Was P. G. Wodehouse an Oxfordian?

Read the fiction of P. G. Wodehouse and you’ll come away with a strong impression that, in his personal life, the author

– was raised by dragon aunts (the Wooster/Jeeves stories)
– went to a private school in England and was obsessed with cricket (Tales of St. Austin, The Swoop)
– was set to work by his family in a bank and hated it (Psmith in the City)
– knew first-hand about life in the great English country houses (the Jeeves/Wooster and Blandings stories)
– liked vacationing in southern France (the short story “Aunt Agatha Takes the Count”)
– spent good parts of his life in America (Carry On, Jeeves, The Small Bachelor, Laughing Gas)
– worked in musical theater and wrote for Hollywood (the short stories “Monkey Business,” “The Nodder,” “The Castaways”)
– was devoted to Shakespeare (The Code of the Woosters, Joy in the Morning) (see this post)
– liked dogs, especially Pekingese (the short stories “Jeeves and the Impending Doom,” “Open House,” and “Ukridge’s Dog College”)
– was an obsessive golfer (“The Heart of a Goof”)

P. G. Wodehouse

And you’d be right on all counts. Of course you could do this with most authors.  You need only to read Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee to gather that the author grew up in a small town along the Mississippi and later lived in New England.  Yet it’s just this sort of common-sense gleaning from the plays and poems of Shakespeare that Stratfordians like James  Shapiro (see this post) object to when it comes to the question of who wrote Shakespeare.

But we digress from our topic, which is who Wodehouse thought wrote Othello and Macbeth.  We don’t suppose his opinion would carry as much weight as a literary scholar or a classical actor, but Wodehouse had solid credibility as a playwright and a man of the theater, and he spent his life with Shakespeare. You can talk about your “desert island” list of books, but Wodehouse actually had to make one and live with it: when he was interned by the Germans during the Second World War, one of the two volumes Wodehouse took with him was the complete works of Shakespeare. Joy in the Morning, which he wrote during the war, shows it.

The question of who wrote Shakespeare was on Wodehouse’s mind for decades.  Digging unsystematically through our Wodehouse library, we found at least half a dozen mentions.

The earliest we ran across was in a comic sketch called “My Life as a Dramatic Critic” that Wodehouse wrote for Vanity Fair around 1918.  (Thanks to Oxfordian researcher Martin Hyatt for bringing this one to our attention; the sketch appears is in A Wodehouse Miscellany.)  In this piece Wodehouse reminesced about his early — very early — career as a theater critic:

I remember once lunching with rare Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern — this would be back in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when I was beginning to be known in the theatrical world — and seeing a young man with a nobby forehead and about three inches of beard doing himself well at a neighboring table at the expense of Burbage the manager.

“Ben,” I asked my companion, “who is that youth?”  He told me that the fellow was one Bacon, a new dramatist who had learned his technique by holding horses’ heads in the Strand, and who, for some reason or other, wrote under the name of Shakespeare.  “You must see his Hamlet,” said Ben enthusiastically.  “He read me the script last night.  They start rehearsals at the Globe next week.  It’s a pippin.  In the last act every blamed character in the cast who isn’t already dead jumps on everyone else’s neck and slays him.”

The sketch includes a quote from Wodehouse’s rave review for Hamlet‘s opening night, as published in The Weekly Bear-Baiter.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

Around the time Wodehouse wrote this, the vogue in anti-Stratfordian Shakespeare authorship thinking was for Francis Bacon.  But in 1920, the unfortunately surnamed J. T. Looney published a book called “Shakespeare” Identified that made the first real case for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays and sonnets.  (Sigmund Freud, who had been a Baconian, became an Oxfordian after reading “Shakespeare” Identified.)

We don’t have any hard evidence that Wodehouse read Looney’s book.  But consider this passage from Joy in the Morning, chapter VII:

One has, of course, to make allowances for writers, all of them being more or less loony.  Look at Shakespeare, for instance.  Very unbalanced.  Used to go about stealing ducks.

Here Bertie Wooster (the novel’s narrator) was apparently referring to the apocryphal story that William Shakespeare, as a lad, was caught poaching (though he is supposed to have poached deer, not ducks).  But is it just coincidence that Wodehouse used the word “loony” only three words away from the word “Shakespeare”?  Or was there no significance to Wodehouse’s once again making fun of one of the dubious legends about the Stratford man, just as, in “My Life as a Dramatic Critic,” he had made fun of the apocryphal story that Will Shakespeare got his start by holding horses outside the theater? We think not. Wodehouse knew how tellingly few were the actual known facts about the life of the Stratford man.

