Contested Will Read Free Page A

when each discovery was made and how it altered previous biographical assumptions. I’ve also come to understand that the authorship controversy has turned on a handful of powerful ideas having little directly to do with Shakespeare but profoundly altering how his life and works would be read and interpreted. Some of these ideas came from debates about biblical texts, others from debates about classical ones. Still others had to do with emerging notions of the autobiographical self. As much as those on both sides of the controversy like to imagine themselves as independent thinkers, their views are strongly constrained by a few powerful ideas that took hold in the early nineteenth century.
    While Shakespeare was a product of an early modern world, the controversy over the authorship of his works is the creation of a modern one. As a result, there’s a danger of reading the past through contemporary eyes – from what Shakespeare’s contested will really meant to how writers back then might have drawn upon personal experiences in their works. A secondary aim of this book, then, is to show how Shakespeare is not our contemporary, nor as universal as we might wish him to be. Anachronistic thinking, especially about how we can gain access to writers’ lives through their plays and poems, turns out to be as characteristic of supporters of Shakespeare’s authorship as it is of sceptics. From this vantage, the longstanding opposition between the two camps is misleading, for they have more in common than either side is willing to concede. These shared if unspoken assumptions may in fact help explain the hostility that defines their relationship today, and I’ll suggest that there may be more useful ways of defining sides in this debate. I’ll also argue that Shakespeare scholars, from the late eighteenth century until today, bear a greater responsibility than they acknowledge for both the emergence and the perpetuation of the authorship controversy.
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    The evidence I continued to uncover while researching this book made it hard to imagine how anyone before the 1840s could argue that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. This working assumption couldn’t easily be reconciled with the received history of the controversy, one that, as noted earlier, goes back to James Wilmot in 1785, or at least to James Cowell in 1805. Aware of this uncomfortable fact, I held off until the very end of my research on consulting the Cowell manuscript in the Durning-Lawrence Library at Senate House Library in London. Before I called it up I knew as much as others who had read about this unpublished and rarely examined work. It was one of the jewels of a great collection of materials touching on the life and works of Francis Bacon, assembled at great expense by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, and, after his death in 1914, by his widow, Edith Jane Durning Smith, who shared his keen interest in the authorship controversy. Upon her death in 1929, the collection was bequeathed to the University of London, and by 1931 the transfer of materials was complete. A year later the leading British scholar Allardyce Nicoll announced in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement in an essay entitled ‘The First Baconian’ the discovery of Cowell’s lectures. It was Nicoll who put the pieces of the puzzle together, relying heavily on a biography written in 1813 by Wilmot’s niece, Olivia Wilmot Serres. Serres’s account, while not mentioning her uncle’s meeting with Cowell or his Shakespeare research, nonetheless confirmed that Wilmot was a serious man of letters, had lived near Stratford, was an admirer of Francis Bacon and had indeed burned his papers. Nicoll was less successful in tracing James Corton Cowell, concluding that he ‘seems to have been a Quaker’ on the grounds that ‘he was in all probability closely related to the well-known Orientalist E. B. Cowell, who was born at Ipswich in