I often wonder whether those who espouse conspiracy theories are ever themselves called upon to organize a conspiracy of any complexity—on the order of, say, a surprise party. The difficulty of even the most mundane collaboration is a powerful argument that none can be kept silent for very long. Jacobean and Elizabethan London was a bad place for keeping secrets: Guy Fawkes was betrayed; so was Essex. “The truth will out,” their contemporary wrote—though that author’s identity and the truth about his life have long been argued.

Samuel Schoenbaum, in Shakespeare’s Lives, the authoritative and hugely enjoyable guide to what we know about Shakespeare and how we came to know it, patiently demolished the many speculative claims, untenable interpretations, and other “curious evidence of human credulity” displayed by the Bard’s biographers. Schoenbaum died in 1996, so future biographers unfortunately will be spared the erudition and wit that so withered the pretensions of their predecessors. His is a book that ought to be updated continually, like the FBI’s most wanted list. Bookshelves continue to fill with biographies of the bard, with the hapless reader left to sort good from bad.

“The truth will out,” their contemporary wrote—though that author’s identity and the truth about his life have long been argued.

Some bad biographies, of course, are worse than others. The most pernicious cancer on Shakespeare scholarship—probably the most extensive pseudoscholarly endeavor ever undertaken—is that of conspiracy-minded theorizers who for a century and a half have argued among themselves about who actually wrote the plays, who kept it a secret, and why. Even Schoenbaum lost patience discussing the “rough beast” of Baconism, whose acolytes madly searched for messages encoded in the plays.

More recently, the beast has birthed a faddish preference for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as true author of the works. (Mark Rylance, now thankfully the former director of London’s Globe theater, reports himself unable to decide between the two Earls). God willing, Mark Anderson’s infuriating new biography of the Earl may put an end to that.¹ Tendentious and speculative, it is the preposterous apotheosis of the Oxfordian case.

Anderson’s book is less an argument for Oxford’s authorship than a speculative biography of the man that begins from the assumption that he did write the plays, and that William Shakespeare, gentlemen of Stratford and shareholder in the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters, was a front man. Its author does not take up contrary evidence to most of his assertions, and, like most Oxfordians, he cannot be taken seriously as a scholar. But his work is interesting for what it shows about how the mind of a contemporary Shakespeare theorizer works.

Anderson’s central contention is that the plays of Shakespeare tell the story of Oxford’s own life:

He had a close but rocky relationship with Queen Elizabeth—whom he portrayed as the witty and charming Olivia (Twelfth Night), the powerful vixen Cleopatra, the cloying Venus, and the compromised Cressida. De Vere’s father-in-law was the historical prototype for Polonius; de Vere’s brother-in-law was the original for Petruchio; de Vere’s sister the model for Petruchio’s Kate; his first wife for Ophelia, Desdemona, and Hero (among many others); his eldest daughter for Miranda; her husband for Miranda’s Ferdinand.

Needless to say, Oxford himself shows up in the plays—in fact, in just about every play. Anderson has simply stitched together his narrative of Oxford’s life from the plays’ protagonists—he is Hamlet, the disenfranchised son, but also Lear, father of three daughters, and Timon, a bitter hermit alienated from court. Imagine the loss to English literature if the man decided instead to keep a diary.

This is the same old game of code-breaking; the Baconists’ cryptological terms have been replaced by biographical ones, appropriate to our memoir-obsessed age. Such parallels may be compelling if you believe that Oxford wrote the plays, but they cannot be convincing: The book is an enormous exercise in begging the question. Anderson even finds references in the plays to his very own theory (call it the de Vere Code).

One key passage comes in Love’s Labor’s Lost, which “talks about Shakspere and the emerging Shake-speare ruse” (the different spellings indicating the player and the playwright, in Anderson’s cloying usage). The country gentleman Costard (Shakespeare) is sent by Armado (de Vere) to carry letters to Jaquenetta (“the author’s muse”). “Symbolically, this is nearly the whole story,” Anderson writes. “De Vere uses his country clown as an envoy to satisfy the author’s longing for the literary delights and public fame he cannot taste.” He later finds a similar “story” in the byplay of Touchstone, Maria, and the provincial William in As You Like It.

