The Mystery of Shakespeare's Identity

By Jumana Farouky / London Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007

An artist's rendering of William Shakespeare reading Hamlet to his family.

Like alien autopsies and the second gunman, the belief that someone other than a glover's son from Stratford

wrote William Shakespeare's plays is a conspiracy theory that refuses to die. Doubters started questioning the

true identity of the writer in the late 19th century. Ever since then, the theory of an alternate author has flirted

with the mainstream as some scholars and researchers have tried to get the broader academic community to treat

the question as a legitimate debate, instead of the ramblings of crackpots. Now, almost 300 Shakespeare

skeptics have made a very public plea to be taken seriously.

On Sept. 10, Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, former artistic director of Shakespeare's

Globe Theatre (a working modern replica of the London theater Will co-owned and acted at), unveiled a

"Declaration of Reasonable Doubt." Created by the California-based Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, an

educational charity dedicated to raising awareness of the Shakespeare identity question, the document asks the

world of academia to accept that there is "room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare"

and to start taking the research into who is really responsible for his works seriously. Along with Jacobi and

Rylance, signatories include Charles Champlin, the former L.A. Times arts editor; Michael Delahoyde, an

English professor at Washington State University; and Robin Fox, professor of social theory at Rutgers

University in New Jersey. Some more famous names, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Orson Welles,

also lent their posthumous support in a list of people who expressed their own doubts about the Bard when they

were alive.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that, for a man who was so prolific with his pen, Shakespeare didn't leave

much evidence of his life behind. Most scholars accept that there is enough to prove that a William Shakespeare

was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, became an actor in London and retired back in Stratford until his death in

1616. But that's where the agreement ends. Stratfordians, as they are known, believe that this William

Shakespeare is the same man who wrote what would become known as the greatest body of literary works in

the history of the English language. The Anti-Stratfordians say that there is, in fact, nothing solid linking

Shakespeare with the plays, poems and sonnets attributed to him.

And so begins the game of tit-for-tat. Stratfordians note that Shakespeare's name is printed on the title pages of

many of the plays published during his lifetime. The Anti-Stratfordians point out that nobody even knows if

that's how Shakespeare spelled his name: the only surviving examples of his handwriting are six scraggly

signatures spelled several different ways. Those pro-Will say that some of Shakespeare's contemporaries

mention him in their writings; the naysayers counter that they only refer to him as an actor, never explicitly as a

playwright.

Then there's the apparent disconnect between the life that William Shakespeare lived and the ones he wrote

about. Anti-Stratfordians claim that Shakespeare's plays show a keen grasp of literature, language, court life and

foreign travel — not the kinds of things that a small-town actor without a university education would be

familiar with. As the Declaration says, "scholars know nothing about how he acquired the breadth and depth of

knowledge displayed in the works." And so doubting scholars look to well-traveled writers and aristocrats —

essayist Francis Bacon; poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe; theater patron Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl

of Oxford — as the more likely candidates.

But Shakespeare advocates dismiss this as snobbery, saying that even a basic education at the time would have

been enough for Will to write his plays. And, if you emphasize — as Stratfordians do — that most of

Shakespeare's plays were adapted from older works, what he lacked in experience he could have made up for in

imagination. "The problem is that argument presupposes that plays from the period consisted of this hidden

autobiography," says leading Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. "That's a modern image of the writer as

someone who puts his own experiences into his plays, a very romantic idea of writing. But it's just not how

plays were written back then."

As Shakespeare (or maybe Bacon or possibly De Vere) asked, "What's in a name?" The star-crossed lovers still

die, there will always be something rotten in the state of Denmark, no matter who wrote the plays. So why all

the fuss? Both sides argue that knowing the identity of the man behind Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest is

essential to understanding them. "Our interpretation of Shakespeare's works would be entirely different if we

knew who wrote them," says Bill Rubinstein, history professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and an

academic adviser for the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition. "If he was heavily involved in politics, for

example, every line in every play would have a different motivation."

The Coalition's "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" doesn't claim to know who wrote Shakespeare's plays, but it

asks that the question "should, henceforth, be regarded in academia as a legitimate issue for research and

publication." Hoping to start the trend is William Leahy, head of English at Brunel University who, later this

month, will teach the first ever M.A. course dedicated to the authorship question. "Shakespeare studies already

look at his work from so many angles — feminist, post-colonialist, historical," he says. "And I think it's

important that the authorship question is one of them." This could be much ado about nothing. Or maybe, one

day, the truth will out.

Four hundred years after the premiere of Hamlet, the authorship question remains a mystery.

by Al Austin

'GBH April 1989

"Isn't it odd, when you think of it," Mark Twain wrote, "that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors - a list containing 500 names, shall we say - and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars about every one of them. Every one of them except one - the most famous, the most renowned - by far the most illustrious of them all - Shakespeare!" Twain went on to suggest that it was because Shakespeare "hadn't any history to record!"

