Murders, tombs, forgeries and forgeries to prove that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare.
Dozens of historical documents have been preserved about the life and work of William Shakespeare. He was well known to his contemporaries as a poet and playwright, whose works were repeatedly published and quoted in poetry and prose. The circumstances of his birth, education, lifestyle - everything corresponded to the time when the profession of a playwright was still considered low, but theaters were already bringing a considerable income to their owners. Finally, Shakespeare was both an actor, and a play writer, and a member of a theater company, he spent almost twenty years rehearsing and performing on stage. Despite all this, it is still debated whether William Shakespeare was the author of the plays, sonnets and poems published under his name. Doubt first arose in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, many hypotheses have emerged that attribute the authorship of Shakespeare's works to someone else.
The names of Bacon, Oxford, Rutland, Derby and Marlowe, of course, are not limited to the list of potential Shakespeare candidates. There are several dozen of them, including such exotic ones as Queen Elizabeth, her successor, King James I Stuart, author of "Robinson Crusoe" Daniel Defoe or the English romantic poet George Gordon Byron. But, in essence, it does not matter who exactly these or those "researchers" consider the real Shakespeare. It is more important to understand why it is Shakespeare who is repeatedly denied the right to be called the author of his works.
The point is not that nothing is allegedly known for certain about Shakespeare's life. On the contrary, after 200 years of research, an astonishing amount of evidence has been collected about Shakespeare, and there is no reason to doubt the authorship of his works: there is absolutely no historical basis for this.
For doubt, however, there are grounds of an emotional nature. We are the heirs of a romantic breakthrough that took place in European culture at the beginning of the 19th century, when new ideas about the poet's work and figure, unknown in previous centuries, arose (it is no coincidence that the first doubts about Shakespeare arose precisely in the 1840s). In its most general form, this new concept can be reduced to two interrelated features. First: the poet is a genius in everything, including in ordinary life, and the existence of the poet is inseparable from his work; he sharply differs from the ordinary man in the street, his life is like a bright comet that flies quickly and burns up just as quickly; at first glance it is impossible to confuse him with a person of a non-poetic warehouse. And second: whatever this poet writes, he will always talk about himself, about the uniqueness of his existence;any of his works will be a confession, any line will reflect his whole life, the body of his texts - his poetic biography.
Shakespeare does not fit this idea. In this he is similar to his contemporaries, but only he fell to become, paraphrasing Erasmus, a playwright for all time. We do not demand that Racine, Moliere, Calderon or Lope de Vega live according to the laws of romantic art: we feel that there is a barrier between us and them. Shakespeare's creativity is able to overcome this barrier. Consequently, there is a special demand from Shakespeare: in the eyes of many, it must correspond to the norms (or rather, myths) of our time.
However, there is a reliable remedy for this delusion - scientific historical knowledge, a critical approach to the conventional wisdom of the century. Shakespeare is no worse and no better than his time, and it is no worse and no better than other historical eras - they do not need to be embellished or altered, we must try to understand them.
We offer six of the longest-lived versions of who could write for Shakespeare.
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Version No. 1
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - philosopher, writer, statesman.
Francis Bacon. Engraving by William Marshall. England, 1640.
Delia Bacon. 1853 year.
Delia Bacon (1811–1859), the daughter of a bankrupt settler from the American state of Connecticut, was not the first to try to attribute the writings of Shakespeare to Francis Bacon, but it was she who introduced this version to the general public. Her faith in her own discovery was so infectious that the famous writers to whom she turned for help - the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Briton Thomas Carlisle - could not refuse her. Thanks to their support, Delia Bacon came to England and in 1857 published the 675-page The True Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays. This book said that William Shakespeare was just an illiterate actor and a greedy businessman, and plays and poems under his name were composed by a group of "noble thinkers and poets" led by Bacon - allegedly in this way the author of "New Organon" hoped to bypass censorship restrictions,who did not allow him to openly express his innovative philosophy (Delia apparently did not know that plays were also censored in Elizabethan England).
However, the author of Genuine Philosophy did not provide any evidence in favor of her hypothesis: the evidence, Delia believed, lay either in the grave of Francis Bacon or in the grave of Shakespeare. Since then, many anti-Shakespeareans are sure that the real author ordered to bury the manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays with him, and if they are found, the issue will be resolved once and for all.
Delia's ideas found many followers. As evidence, they presented small literary parallels between the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, quite explainable by the unity of the written culture of that time, and also that the author of Shakespeare's plays had a taste for philosophy and was aware of the life of a number of European royal houses.
A spread from the book by Francis Bacon "On the Dignity and Development of Sciences" with an example of a two-letter cipher. London, 1623.
