A late 19th century artistic depiction of the Shakespeare family.

“Perhaps the scene is set for the surrender of a document that will finally resolve the beloved Shakespeare myth,” wonders columnist ROBERT MACKLIN as the Bard takes another pasting, this time from an American author.

William Shakespeare is in trouble. Over the years his authorship of some 37 incomparable stage plays has been challenged by Charles Dickens and many others including Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman (as well as an obscure Canberra author and columnist). 

But until now, his reputation as the greatest playwright of all time has barely been dented.

However, the issue has recently attracted a feminist scholar, Robin P Williams in The Sweet Swan of Avon; and right now, the hugely popular author Jodi Picoult has joined the fight with her new book By Any Other Name,“‘the number one international bestseller”. 

It incorporates two parallel novellas – one modern, the other in Shakespearean times – plus a very extended author’s note in which Jodi measures the Stratford man’s claim. 

Her verdict: “I. Do. Not. Buy. It.”

Her reasons include the usual facts: he was the son of illiterate parents and was not formally educated. There’s no record of his authorship during his lifetime. He never travelled beyond England, though the plays contain details of Italy that only a traveller could know, and a familiarity with the law, the military and the activities of the Royal Court which he also lacked.

Jodi adds one more which I, too, found decisive. She writes: “What really irked me – and stuck like a splinter in my mind – is that Shakespeare created some of the most clever, fierce proto-feminist characters in all of literature – Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Katherine, Cleopatra – but he never taught his own daughters to read or write. They both signed with a mark.’

Unfortunately, her chosen alternative – Emilia Lanier – is no more convincing than the earlier nominations of Sir Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford (Edward de Vere), the Earl of Derby (Ferdinand Strange), Sir Fulke Greville, Christopher Marlowe or Sir Henry Neville. 

Indeed, she’s aware of this and is prepared to accept the view of another doubter, Alexander Waugh who holds that Edward de Vere organised a “writer’s room” and Shakespeare was the alias and front man for them all.

My own research flows on similar lines, but my “writer’s room” is aligned with Robin P Williams’ principal subject, Lady Sidney. Her literary and musical “university” was Wilton House, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke. 

Both of her sons, the 3rd Earl – who is increasingly accepted as the gilded youth of the Shakespearean Sonnets – and his younger brother sponsored the famous First Folio which Jodi ignores but which, I suspect, caps the greatest literary hoax in history.

Both men in turn were Lords Chamberlain who controlled all the plays performed in England during the reign of James I and Charles I. 

In her book, Jodi’s William Shakespeare is not just a failed playwright but a thoroughly unpleasant character – a money-grubber who evaded taxes and gouged his neighbours. 

She suggests he wrote the first draft of Titus Andronicus but for rest he was merely the broker who cloaked their creators when the Tudor and Stuart tyrannies made playwriting for the nobility a deadly dangerous craft. 

While the massive Shakespeare industry will no doubt scoff, By Any Other Name arrives just as the authoritative Oxford Shakespeare has deemed some 18 of the plays to contain more than one creative hand. So this time the authorship question is academically respectable. Perhaps the scene is set for the surrender of a document that will finally resolve the beloved Shakespeare myth. 

robert@robertmacklin.com