litro.co.uk

There’s something odd in how we think about authors. We believe that what they create is so incredibly personal, and yet there’s not necessarily anything about their finished product – blog, novel, poem or newspaper article – that really shows who they are at all.

Unless a writer is particularly desperate (and, speaking from personal experience, some definitely are), you won’t find them standing next to a pile of their books in the store, pitching for sales, and unless you’re very lucky your copy of a book won’t come with a single pen-stroke actually written by the author. Reading is often imagined in terms of being allowed a look inside the author’s head, but at the same time you may not have any idea what that head happens to look like.

This may be part of the reason why there’s a long and noble in the writing world of people publishing under assumed names. George Eliot, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, Lemony Snicket – they’re all carefully chosen personas, turning the flawed, real person (George Eliot was troublesomely a woman, Joseph Conrad bothersomely Polish and Lemony Snicket is a banker, not a very child-friendly or Unfortunate profession) into the kind of author they want to be seen to be.

It’s usually done with good intentions, and often we as readers know perfectly well that we’re being sold a kind of fantasy, but what about those writers who really do try to hide themselves behind another personality? When they get found out (as when Syrian feminist blogger Gay Girl in Damascus turned out to be not a girl at all, or even gay, but a Scottish man called Tom MacMaster) there’s a real feeling of betrayal among their readers. Authorship in the twenty-first century has become incredibly personal, and so a lie about that author’s personality turns everything they have written into an extension of that lie. Now more than ever, we think we know our favourite authors inside and out, and we expect them to be true to our images of them.

William Shakespeare

This deeply personal attitude to authorship is perfectly fine, as far as it goes, but it’s very important to remember that it wasn’t always this way. The mental image most people get when you say author to them – one person, alone in a room, pouring out deathless prose – didn’t really exist as a concept until the Romantic poets popped up at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They began having intensely personal Inner Feelings and, more importantly, getting them published. They made it fashionable for the author to be an individual, encountering the world on his own and responding to it in his own unique way. Before that moment, a writer’s identity simply didn’t matter as much – which, for us, is very difficult to imagine. We want our historical authors to be Personalities and because of that there are scholars who spend their entire lives trying to prove bizarre authorship theories – that Homer was a woman (or a slave, or a priest); that the Old Testament was written by five men with too much time on their hands – and, most famously of all, that Shakespeare was not the real author of his plays.

There’s a film coming out in the next few weeks – Anonymous, starring Rhys Ifans and directed by Roland Emmerich (he of Independence Day fame) – that aims to prove just that. Shakespeare, its line of reasoning goes, was nothing more than a patsy. The real creator of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and The Tempest was the aristocratic Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was oppressed by cruel fate and had to hide his genius behind a pen name. Like most conspiracy theories, it leaves you mostly wondering why anyone would go to all that trouble without leaving any notes behind saying ‘It was me!’, but it’s also founded on a very modern, and so incredibly historically inaccurate, concept of authorship.

Images of Shakespeare hiding in a garret, beating himself over the head with Yorick’s skull, may be fun, but on investigation they just won’t wash. Writing in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was less like Shakespeare in Love and more like a night at the pub. If you want a modern image for comparison, you can’t do much better than to imagine a group of guys all crowding round one computer, trying to decide how best to troll a forum. Everyone snickers and makes rude jokes and writes over each other, and even though the finished post has one person’s name on it, it’s really a collaboration between a lot of different, er, ‘artists’. Similarly, even though an Elizabethan play would be ‘by’ one person, it would have been through several different re-drafts on its way to completion, each of them handled by a different writer.

Author’s egos, too, were less of a concern. In the late fifteenth century, when Shakespeare was beginning his career as a writer, it was less fashionable to express your own feelings than it was to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Little boys had to write essays pretending to be William the Conqueror, or an Egyptian slave – who you were, and how you felt, didn’t matter as much. People who try to argue that Shakespeare had daddy issues, or was having a secret love affair, therefore, aren’t going to get very far – it’s like taking ‘The Flea’ as evidence that John Donne was actually a blood-sucking invertebrate.

