Our Scene is London Book

There was an authorship question?

Apparently so. In the new book section of the library a month or so ago, I found a book-length biography dedicated to the hypothesis that someone who died before the Tempest was performed wrote the entirety of William Shakespeare's works. Thinking "This is some of the most bizarre nonsense I have seen in while" I picked it up. The jacket provided a list of people, including Orson Welles & Mark Twain who disputed the idea of William Shakespeare as author of the works attributed to him. Not having the desire to look deeply into an argumentum ad numerum at that moment, I put the book down.

An offhand comment from a friend of mine regarding the paucity of material -- outside of the plays & poems -- surrounding Shakespeare brought the idea back to mind. In the Shakespeare section, I found Scott McCrea's well-reasoned explanation of this taradiddle. The only reason I am not giving a 5-star review to this book is that the nature of the subject matter, a weight of evidence presented to counter several arguments, tends not to lend itself to enjoyable reading.

Basically, the tale McCrea tells is that there was a myth created around William Shakespeare after his death. Most interesting, for the study of literacy, was an anonymous Essay against too much reading. This was a pamphlet that argued "Instead of Reading he stuck close to Writing and Study without Book. How do you think reading could have assisted him in such great Thoughts?" McCrea argues that although Shakespeare's sources, for example Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, are easily discernable, this myth of a glover's son having been 'born great' became quite popular. A little more than two centuries later, the idea that William Shakespeare did not rightly 'achieve greatness' brought some people to seek another individual or group to 'have greatness thrust upon them'.

As McCrea goes through the candidates, a reader may learn much about the milieu Shakespeare lived in and themes that persist throughout the plays, i.e. bear-baiting; the Globe was located next to a ring where this was practiced. Whichever side of the Stratfordian debate you straddle on, you may find a fine finale here.