research explicitly, and since Mr. Kamm dismissed my research out-of-hand, I submitted a response to the editor at Atlantic. And I assumed that the usual courtesy would be extended: when an author’s work is explicitly cited and then criticized, the author has a right of response to defend his or her work.

Not in this case. I submitted my response to the Atlantic, which did not publish it. I subsequently submitted my response to Quillette, which did not publish it. It is possible that neither publication considered my response as meeting their editorial standards. Or it may be that orthodox gatekeepers influenced the editors’ decisions to not publish. We’ll never know. And yet, since I was criticized by name, I would have thought that at the least, the editors would have accepted my response, perhaps with qualifications or requests for changes, e.g., cut the length, revise this or that, and so on. (I would have considered forwarding my response to the SHAKSPER listserve moderated by Prof. Hardy Cook, but as a matter of policy, the authorship question is taboo on that forum.)

For the record, below is the response as I submitted it to Quillette:

”Was Shakespeare A Woman?“ A good question – or just plain nuts?

With the publication of her article in the June issue of the Atlantic (”Was Shakespeare A Woman?“), Elizabeth Winkler has stirred up a hornet’s nest. Well, good. The Shakespeare Authorship Question should be a legitimate question, and she opens the door for renewed skepticism. However, she’ll need a thick skin.

Oliver Kamm has hostile words for Ms. Winkler’s article. In his review (”Conspiracism at the Atlantic“), published at Quillette , he criticizes the Shakespeare Authorship Question in general, and the case for Emilia Bassano in particular. Ms. Winkler’s arguments concerning the case for Bassano are circumstantial yet provocative enough to merit further inquiry. Ms. Winkler cites my research on the authorship question with a link to my book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography; Mr. Kamm did not have anything good to say about my research, either. While I am not qualified to support or challenge Ms. Winkler’s case for Emilia Bassano, I am in a position to respond to the underlying question: is there a legitimate Shakespeare authorship question?

Mr. Kamm employs a word that itself betrays an inherent bias; he describes anti-Stratfordians as ”denialists.“ This is hardly a new accusation. In 2013, when Prof. Stanley Wells referred to me as someone who would deny the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life, I responded by stating that I do not deny any of the evidence; instead, I re-evaluate it. It is the re-evaluation of evidence that leads a skeptic to raise serious questions about the man from Stratford, the man who we all thought was a poet and playwright. Well's review can only be found using the Wayback Machine

I do not argue for or against any alternative candidate, including Emilia Bassano. The candidacies of Bassano, Bacon, Oxford, and many others are circumstantial cases competing against the case for Shakespeare. But I do argue that there is good reason to question the traditional biography of the man from Stratford. Shakespeare left behind no personal papers or other evidence that allow biographers to trace his professional literary career. For reference, I use the term ”personal literary paper trail“ to describe evidence that can support one simple statement: his vocation was writing.

After comparing the evidence for Shakespeare with that for two dozen of his contemporaries, I conclude that Shakespeare is the only alleged writer of any consequence from the time period who left behind no personal literary paper trails during his lifetime; it is a unique deficiency. Surprisingly, Prof Stanley Wells acknowledges that deficiency. However, he also asserts that this deficiency does not matter, since in his view, posthumous testimony is just as reliable as contemporaneous literary paper trails.

If Shakespeare was the dramatist the title-pages claim him to be, then he was, by definition, a writer, and there should be some evidence to support that professional activity. Yet out of 70+ documents left behind during his lifetime, none support his alleged literary activities. So his name could be on all those title-pages for another reason, and no conspiracy theory is necessary to explain why.

The Shakespeare that I find in the documentary evidence is a businessman, investor, and entrepreneur. His theatrical shareholding puts him in proximity to the plays attributed to Shakespeare. He is named prominently in the theatrical documentation for the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s Men. However, shareholders named prominently in documentation for other acting companies were invariably the business agents who were men of means, with sufficient capital to act as financiers – trading in costumes, properties, and . . . playbooks. And if Shakespeare traded in playbooks, then we are closer to an explanation as to why his name appears on title-pages of works he did not write, such as the play A Yorkshire Tragedy and others in what’s been dubbed The Shakespeare Apocrypha.

As for Alan Nelson’s assertion that I cannot make a decent argument, I invite any interested reader to take a look at our debate, which has been up on my website ever since my book was first published in hardcover. In his book Contested Will, James Shapiro’s claims and challenges to the fundamentals of the authorship question are either unsupported assertions or are based on untested underlying assumptions. One such assumption concerns the 1623 First Folio front matter, which is the first testimony on record to identify the actor as the playwright. However, in order to take the cumulative testimony at face value, one must ignore questions about the authorship of some of that front matter, exaggerations and advertising hype, as well as ambiguities that suggest two sets of sign-posts, pointing in opposite directions. (The First Folio refers to the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published seven years after his death in Stratford).

I have no idea who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, but I would hope that the day will come when it will be a legitimate question. There is not much in the known life of Shakespeare that can illuminate the plays and poems, and an author whose life does provide a few keys that can unlock some of the mysteries and unanswered questions about the plays would be exciting.

As a postscript, Richard Paul Roe’s 2011 book, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy , is filled with discoveries of the playwright’s first-hand knowledge of Italy, In other words, Mr. Roe proves that the playwright, whoever he (or she) was, had sojourned in particular parts of Italy. Shakespeare of Stratford, as far as we know, never set foot out of England.

Shakespeare’s biography should be based on something more than just circumstantial evidence. It is unfortunate that Mr. Kamm (as well as Dominic Green at The Spectator USA ) have nothing but contempt for anyone who raises questions about a literary biography unsupported by a single personal literary paper trail.

###

Diana Price is the author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem (paperback edition 2013). The book was first released in 2001 as no. 94 in Greenwood Press’s academic series, ”Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies,“ making it the first book on the subject to be published in a peer-reviewed series. The updated paperback edition was published in 2013. Mr. Kamm claims that ”Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar.“ Price’s research has passed peer-review in several journals. Full bibliography is at her website.

NOTE: In this review, I refer to the man from Stratford as “Shakspere” and to the dramatist as “Shakespeare”. And if you have already read the opening paragraphs in my Amazon review, please click here to resume reading where you left off.

Prof. Stanley Wells has published a short book online, downloadable in Kindle, titled Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare (Kindle Singles, 4 Feb. 2014). At 57 pages, with virtually free access, it is a short read, available to anyone interested in the subject.

There is an obvious irony in the appearance of this e-publication, not quite one year since the publication of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, edited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The 2013 collection of essays by 20 specialists in various fields purported to put an end to the Shakespeare authorship question once and for all. That mission evidently fell short, or Wells would not feel any need to further defend the orthodox narrative.

I am one of many anti-Stratfordians who reviewed the 2013 collection of essays, posting my essay on my website, with slightly shorter versions on Amazon US and Amazon UK. I have to wonder whether Wells read any of the anti-Stratfordian criticism of the essays, as so many claims re-appear in his Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare. Since most of my objections concern claims that cannot be supported by the evidence, at least as I see it, I am concerned here with our disagreements over criteria and skepticism.

Wells’s pamphlet is a handy summary of unsupported claims for the orthodox narrative, and it reads plausibly enough for those with little interest in testing evidence. But he does not re-examine the evidence for Shakspere using the criteria routinely applied by most historians, critics, or biographers of other subjects. The unprecedented reliance on posthumous evidence to prove that Shakspere WAS Shakespeare is a subject on which the orthodox and I continue to disagree.

However, Wells does acknowledge that the first evidence in the historical record that identifies the playwright as the man from Stratford is posthumous; that evidence is, specifically, the Stratford monument and the 1623 First Folio testimony. As we agree on this point, it is appropriate for me to reiterate that Shakspere is the only alleged writer from the time period for whom one must rely on posthumous evidence to make the literary case, i.e., to support the statement that his profession was writing. As he pointed out in our exchange on BloggingShakespeare, Wells considers this distinction “irrelevant.”

Wells faults me for questioning the reliability of posthumous evidence: “Price irrationally casts doubt on posthumously derived evidence.” Most literary critics, biographers, and historians question the reliability of all evidence, including that which is posthumous. Such skepticism is not only rational, it is essentially just common sense.

