JOIN USMark Rylance, whom critics call the greatest Shakespeare actor of his generation, believes that Shakespeare is not one man, but a group of authors who wrote under his name.
Rylance is part of a very distinguished and growing group of theatre actors, writers and directors who are convinced that Shakespeare could not have been one author. The question of Shakespeare authorship is an old controversy — there are several books on the subject — but what has given the authorship question renewed energy, focus and vitality is that Shakespeare’s most brilliant interpreter today has come to believe that it is foolish to think Shakespeare could be just one lone genius. Along with theatre legends like Derek Jacobi, he is part of a group that holds the view that Shakespeare was probably made of several writers, including the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Mary Sidney.
The Shakespeare question is entertainingly and audaciously explored in the movie Anonymous, where Rylance stars as an actor at the Globe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. The most difficult to please theatre critics swear that Rylance could be the greatest Shakespeare actor ever — greater even than Olivier, Gielgud, Jacobi, and Hopkins. They say he speaks the language of Shakespeare most naturally, as if he was born reciting them, as if he was an actor from the Globe theatre of Shakespeare’s own time. His Hamlet is said to be the most definitive. When such an actor says he is convinced Shakespeare could not be just one person, I find it compelling. Rylance says he could not act out Shakespeare if he thought the author some impersonal genius who can slip into any character, any emotion, any gender.
The most compelling and eloquent reason Rylance puts forth (you can hear him speak beautifully at a press interview for Anonymous, courtesy YouTube) is that all true artists, great and small, bring their own experience of suffering and joy and loss to their work; their characters are lit up by the artist’s own emotions, whether it was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Kafka; why then is Shakespeare alone seen as some grand impersonal artist who can be anyone or anything, like some conjurer or magician? No; the writers behind the Shakespeare plays had owned these emotions, known intimately the things they wrote of, and expressed them through these iconic characters. They knew how courts worked from the inside, they were widely and well travelled, they were more than familiar with the customs and languages of all Europe and perhaps beyond.
Why then would they not write these great plays under their own name? And this is the interesting part — something I didn’t really know, or rather didn’t know to the fullest extent: that the theatre in Shakespeare’s time was cheap and vulgar entertainment, so rowdy and low that even Shakespeare scholars concede that an appropriate comparison today would be strip clubs and cabarets. Not the kind of place or activity the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Mary Sidney wanted to be openly associated with. (Perhaps in some ways as infradig and tainted as movies and television when they first began...).
I was just as astonished to learn from The Shakespeare Thefts, a new book by Eric Rasmussen, that during Shakespeare’s lifetime, his plays had the popularity of pulp: only half of them were printed and it was always as cheap paperbacks, in the size and shape of comic books called quartos. (That’s the shape and size and look of the incredibly rare first printing of Hamlet, if you can believe it). So many pirated copies of Shakespeare’s plays circulated in his time that most of the time they didn’t even have the name of the author on it. Manuscripts of plays were frequently stolen from playhouses, cheaply printed and sold quickly to make a fast, quick buck. At the time Shakespeare died, many of his plays had never seen print. Two actors who had been part of Shakespeare’s theatre company, The King’s Men, named John Heminges and Henry Condell felt they should put a stop once and for all to such piracy and began a project of gathering all of his plays together in one edition and decided they were good enough to be in folio, not quarto, size.
Until then, no book that only contained plays had been printed in folio. Folio was like the hardcover of today, or more accurately, like the contemporary special edition with expensive binding, pages and printing. Of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, only one playwright had the distinction of his work printed as folio: Ben Johnson. But there was one crucial difference: his work contained not just plays but prose and poetry. The Shakespeare folio would be the first printed work of only plays. Such a book project was considered a financial risk, a folly. But Heminges and Condell thought the project important enough to take the risk and commissioned the first folio of the Shakespeare plays. Rasmussen writes that the folio was expected in the market by April 1622 (it was included in that year’s Frankfurt Book Fair’s catalogue as one of the books printed!) but the folio came out only in 1623.
It was, Rasmussen notes, a magisterial folio of 908 pages, called Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories &Tragedies, the First Folio. It was priced at one pound! An expensive price for the day, when a year’s salary for a skilled tradesman in London was 4 pounds. Only the wealthy could afford a folio. But their gamble worked: the first folio was so much in demand that a second folio (1632) and a third (1664) and a fourth folio (1685) followed over the years. And if the first folio had not been published, we would not have Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, to list only a few that had gone unprinted until then. Today, there are around 232 known copies of the Shakespeare First Folio in the world. A majority of extant copies are flawed or incomplete — forged pages, damaged and missing. Collecting the First Folio continues to be “something of a fetish among the super rich.”
The Henry Huntington collection has four copies, Folger has 82, Meisie University in Tokyo has every single copy that came into the market in the 70s and 80s. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, paid 6 million for one recently, while Sir Paul Getty paid 7 million.
Mark Rylance is not alone in hoping the question of Shakespeare’s authorship is reasonably doubtful — in the past, Orson Welles and Gielgud have questioned it too.
Rylance is among several prominent theatre folk who belong to the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, which signed a ‘Declaration of Reasonable Doubt’ on the authorship of Shakespeare’s work. Rylance co-wrote and starred in a one man show called ‘I am Shakespeare’, subtitled ‘A Comedy of Shakespearean Identity Crisis’.