A Comedy of Errors. John Watt
not an author.
Approximately fifty per cent of the information we have relates to business activities, suggesting that he was, in fact, more of a merchant and money lender than an actor, and certainly not an author. There exists no contemporary letters from anyone to anyone referring to the Stratford actor as being a poet or in any way connected with writing.
All of these known facts would cover no more than two or three sheets of A4 paper, so how on earth could anyone write a biography stretching to hundreds of pages of a person they know so little about! There is only one way and that is by the imagination of the writers, who have filled in the substantial gaps with a wish list of their own; by inserting unsubstantiated facts, conjecture and stories handed down from other dubious sources, brainwashing everyone who reads their outpourings. It’s a distortion of history and should be condemned without qualification. These biographies should be re-classified and listed as fictional novels to avoid polluting the minds of future generations.
I have recently purchased another Shakspere biography to add to my growing collection. How many do we need? The author of this biography makes the following statement: ‘in truth, as I maintain at the outset of this book, we know more about William Shakspere than that of any of his literary contemporaries bar Ben Jonson’. Well, I’m afraid this statement is incorrect and misleading. Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford, Spenser and Middleton to name but a few, were all playwrights at the time of Shakspere and we have plenty of data on them covering their birth, parentage, primary and university education and their subsequent achievements in life.
This statement is a re-phrasing of the one made in Sidney Lee’s biography, in which he stated: ‘The scantiness of contemporary records of William Shakespeare’s career has been much exaggerated’. Lee later has a fit of honesty by adding ‘nevertheless some important links are missing and at some critical points appeal to conjecture is inevitable’. Lee’s biography ran to over 700 pages, most of which was conjecture. In the case of Shakspere, it seems that we can rely on very little of what has been told to us.
Terry Deary the writer, actor and television presenter, seems to have a dislike for historians, suggesting that they are nearly as seedy and devious as politicians (a bit harsh on historians, I thought. How could anyone match politicians for deviousness?) and that ‘they pick on a particular angle and select the parts to prove their case and make a name for themselves, they don’t write objective history’. Reviewing the biographies on this man from Stratford, Mr Deary has hit the nail on the head: Shakspere’s biographers don’t write objectively. If they cannot lay out the case in a truthful and candid manner, what hope is there?
Many suggest that this portrayal of William Shakspere as the author is the biggest confidence trick in history. Read any of the biographies and you find them full of maybe, possibly, could have been, doubtless, in all likelihood, probably, it is commonly assumed, we have some reason to believe, and a host of other conjecture. The situation has now developed where conjecture is being dropped and submitted as fact ‑ which, in most cases, it plainly isn’t.
The case is based on the flimsiest of evidence, yet we continue to educate millions of people with data based on a myth, along with taking millions of pounds from unsuspecting tourists visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, which has now become the Blackpool of the Midlands. They will be selling sticks of rock there soon with the word ‘Stratford’ running down the middle.
This spin and conjecture is a distraction and is being used to camouflage the lack of information these biographers have on the man, leaving the public with the impression that there is no case to be answered as far as an alternative author is concerned. As Germaine Greer astutely points out in her recent book, Shakespeare’s Wife, ‘all biographies of Shakspere are houses built of straw’. I think it’s time to burn this particular house down.
Whilst alive, Shakspere was only ever known or identified as an actor, a shareholder in theatres, a property owner, money lender and merchant, and never as an author, which is something the film Anonymous got fundamentally wrong. As we shall see, facts are thin on the ground as far as Mr Shakspere is concerned. Despite endless searches by academics, researchers and historians of all persuasions, no evidence has been found to prove that he was the author. There is not even a consensus on what he looked like. There are very few cases in history of famous people not being recognised during their lifetime. So desperate were they to find something tangible directly linking Shakspere to the plays that, in the late 1800s, a man called Ireland drip-fed a list of documents supposedly relating to Shakspere, which were embraced by so-called Shakespearian scholars. They later turned out to have been fraudulent, causing a great deal of embarrassment amongst our so-called ‘experts’.
The following is a quote from Mark Twain, taken from a short book he wrote called Is Shakespeare Dead? in which he set out the case against the man from Stratford:
I took the occasion to air the opinion that the Stratford Shakespeare was a person of no public consequence or celebrity during his lifetime, but was utterly obscure and unimportant and not only in great London, but also in the little village where he was born, where he lived a quarter of century and where he died and was buried. I argued that if he had been a person of any note at all, aged villagers would have much to tell about him many a year after his death, instead of being unable to furnish inquirers a single fact connected with him. I believe and still believe, that if he had been famous, his notoriety would have lasted as mine has lasted in my native village in Missouri. It is a good argument, prodigiously a strong one and the most formidable one for even the most gifted and ingenious and plausible Stratfordian to get around or explain away.
Ian Mortimer, in his book The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, highlighted some important facts about this particular century. Anyone interested in this period would find the book very informative, one statistic being ‘that the average density was just under 60 people per square mile compared to 1000 today’. In a small town like Stratford, this density would have been even lower and yet no-one can recall him as a playwright or, indeed, as a famous local man.
This obscurity is nothing short of astonishing considering he was a man who, as we will see, was obsessed with money, never took the credit for his work and died leaving no inclination or suggestion that he was an author of any kind, let alone the works of Shakespeare. This is not a conspiracy theory put forward by mad and demented people, as Stratfordians and historians would have us believe. This as Ralf Waldo Emerson the American essayist and poet once noted, “are people who cannot marry the evidence to the facts”. We have been served a diet of misinformation for hundreds of years by his biographers and supporters, the amount of which beggars belief and, unfortunately, still continues.
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