On Will-fullness
by Philip Womack
February 2025
Why are we so desperate to believe that William Shakespeare wasn’t William Shakespeare?
Last year, I wrote an article for the Spectator, titled ‘What drives the Shakespeare conspiracy theories?’ It was in response to Jodi Picoult’s recent novel, By Any Other Name, which suggests (somewhat surprisingly) that a woman called Emilia Lanier actually had a hand in the plays of William Shakespeare—and ever since, I’ve found myself becoming more and more interested in the world of #Shaxdeniers.
That an established novelist with such a large following should fall prey to this kind of unevidenced ‘theory’ is bad enough (we hardly know who Emilia Lanier was, let alone that she ever even met her alleged collaborator). But that the London Library should host an event featuring Elizabeth Winkler and Derek Jacobi, two influential people who believe that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, was somehow worse.
Why, though? I found myself asking. Why do people think this way? And why is it only about William Shakespeare? Why not any other poet, playwright or novelist? We have very little evidence about Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, and hardly any manuscripts that bear his name. Or, in the case of Sir Thomas Malory, there are a couple of other potential candidates for authorship of the Morte d’Arthur: yet no sinister conspiracy is mooted.
Dipping a toe into this world has led me into some quite strange places. One person announced, in a piece on The Sceptic's website, that I couldn't possibly know as much about Shakespeare as the late Shakespeare-denier Alexander Waugh, since Waugh was the son and grandson of two further writers. An arbitrary game, but fine: let’s play it. My family is chock-a-block with literary types, with writers, academics, priests and scholars going back generations. I have one of my gt-gt-gt grandfather's copies of Shakespeare, as well as my grandfather's. I read Classics and English at Oxford, Alexander Waugh read Music at Manchester University. And I happen to have gone to Evelyn Waugh's school, Lancing, and worked for Literary Review, where Auberon Waugh had been the editor. I also knew (and admired) Alexander Waugh. Where’s my conspiracy…!?
Let's start with the basics. Most Shakespeare denialists begin with the premise that a glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon couldn’t possibly have had the education or knowledge to write such a glitteringly wonderful series of plays: it must have been an aristocrat. Never mind the snobbery involved, or the fact that large parts of his plays are not about aristocrats (Merry Wives of Windsor, anyone?), this ignores several other quite important things.
First, the background of literally every single other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwright. Ben Jonson’s stepfather was a bricklayer, John Webster’s father a carriage-maker, Christopher Marlowe’s a shoemaker, and so on. Playwrighting was clearly an occupation of the middle classes. Francis Beaumont and Cyril Tourneur are the only ones with much pretence to gentility by blood; John Fletcher came from a family of clerics.
“Why do people think this way? And why is it only about William Shakespeare?”
Second, by insisting that only an aristocrat with knowledge of the court could have written Hamlet, the ‘theory’ discounts several things: both imaginative responses, and the fact that by relying on such an argument, you're also saying that an aristocrat couldn't have written, say, the schoolmaster scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen. (This is also leaving aside the facts that Shakespeare didn't actually write particularly accurately about court scenes, or the fact that he did have some experience of court life, as a player for King James. These can exist in tandem, obviously: young Will wasn't merely transcribing what he saw.) This argument would directly link education with imagination, as if only a certain level of education would allow a writer to be inventive, and that invention would be limited to a facsimile of the experience. And yet it’s also easy to demonstrate that William Shakespeare, as the son of a civic worthy—which John Shakespeare was, without a shadow of doubt—would have had the same grammar school education as every other boy in the country. We know what was on the syllabus; we know what he would have read; we can match that reading to his subsequent works.
We know that Shakespeare didn't go to university (like Webster, but unlike Marlowe); but even if you start from Shakespeare’s plays and work back, the evidence that he was educated is plainly there: he had about the level of Classical knowledge that you would expect someone to have who went to a grammar school, but he’s not quite as self-consciously intellectual as, say, Kit Marlowe. All it takes is reading the plays side by side. Few in the denial game, however, seem keen to do this.
Deniers also seem unable to countenance that there was a very busy literary world in the Elizabethan-Jacobean period. You could buy books from the market, you could borrow them, you could lend them. One of Shakespeare's Stratford friends was even a London bookseller. We also know that Shakespeare visited Oxford, where he undoubtedly would have encountered a stimulating intellectual environment, and might well have had access to the Bodleian library (though deniers don't much like the idea of an autodidact).
It’s clear from other Jacobean playwrights that they all had access to a number of texts, some very erudite indeed: Thomas Dekker, for example, who after his release from prison was at work on numerous plays, which required a number of different sources. When I posited this evidence, the answer I was given by one denialist was that Dekker must therefore have been a front too. It seems that, as with a tube of Pringles, once you pop, you can’t stop. The idea that any working playwright was a front for someone else is… well, there’s no other word for it… ridiculous.
Lastly (as if), it is often said that it wasn’t ‘done’ for aristocrats to put their name on artistic work. This would have been news to Sir Philip Sidney, and also to the Earl of Oxford, who was quite happily mentioned by his contemporary Francis Meres as a good writer of comedy. This assumption is simply that: an assumption, with no historical or documentary basis. And yet this doesn’t seem to bother the deniers either.
“Deniers don't much like the idea of an autodidact.”
To return to what we know of the life.
The record show that John Shakespeare was heavily involved in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon (and would have had a hand in the running of the grammar school there). Will had a father, mother, siblings, children. One of his grandsons was given the first name Shakespeare, as was another relative. Will’s brother, Edmund, came up to London after him to become a player. If you had an older brother who’d spectacularly made it in the theatre world, you’d probably want to follow him into it; and if you had a famous playwright in the family, you might very well want to name your child after him, especially if the surname was in danger of dying out (Will himself having no male-line descendants). I say ‘probably’, because of course it’s tricky proving motivations; but one of the things that Shakespeare-deniers do is ignore probability based on evidence, in favour of wild surmise.