The attempts to solve the "Bacon cipher" can be considered a significant development of the initial hypothesis. The fact is that Francis Bacon worked on improving the methods of steganography - cryptography, which, to the eyes of an uninitiated person, looks like a complete message with its own meaning. Baconians are sure that their hero wrote plays under the guise of Shakespeare not at all for the sake of success with the public - "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet" and "King Lear", "Twelfth Night" and "The Tempest" served as a cover for some secret knowledge.
Version No. 2
Edward de Vere (1550–1604), 17th Earl of Oxford, was a courtier, poet, playwright, patron of the arts and sciences.
Edouard de Vere. Copy of the lost portrait of 1575. Unknown artist. England, XVII century.
A simple English teacher who called himself a descendant of the Counts of Derby, Thomas Loney (1870–1944) did not believe that the "Merchant of Venice" could have been written by a man of ignoble birth who had never been to Italy. Doubting the authorship of the Shylock comedy, Loney took up an anthology of Elizabethan poetry and found that Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis (1593) was written in the same stanza and the same meter as Edouard de Vere's poem Feminine Variability (1587) … De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, could boast of the antiquity of the family and a good acquaintance with Italy, was known to his contemporaries not only as a poet, but also as the author of comedies (not preserved).
In 1920, Lowney published the book Identified Shakespeare, which found many admirers, although the date of the earl's death - 1604 - cuts off a number of later plays from the Shakespearean canon, including King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra., "Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest". However, Loney found a way out: supposedly Oxford, dying, left a whole heap of unfinished manuscripts, later completed by someone roughly
and hastily. Lowney's followers, in order to avoid some contradictions in the dating of the plays, tried to convey them.
Cover of the book "Identified Shakespeare". London, 1920.
Loney did not hide the amateurish nature of his research and was even proud of it: "Probably, the problem is still not solved precisely because," he wrote in the preface to Identified Shakespeare, "scientists have been doing it so far." Later, the Oxfordians decided to call on lawyers for help: in 1987 and 1988, in the presence of the judges of the US Supreme Court and London's Middle Temple, respectively, the followers of Loney's hypothesis entered into an open dispute with Shakespearean scholars (in London, in particular, they were opposed by the most venerable living Shakespearean expert Professor Stanley Wells). Unfortunately for the organizers, the judges awarded the victory to the scientists both times. On the other hand, the Oxfordians succeeded in pushing the Baconians out - by far the Oxfordian version of anti-Shakespearianism is the most popular.
Among Loney's most famous followers was the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who in his youth leaned towards Baconianism, and in 1923, after meeting Shakespeare, he converted to Oxfordianism. So, in the 1930s, Freud began to develop parallels between the fate of King Lear and the biography of the Earl of Oxford: both had three daughters, and if the English count did not care about his own at all, then the legendary British king, by contrast, gave everything to his daughters. what he had. After fleeing the Nazis to London in 1938, Freud wrote Lowney a warm letter and called him the author of a "wonderful book", and shortly before his death, on the grounds that Oxford lost his beloved father in childhood and allegedly hated his mother for her next marriage, he attributed to Hamlet Oedipus complex.
Version No. 3
Roger Manners (1576-1612), 5th Earl of Rutland, courtier, patron of the arts.
Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. Portrait by Jeremiah van der Eiden. Around 1675.
The Belgian socialist politician, teacher of French literature and symbolist writer Célestin Dumblen (1859–1924) became interested in the Shakespearean question when he learned of a document found in a family archive in 1908. It followed that in 1613, the butler of Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, paid a large sum to "Mr. Shakespeare" and his fellow actor Richard Burbage, who invented and painted on the earl's shield an ingenious emblem to make Manners worthily appear at the knightly tournament … This discovery alarmed Dumblen: he noticed that Francis's elder brother, Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, died in 1612 - almost at the same time when Shakespeare stopped writing for the stage. In addition, Roger Manners was on friendly terms with the Earl of Southampton (aristocrat,to whom Shakespeare dedicated two of his poems and who is considered the main addressee of Shakespeare's sonnets), as well as with the Earl of Essex, whose fall in 1601 indirectly affected the actors of the Globe Theater. Manners traveled to the countries that served as the setting for many Shakespearean plays (France, Italy, Denmark), and even studied in Padua with two Danes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (common Danish surnames of the time). In 1913, Dumblen summarized these and other considerations in the book, Lord Rutland is Shakespeare, written in French.and even studied in Padua with two Danes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (common Danish surnames at the time). In 1913, Dumblen summarized these and other considerations in the book, Lord Rutland is Shakespeare, written in French.and even studied in Padua with two Danes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (common Danish surnames at the time). In 1913, Dumblen summarized these and other considerations in the book, Lord Rutland is Shakespeare, written in French.
