Страница 35 из 39
Attached to the north chancel wall overlooking this grouping is the famous life-size painted bust that Edmond Malone ordered whitewashed in the eighteenth century, though it has since been repainted. It shows Shakespeare with a quill and a staring expression and bears the message:
Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed
Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom
Quick nature died’ whose name doth check this tomb
Far more than cost, sith all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.
Since Shakespeare patently has never been within the monument, many have puzzled over what those lines mean. Paul Edmondson has made a particular study of the Shakespeare graves and memorial, but happily agrees that it is more or less impossible to interpret sensibly. “For one thing, it calls itself a tomb even though it is not a tomb at all but a memorial,” he says. One suggestion that has many times been made is that the monument contains not the body of Shakespeare but the body of his work: his manuscripts.
“A lot of people ache to believe that the manuscripts still exist somewhere,” Edmondson says, “but there is no evidence to suppose that they are in the monument or anywhere else. You just have to accept that they are gone for good.”
As for the heroes of this chapter, Henry Condell died four years after the publication of the First Folio, in 1627, and John Heminges followed three years later. They were buried near each other in the historic London church of Saint Mary Aldermanbury. That church was lost in the Great Fire of 1666 and replaced by a Christopher Wren structure, which in turn was lost to German bombs in World War II.
Chapter Nine. Claimants
THERE IS AN EXTRAORDINARY- seemingly an insatiable-urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare. The number of published books suggesting-or more often insisting-as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.
Shakespeare’s plays, it is held, so brim with expertise-on law, medicine, statesmanship, court life, military affairs, the bounding main, antiquity, life abroad-that they ca
The controversy has been given respectful airings in the highest quarters. PBS, the American television network, in 1996 produced an hour-long documentary unequivocally suggesting that Shakespeare probably wasn’t Shakespeare. Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times have both devoted generous amounts of space to sympathetically considering the anti-Stratford arguments. The Smithsonian Institution in 2002 held a seminar titled “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”-a question that most academics would have thought hopelessly tautological. The best-read article in the British magazine History Today was one examining the authorship question. Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be-I weep to say it-Elizabeth I. Perhaps the most extraordinary development of all is that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London-built as a monument for his plays and with aspirations to be a world-class study center-became, under the stewardship of the artistic director Mark Rylance, a kind of clearinghouse for anti-Stratford sentiment.
So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment-actually all of it, every bit-involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book,” a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement ca
Daniel Wright, a professor at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, and an active anti-Stratfordian, wrote in Harper’s Magazine that Shakespeare was “a simple, untutored wool and grain merchant” and “a rather ordinary man who had no co
That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605-that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be-Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages as the author of the so
The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents co
So where did all the anti-Stratford sentiment come from? The story begins, a little unexpectedly, with an odd and frankly unlikely American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon was born in 1811 in the frontier country of Ohio into a large family and a small log cabin. The family was poor and became more so after her father died when Delia was young.
Delia was bright and apparently very pretty but not terribly stable. As an adult, she taught school and wrote a little fiction, but mostly she led a life of spinsterly anonymity in New Haven, Co
Gradually, for reasons that are not clear, she became convinced that Francis Bacon, her distinguished namesake, was the true author of the works of William Shakespeare. The idea was not entirely original to Delia Bacon-one Reverend James Wilmot, a provincial rector in Warwickshire, raised questions about Shakespeare’s authorship as early as 1785. But his doubts weren’t known until 1932, so Delia’s conviction was arrived at independently. Though she had no known genealogical co
In 1852 she traveled to England and embarked on a long and fixated quest to prove William Shakespeare a fraud. It is easy to dismiss Delia as mildly demented and inconsequential, but there was clearly something beguiling in her ma