Quotations Relevant to the Authorship Question

by Morse Johnson

SOS Newsletter, Vol. 26-B, No. 3, pp. 1-11, Summer, 1990

George Sampson:

How did (the Stratford-on-Avon man) reach the wit, the humor and the assured mastery of verse exhibited in a delightful early comedy like Love's Labour's Lost? These are some of the questions to which we (Stratfordians) desire an answer, but answer there is none.

George Sampson:

... (anti-Stratfordians are) a succession of cranks representing the extreme of ignorant credulity and morbid ingenuity.

Preface

Tradition has attributed the works of William Shakespeare or Shakespeare—as the name was consistently spelled on all the published works—to Will. Shakspere, as his name was spelled in the Burial Registry (1616), who was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564. A preponderant majority of Shakespearean scholars and buffs have endorsed that attribution and are identified as Stratfordians, and a minority of Shakespearean scholars and buffs have rejected it and are identified as anti-Stratfordians. This long-time and world-wide controversy has been labeled the Shakespeare authorship question.

(STRATFORDIANS quoted or referred to herein are identified by capitalizing their names; the anti-Stratfordians are not capitalized. References to the Stratford man's documented life, experiences and learning are indicated by the name, Will. Shakspere, and deductions based on what the works reveal about the life, experiences and learning of their author are indicated by the name, Shakespeare.)

The purpose of this article is to illustrate that by their own deductions, depictions and perplexities and their recognition of irrefutable facts, Stratfordians have demonstrated that Will. Shakspere could not have been the author of the works of Shakespeare.

Prior to Will. Shakspere's assumed departure from Stratford to London around 1587-88, his birth, marriage and the birth of his three children are the only extant recorded facts about him. Since there are no facts proving that Will. Shakspere attended any school, Stratfordians have been compelled to rely on hearsay not reported until the early 18th century by Nicholas Rowe:

... tho' (Will. Shakspere) was the eldest son, (his father) gave him no better education than his own employment (a butcher and/or draper). (His father) had bred him `tis true, for some time at (the Stratford) Free-School where `tis probable he acquired the little Latin he was master of: but ... the want of his assistance at home, forc'd his father to withdraw him from thence ... (Emphasis added.)

* Ed. note: The roster of that school's pupils and its curriculum during the 1570s have never been located. It is, however, possible that Will. Shakspere studied Latin during his assumed foreshortened attendance there.

Stratfordians recognize that the only extant handwritings of Will. Shakspere are six shakily written, with some blots and illegible letters and variably spelled, signatures on four documents, in none of which is the last name spelled "Shakespeare" or has any association with literary interests, and were only inscribed in the last four years of his life.

JAMES O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPS:

Removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighborhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments. He could not, at all events, under the circumstances in which he had then so long been placed, have had the opportunity for acquiring a refined style of composition.

Sir G. G. Greenwood reported that:

... exception has been taken to (the above) phrase, `bookless neighborhood' ... It is ... obvious that all Mr. Phillips meant was that the possession of books among the good people of (Stratford) was a very exceptional distinction indeed; and this is fully borne out by the fact that so many townsmen, aldermen and burgesses included, are shown to have been illiterate (and) the great majority of the good people of Stratford, in Shakspere's time were altogether illiterate ...

RICHARD GRAND WHITE:

It is only in London that those plays could have been written. London had but just before Shakespeare's day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as well as acknowledged throughout England. As long as two hundred years after that time the county of each Member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue ... (Shakspere's) language would have been a dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern English ears.

EDWARD GARNETT and EDMUND GOSSE:

Nothing is more remarkable in (Shakespeare's) earliest productions than their perfect polish and urbanity. The principal characters in Love's Labours Lost are princes and nobles, true to the models he might have found in contemporary society. The young patricians in The Two Gentlemen of Verona have in every respect the ideas and manners of their class. The creator of such personages must have been in better company and enjoyed a wider outlook upon society than can easily be believed attainable by an actor or a resident in a single city ... that knowledge of good society (and) easy and confident attitude towards mankind which appears in Shakespeare's plays from the first and which ... are so unlike what might have been expected from a Stratford rustic or London actor. (Emphasis added.)

JOSEPH QUINCY ADAMS:

... if we are forced to think of (Will. Shakspere) as early snatched from school, working ail day in a butcher shop, growing up in a home devoid of books and of literary atmosphere ... we find it hard to understand how he suddenly blossomed out as one of England's greatest men of letters with every mark of literary culture.

