Who Wrote Shakespeare?

Not Even Woody Allen Knows

A view of Cambridge from just beyond the Thames

When I had the good fortune to spend a summer semester abroad in 2008, I went to Cambridge with grand dreams of treading the paths where C. S. Lewis once trod. Few things go according to plan, and I spent less time following Lewis’s footsteps than anticipated. But one of the highlights of that trip was a lecture by Stanley Wells and Joseph Fiennes, “Is It True What They Say about Shakespeare?” Wells and Fiennes co-authored Coffee with Shakespeare and the same humor present in that little volume was on display in the drafty Cambridge lecture hall that July evening. It is not every day that I would get to hear someone try and tackle the grand myths surrounding Shakespeare’s biography, and to hear it from two renowned authors on the subject sounded like quite a pleasant evening. Of course, what I did not expect to attend was a brilliant lecture infused with an amazing comedy show that kept most of the audience laughing for the better part of an hour.

Author and Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells

The final topic of the evening, and the most interesting to me, was the controversy about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. At that point in life, I was not aware that so many different people had been proposed as the “real” authors of Shakespeare’s greatest works. The lengthy list of alternative authors included Shakespeare’s contemporaries Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. Dr. Wells was clearly unimpressed by these arguments in his lecture and offered a simple, intelligent explanation: there was no reason to believe anyone wrote Shakespeare except Shakespeare.

I find it remarkably interesting that such a topic can garner an amazing amount of attention. The arguments over authorship for Old English texts spring up from the poems being anonymous to begin with. I had always thought that if the Beowulf poet had signed his name, then perhaps no one would argue anymore over who wrote it. But after the lecture on Shakespeare, I’ve begun to think I’d be wrong. Still, no one questions the authorship of Bede, at least not to my knowledge. It just strikes me as very strange to take on such an argument, since for the moment it has no real impact or even purpose to studying the works of Shakespeare. It would only change the name of the course.

William Shakespeare

I wonder if we were to discover that someone else had actually written Hamlet, if it would change our appreciation of the play. Would we admire it more because of who wrote it? Or perhaps it might seem less authentic to find out it had been mistakenly attributed for so long? Of course, that is what scholars do, they poke and prod at the questions that most people would never think to ask.

To wrap up their talk, the scholarly comedians wrapped up their lecture with a skit that Woody Allen had written about the ‘true’ author of Shakespeare. I’d not heard it before and found myself laughing aloud as Woody Allen confused himself about the identity of Shakespeare and then eventually fearing that more than just Shakespeare had been “ghost written.” It was, however, the concluding statement that made me laugh the hardest that evening, and it also shed the best light on the entire argument, because “if Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, then who wrote Christopher Marlowe?”

Christopher Marlowe, or is it?

Overall, that night prepared me for a lot of the debates I would encounter in graduate school, especially in courses about ancient texts like the Bible and Plato. And I hope I’ve been able to handle these arguments with the same humor and confidence that I saw on display that Summer so long ago.