Cover of the book "The Game about William Shakespeare, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix."
Dumblen's version has followers in Russia: for example, Ilya Gililov, the author of The Game about William Shakespeare, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix (1997), claimed that Shakespeare was composed by a group of authors led by the young wife of Count Rutland, Elizabeth, the daughter of the famous courtier, writer and poet Philip Sidney. At the same time, Gililov based himself on a completely arbitrary adaptation of Chester's collection, which includes Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Dove" (1601, according to Gililov - 1613). He argued that Rutland, Elizabeth and others composed plays and sonnets for purely conspiracy purposes - to perpetuate their close circle in which only they knew rituals coped. The scientific world, with the exception of a few harsh rebukes, ignored Gililov's book.
Version No. 4
William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby, was a playwright and statesman.
William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. Portrait by William Derby. England, XIX century.
Abel Lefranc. Around the 1910s.
French literary historian and expert on François Rabelais Abel Lefranc (1863–1952) first thought about William Stanley's chances of becoming a candidate for "real Shakespeare" after the publication of a book by respected English scholar James Greenstreet entitled "The Formerly Unknown Noble Author of Elizabethan Comedies" (1891). Greenstreet was able to find a letter from 1599 signed by George Fenner, a secret agent of the Catholic Church, which said that the Earl of Derby could not be of use to Catholics, as he was "busy writing plays for ordinary actors."
In 1918, Lefranc published Under the Mask of William Shakespeare, in which he recognized Derby as a much more suitable candidate for Shakespeare than previous applicants, if only because the earl's name was William and his initials coincide with Shakespeare's. In addition, in private letters he signed himself in the same way as the lyric hero of the 135th sonnet - Will, and not Wm and not Willm, as Stratford Shakespeare himself did on preserved documents. Further, Derby was an accomplished traveler, in particular closely acquainted with the Navarre court.
It was not surprising, Lefranc thought, that Henry V contained several extensive passages in French, which Derby was fluent in. In addition, the Rabelais specialist believed that the famous image of Falstaff was created under the influence of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which had not yet been translated into English in Shakespeare's time.
For all the ingenuity of this reasoning, the Derby version had little chance of keeping up with the Oxfordian: Lefranc's book was written in French, and by the time it came out, Thomas Lowney (by the way, calling himself a descendant of the Earl of Derby) had already put forward his arguments in favor to Edouard de Veer.
Version No. 5
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) - playwright, poet.
Alleged portrait of Christopher Marlowe. Unknown artist. 1585 year.
The son of a shoemaker who was born the same year as Shakespeare and who managed to graduate from Cambridge only thanks to the generosity of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christopher Marlowe was almost the only candidate for Shakespeare of ignoble birth. However, Calvin Hoffman (1906-1986), an American advertising agent, poet and playwright who published in 1955 the book "The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare", attributed to Marlowe an affair with the noble Thomas Walsingham, the patron saint of poets and the younger brother of the powerful Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State and Chief of the Secret Service to Queen Elizabeth. According to Hoffman, it was Thomas Walsingham, upon learning that Marlo was facing arrest on charges of atheism and blasphemy, decided to save his lover by imitating his murder. Respectively,in a tavern quarrel in Deptford in 1593, it was not Marlowe who was killed, but some vagrant, whose corpse was passed off as the disfigured body of a playwright (he was killed with a dagger in the eye). Marlowe himself, under an assumed name, hastily sailed to France, hiding in Italy, but soon returned to England, settling secluded not far from Scadbury, the estate of Thomas Walsingham in Kent. There he composed "Shakespearean" works, transferring the manuscripts to his patron. He sent them first to a copyist, and then, for staging on stage, to the London actor William Shakespeare - a man completely devoid of imagination, but loyal and silent.settling secluded not far from Stedbury - the estate of Thomas Walsingham in Kent. There he composed "Shakespearean" works, transferring the manuscripts to his patron. He sent them first to a copyist, and then, for staging on stage, to the London actor William Shakespeare - a man completely devoid of imagination, but loyal and silent.settling secluded not far from Stedbury - the estate of Thomas Walsingham in Kent. There he composed "Shakespearean" works, transferring the manuscripts to his patron. He sent them first to a scribe, and then, for staging on stage, to the London actor William Shakespeare - a man completely devoid of imagination, but faithful and silent.
Cover of the first edition of Killing the Man Who Was Shakespeare. 1955 year.
