William Shakespeare and the Holy Grail

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In Jane Austen’s third published novel, Mansfield Park, she writes, “Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how…[he is] so spread about that one touches him everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct”. This claim, uttered by the charming Crawford, is hurriedly agreed to by the male lead, Edmund. “His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare…”¹ 

Though I tend to agree with Edmund’s perspective, (one can scarcely escape Shakespeare’s pervasive legacy or the many words he created which are still in use), I’m inclined to disagree with Crawford’s first assertion, that we all know Shakespeare, but not how he came to exist in our minds. I remember when, exactly, it was that I first became acquainted with William of Stratford; and where. 

In my eighth grade Language Arts class, I first learned about the Bard, his wife, Anne Hathaway, and their children (the first of which, Susanna, was born only six months after their marriage.² My class found this revelation highly scandalous). My teacher, Mrs. Lowry, lectured about the playwright with such confidence that I can still easily recall her assertions. After all, she presented to us nothing more or less than unobtrusive historical fact. We learned about the author, and then dove into the works, performing Julius Caesar in class. I got to play Caesar in the third act, uttering the words ‘Et tu, Brute?’ with all the dramatic verve characteristic of a pre-teen. 

Suffice to say, my first introduction to the plays was closely accompanied by a confident assertion of their authorship, and it wouldn’t be until the final year of my undergraduate studies, even as a theater and humanities double major, that I realized there was reason to doubt the identity of the author at all.

In 1964, in an English courtroom, the will of a woman named Evelyn May Hopkins was contested. Rather than bequeathing money to her many descendents, she reportedly left a third of her significant inheritance to the Francis Bacon society, for the purpose of finding the missing manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays. The ultimate goal of this elaborate endeavor was to prove the philosopher Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. Ms. Hopkins’ heirs contested her will before the court, arguing that Shakespeare’s claim to authorship was firm, and nothing would be achieved by the granting of sizable funds from her estate. However, after listening to the testimony of countless scholars, the Hopkins will was upheld, on the grounds that the authorship question could not be conclusively answered. 

This revelatory ruling concluded with a staggering remark from the Right Honourable Richard Wilberforce. “The evidence in favour of Shakepeare’s authorship is quantitatively slight. It rests positively, in the main, on the explicit statements in the First Folio of 1623, and on continuous tradition; negatively on the lack of any challenge to this ascription at the time [of the Folio’s publication]...the intensive search of the nineteenth century has widened the evidentiary gulf between William Shakespeare the man, and the author of the plays.”³ 

Does Shakespeare’s claim rest only on the lack of any challenge to his authorship after the publication of the First Folio, as Justice Wilberforce asserts? And if William Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the plays he is so famous for, who is? I’ll give you a disappointing answer: no one really knows. The original manuscripts of the plays have never been found, which explains why Evelyn May Hopkins made such a large financial contribution to the discovery of them as recently as 1964. What I will say is that Ms. Hopkins wasn’t crazy for doubting Shakespeare’s claim, as evidenced by the verdict in her case.

There is surprisingly little evidence to link Shakespeare directly to the plays, as Justice Wilberforce highlighted. And, for the intents and purposes of this brief introduction, I will highlight two more discrepancies which I find compelling. William Shakespeare, according to records, never received any formal education⁴ , though the possibility remains that he attended basic grammar school (records may have been lost, though it is unlikely). This lack of formal education is at odds with much of the content in his plays. Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks, “He was at home in the Aristotelian cosmology of his time. He had learned the new Platonic philosophy…He was familiar with foreign countries, foreign affairs, foreign languages.”⁵ The worldliness and level of detail in the plays is at odds with its supposed playwright; a man who never stepped foot outside of England. Would a common peasant, the son of a glover, a man with no formal education in Greek, Latin, history, or law, subjects which are heavily referenced in his purported works, have the experience or knowledge necessary to pen them?

Moreover, a wealth of information has been uncovered about William Shakespeare the man: records of business dealings, finances, investments, and even evidence of his role in Early Modern theatrics, including records of acting roles he took and his position as shareholder in an acting company. More detailed personal records of Shakespeare have emerged than from many other writers of the time. However, no concrete records have emerged connecting him to the plays. Blair Worden, an Oxford historian, remarks, “...there can be no other important writer since the invention of printing for whom we are unable to demonstrate any relationship at all.”⁶

But, but, BUT! You may be thinking to yourself…do we really know this little about the true authorship of the plays? Is what we know really so circumstantial? Where do I start on this quest for the holy grail? Luckily, my dear friends, we have leads.

