Double Falsehood, Brean Hammond (ed.), Arden Shakespeare, 464pp, £16.99 (paperback)
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro, Faber and Faber, 384pp, £20 (hardback)

Shakespeare is familiar, perhaps intensely familiar, to most of us, but do we really know what he sounds like? Is this Shakespeare: ‘worthy the man/Who with my dukedoms heirs my better glories’? Or this: ‘This maid,/For whom my sighs ride on the night’s chill vapour’? Or even this: ‘He doth solicit the return of gold/To purchase certain horse that like him well’? Alexander Pope thought these last lines ‘very absurd’, and it is hard not to agree with him. But all three quotations come from Double Falsehood; Or, the Distrest Lovers, a romantic tragicomedy that premiered in 1727, and was published in 1728 with the boast of having been ‘Written Originally by W. SHAKESPEARE’. As editor Brean Hammond notes, the play was ‘prepared and presented for production’ by the controversial eighteenthcentury editor and author Lewis Theobald – and the degree of agency contained in that verb ‘prepared’ has been the subject of extensive scholarly debate. Is the play Shakespeare’s? Or James Shirley’s? Philip Massinger’s? John Fletcher’s? Is it a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher? Or is it a forgery, a falsehood itself, composed by the ambitious, often quixotic, and generally impecunious Theobald? Does it even matter who wrote the play?

Double Falsehood’s plot, based on the story of Cardenio found in Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, is straightforward to the point of starkness. Indeed, if Don Quixote is intricate and self-referential – Cervantes called his work a ‘selftwined threde’ – the author of Double Falsehood (whoever that was) has unwound things to a single strand. The ‘double falsehood’ is enacted by Henriquez, a nobleman and libertine, a ‘truant to my wishes and his birth’, according to his father, who pursues the hearts, and bodies, of both the virtuous Violante, and Leonora, fiancée of his friend Julio. The play charts the pursuit, the revelation, and the reconciliation. It is full of moments that seem to remind us of other Shakespeare plays: the balcony scene; the circulating letters; the morally questionable father; the quartet of entangled young lovers; but then, so do many plays, by many authors. Compared to Shakespeare’s other tragicomedies (Pericles; Cymbeline; The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest), Double Falsehood – as Hammond notes – seems unsubtle, even clumsy, making meeker demands on its audience.

We know a few things for certain. Several seventeenth-century documents suggest there was indeed a play, called Cardenio, probably written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the Cardenio story from Don Quixote. Although no printed or manuscript text of Cardenio survives, it was performed twice at court in late 1612/1613: among other things, payments survive to the actor John Hemminges – a little more than £6, ‘for him soelf and the rest of his fellowes’, for a performance ‘before the Duke of Savoyes Embassadour’. A century later, Lewis Theobald claimed to have a manuscript copy of the play, deriving from the Duke’s theatrical company in the 1660s. Theobald, oddly, or perhaps proprietarily, seems to have shown no one this ‘dear Relick’, and it no longer survives: Hammond thinks it was lost in the fire that destroyed Covent Garden Theatre Museum in 1808. But Theobald tidied the text – ‘adapted for the eighteenth-century stage’ is his way of putting it – and offered the waiting world (as the 1728 dedication has it) a ‘remnant’ of Shakespeare’s ‘pen’, albeit revised by Theobald’s own interventions. And this is Hammond’s carefully-argued thesis: that what we have, in this meticulous (if occasionally, in its commentary, repetitious) new Arden edition, is a ‘ghost’ of a play by Shakespeare and Fletcher; that the Double Falsehood we can read today is an eighteenth-century adaptation (by Lewis Theobald) of a Restoration theatrical revision (perhaps by Thomas Betterton or William Davenant) of a Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration. Double Falsehood is ‘a palimpsest that contains elements dating back to c.1611-12, elements dating to the mid-1660s, and elements first introduced in the mid-to-late 1720s’. There is Shakespeare in there, Hammond suggests, albeit mixed with other things.

Those suspecting Lewis Theobald of faking the whole thing do not have far to look for unflattering representations of their man. Responding to Theobald’s attack in Shakespeare Restored, or, A specimen of the many errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope (1726), Pope cast Theobald as ‘Tibbald’ in The Dunciad (1728), King of the Dunces, where he was adopted by the goddess of ‘Dulness’. William Hogarth’s print The Distrest Poet (1737), depicts a writer, tucked in a cramped and humble garret, scratching his head, surrounded by the detritus of poverty and unrealised literary ambitions (a bin full of discarded papers): this is Theobald, mid-composition, and clearly broke. Mutterings of plagiarism were common, too: watchmaker Henry Mesteyer claimed Theobald’s 1715 play, The Perfidious Brother, was stolen, wholesale, from a manuscript he gave Theobald.