In fact, once you situate William Shakespeare within his time, it becomes almost impossible to conclude that he wasn’t the poet and playwright of immortal renown. Like almost anyone else, he existed within a complex web of business and family relationships. So if you are positing that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, that's an awful lot of people who have to have been in the know, and a whole lot of evidence that has mysteriously vanished.
As we discover more about authorial co-operation in the Bankside theatres, the case for a mysterious original hand also entirely evaporates. You could—just about, if you had never read the plays thoughtfully, or looked at any documentary evidence—believe that one person wrote all the plays in total secret, and then had them delivered (over decades!) to a theatre where some jobbing hack called Shakespeare just pretended they were his. But once we understand that Shakespeare worked consistently with others—with the actors, for whom he wrote specific parts; with his fellows in his playing company, with whom he made business decisions about what plays to put on; with other playwrights—then it becomes quite hard to set much store by all the ‘hidden hand’ malarky. If Shakespeare couldn't write, why was he in the theatre in the first place? How many dozen co-creatives were all privy to the secret that he wasn’t who he said he was? What happened when they needed a piece or a scene rewritten quickly? One or two acts of subterfuge might have been manageable. But 37 plays?? Give me a break.
By this point, straightforward logic should really have seen off any lingering doubts. But somehow, it doesn't.
Deniers now bring up ‘the documentary gap’ (whilst simultaneously oblivious to the glaring documentary chasms in their own theories). For this line of attack I blame Mark Twain, of whom I was quite fond until I realised just how damaging he’d been. Twain wondered why Shakespeare had not left any letters behind. Unfortunately, the lauded American wit doesn’t appear to have known anything about archives or Elizabethan history, or how documents survive through time. We hardly have any letters from any playwrights. There are ‘documentary gaps’ for every single playwright of the period.
Moreover, in truth there isn't much of a documentary gap at all when it comes to Shakespeare. We have a lot of documents, alongside other evidence, that demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Shakespeare was exactly who everyone said he was. (What we don't have is any documents that suggest a conspiracy, and I'll come to that in just a moment.)
“In truth there isn't much of a documentary gap at all when it comes to Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare's father’s life is exceptionally well documented, and we know that dozens of players visited Stratford during William’s childhood. We have Shakespeare’s will, dictated on his deathbed (hence the shaky signatures). We have the evidence of his friends and fellows in his acting company, and of people who saw the plays and talked about them. We have a document showing he was given red cloth (as a player) by King James. We have a letter to him from a relative. We have the grant of arms that he petitioned for on John’s behalf. We have his famous monument in the Stratford church, and we have the reactions to the great playwright’s death from his friends and theatrical fellows (whom he left money with which to buy remembrance rings). All of this evidence—and much more—is freely available to look at in the Folger Library.
And even that is setting aside the overwhelming Exhibit A that stares us in the face: William Shakespeare's name on all the poems and the plays, not someone else's. There is simply no reason to posit that Will Shakespeare was lying, that the printers and editors were lying, and/or that the Stationers’ Guild were lying when they wrote down his name in their register—just as there is no reason to believe that they were lying about Webster, Dekker or Middleton.
But let us entertain the idea, for a minute, that there was in fact a conspiracy to hide the ‘true’ authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. Think of the number of people who would have to be involved in it: his family; his landlady; his colleagues; the players in the companies; his fellow playwrights; the people he knew in Stratford and London. That's just on his side. If there had been an aristocrat involved, then there would also have been liveried servants bustling to and fro for years, which would have been conspicuous.
People involved in conspiracies need to communicate, and invariably tend to slip up (think of the Gunpowder Plot) or betray each other for a whole range of quite predictable reasons. Given the cutthroat relationships among the Jacobean theatre companies, a single shred of evidence against the mighty Shakespeare would have been extremely valuable to anyone who got their hands on it. Furthermore, such a document, given its earth-shaking contents, would—on the balance of probability—have been kept, while a letter from Shakespeare about his tithe lands would have gone the way of every other piece of paper.
In short, had there been any such conspiracy, we would have known by now. Instead, all that happens is that ever more research and scholarship links William Shakespeare, the boy born in Stratford, with the plays and poems that bear his name.
So Shakespeare-deniers refuse to believe entirely probable things about the Bard, such as that he went to school, or that he was able to conduct business transactions at the same time as writing plays; but insist that their preferred alternative candidates achieved fundamentally improbable—if not flatly impossible—things, in a desperate effort to make these square pegs fit the round holes in their theories.
Perhaps the most notorious of these is the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, before Shakespeare had written about a dozen of his latest, greatest plays, including King Lear. The considered response to this, I was amazed to discover, is that the Earl of Oxford must have written King Lear (1606) before he died, along with all the other subsequent manuscripts, and left them lying around to be performed over the next ten years or so.
Once again: what’s more probable? That a time-travelling Earl, whose letters we do have, and whose upbringing, accent, handwriting, and vocabulary range were entirely different from Shakespeare’s, wrote King Lear several years before it was put on, carefully seeding it with references to political events which would take place after his death? Or that Will Shakespeare, the well-known playwright, actor and poet, responding to demands from the theatre and his fellows, saw a good thing in the pre-existing hit King Leir, noted its relevance to the recent union of Scotland and England, and added his own particular brand of tragic art to the ending?
To return to my original question, then: why? Why would you take away one man’s singular and well-attested artistic and dramatic achievement, and replace it with someone else’s, on the basis of nothing more than assumptions which, when even basically examined, fall away like thistledown upon a gentle breeze?