Robert C. Williams makes the point: “A primary source is a document, image, or artifact that provides evidence about the past. It is an original document created contemporaneously with the event under discussion” (The Historian’s Toolbox: A Student’s Guide to the Theory and Craft of History, 2003, p.58). Paul Murray Kendall puts it this way: “What a man leaves behind him after he dies is a mess of paper: birth certificate, school grades, diary, letters, check stubs, laundry lists … This paper trail, extending from his entrance to his exit, is what the biographer tries to tread” (The Art of Biography, 1965, p. xiii).

Since I am concerned with the professional literary activities and interests of William Shakspere, I revisit all his paper trails to ask yet another question: does the evidence support the statement that Shakspere was a writer or does it have any bearing on his literary activities or development? If one is attempting to construct a ‘literary’ biography, then I submit that identifying ‘literary’ paper trails is an essential step. In my book and more fully on here my website ( “Criteria”), I cite more scholars who illustrate or enumerate various criteria and problems of reliability, including H.B. George, Richard D. Altick & John J. Fenstermaker, Harold Love, S.P. Cerasano, Harold Jenkins, Arthur Freeman, D. Nichol Smith, John Huntington, and William Ringler, among others . I doubt that Prof. Wells would describe these scholars as irrational.

Yet regarding the Shakespearean testimony in the First Folio, posthumous by seven years, Wells does not question the authorship of the two prefatory epistles printed over the names of the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell; he does not analyze the ambiguities and contradictory statements made throughout the Folio front matter; and he accepts at face value those statements that support the orthodox narrative. He overlooks the statements that imply or point to a gentleman of rank, so he never has to choose between two sets of signposts, or question the overall reliability of the front matter. And how much of the front matter is promotional in nature, aimed at encouraging sales (“whatever you do, Buy”)? Surely that sales pitch should alert the reader to be on the lookout for more signs of a promotional agenda or commercial considerations in the testimonials.

Similarly, Wells uncritically accepts literary allusions to the Shakespeare plays and poems as proof that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare, even when those allusions are impersonal literary commentary or confined to references to the written or performed word. Wells is of course following the orthodox biography as it has been handed down ever since the late eighteenth century. From the time of Edmund Malone, who was the first Shakespeare scholar to introduce serious scholastic rigor into his studies, the assumption of Shakespeare’s authorship has been accepted as fact, and few have stopped to question the absence of proof. If sheer repetition of a narrative constituted proof of that narrative, Prof. Wells’s pamphlet Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare would carry the day. But if he applied the criteria routinely applied by biographers of other subjects, by historians, and by literary critics, he would have to confront the problem that the orthodox literary biography of Shakespeare is founded on unproven assumptions.

[The foregoing is posted on Amazon US and Amazon UK.]

Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare : a point-by-point rebuttal

Wells categorizes all anti-Stratfordians as “deniers.” Yet, anti-Stratfordians come in many stripes. Not all anti-Stratfordian arguments have been, or remain, credible. Indeed, there have been some pretty outrageous anti-Stratfordian claims that make some of us cringe. But it is unfortunate that in leading off, Wells entitles his first chapter “The Growth of the Anti-Shakespearean Heresy.” Pejorative #1: “Anti-Shakespearean” makes it sound as though skeptics hate Shakespeare. Most anti-Stratfordians love the works of Shakespeare and describe themselves as “anti-Stratfordian” to distinguish the man from Stratford from the real author, whoever he/she was. Pejorative #2: “Heresy.” Wells is relegating the anti-Stratfordians in toto to the pre-determined category of “heretics.” What if anti-Stratfordian skepticism (a term I would prefer) turns out to be justified? Wells condemns his opponents before he has defended the first challenge. As one of the “deniers,” I have elsewhere pointed out that I don’t deny any evidence; I re-evaluate it. And he concludes that my own unorthodox biography is “destructive”; it has been my goal to reconstruct what can be known about the life of the man from Stratford, and to reconstruct that life from the available evidence.

Wells asserts that we know more about Christopher Marlowe than we do about Shakespeare. I would disagree, and it is relevant to point out why I disagree, since it involves the distinction between a general paper trail and a literary paper trail. Only a few parts of Marlowe’s biography are documented, including his sensational murder. But in general, his life is not particularly well-documented, and few of the paper trails he left behind are literary.

Marlowe left over twenty records of his presence at Cambridge University, largely recorded in the so-called buttery books (Boas, 13), but also in academic testimony (Ide, 58-59). The recommendation for his degree taking includes an inconclusive reference to state service, whatever that was (Boas, 22-23). So Marlowe is man of recorded education. We can make no comparable statement for Shakspere.

The circumstances of, and factional politics surrounding Marlowe’s death have been debated (by e.g., Charles Nicholl and Paul E. J. Hammer). Yet his murder sheds no light on his writing career, although the poet George Peele wrote a tribute to him (“unhappy in thy end / Marley the Muses darling, for thy verse”) a few weeks after the murder (Nicholl, 51-52). Even Marlowe’s arrest along with Thomas Watson, presumably the poet, is not evidence of his literary activities. One has to consider Robert Sidney’s letter to Lord Burghley, reporting Marlowe’s apprehension for counterfeiting, and Thomas Kyd’s undated letters to the Lord Keeper protesting that Marlowe’s manuscripts were “shuffled with some of mine … by some occasion or writing in one chamber two years since” to make decisions about those reports (with respect to Kyd’s letters, see especially J.A. Downie, whose analyses raise questions about the dates of composition of the two letters). But even accepting those records, Marlowe is one of the least documented of the alleged writers from the time period – in terms of literary paper trails.

Ironically, we know more about Shakspere’s professional activities than we do about Marlowe’s. The evidence that Shakspere left behind tells us that he was a theatrical shareholder, actor, money-lender, commodity trader, real estate investor, and so on. Regrettably, none of the evidence for Shakspere’s professional activities can be used to support the statement that he wrote for a living. And he is a man of no recorded education.

To put this into another perspective: Richard Burbage’s business affairs are well-documented, as are Shakspere’s. Nobody questions whether Burbage was an actor and businessman. Nobody questions whether Shakspere was an actor and businessman. But like Burbage, Shakspere left no evidence that would support the statement that he was a writer by profession.

Early on, in Chapter 1 (the Kindle download does not show page numbers), Wells claims that

we know as much as we have a right to expect about Shakspere’s public and professional career.

But that is one of the problems. We do not know as much as we have a right to expect about Shakspere’s professional career as an alleged writer, not when the quality of the evidence he left behind is compared to the quality of that for two dozen writers from the time period. The absence of any literary paper trails for Shakspere is a unique deficiency.

Wells dates the onset of authorship doubts to the mid-1800s. He claims:

Until the middle of the nineteenth century nobody doubted it.

That statement is inaccurate. We find Elizabethans speculating on or suggesting alternative authors. A character in one of the Parnassus plays guesses that a lesser poet named Samuel Daniel wrote Romeo and Juliet. Gabriel Harvey insinuates that the poet of Venus and Adonis was possibly Sir Edward Dyer. There are more, although such early expressions of confusion over Shakespeare’s authorship stopped short of explicit statements such as “I don’t think Shakspere of Stratford wrote Hamlet.” But they do show that confusion of attribution and authorship existed during Shakspere’s lifetime.

Nor did doubts about authorship originate with Joseph C. Hart and Delia Bacon. Wells might argue that they were the first to formalize the question, although both of them present fairly easy targets, and Wells spends some space ridiculing them. The strategy is not new. From a review, published in Shakespeare Quarterly, of two books defending orthodoxy: “One impressed by the learning and dialectic of a Sir George Greenwood may well feel perhaps that [Frank W. Wadsworth and R.C. Churchill], eager to write amusingly, have generally chosen to discuss the more patently absurd [anti-Stratfordian] claims and to disregard arguments less easily ridiculed” (Maxwell, 437).

Hart and Bacon also prompt Wells to bring up the snobbery issue. Miss Bacon, for example, could not reconcile Shakspere’s records, which lacked any documented access to the upper classes, with the aristocratic perspectives and past-times in the plays and poems. But pointing out a disconnect is not snobbery; it is the identification of a problem.

Wells claims:

Most recently, as if in despairing acknowledgement of the absurdity of the proliferation of contenders, sceptics have taken to saying that they have no idea who the author was, only it can’t have been Shakespeare.