J. DOVER WILSON:

It is also clear that, if the author of Merry Wives knew his middle class, the author of Love's Labour's Lost had made himself equally familiar with the life, manner and conversation of ladies and gentlemen of the land. To credit that amazing piece of virtuosity to a butcher boy who left school at 13 or even to one whose education was nothing more than what a grammar school and residence in a little provincial borough could provide is to invite one either to believe in miracles or to disbelieve in the man of Stratford.

Morse Johnson: Stratfordians recognize that from the time Will. Shakspere is assumed to have arrived in London, the first recorded mention in London of the name Shakespeare (however spelled)—then only as a poet—was in 1593, as an actor not until 1595, and as a playwright not until 1598.

SAMUEL SCHOENBAUM:

... By 1592 (Will. Shakspere) had made his mark as a playwright. Authoritative Stratfordians have claimed that during the period 1587-88 to 1595 Will. Shakspere was a prominent and busy actor which required frequent participation in rehearsals and performances during the daytime, was familiar with the administrative and artistic responsibilities for many of the operations of an acting company, and mastered the techniques and lore of dramaturgy and fraternized with other playwrights, poets, actors and aristocrats.

Authoritative Stratfordians have also claimed that during the same 158788 to 1595 period he, with a quill, and if during nighttime only by candlelight, wrote at least as many as 10 of the plays according to almost all Stratfordians, the elegant and lengthy poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and at least 50 technically demanding and polished sonnets.

ALLARDYCE NICOLL:

Sometimes, we may suppose, the peculiar parallels between the plays and works by others may be due to coincidence, to the intermediary writings now lost or to that of conversations with friends but even when allowance has been made for all such possibilities, enough remains to warrant the assumption that Shakespeare was easily familiar with Latin, French and Italian, that he read widely in these as in English, and that he frequently took the trouble to examine several renderings of a story before he himself sat down to write ... we are coming more and more to believe that he took far greater pains with his preparatory planning than had hitherto been supposed. Quite clearly, he read much more than Holinshed's Chronicles when he was writing the history plays.

Many Stratfordians [including the following] have also recognized that Shakespeare's works attest that their author had been an omnivorous reader: A.L. ROWSE; KENNETH MUIR; WILLIAM ALLEN NEILSON AND ASHLEY-HORACE THORNDIKE; JOSEPPH SATIN; T.W. BALDWIN; PAUL N. SIEGAL; AND VIVIAN THOMAS. The following is a list of authors (last names only) of the books, some of which by that time had not been translated. Shakespeare had read at least in part, or, in some instances, had extensive conversations about, as deduced from the plays, sonnets and poems by, among others:

Aeschylus, Aesop, Africanus, Alexandrinus, "Anonymous", Appian, Ariosto, Aristophanes, Augustine, Bandello, Boccaccio, Bright, (Arthur) Brooke, Buchanan, Caesar, Camerarius, Cardano, Castiglione, Catullus, Gaxton, Chaucer, Cicero, Cinthio, Daniel, Dante, De Belleforest, de Montemayor, duBartas, Eden, Elyot, Erasmus, Euripides, Fabyan, Fiorentino, Forman, Foxe, Froissart, Fullbecke, Galen, Garnier, Gascoigne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gower, Grafton, (Saxo) Grammaticus, Guazzo, Hakluyt, Hall, Harsnett, Henryson, Hesoid, Hippocrates, Holinshed, Homer, Horace, Howard, Josephus, Juvenal, Legge, Leslie, Livy, Lucian, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Mantua, Marianus, Martial, Mexla, Montaigne, More, Ovid, Painter, Palingenius, Paracelsus, Pasqualizo, Petrarch, Plautus, Pliny, Plowden, Plutarch, Pythagoras, Quintilian, Rabelais, Rawley, Riche, Ronsard, Sallust, Scot, Seneca, Sidney, Silvayn, Sophocles, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Straporola, Stow, Suetonius, Tacitus, Tasso, Terence, Thomas, Twyne, (Polydore) Vergil, (Maro) Virgil, Warner, Wright, Xenophon and five Arthurian romances.

T.W. BALDWIN:

It is easy enough to find books once owned by Ben Jonson. Had Will. Shakspere purchased books as ardently as he did ... real property, we should certainly have more trace of his activities in that way ... we have no absolutely conclusive external proof that he ever owned a book of any kind.

