Bard Knock Life (Stratford Anthem).

Did William Shakespeare really write his own plays? It's a debate that's been raging within certain sections of academia for years, decades, centuries even and some people, on either side of the debate, get very aereated about it. Most of us, however - and I include myself in this, don't really give a flying fuck either way. It's not to say the subject isn't interesting. More to say, it's not really important.

Which it isn't. So I didn't hold high hopes for Tuesday evening's London Fortean Society talk, The Shakespeare Furore, at The Bell in Whitechapel with the novelist, poet, academic, and self-proclaimed power tool enthusiast Dr Ros Barber. However, and the LFS have form in proving me wrong - that's why I keep going, it proved to be quite an interesting and illuminating, if a little overlong, lecture about something that is quite clearly very close to Dr Barber's heart. She's gone to court over it. Or at least over repercussions caused by her writing about it.

But more of that later. The Shakespeare Authorship Question (from hereon in referred to as the SAQ) began almost at the same time as William Shakespeare's writing career. His first known publication, 1593's narrative poem Venus and Adonis, showed the signs, according to Shakespeare's contemporary Gabriel Harvey, of being written, or ghost written, by a "rich mummer".

A mummer being a word used at the time for a masked actor. Harvey, who was two decades older than Shakespeare, may have been jealous of the younger writer whose poem he described as an "anonymous pamphlet" or he may simply have been bored or short of money. At the time of the publication of Venus and Adonis, London's theatres were closed due to the plague.

A year later, the clergyman and writer William Covell added his tu'penneth by claiming that the author of that year's The Rape of Lucrece (another narrative poem credited to Bill Shakespeare) must have attended either Oxford or Cambridge. Historical records tell us that the bard, or - as Dr Barber insists on calling him, rather irritatingly, "the man from Stratford" - did not attend either Oxford or Cambridge.

Others chipped in, either correctly or simply throwing shade at the man who would go on to become the most famous ever writer in the English language. Including another literary churchman Francis Meres who felt certain that Shakespeare's poems and plays were really written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. 

It sounds odd now but it was an age when many authors chose to write anonymously or use pseudonyms. That's because the monarchy and the church had the power to have writers that displeased them jailed or tortured. Elizabeth I personally oversaw the jailing of authors and took great pleasure in doubting literary authorship. It's possible, to my mind, that supposedly religious figures like Meres and Covell were simply toadying to a cruel tyrant. Witness Keir Starmer's pathetic, unedifying, and ultimately doomed attempts to curry favour with Donald Trump for a modern analogue.

In 1599, the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury joined forces to ban all satirical literature (any belief system that can't accept criticism is a weak belief system, all religion is a lie) as well as some smutty poems. Later on, all history books that had not been personally approved of by the monarchy were also banned. SAQ leading light Gabriel Harvey was wholeheartedly in favour of the ban. Not least because it was bad news for his rival, the satirical pamphleteer Thomas Nashe. Nashe was in so much trouble he went on the run and then died, in mysterious circumstances, a couple of years later.

By the nineteenth century, the American writer Delia Bacon made a case for the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (to whom she was unrelated) being the true author of Shakespeare's plays but other names were thrown into the ring too. Both Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud cast doubt on Shakespeare writing the works he is now famous for and, in 1895, Christopher Marlowe (who died aged just 29 in Deptford, yet again in 'mysterious circumstances') was first proposed as the real author of Shakespeare's work. 

Who knows. It's not in doubt that Shakespeare was certainly influenced by Marlowe or that Shakespeare (or whoever was 'really' writing his plays) lifted whole passages from the 14c Italian scholar Petrarch but the SAQ just wouldn't go away. As far back as the 17th century, the dramatist Edward Ravenscroft had singled out Titus Andronicus (a play Ravenscroft himself revived) as being particularly suspicious on the authorship question.

Around the end of the nineteenth century the SAQ was such a hot topic that people started discussing it as a phenomenon known as "the disintegration of Shakespeare" but, perhaps inevitably, there was a backlash and questioning Shakespeare's authorship credentials became taboo in British and American academia. A few dissenters remained but for the most part to claim that William Shakespeare did not write his own plays could lead to serious reputational and career damage.

That all changed with, you guessed it, the arrival of the Internet. As we all know, the Internet is an amazing source of information. It's been life changing. But it's also full of complete and utter bullshit (or, as my friend John once described it, the Internet is a rose garden - full of beautiful flowers but also full of pricks). Dr Barber, it may or may not be instructive to learn, claimed she is a huge fan of how information can travel so freely and quickly on the Internet.

Internet questioning of Shakespeare's authorship led to interest in previously obscure books by the likes of Brian Vickers (Shakespeare:The Critical Heritage, Returning to Shakespeare, and lots more where they came from) and Diana Price (Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography:New Evidence of an Authorship Problem). The latter author being an actual real academic.

Ben Jonson (the playwright and poet), Thomas Nashe, and the allegorical poet Edmund Spenser were proposed as either the real authors behind Shakespeare's most famous works or at least the bard's co-authors and in 2001 Dr Roger Strittmatter (a humanities professor in Baltimore) became the first person to write a PhD on the subject. Five years later the second PhD appeared. It's author? One Dr Ros Barber.

In 2006, actor, playwright, and theatre director Mark Rylance (with later help from Derek Jacobi) wrote a play, I Am Shakespeare, about the SAQ and by 2008 you were able to take a master's degree on the subject at Brunel University in Uxbridge. More books came out, a film - Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich who is admittedly more famous for Independence Day and Godzilla), and there were seminars and webinars on the subject. Ben Elton's sitcom Upstart Crow (starring David Mitchell as Shakey himself) even touched on the subject and even King Charles (then still a prince) began to doubt Shakespeare. Much to the annoyance of his father who held a more 'orthodox' view on the subject. You can just imagine them quarreling about the true author of Troilus and Cressida over their Coco Pops.

When Elizabeth Winkler's book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies:How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature came out in 2023, the already extant backlash became ever more vitriolic and, often, very misogynistic. Winkler wasn't claiming that Shakespeare WAS a woman or that the true author of the works credited to Shakespeare was a woman. She was simply looking at the vexatious history of the SAQ.

This prompted The Times to run an article claiming that the SAQ was not a "respectable" subject to debate, that theories that suggest Shakespeare did not write his own work were "baseless" and were, in fact, conspiracy theories comparable to flat Earth belief, doubting the veracity of the moon landings, or even holocaust denial. It was claimed that by doubting Shakespeare's authorship credentials, the likes of Elizabeth Winkler and Dr Ros Barber were a threat to liberal society.

Which is quite a stretch. Dr Barber herself is pretty strident in her views as a doubter but she didn't go that far. Though she did go all the way to court (in a case she lost at great cost to herself) after replying to the criticism in a way which clearly seriously irked the journalist, Oliver Kamm, in question. Fearing further legal proceedings, Dr Barber wisely steered clear of discussing the court case but other than that she was more than generous with her time and certainly very knowledgeable on the subject but is she correct when she claims Shakespeare did not write the books that have his name on?

Quite frankly, I don't know and I don't particularly care either way. Spending decades of one's life fixating on this question (a question that is highly unlikely to be satisfactorily answered) seems a bit strange but we all have things we love and obsess about so why not this? Thanks to Jade, Dewi, Tim, Michael, and Paula for joining me at the talk, to Pizza Union on City Road for filling my tummy beforehand, to The Bell, the London Fortean Society, and David V Barrett for hosting and thanks to Shakespeare (or whoever it really was) for writing books that have become so important a part of English language and our cultural heritage that over four hundred years later we're still talking about them. I exited The Bell, thankfully not pursued by a bear.