Unlike many anti-Stratfordians, I do not argue for or against any alternative candidate. Wells implies in the above quote that my candidate-neutral position is a cop-out. It is not. For one thing, I do not think that presenting an alternative circumstantial case is the appropriate way to challenge the circumstantial case for the incumbent William Shakspere; that challenge should be made on its own merits. For another, as far as I am aware, the advocates for alternative candidates all present competing circumstantial cases of varying degrees of persuasion. None has discovered the smoking gun.

Wells claims:

The subject is well worthy of serious academic discussion as a social, psychological and intellectual phenomenon.

While some anti-Stratfordians are ideologically-driven, Wells implies that anyone who questions the authorship is somehow lacking mental or emotional stability. A social, psychological, or intellectual “phenomenon” deflects a discussion that should be focused on a critical analysis of the evidence, as well as on the criteria for that analysis.

Wells claims that in the film Anonymous, actor Mark Rylance

also takes the role of Richard III in the play that is performed on the eve of the Essex rebellion. (In fact, the play was Richard II, but where so much else is fiction how can we object to this additional distortion of the historical record?)

Wells corrects the record that it was Richard II, not Richard III, as the play performed during the Essex Rebellion, but few of his general readers would be aware that there has been debate on this subject as to whether the play performed in 1601 was even Shakespeare’s (see Blair Worden and Paul E. J. Hammer).

Wells references the earlier collection of essays:

Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013) … contains essays on various aspects of the authorship debate written by an international team of scholars.

In my review essay of this collection, I identified numerous leaps of faith and outright errors committed by this international team of scholars. Interested readers may take a look at my review.

Chapter 2

Wells claims:

There is nothing unusual about the fact that so little is known about William’s siblings; it just highlights how much, by comparison, we know about him.

With this statement, Wells sets up the reader to confuse or conflate quantity of evidence with quality of evidence. One thing that we know about Shakspere from the 70-plus records that survive is that his professional activities are well-documented. Unfortunately, his alleged career as a writer is not one of them.

Wells claims:

Stratford was not (as the deniers often claim) a backwater. A market town, which served the surrounding villages, it had a splendid church, a well-established grammar school, fine houses and townsmen who were well educated and wealthy. One of them was Richard Quiney.

Wells cites Richard Quiney’s ability to write in Latin. In this case, Wells is on solid ground. Some of Quiney’s correspondence survives, so we know he could read and write Latin. No comparable evidence survives for Shakspere. But the implication that one might extrapolate Quiney’s education and correspondence to represent the general milieu, perhaps the majority of townsmen in Stratford, is undermined by Charles Knight’s early observation that in the year that John was elected alderman (1565, the year after son William was born), only seven out of nineteen aldermen and burgesses could write their names (Knight, 15-17).

All of Wells’s speculation on what Shakspere would have learned at grammar school remains unsupported by any evidence. As I pointed out in my review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, T.W. Baldwin is unable to cite one document to support the statement that Shakspere attended school, or expressed gratitude to a mentor, or attended university or one of the Inns of Court, or owned a book, or wrote a word of dialogue, a line of poetry, or even a letter concerning his business affairs. Shakspere remains a man of no recorded education. The best that can be said is that if Shakspere of Stratford wrote the plays, then he must have attended the Stratford Grammar School. His assumed education is therefore the result of circular reasoning. Nor does Wells explain how a theoretical grammar school education could have equipped a student with a knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish, subjects not taught at provincial grammar schools.

Wells compares William’s hypothetical grammar school training with Ben Jonson’s. While there is no evidence of Jonson’s attendance at Westminster School, Jonson twice acknowledged his gratitude to his mentor, William Camden, who had taught at Westminster School:

Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe
All that I am in arts, all that I know,
… … … … … … … . . … … .
What weight, and what authority in thy speech!
Man scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach

[epigram xiv]

Jonson’s dedication of Every Man in His Humour in his 1616 folio is addressed to Camden with comparably explicit gratitude, to “the instructor” for “the benefits confer’d upon my youth”. There is no comparable evidence for Shakspere.

Richard Field, a printer who was born and bred in Stratford, printed three of the Shakespeare poems, but that is not good evidence that Field and the dramatist were acquainted. Nobody knows how the Shakespeare poems were transmitted to the printing house.

Yet, Wells claims that

It is virtually certain that the two were lifelong friends.

But there is no evidence to support the statement. (Why the dramatist should name a headless corpse in Cymbeline after Field remains a matter of speculation.)

Wells finds generic biographical echoes in the plays (premarital sex, schooldays, etc., but nothing with any thematic heft. He accepts Andrew Gurr’s reading of Sonnet 145 as

a love poem which puns in its closing lines on the name Hathaway: ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’

It’s a guess, not only about “Hate away” punning on Hathaway, but also involving speculation on what Shakspere was doing during one of the undocumented Lost Years. Wells further speculates that during those Lost Years,

before long he was writing plays, sometimes (as was common) in collaboration with others.

“He was writing plays” is not fact. It is conjecture. There is no evidence that can prove that Shakspere ever composed a line of dialogue. For those who would look to title page attributions for that “proof,” it is important to point out that title-page attributions are not personal records. They are not even reliable as evidence of authorship (witness the title-pages for A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, or The Passionate Pilgrim). The authority of Shakespearean title-pages is further compromised as more “co-authors” are identified, e.g., Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, etc. And in light of other cases of misattribution, it is possible that the name Shakespeare, however spelled, appears on title-pages for some other reason.

Chapter 3

Concerning the famous Upstart Crow / Shake-scene passage from Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Wells claims:

Of all the allusions to Shakespeare from his own time, this is the least complimentary, both professionally and personally. On the whole, people seem to have liked him.

The Upstart Crow passage is indeed uncomplimentary, but Wells’s second statement, that “people seem to have liked him” cannot be supported by any of the allusions. The allusions to “gentle” or “sweet” Shakespeare,” “good Will,” “friendly Shakespeare,” and “so dearly loved a neighbor,” to name some of the most quoted, are examples of impersonal literary commentary, not testimonials about the author. To paraphrase Harold Jenkins, the allusions to Shakespeare are of a purely literary character and necessitate no personal knowledge (11).

In response to complaints over the open letter containing the Upstart Crow passage, Henry Chettle subsequently published an apology. Wells repeats the claim that Chettle was apologizing to Shakspere:

significantly he goes on to say that ‘divers of worship [i.e., various eminent people; could he include the earl of Southampton, soon to become Shakespeare’s patron?] have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious [meaning urbane, polished] grace in writing that approves [bears witness to] his art.’ Obviously this refers to a writer (Shakespeare),

There is no evidence that the earl of Southampton was vouching for the insulted party (and an earl would not be referred to as your “worship”). But more importantly, Chettle’s apology is explicitly directed to two of the three playwrights addressed in Groatsworth, that is, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. However, like most orthodox biographers, Wells claims that Chettle apologized instead to Shakspere. With that sleight-of-hand, biographers transform Shake-scene from being the subject of the open letter blasting the Upstart Crow, into being one of its three addressees, and therefore one of the “fellow Scholars” who spends his wits “making plays.” (Lukas Erne makes the case that George Peele is the intended recipient of the apology.)

Like most biographers, Wells claims personal interaction and even friendship between the poet Shakespeare and the earl of Southampton, basing his suggestion on the dedications of the two narrative poems to the earl:

The first dedication is relatively formal in tone, the second much warmer, suggesting that a real friendship may have developed.

Neither dedication to Southampton is useful in supporting the theory that the poet and the earl of Southampton developed a friendship or were even acquainted; both dedications are couched in impersonal or formulaic language. Further, the second dedication tells us that after his first try with Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare, whoever he was, was still writing that he had merely heard about, or been assured (“the warrant I have”) of Southampton’s presumably generous disposition.

Wells claims:

From now on Shakespeare was the resident playwright of the most important theatre company in the land.

This is another statement based on the assumption that Shakspere the actor was also the playwright. So far, Wells has produced no evidence that Shakspere wrote anything.

Wells claims:

The closeness of this relationship is clear from the fact that the printed texts of some of the plays he wrote for the company show that he had specific actors in mind for particular roles. In the first printed text of Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, [Will] Kemp’s name appears in speeches designed for the character Dogberry.