It would take writing a book, possibly many books, to fully explore the theories which have been developed (so far). The aim of the rest of this piece is to provide brief introductory information on four possible authors. Please note that the snippets of evidence for each claim are not comprehensive, and may be embellished at a later date, in subsequent articles. I will likely write a follow-up focusing solely on Francis Bacon (as he is a major focus of my master’s thesis), so his claim will not be introduced here.

In her 2023 book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, Elizabeth Winkler outlines the dramatis personae in style: 

“Seeing the origins of the works in the man from Stratford [William Shakespeare], traditionalists are…[called] Stratfordians–defenders of the faith; orthodox believers in the one true church. The heretics banging their ninety-five theses against the church door are anti-Stratfordians…but their quest for truth has splintered them into sects…Baconians [believers in Francis Bacon’s claim], Marlovians [Christopher Marlowe’s claim], Oxfordians [Edward de Vere], Sidneyans [Mary Sidney Herbert]...and others, each named according to their god. Like the Protestant Reformers, they seek a purer form of faith; a return to the true religion, before it was corrupted by the creeds and dogmas and vanities of men.”⁷

In many ways, William Shakespeare of Stratford is the incumbent. Widely assumed to be the author of the plays, and, as Winkler remarks, the most traditional candidate. In the eight year gap in records between the birth of his son, Hamnet, and his arrival in London, not much is known about his doings.⁸ One popular theory is that he was a schoolmaster, which would explain his familiarity with concepts characteristic of formally educated individuals of the time. It would also explain how he was introduced to playmaking. 

The chief focus of pedagogy in the early 1600s was on Latin and Greek, developed from the works of Cicero and Quintillan.⁹ Because of the emphasis on the mastery of these languages, performative arts and pedagogy of the period both prized oratory. In his book, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing, John Astington writes: 

“The acquisition of proper pronunciation, clarity of enunciation, vocal emphasis and control, respect for rhythm and pitch, and the accompanying…facial expression and bodily stance and gesture…all regarded as appropriate educational attainments…[were expressly] laid down by the two principal Latin authors studied…”¹⁰

Because of this emphasis, school ‘exercises’ included drama, and English plays were even allowed in certain situations in addition to Latin. Cicero particularly prized exemplary performance and oratory, writing, “Qued tamen unum id esse quod/yet achieving this [balance between speech and expression] is the one thing that cannot be taught.”¹¹

Astington continues, “The chief interest of [Cicero and Quintillan’s system of oratory] in connection with the contemporary theater is its inescapable stress on the living, physically present speaker as a potent means of communication.”¹²

If William Shakespeare truly was a schoolmaster, he would have taught a curriculum based heavily on performance, and even likely written plays in English to be performed by his students. He would have entered a London playhouse for the first time with a wealth of experience surrounding playmaking and the necessary sophistication of thought to make his plays unforgettable, despite his humble beginnings. 

If one was so inclined, it would not be difficult to uncover more information about Shakespeare’s claim to authorship. It is the mainstream, after all. Elizabeth Winkler claims, “Though scholars claim not to participate in the authorship debate–not to recognize it–Shakespeare biographies are entirely about the authorship question. They try to make the case for Shakespeare, to explain how he did it.”¹³  One need only to pick up a book on Shakespeare and his remarkable life by a foremost scholar in the field, to imagine the rise from glove maker’s son to literary behemoth.

Possibly the most popular anti-Stratfordian theory today is the Oxfordian claim. This name refers to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, described thusly in the Dictionary of National Biography: “...despite his violent and perverse temper…eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of substance, evinced a genuine taste in music and wrote verses of much lyric beauty.”¹⁴ 

Most compelling about de Vere’s claim include his early poems surviving into modernity, while his plays (which courtier poets of the time claim existed) have all been lost. Plays said to have been put on by de Vere in court, long before Shakespeare was ever thought to have devised them, have been described as fantastically similar to the Bard’s later work. References include a play with a character named ‘Hamlet’ and one described by a French diplomat as beginning with a shipwreck and ending in marriage (just like Twelfth Night). 

