Whenever I tell people outside of my discipline that my PhD is in Renaissance drama, I’m typically asked one of two questions: the harmless “have you read all of Shakespeare’s plays?” or the irksome “did Shakespeare actually write his plays?”
There’s a simple one-word answer to both of these questions—the former is no and the latter is yes—but the conversation rarely stops there. While the first question usually leads to a friendly chat about which plays we’ve each read (I’ve still got a few of the comedies to read!), the second has me bracing for a heated debate. In some instances the person is simply asking because they’ve heard in passing that Shakespeare might not have been the real author of the plays published under his name, but in most cases they’re already a firm believer in the conspiracy theory.
Delia Bacon, ready to tell you what she thinks about Shakespeare, from a daguerreotype taken in 1853
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Known as anti-Stratfordians, these people believe that the William Shakespeare who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 couldn’t possibly be the writer of the plays credited to his name. After all, how could someone with no record of even attending school possibly write such sophisticated plays filled with Latin, French, philosophy, and politics? How could someone who never left England write stories set in France, Italy, and Denmark? In the words of Delia Bacon, one of the earliest anti-Stratfordians, Shakespeare was merely a “stupid, illiterate, third-rate play actor.”1
But what Shakespeare deniers don’t agree on is who did write the plays. Many people who question Shakespeare’s authorship think that his works—which are often considered the peak of English literature—must have been written by someone well-educated and/or well-traveled. A few of the most popular candidates perfectly match that description, including Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Neville, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. But there are also other (usually less touted) suggestions who don’t fit that bill, including Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway.
Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead?, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Countless words have been written arguing the case for these various candidates and numerous high-profile non-academics have thrown their weight behind some of the suggestions. Mark Twain favored Francis Bacon, while Keanu Reeves is an Earl of Oxford supporter.2 But ask any early modern academic about the authorship question and you’ll almost always get the same answer: the evidence simply doesn’t support anyone but William Shakespeare as the writer of the plays.
The dynamic at play here—of experts in a subject being in agreement but conspiracy theorists rejecting that conclusion in favor of their own logic—can be seen across many conspiracy theories, from the idea that the 1969 moon landing was faked to the theory that the Earth is flat.
So how should academics respond when someone brings up a conspiracy theory about their specialization? Astronaut Buzz Aldrin eventually got so fed up of being harassed and accused of lying about walking on the moon that he ended up punching a theorist. I’ve never been pushed to the point of physical violence, but I do understand his annoyance and frustration.
If someone asks me about the Shakespeare authorship question in good faith (i.e. they’re just curious), I’m willing to walk them through why the main points of the conspiracy theory either ignore or misunderstand how society and playwriting worked during the Renaissance.
For instance, it’s true that there’s no record of Shakespeare having attended Stratford’s grammar school, but that’s because there’s no record of anyone attending the school at that time due to all of the documents having been lost.3 Such gaps in documentation aren’t uncommon for the Renaissance—hundreds of plays from the period, including a few of Shakespeare’s, have also been lost to time.4 Many conspiracy theories thrive on such gaps, but absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Although we can’t say for certain that Shakespeare went to grammar school, given that he could attend for free thanks to his dad being on the town council, it’s highly likely that he did.
Pandosto, the triumph of time, by Robert Greene, 1588, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And the idea that whoever wrote the plays must have traveled to the countries featured in them is equally misguided. This notion assumes that the playwright was writing purely from personal experience, but all of Shakespeare’s plays—along with the vast majority of Renaissance plays—were written using sources.5 The plays even contain geographical errors that a person who had visited the country would never make. For instance, in The Winter’s Tale, Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) has a coastline despite actually being landlocked. This mistake also appears in one of Shakespeare’s sources: Robert Greene’s Pandosto.6
These two arguments illustrate a few of the broader tendencies that are common with conspiratorial thinking when it comes to any historical subject. People sometimes have preconceived and completely incorrect assumptions about the past that underpin their beliefs and subsequent arguments. This includes thinking that a lack of primary sources is a sign of conspiracy (rather than an inevitable part of the historical record) and that knowledge in the past could only be accessed in limited ways by very specific people. In the case of Shakespeare, his current reputation as one of the world’s best writers sometimes leads to people holding him to an incredibly high standard. But just as is the case today, a university education, traveling, and holding certain occupations—be that political, legal, or otherwise—weren’t the only ways to gain access to knowledge (books and collaborators were readily available to Renaissance playwrights!). These preconceptions are easy for experts to point out as incorrect, but they’re often deeply held and therefore hard to dispel.
I tend to be less charitable with my time and knowledge when the person asking me about Shakespeare’s authorship is doing so in bad faith. Typically, these people have already been convinced of the conspiracy theory and are just looking for a fight. Such anti-Stratfordians are usually easy to spot because their arguments tend to go beyond questioning and misunderstanding and towards conjecture and cryptic readings of the plays.
For instance, one theory has it that the Earl of Oxford hid details of his alleged secret relationship with Queen Elizabeth I and their resulting love child—apparently Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton—in Shakespeare’s works.7 Another theory, put forward by Isaac Platt, a biographer of Walt Whitman, argues that the Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus, which appears in Love’s Labour’s Lost, is an anagram of “Hi ludi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati,” which translates to “These plays, produced by Francis Bacon, guarded for themselves.”8
Composite image created by Fr Charles Sidney de Vere Beauclerk SJ, merging portraits claimed to depict Edward de Vere and William Shakespeare, from The Story of Edward de Vere as William Shakespeare by Percy Allen, 1932, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The ridiculousness of these claims is surely self-evident. I prefer to not even dignify such outlandish theories with a response that dives into details, partly because I don’t think it’s worth elevating them to the level of serious debate, but also because factual evidence rarely changes the minds of diehard conspiracy theorists.