Nobody knows what the compositors (typesetters) were looking at when they set type for a play, including Much Ado. According to Andrew Gurr, “The naming of players in playscripts is a vexed question that depends heavily on what sort of manuscript is identified as the source for the printed text, and when the names were inserted in the manuscript” (72n; see also Werstine, 118).   “the source” could be an authorial manuscript, but it also could be a scribal transcript, edited copy, a reported text, the transcript of a shorthand report, a playhouse script, or some other descendent copy. However, since no ‘foul papers’ by Shakespeare or anyone else have ever been discovered, the arguments proposing that the dramatist’s ‘foul papers’ served as printer’s copy for this or that printed text are unsupported by any evidence.

Wells claims:

What all this means in relation to the authorship question is that the man who wrote the plays (no woman is recorded as having written for the public theatres in his time) was a thoroughgoing professional, familiar with, and deeply immersed in, the practices of the public theatres.

Wells builds on Shakspere’s documented career as an actor and theatrical shareholder, and then adds to that his assumptions about the authorial origin of certain speech prefixes, to claim that Shakspere was the dramatist, “a thoroughgoing professional, familiar with, and deeply immersed in, the practices of the public theatres.” It sounds good, but it is more than we know.

The cast lists that Wells quotes, from two Jonson plays of 1598 and 1603, were not printed until 1616, the year of Shakspere’s death. Not only do they not tell us what parts he played, they shed no light on his alleged writing activities. They also represent the first time in the surviving historical record that Jonson recorded the name “Shakespeare.”

Wells claims:

About half of Shakespeare’s were printed in his lifetime.

Shakespeare, the writer considered his work good enough to “outlive marble.” Shakspere, the businessman, had a sharp eye for any source of income. The Shakespearean publishing record therefore presents two obvious contradictions. (And it surely presents a problem for Lukas Erne’s recent theories about Shakspere’s supposedly active role in getting his plays into print as a deliberate career initiative.)

Chapter 4

All of the Shakespearean literary allusions are accepted into the literary biography of a man whose documentary remains cannot support the statement that he wrote anything. In accepting the literary allusions as personal testimony for Shakspere, Wells follows the orthodox tradition:

In 1594, when he was thirty years old, a minor writer called Henry Willoughby names Shakespeare as the author of The Rape of Lucrece, published in that year;

Actually, the allusion (in Willobie His Avisa) to Lucrece is not by Henry Willoughby; the allusion occurs in a prefatory poem subscribed with the pseudonymous “Contraria Contrariis: Vigilantius: Dormitanus” (Willoughby, 19-20). Henry Willoughby himself was almost certainly an innocent bystander in the publication of Willobie His Avisa ; the attribution to him is made in the preface on the dubious authority of “Hadrian Dorrell,” for whom no historical evidence exists (Willoughby, 19-20). All that aside, the naming of Shakespeare as the author of Lucrece is good evidence that “Vigilantius” had read The Rape of Lucrece ; it is not evidence that he recognized Shakspere as that poet. (Note: In the interest of saving a little space, I am not reproducing all the literary allusions; many, perhaps most are available online via search engines.)

Concerning the much-quoted allusions to Shakespeare in the 1598 publication of Palladis Tamia, Wells claims:

It looks as if [the author Francis] Meres had private knowledge, possibly that he knew Shakespeare personally. When he says ‘among his private friends ’ he may mean that Shakespeare is actually addressing sonnets to his intimates or simply that he is showing them sonnets which may or may not have been addressed to specific individuals.

Wells’s suggestion that Meres had inside personal knowledge of Shakespeare sonnets cannot hold up under scrutiny. While the statements sound plausible enough, not only is it speculation, it also fails to take into account the analyses by various scholars. Don Cameron Allen’s edition of Palladis Tamia remains an important reference point, and he is not alone when he considers the book “the work of a hack who had a contracted obligation to fulfill,” one who relied on literary critics such as George Puttenham and William Webbe for some of his information (Meres, vii). Another commentator likewise supposed that Meres’s “information about [the poets] must have come, not from his own direct knowledge, but from a reliable outside source” (Thomas, “Dating,” 188).

Richard Barnfield’s praise of Shakespeare’s poetry is another impersonal reference, necessitating no personal knowledge of the poet of Venus and Adonis. Similarly, although John Weever recognizes the name Shakespeare as both poet and playwright, his sonnet does not tell us whether Weever personally knew Shakspere; Weever’s biographer could not be sure (Honigmann, 21).

With respect to the three Parnassus plays (Cambridge student satires), Wells claims:

[the character] Gullio has spoken almost all of the second stanza of Venus and Adonis, exclaims ‘Sweet Master Shakespeare!’ (‘Master’ shows that he is aware that by this time Shakespeare has been granted a coat of arms and the status of gentleman that goes along with it.)

The entry in the Stationers Register (1600) for Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV (2) names “master Shakespere,” and it is subsequent to the grant of the coat of arms to John Shakspere. I am surprised that Wells did not cite Tom Reedy’s recent attempt to invest that entry with ultimate attribution authority, as though it were the elusive literary paper trail that clinches the case. (My analysis of Mr. Reedy’s assertion is here.)

The “praise” that the character Gullio bestows on “sweet Master Shakespeare” is, in the opinion of the editor of the Parnassus plays, worthless praise from a fool (337). And while some critics consider Gullio a stock character rather than a satire of a real person, the scenes in which Gullio appears merit a closer look. My own analysis of the Parnassus plays, as they concern the Shakspere biography, takes up several pages in my book. And a close look at the scenes in which Shakespeare (however spelled) is mentioned can support an unorthodox narrative of Shakspere’s life. One cannot break the impasse by avoiding the ambiguities and contexts that should raise red flags.

The orthodox biographer rarely puts these sorts of allusions under the microscope, probably because such analyses raise too many awkward questions. However, anti-Stratfordians have been free to ask such questions, as did, for example, Sir George Greenwood; his analyses of the Parnassus scenes, especially the one with actors Burbage and Kemp (328-330),  remain Must Reads. Any critical reader of the Parnassus plays will also want to consult J.B. Leishman’s edition to get some ideas about how to decide which interpretation(s) might make sense. To present the Parnassus lines as obvious, or to be taken at face value, is a disservice to the Elizabethan and Jacobean satirists, who were conditioned to write between the lines, and to poke fun in ways that, if challenged, allowed them to defend their innocent intentions.

Wells claims that the pedant Gabriel Harvey’s annotations show that he knows “Shakespeare as both poet and dramatist.” But Harvey’s written annotation demonstrate his familiarity with the printed works of Shakespeare in both genres ; his comments could not by any stretch be used to show that he personally recognized the man from Stratford as the poet-dramatist.

Wells claims:

The second poem to be explicitly addressed to Shakespeare appears in a collection by the poet known as John Davies of Hereford (to distinguish him from another of the same name). Cryptic as epigrams of this period often were, it certainly names him as an actor, and in its title –‘ To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shakespeare’, compares him to the great Roman dramatist whose plays were often studied in schools. (Absurdly, some of the deniers say that this comparison with Terence, who apparently had a reputation as a plagiarist, shows that Shakespeare’s reputation was based on other men’s works.)

Wells is dismissive of anti-Stratfordians who point out that “Terence” was known not only as a dramatist but also as a front man. He grudgingly acknowledges that Terence “apparently had a reputation as a plagiarist.” Apparently? No, Terence’s reputation as a front for aristocratic playwrights (Scipio and Laelius) was well-known to those who lived in Shakespeare’s time; that reputation was in print in several editions of Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570, 1579, 1589) and also in the 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays. Identifying ambiguities in this epigram is a necessary step. A full analysis of Davies’s epigram to “Shake-speare,” as well as some of Davies’s other epigrams that precede and follow the one to Shake-speare, reveals many more ambiguities and competing interpretations. I disagree that identifying potential ambiguities is absurd.

Chapter 5

Few question the legal and documentary records that can be used to reconstruct Shakspere’s activities in the theater, whether as actor, company shareholder, or shareholder in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. They may yield more information about Shakspere’s activities than previously thought, as I have argued elsewhere (Unorthodox, 102-8). However, there is one record that I still have questions about: the 1604 Revels accounts that Wells cites:

In the Christmas season of 1604 to 1605 he is explicitly named four times (under the spelling ‘Shaxberd’) as the author of the plays – including seven by him – acted at court before the king and his family.