One thing we do know is that Wodehouse was amused by the baroque, conspiratorial thinking of those Baconians who claimed that clues to the mystery of authorship could be found in elaborate ciphers.  One of these Baconians was a prominent character in the short story “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald” (it’s in Mr. Mulliner Speaking, published in 1929).  Young Algy Wymondham-Wymondham is explaining to Archibald Mulliner that the aunt of an attractive girl with whom Archibald is smitten is “potty.”

“Potty?  That divine. . . . I mean, that rather attractive-looking girl?”
“Not Aurelia.  The aunt.  She thinks Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”
“Thinks who wrote what?”  asked Archibald, puzzled, for the names were strange to him.
“You must have heard of Shakespeare.  He’s well known.  Fellow who used to write plays.  Only Aurelia’s aunt says he didn’t.  She maintains that a bloke called Bacon wrote them for him.”
“Dashed decent of him,” said Archibald, approvingly.  “Of course, he may have owed Shakespeare money.”
“There’s that, of course.”
“What was the name again?”
“Bacon.”
“Bacon,” said Archibald, jotting it down on his cuff.  “Right.”
Algy’s careless words had confirmed his worst suspicions.  A girl with an aunt who knew all about Shakespeare and Bacon must of necessity live in a mental atmosphere into which a lame-brained bird like himself could scarcely hope to soar.

Here Wodehouse has merely recycled the gag about Bacon’s owing Shakespeare money that he used ten years earlier in the Vanity Fair sketch.  But a few paragraphs later, Wodehouse demonstrates that he had actually read some of the Baconian propaganda.  He has Archibald Mulliner obtain a set of books by Bacon and read them, so as to ingratiate himself with Aurelia’s aunt, and he succeeds:

[R]eaching out an arm like the tentacle of an octopus, she drew him into a corner and talked about Cryptograms for forty-seven minutes by the drawing-room clock.

The aunt inflicts upon Archibald an explanation — Wodehouse himself goes on with it too long, actually — of how a cipher reveals that Milton’s famous epitaph on Shakespeare actually referred to Bacon.

Francis Bacon

In “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald” Wodehouse skewered the Baconians so thoroughly as to dispose of any suggestion that he was a Baconian himself.  Indeed, when Wodehouse recycled his gag yet again three years later, he left Bacon out of the story.  In April 1932, in a letter to a friend (it’s quoted in David A. Jasen’s P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master), Wodehouse was deprecating the plot for his new novel Thank You, Jeeves:

Come, come, Wodehouse, is this the best you can do in the way of carrying on the great tradition of English Literature?  Still, I’ll bet the plot of Hamlet seemed just as lousy when Shakespeare was trying to tell it to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern.

Wodehouse went on to imagine Shakespeare’s trying futilely to summarize the plot of Hamlet for Ben Jonson.

Wodehouse wrote a final, more elaborate variation of the gag about Shakespeare and Bacon — at least, the last variation we could find — in a humorous sketch he published in Punch in the mid-50s called “Francis Bacon and the Play Doctor” (it appears in America, I Love You, the British edition of which is titled Over Seventy).  Here Wodehouse tells of “a Baconian of my acquaintance” who had documentary proof (“only unfortunately in a cipher which nobody but he can read”) of how Hamlet came to be produced.

In this facetious account, Bacon had “always had the firm conviction that he could write a play,” so he steals time from his job as Chancellor of the Exchequer to dash off Hamlet. Eventually, a theatrical manager takes an interest in the play but explains to Bacon that “it needs fixing.”  Bacon is forced to let the company’s script doctor, “young Shakespeare,” tinker with his play (and it is thus Shakespeare who is responsible for the impossible series of stabbings and poisonings in the last scene of the play.

The program was initially going to have read as follows:

HAMLET

BY

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(Based on a Suggestion by F. Bacon)

“But Bacon, after sitting through a rehearsal or two and reading the revised script, decided to take his name off the bills.”

