In honor of my annual pilgrimage to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I offer the absolute joy and frustration of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is everywhere: in the Park, at festivals, at Renaissance Fairs. We visit his shrines, we study his work. And we debate.
Writing about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is as popular as staging them. The controversy that swirls around the author of those plays is itself an industry, and a contentious one at that.
As writers, we can’t help noticing the Bard left little in the way of drafts, notes, napkins, scribbles in the margins of Johnson’s script. For a man who produced 38 plays and 154 sonnets, there is little to no evidence of his process which has engendered 400 years of cheerful speculation with only the plays themselves as evidence.
But the plays are also a problem, a handful of his plays were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime but ended up quite different by the time they made it into the First Folio.
So who was Shakespeare?
More to the point, who do we think he was?
The traditional and widely accepted view is that William Shakespeare, the Stratford-upon-Avon-born actor, playwright, and poet, was indeed the author of the works attributed to him. This view is supported by historical documents, including official records and contemporary accounts, linking Shakespeare to the plays and poems.
However, William Shakespeare’s formal education is often cited as a weakness in the argument for his authorship. Critics argue that his modest education in grammar school would not have provided him with the breadth of knowledge, linguistic skill, and familiarity with courtly life and foreign languages reflected in his works. Nor would his background support the number of references to classical literature, history, mythology, and foreign languages found in his plays.
Bertram Fields who wrote Players, the Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare argues that given Shakespeare’s propensities as well as his lack of education and social status,it is more than reasonable to attribute plays like Othello and Macbeth to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. This theory postulates that Oxford wrote the plays and actor and front of the house man, Shakespeare, edited the final version to better appeal to audiences. Shakespeare as the script doctor and producer.
Continuing with the Oxfordian view, perhaps Oxford in turn gathered information, setting details, and history from a whole group of contributors, like the process for the OED. For instance, Oxford’s son in law, Lord Stanley, could have reported about the court of Navarre, the setting for Love’s Labour’s Lost.
After Oxford’s death, Lord Stanley organizes a group of writers to finish some of Oxford’s plays and get them performed: like Measure for Measure, Othello and Macbeth.
“Oxfordians were more open to the idea of collaboration. Oxford has surrounded himself with other writers – employed them as his secretaries, financed them, and even housed them.” George Greenwood suspected that the plays were the work of “many pens and one Master Mind.” (Elizabeth Winkler Shakespeare was a Woman and other Heresies).
Let’s talk about Renaissance women. there is grow speculation that women contributed to the Shakespeare plays.
“Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke) was first proposed as an authorship candidate in Gilbert Slater’s Seven Shakespeares(1931). Slater through some of the plays “showed Feminine rather than masculine intuition” and suspected that unruly Rosalind. . . was a self portrait of the authoress” He conceived as Mary Sidney as a collaborator in a group of writers led by Oxford.” (Elizabeth Winkler)
Sidney produced her own work, publishing The tragedy of Antonie, a french translation, making her the first woman to publish a play in English. it’s thought to have influenced Anthony and Cleopatra.
Scholar Margaret Hannay, noted that much of what Sidney wrote and translated has disappeared. The outstanding question, did she influence or contribute to Shakespeare’s plays?
Carol Symes, historian at University of Illinois commented that “This is one of those things that’s probably always going to be unprovable precisely because of the undocumented nature of women’s work”. She feels that it’s almost impossible to contract all this knowledge and experience into one person, one writer.
Just because we don’t have their names on the works doesn’t mean the women weren’t writing. even performing during the 17th century.
As Virginia Woolf commented – Anon was probably a woman.
If Shakespeare was the theater producer, the man with the final say over performances and scripts, his could well be simply the last name on the works.
When I proposed this idea, all of it, women contributors, many groups of writers, my audiences are more than comfortable with the idea of group collaboration, much like the writers for Saturday Night Live, or screen writers. Or, if we are lucky, our own books.
So why the blow back?
The idea of a single genius responsible for the most famous works in literature is difficult to shake. There is a treasured belief that Genius comes from nothing, a gift from the Gods. Which is a lie, genius is actually developed and nurtured by privileged education and exclusive opportunities. Admitting to collaboration was to denigrate Shakespeare as god, or more importantly, the British God.
God or not, we enjoy the plays for what they are – magnificent – genius – human.
New Collection! I’m working on a new book – Out Loud – A Writing Adventure for Women. Learn how to tap into your creativity, organize your next non-fiction book and embrace your writing life! Launches in the Winter of 2025
