History of the Shakespeare authorship question facts for kids
Note: In compliance with the accepted terminology used within the Shakespeare authorship question, this article uses the term "Stratfordian" to refer to the position that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the primary author of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him. The term "anti-Stratfordian" is used to refer to the theory that some other author, or authors, wrote the works.
Claims that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works traditionally attributed to him were first explicitly made in the 19th century. Many scholars consider that there is no evidence of his authorship ever being questioned prior to then.
Throughout the 18th century, Shakespeare was described as a transcendent genius and by the beginning of the 19th century Bardolatry was in full swing. Uneasiness about the difference between Shakespeare's godlike reputation and the humdrum facts of his biography continued to emerge in the 19th century. In 1853, Delia Bacon, an American teacher and writer, travelled to Britain to research her belief that Shakespeare's works were written by a group of dissatisfied politicians, in order to communicate the advanced political and philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon (no relation). Later writers such as Ignatius Donnelly portrayed Francis Bacon as the sole author. After being proposed by James Greenstreet in 1891, it was the advocacy of Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on Renaissance literature, which in 1918 put William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby in a prominent position as a candidate.
The poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was first proposed as a member of a group theory by T.W. White in 1892. This theory was expanded in 1895 by Wilbur G. Zeigler, where he became the group's principal writer.
In 1920, an English school-teacher, J. Thomas Looney, published Shakespeare Identified, proposing a new candidate for the authorship in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.This theory gained many notable advocates, including Sigmund Freud, and since the publication of Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality in 1984, the Oxfordian theory has become the most popular alternative authorship theory.
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Delia Bacon and the first group theory
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The overwhelming majority of mainstream Shakespeare scholars agree that Shakespeare's authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for two centuries afterward.
In 1853, with help from Emerson, Delia Bacon, an American teacher and writer, travelled to Britain to research her belief that Shakespeare's works were written by a group of dissatisfied politicians (including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of Oxford), in order to communicate the advanced political and philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon (no relation). She discussed her theories with British scholars and writers. In 1856 she wrote an article in Putnam's Monthly in which she insisted that Shakespeare of Stratford would not have been capable of writing such plays, and that they must have expressed the ideas of an unspecified great thinker.
Candidacy of Sir Francis Bacon
In September 1856 William Henry Smith wrote a letter which was subsequently published in a pamphlet, Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays?: a letter to Lord Ellesmere (1856), expressing his view that Francis Bacon himself had written the works. The Baconian movement attracted much attention and caught the public imagination for many years, mostly in America. Ignatius Donnelly's claim to have discovered ciphers in the works of Shakespeare revealing Bacon as a "concealed poet" were later discredited by William and Elizebeth Friedman, expert code-breakers, in their book The Shakespearian Ciphers Examined.
A new twist was added in the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who claimed to have uncovered evidence that Francis Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth, who had been privately married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The couple were also the parents of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. This provided a further explanation for Bacon's anonymity. Encoded within his works was a secret history of the Tudor era. Bacon was the true heir to the throne of England, but had been excluded from his rightful place. This tragic life-story was the secret hidden in the plays. This argument was taken up by several other writers, notably C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913) and Alfred Dodd in The Personal Poems of Francis Bacon (1931) and many other publications.
In 1891 the archivist James H. Greenstreet identified a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which he reported that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet proposed Derby as the real hidden author, founding the Derbyite theory. Greenstreet's theory was revived by the American writer Robert Frazer, who argued in The Silent Shakespeare (1915) that the actor William Shakespeare merely commercialised the productions of more elevated authors, sometimes adapting older works. He believed that Derby was the principal figure behind the Shakespeare plays and was the sole author of the sonnets and narrative poems. He concludes that "William Stanley was William Shakespeare".
20th-century candidates
After Marlowe, the first notable new candidate was Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. Rutland's authorship was defended by the suggestion that the plots of the plays reflected details of his life, an argument that was to become important to claims for candidates proposed in the 20th century. The Rutlandite position was revived by Ilya Gililov in the 21st century.
In 1918, Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on François Rabelais, published the first volume of Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare" in which he provided detailed arguments for the claims of the Earl of Derby. Many readers were impressed by Lefranc's arguments and by his undoubted scholarship, and a large international body of literature resulted. Lefranc continued to publish arguments in favour of Derby's candidature throughout his life.
The Oxford candidacy
In 1920, John Thomas Looney, an English school-teacher, published "Shakespeare" Identified, proposing a new candidate for the authorship in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The theory gained several notable advocates, including Sigmund Freud.
By the early 20th century, the public had tired of cryptogram-hunting, and the Baconian movement faded, though its remnants remain to this day. The result was increased interest in Derby and Oxford as alternative candidates. In 1921, Greenwood, Looney, Lefranc and others joined together to create the Shakespeare Fellowship, an organisation devoted to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question but endorsing no particular candidate. Since then a great many candidates have been put forward, including Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway, his supposed girlfriend Anne Whateley, and numerous scholars, aristocrats and poets. New candidates are regularly put forward, such as Mary Sidney (proposed in 1931), Edward Dyer (proposed in 1943), William Nugent (proposed in 1978), Henry Neville (proposed in 2005) and Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter (proposed in 2019).
Academic views
In 2007, the New York Times surveyed 265 Shakespeare teachers on the topic. To the question "Do you think there is good reason to question whether William Shakespeare of Stratford is the principal author of the plays and poems in the canon?", 6% answered "yes" and an additional 11% responded "possible", and when asked if they "mention the Shakespeare authorship question in your Shakespeare classes?", 72% answered "yes". When asked what best described their opinion of the Shakespeare authorship question, 61% answered that it was a "A theory without convincing evidence" and 32% called the issue "A waste of time and classroom distraction".
