Contested Will Read Free Page B

1828’.
    Armed with this information, I turned to the lectures themselves, which made for gripping reading – how Cowell began as a confirmed Shakespearean, how his fortuitous encounter with Wilmot changed all that, how Wilmot anticipated a widely accepted reading of Love’s Labour’s Lost by a century, and perhapsmost fascinating of all, how Wilmot uncovered stories of ‘odd characters living at or near Stratford on the Avon with whom Shakespeare must have been familiar’, including ‘a certain man of extreme ugliness and tallness who blackmailed the farmers under threat of bewitching their cattle’, as well as ‘a legend of showers of cakes at Shrovetide and stories of men who were rendered cripples by the falling of these cakes’. I thought it a shame that Cowell had not taken even better notes.
    And then my heart skipped when I came upon the following words: ‘It is strange that Shakespeare whose best years had been spent in a profitable and literary vocation should return to an obscure village offering no intellectual allurement and take up the very unromantic business of a money lender and dealer in malt.’ The sentence seemed innocuous enough; scholars and sceptics alike have often drawn attention to these well-known facts about Shakespeare’s business dealings. But having long focused more on when than on what people thought what they did about Shakespeare, I remembered that these details were unknown in 1785, or even in 1805. Records showing that Shakespeare’s household stockpiled grain in order to produce malt were not discovered until the early 1840s (and first published in 1844 by John Payne Collier). And it wasn’t until 1806 that the Stratford antiquarian R. B. Wheler made public the first of what would turn out to be several documents indicating that Shakespeare had engaged in moneylending (in this case, how in 1609 Shakespeare had a Stratford neighbour named John Addenbrooke arrested for failing to repay a small sum). While an undelivered letter in which another neighbour asks Shakespeare for a loan had been discovered in the late eighteenth century, the scholar who found it chose not to announce or share his discovery; it remained otherwise unknown until 1821. So Shakespeare’s grain-hoarding and moneylending didn’t become biographical commonplaces until the Victorian era.
    The word ‘unromantic’ in the same sentence should have tipped me off; though there was a recorded instance of its use before1800, it wasn’t yet in currency at the time Cowell was supposedly writing. Whoever wrote these lectures purporting to be from 1805 had slipped up. I was looking at a forgery, and an unusually clever one at that, which on further examination almost surely dated from the early decades of the twentieth century. That meant the forger was probably still alive – and enjoying a satisfied laugh at the expense of the gulled professor – when Allardyce Nicoll had announced this discovery in the pages of the TLS . The forger had brazenly left other hints, not least of all the wish attributed to Cowell that ‘my material may be used by others regardless whence it came for it matters little who made the axe so that it cut’. And there were a few other false notes, including one pointed out by a letter-writer responding to Nicoll’s article, that Cowell had got his Warwickshire geography wrong. It also turns out that Serres, the author of Nicoll’s main corroborative source (the biography of Wilmot) was a forger and fantasist. Much of her biographical account (including the burning of Wilmot’s papers) was invented and she later changed her story, asserting she was actually Wilmot’s granddaughter and the illegitimate daughter of King George III. Her case was even discussed in parliament and it took a trial to expose her fraudulent claim to be of royal descent. So Olivia Serres, at the source of the Cowell forgery,