So did Wodehouse really doubt that the Stratford man wrote Shakespeare? We think he did doubt. Consider Wodehouse’s use of the gag about Shakespeare and Bacon in Joy in the Morning, chapter XXIII. Here Jeeves, who has a bright idea for helping Bertie’s Uncle Percy, Lord Worplesdon, with a thorny problem, suggests that the suggestion should “appear to emanate” from Bertie rather than him in order to bolster Bertie’s standing with his uncle:

I nodded. His meaning had not escaped me. If you analyzed it, it was the old Bacon and Shakespeare gag. Bacon, as you no doubt remember, wrote Shakespeare’s stuff for him and then, possibly because he owed the latter money or it may be from sheer good nature, allowed him to take the credit for it. I mentioned this to Jeeves, and he said that perhaps an even closer parallel was that of Cyrano de Bergerac.

This, we would emphasize, is the voice of Bertie Wooster, the character in Wodehouse whose views most reliably reflect those of Wodehouse himself. And Bertie takes it for granted that the Stratford man was not the author.

One might infer that Wodehouse, in his mid-sixties, was still wrestling with why someone like Bacon or de Vere would have let the Stratford man take credit for writing Hamlet. But one might also infer that, just as Wodehouse’s vast fictional world remained locked in Edwardian England, Wodehouse’s thinking about the authorship question never advanced beyond what he took from the Baconians and (we surmise) from J. T. Looney in the teens and twenties. Any intellectual curiosity he may have had as to who really wrote Shakespeare had long since been eclipsed by the comic value of (a) the gag itself and (b) the nuttiness of some of the Baconians.

We regret finding no evidence that P. G. Wodehouse was, in fact, a Oxfordian.

 

 

 

This is a good opportunity for us to mention an excellent new publication focusing on Oxfordian scholarship that’s come to our attention. It’s called Brief Chronicles and it’s strictly an on-line journal, so far as we can tell. Here’s the link. And it’s free (although downloading a free issue can take a couple of minutes). The recently published second issue has some excellent and thought-provoking pieces.

Bill Bryson on Shakespeare (and the authorship question)

Shakespeare biographies are something of a pet peeve of ours, since so few hard facts about the life of William Shakespeare are actually known, and nobody ever turns up anything new. And so many new Shakespeare books come out every year that we don’t even try to keep up. So we nearly missed Shakespeare: The World as Stage, a modest little “biography” of the Bard that Bill Bryson published in 2007. 

Marlowe

We really liked this crisply written little book (196 pages and wide margins), even though a lot of it consists of filler material about 16th-century social and political history that doesn’t have any direct connection either with William Shakespeare or with the plays attributed to him. From pages 62 to 65, for instance, and for no compelling reason related to the life of Shakespeare, Bryson gives us a lively account of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1567. From pages 92 to 94 he bunny-trails into an entertaining biographical sketch of Christopher Marlowe. We don’t blame him; if Shakespeare biographers didn’t do this sort of thing, their books would be awfully short.

And we did learn a few things that we didn’t know, or needed to be corrected on. Take the matter of the “second-best bed” bequeathed to Mrs. Shakespeare in Will Shakespeare’s will.  The old conventional wisdom (which we were taught long ago) was that Shakespeare’s failure to leave his wife his best bed was a sign of strained marital relations.  The newer conventional wisdom (which we dutifully accepted) was that the “second-best bed” would have been the marital bed and the one that Anne would have wanted most, after all.  But the latest wisdom, we learn from Bryson, is that it truly was unusual and inexplicable for a husband to leave his wife their second-best bed.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would write a “biography” of William Shakespeare today without giving at least some attention to whether the man born and buried in Stratford actually wrote the celebrated plays and sonnets, or whether someone else wrote them using the pseudonym “William Shakespeare.” Yet many writers on Shakespeare do ignore the issue. To his credit, Bill Bryson does not gloss over the question of authorship and, in fact, devotes the ninth and final chapter of his book to it.

Bill Bryson

To our sorrow (for, as noted in an earlier post, we ourselves are of the Oxfordian persuasion), Bryson is a hardened skeptic on the subject.  He goes so far as to say that “nearly all the anti-Shakespeare sentiment — actually all of it, every bit — involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact.”  Unfortunately, Bryson uses mostly straw-man arguments to support this sweeping statement, making sport of some of the least defensible things said on the subject — assertions that are very far from being pillars of anti-Stratfordian schools of thought.