Anderson’s arguments aren’t merely unconvincing; they are unnecessary, and therefore foolish. Like so many other theorizers, he doesn’t know when to stop. It is not enough to note similarities between the life of Oxford and plots in the plays (perhaps Shakespeare noted them, too); every character must be Oxfordized, every reference to the Stratford man (even the poet’s puns on his own name, “Will”) must be made to apply, in fact, to Edward de Vere—the vindication of Oxford is not complete unless Shakespeare is entirely effaced.

Even Jonson’s laudatory phrases in the first folio and the inscription on his tomb, it turns out, are meant sarcastically, Anderson explains—but his explanation has to be seen to be disbelieved. Anderson takes the phrase “Sieh all that he hath writ leaves living art but page to serve his wit,” glosses “Sieh” as German for “Look there [at],” and notes that the imperative “would seem to point the viewer across the Trinity Church chapel to Shakespeare’s burial marker.”

What this perplexing sentence, then, says is “Look there at that doggerel Shakspere wrote: All his wit leaves a living corpus of works that add up to a single page.” A second reading turns on the meaning of art as “contrivance” or “ruse,” page as “servant” and wit as “a witty person”: “Look there at the one thing Shakespeare wrote: The rest lives on as the ruse that is but the servant to the wit whom Shakspeare stood for.”

What is the “doggerel” on the burial marker? The brief verse, of which Mark Twain said “So far as anyone knows and can prove Shakespeare of Stratford wrote only one poem during his life”:

It is typical of Anderson that, in his zeal, he misses here a point in his favor: We can’t even prove Shakespeare wrote that.

Anderson’s disdainful references to “the Stratford man” as a “country clown” or “loudmouth player,” and his determination to deny him the slightest scrap of literary achievement, are typical of Oxfordians. They reflect a common conviction—that the author of the plays must have had every intellectual advantage—but the frisson of condescending to a genius such as Shakespeare seems irresistible. Self-aggrandizing is always on the conspiracy theorist’s agenda; the grander the conspiracy, the greater its “discoverer’s” accomplishment.

In this respect, Anderson had the singular misfortune of seeing his book published simultaneously with another that presents a remarkably similar discovery. Like Shakespeare by Another Name, Rodney Bolt’s History Play shows a sneering dismissiveness toward the Stratford player, used as a beard by a superior mind.² It reads in the plays the life and learning of the man it proposes wrote them. And it describes a conspiracy by which the actual author was denied credit. The only difference: Bolt doesn’t believe it. His book is a genuine novelty in Bard biography, an amusing pseudoscholarly fiction that tweaks Shakespeare theorizers in particular but also anyone who hopes to know the Bard by reading his plays.

The stylistic similarities between his plays and Shakespeare’s early work—which lifts whole lines from Marlowe’s plays—has long been noted.

Bolt’s protagonist, Christopher Marlowe, has been mentioned alongside Oxford for decades as an alternate author for the plays. (Never mind that he died in 1592, before the first performance of most of Shakespeare’s plays; Oxford died in 1604, and that doesn’t bother the Oxfordians.) Marlowe had both a university education and, as a shoemaker’s son, a background in the baser aspects of Elizabethan life. He also had considerable poetic skills—which Oxford, on the evidence of his extant poems, did not. The stylistic similarities between his plays and Shakespeare’s early work—which lifts whole lines from Marlowe’s plays—has long been noted. (One elegant theory mentioned by Schoenbaum suggested that it was Shakespeare who wrote his early works under a pen name Christopher Marlowe.) By the same token, Marlowe’s career is powerful corroborating evidence for assumptions made about Shakespeare’s. Nearly the same age, both achieved rapid success in a London theater whose expansion they helped drive. If Canterbury Christopher came into close contact with the highest rungs of the Elizabethan court (as he did, probably to his everlasting regret), why not Warwickshire Will?