Hoffman began his research by counting the phraseological parallels in the writings of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and later got acquainted with the works of the American professor Thomas Mendenhall, who compiled the "vocabulary profiles" of various writers (with the help of a whole team of women who industriously counted millions of words and letters in words). On the basis of these searches, Hoffman stated that the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare were completely similar. However, most of all these "parallelisms", in fact, were not, the other part related to common words and constructions, and a certain layer of explicit parallels testified to a well-known fact: the young Shakespeare was inspired by the tragedies of Marlowe, having learned a lot from the author of "Tamerlane the Great", " The Maltese Jew”and“Doctor Faust”.
In 1956, Hoffman obtained permission to open the Walsinghams crypt, where he hoped to find the original Marlowe-Shakespeare manuscripts, but found only sand. However, since Hoffman was forbidden to touch the actual tombs that lay under the floor, he stated that his hypothesis, not being confirmed, was still not completely refuted.
Version No. 6
Authors group.
William Shakespeare. Engraving by John Chester Buttra. Around 1850.
Attempts to find a whole group of authors behind the works of Shakespeare have been made more than once, although the supporters of this version cannot agree on any specific composition of it. Here are some examples. In 1923, HTS Forrest, a British administration official in India, published a book entitled Five Authors of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in which he spoke of the poetry tournament hosted by the Earl of Southampton. For the award announced by the Earl in the art of composing sonnets, according to Forrest, five major poets of the Elizabethan era competed at once: Samuel Daniel, Barnaby Barnes, William Warner, John Donne and William Shakespeare. Accordingly, all five are the authors of the sonnets, which, Forrest believed, have since been mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare alone. It is characteristic that one of this company,the author of the epic poem Albion's England, Warner, did not write sonnets at all, and another, John Donne, resorted to the form of a sonnet only for writing religious poetry. In 1931, Gilbert Slater, an economist and historian, published Seven Shakespeare, in which he brought together the names of virtually all the pretenders most popular among anti-Shakespeareans. According to him, Francis Bacon, the Earls of Oxford, Rutland and Derby, Christopher Marlowe, as well as Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary, Countess Pembroke (writer and sister of Sir Philip Sidney) participated in the composition of Shakespeare's works. Women were not often offered and are proposed for the role of Shakespeare, but for Countess Pembroke Slater made an exception: in his opinion, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were marked with a clear presence of female intuition, and also - in particular - As you like it. which Mary didn't just write,but also brought herself out in the form of Rosalind. The original theory was proposed in 1952 by British Lieutenant Colonel Montague Douglas, author of The Lord Oxford and the Shakespeare Group. According to his version, Queen Elizabeth entrusted the Earl of Oxford with the head of the propaganda department, which was supposed to produce patriotic pamphlets and plays. The Earl fulfilled his commission with dignity, having gathered under the name of Shakespeare a whole syndicate of authors, including the nobles - Francis Bacon, the Earl of Derby - and famous playwrights: Marlowe, John Lily and Robert Green. It is curious that one of the main documents confirming Shakespeare's authorship belongs to Green's pen - in the pamphlet "A grain of mind, paid a hundredfold by repentance" (1592), written shortly before his death, Green viciously attacked a certain actor - "an upstart crow", adorned with "our plumage"who dared to compete with the playwrights of the previous generation. The surname Shakescene, deliberately altered by the author of the pamphlet (“stunning scene” instead of Shakespeare, “stunning with a spear”) and a slightly altered quote from the third part of Henry VI leave no doubt as to whom Greene is throwing satirical lightning bolts. However, the version of Lieutenant Colonel Douglas is lame not only on this point: if the historical chronicles of Shakespeare can still (with a very big stretch) be considered suitable for the patriotic education of subjects, then why did the propaganda department bother with Romeo and Juliet, not to mention Hamlet "And" Othello "is absolutely incomprehensible."Stunning with a spear") and a slightly modified quote from the third part of "Henry VI" leave no doubt about who Green throws satirical lightning bolts. However, the version of Lieutenant Colonel Douglas is lame not only on this point: if the historical chronicles of Shakespeare can still (with a very big stretch) be considered suitable for the patriotic education of subjects, then why did the propaganda department bother with Romeo and Juliet, not to mention Hamlet "And" Othello "is absolutely incomprehensible."Stunning with a spear") and a slightly modified quote from the third part of "Henry VI" leave no doubt about who Green throws satirical lightning bolts. However, the version of Lieutenant Colonel Douglas is lame not only on this point: if the historical chronicles of Shakespeare can still (with a very big stretch) be considered suitable for the patriotic education of subjects, then why did the propaganda department bother with Romeo and Juliet, not to mention Hamlet "And" Othello "is absolutely incomprehensible.absolutely incomprehensible.absolutely incomprehensible.
Author: Dmitry Ivanov