My 10th grade English class had devoted a semester to the works of William Shakespeare, and that seemed appropriate given his place in our language and our culture.
During those months, I’d read about a dozen or so of his plays and had been required to memorize one of the most famous soliloquies in Macbeth. Even today, decades later, I discovered that I could still recite it by heart, a fact that greatly surprised me.
By common agreement, Shakespeare ranks as the towering, even formative figure of our globally-dominant English language, probably holding a position roughly comparable to that of Cervantes for Spanish and perhaps Goethe and Schiller for German. Many of the widespread phrases found in today’s English trace back to his plays, and in glancing at Shakespeare’s 12,000 word Wikipedia article, I noticed that the introduction described him as history’s foremost playwright, a claim that seemed very reasonable to me.
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Although I’d never studied his works after high school, over the years I’d seen a number of the film versions of his famous dramas, as well as some of the Royal Shakespeare Company performances on PBS, and generally thought those were excellent. But although my knowledge of Shakespeare was meager, I never doubted his literary greatness.
During all those years I remained only dimly aware of the details of Shakespeare’s life, which were actually rather scanty. I did know that he’d been born and died in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, which I’d once visited during the year I studied at Cambridge University.
I’d also vaguely known that Shakespeare had written a large number of sonnets, and a year or two after my day trip to his birthplace, there was a long article in the New York Times that a new one had been found. Shakespeare’s stature was so great that the discovery of a single new poem warranted a 5,000 word article in our national newspaper of record.
I’m not sure when I’d first heard that there was any sort of dispute regarding Shakespeare’s personal history or his authorship of that great body of work, but I think it might have been many years later during the 1990s. Some right-wing writer for National Review had gotten himself into hot water for his antisemitic and racist remarks and was fired from that magazine. A few years later my newspapers mentioned that the same fellow had just published a book claiming that Shakespeare’s plays had actually been secretly written by someone else, a British aristocrat whose name meant nothing to me.
That story didn’t much surprise me. Individuals on the political fringe who had odd and peculiar ideas on one topic might be expected to be eccentric in others as well. Perhaps getting fired from his political publication might have tipped him over the edge, leading him to promote such a bizarre and conspiratorial literary theory about so prominent a historical figure. The handful of reviews in my newspapers and conservative magazines treated his silly book with the total disdain that it clearly warranted.
I think about a decade later I’d seen something in my newspapers about that same Shakespeare controversy, which had boiled up again in some other research, but the Times didn’t seem to take it too seriously, so neither did I.
A few years later, Hollywood released a 2011 film called Anonymous making that same case about Shakespeare’s true identity, but I never saw it and didn’t pay much attention. The notion that the greatest figure in English literature had secretly been someone else struck me as typical Hollywood fare, pretty unlikely but probably less so than the plots and secret identities found in the popular Batman and Spiderman movies.
By then I’d grown very suspicious of many elements of the American political history that I’d been taught, and a couple of years after that film was released, I published “Our American Pravda,” outlining some of my tremendous loss of faith in the information provided in our media and textbooks, then later launched a long series of a similar name.
But both at that time and for the dozen years that followed, I’d never connected my growing distrust of so much of what I’d learned in my introductory history courses with what my introductory English courses had taught me during those same schooldays. Therefore, the notion that Shakespeare hadn’t really been the author of Shakespeare’s plays seemed totally preposterous to me, so much so that I’d even half-forgotten that anyone had ever seriously made that claim.
However, last year a young right-wing activist and podcaster dropped me a note about various things and he also suggested that I consider expanding my series of “conspiratorial” investigations to include the true authorship of the Shakespeare plays. He mentioned that the late Joseph Sobran had been a friend of his own family, explaining how that once very influential conservative journalist had been purged from National Review in the early 1990s and then published a book arguing that the famous plays had actually been written by the Earl of Oxford, while various other scholars had taken similar positions. That had been the 1990s controversy I’d largely forgotten.
I told him that I’d vaguely heard of that theory over the years, probably even reading one or two of the dismissive reviews of that Sobran book when it appeared, but had never taken the idea seriously. Indeed, during my various investigations of the last decade or so, I’d concluded that something like 90-95% of all the “conspiracy theories” I’d examined had turned out to be false or at least unsubstantiated and I expected that this one about Shakespeare was very likely to fall into that same category. But almost all of my recent work had focused upon politics and history and I thought that a short digression into literary matters might be a welcome break. So I clicked a few buttons on Amazon and ordered the Sobran book as well as another more recent one he’d recommended to me on the same topic, then forgot all about it.
