Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare: A New Attribution Method by Barry R. Clarke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare: A New Attribution Method by Barry R. Clarke MacDonald P. Jackson (bio) Barry R. Clarke. Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare: A New Attribution Method. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019, xxix + 310, pp. $271.00; $58.99. isbn: 978-0-367-13782-3 (HB); isbn: 978-0-367-22544-5 (PB). To quote the summary inside the front cover, this book advocates a “paradigm shift . . . away from a single-author theory of the Shake-speare work towards a many-hands theory.” There must, however, be few “orthodox scholars” who nowadays believe that every play in the First Folio of 1623 is by Shakespeare alone. It is widely accepted that playwrights besides Shakespeare contributed to 1 Henry VI (Thomas Nashe and at least one other), Titus Andronicus (George Peele), Timon of Athens (Thomas Middleton), and Henry VIII or All Is True (John Fletcher), and also to Pericles (George Wilkins) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (Fletcher), both excluded from the Folio. The New Oxford Shakespeare more controversially detects Marlowe’s hand in all three Parts of Henry VI and argues for minor adaptation by Middleton of Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well. It names Shakespeare as part- author of Edward III and (most contentiously of all) Arden of Faversham, each published in anonymous quartos. Clarke knows most of this (47–48), but his “many hands” include more contributors to more plays, and he rejects current attributions to “single authors” even of scenes and sequences believed to make up their shares in a play-script. Before elaborating, I should explain that Clarke calls “the man from Stratford” “Shakspere,” reserving “Shakespeare” for the published works (xviii), while, to no obvious purpose, the hyphenated “Shake-speare” also appears sporadically. Hence the variant spellings in my quotations from Clarke’s book. Within wording of my own the traditional “Shakespeare” is used. [End Page 364] Regarding the famous “upstart crow” allusion in Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit as indicating that Shakespeare “was a play broker” who claimed as “all his own work” other men’s plays to which he had merely “added lines,” Clarke finds the writing of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and Anthony Munday in 3 Henry VI (91) and states that its “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!” (Riverside, 1.4.137) “might be the only line that we can be sure Shakspere ever wrote” (88). He sees signs of Nashe and, as reviser, Thomas Heywood in The Comedy of Errors; of Nashe and, as possible revisers, Heywood and Thomas Dekker, in Love’s Labor’s Lost; and of Francis Bacon in both those comedies plus Twelfth Night and The Tempest (126, 141, 163, 187). Clarke discloses that some years ago he held the view that the Shakespeare canon was created by “Francis Bacon . . . alone under the pseudonym Shakespeare” (8 n.5), and a large part of the present book is occupied with rehearsing the standard anti-Stratfordian arguments. We are told, for instance, that “The extant documents for the actor William Shakspere reveal him to be an entrepreneur in the London theatre world, as well as a money-lender, a dealer in malt, and a property speculator. However, there is no evidence that he had access to the books that are known to have provided background material for some of the Shakespeare plays” (13); further, apart from “six surviving William Shakspere signatures, which are inconsistent, there is no record of his handwriting. No original Shakespeare manuscript for a sonnet or play has ever been found” (22). Clarke concedes that no autograph manuscripts exist of plays or poems by several other writers of the time, but, oddly, includes in his list two playwrights for whom they do: Heywood (The Captives and The Escapes of Jupiter) and Middleton (A Game at Chess). Like most anti-Stratfordians, he makes no attempt to rebut the case, which in my view is overwhelming, that “Hand D’s” insurrection scene added to the British Library manuscript play Sir Thomas More was both conceived and penned by Shakespeare. Clarke tortures the sense of passages in the Parnassus plays...