Читать книгу A Comedy of Errors - John Watt - Страница 5

The problem we have with these “alternative author” supporters that lay claim to ‘their man’ as having been the author, is that they don’t have sufficient evidence either. Several candidates have been put forward as authors and, unlike our man from Stratford, we have a fairly good documented history of these people, including their educational credentials. However, without direct evidence from these various societies, it becomes a fruitless exercise and deflects attention away from the real issue regarding Shakspere the man.

A recent film reviewer summarised the difficulty with the film Anonymous (2011), which depicted Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author, by saying ‘If you can’t convince them, confuse them’. That, unfortunately, is precisely the problem with alternative authors. This film, quite frankly, makes our task more difficult, as it is riddled with inaccuracies, including the portrayal of William Shakspere as a fraud. If someone doesn’t identify himself as being an author in the first instance, how can he or she be accused of fraudulent behaviour? The whole storyline in this film left Stratfordians rubbing their hands in glee that such drivel could have reached the screen.

The Francis Bacon Society claims to have the strongest case, in that they have written evidence of Bacon’s connection with Shakespeare, which is contained in a document known as the ‘Northumberland Manuscript’, which once belonged to Bacon. This document was discovered in 1867 during the demolition of Northhumberland House, in the Strand, London. It contains forty-five unnumbered ‘leaves’. It has Shakespeare and Bacon mentioned on the same page, references to some Shakespeare plays, namely Richard II and Richard III, and various other ‘Shakespeare’ connections. There is also the word ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ contained in this manuscript, which also appears in the Shakespeare play Love’s Labour’s Lost. This is an unusual word and can be traced back to a Latin dictionary which was around in the twelfth century, thus finding it in some of Bacon’s writings is curious. This manuscript is held at Alnwick Castle, the home of the Duke of Northumberland.

It is not necessary to be a supporter of this man Shakspere from Stratford in order to be a Shakespearean scholar, and Baconians are no exception. They can point you to similarities of speech, text and grammar in much of Bacon’s writings, as can Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford’s supporters. There is also the extraordinary finding of a Miss Annette Covington of Cincinnati in the USA of the name Francis Bacon, hidden, but clearly visible, in the opening letter of The Tempest in the 1623 folio.

Unfortunately, Baconians have put too much emphasis on Bacon having inserted cyphers in the plays. This they see as being ‘key’ to this conundrum; however, no one has come up with a clear and easily understood cypher as yet. Bacon did indeed use cyphers in some of his writings, even producing a book on the subject. A gentleman by the name of Ignatius Donnelly produced a two-volume set of books called The Great Cryptogram on the Bacon/Shakspere controversy, which promised a lot and produced little in the way of evidence. His books were first published in 1888 and, although failing to deliver a ‘knockout blow’ in relation to finding a cypher, running to around 1000 pages, the books contained a wealth of information and insight into the works of Shakespeare. Stratfordians may poke fun at Mr Donnelly, but he knew his Shakespeare inside out.

The Baconians’ obsession with cyphers has led to some ridicule and has diverted their cause somewhat. Bacon, if he wrote the works, might have inserted clues to his identity. For him to have incorporated a master cypher throughout these works, considering the span of years taken to write them, including the re-writing and amendments, makes a master cypher, in my opinion, most unlikely.

It is a pity that these societies and the various other people interested in proving that the works were not written by this man from Stratford could not have come together as one. The amount of information available is nothing short of staggering, comprising over 200 years’ worth of collected data. I’m convinced, if each had put aside their preferred candidate, pooled together the information and acted as a ‘team’, the case could be finally settled. My objective, here, is to try and reconstruct the case for them by using the masses of data which they have unearthed.

Whenever I’m in conversation with people and suggest that the works of ‘Shakespeare’ were not written by the man from Stratford, I’m immediately asked, ‘Then who did?’ My response is that I don’t know. Baconians, on the other hand, and the supporters of Marlow and De Vere, etc, come up with a host of ‘maybes’, but unfortunately no acceptable proof. This results in them defending their chosen candidate when we should be concentrating on whether or not Shakspere was the author. We need to drill down deeper into the conundrum to find out more about the credentials of William Shakspere. We have a good starting base in that, as pointed out earlier, he himself never claimed to being the author. All we need to do now is to dissect what’s been fed to us by the Stratfordians and the so-called experts, remove what’s fiction, and then marry this up to the known facts to discern whether it was possible for Shakspere to have produced this collection of literary works

What is not in dispute is that the vast and detailed array of knowledge contained in these works meant that the person would have been well-educated, have had a detailed knowledge in the practice of medicine and the law, and was conversant and well-read in Greek, French, Italian, Latin and Danish. He (or she) would have been knowledgeable of the Italian legal process, customs and geography and familiar with the workings of the French and English courts. Did Mr Shakespeare possess or acquire this knowledge?

This is not another ‘whodunit’ book. This, as I have said beforehand, is not the route that should be taken for, when an alternative author is put forward, it deflects attention away from the real issue. This book is more of a ‘who didn’t do it’. Did William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon possess or acquire the knowledge to be the writer? Let’s try and unfold the myths and see if it was possible.