Who Cares Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Posted by Jem Bloomfield Aug 1, 2007

There has been a long-standing controversy over the authorship of the works attributed to Shakespeare, though it might be better to call it a series of conspiracy theories. Unlike other authorship controversies, such as the debate as to whether Cyril Torneur or Thomas Marston wrote The Revenger’s Tragedy, the Shakespeare question is not a straightforward choice between two contenders. The suggested authors have ranged from other playwrights (Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe) to courtiers (The Earls of Oxford and Essex) and even to the essayist and cryptographer Francis Bacon.

However, from one point of view, the whole controversy is rather pointless. It would certainly be interesting to find out that someone else had written the plays and poems under Shakespeare’s name. It would throw an interesting light on Francis Bacon’s character, for example, to know that he moonlighted as a dramatist. Likewise it would be interesting to compare Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s works side-by-side if it turned out they were written by the same man. but it wouldn’t drastically affect our current view of the works themselves.

This is because so little of our view of Shakespeare is coloured by his biography – no-one seriously tries to interpret the Forest of Arden in As You Like It through the rumours that Shakespeare may have been a poacher. Even on important matters, such as Shakespeare’s education, contemporary sources can take second place to analysis of the works – Ben Jonson’s dictum that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek” has been firmly revised by scholarly work on his classical influences, such as Jonathan Bates’ very readable study Shakespeare and Ovid.

“Shakespeare” is less a person to us than a collection of plays with a recognisable face on the front. Even if we discovered that Kit Marlowe had written the plays, they were still performed at The Globe, and our knowledge of contemporary theatre practice would still be the main influence on our readings of them. The conspiracy theories will no doubt continue, but it is tempting to ask: who cares who wrote Shakespeare?