There are different ways to respond to the complexities of Double Falsehood. American professor and editor Gary Taylor attempted to ‘unadapt’ Theobald’s adaptation to reclaim a speculative ‘original’: ‘[t]he result is not authentic (it could never be),’ Taylor wrote, ‘but it is at least, I hope, authentish’. Renaissance scholarship’s superstar, Stephen Greenblatt, collaborated with playwright Charles Mee to write Cardenio (2008), which includes parts of Double Falsehood as a play-within-a-play. Others prefer to wait and hope that a cache of manuscripts will finally turn up (perhaps also containing the lost plays of Sophocles, and Sibelius’s eighth symphony). Brean Hammond’s response – both more generous and more modest – is this new Arden edition, and it is hard to imagine a more careful layingout of the whole pleasing tangle that is the story of Double Falsehood.

Controversies about Shakespeare’s authorship also form the subject of James Shapiro’s tremendously enjoyable Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? The title’s question mark is in some ways misleading: Shapiro has no doubts that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and no doubts that those (including Mark Twain; Henry James; Sigmund Freud) who propose other authors (Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere; Mary Sidney; Fulke Greville; Christopher Marlowe) misunderstand the nature of early modern literary production. But his account of why and how people have argued against Shakespeare’s authorship is riveting. Crucial to the history of the controversy is a book by Edmond Malone with perhaps the most utilitarian title in the history of criticism: his Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written (1778), a first effort to construct a secure chronology. While there were some errors (Malone has The Winter’s Tale in 1594, almost twenty years too early), the framework enabled critics, for the first time, to relate Shakespeare’s life to his writing. And this, in turn, meant readers who expected to discern a clear match between what was known of Shakespeare’s biography and the subjects of the plays, could begin to doubt the bard’s claims of authorship. What could a Stratford glover’s son know of Italy; the law; aristocracy; classical culture; genius?

Listening to any Shakespeare-denier (or anti-Stratfordian) piecing together the increasingly baroque turns of their theories is an ultimately dispiriting experience: the sense is of an endless energy yoked to a futile cause, usually motivated, fundamentally, by an undeclared preoccupation with class: ‘How could a provincial grammar school boy …’, and so on. But Shapiro animates these implausibilities, and moves swiftly, and generously, across the central cases. Delia Bacon argued that Shakespeare’s works were written by Francis Bacon, and others, in an attempt to oppose the despotism of Elizabeth I and James I and to circulate a republican political agenda – a thesis which in fact anticipates recent scholarly emphasis on Shakespeare’s plays as both politically radical, and as the products of artistic collaboration. J. T. Looney, a school teacher with a distaste for modernity’s disruptions, argued that ‘Shakespeare’ must be an aristocrat; a man with feudal connections; an enthusiast for Italy, music, falconry; a Catholic; a man with a ‘conflicted’ attitude to women – and consequently settled on Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. All these counter-Shakespeares still have their advocates today: indeed, the Oxfordian movement seems to be gathering momentum all the time, due in part to Charles Ogburn’s nine hundred-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984), and more recently to the Internet, the perfect medium for those who believe that modern-day Oxfordians face (in Ogburn’s words) an ‘intellectual Watergate’.

Shapiro’s book delivers, in scrupulously fair prose, a series of quiet but ultimately fatal blows to anti-Stratfordian thinking. But Contested Will is not only concerned with the particularities of Shakespeare’s rivals. What also animates the book, and provides the subject of the passionately argued epilogue, is the more fundamental question of the relationship between literature and life: ‘the larger story of the way we read now’. For Shapiro, most anti-Stratfordian polemic takes as its mistaken axiom the belief that an author’s life can be read in his literary remains: hence, a play about nobility requires an ennobled author; a play about Venice demands a well-travelled writer; and on and on, into absurdity. Shapiro mounts a very sensible case for the danger of reading pre-modern literature as private or confessional – a flawed and ahistorical methodology that underpins, Shapiro notes, two of the more high-profile recent studies of Shakespeare: Michael Wood’s BBC television series, In Search of Shakespeare (2003), and Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderfully readable Will in the World (2004). Both Wood and Greenblatt regard the plays and poems as providing (in Shapiro’s words) ‘extraordinary access to the poet’s desires and anxieties’, but Shapiro argues that early modern writers simply did not seek to include accounts of their lives and convictions within their imaginative writing.

