skip to Main Content

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: The Epitome of Anti-Stratfordian Scholarship

Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: The Epitome of Anti-Stratfordian Scholarship. Diana Price. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2000.

 

1: Overview

I do not care who wrote the plays conventionally attributed, in part or in whole, to William Shakespeare of Stratford and of London.  For me, the play’s the thing.  Yet I have read a few orthodox biographies; a few unorthodox biographies, including both editions (2001, 2012) of Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem; and Sam Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, with its amusing chapter on claimants.  I accept the main claim of the orthodox biography: Shakespeare authored the plays or parts of plays attributed to him, with one exception.  I am skeptical about Shakespeare’s handwriting in, and agnostic about his authorship of, an addition to the Sir Thomas More manuscript.

Price knew my views, yet she asked me to review her book for a regional magazine.  I chose to review the revised edition in two notes on my website, merged and revised here, this one replacing them there.  Both editions are well researched and written, the first more restrained and reasonable than the second.  My guess is that resistance from affiliated scholars led her to redouble her efforts by restating her arguments more tendentiously.  Both reviews have opined that, of anti-Stratfordian biographies, hers is the best.  Even so, the best is not good enough because hers like theirs uses the trappings of scholarship, not to establish truth, but to win converts by sophistical means to a dubious proposition.

So I scrutinize the quality of Price’s scholarship as the epitome of theirs.  I do not object to anyone’s criticizing the orthodox biography of Shakespeare.  No disinterested analysis of Shakespeare’ life in Stratford and London is ever amiss.  Anti-Stratfordians have the same right as other scholars have to analyze and assess evidence relevant to Shakespeare’s authorship.  However, their challenge must adhere to accepted scholarly principles and practices if they are pursuing truth, not promoting alternative candidates for reasons not scholarly.  They must neither adopt a theory nor aim for a conclusion which guides the selection, analysis, and evaluation of evidence.  In particular, they must not, though many do, begin or end with the claim that the author of the canonical plays is an aristocrat obliged by personal, political, or social reasons to conceal his identity—a claim for which no evidence of any kind exists.  An indication that anti-Stratfordians do not pursue scholarship, but push this cause, is their efforts to repudiate every scintilla of evidence supporting the orthodox attribution of the plays to Shakespeare’s authorship.  It is implausible that, over the centuries, all scholars, affiliated or independent, except anti-Stratfordians, have mistaken all the evidence for attribution.  Accordingly, I do not address True Believers.  Instead, I address those who might be attracted to their crusade, might accept the appearances of scholarship as signifying its reality, and should witness in action some of non-scholarly means which might mislead them.

2. Price’s Anti-Stratfordian Argument

Price’s book, original in its agnosticism about an alternative to Shakespeare’s authorship of the canon, nevertheless shows abuses typical of biased scholarship used to advance a doubtful proposition: whatever Shakespeare may have been or done in the theater and for his company, he was not the writer of plays.  All anti-Stratfordian biographies except hers, when they have thus attacked his authorship, advance one or another of a long list of alternative candidates as the author.  Her originality is to attack Shakespeare as the author of the plays but to commit to no one else.  Perversely, her singleness of purpose, restricted scope, and intense focus on the orthodox attribution accentuate the deficiencies of her attempt to discredit, if not displace, it.

The deficiencies of Price’s attack on the orthodox biography are matters of scholarly approach.  Symptomatic of other deficiencies are her aspersions on the near-unanimity of affiliated scholars who reject her defective arguments for “de-attribution” as reflecting a widespread conspiracy of the Shakespeare establishment to protect that biography.  Instead, that unanimity reflects their adverse assessment of her work according to established standards of scholarship.  I am an independent scholar like Price, but I agree with affiliated scholars.  I find that she manufactures, mishandles, or misconstrues data; contrives inferences; applies double standards; and uses pejorative language.

The main argument of Price’s book is that only direct evidence in his lifetime—for example, personal diary entries, letters, business records—is the proper basis for attributing authorship, and, in the absence of such evidence, Shakespeare is not the author of the plays in the canon.  Price claims not only that Shakespeare is the only important contemporary writer who left nothing to indicate that he was a writer, but also that no contemporaries left anything during his lifetime to indicate that he was.