Biographies of William Shakespeare do exist - hundreds and hundreds of them. But Twain complained that they are composed of guesswork.

Precious little is known for certain about Shakespeare. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, got married when he was 18, had three children, left his family and went off to London. His name was listed among actors who performed twice for the queen, and he is listed among the shareholders in the Globe Theatre. He returned to Stratford in his 40s, bought a big house, dealt in real estate and grain for a while and died in 1616. His will mentioned no plays or poems or books. Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist: six signatures, each spelled differently. When he died, nobody seems to have noticed.

How did this small-town boy with little or no education learn so much about law and history and Italy and Latin and Greek and royalty and all the other knowledge that filled Shakespeare's plays? Well, say the biographers and historians, by keeping his eyes and ears open and being a genius. Samuel Schoenbaum of Washington, DC, America's foremost Shakespeare biographer, says, "There are certain things that defy rational explanation. There is something incomprehensible about genius. Shakespeare was superhuman."

Answers like that didn't satisfy Twain - or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sigmund Freud, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman or Henry James. All found something fishy about the man from Stratford.

And doubts continue. New doubters are born every day. This past November, one of England's most famous politicians and classical scholars, Enoch Powell, stood contemplating the Shakespeare monument in the Stratford church. "Isn't it disgusting? It's a lie. I can't look at it."

Since the middle of the last century, non believers in the Stratford man have been putting up other names as the "real" author, men (and a woman or two) who might, for a variety of reasons, have used "William Shakespeare" as a pen name: Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe.

But most of these challengers have fallen by the wayside, and with each failure, the snickering from the Stratford stands has grown louder.

Then, early in this century, an English schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney went looking for Shakespeare the way a detective might - with a list of characteristics the true author would need to have had, historical fingerprints. After years of searching through old documents, Looney came up with this man: Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who lived from 1550 to 1604.

History had all but ignored de Vere. And yet, he was the highest-ranking earl in the kingdom - and brilliant, earning two master's degrees before he was seventeen years old. And he seems to have cut a wide swath through England, France and Italy four centuries ago, was an intimate of Queen Elizabeth I, sailed off in his own ship to help battle the Spanish Armada, got himself captured by pirates, killed a man and engaged in a scandalous extramarital affair.

Looney found several poems written by de Vere under his own name when he was in his early 20s, poems Looney thought were similar to some of those attributed to Shakespeare plays. For example, de Vere's guardian, Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in England, seemed to be satirized as Polonious in Hamlet.

De Vere seemed to quit writing when still a young man. But Looney was sure the writing continued under the name "William Shakespeare."

Why wouldn't de Vere have put his own name to the plays? In Looney's view, it was because play-writing was beneath the dignity of nobility. Furthermore, de Vere would have been barred from using his own name because he had inside knowledge of all the court intrigues. Powerful people, like Lord Burghley, and even Queen Elizabeth, would have been embarrassed had the public known de Vere was the author and the plays were satire. So, (according to the scenario constructed by Looney and others who continued his work after he died) de Vere chose a natural pen name. Gabriel Harvey, a poet and secretary to de Vere, had, after all, saluted him in a speech before the queen as a man whose "countenance shakes a spear." Then, when de Vere's friends and relatives decided to publish his plays, long after de Vere's death, they chose as a "front man" the obscure, semiliterate, country bumpkin, William Shakespeare of Stratford, who, Powell noted, "had the added advantage of being dead."

"Preposterous!" retorted the historians and biographers and teachers of Shakespeare. De Vere could not possibly be the author (the counter-attack continued); he died before some of the plays - The Tempest, for one - were written!

Although Looney announced his discoveries 70 years ago, and his disciples have been digging up new evidence ever since, the general public has remained, for the most part, blissfully unaware. To find out about it, one had to read several books not found in most bookstores, or even in most libraries.

Then, in 1983, a successful author named Charlton Ogburn wrote an even bigger book - about 900 pages - called The Mysterious William Shakespeare, skillfully explaining hundreds of ways in which the life of de Vere and the works of Shakespeare seem to meet. Ogburn and many of his

readers are confident that the evidence contained in this book amounts to proof that Edward de Vere was William Shakespeare.

De Vere's champions have discovered that once into the fight there seems to be no way out - it becomes an obsession, a lifelong passion. Ogburn and his colleagues consider their man a heroic figure who was wronged in life and slandered through his history as a libertine spendthrift. Tears fill Ogburn's eyes as he quotes lines from Hamlet and Macbeth that he believes came straight from the soul of the tormented Earl of Oxford.