But one tactic that can be useful here is questioning who is orchestrating the conspiracy and why. In many conspiracy theories, the elite—a term often used to refer to the government, intelligence agencies, various secret societies, and the wealthy—are pinned as the masterminds behind nefarious plots. But if you just ask why, the theory tends to fall apart under the weight of its own convoluted absurdity. For instance, if the British royal family and M16 did conspire to assassinate Princess Diana, why would their plan rely so heavily on chance? Getting Diana’s driver drunk wouldn’t necessarily result in a car crash and even if it did there’s no guarantee that she would be killed.
In the case of the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy, if someone was using William Shakespeare’s name as a front, why? Some theorists claim that it was socially stigmatized for aristocrats to publish commercial plays, but there’s no evidence that such a stigma of print existed.9 Even if that was the reason, why would the author then cryptically hide details of their true identity in the plays? And whoever the author was, they’ve now been dead for four centuries, so who would still be covering it up and for what reason?
As well as questioning who would be behind a cover-up and why they would ever craft such a nonsensical plan, I think it can also be useful to put a conspiracy theory into its wider historical context by explaining how and why it took off in the first place.
During the Renaissance, Shakespeare was neither lauded above his peers nor doubted by his contemporaries. Although the question of his authorship is now one of the most pervasive literary conspiracy theories around, it didn’t develop until after he was singled out as a literary genius (whether rightly or wrongly is a matter of opinion!). Bardolatry—the excessive idolization of Shakespeare—really took off during the Victorian period and by the middle of the 19th century he was subject to the pushback that sometimes comes with extreme popularity and adoration.10 In Shakespeare’s case, that pushback took the form of people doubting how someone of his background (a glovemaker’s son who was grammar school educated at best) could have risen to such literary heights. Essentially, this conspiracy theory is rooted in classism.
A Sculptor’s Workshop, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1617 by Henry Wallis, 1857, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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But I think there are a variety of other interwoven reasons for why this theory has endured for so many years. To start with, Shakespeare is one of the best-known literary figures in the world thanks to his plays having been a staple of the high school curriculum in numerous countries for decades. People these days sometimes think that it’s strange or even suspicious that a person of such world-renowned stature didn’t leave much of a paper trail. But not only are many texts from the Renaissance now lost to time, Shakespeare also wasn’t put on a pedestal during his lifetime, so there was no reason for him or his contemporaries to think it important to preserve draft play manuscripts and personal letters. This combination of being well-known and lauded but also enigmatic makes Shakespeare a ripe subject for conspiratorial thinking.
And then there’s the fact that questioning whether Shakespeare really was Shakespeare isn’t all that damaging as far as conspiracy theories go. Spreading conspiracies about recent tragedies—as Alex Jones did in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting—is deeply offensive and upsetting to victims and their loved ones. In comparison, the Shakespeare authorship question is harmless and able to spread without causing personal distress or being hampered by legal retaliation.
Orville Ward Owen’s “cipher wheel”, which he used to allegedly decipher the cryptograms in Shakespeare’s works and prove that Bacon was the true author. From Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story by Orville Ward Owen, 1894, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There are still a few different elements that have to come together for someone to fall down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole though (and the so-called evidence of the theory isn’t really part of it!). Our brains love to crack codes and solve puzzles, which is a part of what makes conspiracy theories so compelling, but of course not everyone who enjoys reading murder mysteries or completing Sudoku also believes that aliens built the pyramids or that the Titanic was deliberately sunk. For someone to make that leap, they also usually need to distrust authority—be that the government, academia, or the news. By going against what is widely believed/taught/reported, conspiracy theorists gain a sense of agency and control—which can be reassuring during uncertain times—and they get to feel like independent critical thinkers.
Of course, none of this is to say that academics and experts are always correct or shouldn’t be questioned, but it can be exhausting to be drawn into the same debates over and over again by people who either don’t understand the basics of the subject or are deliberately ignoring facts. Brandolini’s law—that being “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it”—is certainly true in my experience.
Barring the unlikely event that real evidence comes to light that proves that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else, I’m going to continue educating the curious questioners and ignoring the strident deniers.
- Delia Bacon, “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. 7 (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 19.
- Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909); Keanu Reeves Plays With Puppies While Answering Fan Questions,” posted May 17, 2019, by Buzzfeed Celeb, YouTube, 5 min., 26 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOqUiXhECos&t=59.
- Jennifer Reid, host, Let’s Talk Shakespeare, episode 1, “Was Shakespeare Educated?,” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, November 8, 2015, 21 min., 53 sec., https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/was-shakespeare-educated/.
- Heidi Craig, “Minding the Gaps of Early Modern Drama,” Folger Shakespeare Library, October 4, 2018.
- List of sources for Shakespeare’s works, Folgerpedia, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/List_of_sources_for_Shakespeare%27s_works.
- Robert Greene, Pandosto the triumph of time (London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Cadman, 1588).
- Diana Price, “Rough Winds Do Shake: A Fresh Look at the Tudor Rose Theory,” The Elizabethan Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (1996): 4-23, https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/wp-content/uploads/ER1996-v4-2B-Price_Tudor-Rose-Theory.pdf.
- Isaac Hull Platt, Are the Shakespeare plays signed by Francis Bacon? (Philadelphia: The Conservator, 1897), 7.
- Steven W. May, “Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical ‘Stigma of Print’,” Renaissance Papers (1980): 11-18, https://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/stigma.html.
- Jennifer Reid, host, Let’s Talk Shakespeare, episode 10, “How Did Shakespeare Get So Popular?,” Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, January 10, 2016, 28 min., 28 sec., https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/how-did-shakespeare-get-so-popular/.
