On Monday (3 June) I was the opening speaker at a debate held at the English-Speaking Union headquarters in London at which the motion was ‘This house believes that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays and poems attributed to him’. The other speakers in favour of the motion were Paul Edmondson and Michael Dobson; opposing were Roland Emmerich (the director of the film Anonymous), Charles Beauclerk (descended from the Earl of Oxford) and William Leahy, who runs a course in Shakespeare Authorship Studies at Brunel University. Each of us was allowed five minutes; I kept pretty strictly to factual matters in order to set the scene. The event was attended by a full house of some 120 people including other academics, students and press – also Janet Suzman – who took part in a question and answer session. It was live streamed on the internet. There was no formal vote, but we were declared the winners by acclamation. Here is my speech:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to explain in brief the grounds for my conviction that, give or take a few collaborations with other professional dramatists, the works currently attributed to William Shakespeare are the work of the townsman of Stratford-upon-Avon whose baptism on 26 April 1564 is recorded in the town’s parish registers and who is memorialized in the parish church with a bust and with tributary verses written in both Latin and English.
First, the publication evidence. During his lifetime many plays were attributed to William Shakespeare in the registers of the Stationers’ Company of London and on 37 title pages of first editions and reprints of published versions of these plays. The dedications to the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece bear the signature ‘William Shakespeare’, and the volume of Sonnets published in 1609 describes these poems as ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets, never before imprinted.’ That is the primary evidence.
Second is the evidence afforded by references in works surviving either in print or in manuscript. During his lifetime Shakespeare is mentioned by name as a writer, sometimes in general terms, at other times explicitly as the author of works now attributed to him, by writers including Henry Willobie, William Covell, Richard Barnfield, John Weever, Thomas Freeman, Anthony Scoloker, the anonymous author of the Parnassus plays (in which a character wants a portrait of him as a pin-up) , Henry Chettle, William Camden, William Barksted, Leonard Digges, and the dramatist John Webster. Most significantly in the current context, Francis Meres, in 1598, not merely named 12 plays as having been written by William Shakespeare but did so in the same paragraph as a separate allusion to the Earl of Oxford as a writer of comedies. The fact that the names of most of these writers are little known today does nothing to devalue their evidence. After Shakespeare’s death there are most conspicuously the remarks about him made by Ben Jonson in conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden.
There also exist numerous references to William Shakespeare as an actor and shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s Men including references to his having acted in plays by Ben Jonson.
These facts alone, I submit, are enough to demonstrate beyond doubt that, on evidence supplied by many of his contemporaries and in theatrical records, William Shakespeare was a poet, a dramatist, and an actor, and that works currently attributed to him were written by a man of that name.
Whether this man was the William Shakespeare baptized in Stratford in 1564 might seem to be of only secondary importance, but even so there is unimpeachable evidence that he was. First is the evidence supplied by the memorial verses on the monument to the man of Stratford which compare him to great figures of classical antiquity – Virgil, Nestor, and Socrates – which declare that he now inhabits Olympus, and which claim that ‘all that he hath writ / Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.’ Then there are the verses printed in the First Folio by Ben Jonson which allude to the author of the works in that volume as a ‘swan of Avon.’ Applied to a local wool or malt merchant, however successful, these terms might appear to be improbably hyperbolical. Lines in the Folio by Leonard Digges refer to its author’s ‘Stratford monument.’ An elegy on Shakespeare by William Basse first printed in 1633 links him with the dramatist Francis Beaumont and the poets Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer and refers to him as a ‘tragedian’, which could mean both an actor and a writer of tragedies. One of the numerous manuscripts of this elegy is headed ‘On Mr William Shakespeare he died in April 1616′ and in another ‘On William Shakespeare buried at Stratford-upon-Avon his town of nativity.’
Some of this evidence, ladies and gentlemen, is posthumously derived. Anti-Stratfordians frequently dismiss all such evidence, using the phrase ‘in his lifetime’ as a mindless mantra, as if posthumously derived evidence were ipso facto inadmissible. But if we accepted only evidence derived from a subject’s lifetime we should not know, for example, how Christopher Marlowe died in Deptford, or of Charles Dickens’s relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, or how Anne Frank lived and died in hiding during the Second World War.
This and more, ladies and gentlemen, I submit, amounts to unimpeachable evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did indeed write the works attributed to him, and that attempts to deny this fly in the face of historical fact in favour of improbable – nay, impossible – fiction.’