There is a passion on the other side of the argument, too. Historian A.L. Rowse's eyes also well up with tears as he stands beside the "bloody fools" who doubt his hero. "These are people who aren't qualified to hold an opinion," he seethes. The only thing wrong with the man from Stratford is that "he likes the girls too much. He was too sexy."

Rowse and his colleagues insist the evidence in favor of the orthodox view is insurmountable. The First Folio, the first collected edition of the plays, seven years after the Stratford man's death, was edited by two of his fellow actors, Herminge and Condell, men he named in his will. And "Honest Ben" Jonson, in his poem prefacing the First Folio, called the author "sweet swan of Avon." What's more, the Shakespeare monument in the Stratford church, erected about the same time, clearly implies that the man it honors was a famous writer. And throughout their lives, none of the people who took part in those tributes ever let on that they were anything about what they seemed to be.

All part of the hoax, counter the anti-Stratfordians, all cooked up to disguise the author. They contend the First Folio and the Stratford inscription provide sure clues that the people behind those things were joking.

The Stratford man's supporters note that Americans are prominent in the challenge to their man. They suggest that it stems from a peculiar sort of snobbery, that some Americans can't accept the thought of a common English schoolboy being Shakespeare.

The contest - the mystery - comes down to this: Those who believe de Vere was Shakespeare must accept an improbable hoax as part of it, a conspiracy of silence involving, among others, Queen Elizabeth herself. Those who side with the Stratford man must believe in miracles.

Shakespeare: the conspiracy theories

Who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare? Here are some of the conspiracy theories

There is so little known about the real William Shakespeare. It is hardly surprising therefore that plenty of theories about our most famous bard and his work have arisen. It was, after all, Mark Twain who said: “So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life.”

Not always as easily dismissed as Shakespeare champions would have you believe, here are the most widely known theories about the authorship of the plays.

Various authors

In 1848 the American Joseph C Hart wrote a book putting forward the argument that the plays were written by several different authors. In 1856 Delia Bacon, another American, wrote an article to support this theory and attributed the authorship to a group of people who were overseen by Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Edward de Vere

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford was also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England and a courtier poet. There is little evidence that suggests he did write them, but some believe there are references in the plays to de Vere's life and that there are a series of codes in the writing that implicate the Earl as the author. This is the theory put forward in the film Anonymous.

Sir Francis Bacon

It is also thought possible that Sir Francis Bacon, writer of New Atlantis, essayist and scientist, could have penned the plays. Again there is little evidence to suggest this, apart from similarities in the plays to his own. The theory that Bacon could have written the plays was first put forward in 1856.

Christopher Marlowe

The playwright Christopher Marlowe was writing at the same time as Shakespeare and it's likely that the two crossed paths. The theory goes that the reports of Marlowe's death in a drunken brawl on May 30 1593 were falsified to protect him from going to prison for being an atheist. Marlovians believe that Shakespeare was named as the play's author to protect the truth of what really happened to Marlowe.

William Stanley

With the initials WS, William Stanley is another strong contender for authorship of the plays. He was the 6th Earl of Derby and had his own theatre company called Derby's men. He was known to sign himself off as Will. He travelled in Europe, and through his marriage to Elizabeth de Vere, he was related to William Cecil, on whom many believe the character of Polonius in Hamlet is based.

Roger Manners

The theory that the plays were written by Roger Manners the 5th Earl of Rutland was supported by a German literary critic called Karl Bleibtreu in 1907. Manners married the daughter of the poet Philip Sydney and it is thought that the two of them together wrote the plays. However, the Earl would have been only 16 when the first of Shakespeare's works was published in 1593.

October 21, 2011

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?By STEPHEN MARCHE

“Was Shakespeare a fraud?” That’s the question the promotional machinery for Roland Emmerich’s new film, “Anonymous,” wants to usher out of the tiny enclosure of fringe academic conferences into the wider pastures of a Hollywood audience. Shakespeare is finally getting the Oliver Stone/“Da Vinci Code” treatment, with a lurid conspiratorial melodrama involving incest in royal bedchambers, a vapidly simplistic version of court intrigue, nifty costumes and historically inaccurate nonsense. First they came for the Kennedy scholars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Kennedy scholar. Then they came for Opus Dei, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic scholar. Now they have come for me.

Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

The good news is that “Anonymous” makes an extraordinarily poor case for the Oxfordian theory. I could nitpick the film all day. (In fact, I did on the day I saw it.) Mistakes are plentiful and glaring. In an early scene, Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe watches a new play, “Henry V,” which supposedly happens on the same day that Lord Essex departs for Ireland. But Marlowe died in 1593, while Essex left for Ireland in 1599. When Marlowe is killed, Ben Jonson confronts Shakespeare with the crime, saying that he “slit [his] throat,” but Christopher Marlowe was actually stabbed above the eye, according to the coroner’s report. Simple chronological or factual fudges, you might say — sure, but there’s more. The theatrical censor responds with shock to the idea that in Shakespeare’s version of “Richard III,” the king is portrayed as a hunchback. But Shakespeare did not invent that idea. In the influential “History of Richard III,” by Thomas More, written around 1516, Richard is “little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right.” And so on. In the film, Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights are all amazed that “Romeo and Juliet” is in iambic pentameter, but by the time “Romeo and Juliet” came out, drama in iambic pentameter was the standard; the first extant English play in iambic pentameter was “Gorboduc,” by Norton and Sackville, in 1561.