Shapiro’s argument is based on two assertions. First, that ‘autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and second, that plays, in particular, were not seen as places for confessional, authorial allusions. It is worth lingering over both these claims.

Shapiro suggests that scholars ‘who have scoured the period for evidence of autobiographical writing have come up almost empty-handed’. But this is not quite right; or at least, it is too restricted a description. (I write as one who has done some scouring.) The term ‘autobiography’ was coined to describe an eighteenth-century form: a narrative that is retrospective, chronological, and whose central theme is the development of the author’s personality. This stress on development and pattern serves later autobiographical writers like Rousseau, Goethe, and Gosse, but is not applicable to sixteenth and seventeenth-century writing. Rather than to note the inevitable absence of an eighteenth-century genre in the sixteenth century, however, a better method is to look, more inclusively, and with greater historical sensitivity, at the various ways in which a life might be recorded in the early modern period: at forms of ‘life-writing’ (to use a less restricted term) available in Shakespeare’s England that do not, perhaps, conform to our expectations. And with a more capacious sense of how a life might be written, the field opens up: spiritual journals, which use borrowed Biblical language to describe crisis, conversion, and faith; printed books, such as almanacs, annotated with notes in the margins describing the owner’s activities; financial records which evolve into narratives of the compiler’s life, where an account of one’s money generates an account of one’s life; letters; family Bibles, annotated with notes; quotations from poetry and plays, collected in commonplace books and loosely assembled to convey a sense of a life as the rearticulation of gathered sentences; and many other forms. It is true that these are not autobiographies in our modern sense, but they certainly are forms of writing that register a writer’s sense of their own life, and, despite Shapiro’s claim, suggest a powerful and widely disseminated autobiographical impulse – even if they do it in ways that do not match our expectations. In fact, this culture of self-writing resonates in Shakespeare’s plays, which feature many characters preoccupied with, and often tormented by, imagining their being as a written text: ‘I am a scribbled form,’ says the collapsing King John, ‘drawn with a pen/Upon a parchment, and against this fire/Do I shrink up.’ In this slippage between person and text, characters are characters in that double sense: both personalities and written letters. This is what Claudius puns on, as he worries over Hamlet’s letter telling of his ‘sudden and more strange return’. ‘Know you the hand?’ says Laertes. ‘Tis Hamlet’s character,’ Claudius replies. Shapiro is right to note that pre-modern ‘conceptions of self and of one’s place in the world were not identical to our own’, but the implication of this is not that we abandon our search for a pre-modern autobiographical impulse, but rather that we reformulate the concepts and terms that organise our enquiry.

What, then, of Shapiro’s assertion that drama is particularly resistant to confessional allusions? It is certainly the case that to read a play for direct references to an author’s feelings or beliefs goes against everything we know about how early modern drama operated as a genre and as a commercial enterprise, and Shapiro is right to say that Shakespeare was ‘too accomplished a writer to recycle [his personal experiences] … in the often clumsy and undigested way that critics in search of autobiographical traces … would have us believe’. But there might be other, less clumsy, and less undigested, ways in which a life could inform, and find a place within, literature. At several points, Shapiro uses the term ‘embedded’ to describe – in order to dismiss – the supposed presence of an author’s life in his or her work. But ‘embedded’ suggests a life as something whole, nestling within a literary work, available for direct recovery: reach in – there – and you can grasp it. There are surely fitter, more flexible ways of imagining the relationship between an author and his or her writing.

In the final lines of the book, Shapiro offers two models for reading Shakespeare’s plays: one that suggests Shakespeare wrote from pure imagination; a second that responds to the literature with a need to pick out the life that lurks within.

We can believe that Shakespeare himself thought that poets could give to ‘airy nothing’ a ‘local habitation and a name’. Or we can conclude that this ‘airy nothing’ turns out to be a disguised something that needs to be decoded, and that Shakespeare couldn’t imagine ‘the forms of things unknown’ without having experienced them first-hand. It’s a stark and consequential choice.

But is that really the choice – between a kind of ex nihilo imagination, and a crude idea of literature as something to decode? There is a vast space in between, where a more complex but still potentially discernible interaction between life and writing, and between experience and imagination, takes place. This is a challenge for literary scholarship: to find ways of analysing and drawing the relationship between life and literature which convey this intricacy, and resist either denying any link at all (one easy option), or simply conflating text and life (another easy option).