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We've looked at the idea of Shakspere as
a play broker whose name ended up on plays that weren't his.
And we've identified some of the plays on which his name or
initials appear which aren't a part of the Shakespeare canon.
But what about those works that are part of the Shakespeare canon?
What about Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Julius Caesar and the Sonnets?
What sense would it make for a writer of
this talent to allow his work to appear under the name of another person?
When we think about Shakspere and Shakespeare as potentially different people,
we must consider what the relationship might have been between them.
One idea first espoused by Delia Bacon in
the mid 19th century is that what we know as 'Shakespeare' is actually a group of writers.
It was quite usual for plays to be co-authored at this time as Henslowe's payment records show.
Many scholars now believe that a good number of the plays in the First Folio,
plays billed as "Mr. William Shakespeare, His Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies", were written in conjunction with other authors.
In a way, we shouldn't be surprised by this.
We don't have the source manuscripts for Shakespeare's plays, and the versions published
in the Folio often differ quite radically from versions published earlier.
We don't know to what extent they were changed or
coauthored by other playwrights working for the company.
In addition, we have another example where the King's Men
published a number of co-authored plays under their dominant brand.
In 1647, a First Folio edition of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher was
published, acknowledged by academics to be modeled very
closely on Shakespeare's First Folio and Jonson's Works.
Yet scholars readily admit that only four of the 35 plays in "Comedies
and Tragedies Written by
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen"
were jointly written by Beaumont and Fletcher.
Fletcher had a hand in most of them,
but his co-author was more often Philip Massinger.
Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Webster,
John Ford, Nathan Field and William Rowley have been
recognized as the other co-authors, and sometimes sole authors, of these plays.
But Beaumont and Fletcher was the successful brand name in their era,
just as Shakespeare was the successful brand name in his.
There were reasons to believe therefore that a Folio of
collected Works brought out in the first half of the 17th century,
published under the name of the King's Men's most successful author brand
in that era, need not necessarily be taken at face value.
Co-authorship, then, is to be expected to some degree.
But when stylometric analysis dissects Shakespeare plays and
determines that this scene is written by Thomas Middleton or that by Christopher Marlowe,
they distinguished the style of those writers from a style they recognize as Shakespeare.
There is the sense of a central distinguishable author with a particular writing style,
particular thematic concerns, and
a particular level of skill, running through the major works.
And let's not forget that no matter how many authors contributed to
any one play, the sonnets are the work of one person.
The question is, why would a person allow
their work to be published under another person's name?
There are several possible answers, and some of them are provided by writers of the day.
Robert Greene, in 1591's Farewell to Folly,
wrote of certain authors who "get
some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.
Thus is the ass made proud by this underhand brokery.
And he that cannot write true English without the aid of clerks
of parish churches will need make himself the father of interludes."
'Interludesi is a 16th century term for stage plays.
Batillus was a mediocre poet who tried to claim some verses by Virgil as his own.
But as Greene tells it in 1591,
the authors of which he speaks actually "get"
another person to be a Batillus in an act of what he calls "underhand brokery".
Notice that term and how Greene is using it to describe an arrangement
whereby a middleman agrees to put their name on someone else's writing.
There is no 'conspiracy' required for this to occur,
only a quiet business transaction.
In his example, the person who takes credit for the work (an ass in Greene's view),
who cannot even write without help, gets to feel proud for seeming to have written plays.
Greene describes the authors who do this as "scabbed Jades'
likely to die of the fashion",
accuses them of distilling their works out of
ballads or borrowing ideas from theological poets.
The reason he gives for them employing a
Batillus? Because "for their calling and gravity"
they are "loath to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hand."
Writing for the stage was not considered a respectable occupation.
If you think about the works of Shakespeare, they are peppered with crowd pleasing
bawdy humor, which could certainly be described as profane.
And the first two poems published under Shakespeare's name were explicit for the era,
their stories centering on the consequences of sexual desire.
There's no evidence that Robert Greene was writing about Shakespeare.
This pamphlet was published before the narrative poems
or any acknowledged Shakespeare play had been published.
But his testimony does support the idea that an Elizabethan writer might
conceal their identity by using a front, rather than just a pseudonym.
The reason for using a front is because writers could
get into deep trouble for their writing in this era.
Whether you were a courtier or from a more humble background, you could be banished,
imprisoned or even tortured if you said or did anything displeasing to the queen.
The queen's godson was banished from court for
translating the bawdy portions of an Italian work.
John Stubbs had his hand cut off for writing about the queen's marriage.
Ben Jonson, Thomas Nash and John Haywood were imprisoned for satires and histories.
It's no surprise, then, that anonymous and pseudonymous publication was common in this era,
but a pseudonym almost invites investigation;
it doesn't protect a writer the way a human front does.
We know that writers in
at least one other repressive and politically paranoid era, finding pseudonyms
not sufficiently protective or effective,
co-opted real individuals to act as their fronts.
Under McCarthyism in 1950's Hollywood,
writers found to be communist sympathizers were
blacklisted, meaning they could no longer work as screenwriters for the big studios.
In order to get around the prohibitions,
certain blacklisted writers secretly engaged people
prepared to represent screenplays they had not written as their own.
One might imagine that such an arrangement would be impossible to maintain if
the hidden writer were famous or their work became a high profile success.
But this is not the case.
In 1953, the Oscar for Best Screenplay went to the romantic comedy
Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn, and was
awarded to the supposed screenwriter Ian McClellan Hunter.
But the author of Roman Holiday's screenplay was actually Dalton Trumbo.
It is now known that from 1947 to 1960 Dalton Trumbo
wrote or co-wrote 17 screenplays for which he received no writing credit.
In his case the historical record has now been corrected thanks to
enormous efforts on his behalf by his son and by the Writers Guild of America.
However, there are still numerous works from
the era that remain wrongly ascribed to their fronts.
Robert Greene's Batillus is shorthand for
front and his is not the only testimony to this practice.
In July 1599 John Hayward was interrogated before
the Star Chamber for a history book he had written to which the Queen took offense.
The Queen "argued that Hayward was pretending to be
the author in order to shield 'some more mischievous' person,
and that he should be racked so that he might disclose the truth".
Here is the Queen of England espousing
torture because she believed Hayward to be a front.
So, did anyone believe that Shakespeare was a front?
There is evidence that two people did almost as
soon as works began to be published under the Shakespeare name.
We'll look at their texts in the next lecture.
Ros BarberDr