Price’s argument is flawed on three main counts.  First, her claim that the absence of direct evidence is evidence of absence is a non-sequitur.  Second, her claim that no document by another in his lifetime identifies Shakespeare as a playwright is refuted by Robert Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit, much studied and long accepted as proof beyond reasonable doubt that contemporaries so recognized him.  Third, her insistence on direct evidence only from his lifetime contravenes scholarly principle and practice, and is special pleading to fit her case.  Standard historical scholarship accepts after scrutiny indirect evidence of many kinds in and after a person’s life.  Scholars have reliable and sufficient indirect evidence for attributing authorship to Shakespeare.  Evidence in his lifetime includes mentions of him as the author of plays, his name in Stationers Register entries, and his name on the title pages of plays published in his lifetime.  Evidence after his lifetime includes the First Folio, with its editors’ and Shakespeare’s colleagues’ letter to readers and his rival’s Ben Jonson’s testimonial poems.  The reductio ad absurdum of Price’s exclusion is that, if applied to other contemporary playwrights, it would deny the attribution of authorship to many plays lacking direct evidence.

3. Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit

All biographies of Shakespeare discuss Greene’s A Groatsworth of Wit (London, 1592), the first document to mention Shakespeare, with the pun “Shake-scene.”  All biographers cite the following passage; traditionalists offer, and anti-Stratfordians refuse, it as the first evidence of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright:

“Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned: for vnto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleaue: those Puppets (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case that I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not: for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions.”

The first half of this passage scorns actors, who speak the lines written for them by three playwrights (thought to be Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele) yet are guilty of ingratitude to the writers who make their professions possible.  The second half reviles a specific actor, “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who writes plays as well as acts in them.  The evidence of Shakespeare in both functions is evident in the passage.   The pronoun “his” and the adaptation “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde of a line in 3 Henry VI, I, iv, 137, link this actor/writer with the line as its author.  The comment on his ability “to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you” pays tribute to his writing ability as equal to, or better than, theirs.  His status as “an absolute Iohannes fac totum” implies his function as both actor and writer.

Greene’s warning to three playwrights would have made no sense to them if it concerned an actor’s ingratitude, presumption, or ad-libbing their blank verse; it would have made sense only for other reasons.  Greene might have warned that Shakespeare, an in-house playwright as well as a company actor, was an emerging double threat to them.  He did warn them that a playwright having no university education—he and the three had one—but succeeding because he imitated them should prompt their departure for more profitable employment.  If so, Greene is the first to link Shakespeare’s lack of a university education with his playwriting capability but, unlike anti-Stratfordians, he acknowledges his achievement.

Price uses unscholarly means to reject the accepted interpretation of Greene’s pamphlet, which she knows contradicts her position.  She substitutes her modernized paraphrase of it and omits the reference to 3 Henry VI.  Of two meanings of “bombast,” she selects inflated speech and skips over inflated writing, the latter a more common meaning at the time.  Omitting evidence contrary to her position is bad; worse is adding unsupported denigrations of Shakespeare to her reading of this passage:

“‘Shake-scene’ is resented, not as a promising dramatist who threatens the status quo, but as a paymaster, callous usurer, and actor who thinks himself capable of extemporizing blank verse. . . . [and] is arrogant enough to presume that his ad-libbing can compete with or improve upon the lines written by professional dramatists, the very same writers whom he hires.  Moreover, he thinks he can pass off their words as his own” (50).

Yet nothing in Greene’s passage shows Shakespeare “a paymaster” or a “callous usurer” or an actor presumptuous in his “ad-libbing.”  These various denigrations derive from other places in Greene’s pamphlet, but these other places neither name nor allude to Shakespeare.  Price frames her refutation with sophistical devices: facts unsupported and irrelevant to his authorship, and derogatory language to discredit Shakespeare.

