Why Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare

Paul Franssen

Utrecht University

Why Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

• 1. paper trail

• 2. testimonies of contemporaries that WS was an author

• 3. dating

• 4. Stratford and Shakespeare’s private life reflected in the works

• 5. the problem with conspiracy theories

1. The paper trail

Shakespeare’s baptism

Shakespeare’s Coat of Arms 1596

The Stratford Grammar School

Lost years, 1585 - 1592

• Starting his acting career in London?

• Taking care of the horses outside the theatre?

• Being a schoolmaster in the country?

• Working as a lawyer’s apprentice?

• Visiting the continent, accompanying an aristocratic gentleman, or as a student at a Catholic college?

The First Folio, 1623

Leonard Digges on Shakespeare’s “Stratford Monument”

Shakespeare as a witness

2. Witnesses of Shakespeare’s Authorship

Records of the Revels Office,1604-1605

Robert Greene, 1592

• …for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.

Francis Meres, 1598

…the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honeytongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets. … Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame,& his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry 4. King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.

The Return from Parnassus I, 1598

Gullio: Let this duncified worlde esteeme of Spencer and Chaucer, Ile worship sweet Mr Shakspeare, and to honoure him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe. (4.1)

Gabriel Harvey, 1598-1603

The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort.

3. Dating the Canon

Some dates

• Death of Oxford: June 1604

• Wreck of the Sea Venture: 1609

• Pamphlets: late 1610

• The Tempest first performed at Court: late 1611

• Death of Shakespeare: 1616

Some parallels

• Storm drives apart a fleet of ships, one of which contains the aristocratic leader

• After the shipwreck, conspiracies among the ordinary sailors.

• St. Elmo’s fire.

• “glut” and “bosky”

4. Stratford and Shakespeare’s Private Life

Possible autobiographical elements in the works

Prospero to Ferdinand:

If thou dost break [Miranda’s] virgin-knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies mayWith full and holy rite be ministered,

….barren hate,Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

That you shall hate it both.(Tempest 4.1.15-22)

Duke Orsino to Cesario/Viola:

….. Let still the woman takeAn elder than herself. So wears she to him;So sways she level in her husband’s heart.

(Twelfth Night 2.4.29-30).

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,And Will to boot, and Will in overplus …

sonnet 135

Make but my name thy love, and love that still,And then thou lov’st me for my name is Will.

Sonnet 136

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”

…………………………………………………..….“I hate” from hate away she threw,And saved my life, saying “not you.”

Sonnet 145

What, would you make me mad? Am I not Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton Heath, by birth a peddler …..?

Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot,if she know me not.

Shrew Induction.2.15-18.

5. The problem with conspiracy theories

The Stratford Monument

Part of legend below bust:

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast?

Read if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast,

Within this monument Shakspeare: with whome

Quick nature dide: whose name doth decke the tombe,

Far more then cost: si[t]h all, that he hath writt,

Leaves living art, but page, to serve his witt.