Some readers will have heard of the notorious forger John Payne Collier. Collier’s friend and colleague, Peter Cunningham (1816-69), came under suspicion when he tried to sell the 1604-5 and 1611-12 Revels accounts to the British Museum in 1868. These accounts were at first pronounced forgeries, then pronounced genuine, then questioned again. A. E. Stamp’s The Disputed Revels Accounts (1930) continues to be quoted as the ultimate vindication of the disputed documents, but Samuel A. Tannenbaum’s analysis of their irregularities, e.g., Shakspere Forgeries (1928), leaves lingering doubts. In my view, the jury is still out. And the “Shaxberd” spelling should prompt more questions than it does.

Wells introduces the famous Heywood apology:

The Passionate Pilgrim was reprinted in 1612 with the addition of other poems by the prolific dramatist and poet Thomas Heywood, who, in another book, An Apology for Actors (published in the same year), complained of the ‘manifest injury’ done to him by including some of his poems in a book under another’s name, pointing out that this might give the impression that he had stolen them. And he says that the author – obviously Shakespeare – was ‘much offended’ with Jaggard, who had, ‘altogether unknown to him, presumed to make bold with his name’. Probably as a result, the original title page was cancelled and replaced by one that does not name Shakespeare.

It is not “obviously” Shakespeare who was the “much offended” party, although that claim has been repeated so often that it has solidified into “fact.” A “manifest injury” was inflicted when some of Heywood’s poems were passed off, by published William Jaggard, as by Shakespeare, named on the title page. It would seem that either Heywood or Shakespeare could have taken offense at the misattribution. But in this case, the victim of the “manifest injury” was not Shakespeare, but Heywood. Like his predecessors, Wells pays no attention to the semantics and literary conceits used by Heywood in his Apologie for Actors, in which he refers to himself three times as the “Author” before repeating the word in the famous passage that Wells quotes (Price, Unorthodox, 138-39). Wells further claims that “as a result, the original title page was cancelled and replaced by one that does not name Shakespeare.” Actually, if Colin Burrows has it right, and he makes some good observations (79n), it was the other way around: Shakespeare’s name was left off of the first title pages to come off the press and was re-instated in a press correction, for promotional purposes.

Wells opines that Shakspere may not have approved of the publication of plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy or The London Prodigal, both attributed to Shakespeare on the title pages; these are two of the plays in the Shakespeare Apocrypha. But Wells’s unsupported assumption (that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare) should raise yet another red flag. Considering the plays and poems misattributed to Shakespeare (or to “W.S.”) during his lifetime, as well as the number of Shakespeare plays published in corrupt editions (the so-called “bad quartos”), the larger question is, or should be: “where was Shakespeare?”

Wells reports on the Shakespeare collaborations as though they obviously represented active hands-on partnerhships. Collaborations can certainly represent two or more authors actively working at the same time on various parts of a play, whether jointly writing scenes or revising each other’s drafts, for example. The Henslowe papers show payments in the same entry to playwrights collaborating and getting paid for their respective contributions to a play (Henslowe’s, 125, 126, 127, 129, etc.). But other scenarios are possible.

Scholars simply do not have the evidence to prove the nature of the Shakespearean collaborations, that is, whether active or passive. Some editors of collaborative plays such as Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton) or Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher) consider the possibility that one or the other playwright was picking up an abandoned or incomplete text, and contributing to, adding to, or revising a play independently of a second author (Jowett, Timon, 98-99; Potter, 32).

Chapter 6

Wells associates Shakspere’s son with Hamlet :

Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet (the name is a variant of Hamlet)

It may be pleasant to think that Shakspere named his son in anticipation of the title character of what was to become Shakespeare’s most famous play. However, Shakspere’s neighbors were Hamnet and Judith Sadler, and biographers reasonably suppose that the Shakspere twins were named after their neighbors. However, since Hamnet Sadler’s name is spelled “Hamlet” in a few Stratford documents, Wells’s supposition is not outrageous. But there are only two documentary records for son Hamnet, his christening in 1585 and his burial in 1596. Both are spelled “Hamnet” (Chambers, Facts, 2:3,4).

Wells claims:

So far as we know Shakespeare’s wealth came from his share in the profits of the acting company; and this supposition is supported by the fact that other members of the King’s Men also died wealthy men.

Wells cites Henry Condell and Augustine Phillipps as shareholders who likewise amassed a small fortune. But their wealth is documented in later years. However, I point out that:

While it is safe to conclude that Shakspere made money from theatrical investments, even his shareholding does not fully explain his financial history. He bought New Place in Stratford in 1597, three years after he became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but two years before he became a shareholder in the Globe theatre. Obviously, Shakspere had other sources—major sources—of income. (Unorthodox, 101)

And in 1598, Shakspere invested in a commercial quantity of grain and was approached for financing by Stratford neighbors. Again, that is a year before the Globe was built.

Chapter 7

To begin with the posthumous evidence, specifically the Stratford monument, Wells claims:

it is surely patently obvious that whoever wrote them [the epitaph] wished to convey that a man called Shakespeare who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon was a supremely great writer. The deniers have to go through extraordinary contortions in their attempts to deny this.

Agreed: the monument conveys the impression that Shakspere was the writer. But there are more questions: What is its provenance? What does the epitaph tell us? Wells himself describes the epitaph as “cryptic.” Why doesn’t the epitaph contain explicit and coherent praise of a writer? More on this below.

In the final analysis, it all comes down to the 1623 First Folio about which Wells claims that

several references in the prefatory matter of the First Folio make it very clear that this is the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

True. But as I conclude in an article published in the Tennessee Law Review :

One of the critical passages from Heminges and Condell’s testimony is the claim that they are publishing the plays in the First Folio “Only to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our < Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays.” This claim is made in no uncertain terms. Now, just who wrote this passage is an authorship question for another day, but in weighing this testimony, one would need to put the author on the stand to determine whether he was an impartial and trustworthy witness, if he was a pen for hire, if he had an agenda, if he contradicted himself, and so on. In other words, we would need to be satisfied that this testimony holds up under cross-examination. However, putting aside the complexities of this testimony, for the sake of argument, let us accept this statement at face value.

If we do, is this good evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford was the writer? I’d say yes. Is it personal evidence? I’d say yes. So, does it qualify as a personal literary paper trail for Shakespeare? That depends on the admissibility of posthumous evidence. I maintain that it is not admissible as contemporary testimony. But every modern biographer follows the lead of E.K. Chambers [Sources, 50], who asserts that this “prefatory matter … may be regarded as contemporary ” [emphasis added].

Why? Why should it be regarded as contemporary, when it is posthumous by seven years? (145-46)

Wells does not question the authorship of the two prefatory epistles, he does not identify and analyze the ambiguities and contradictory statements throughout the front matter, and he accepts at face value those statements that support the orthodox narrative. In other words, he overlooks the signposts in the Folio front matter that point to a well-born author, so he never has to choose between the two contradictory sets of signposts, much less question the reliability of the front matter. In the absence of contemporary evidence that could prove that Shakspere wrote for a living, the question about the reliability of the First Folio testimony is of great relevance.

Chapter 8

In “Some Arguments Aainst,” Wells states that

The argument is that the town [of Stratford] was an intellectual and cultural backwater which could not have fostered genius.

While there were educated men in Stratford, I doubt that Wells would characterize the market town as the intellectual and cultural capital of Warwickshire. Nevertheless, I do not say that Shakspere couldn’t have become the literary genius. I do say that if he did, he would have left some records behind to show how he did it. By leaving out that important question, Wells can again set up a misplaced argument about the intellectual snobbery of skeptics.

In his attempt to absolve the dramatist, whoever he was, of foreign travels to Italy, Wells claims that “we don’t know for certain that Shakespeare didn’t visit Italy.” There is no evidence that Shakspere did. Wells then denigrates the research of Richard Paul Roe (The Shakespeare Guide To Italy ), by pointing out that Romeo and Juliet is not, as Roe stated, Shakespeare’s first play. Probably not, although in 1845, Joseph Hunter proposed that it was (2:120-21). Yet that “howler” is enough for Wells to belittle Roe’s research. (Would Wells dismiss out of hand the 2012 Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, because, in the introduction, Arthur F. Kinney states that ca. 1577-78, Philip Henslowe built the Curtain in Shoreditch?) More to the point, Roe’s research is not dependent on the generally accepted chronological order of writing. His areas of inquiry are the culture, geography, topography, and customs in early modern Italy. He identified Shakespearean dialogue that might exhibit firsthand familiarity with matters Italian. He then attempted to retrace the dramatist’s Italian travels, using the dialogue as his guide, to see if there were, in fact, real life prototypes, locations, travel routes, and so on.  