Curiously, Shakespeare’s plays have survived, though any early work that may have existed is entirely lost. Did Shakespeare’s dramatic verve come out of nowhere, or does his early work in fact exist, just under another name? The final linchpin in this trifecta of intrigue seems to be that de Vere stopped writing entirely around the time that the works of Shakespeare emerged. The earl would have been around forty at the time. As Winkler states, “The dates of Oxford’s poems and Shakespeare’s plays ‘fit in exactly with the theory of one work being but the continuation of the other.’”¹⁵ 

Many theorists have noticed similarities in content between the sonnets of Oxford and Shakespeare, and, what’s more, significant parallels between the life of de Vere and characters in the plays. Edward de Vere was a soldier (unlike Shakespeare), notable when one considers the caliber of military knowledge on display in the plays. In addition, de Vere was particularly well traveled, and ample documentation remains surrounding his time spent in Windsor Castle, Denmark, and Northern Italy, popular settings for the plays.

Thematically, it makes sense that the author would have been a member of the higher class. Shakespeare’s protagonists enjoyed activities popular among the privileged of the day, and, according to scholar Frederick Boas, the plays contain slang specific to Early Modern students of Cambridge University, where de Vere attended.¹⁶

Distinct from other Early Modern playwrights, it was the lower classes who were often made to be the butt of the Shakespearean joke. Think of Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a lower class actor turned into a literal ass by fairy royalty. Or of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, an especially gullible servant whose name literally translates to ‘ill will’. In the play, he is made to wear ridiculous clothes and ultimately ridiculed for loving the Countess Olivia. 

But why lie? As a member of the one percent, de Vere already had a reputation for literary prowess. Was a pseudonym necessary? A penchant for scandal and eventual fall into disgrace could provide a compelling reason to distance oneself from one’s works. It is possible he simply did not want credit for them, or wanted to write more freely as someone with a lot to lose.

Newly minted anti-Stratfordians interested in de Vere’s claim may look into the source of the theory: “Shakespeare” Identified by John Thomas Looney, who remarks, “Personally, I find it utterly impossible to read…Edward de Vere…and the sonnets…without an overwhelming sense of their being but one mind behind the two utterances.”¹⁷

Christopher Marlowe’s claim to authorship may be the least interesting thing about him. Like William Shakespeare, he came from humble beginnings. His father was a cobbler, and without the aid of scholarships, he would never have been able to attend school. He rode the wave of money all the way to Cambridge, and six years of study there enabled him to become a gentleman. 

During his time at Cambridge, it is widely theorized (but has never been definitively proven) that he began spying for Queen Elizabeth, leading people to believe that his later inquest for heresy, atheism, and blasphemy, was a sham or cover-up. The Queen’s personal coroner attended the inquest without the presence of a secondary county coroner, which was the legal standard of the day. The witnesses to the inquest worked, like Marlowe, as intelligence agents. Marlovians popularly deem them ‘professional liars’. Lastly, each witness to his inquest was socially and professionally connected to Marlowe’s patron and eventual ‘murderer’, Thomas Walsingham. Walsingham was quickly pardoned after stabbing Marlowe, who was on bail in a government safe house prior to his official trial. Could the murder have been a cover-up to prevent Marlowe’s potential execution for heresy? His employer, Lord Treasurer Burghley, had a documented history of protecting Marlowe from accusations of treason and heresy. 

The Shakespearean Authorship Trust summarizes, “The faked death scenario has been proposed as a compromise meeting the needs of the two main factions of the [Queen’s] Privy Council, [Marlowe’s powerful friends], and a faction…who would want to make an example of a notorious atheist”. 

Before his ‘death’, Marlowe was a popular playwright and poet under his own name. His most popular work, Doctor Faustus, is still widely performed today, and he is credited with popularizing blank verse in Elizabethan playwriting. We have ample evidence of his style and prowess as a writer, and many argue that his works are nearly indistinguishable from the early work of William Shakespeare. In fact, many plays from Shakespeare’s eventual First Folio, such as Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew were attributed to Christopher Marlowe until the 1920s. What’s more, Shakespeare himself didn’t emerge on the literary scene for the first time until two weeks after Marlowe’s reported death in 1593. 

Likewise, Marlowe had proven familiarity with a vast range of social classes. Samuel Blumenfeld, a journalist and Marlovian, writes, “Marlowe had the social breadth required to be the author: from cobbler[‘s son] to Queen’s agent. Despite mixing with noblemen and having duties that took him to foreign courts, he remained familiar with the yeoman class sensibilities strongly depicted in the Shakespeare canon.”¹⁸

If the author of the plays was a woman, we may never know her name. In Early Modern England, it was considered highly immodest for women to act on or write for the stage. Richard Lovelace, a poet of the time, compared performing and publishing as a woman to prostitution: “Powders a Sonnet as she does her hair, / Then prostitutes them both to publick Aire”¹⁹ The idea of a woman writing a play also could have jeopardized its commercial viability. 