In September 2007, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition sponsored a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" to encourage new research into the question of Shakespeare's authorship, which has garnered more than 3,000 signatures, including more than 500 academics. In late 2007, Brunel University of London began offering a one-year MA program on the Shakespeare authorship question (since suspended), and in 2010, Concordia University (Portland, Oregon) opened the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre.
Non-English candidates
Some suggestions do not necessarily imply a secret author, but an alternative life-history for Shakespeare himself. These overlap with or merge into alternative-author models. An example is the claim that he was an Arab whose real name was "Sheikh Zubayr". This was first proposed in the 19th century as a joke by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, but developed seriously by Iraqi writer Safa Khulusi in the 1960s. It was later endorsed by Muammar Gaddafi. Such claims for a non-English origin for Shakespeare were linked to the expansion of his influence and popularity globally. Claimants have been detected in other countries, and he has even figured as a "contested heirloom", appropriated to various competing national or ethnic identities.
His Englishness was first disputed in the wake of the Romantic "Shakespeare mania" (Shakespearomanie) that swept Germany, and led to assertions of his Nordic character, and to claims that he was essentially German. However, no alternative German candidate was proposed. Instead Shakespeare of Stratford himself was identified as racially and culturally Germanic. The claim that Shakespeare was German was particularly stressed during World War I, and was later ridiculed in British propaganda. The meme resurfaced in anti-Nazi propaganda later. Nazi views of his Germanic identity were ambivalent. Gustav Plessow's 1937 racial analysis ostensibly demonstrated that "the Nordic element in Shakespeare was in fact predominant, though not quite without alien admixtures: the virtues of his perfect Nordic forehead were somewhat marred by Mediterranean eyes and hair and a chin of doubtful origin."
As early as 1897, George Newcomen had suggested Shakespeare was an Irishman, a certain Patrick O'Toole of Ennis. Thomas Fingal Healy, writing for The American Mercury in 1940, picked up the idea, claiming that many of the plays draw on Irish folklore. Shakespeare was forced to conceal his Irish background because the Irish were considered a "rebel race" by Queen Elizabeth. Healy found numerous references in the text of Hamlet to clothes which, he thought, showed that the Dane was based on a legendary Irish tailor called Howndale. The distinguished Meath historian Elizabeth Hickey writing under the pen name of Basil Iske, claimed in 1978 that she had identified the Irish Shakespeare as the rebel and adventurer William Nugent. She asserted that there were numerous distinctively Irish idioms in Shakespeare's work.
Sigmund Freud, before adopting the Edward de Vere identification, toyed with the notion that Shakespeare may not have been English, a doubt strengthened in 1908 after he believed he had detected Latin features in the Chandos portrait. On the basis of a suggestion by a Professor Gentilli of Nervi, Freud came to suspect that Shakespeare was of French descent, and his name a corruption of "Jacques Pierre".
The case for an Italian, either Michelangelo Florio or his son John Florio, as author of Shakespeare's works was initially associated with resurgent Italian nationalism of the Fascist era. Michelangelo Florio was proposed by Santi Paladino in 1927, in the Fascist journal L'Impero. The theory is linked to the argument put forward by other anti-Stratfordians that Shakespeare's work shows an intimate knowledge of Italian culture and geography. John Florio was proposed by Erik Reger, in an article entitled "Der Italiener Shakespeare" contributed to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung shortly after Paladino's publication in the same year. Paladino claimed that Florio came from a Calvinist family in Sicily. Forced to flee to Protestant England, he created "Shakespeare" by translating his Sicilian mother's surname, Crollalanza, into English. One or both of the Florios have since been promoted by Carlo Villa (1951), Franz Maximilian Saalbach (1954), Martino Iuvara (2002), Lamberto Tassinari (2008) and Roberta Romani (2012). Paladino continued to publish on the subject into the 1950s. In his later writings he argued that Michelangelo Florio wrote the works in Italian, and his son John rendered them into English.
Another Italian candidate was proposed by Joseph Martin Feely in a number of books published in the 1930s, however Feely was unable to discover his name. Nevertheless, he was able to deduce from ciphers hidden in the plays that the true author was the illegitimate child of an Italian aristocrat ("sprung basely from noble Italian blood"), and educated in Florence. He then moved to England where he became a tutor in Greek, mathematics, music, and languages, before becoming a playwright. Emilia Lanier's candidacy is also linked to her Italian family background, but involved the additional claim that she was Jewish. Lanier's authorship was proposed by John Hudson in 2007, who identified her as "a Jewish woman of Venetian ancestry", arguing that only a person with her distinctive ethnic background could have written the plays.
Images for kids
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Title page of Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae by Selenus. Baconians have argued that this depicts Bacon writing the plays (bottom panel), giving them to a middle man, who passes them to Shakespeare (the man holding a spear in the middle-left panel). The mainstream view is that it depicts encoded military instructions being passed on to soldiers.
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Page from a manuscript purportedly written in 1805 by James Cowell, which has since been determined to be a forgery. MS 294, Senate House Library, University of London.
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Poet Walt Whitman surmised that the author of Shakespeare's historical plays might be "one of the 'wolfish earls' so plenteous in the plays themselves".
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A pair of stamp-sized miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard, depicting Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester, claimed by some Baconians to be the parents of Francis Bacon and possibly others.
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Marlowe kills "Francis Frazer" in a duel, before exchanging identity with him. Illustration to Wilbur G. Zeigler's 1895 novel It was Marlowe, in which Marlowe was first proposed.
