I have never been to Stratford-upon-Avon, mostly because Shakespeare’s works were something I had to study (as an English major), rather than something that called to me. The history of a person, place, or thing always intrigues me though, particularly if there’s a mystery of some kind surrounding it. I say this to explain my fascination with the mysterious pieces to the puzzle of Shakespeare that Elizabeth Winkler reveals, chapter by chapter, in her book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies.
I love the term “Bardolatry” - the title of the chapter that explores the origins of the guy from Stratford’s fame - because when Britain’s leading Shakespeare authority, Stanley Wells, declared it “immoral” to question history and “take credit away” from Shakespeare, it definitely feels idolatrous. Winkler takes the reader into that history which gave the guy from Stratford the credit to begin with.
The English Civil War in 1642 resulted in the closure of all theaters, and condemnation of plays as “Spectacles of Pleasure” by the Puritanical Parliament. “English drama was cast out along with the English monarchy,” (p.103) and drama was banned for nearly twenty years, only returning with the restoration of the king. But there had been no plays written in England for two decades, so instead of waiting them to be written when the king re-opened the theaters, the English turned to the drama of the old days. Hence, the revival of old works – including Shakespeare’s - in 1659 for the new king’s entertainment
Old tennis courts were converted into small theaters with expensive tickets, remaking theater from the entertainment of the masses into the exclusive delight of the nobility. Charles II had seen women perform onstage during his exile in France, so women could finally play the heroines, including the cross-dressing ones, which increased the plays’ appeal across the gender spectrum. And politically, Shakespeare’s plays fed the story of a nation restoring a banished monarch and a Prince avenging his father’s murder, and with new Third and Fourth Folio editions ensuring the plays’ survival in print, by the time Voltaire visited in 1728, Shakespeare was “rarely called anything but divine in England.”
In 1709, author Nicholas Rowe placed advertisements in the London Gazette and the Daily Courant, requesting anyone with reliable information on Shakespeare’s biography to come forward, apparently without success, because Rowe’s introduction to a new edition of the plays was dotted with few facts – many of which proved to be inaccurate or unverifiable - which were repeated as truth for the next 150 years. Rowe claims Shakespeare was caught poaching deer in a deer park that didn’t exist until the 1700s, was prosecuted “somewhat too severely,” then wrote a bitter ballad against the owner to avenge himself (the ballad doesn’t exist), and was then forced to leave Stratford to go to London, where he promptly began writing his immortal plays. Rowe also claimed that the Earl of Southampton gave him a “bounty” of a thousand pounds with no record of this, or any contribution by Southampton to William Shakespeare.
A few documents did turn up in the 1700s – a loan, a real estate investment, and the request for a coat of arms – but even the Stratford vicar who discovered Shakespeare’s will noted that it “appears to me so dull and irregular, so absolutely devoid of the least particle of that spirit which animated our great Poet; that it must lessen his Character as a Writer.”
Meanwhile, sixteenth-century visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon hoped to find relics at Shakespeare’s large house on Chapel street, now no longer held by anyone of his family (it was inherited by his daughter, and then her daughter, who died without children). The current owner was so annoyed by the constant tourist traffic that he had the backyard mulberry tree, said to have been planted by the poet himself, cut down to stop the invasion of his privacy. Townsfolk retaliated by smashing the windows of the house, and the feud continued until 1759 when the owner demolished the entire house – so enraging the locals that they drove him out of town. Tenants of a house on Henley Street then declared their house to be the birthplace of Shakespeare in hopes of capitalizing on the tourist trade, despite the fact that Shakespeare’s father didn’t rent that particular house until his son was eleven years old. In 1769, the leading Shakespearean actor of his day, David Garrick, organized a bicentennial of the Stratford guy’s birth, cementing the connection between Stratford and Shakespeare, and elevating his birthplace – a room on the upper floor of the Henley street house – to the level of shrine. And still, no documents or evidence of the playwright’s genius were discovered, leading to forgers in 1794 claiming to have discovered such documents in the old trunk of a mysterious gentleman collector.
But a lawyer with a passion for Shakespeare was suspicious, and in 1796 he published a report showing that the papers weren’t even good forgeries. The spelling and vocabulary were off, using words that didn’t come into use until the 1700s, the dates were wrong, and Southampton’s signature didn’t match his signature in verified documents. The forgers confessed, but even the passionate lawyer could never find enough documentation to prove the literary prowess of the man credited with writing Shakespeare’s words.
A new forger emerged in the 1830s – a successful London journalist who did actually discover credible Shakespeare documents: a record showing that Shakespeare hoarded ten bushels of corn, and a lawsuit regarding his failure to pay tithes. But these were not the literary records scholars wanted, so he then added other “discoveries” including twenty-one new documents. In 1858, he announced his discovery of a new Folio that featured the author’s annotations and revisions, which he guarded from all eyes, and kept at the home of his patron. But when the patron died, the Folio was left to the British Museum, where the forger’s fraud unraveled. The annotations were found to be modern forgeries with pencil markings beneath archaic looking ink, and even so, it would take years to separate the forger’s authentic discoveries from his lies.
Biographies of Shakespeare abounded, with fictionalized retellings of myths – including the deer poaching legend, and other unverifiable “facts” about the man from Stratford – which were actually more dangerous than the forgeries, “for while the forgeries were eventually discarded, the fictions lasted.” Professor Stanley Wells, who declared that it is immoral to question history, wrote his own biography – Shakespeare Beyond Doubt – featuring an image of actor Joseph Fiennes from the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love on the cover (oh, the irony). In one chapter, Wells catalogued the Renaissance allusions to Shakespeare as “clear evidence” of his authorship, while leaving out other, less favorable allusions to the “crafty cuttle hiding in a cloud of ink” and “that poet who takes a name from shaking and spear,” all while declaring the support for his hypothesis fact.
Elizabeth Winkler ends the Bardolatry chapter with a description of her visit to Stratford to interview Professor Wells, who furiously canceled their first meeting because he finally did his research about her and decided she was “anti-Stratfordian.” She wandered to the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare and his family are buried. The slab that marks his burial spot is “famously strange,” with no name and no identification of him as a poet. Instead, the attributed author of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream apparently wrote a curse for his epitaph:
Good Friend for Jesus Sake Forbeare,
To Digg the Dust Enclosed Heare:
Blest Be The Man That Spares These Stones,
And Curst Be He That Moves My Bones.
Photo of the Henley Street “Birthplace” by ianpudsey, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52949778