Was Shakespeare a woman? And did Taylor Swift know him best?
320pp, Hodder, £25 (0844 871 1514), ebook £14.99
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SHAKESPEARE WAS A WOMAN AND OTHER HERESIES
419pp, S&S, £20 (0844 871 1514), ebook £15.49
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Unlike Shakespeare’s whining schoolboy, satchel on back, “creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”, I positively strode in March to the opening of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in Glendale, Arizona, eagerly anticipating her rendition of the perfect pop song, Love Story
– “Little did I know / That you were Romeo, you were throwin’ pebbles / And my daddy said, ‘Stay away from Juliet.’” At the climax of the song, Juliet’s dad relents, Romeo pulls out a ring, and the girl heads off to buy a wedding dress.
As Sophie Duncan shows in Searching for Juliet, her witty and scholarly history of the heroine’s “afterlife”, Swift joins a long line of creative artists in every conceivable form – not to mention advertisers, purveyors of tourist tat in Verona and social media influencers – who have repurposed the tragedy in which Shakespeare more or less invented the idea of the teenager in love.
The story had been told before, but Shakespeare was the first to make Juliet so very young: just 13.
Duncan writes especially well about Franco Zeffirelli’s casting of 15-year-old Olivia Hussey in his 1968 film, for which the promotional material said: “The star-crossed lovers of Verona could also be the love children of Haight-Ashbury and the East Village.” Apparently Zeffirelli had hoped to cast Paul McCartney as Romeo. Though this didn’t work out, McCartney, always the gentleman, took Hussey for an evening at a nightclub and sent her a telegram saying, “You’re a beautiful Juliet.”
We can say with certainty that Juliet was originally a boy: Shakespeare wrote the part for an apprentice male actor. Not until 1662, Duncan reminds us, was there a female Juliet, the 25-year-old Mary Saunderson, who duly married the actor who played… Mercutio.
The proposition that Juliet’s creator was a woman is harder to sustain. Four years ago, the American journalist Elizabeth Winkler published an essay in
The Atlantic suggesting that the true author of the plays was Emilia Lanier, née Bassano, daughter of
Young love: Olivia Hussey in Franco Zeffirelli’s (1968)
If Shakespeare were Italian, he presumably would have known that Venice has canals
a Venetian-born musician at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. She was an accomplished poet and the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. This, despite the fact that her most notable poem, a pious number titled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, bears no resemblance to the works attributed to the man from Stratford, which form the bedrock of not religious but secular English literature.
Now, in Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, Winkler offers an entertaining survey of the history of the authorship debate. She even reports that “[then-]Prince Charles had written to Prof Jonathan Bate, asking for a list of arguments backing Shakespeare. Was the Prince of Wales plagued by a faltering faith? If he had doubts, it would not be wise to let on – not as President of the Royal Shakespeare Company and not, certainly, as he was approaching his throne.” I can assure Winkler that the request from His future Majesty came only out of a desire to win the argument with his father – an advocate of the diplomat Henry Neville – that was, it seems, a fixture every Christmas at Sandringham.
Leadership of a Shakespearean theatre company is not inherently an impediment to “anti-Stratfordian” beliefs. The best chapter in Winkler’s book recounts her interview with Mark Rylance, as great a Shakespearean actor as there has ever been and the original
artistic director of the reconstructed Globe Theatre. He describes his conversion to the Baconian theory on the grounds of his wonder at the philosophical depth of the plays: surely they were the product of a philosopher, not a mere grammar-school boy from the provinces.
Yet one might just as well say that the knowledge of military matters in the plays means they must have been written by a soldier: rival playwright Ben Jonson, perhaps, who did indeed serve in the
Netherlands. Or there is the argument that the frequent Italian settings means that they were written by an Italian. Step forward, lexicographer John Florio, one of the candidates ignored by Winkler – though he would presumably have known that Venice has canals, something of which the author of The Merchant of Venice and Othello: the Moor of Venice seems to have been ignorant.
Winkler unravels a wealth of cryptograms, anagrams, canards and conspiracies of the kind beloved of “anti-Stratfordians”, but studiously ignores testimony from Shakespeare’s contemporaries – Jonson, Leonard Digges, William Camden, George Buc and several more – in which the actor from beside the Avon is identified as the author of the plays. Nor does she address the compelling evidence for collaborative playwriting that is a stumbling block to those who believe that Will was merely the front man for an aristocratic amateur such as Bacon or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
The ultimate explanation for the authorship controversy is that everyone – schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, lean and slippered pantaloon, woman, outsider – can find themselves in Shakespeare. Yes, you can find Bacon, de Vere and Emilia Bassano in Shakespeare: not because any of them wrote the plays, but because Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson recognised, the “Soul of the Age”.