4. Three First Folio Examples of Sophistical Arguments

Price rules out posthumous evidence for his authorship but rules it in when she thinks that she can make it serve to cast doubt on or to deny his authorship.  Her double standard of scholarship notably occurs in her discussions of three different items in the First Folio: a brief poem “To the Reader” by “B. I,” attributed to Jonson and addressing its Droeshout print; a longer poem “To the memory of my beloued, the AVTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left vs,” by “Ben: Ionson”; and between them, a letter “To the great Variety of Readers,” signed by “John Heminge” and “Henrie Condell.”  Price’s discussions of these items take a common approach: ignore the context, quibble with the words or quarrel with the text, infer ambiguities about authorship, then accept them as additional grounds to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship.

In discussing “To the Reader,” Price calls attention to the verb “hit” in the lines “O, could he but have drawn his wit/As well in brass, as he hath hit/His face; the Print would then surpass/All, that was ever writ in brass” and claims that “‘hit’ is a past tense of ‘hide’,” or “hid.”  On the basis of this etymological claim, she implies that Jonson, using “hit” meaning “hid,” hints that the portrait of Shakespeare concealed the identity of the author (not Shakespeare); and suggests a parallel to the actual author hiding behind a false name (Shakespeare) (182).  If Price were right about “hit” as “hid,” she reveals no more than an ambiguity, perhaps unintended, not a reason to doubt Shakespeare’s authorship of the canon.  Even so, anyone without an anti-Stratfordian bias would think that Jonson means that this portrait matched Shakespeare’s appearance but not his art.

But Price’s etymological claim is baseless.  No example in the Oxford English Dictionary supports her claimed etymological fact about the past tense of “hide” as “hit.”  Even so, whether the partial orthographic or phonetic similarity of “hit” to “hid” would overcome the clear metaphorical aptness of “hit” in context to suggest “hid” is very problematic.  Jonson’s appropriate metaphor obliged him to use its vehicles, and the range of options which both rhyme and are metrical is a limited one—to “hit.”  Her seemingly erudite argument builds on a fabricated etymology to mislead her reader.

In discussing “To the memory of my beloued, the AVTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left vs,” Price ignores the plain meaning of this title, which directly contradicts her thesis.  She takes four of eighty lines out of context and misconstrues them as a hint that Shakespeare was not, could not have been, a London playwright.  Jonson writes, “if I thought my iudgement were of yeeres,/I should commit thee surely with thy peeres,/And tell, how farre thou didst our Lily out-shine,/Or sporting Kid, or Marlowes mighty line (27-30).  She notes that Jonson links these three playwrights to Shakespeare as “peers” and that they had ceased most or all of their dramatic work by 1590, 1593, and 1594, respectively.  She states that “The careers of these three ‘peers’ were over by the time Shakspere was supposedly first establishing himself in literary London” and “pre-date Shakspere’s presumed period of creativity by nearly a decade.”  She concludes that, “By suggesting that Shakespeare’s literary career was at its zenith during the heydeys” of these dramatists, Jonson was undermining his identification of Shakespeare as a dramatist (196).

Price misconstrues words and muddles all else.  Jonson compares Shakespeare’s achievements and those of these three “peeres” “of yeeres.”  Noting when these “peeres” died, she implies that “of yeeres” limits Shakespeare’s and their best plays to the period when all four careers overlapped and when, so she infers Jonson thought, “Shakespeare’s literary career was at its zenith.”  Then noting that their careers were over ten years before Shakespeare’s “period of creativity,” she implies that, if Shakespeare were at the height of his powers in the late 1580s and early 1590s, he could not have authored the far greater plays from the mid 1590s forward for 15 or so years.  Presumably, if he did not write the later plays, he is unlikely to have written the earlier ones; therefore, he authored none of them.

Price’s argument is contrived.  Jonson’s comparison is a simple one.  It asserts that Shakespeare wrote plays during the lifetime of these three playwrights and acclaims his plays at the beginning of his career for outstripping theirs at end of their careers.  So, Jonson says that by the early 1590s, when four careers overlapped, Shakespeare was already ascendant.  Jonson’s opinion neatly tallies with Greene’s, who said almost as much in 1592—that, by then, Shakespeare had become a dramatist to be reckoned with.