Wells criticizes Roe’s reconstruction of the travels in Two Gentlemen :

The author of The Two Gentlemen of Verona does not simply say that the journey is made by water, but makes it quite clear that it is a sea journey. Proteus says to Speed:

Go, go, be gone, to save your ship from wreck,
Which cannot perish, having thee aboard,
Being destined to a drier death on shore. (1.1.141– 3)

This in itself is enough to show that the playwright imagined a voyage by sea, not by canal, on which ships, shores and wrecks are to say the least uncommon.

Wells omits subsequent critical lines of text that Roe explores, including the dramatist’s clarifications of terms:

Panthino Launce, away, away, aboard! thy master is shipped and thou art to post after with oars. What’s the matter? why weepest thou, man? Away, ass! You’ll lose the tide, if you tarry any longer.

Launce It is no matter if the tied were lost; for it is the unkindest tied that ever any man tied.

Panthino What’s the unkindest tide?

Launce Why, he that’s tied here, Crab, my dog.

Panthino Tut, man, I mean thou’lt lose the flood, and, in losing the flood, lose thy voyage, and, in losing  thy voyage, lose thy master …  [emphasis added] (II.iii.33-45)

Panthino tries to get Launce to understand that by “tide” he means “flood.” Roe describes the canal and sixteenth century lock system that produced the “flood” that transported the boat out of the “mitre gates.”

Launce Lose the tide, and the voyage, and the master, and the service, and the tied! Why, man, if the river were dry, I am able to fill it with my tears; if the wind were down, I could drive the boat with my sighs. [emphasis added] (II.iii.50-54)

Roe cites Elizabethan and Jacobean travel reports, in which “river” is used interchangeably with “canal,” 150), and he documents the use of the inland canal system by large cargo-laden vessels and even warships, generally associated with ocean sailing (47, 48, 49, 58-59). Roe is able to reconstruct several other Shakespearean journeys, including those in Merchant of Venice and Winter’s Tale. 

Roe’s research is more meticulous than Wells indicates. Nevertheless, if Wells were determined to find fault with his research, he might have criticized Roe’s reliance on the quarto or Folio texts with respect to presumed authorial choices of spelling or capitalization (Roe, 146-47, 148, 184-85). None of the printed plays can be proven to be based on the author’s so-called “foul papers” (see Werstine, e.g. 44-50). Nevertheless, Roe’s research is not ultimately reliant on the printed idiosyncrasies. Wells might also have criticized Roe’s reliance on a modern Catalan dictionary for translations of the names Ariel and Caliban (as Ros Barber pointed out on the Shaksper listserve). Perhaps some anti-Stratfordians can dig around for sixteenth-century Catalan journals, maritime logs, correspondence, and so on, that might prove the case one way or the other. But it’s a minor point, especially compared to his major discoveries, including St. Gregory’s Well in Two Gentlemen and the Duke’s Oak in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Roe’s research is ground-breaking, not the least because he read the Italian plays more closely than his predecessors. In a sense, his list of Italianate specifics comprised a sort of bucket list. I do not know how many more investigations he had in mind before his death in 2010, but based on his published book, his batting average is outstanding. It is regrettable that Wells does not appreciate Roe’s original research or share in the thrill of his discoveries.

Switching the subject to Shakespeare’s genius. If, as Wells claims, some anti-Stratfordians discount the notion of genius, I am not one of them. I do consider genius a factor in studying the Shakspere biography, but I am puzzled that Wells argues that

The achievements of such relatively untutored geniuses as a Robert Burns, a John Clare, a Charles Dickens, a Franz Schubert, a William Blake, an Emily Dickinson, a Charlotte Brontë, or a Mark Twain should be enough to disabuse anyone of such a notion.

Yes, and every one of these geniuses left behind some evidence that I call literary paper trails. Some of those “untutored” geniuses even left behind evidence, however scanty, of their education (e.g., Burns, Brontë, Dickinson, and Schubert). For none of these literary geniuses of humble beginnings must one rely on posthumous evidence to support their literary development or activities. So again, if Shakspere was another untutored genius, how did he do it? There is no evidence that can tell us how he did it.

Chapter 9

In his criticism of my paperback edition of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Wells reproduced much of the relevant sections of his comments first posted on Blogging Shakespeare. He claims:

At other points she attempts to denigrate Shakespeare of Stratford’s literary reputation by proposing that his wife and daughters were illiterate.

The evidence we have (including Susanna’s single ill-formed signature and her inability to recognize her husband’s handwriting) supports the statements that wife and daughters were indeed functionally illiterate.

Wells claims:

Price writes of Stratford-upon-Avon as an educational backwater, while also quoting John Hall’s description of one of the Quineys – the family into which Judith Shakespeare married – as ‘a man of good wit, expert in tongues, and very learned’.

As we have seen, there is more evidence to support the statement that Richard Quiney could read and write in both English and Latin. But daughter Judith’s marriage to Thomas Quiney is not evidence of her literacy; obviously, literate in-laws do not automatically confer literacy on illiterate relatives, even spouses. (See also Charles Knight’s observation above).

Wells’s criticism that I “misleadingly [say] that there are ‘no commendatory verses to Shakespeare’, ignoring those printed in the First Folio, as well as the anonymous prose commendation in the 1609 edition of Troilus and Cressida, and that by Thomas Walkley in the 1622 quarto of Othello.” His criticism illustrates the problems that Wells and I have with criteria. The commendatory verses in the First Folio were published seven years after Shakspere died. The poems by Leonard Digges and Hugh Holland contain literary praise but no personal testimony about the author. Digges’s reference to the Stratford monument may or may not be at firsthand.

Jonson’s eulogy is far more complex. Like his two Folio epistles, Jonson’s eulogy is factually inconsistent, but it takes many pages to comprehensively explore his language and point out the contradictions. Suffice it to say here, by taking certain statements at face value and ignoring those containing contradictions, Wells can avoid choosing between two sets of signposts, the first pointing to Shakspere of Stratford, and second pointing to an unnamed gentleman.

There are two editions of Troilus, both printed in 1609. The preface in one issue of Troilus tells us nothing personal about the dramatist, and it claims that Troilus is “a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.” The title-page of the other issue contradicts that claim; it states that the play “was Acted by the Kings Majesty’s Servants at the Globe.” Far from confirming the traditional attribution, these conflicting statements simply raise more questions.

The 1622 epistle by Walkley, the publisher of Othello, tells us that the dramatist was dead, but offers no further details except to encourage potential customers to read the play. Neither the Troilus nor the Walker prefaces require personal knowledge of the author. They are impersonal literary commentary aimed at encouraging sales.

Wells refers to:

the monument in Holy Trinity Church, with its inscriptions eulogizing Shakespeare of Stratford as a writer.

The epitaph reads: “Stay Passenger, why goest thou by so fast? / Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath plast [placed] / Within this monument Shakspeare: with whom / Quick nature died: whose name doth deck this tomb / Far more than cost: sith [since or see] all that he hath writ / Leaves living art, but page to serve his wit”. As I have argued above and in more detail in the book, the epitaph to Shakespeare does not constitute coherent praise for a writer. Some of the shortcomings are obvious, especially so when one compares the epitaph to those for

Edmund Spenser “with thee our English verse was rais’d on high”

Francis Beaumont “He that can write so well”

Michael Drayton “a Memorable Poet of his Age”

John Taylor “Here lies the Water Poet”

George Chapman “a Christian Philosopher and Homericall Poet”

(Pettigrew, 406, 407; LeNeve, 150).

Wells repeats his criticism from his BloggingShakespeare comments on William Basse’s (or John Donne’s?) elegy:

Still more importantly, Price downplays William Basse’s elegy on Shakespeare, which ranks him alongside Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont. This poem could have been written any time after Shakespeare died, and, as I have said, it was circulated widely in manuscript – at least thirty -four copies are known – before and after it was published in 1633; and Price fails to note that one of the copies is entitled ‘On Willm Shakspear buried att Stratford-vpon-Avon, his Town of Nativity’.

