Why not Shakespeare?


Review by Brian Vickers

Peter Dawkins: THE SHAKESPEARE ENIGMA, 477pp.

Alex Jack, editor: HAMLET, by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Volume One: 159pp. Volume Two: 479pp.

Richard Malim, editor: GREAT OXFORD. Essays on the life and works of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, 362pp.

Scott McCrea: THE CASE FOR SHAKESPEARE. The end of the authorship question, 281pp.


Those who seek to deny Shakespeare’s authorship of over thirty plays, two narrative poems and a collection of sonnets are driven to strange expedients. Consider the following stories:

(1) Francis Bacon, despite his busy life as a barrister, involved in both state and private legal cases, who kept up his connections with Gray’s Inn as a law lecturer, an MP and chairman of several committees, a rising government legal officer (Solicitor-General 1607, Attorney General 1613), and a scholar whose avowed ambition was to reform science so that it could benefit mankind – despite all this, had enough time to write the works published under Shakespeare’s name, with the connivance of the actor from Stratford. Either they managed to deceive all the theatre people with whom Shakespeare worked on a daily basis – his fellow actors; those who shared with him the management of both the theatre company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until 1603, thereafter the King’s Men) and their playhouse (the Theatre until 1599, thereafter the Globe); and the playwrights (Peele, Middleton, Wilkins, Fletcher) with whom he co-authored at least six plays, a process involving much viva voce discussion of plotting – or else all these people were in on the secret. Bacon concealed his authorship during his and Shakespeare’s lifetime, but thoughtfully left some encoded messages in the First Folio, which were not deciphered until 1856. Bacon was also the President or Imperator of the Rosicrucians, an adept of the Kabbalah, and the leading English freemason.

(2) Although Christopher Marlowe was to all appearances killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford on May 30, 1593, his death being certified at an inquest held on June 1 and presided over by the Queen’s coroner, at which sixteen local jurors acquitted the assailant, Ingram Frazer, on the grounds of self-defence, this was all an elaborate scam arranged by Thomas Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster and Marlowe’s homosexual lover. The body buried in an unmarked grave in St Nicholas’s Churchyard on June 1 was in fact that of John Penry, the
Separatist leader, who had just been executed. With the help of the Muscovy Company, Marlowe was spirited away to Scotland, or Russia, or most likely Italy, from whence he entered into “the Shakespeare Compact”, an arrangement under which his works appeared under that actor’s name, regularly supplying the company with new plays, including co-authored ones, subject to the difficulties previously mentioned. The true story, wasnot revealed until 1955, persuaded those who erected a plaque to Marlowe in Westminster Abbey to give his death date as “1593?” and 1955.

These stories both come from books under review here, The Shakespeare Enigma, by Peter Dawkins, and Alex Jack’s edition of Hamlet: By Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Both purport to be works of scholarship. As Dawkins describes the “treasure trail” he has been following for “the best part of thirty years”: it has been “a rigorous journey. It demands rigour. It demands attention to detail. It demands accuracy, as far as that is humanly possible. It demands open-mindedness and humility as well as a willingness to question everything . . .”. But the history of “the Baconian heresy” since its appearance in 1856 has been strikingly lacking in these qualities. For generation after generation its proponents have cloned themselves on their predecessors’ work, ignoring all counter-evidence. Regularly refuted, they rise again from the dead.

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Posted: Fri - September 2, 2005 at 10:39 AM          

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