The craziest idea in “Anonymous,” however, is that Edward de Vere wrote a version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 40 years before its performance at court, putting the composition of the play somewhere around 1560. (That’s what the film implies, anyway: we see a scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” performed at court, and then the title “40 Years Earlier,” and then a kid who turns out to be the earl reciting Puck’s final speech.) The idea that a kid wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” isn’t even the crazy part. To put the issue in a contemporary framework, it’s one thing to say that somebody other than Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint”; it’s another to say that this clandestine Jay-Z wrote “The Blueprint” in 1961. You can’t write a hip-hop masterpiece before hip-hop has been invented. And you can’t write “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” until English secular comedy has come into existence.

Even with the best intentions, most historical dramas sacrifice history for drama, switching around events and creating composite characters. Real life lacks narrative tension; that’s why people go to the movies. Shakespeare himself never hesitated to alter the details in his own history plays if he thought the change would

improve a scene. (Although I might add that the Oscar-winning “Shakespeare in Love” managed to be pretty good with only a handful of tiny anachronisms.)

“Let me offer you a different story, a darker story,” the prologue of “Anonymous” announces, and like an Oliver Stone movie, it is fiction that wants to confuse itself with fact. It’s the best of both worlds for Emmerich: he gets to question hundreds of years of legitimate scholarship without any need to be consistent with basic chronology, because, after all, it’s just a movie.

And if you take “Anonymous” as just a movie, it may not even be that bad. I couldn’t possibly judge, because I was apoplectically stuttering about the inconsistencies, but several legitimately solid reviewers have already approved of the film. The movie is certainly overflowing with those superactorly British actors who tend to make you feel that you should be enjoying their performances even when you’re not. And I fear that the attraction of the Oxfordian theory, to people who don’t know any better, may be profound. Counternarratives have an inevitable appeal: wouldn’t it be cool if there were yetis? If the United States Army were keeping extraterrestrial remains in the Nevada desert? If aliens with powers beyond our imagination built the pyramids? If Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but actually this, like, lord who had to keep his identity secret?

You don’t have to be a truther or a birther to enjoy a conspiracy theory. We all, at one point or another, indulge fantasies that make the world seem more dangerous, more glamorous and, simultaneously, much more simple than it actually is. But then most of us grow up. Or put down the bong. Or read a book by somebody who is familiar with both proper historical methodology and the facts. The errors in “Anonymous,” I should point out, do not require great expertise to identify. Any undergraduate who has taken a course in Early Modern Drama, and paid attention, should be able to spot at least 10. (That might make a good exam, come to think of it.)

In the movies, a few mistakes don’t matter, but the liberties with facts in “Anonymous” become serious when they enter our conception of real history. In scholarship, chronology does matter. And the fatal weakness of the Oxfordian theory is chronological, a weakness that “Anonymous” never addresses: the brute fact that Edward de Vere died in 1604, while Shakespeare continued to write, several times with partners, until 1613. “Macbeth” and “The Tempest” were inspired by events posthumous to the Earl of Oxford: the gunpowder plot in 1605 and George Somers’s misadventure to Bermuda in 1609. How can anyone be inspired by events that happened after his death?

So, enough. It is impossible that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare. Notice that I am not saying improbable; it is impossible. Better scholars than I will ever be have articulated the scale of the idiocy. Jonathan Bate in a single chapter of “The Genius of Shakespeare” annihilated the Oxfordian thesis. If you want to read the definitive treatment, there is James Shapiro’s more recent “Contested Will,” although that book is nearly as absurd as its subject, because using a brain like Shapiro’s on the authorship question is like bringing an F-22 to an alley knife fight, and he kind of knows it. He ties his argument into the larger question of art and its relationship to the artist’s life, but even so the whole business is evidently a waste of his vast talent.

Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. “How could a semiliterate country boy have composed works of such power?” Their snobbery is the surest sign of their ignorance. Many of the greatest English writers emerged from the middle or lower classes. Dickens worked in a shoe-polish factory as a child. Keats was attacked for belonging to the “cockney school.” Snobbery mingles with paranoia, particularly about the supposedly nefarious intrigues of Shakespeare professors to keep the identity secret. Let me assure everybody that Shakespeare professors are absolutely incapable of operating a conspiracy of any size whatsoever. They can’t agree on who gets which parking spot. That’s what they spend most of their time intriguing about.