In discussing “To the great Variety of Readers,” which she claims that Jonson wrote for Heminge and Condell, Price again focuses on a few words: “His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot in his papers.”  She details many meanings of the word “vtter,” the closest to penning a document being publishing, not authoring, one.  So she defaults to the meaning of “vtter” as speak, a meaning implying that Shakespeare dictated nearly forty plays to someone who wrote down what he said.  The practical absurdity sets aside the definitional truth that he would still be the author and makes a joke of colleagues’ receiving unblotted papers from him.  “When taken in the larger Jonsonian context, his choice of the word ‘utter’ in the Folio sends up a red flag.  It is another example of Jonsonian ambiguity” (207).  She does not define the “larger Jonsonian context”; indeed, she does not consider it.  For, if she had, she would have realized that, far from being an example of “Jonsonian ambiguity,” what Jonson wrote is unambiguous.  The meaning of “vtter” in context is clear because of the parallelism and imagery of the remark: “mind” is to “thought” as “hand,” not “tongue,” is to “vttered,” or wrote.

Concluding Remarks

Price points out a few peculiarities in Shakespeare’s orthodox biography.  The main one, the lack of personal documentation, is not a big one; in context, it does not cast doubt on his authorship of the plays in the canon traditionally assigned to him.  For, as an in-house dramatist, Shakespeare had no need to write down anything about his writing plays.  And, at a time when few people thought much of plays or playwrights, Shakespeare would be a man of this times if he had little or nothing to say about his work, which his company, not he, owned.  Heminge and Condell collected his works into the First Folio, published it posthumously in 1623 to honor their colleague and friend, but did not keep the manuscripts locked away for safekeeping.  In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, Jonson was the first professional dramatist to publish his plays and give the collection the title word, then honorific, of Works.

As for the rest, Price expends excessive energy on many matters only peripheral to Shakespeare’s biography; her efforts suggest an endeavor almost frantic to convert every bit of evidence, however tenuously related to her thesis, into support for it.  She abuses scholarly erudition and devices biased to advance the anti-Stratfordian cause not serve to explore the limits of our confidence in Shakespeare’s authorship.  The latter, not the former, purpose is a worthy one, justifies skepticism, but requires no special pleading, no inventions, omissions, or misrepresentations of relevant information, no biased inferences or conclusions, no inflammatory language impugning Shakespeare’s character or conduct.  Arguing that Shakespeare’s authorship is not certain, only probable, is one thing; arguing that, if it is not certain, it is not credible, is quite another.

Any scholar can over-reach in this, that, or another instance, but Price strains to cast doubt Shakespeare’s authorship and goes entirely too far too often.  Too much depends on an assumption that the absence of evidence, which, as I have noticed, she labors to discredit, is evidence of absence.  A truly scholarly book written with her erudition and energy, and scrutinizing the orthodox biography, would limit itself to arguing, with some success, that absolute certainty as opposed to varying degrees of probability about of Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship of the plays cannot, given the surviving records, be achieved.  Such scholarly criticism would be a worthy result of sensible skepticism.

Price could still perform a real service to the authorship question in two ways.  One, she could refocus on the inadequacies of the orthodox biography of Shakespeare and write one like Schoenbaum’s without his genuflection. The other, of lesser scope, she could reflect more than I have done on the reasons why an accomplished playwright recognized as such in his own time and one who addressed the immortality of art in his sonnets was, unlike Jonson, so little concerned with his plays that he did not arrange with his colleagues their publication in his lifetime.

 

Also see “The Shakespeare Authorship Question: E Pluribus Unum.”

Avatar photo

Michael L. Hays is formerly an independent consultant in defense, energy, and environment; a full- or part-time teacher for the past forty-five years under diverse auspices; a civic activist for public education as a columnist and blogger; and a retired independent scholar with his doctorate in English, specializing in Shakespeare.

Back To Top