What’s in a name? He whom we call The Bard

By any other name would read as well.

Writing in The New York Times last month, William Niederkorn gave a friendly nod to four recent books of Shakespearean scholarship. None of the four is likely to settle an argument that has been raging for the past 300 years: Did William Shakespeare really write the plays and poems attributed to him? If he didn’t write them, who did?

In case you have come late to this kerfuffle, the tempest rages about the sheer improbability of Will Shakspere’s authorship. Considering the fame subsequently attached to his name, however you spell it, we know everything about Will’s plays but amazingly little about his life. Except for a few bare bones of unrevealing fact, standard biographies provide little of interest about the man himself. Beyond the dates of his christening (1564) and his death (1616), much of the rest is speculation: “We may assume that” and “it is probable that.”

Thus, in Merriam-Webster’s brief biography, “Will almost certainly attended a local grammar school.” There is a record of his arrest for poaching. In November 1582, Will married Anne Hathaway. Inconveniently, alas, their daughter Susanna was born six months later. In 1584 or thereabouts he moved from Stratford to London. There his natural wit served him well as an actor and theatrical apprentice. He began to write plays and swiftly won recognition for his astonishing gifts. He bought into the Lord Chamberlain’s company. About 1610 he returned to Stratford as a moderately wealthy proprietor. He died. His death was remarkably unremarkable.

That’s about the biographical size of it. Beyond the plays themselves, we actually know very little about their reputed author. Mark Twain was among many close observers to make a point of it: We can go to the standard biographies, he wrote, and learn about every celebrated Englishman but one, “by far the most illustrious of all, Shakespeare!” About the Bard, Twain complained, “you can find – nothing. Nothing of even the slightest importance. Nothing worth the trouble of storing away in your memory. Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly commonplace person.”

Twain loved to stretch things, but he was not stretching by much. The evidence to prove Shakespeare’s authorship is exceedingly slim. Trouble is, the evidence to prove another’s authorship is almost equally unconvincing. Three or four likely candidates have been trotted out, but Marlowe died too young and Bacon lived too long. Lesser nominees have faded from the list. Only Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, remains in competition.

In 1984, in “The Mysterious William Shakespeare,” Charlton Ogburn made a persuasive case for Oxford. If you are minded to tackle just one of a hundred books on the controversy, let me recommend this one. You can find it, I’m told, through the Internet. In his recent article, the Times’ Niederkorn recommends “Shakespeare by Another Name,” in which Mark Anderson also nominates Oxford as the “real” author of the canon. Niederkorn is not persuaded. Each side of the controversy – the Stratfordians and the Oxfordians – relies upon “stories, and not on hard evidence.”

The trouble with fingering Oxford as the real author is that the noble earl died long before Shakespeare’s most powerful plays were published – and Oxford’s teen-aged poems were almost as awful as my own teen-aged poems. And my own were lousy.

Let it go! After all, “the play’s the thing.” Isn’t it? And who said that, anyhow?

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.