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting

every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

The Shakespeare controversy, which emerged in the 19th century (at that time, theorists proposed that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare), was one of the origins of the willful ignorance and insidious false balance that is now rotting away our capacity to have meaningful discussions. The wider public, which has no reason to be familiar with questions of either Renaissance chronology or climate science, assumes that if there are arguments, there must be reasons for those arguments. Along with a right-wing antielitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism have also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say.

The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.

Unfortunately, the nonquestion of Shakespeare’s identity is now being asked on billboards all over the world. It will raise debate where none should be. It will sow confusion where there is none. Somebody here is a fraud, but it isn’t Shakespeare.

To Be or Not to Be ShakespeareWhile skeptics continue to question the authorship of his plays, a new exhibition raises doubts about the authenticity of his portraits.By Doug Stewart Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe September 2006

Even if you're a regular visitor to London, it's probably never occurred to you to stop in to see William Shakespeare's original manuscripts at the British Museum or Library. That's just as well. There are no original manuscripts. Not so much as a couplet written in Shakespeare's own hand has been proven to exist. In fact, there's no hard evidence that Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon (1564-1616), revered as the greatest author in the English language, could even write a complete sentence.

Is it any wonder that controversy swirls around the authorship of the 154 sonnets and some 37 plays credited to him? Skeptics have long belittled the notion of a barely educated small-town boy who moves to London to work as an actor and is suddenly writing masterpieces of unrivaled beauty and sophistication. Henry James wrote to a friend in 1903 that he was "haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world." Other doubters have included Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud.

At heart, the Shakespeare debate is about more than missing records. It's driven by an unquenchable need to slip past Shakespeare's verses and locate the real-life artist behind them, whoever he or she might be. Little is known about Dante or Chaucer either, but somehow that isn't as nettlesome. "If Shakespeare hadn’t been metamorphosed into a god, nobody would think it was worth having an authorship controversy about him," says Jonathan Bate, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Warwick, not far from Stratford.

It's certainly curious that the creator of such vivid, recognizably human characters as Falstaff, Lear and Hamlet should himself remain as insubstantial as stage smoke. The most detailed description of the man left to us by someone who actually knew him, it seems, is a less-than-incisive sentence from his friend and rival, the playwright Ben Jonson: "He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature." That covers a lot of ground. As for Shakespeare's appearance, none of his contemporaries bothered to describe it. Tall or short? Thin or chubby? It's anyone’s guess.

An exhibition about the visual side of this quest—the desire to see William Shakespeare's face, literally—is on view through September 17 at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. "Searching for Shakespeare" brings together eight images of the Bard (six paintings, one engraving and one sculpted bust)—only one of which was likely done from life—along with rare theatrical artifacts and documents. Rendered by long-forgotten artists, each of the six painted portraits surfaced after the playwright's death, in some cases centuries later. "There's something about Shakespeare that connects with those big human issues—who we are, why we feel the way we do, love, jealousy, passion," says Tarnya Cooper, who curated the exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery, where the portraits exhibit opened last March. "In looking for a portrait of Shakespeare, we want to see traces of those passions in the portrait's face."

Unfortunately, as a flesh-and-blood human being Will Shakespeare of Stratford remains stubbornly out of reach. He was born to an apparently illiterate glove maker and his wife early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At 18, he married the pregnant Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior. By 21, he had fathered three children. He turns up in the documentary record next at age 28 in London—apparently without his family—working as an actor. He's later listed as a member of a prominent acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men,

and later, the King's Men. His name appears on the title pages of plays printed for popular consumption beginning in his mid-30s. Records show he retired around 1613 and moved back to Stratford, where he died in relative obscurity three years later at 52. And that's about it.

The sketchy paper trail from Shakespeare's life hasn't stopped the publishing industry from issuing a stream of biographies filled with phrases like "may have" and "could have." Last year in the New York Times Book Review, editor Rachel Donadio mused whether Stephen Greenblatt's 2005 biography of the Bard, Will in the World, should be on the fiction or the nonfiction bestseller list.

"There are documents from William Shakespeare's life that concern his career as an actor and theater manager and so on, but there's nothing that suggests a literary life," says Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an examination of the plays' authorship. "That's what’s so damning about the documentary record. The greatest manhunt in literary history has turned up no manuscripts, no letters, no diaries." The only definitive examples of Shakespeare's handwriting are six signatures, all on legal documents. Of course, few letters or diaries of commoners from that time have survived.