WILLIAM ALLEN NEILSON and ASHLEY HORACE THORNDIKE:

... only a fraction of what any author reads leaves a mark that can be identified in what he writes. Since there were no public libraries in London at that time, where and how did Will. Shakspere find and read those books, save for Latin classics which, if he attended that Stratford Free-School, he may have been exposed to? As one of many examples, the book, which was undoubtedly the creative springboard for The Merchant of Venice, certainly could only have been found, if at all, in a private library in London. About that book, JOSEPH SATIN wrote:

The most productive source of this play is a novella by Giovanni Fiorentino ... which appeared in a collection of his entitled Il Pecorone in 1378. Il Pecorone consists of fifty novellas divided into `Days', groups of ten stories like its model the Decameron ... `The Merchant of Venice' story is the first story of the fourthe day, and no translation of it existed in Shakespeare's day. We may assume that Shakespeare read it in the original (Italian) ...

Charlton Ogburn:

... Shakespeare's England: An Account of the Life & Manners of His Age. Published in 1916 under an ode to Shakespeare by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, the work covers its subject in thirty chapters, each of which takes up a different feature of the Elizabethan Age with particular reference to the treatment it receives in Shakespeare. The two-score contributors are all (Stratfordians) ...

... (it) devotes 150 pages to "Sports and Pastimes" in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Hunting, falconry, coursing with greyhounds, archery, fencing and dueling, horsemanship, dancing, and games are treated in detail and illumined with quotations from Shakespeare that show his precise and comprehensive knowledge of the subject. A portrait of the dramatist is limned as a man of leisure able to have indulged freely in the nobility's active diversions and make himself proficient in them. If he was ever guilty of a slip in treating them he has not been caught in it. Concluding the section on hunting, the Honorable J.W. Fortescue comments that probably `in all ages good sportsmen, like good men, are rarer than bad; but good there must have been in all times, and among the best of the sixteenth century we must certainly rank William Shakespeare.'

PAUL M. SIEGAL:

From the very beginning of his history plays Shakespeare conceived of history as being an organic process—germinating, growing, decaying, renewing itself ... Titus Andronicus, written very early in (Will. Shakspere's) career and without a source, `seems to be', as T. J. B. Spencer says, `a quintessence of impressions derived from an eager reading of Roman history rather than a real effort at verisimilitude,' as contrasted with `the care and authenticity' of the later Roman plays. The political institutions in it are derived from many periods in Roman history (Emphasis added).

VIVIAN THOMAS:

Clearly, Titus Andronicus stands apart from the three plays categorized as Roman. This early play lacks the rich historical source material which Shakespeare was able to draw on for his mature Roman plays, but it merits more than passing consideration because it reflects so clearly Shakespeare's early awareness of the potency of Roman insights into Shakespeare's exploration of the relationship between the conflicting values of warfare and civilized living (Emphasis added).

T.J.B. SPENCER:

Ancient, and in particular Roman, history was explored as the material of political lessons, because it was one of the few bodies of consistent and continuous historical material available ... In writing his Roman plays Shakespeare was touching upon the gravest and most exciting, as well as the most pedantic, of Renaissance studies of European scholarship ... in spite of literary admiration for Cicero, the Romans in the imagination of the sixteenth century were Suetonian and Tacitan rather than Plutarchan ... it required a considerable intellectual feat to substitute the Plutarchan vision of Rome (mostly republican) for the customary line of the Imperial Caesars. Montaigne and Shakespeare were capable of that feat. Not many others were.

VIVIAN THOMAS:

The aim of this book is to show how a clear understanding of Shakespeare's exploration and articulation of Roman values provides an invaluable means of gaining fresh critical insights into the Roman plays. The most striking feature of these plays is that, more than any other group of plays or any individual play, they create an intense sense of a social universe—not just a sense of place but an awareness of the values, attitudes, aspirations, and idiosyncrasies of the different Romes which are portrayed in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Shakespeare gives a palpable sense of the Roman world in diverse ways: the physical landmarks of Rome, such as the Tiber and the Capitol, are mentioned with great frequency; there are numerous references to Roman manners and customs—the Feast of Lupercal in the opening scenes of Julius Caesar for example; political and religious institutions and officials are ever present, such as tribunes, aediles, patricians, augurers, flamens (priests) or lictors (ushers); the mythology of the pantheon and references to the gods pervade the plays; and Roman history, including most vitally its Trojan origins, is focused in the minds of the major participants. Yet, when all this is recognized, the most important reason for feeling such an intense awareness of the peculiar quality of these societies is the articulation of Roman values. These values are not platitudinous precepts but deeply held convictions about the relative worth of different kinds of human actions. Consequently, it is possible to identify those qualities which are most esteemed in these Roman worlds.