The aim of finding the manuscripts was to prove that Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher and statesman, was in fact the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. Miss Evelyn May Hopkins had died, leaving a third of her inheritance to the Francis Bacon Society for the purpose of finding the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays.
In England in the summer of 1964, the question came before the courts. It’s also a metaphor for the problem of authority-of who has the authority to determine the truth about the past. I’ve come to see the authorship question as a kind of metaphor for the problem of history-of how we know what we think we know about the past. “Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder, you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!” “You easily, regretlessly relinquished the laurels… concealing for all time your monstrous genius beneath a mask,” he wrote. “All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures-an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high.”įor Vladimir Nabokov, the mystery inspired a poem. “So far as anybody actually knows and can prove, Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon never wrote a play in his life,” he wrote. Whitman, the poet of democracy, was no snob, but he was convinced that there was another mind behind the plays.
“We all know how much mythus there is there is in the Shakspere question as it stands to-day,” Walt Whitman noted. “I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world,” wrote Henry James. This is curious, because many of our greatest writers and thinkers have suspected that the name was indeed a pseudonym for a concealed author. Because it is obscene to suggest that the god of English literature might be a false god. You will be punished, which is to say, educated. Someone else might get up and leave the room. If you raise it casually in a social setting, someone might chastise you as though you’ve uttered a deeply offensive profanity. The Shakespeare authorship question-the theory that William Shakespeare might not have written the works published under his name-is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature.Īmong Shakespeare scholars, even the phrase “Shakespeare authorship question” elicits contempt-eye-rolling, name-calling, mudslinging.
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