Doubters over the years have proposed some 60 candidates as the real Shakespeare, among them Sir Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth herself. The popular favorite among skeptics of the 19th and early 20th centuries was Francis Bacon, philosopher and writer. Some Baconians maintained that secret codes sprinkled throughout Shakespeare's plays pointed to the works' true author. (For example, by counting the difference in total words in two passages from Henry IV, Part 1, multiplying that by the number of hyphenations, then using the result to move up or maybe down a page somewhere else, you can begin to extract hidden messages in the plays, such as "shak'st...spur...never...writ...a...word...of...them.") Other contenders were decidedly far-fetched—a long-dead member of Henry VIII's court; a cabal of Jesuits—but the very proliferation of theories demonstrated how deeply unsatisfying many people found the Stratford story to be. In recent decades, the debate has largely settled down to a dispute between two opposing camps. On one side are the mainstream defenders of the status quo, known as Stratfordians. The anti-Stratfordian movement, meanwhile, backed by books, Web sites and conferences, has coalesced mainly around a single candidate: Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604).

Oxfordians, as they are known, dismiss Will of Stratford as a frontman for the ink-stained earl who used his name as a pseudonym. (More or less. Will's surname was often Shakspere but sometimes Shaxspere, Shagspere or Shaxberd, though variants on the spelling of names were hardly uncommon at the time.)

"Shakespeare the writer, whoever he was, was one of the most broadly educated authors in English literature," says Anderson, an avowed Oxfordian. The poet-playwright was steeped in the classics and drew on source texts that hadn’t yet been translated into English. His working vocabulary of more than 17,000 words—twice that of John Milton's according to lexicons compiled for both men in the 19th century—includes nearly 3,200 original coinages. Could such erudition, Anderson asks, really come from a man with, at most, an English grammar-school education?

There is other circumstantial evidence against "the Stratford man," as Oxfordians condescendingly call Shakespeare. Neither his wife nor his daughter Judith, it appears, were sufficiently literate to write their own names. The man himself is not known to have traveled beyond southern England, yet his plays suggest a firsthand knowledge of the Continent—Italy especially. In Stratford he was known as a businessman and property owner with some connection to the theater, not as a writer. His death attracted no notice in London, and he was buried—beneath a marker that bore no name—in Stratford.

The glimpses of Shakespeare's character afforded by the few surviving legal documents from his life, moreover, don't square with the current popular notion of a wise and lofty-minded poet. He apparently sued over debts as small as two shillings. A London acquaintance once sought his arrest, along with that of some other men, "for fear of death." And in 1598, he was accused of hoarding grain in Stratford during a famine, prompting a furious

neighbor to demand that he and his fellow profiteers be "hanged on gibbets at their own doors." Then there is his will (a centerpiece of the Yale exhibition), in which he bequeathed to his wife his "second best bed." As poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1850, "Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast."

The two portraits of Shakespeare that have been widely accepted as authentic have probably contributed to the doubts. The best-known—an image instantly recognizable today—is a posthumous engraving made by Martin Droeshout, a none-too-talented Dutch artist of the early 1600s. It appeared on the title page of the First Folio, the massive compilation of plays by Mr. William Shakespeare published by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors and longtime friends of the Bard, in 1623, seven years after his death (see "Folio, Where Art Thou?"). In Droeshout's anatomically awkward rendering, which he likely copied from a life portrait that no longer exists, the subject looks distant and slightly uncomfortable, as though he'd rather not be posing at all. The second generally accepted portrait, also posthumous, is a memorial bust in Stratford's Trinity Church, which many find even more disconcerting than Droeshout's engraving. Critic J. Dover Wilson likened the well-fed, vacant-looking man in the carving to "a self-satisfied pork-butcher." The two portraits, Wilson wrote in his 1932 biography The Essential Shakespeare, are "so obviously false images of the greatest poet of all time that the world turns from them in disgust." Wilson seems to have been overstating matters, for evidently both likenesses were acceptable to Shakespeare's own friends and family.

In the years following these two early efforts at depicting him, Shakespearean portraiture became something of a cottage industry. "New portraits turn up quite often," says curator Tarnya Cooper in London. "In the last three months, I've had three." So far, all have been deemed fabrications or portraits of someone else. Last year, a scientific examination revealed that one of the most familiar likenesses of the playwright, the Royal Shakespeare Company's so-called Flower portrait—once thought to have been done in the Bard's lifetime and to have perhaps been the source of the Droeshout engraving—was actually concocted in the 19th century. In 1988, the subject of another rendering, the Folger Shakespeare Library's Janssen portrait, inscribed with the date 1610, proved to be hiding a full head of hair; the subject's domelike forehead was a paint-over added in the 17th or 18th century.