Of course Shakespeare was a real person, with a life as complex and individual as our own, but he didn’t necessarily see himself – as either a person or an author – the way we would today. For the record, I firmly believe that he wrote all of his own works – but not in the way that you or I would now, if we were to go about the same project. In conclusion: love Shakespeare’s plays by all means, but don’t imagine him as a fifteenth-century hipster poet. He was just one guy out of a group, sitting round a table and making astonishingly creative sex jokes. And also some pretty great plays.

Robin Stevens

This week I went along to the London Review Bookshop to hear American academic James Shapiro answering questions on his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

I was hoping for a bit of argy-bargy, an audience packed with Shakespeare doubters, maybe a bit of refined academic heckling, but Shapiro seemed to be pretty much preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, it was an interesting hour. For the last hundred and fifty years, an ever-growing list of people, invariably royal, noble, distinguished or exciting in some way, have been put forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

It all started when an 18^th Century scholar local to Stratford-upon-Avon went searching for books or papers belonging to Shakespeare and drew a blank. The conclusion he leapt to was that this absence of the trappings of a learned man must mean that Shakespeare was not a learned man, and that as only  a learned man could possibly have written the plays, ergo, Shakespeare, son of a mere glove-maker, was an imposter.

It took a hundred years or so for this theory to catch on, but by the 19^th Century the idea that Shakespeare was an uneducated fraud who couldn’t spell his own name, let alone write the masterpieces of the English language, was rife. Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Wells and Sir Derek Jacobi are among the notable names who’ve signed up to this anti-Stratford camp.

Rather than looking in detail at the contenders for the real Shakespeare, Contested Will instead examines why the question exists at all. It’s a weird one – why is the belief that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare so prevalent, and why does it attract such ardent disciples? Is it down to sheer snobbery –the conviction that such brilliant writing must be the product of an educated, upper-class mind? Is it a modern love for conspiracy and esoteric secrets? Or is it because we have so few details about the life of the best-known English writer that we feel compelled to fill in the gaps using the only material available to us – the plays?

The argument seems to come down to the devil in the detail of the plays. How much of what Shakespeare wrote could he have made up, or got from books, and how much would have to come from experience? Could a man who’d never travelled to Italy have written the plays set there? Or, as another case in point, proponents of the Earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeare use the fact that the earl had three daughters and was once captured by pirates as an indication that he’s a more likely author of King Lear and Hamlet than the man from Stratford.

But Shapiro makes the case for the power of the imagination as the truth behind the mystery of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a reassuring conclusion for anyone who’s ever hoped to write convincingly about stuff that hasn’t actually happened to them, whether it’s setting a story in a country they’ve never visited, writing from the point of view of a murderer, flying to other planets or turning into a werewolf.

The compulsion to read an author’s life into their work seems a basic one, as rife among modern authors as Elizabethan ones. Shapiro quotes T.S. Eliot, who commented that he was used “…to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience.”

And Lorrie Moore, quoted in this weekend’s Guardian Weekend talking to the Guardian Book Club, wondered whether there was a current trend for writers, especially women writers, to be routinely suspected of autobiography, with readers “determined to think of fiction as a mere route to memoir.” Moore’s stories, which often deal with marital breakdown and terminal illness, are frequently scanned for evidence of trauma in her own life, a process Moore tries to steer clear of.

It’s as if we’re getting fiction muddled up with the real-life memoir section at Waterstones, searching it for truth in the sense of what a writer has experienced on a literal level, rather than a deeper and more widely applicable truth that can come out of stories a writer dreamed up.

Personally, I come down on the side of those like Shapiro who maintain that you don’t need to have three daughters yourself to write convincingly about sibling rivalry, or have been kidnapped by pirates to imagine such an event taking place. It’s a case all writers who believe in the capacity of made-up stuff to contain truth should get behind.

Emily