William Shakespeare: Encyclopedia II - William Shakespeare - Speculations about Shakespeare

William Shakespeare - Speculations about Shakespeare

William Shakespeare - Identity

Over the years such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon actually produced the works attributed to him. These claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them, although their advocates also point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history. Most professional scholars consider the argument baseless, and attribute the debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of Shakespeare's life.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, became the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, after having been identified in the 1920s. Oxford partisans note the similarities between the Earl's life, and events and sentiments depicted in the plays and sonnets. The principal hurdle for Oxfordian theory is the evidence that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after their candidate's death, but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to have written the works of Shakespeare. It has been speculated that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was faked for various reasons and that Marlowe went into hiding, subsequently writing under the name of William Shakespeare.

A related question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.

William Shakespeare - Religion

Several decades before Shakespeare's birth, the English Crown severed the country's church from the Roman Catholic Church. In the following years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the protestant Church of England, with recusancy laws used to help enforce this conversion.

Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare may have been secretly Catholic. There is no question that Shakespeare had many family members, patrons and friends who were Catholic and that he grew up in a hotbed of recusancy, with nearly conclusive evidence that both Shakespeare’s father John Shakespeare and his daughter Susannah were recusant Catholics. His mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. Archdeacon Richard Davies (d. 1708), an Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst".^[5] Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth were Catholic sympathizers and may have been hired by his father. Simon Hunt, likely one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.

A number of scholarly works maintain that Shakespeare was Catholic, such as Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare by Clare Asquith.^[6] Asquith maintains that Shakespeare lived in a society where there was substantial and widespread, yet quiet, resistance to the newly imposed faith and that Shakespeare was part of this resistance--his own works being the best evidence of his faith. Lady Magdalen Montague, a well known Catholic and a bulwark of English Catholicism was a prominent patron of the Bard, and is even found within his plays Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale and Comedy of Errors.

Asquith says the Bard would use terms such as "high" to refer to Catholic characters and "low" to refer to the Protestant--referring to their altars--and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garb. Asquith detected in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were merchants and souls were jewels, the people pursuing them were creditors, and the Tyburn scaffold where the members of the underground died was called the place of much trading. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters. Asquith says Shakespeare also used this code.

Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted, though some consider it a growing consensus. The Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only that he might be other than Catholic, but whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which ... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age."^[7] Stephen Greenblatt, of Harvard, suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives. An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in "The Phoenix and Turtle", sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit Edmund Campion in "Twelfth Night"^[8] and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.

William Shakespeare - Sexuality

The content of Shakespeare's works has raised the question of whether he may have been bisexual. It should be noted that the question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" in a modern sense is anachronistic, as the concepts of homosexuality and bisexuality did not emerge until the 19th century; while sodomy was a crime in the period, there was no word for an exclusively homosexual identity (see History of homosexuality). Elizabethans also frequently wrote about friendship in more intense language than is common today.

Although twenty-six of the sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady"), one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focus on the young man's beauty, has been interpreted as evidence for Shakespeare's bisexuality, although others interpret them as referring to intense friendship, not sexual love. Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical, but mere fiction, so that the "speaker" of the Sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. Despite these alternative interpretations, many readers have suspected otherwise. For example, in 1954, C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" (although he added that they are not the poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature" ^[9].

Many readers have found similar evidence in the plays. The most commonly cited example is a number of comedies such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It, which contain comic situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device that exploits the fact that in Shakespeare's day women's roles were played by boys. While the situations thus presented are heterosexual in terms of the story, the stage image of men wooing and kissing may well have been titillating to those of a homosexual orientation, and while other dramatists occasionally used the same device, Shakespeare seems to have had an exceptional preference for it, using it in five of his plays.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Speculations about Shakespeare", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki