The American novelist Jodi Picoult has revealed that she thinks that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman, telling the Hay Literary Festival, ‘I think that, back then, people in theatre knew that William Shakespeare was a catch-all name for a lot of different types of authors. I think they expected it to be a joke that everyone would get. And we’ve all lost the punchline over 400 years.’
Apparently, a male writer couldn’t have written the ‘proto-feminist’ characters in some of the plays
Apparently, a male writer couldn’t have written the ‘proto-feminist’ characters in some of the plays, which is a bit like saying that they must have been written by cruel, old-fashioned dukes because they sometimes have cruel, old-fashioned dukes in them. Picoult’s chosen candidate for the true author is poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano), because, er… Desdemona’s maid is called Emilia, and other equally shaky reasons. (Lanier has been posited in the past as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, slightly more credibly.)
By Any Other Name, Picoult’s new book (tagline: ‘What if the greatest works of literature were a fraud?) uses this conceit to explore the general phenomenon of women writing under male names over the centuries.
That’s a great device, yes. And it’s certainly a potent attention-grabber. Virginia Woolf did almost the same thing 95 years ago. But does Picoult actually believe it? I hope not, because it’s quite, quite loopy.
Why do people – still – come out with this rubbish about Shakespeare? The obvious first answer is because Shakespeare remains a famous figure. He is a brand that everybody knows, at least by name. Nobody is claiming that the plays of Thomas Dekker were written by somebody other than Thomas Dekker.
There is also the nebulousness of Shakespeare the man as a personality. Unlike several of his contemporary writers, he didn’t write anything but plays and poetry, and nothing in the first person. The personality of Ben Jonson, for example, oozes out of everything he wrote. You can tell where Jonson stood on the characters and issues of the day.
But Shakespeare takes everybody’s side. He writes all characters and all viewpoints – high, low, male, female – with equal felicity and compassionate understanding. You cannot pin him down.
People tend therefore to see themselves – or an idealised vision of themselves – in Shakespeare. A one-eyed Armenian dairy farmer might imagine that Shakespeare was a one eyed Armenian dairy farmer, and assemble plentiful ‘evidence’ for it. So Picoult reads Shakespeare and sees a feminist author.
The accusation, frequently made, that questioning Shakespeare’s authorship is pure snobbery – because how could a rural lad who didn’t attend university be so clever – also holds true. And it’s odd how nobody ever suggests that because of the plays’ intimate familiarity with low life slang then they must’ve been written by a pub landlord or a stable lad. Nobody ever wants to claim those bits of Shakespeare, the stuff that is pure Carry On.
It is inevitable that in our culture – in which worth is bestowed to art from its origins in a ‘marginalised identity’ or its espousal of intersectionality – these crazy assertions would now come with 21st century protected characteristics attached. We can’t be far from Shakespeare was actually a Muslim/neurodiverse/non-binary.
But the daftest thing about all these claims – which go back centuries – is that, unlike Jack the Ripper or the Mary Celeste, they are attempts to create a historical mystery where there just isn’t one. There is a ton of documentary evidence that William Shakespeare wrote the works of William Shakespeare. His peers knew he was the best of the bunch, and they certainly knew who he was. They took steps to preserve his works in the First Folio, years after his death, which has a drawing of him that matches other portraits, refers in passing to his lack of formal education, and confirms his origins in Stratford. Most plays printed at the time didn’t have a name on them – Shakespeare’s did, as a selling point.
If this was all the jolly wheeze that Picoult suggests, it was a hell of an elaborate and time-consuming one. It also relies heavily on the ability of actors and writers to refrain from spilling the juiciest of gossip. Now a lot may have changed between the days of the doublet and Dua Lipa, but anybody who thinks members of these professions could keep a lid on the true identity of the hottest talent in town is either mad, or dissembling.
And yet writers like Picoult and actors like Mark Rylance or Derek Jacobi continue to lend credence to this cherry-picking, tenuous guff.
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