For example, Bryson mocks a writer for the New York Times for claiming that William Shakespeare (the man from Stratford) never owned a book. As to that, there is no evidence one way or the other (except that that no books are mentioned in William Shakespeare’s will).  Personally, we don’t doubt that he was literate; why shouldn’t an actor, theatrical producer, and prominent citizen of Stratford have read and owned books?  But what does it matter? The argument against authorship by the Stratford man doesn’t depend in the slightest on the assumption that he didn’t or couldn’t read.

Bacon

Bryson devotes five pages to making fun of the old theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author.  As Bryson well knows, however, hardly anything really thinks Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays anymore.  Bryson gives less space, though he pays more serious attention, to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, a candidate who does have a great deal of support today (including Emsworth’s).  Bryson concedes that de Vere

had certain things in his favor as a candidate: He was clever and had some standing as a poet and playwright (though none of his plays survives [or do they survive? Mr. Bryson, that's the issue!], and none of his poetry indicates actual greatness — certainly not Shakespearean greatness); he was well traveled and spoke Italian, and he moved in the right circles to understand courtly manners.

Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford

But Bryson goes on to attack de Vere’s candidacy with some thoroughly debatable assertions. Bryson argues that de Vere’s colorful personal history (squandering his fortune and episodes of violence and sexual depravity) is irreconcilable with the “gift for compassion, empathy, or generosity of spirit” reflected in the plays and sonnets. Emsworth emphatically disagrees; the plays are more than violent and kinky enough to suggest that the playwright had first-hand experience with such matters during an irresponsible youth.

Bryson also claims, as if it were an unanswerable point, that de Vere couldn’t have written a number of the “later” Shakespeare plays because he died in 1604. In fact, as Bryson also knows very well, there’s no evidence as to when any Shakespeare play was actually written or even first performed.

In fairness, this book was intended to be a popular biography, not a work of scholarship, and the question of who wrote the plays and sonnets wasn’t Bryson’s main focus at all. Still, on the issue of authorship, we were unmoved either by Bryson’s mockery or by his reasoning.

Who wrote Hamlet? Not up for discussion at the Stratford Festival

Edward de Vere

Nibbling on our breakfast scone at a B & B in Stratford, Ontario last weekend, we were pleased to learn that two of our fellow guests, a couple from Dearborn, Michigan, were fellow Oxfordians. That is, they shared our view that the plays traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare were probably — no one will ever know for sure — written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

This led us to wonder, in turn, how many other Stratford Festival patrons share our irritation every time they open their play programs to find the five canned paragraphs that purport to sum up the life of William Shakespeare.

For most playwrights, biographical blurbs in theater programs have to be greatly condensed. Not so with William Shakespeare. So little is really known about him that at least half of the material about him in the Stratford Festival’s 2008 programs is filler — educated guesses about his life and career. We detect the dramaturge’s struggle for hard facts about the playwright from such speculative phrases as these:

“The exact date of his birth is unknown . . . .”

“[T]radition has it . . . .”

“The young Shakespeare is assumed to have attended what is now the Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, where he would have studied . . . .”

“Nothing further is known of Shakespeare’s life until 1592 . . . .”

“Possibly as early as 1610, the playwright retired to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon . . . .”

Conspicuously absent from the Stratford Festival’s programs is any hint that this man of whom we know so little may not actually have written The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Love’s Labours Lost.

Francis Bacon

But surely the powers-that-be at the Stratford Festival are aware of the issue. And they are surely also aware of the new evidence pointing to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth, as the true author — far more evidence, both in quality and in quantity, than was ever brought forward in decades past to support the candidacies of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or other Elizabethans.

Emsworth does not complain that the Stratford Festival has not come out in favor of Oxford. This is a matter on which reasonable minds can differ.

As it stands, though, the Stratford Festival is effectively siding with the actor from Stratford. Have the Artistic Director and the dramaturge decided simply to leave things as they are until someone actually produces a draft of Macbeth in Oxford’s handwriting? What will it take for the Stratford Festival to acknowledge that there is at least a serious question as to authorship?

In the meantime, simply ignoring the case for Oxford is not what one might expect from the most influential Shakespeare organization in North America.

Emsworth refers curious readers to the website of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, which outlines the principal reasons to doubt that the actor from Stratford wrote the Shakespeare plays, along with the facts that point to Edward de Vere as the actual poet and playwright. (We are not connected with this organization.) Emsworth has just noticed that Wikipedia now includes an extensive and seemingly objective entry on “Oxfordian theory,” which sets forth arguments both for and against authorship by de Vere.