…

So William Basse’s poem, and the fact that it has come down to us in so many versions, bears witness to Shakespeare’s popularity as a great writer worthy of comparison with England’s best. And the titles people gave to some versions of Basse’s poem make clear that this was the Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon; one of them, indeed, reads ‘On Willm Shakspear buried att Stratford-vpon-Avon, his Town of Nativity’. It is a clear identification by an unprejudiced early witness of Shakespeare the playwright as a Stratford man.

My response to that criticism stands:

I “downplay” this elegy for several reasons. Its authorship remains in question; it may have been written by John Donne, to whom it is attributed in Donne’s Poems of 1633. There is no evidence that either Basse or Donne knew Shakspere. And yes, the elegy does exist in numerous manuscript copies; the one allegedly in Basse’s handwriting is tentatively dated 1626 and shows one blot and correction in an otherwise clean copy– suggesting that it might be a transcript.

The poem itself contains no evidence that the author was personally acquainted with Shakspere. Whether by Donne or Basse, it is a posthumous and impersonal tribute, requiring familiarity with Shakespeare’s works, and, possibly, details on the funerary monument in Stratford. Wells and Taylor themselves cannot be certain which manuscript title (if any) represents the original (Textual, 163).

Wells seems to think that the Basse/Donne poem is convincing evidence that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare. The title ’On Willm Shakspear buried att Stratford-vpon-Avon, his Town of Nativity’ is prefixed to one of the manuscript copies of unknown provenance. The title could be derivative of the First Folio front matter, it could be reliant on the monument inscription, but it cannot prove that Shakspere wrote Shakespeare.

Wells is critical that I offer “a detailed discussion of William Dugdale’s sketch, made around 1634, of the Stratford monument”.

She accepts this monument as an effigy of the Stratford Shakespeare, but fails to take note of Dugdale’s statement that it portrays ‘william Shakespeare the famous poet’, even though she reproduces it in her book.”

The annotation in Dugdale’s notebook tells us very little, since it is impossible to know whether it represents Dugdale’s original description or is derivative of someone else’s. Interestingly, and also in 1634, a Lt. Hammond similarly described “A Neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. William Shakespeere” (Chambers, Facts, 2:243). Perhaps one report was derivative of the other, or just as likely, both derived from the same source. For all we know, the Stratford vicar put up a make-shift sign in the chancel to make sure that visitors were made aware of what they were looking at.

Wells faults me for citing sonnets when it suits my unorthodox purpose, although he did not specify which ones he would challenge. The reason I cite certain sonnets is because they are difficult to reconcile with Shakspere’s documented activities.

Wells especially faults me for not dealing with Sonnet 136, which proves that the author’s name was Will (‘I was thy Will’ and “My name is Will”).’ Wells’s criticism of my selectivity must stand; I did not quote this sonnet. However, Stephen Booth’s critical edition of the Sonnets provides readers with various interpretations from which to choose. And when one juxtaposes Sonnet 136 and the lines about “My name is Will” with these lines from sonnet 72 [emphasis added]

My name be buried where my body is
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

one confronts a contradiction. “My name is Will” vs. “My name be buried where my body is.” The conflicting sentiments are difficult to reconcile with the orthodox narrative, but perhaps less difficult with an unorthodox one.

In closing, Wells argues with plausible-sounding statements that cannot withstand skeptical scrutiny, and too often, extended scrutiny exposes the weakness or invalidity of an assumption, the ambiguity of the actual text, and in some cases, an outright misreading of an allusion (such as the Chettle apology). It has been my intention in challenging the various claims made by Prof. Wells to demonstrate why questions remain about Shakespeare’s authorship.

Wells has not been able to produce one literary paper trail for Shakspere, left behind during Shakspere’s life. (Interestingly, he steered clear of the one “literary paper trail” proposed by scholars in 1923: that is, the Hand D portions of the Sir Thomas More manuscript. The identification of Hand D as Shakspere’s continues to gain momentum in orthodox circles as another “fact,” so I suppose it is a relief that Wells omitted it.)

In the absence of documentary evidence comparable to that left behind by two dozen other writers from the time period, the orthodox literary narrative for Shakspere collapses. If sheer repetition of a narrative constituted proof of that narrative, Prof. Wells’s pamphlet Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare would carry the day. But if he applied the criteria routinely applied by biographers of other subjects, by historians, and by literary critics, he would have to confront the problem that the orthodox literary biography of Shakespeare is founded on unproven assumptions, not facts.

Bibliography

Altick, Richard D. and John J. Fenstermaker. The Art of Literary Research . 4^th ed. New York: Norton, 1993.

Baldwin, T. W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

Barber, Ros. “Meaning of Ariel” posted to Shaksper listserve 19 Feb. 2014.

Boas, Frederick S. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study. 1940. Reprint with corrections and a supplementary note, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Burrow, Colin, ed. The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Sonnets and Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Centerwall, Brandon S. “Who Wrote William Basse’s ‘Elegy on Shakespeare’?: Rediscovering A Poem Lost From the Donne Canon.” in Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006): 267-84.

Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. 1930. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

─────. Sources for A Biography of Shakespeare. 1946. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Downie, J.A. “Marlowe, May 1595, and The ‘Must-Have’ Theory of Biography.” in The Review of English Studies 58:235 (June 2007: 245-67).

Erne, Lukas. “Biography and Mythography: Rereading Chettle’s Alleged Apology to Shakespeare.” in English Studies 79 (September 1998): 430-40.

─────. Shakespeare and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Greenwood, George. The Shakespeare Problem Restated. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. 1908.

Gurr, Andrew. “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145.” in Essays in Criticism 21 (July 1971): 221-26.

─────. The Shakespearian Playing Companies Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Hammer, Paul E. J. “Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising.” in Shakespeare Quarterly 59:1 (spring 2008): 1-35.

─────.  “A Reckoning Reframed: The ‘Murder’ of Christopher Marlowe Revisited.” English Literary Renaissance. 26:2 (April 1996): 225–242.

Henslowe’s Diary. Edited by R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Honigmann, E.A.J. John Weever: A Biography of a Literary Associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, Together with a Photographic Facsimile of Weever’s ‘Epigrammes’ (1599) . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.

Hunter, Joseph. New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare. 2 vols. 1845. Reprint, New York: AMS Press Inc., 1976.

Ide, Arata. “Christopher Marlowe, William Austen, and the Community of Corpus Christie College.” in Studies in Philology 104 (winter 2007): 56-81.

Jenkins, Harold. The Life and Work of Henry Chettle. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1934.

Jowett, John. ‘Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit ’. Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 87, December 1993: (453–86).

─────, ed. Timon of Athens. Oxford Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kendall, Paul M. The Art of Biography. 1965, Reprint, Norton, 1985.

Kinney, Arthur F., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Leishman, J. B., ed. The Three Parnassus Plays 1598-1601. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949.

Le Neve, John. Monumenta Anglicana, Being Inscriptions on the Monuments of Several Eminent Persons Deceased in or since the Year 1600 to the End of the Year 1718 . London, 1717-19.

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Parnassus plays (see Leishman)

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─────. Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem. Paperback edition (corrected and revised). Cleveland, OH: shakespeare-authorship.com, 2013.

─────. Responses to Stanley Wells’s comments on Blogging Shakespeare 9 May 2013 and 14 May 2013.

Reedy, Tom. Thread below Price’s Amazon US review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, accessed Oct-10-13.

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─────. More About the Forged Revels Accounts. Shakspere Studies No. 3. New York: The Tenny Press, 1932.

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─────. blogging shakespeare 8 May 2013. Now, his review can only be found using the Wayback Machine

─────. Why Shakespeare WAS Shakespeare. Kindle Singles, 4 Feb. 2014.

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Worden, Blair. “Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?” in London Review of Books 25:13 (10 July 2003): 22-24.

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Annotated bibliographical entry in Warren Hope and Kim Holston’s The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories. 2nd Edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009.

