Contested Will Read Free

Shakespeare’s authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book.
    I should say at this point that I happen to believe that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems attributed to him, a view left unshaken by the years of study I have devoted to this subject (and toward the end of this book I’ll explain in some detail why I think so). But I take very seriously the fact that some brilliant writers and thinkers who matter a great deal to me – including Sigmund Freud, Henry James and Mark Twain – have doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. Through their published and unpublished reflections on Shakespeare I’ve gained a much sharper sense of what is contested and ultimately at stake in the authorship debate. Their work has also helped me unravel a mystery at the heart of the controversy: why, after two centuries, did so many people start questioning whether Shakespeare wrote the plays?
    There’s another mystery, often and easily confused with this one, that I cannot solve, though it continues to haunt both Shakespeareans and sceptics alike: what led to the playwright’s emergence (whoever one imagines he or she was) as such an extraordinary writer? As for the formative years of William Shakespeare – especially the decade or so between his marriage to Anne Hathaway in the early 1580s and his reappearance in London in the early 1590s, by now an aspiring poet and playwright – they are called the ‘Lost Years’ for a reason. Was he a lawyer, abutcher, a soldier, or teaching in a Catholic household in Lancashire during those years, as some have surmised? We simply don’t know. No less inscrutable is the ‘contested will’ to which the dying Shakespeare affixed his signature in 1616. The surviving three-page document makes no mention of his books or manuscripts. And, notoriously, the only thing that Shakespeare bequeathed in it to his wife Anne was a ‘second best bed’. Not only the nature of their marriage but also the kind of man Shakespeare was seems bound up in this bequest. Was he referring, perhaps, to the guest bed or alternatively to the marital bed they had shared? Was he deliberately treating his wife shabbily in the will or did he simply assume that a third of his estate – the ‘widow’s dower’ – was automatically her share? We don’t know and probably never shall, though such unanswerable questions continue to fuel the mystery surrounding his life and work.
    With these challenges in mind, this book first sets out to trace the controversy back to its origins, before considering why many formidable writers came to question Shakespeare’s authorship. I quickly discovered that biographers of Freud, Twain and James weren’t keen on looking too deeply into these authors’ doubts about Shakespeare. As a result, I encountered something rare in Shakespeare studies: archival material that was unsifted and in some cases unknown. I’ve also revisited the life and works of the two most influential figures in the controversy, the allegedly ‘mad’ American woman, Delia Bacon, who first made the case for Francis Bacon, and the schoolmaster J. T. Looney, the first to propose that Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays. For a debate that largely turns on how one understands the relationship of Shakespeare’s life and works, there has been disappointingly little attention devoted to considering how Bacon’s and Looney’s experiences and worldviews determined the trajectory of their theories of authorship. Scholars on both sides of the debate have overlooked a great deal by taking these two polemicists at their word.
    More than any subject I’ve ever studied, the history of theauthorship question is rife with forgeries and deception. I now approach all claims about Shakespeare’s identity with caution, taking into account