Though Cooper can't affirm that any of the "Searching for Shakespeare" portraits were painted from life, she labels as "pretty high" the odds that a living, breathing William Shakespeare posed for the National Portrait Gallery's own Chandos portrait, which she calls "our Mona Lisa." The undated painting is attributed to an obscure English artist and possible bit actor of Shakespeare's day named John Taylor. A succession of owners since the mid-1600s have deemed it an authentic portrait of Shakespeare, and it was the first work the gallery acquired at its founding in London in 1856. The portrait's swarthy, somewhat lugubrious subject didn't look sufficiently "English" to a few of the Bard's early admirers, however. "Our author exhibits the complexion of a Jew, or rather of a chimney-sweeper in the jaundice," complained an 18th-century editor named George Steevens.

The search for an authentic image of Shakespeare, like the search for revelations about his life, is guided in part by what we hope to find: we hope he flirted with Queen Elizabeth, but he probably didn't. We hope he didn't hoard grain, but he probably did. This may explain the popularity of two of the eight highlighted portraits in the exhibition. Both the Grafton portrait (1588) and the Sanders portrait (1603) depict sensuous young men, neither of whom has any substantial claim to being Shakespeare. For the frontispiece of The Essential Shakespeare, J. Dover Wilson chose the Grafton, confessing that he couldn't help but wish that "the unknown youth of the wonderful eyes and the oval Shelley-like face" was in fact the young poet. And literary critic Harold Bloom announced in Vanity Fair in 2001 that he preferred the "livelier" Sanders to traditional portraits.

But "Searching for Shakespeare" includes one portrait about which there is no doubt whatsoever: it is of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. That he appears a more dashing and self-assured figure than any of the Shakespeares on display is not, of course, why Oxfordians find him the more plausible candidate—though it probably doesn't hurt. Fourteen years Shakespeare's senior, Oxford was an urbane, multilingual dandy, well

educated, well traveled and well connected. At 12, when his father died, he was taken in by William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, who for more than 40 years was Queen Elizabeth's most trusted adviser. He became Oxford's father-in-law when Oxford, at 21, married Burghley's daughter, Anne Cecil. At court, he won attention as a jousting champion, clotheshorse and ladies' man. "The Queen's Majesty delighteth more in his personage and his dancing and his valiantness than any other," another young aristocrat, the future Earl of Shrewsbury, wrote of the 21-year-old earl.

Oxford's many enemies, however, described him variously as a whoring, hot-tempered bully, a dissolute spendthrift and a flatulent pederast. At 17, he used his sword to kill an under-cook in Burghley's household (supposedly in self-defense). And at 24, he abandoned his wife for the Continent for more than a year. As for his poetry, Oxford biographer Alan H. Nelson, emeritus professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and a Stratfordian, ranks it "from absolutely dreadful to middling."

In his own time, at least, Oxford's poetry won praise. So did his skill as a playwright, though none of his dramas survive. Some modern-day advocates claim that it would have been unseemly for a high-ranking nobleman to write plays openly for the hugely popular, sometimes rowdy Elizabethan public theater. And, they say, playwrights who satirized the powerful too obviously could find themselves jailed or worse.

Richard Whalen, author of Shakespeare—Who Was He? (which answers its title's question as, unquestionably, the Earl of Oxford), allows that the earl's identity as the real Shakespeare had to have been known to a number of theater-world insiders, among them an accommodating Will. Nonetheless, Whalen argues, one needn't posit the existence of a grand conspiracy that concealed Oxford's role. "His authorship was probably an open secret," says Whalen, who, like his fellow Oxfordian Mark Anderson, is unaffiliated with a university. The powers that be could pretend they didn't know a nobleman was stooping to farce and, worse, critiquing his peers. As for the general public, he says, "They weren't all that interested in who wrote the plays they went to."

Links between Oxford and Shakespeare are not hard to find. The oldest of Oxford's three daughters was once offered in marriage to the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated his two long narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece." (He declined.) Another daughter was married to one of the two earls to whom the First Folio was dedicated.

Oxford supporters find other evidence in the plays themselves. In Hamlet and King Lear, for example, they hear the voice of an aristocrat, not a commoner. "The plays demonstrate a keen, intimate knowledge of how people in a royal court or a government bureaucracy think and operate," says Whalen. "Yes, great writing is always a creative process, but a writer's best works are products of their own experiences. Think of Tolstoy, who wrote about what he knew best: his family, Russia, war. I would argue the Earl of Oxford's life fits the profile of someone you would expect to have written the works of Shakespeare."

Oxfordian Mark Anderson finds other clues in Shakespeare's settings, plots and characters. He discerns in Hamlet, for instance, elements drawn from Oxford’s life. "Polonius is a caricature of Oxford's father-in-law, Lord Burghley, who was known to be rather prolix and tedious," he says. "Burghley, like Polonius, once sent spies to check up on his own son." Ophelia is Burghley's daughter, whom Oxford/Hamlet woos, and so on.