“It is highly unusual, if not unique, to find only posthumous literary evidence remaining for an individual who supposedly lived by his pen.” There were many Shaksperes, so why pick the Stratford man? Shakspere was frequently absent from London so how important was he to the theater company? Examined is frequent use of the hyphenated name. “No other Elizabethan or Jacobean author appeared in hyphenated form with comparable frequency.” Ben Jonson didn’t write anything about Shakespeare or Shakspere during the latter’s lifetime, “a surprising omission for an author who wrote explicitly about most of his literary colleagues.” Price shows how Stratfordian biographers spin facts and allusions to make the author “good” and “gentle Will.” With liquid assets and business acumen, Shakspere is touted as seminally important in behind-the-scenes activities. Why, then, is there no real, literary, paper trail? Many Elizabethan writers are buried in Westminster Abbey. Shakspere isn’t one of them. Price argues that Shaksperes signatures are “not evidence of a literary career.” For her, the plays were intended to be read as literature. [Contrast with Irvin Matus’ view in “The Ghost of Shakespeare,” Harper’s, April 1999.] There is detailed analysis of Jonson’s contradictory allusions in dedications and plays. “Jonson’s two conceptions of Shakspere/Shakespeare are inherently incompatible, but his conflated testimony makes sense if he recognized Shakspere and Shakespeare as two different people. Jonson knew better than to comment explicitly in print on the professionally performed plays of an aristocrat.” As for Michael Drayton, poet and Warwickshire man treated by the Stratford man’s doctor son-in-law, “he concluded the poem [Elegies upon Sundry Occasions] by talking about aristocratic poets who had written for the stage, but whose names he would not reveal.” If the Sonnets of 1609 are dedicated to “OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.,” he’d most certainly be dead. Price investigates the lack of Shakspere’s literary bequests and absence of books in his home. She argues that statistically the lack of any literary personal records for Shakspere is “a virtual impossibility.” No conspiracy was necessary. Think about the mores of the time. Aristocrats would not write for profit, nor would men of humble origin incriminate one who did write for the theater. Facts are needed despite genius, so where did Shakspere get those? Why were his daughters “functionally illiterate”? The author knew Italy and falconry and royal tennis and used his knowledge to create metaphors. The dating of The Tempest is examined. “Shakespeare” was an “entrepreneur and financier,” not a dramatist. There are thirty-one illustrations, including applications for John Shakspere’s coat of arms, letters with signatures of Elizabethan authors, Shakspere‘s signatures, the Holy Trinity Church monument, the Dugdale sketch, portrait engravings of various writers. Appendix: Chart of Literary Paper Trails, bibliography, index.

An earlier review by Warren Hope in The Elizabethan Review

"Once you have eliminated the impossible,” an ascetic Holmes instructed the fleshy Watson, "what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Holmes’s axiom could serve as the motto for Diana Price’s new book, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. Her subject is nothing less than the impossibility that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was William Shakespeare, the poet and playwright. This subject makes her book unlike any book dealing with the Shakespeare authorship question that has appeared in years.

Most writers on this subject are concerned with either defending the traditional attribution of the plays and poems to William Shakspere of Stratford or with stripping Shakspere of his laurels and placing them on another’s head. Price takes a new approach or, rather, an approach that is so old that it now seems new, and makes it her own.

Price spends next to no time or space on who the poet and playwright actually was except to indicate the likelihood that he was “a gentleman of rank.” She instead tackles the question of who William Shakspere of Stratford actually was--a subject that has been too frequently ignored by Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians alike.

Stratfordians don’t deal at length with the subject because they inevitably run into facts that are contrary to their view of the author. Anti-Stratfordians don’t deal at length with the subject because they are less interested in what used to be called “the negative argument,” that is, the case against the Stratford citizen’s claims to authorship, than in making a case for their pet candidate for Shakespearean honors. The result is the neglect of a vital but virtually untouched field of study. Price works that field admirably and the harvest is abundant.

This abundance flows from Price’s method. She is restrained, reasonable, and patient. But she has the wit and imagination to not restrict herself to facts that are supported by physical or documentary evidence—although such facts play a prominent part in her book. She is perhaps at her best when she analyzes and interprets literary allusions to William Shakspere—Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and Ben Jonson’s “On Poet-Ape,” are instances, the first so well-known to students of Shakespeare that its meaning often goes unfathomed and the second so little known that the light it throws on Will Shakspere’s life is rarely even considered.

Price’s lucid prose, graced with understatement, is the perfect vehicle for her re-examination of what can honestly be known of William Shakspere’s actual life based on all the available records and sources. The result is a coherent and credible portrait of a tight-fisted, hard-headed, vain, ignorant, clever, shrewd theatrical impresario who is clearly the antithesis of the author of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. As Price knows and shows, even Shakespeare felt compelled to ridicule Shakspere.

Like many good logicians, Price saves her most damning argument for the book’s end. She devotes an Appendix to what she calls a “Chart of Literary Paper Trails.” This chart — actually an essay reduced to a chart that is supplemented with extensive notes — answers the frequently heard but unexamined assumption that we know so little of Shakspere’s life as a writer because we know little or nothing of the lives of the writers of his time.

She examines the records of twenty-five writers, ranging from the firmly established Ben Jonson to the admittedly obscure John Webster, and organizes these records into ten categories. Of the twenty-five life records examined, only one results in a complete blank — the records of William Shakspere of Stratford. It is this vacuum of a writer’s life that Price deftly replaces with her coherent portrait of an avaricious, energetic man-of-the-theater from the provinces.

A thorough reading of this thoroughly readable book by anyone who is not prejudiced beyond reason on its subject will necessarily lead to the conviction that it is impossible that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays and poems of William Shakespeare.

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This book is the most positive and balanced work ever done on a great and beautiful question: Who was William Shakespeare? Diana Price brings a disciplined and enlightened scholarship to the subject. She does not offer fanciful hypotheses. On the contrary, she reveals many of the known facts about William Shakespeare that have been previously ignored or interpreted to suit a theory. She then compares his documentary evidence to that for other writers of Shakespeare’s time. If you are sceptical, take a minute to read the appendix. If you want to know what we know about the actual William Shakespeare, this is a book to read and keep in your library as a reference. Absolutely fascinating and essential to understanding why there is an authorship question. I recommend it first, always, to anyone who asks me who Shakespeare was.

Mark Rylance Actor

Artistic Director, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre 1995-2005

Dear Jamie Andrews,

It has come to my attention that you replied to Alexander Waugh’s communication last week concerning the British Library’s announcement about the Sir Thomas More manuscript, specifically the Hand D Additions. I share Mr. Waugh’s concern that in its announcement about the digitization project, the British Library described the Hand D Additions as “Shakespeare’s only surviving literary manuscript.” As of today, 16 May 2016, those words are still on your web page https:/www.bl.uk/collection-items/shakespeares-handwriting-in-the-book-of-sir-thomas-more .

In your response to Mr. Waugh, you refer to Prof. John Jowett’s Arden edition of the play and also to the fact that “most collected works of Shakespeare published since 1951 have included Sir Thomas More : “This of course chimes with Diana Price’s acknowledgment of ‘received scholarship’ in this field in the article you referenced.” Rather, it would be accurate to say that my research challenges the “received scholarship.” And as I understand from Michael L. Hays, his article questioning other aspects of the paleographic case is forthcoming in Shakespeare Quarterly. Prof. Jowett himself elsewhere states that he is “fairly sure,” as distinct from positive, that Hand D is Shakespeare’s. May I add that while “most collected works of Shakespeare” have included the Additions to Sir Thomas More, it is also true that three leading editions in 1997 (Norton, Riverside, and Bevington) included Funeral Elegy “by W.S.”; the poem was subsequently dropped when Prof. Donald Foster’s claim was debunked.

As I am sure you know, the British Library’s announcement was picked up by media worldwide. Many, perhaps most media ran the identification of the Hand D Additions as Shakespeare’s without qualification, and most media ran the facsimile. It is unfortunate that the British Library’s prestigious reputation is sufficient to assure readers and listeners that Shakespeare did indeed leave behind a personal literary paper trail. Short of a corrected announcement, it is difficult for me to imagine how to counter the impression that the controversy over Hand D is now settled. Perhaps you have already considered other options.

I hope you will share this message with your Chairman, Baroness Blackstone. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Diana Price

Website: http://www.shakespeare-authorship.com/

Hand D article in Journal of Early Modern Studies: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/7066