As an outsider to the literary community, I found it extremely implausible that for centuries the true identity of the greatest figure of the English language had remained concealed from all the many hundreds of millions who spoke that tongue, or the multitudes who watched his famous plays performed, or studied his works at universities. How likely was it that until a couple of decades ago, none of our greatest writers, critics, and literary scholars, numbering in the many dozens or more, had ever suspected that all the Shakespeare plays had actually been written by someone else?
But one reason I was much more willing to consider investigating this matter was that since the 1990s my opinion of Sobran had considerably improved. At the time he’d published his book, I’d barely been aware of him, but after his bitter Neocon enemies had stampeded America into our disastrous Iraq War following the 9/11 Attacks, he and all those others who had previously warned of their growing political influence and subsequently suffered at their hands had greatly risen in my estimation.
Furthermore, my content-archiving project of the early 2000s had included all the issues of National Review, and I’d discovered Sobran’s enormously important role in that conservative flagship publication, cut short when the Neocons had forced Editor William F. Buckley Jr. to purge him.
In sharp contrast to my own background, Sobran himself had originally begun his career in English literature before switching to conservative journalism in the 1970s and a year or two ago I’d briefly described his unfortunate fate:
Although the name of Joseph Sobran may be somewhat unfamiliar to younger conservatives, during the 1970s and 1980s he possibly ranked second only to founder William F. Buckley, Jr. in his influence in mainstream conservative circles, as partly suggested by the nearly 400 articles he published for NR during that period. By the late 1980s, he had grown increasingly concerned that growing Neocon influence would embroil America in future foreign wars, and his occasional sharp statements in that regard were branded “anti-Semitic” by his Neocon opponents, who eventually prevailed upon Buckley to purge him. The latter provided the particulars in a major section of his 1992 book-length essay In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Oddly enough, Sobran seems to have only very rarely discussed Jews, favorably or otherwise, across his decades of writing, but even just that handful of less than flattering mentions was apparently sufficient to draw their sustained destructive attacks on his career, and he eventually died in poverty in 2010 at the age of 64. Sobran had always been known for his literary wit, and his unfortunate ideological predicament eventually led him to coin the aphorism “An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.”
Sobran had been a nationally-syndicated columnist and a regular commenter on the CBS Radio network, so his personal fall was a considerable one. Given that he’d written his Shakespeare book just a few years after his final ouster from National Review, he still had retained some of his previous standing, helping to explain why this work had been reviewed in several publications albeit unfavorably, rather than simply ignored.
When the Shakespeare books I’d ordered eventually arrived, I set them aside and only much later finally got around to reading them. As I did so, I was quite surprised at what I discovered.
Published in 1997, Sobran’s Alias Shakespeare was quite short, with the main text only running a little more than 200 pages, and although I began it with extreme skepticism, the 15-odd pages in the Introduction quickly dispelled much of that.
The author started by emphasizing that nearly all the mainstream Shakespeare scholars have always dismissed as ridiculous any doubts about the authorship of the plays, and he himself had taken that same position, including during his years of graduate school, when he had focused on Shakespeare studies.
Moreover, once he eventually became suspicious of this conventional view and began investigating the topic, he “entered a bizarre world of colorful people, totally unlike the academic world.” Their various theories of authorship included Francis Bacon, a wide variety of different British noblemen, and even Queen Elizabeth I, and these numerous activists often bitterly quarreled with each other. Yet Sobran argued that it was important to remember that “so many important discoveries have been made by dubious scholars, intellectual misfits, and outright cranks.” Meanwhile mainstream scholars had almost entirely ignored the Shakespeare authorship issue, claiming it didn’t exist.
Sobran’s attitude seemed a very reasonable one on that controversial literary subject, and he maintained that same judicial tone throughout the book, often emphasizing his uncertainty on many of the issues that he was raising.