As persuasive as their case may be, even the most ardent Oxfordians must admit there isn't a scrap of real evidence tying their man to Shakespeare's work. And how to explain Ben Jonson's eulogy of the "Sweet Swan of Avon," in the First Folio? "...Soule of the Age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!...Thou art a Monument, without a tombe, / And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, / And we have wits to read, and praise to give."

By and large, orthodox Stratfordians—a group that includes the vast majority of historians and English professors with an interest in Shakespeare—dismiss Oxford's champions as wishful thinkers who ignore or misread historical evidence. It's natural, they say, that we yearn for traces of our most revered writer—a signed

love sonnet on parchment, at least, if not a complete first draft of Macbeth. But finding their absence suspicious, they say, reveals basic misunderstandings about life during the English Renaissance.

"In his own time, Shakespeare wasn't thought of as a universal genius," says Marjorie Garber, professor of English and visual studies at Harvard University and the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare After All (2004). "Nobody was about to save a laundry list he wrote so they could sell it on eBay. It wasn't that kind of culture." Paper, typically handmade in France, was scarce and expensive; when it was no longer needed, it was reused—to line a baking dish, perhaps, or stiffen a book cover. Letter-writing and diary-keeping were unusual, especially for commoners. As for play manuscripts, Garber says, "Once they were set in type, there was certainly no reason to save them." Even in print, plays were considered something less than literature. When Thomas Bodley set up the Bodleian library at Oxford University in Shakespeare's time, she points out, he refused to include play texts. "These were considered trash, like pulp fiction."

One by one, mainstream scholars knock down the Oxfordians' debating points. No, Stratford wasn't an uncultured backwater; a lord mayor of London and an archbishop of Canterbury had both come from there. No, a Stratford grammar-school graduate wasn't akin to a seventh-grade dropout of today. The Greek and Latin classics echoed in the plays were a standard part of the grammar-school curriculum. Shakespeare may never have visited Italy, but neither he nor anyone else during the Renaissance ever set foot in ancient Greece or Rome either, and that did not rule out the Classical world as a popular setting for poetry and drama. And no, you didn't have to be a nobleman to write about kings and queens. Writers of every stripe did so—it's what the Elizabethan public demanded.

"In the end, what sets Shakespeare apart from his contemporaries is the sheer range of his style and his subject matter," says the University of Warwick's Jonathan Bate. "He was great in comedy and tragedy and history. He could write about the court, and he could write about ordinary people." A play doesn’t have to be autobiographical, Bate suggests, any more than a sonnet has to be confessional. "Shakespeare always kept himself well disguised. He didn't insert his own opinions, and he steered away from the topical controversies of the day. That's why it's so easy for directors and filmmakers today to make his plays contemporary. It's the key to his endurance."

Nor, Bate adds, is it necessary to believe that Shakespeare began writing masterpieces as soon as he picked up a quill. "There is good evidence that he started by rewriting the works of other dramatists. Lots of his early plays are either collaborative works, where he's a kind of junior partner working with more established dramatists, or they're reworkings of older plays." Even the mature plays like Hamlet and King Lear, Bate says, drew on existing works for their plots. "In his time, originality wasn't especially valued."

As for England not mourning his death, that's not surprising either. By 1616, Shakespeare was, after all, a middle-class retiree living far from London, and his plays were no longer the latest fashion. "In his own lifetime and for some time after, Shakespeare is certainly admired and respected, but he's not thought of as unique," says Bate. Which is why later writers felt justified in "improving" on him. British poet laureate John Dryden shortened Troilus and Cressida in the late 1600s by excising what he called "that heap of Rubbish, under which so many excellent Thoughts lay wholly bury'd." An unnamed critic in the following century scolded Shakespeare "for ignoring the ancients, for violating decorum by resorting to tragicomedy and supernatural characters, and for using puns and blank verse."

"The idea that he was a completely different order of genius from all his contemporaries only begins in the mid-18th century, with the British Empire taking off and literacy growing," says Bate. The apotheosis became official with actor David Garrick's lavish Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford in 1769. For today's public, of course, Shakespeare is to literary genius what Mozart is to music and Leonardo to painting. The authorship debate, says Bate, is a natural consequence of a cult of Shakespeare now deeply rooted in our culture.

Harvard's Marjorie Garber takes an unusually tolerant view of the long-running dispute. "A lot of people, especially writers, prefer the mystery to an answer," she says. Any answer is going to be simply a human of a particular time and place. We regard Shakespeare today, she believes, the way his friend Ben Jonson did in his First Folio tribute—"He was not of an age, but for all time!"—and asks whether we really want to see him reduced to an ordinary mortal. "Many people prefer to keep the idea of a transcendent, universal Shakespeare," she says. Garber likes to cite a remark Charles Dickens made to a friend in 1847: "The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up."

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