Bolt’s book, like Anderson’s, is not concerned with making a positive case for its candidate (he cheerfully fabricates sources when necessary). Rather, it follows Marlowe—who, it turns out, actually faked his death—as he lives a life of exile on the Continent, meeting with Montaigne, studying commedia dell’arte, visiting Denmark. Negligible as fiction, it is a spot-on impersonation of a Shakespeare theorizer; the author even finds Marlowe referring, obligingly, to the very theory he has postulated. But Bolt is also after larger game, out to parody all Shakespeare biographers who patch and pad the record with nearly as great abandon as the Bard-deniers. He calls his book a “wicked woodworm,” meant to eat away at the certainty of our assumptions.

The worm will find fresh meat in Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: A Biography.³ One speculation Bolt places among the hoariest—that young Will Shakespeare saw a pageant staged at Kenilworth by the Earl of Leicester—is given airing (as it was, at great length, in Stephen Greenblatt’s recent surprise bestseller, Will in the World). But, then, Ackroyd gives credence to just about every assertion ever made about the life of William Shakespeare. An apt subtitle for his book would be the one Shakespeare and Fletcher gave their Henry VIII: “All Is True.”

His Shakespeare was a schoolteacher or tutor, though he most likely also served as a law clerk (and probably was secretary to the Earl of Southhampton). Ackroyd generously admits to the canon The Troublesome Raigne of King John, Edmund Ironsides, and other questionable plays, and claims the “bad” quartos of Hamlet and other plays are actually earlier versions. Titus Andronicus is “nearly all his work.”

Shakespeare is not only the “Shake-Scene” slandered by Robert Greene in his 1592 Groat’s-Worth of Wit, but the “Noverint,” or law clerk, referred to disparagingly by Thomas Nash three years earlier (most scholars take this to be Thomas Kyd). And Ackroyd strives to prove that he is the “W.S.” of the anonymous satirical poem, “Willobie, His Avisa”—which Oscar Wilde among others have suggested completes the story of the Sonnets—even though he doesn’t believe the Sonnets are biographical at all.

Even those legends Ackroyd finds he must reject, he strives valiantly to save. Thus Shakespeare may not have been punished for stealing deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, as centuries of schoolchildren learned, but Lucy was a noted persecutor of recusants. So perhaps the story sheds light on the playwright’s religion. Indeed, perhaps “Shakespeare and his father were briefly imprisoned” by Lucy—“but on this matter the records are silent.” The story may be true after all, for, Ackroyd notes, Franz Joseph Gall believed that the phrenological bump for theft is the same as that for the composition of plays.

Ackroyd’s credulity on the facts of Shakespeare’s life is unfortunate, as he is excellent on the plays and their milieu. Here readers will find much ammunition with which to refute the claims of the Bard-deniers. Ackroyd’s Shakespeare is thoroughly a creature of the stage, not alone among Elizabeth playwrights in writing quickly, copiously, and well. In regard to his education and reading: “he learned as much as he needed to learn.” He never opens a book without looking to take something for a play; if he needs a foreign phrase or a technical term, he asks his fellows.

Ackroyd rightly finds in this fellowship not only an explanation of the plays’ “all-encompassing” knowledge of the world but the very wellsprings of Shakespeare’s miraculous achievements. Shakespeare wrote most of his works for, and to suit, particular actors: Will Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Burbage, and others with whom he worked for years. Theirs was “the most enduring company in English theatrical history,” Ackroyd writes, and one of them was the finest poetic mind of the age.

Ackroyd’s book is less helpful on another burning question about Shakespeare’s life: that of his religion. Here all his bad habits are on display. Like Greenblatt, Ackroyd is eager to place the young Shakespeare in the household of Thomas Houghton, a Catholic nobleman in Lancashire, on the evidence of a player, “William Shakeshafte,” mentioned in his will. (Park Honan, in his 2000 biography, was more circumspect about this claim.) Many Stratford families, including Shakespeare’s nearest neighbors and close friends, were known recusants—but his father was not, despite what Ackroyd asserts. John Shakespeare’s “Spiritual Will and Testament,” discovered in the eighteenth century, is now believed genuine, but few would join Ackroyd in speculating that the handwriting on it is that of his playwright son.

This book asks the pertinent question: If Shakespeare was Catholic, how would that affect the way in which we read the plays?