However paradoxically, Shakespeare, a man who opted not to educate his daughters, depicted many of his heroines reading and held the misogyny of the day up for critical appraisal.  Juliet Dusinberre, a Cambridge scholar, argues that Shakespeare’s work is deeply feminist, explaining, “...the struggle [in Shakespeare’s work is] for women…to be human in a world which declares them only female”. Elizabeth Winkler adds, “...when things end happily [in Shakespeare’s plays]...it is often because the heroines win.”²⁰ It would be easy to argue that, across the board, female characters in the plays often overshadow male ones. How is it possible for one man to write so much about the plight of educated, headstrong women of the day, and simultaneously allow his own daughters to remain illiterate? Is it possible that the answer lies behind a masculine disguise; an educated woman hiding behind the name of an uneducated man, metaphorically dressing herself in male clothes, like Rosalind, Viola, or Portia? Mark Rylance, renowned actor and artistic director of the Globe Theatre from 1995 to 2005, emphasizes in an article for the Atlantic that, “Shakespeare’s women far surpass in their variety and humanity the writing of women characters by any other dramatist.”²¹ There is quite significant precedent, throughout the skew of history, of female authors disguising themselves as men. The Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and more wrote under male pseudonyms during their lifetimes, and we may owe the enduring quality of their literary contributions to that fact.

In the modern day literary conversation, where the gender gap is not nearly as pronounced, people often complain about stale representation of women in works by men. Of underdeveloped female relationships, oversexualized characterization which popularized the term ‘male gaze’, works not passing what has been called the ‘Bechdel test’, female characters never engaging in a conversation with one another that is not centered around men. One need only log onto the subreddit, r/menwritingwomen, or Google male gaze, to find this stark disparity. Therefore, it is work asking, I believe, how a man who lived over five hundred years ago was able to depict female relationships, the fortitude of women, and their struggles, with such female intuition? 

 The identity of the most famous dramatist in history increasingly appears to be not unlike a holy grail, a fountain of youth: we chase it obsessively, hoping to bask in the glory of its discovery, attain eternal youth, to see the true face of our god. How has so little evidence persisted of one of the most widely read literary figures ever? Was this intentional, or a frustrating coincidence that may never be rectified? I’ll close with the words of, again, Elizabeth Winkler: “Shakespeare is, it would seem, a miracle that must be accepted on faith…Shakespeare’s godlike status owes something to this mystery, this perfect unknowability. For if he knows us only as God knows us, we know him about as well as we know God.”²² 

Notes

1. Austen, Jane. 1814. “Mansfield Park.” Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/141/pg141-images.html.

2. Spencer, Terrence John B., and John R. Brown. 2024. “William Shakespeare | Plays, Poems, Biography, Quotes, & Facts.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare.

3. Winkler, Elizabeth. 2023. Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster: xiv.

4. Spencer, Terrence John B., and John R. Brown. 2024. “William Shakespeare | Plays, Poems, Biography, Quotes, & Facts.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare.

5. Trevor, Hugh. 1962. “What's in a Name?” Shakespeare Authorship. https://shakespeareauthorship.com/sf/whats.html.

6. Mulryne, J. R., and Takashi Kozuka, eds. 2016. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography. Burlington, VT: Taylor & Francis Group: 24.

7. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 6-7.

8. Spencer, Terrence John B., and John R. Brown. 2024. “William Shakespeare | Plays, Poems, Biography, Quotes, & Facts.” Britannica. 

9. Astington, John H. 2012. Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time: The Art of Stage Playing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511761379: 

10. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time, 40.

11. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time, 45.

12. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time, 46.

13. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 33.

14. Dictionary of National Biography. United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1899: 246.

15. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 187-188.

16. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 189.

17. Looney, John T. 1920. "Shakespeare" Identified. London: Cecil Palmer: 158.

18. Blumenfeld, Samuel. n.d. “Marlowe as Shakespeare — Shakespearean Authorship Trust.” Shakespearean Authorship Trust. https://shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org/marlowe.

19. Lovelace, Richard. 1959. “Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace Esq.” Oxford Text Archive. https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12024/A49294/A49294.html?sequence=5&isAllowed=y: 85.

20. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 13.

21. Rylance, Mark. 2019. “Mark Rylance: Keep Questioning Shakespeare’s Identity.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/mark-rylance-keep-questioning-shakespeares-identity/590395/.

22. Winkler, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, 8.