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 Who
was Shakespeare? The answer to this old
question depends on when his works were written. And I think there is vivid
evidence, right under the noses of the academic scholars, that William
Shakspere of Stratford was too young to have written them.
The first two published
works of “William Shakespeare” weren’t plays but two
long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis in 1593 and
The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. Both were immediately
recognized as great poems; both were also very popular, going through more
editions than almost any of the individual plays.
Contemporary praise of
Shakespeare always began by citing these two poems, not the plays. In 1598,
for example, Francis Meres wrote that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid
lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus
and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among
his private friends, &c.” After naming a dozen of the plays, Meres
added that “the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s
fine-filed phrase, if they would speak English.” Other early tributes to
Shakespeare likewise rated the two long poems above the plays, if they
mentioned the plays at all.
This is surprising,
because modern taste has ignored and, I would say, underrated them, the
only works to bear dedications by Shakespeare (to the young Earl of
Southampton). Because the poet calls Venus “the first heir of my
invention,” scholars and biographers have assumed that both poems
are among the Bard’s “early” works, written near the
beginning of his career as a dramatist.
Oddly, these poems are
the only two Shakespeare works that can be dated with any precision —
thanks to those dedications. Dating the plays is another matter, involving
deduction, guesswork, and circular reasoning — chiefly the assumption
that William of Stratford wrote them, and must have written them sometime
during his adult life, between about 1588 and 1616. If we accept this
question-begging method of dating, these works written around 1593–94
must fall near the outset of his career in the theater.
But the scholars have
gotten it all wrong. Venus and Lucrece are in
fact fully mature works, written after most of the plays.
Moreover, they all but prove that Will of Stratford couldn’t have been
the author we know as Shakespeare.
The orthodox belief in
Will’s authorship depends wholly, as I say, upon dating his works
plausibly within his adult life span — taking into account the first known
dates of performance and publication (which prove next to nothing about
when they were actually written), as well as clear stylistic developments.
And the scholars have, on the whole, done a plausible job, given their
premises. But there are serious difficulties, which they have done their best
to explain away. And as we’ll see, the two long poems present a
problem that just can’t be explained away if we posit Will’s
authorship. Put simply, was Will old enough to have written the works
attributed to him?
First there is the
problem of Hamlet, first published in a mutilated version in
1603 and in a far better one in 1604. The scholars date it around 1600,
when, they reckon, Will had reached the peak of his genius. But this leaves
them with the problem of explaining three references to a Hamlet play many
years earlier — the first in 1589, when Will may not even have arrived
in London yet. The style of Hamlet, with its superbly flexible
blank verse and discursive prose, is far too sophisticated to permit the
inference that it’s an “early” work.
Solution? The scholars
posit an older Hamlet play by somebody else. That would account for those
vexing references. The trouble with this solution is that no trace of such a
play has ever turned up. What the scholars do agree on is that Will of
Stratford didn’t write that supposed play. (I contend it never existed.)
Again,
in 1591 Edmund Spenser published a poem saluting
“our pleasant Willy,” a brilliant writer of comedy who had
“of late” retired from the theater. This was long assumed to be
Shakespeare, as the context suggests. But again, as the scholars eventually
realized, in 1591 Will would have been far too young to have made much of a
reputation as a playwright — let alone to have retired.
Solution? The scholars
have decided that Spenser’s “Willy” couldn’t have
been Shakespeare, but must have been some other Willy. But who? Nobody
else fits Spenser’s description. What the scholars do agree on is that
Spenser couldn’t have been talking about Will of Stratford. So a purely
hypothetical “Willy” joins a purely hypothetical Hamlet.
Which brings us back to
Venus and Lucrece. According to the scholars,
these poems were written around the same time as the earliest and least
distinguished Shakespeare plays, such as the Henry VI cycle and the more
farcical comedies (The Comedy of Errors, for example).
 But here another dating
problem arises, unnoticed by the scholars. Though we don’t know the
exact dates of the plays, we can approximately tell their
relative dates by their style. The relatively early plays are
marked by their very regular blank verse — very good, but palpably
inferior to the richer and far more irregular verse of the great tragedies. We
know those tragedies were written later because they show the poet in much
greater technical command of his poetic and rhetorical resources. This
isn’t an aesthetic judgment or a question of personal taste, but a
matter of his skill in his craft, as when a composer advances from simple
melody to the more difficult form of the fugue.