Although I’d assumed that only cranks and fringe eccentrics had ever questioned Shakespeare’s authorship, I was very surprised to discover that over the last century or two the list of such “heretics” included many of our most illustrious English-language literary figures and intellectuals, including Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Nabokov, and David McCullough. Some of our most notable actors and dramatists, especially those known for their Shakespearean roles were also skeptics: Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud, Michael York, Kenneth Branagh, and Charlie Chaplin. A few years after the publication of Sobran’s book, Sir Derek Jacobi, a renowned Shakespearean actor, provided the Forewords to other books taking that same position. Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Antonin Scalia were also numbered among the Shakespeare skeptics.
Obviously, all these eminent literary, dramatic, and intellectual figures might easily be mistaken, but as an ignorant outsider who had barely been aware that any serious dispute even existed, I read the rest of Sobran’s book with far more of an open mind than when I’d turned the first page.
The telling point that Sobran made in his first chapter was that aside from the huge corpus of the literary works commonly attributed to him, our solid knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and activities is so scanty as to almost be non-existent, mostly consisting of a tiny handful of short business records and documents showing that he had once testified in a minor lawsuit. This was hardly what we would expect of such a towering literary figure.
Although his movements and places of residence were largely unknown, we did know that he ended his days back home at Stratford, living there for at least five years and perhaps a dozen. From that period came his last will and testament, which constituted the only written artifact we have from his entire life, running just 1,300 words. That document is very puzzling, giving no indication that he had ever owned a single book or any literary manuscript. There were no signs of any intellectual interests or literary patrons, and the style was so plodding and semi-literate compared to some other testaments of that era that it seemed difficult to believe that it could have been written or dictated by one of the greatest stylists of the English language.
As Sobran pointed out, that will included three of Shakespeare’s six surviving signatures, all of which were quite irregular, hardly what we would expect from someone who wrote so frequently. Indeed, a document expert cited by a leading Shakespeare scholar claimed that all of Shakespeare’s signatures were probably made by different hands. Since we have no solid evidence that Shakespeare ever attended grammar school, this suggested the astonishing possibility that Shakespeare may have been unable to write his own name. Indeed, both of Shakespeare’s parents, his wife Anne Hathaway, and his daughter Judith were apparently illiterate, signing their names with a mark.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, whether literary figures or otherwise, not a single letter written by Shakespeare has ever been found despite enormous research efforts, nor a single book that he had ever owned.
Although Shakespeare would have certainly ranked as one of Britain’s leading literary lights, he never offered any public tribute nor statement at the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 nor at the accession of her successor James I, and when he himself died in 1616, no one in London seemed to have taken any notice of his passing.
As Sobran emphasized, although Shakespeare lived and worked for 51 years in Britain, much of that time in the London metropolis, he seemed almost to have existed as a ghost, apparently invisible to nearly all his contemporaries. Numerous thick Shakespeare biographies have been published by various scholars, but aside from the inferences they drew from the enormous body of literary work attributed to him, their contents were almost entirely based upon speculation, given the near total absence of any known facts.
A central problem raised by all those who doubted that the plays were actually written by the actor from Stratford was that the plots and descriptions heavily relied upon far-reaching knowledge of classical history and foreign countries, Italy in particular, while their supposed author certainly had no higher education.
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One very surprising fact that I’d never previously known was that all the published plays and other literary works had sometimes been released anonymously, sometimes under the name “Shake-Speare” including the dash often used for pseudonyms in that era, or sometimes under the name “Shakespeare.” Meanwhile, the man from Stratford and his entire family, including both parents and children, almost always spelled their names “Shakspere.”
Elizabethan spelling was often irregular, but it seemed rather odd that the man we today believe was the famous playwright apparently never used the name under which his plays were published or that we today call him. This sharp distinction has conveniently allowed the books and articles of these Shakespeare dissenters to easily distinguish in their text between the “Shakespeare” who was the author of the plays and the “Shakspere” who was the obscure inhabitant of Stratford.
Consider an amusing rough analogy. Samuel Clemens was one of America’s greatest writers, with all of his works published under the pen-name of Mark Twain. But suppose those facts had not been widely known at the time, and a generation or two later, after all those aware of Twain’s true identity had passed from the scene, literary experts had located an obscure Southern businessman named “Mark Tween,” and convinced themselves that he had actually been the famous author.
In effect, Sobran and his allies were arguing that for the last several centuries the literary establishment of the English-speaking world has been suffering from one of the most egregious cases of mistaken identity in all of human history, with most of its tenured faculty members perhaps being too embarrassed to ever even consider that possibility.