Furthermore, all these facts have been known for decades, many for much longer. What has driven the renewed interest in the Catholic Shakespeare is not any new discovery but the renewed interest in late Medieval Catholicism, and its Elizabethan aftermath, spurred by Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars. Ackroyd notes that, as town bailiff, John Shakespeare would have overseen the whitewashing of Holy Trinity’s Medieval paintings, a trauma he speculates helped ensure his later recommitment to the old faith. And Duffy is cited directly in Clare Asquith’s new book, Shadowplay.⁴

This book asks the pertinent question: If Shakespeare was Catholic, how would that affect the way in which we read the plays? Her answer, however, is disturbingly irresponsible, reflective of the worst tendencies of the Shakespeare theorizers. Indeed, it is irresistible to draw parallels with Anderson. Like Anderson, she expanded her book from a magazine article (Anderson’s a 1999 Harper’s piece, Asquith’s 2001 Times Literary Supplement article on “The Phoenix and the Turtle”). Like Anderson, she doesn’t bother to prove her contention about the author of the plays, but instead proceeds directly to “decode” the entire Shakespeare canon in light of it. Like Anderson, Asquith seems to know precisely what events Shakespeare had in mind when crafting particular works.

Clearly, for instance, when he wrote Hamlet it was to express the predicament of English Catholics, waiting for Elizabeth to die and wondering whether to revolt: “Did Shakespeare realize when he decided to appeal to those caught in this essentially English predicament by reworking an old drama known to scholars as the Ur-Hamlet that he would be producing not only his own finest play but one of the greatest works of literature ever written?” Presumably not, as he must have been busy incorporating the “code words” which Asquith lists in an appendix: “dark” for Protestant, “fair” for Catholic, “earthquake” for the Reformation, “Moon” for Queen Elizabeth. (The most amusing way to read such works is always back to front.)

Asquith seems to know her subject well, and might have written a book—a much needed book—shedding light on the aspects of Catholic England that find an echo in the plays. Instead, she proposes a Shakespeare every bit as fictional as Bolt’s or Anderson’s. It was with disappointment, but little surprise, that I noted Asquith’s catching Shakespeare alluding in certain plays—such as As You Like It and Julius Caesar, which despite apparent differences were both meant to “publicize Shakespeare’s own return to the company of Catholic resistance writers”—to the very process of encoding she claims to have discovered.

It is this compulsion of theorizers, this inability to know when to quit seeing connections, that ensures that all conspiracies are always vast. Such arguments are infinite only because they are closed circles, never opening outward. So ufologists can tell you all about Area 51, but nothing about the universe. So Da Vinci codists talk endlessly about the bloodlines of Mary Magdalene, but can say nothing about the human heart. In the works of Shakespeare theorizers, this takes the form of a subtext that gradually overwhelms the texts themselves—texts that say so very many important things about both.

In this, Ackroyd’s biography is instructive about what, precisely, the difference is between the different types of bad Shakespeare biography. He knows when to stop. Though extravagant in his speculations about Shakespeare’s life, he knows speculation is a one-way street. Though he looks to the plays for knowledge about the man who wrote them, he never once takes the effigy he has created and tries to find him in the plays. He shows an essential humility before the plays.

To allow our own ideas about Shakespeare to color our interpretation of the works is to limit what they actually do mean, to mistake a higher truth for a lesser one. That Hamlet may call to mind Oxford’s loss of his ancestral birthright, or the displacement of Catholics from their proper place in English culture, or any number of parallels in the lives of those yet to be born, are not indicators of autobiographical truths about the author. They are simply another indicator of the works’ great artistic, almost mythic, truth. The lives in Shakespeare are not his, but everyone else’s.

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1.   Shakespeare by Another Name: A Biography of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare, by Mark Anderson; Gotham Books, 640 pages, $32.50.
2.   History Play: The Life and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, by Rodney Bolt; Bloomsbury USA, 400 pages, $24.95.
3.   Shakespeare: A Biography, by Peter Ackroyd; Nan A. Talese, 592 pages, $32.50.
4.   Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, by Clare Asquith; PublicAffairs, 364 pages, $28.95.