Some brief comparisons
may illustrate the point. Here are a few lines from the first scene of
The Comedy of Errors, usually dated around 1592:
Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more;
I am not partial to infringe our laws.
The enmity and discord which of late
Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke
To merchants our well-dealing countrymen,
Who, wanting guilders to redeem their lives,
Have seal’d his rigorous statutes with their blood,
Excludes all pity from our threat’ning looks.
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And a speech from the first scene of King John, a history play
usually dated around 1594 or even later:
Philip of France, in right and true behalf
Of thy deceased brother Geoffrey’s son,
Arthur Plantagenet, lays most lawful claim
To this fair island and the territories,
To Ireland, Poictiers, Anjou, Touraine, Maine,
Desiring thee to lay aside the sword
Which sways usurpingly these several titles
And put the same into young Arthur’s hand,
Thy nephew and right royal sovereign.
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Here are the opening
lines of Venus:
Even as the sun with purple-color’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase.
Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus
makes amain unto him,
And like a
bold-fac’d suitor ’gins to woo him.
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And the first two stanzas of
Lucrece:
From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire,
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire,
And girdle with
embracing flames the waist
Of Collatine’s
fair love, Lucrece the chaste.
Haply that name of chaste unhapp’ly set
This bateless edge on his keen appetite,
When Collatine unwisely did not let
To praise the clear unmatched red and white,
Which triumph’d in that sky of his delight,
Where mortal stars, as
bright as heaven’s beauties,
With pure aspects did
him peculiar duties.
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There is nothing very
wrong with the first two selections; but they are no more than businesslike,
colorless, legalistic, rather mechanical verse, displaying no particular wit,
imagery, virtuosity, or any other quality we’d be tempted to call
Shakespearean. As poetry, they are simply flat.
By contrast, the latter
two passages, written in difficult stanza forms and under the constraints of
complex rhyme schemes, show the poet in full command of his medium,
combining epigrammatic wit, rich alliteration, vivid colors, splendid images, a
riot of vowels, an easy freedom of meter, a wealthy vocabulary, paradox,
contrast, antithesis — all this visible in just 20 lines! Here is the same poet, but at a far riper
stage of his development. The amazingly concentrated power of expression
these two poems exhibit is fully equal to that we find in
Hamlet and Othello.
 In short, by 1593
“Shakespeare” had already discovered what the English
language was capable of. This means, for one thing, that the standard dating
of the plays is seriously amiss. The real dates of the plays are several years
— maybe a decade or so, in most cases — earlier than the
scholars believe. When the poet wrote Venus and
Lucrece, he was nearer the end than the beginning of his
literary career.
The initial reception of
these poems tends to confirm this. The poet spoke of his
“unpolished” and “untutored” lines, but this false
modesty fooled nobody. Nobody thought these were the work of a novice.
Their mastery was obvious in every line: “Bewitching like the wanton
mermaid’s song.” “A lily prison’d in a gaol of
snow.” “Till he take truce with her contending tears.”
“The pith of precedent and livelihood ... Earth’s sovereign salve
to do a goddess good.” Unpolished?
Pure shame and aw’d resistance made him
fret,
Which bred more beauty in his angry eyes,
Rain added to a river
that is rank
Perforce will force it
overflow the bank.
Still she entreats, and prettily entreats,
For to a pretty ear she tunes her tale,
Still is he sullen, still he lours and frets,
’Twixt crimson shame, and anger ashy pale,
Being red, she loves him
best; and being white,
Her best is
better’d with a more delight.
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To read these poems is
to see, in glorious abundance, what Meres meant about
“Shakespeare’s fine-filed phrase.” It’s a marvel
that generations of scholars have been able to believe that these are among
the poet’s juvenile efforts; that he could have written them at the
same time he was writing plays in blank verse so immeasurably far below the
level he would finally achieve.
Those plays, we must
conclude, were written many years before the two long poems. Which means
that Will couldn’t have written them, unless he wrote them during his
boyhood in Stratford. Which means that someone else, someone much older
than Will, must have written them — someone who, by the way, was
close to the Earl of Southampton.
That would perhaps be
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a noted poet and playwright. In 1593
Southampton nearly married his daughter.
Joseph Sobran
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