Margaret Demorest’s book is an attempt to show that Shakespeare
didn’t write the works we associate with his name; he is the "man
from Stratford", an unimportant actor. John Donne is the
true author. To prove this large claim, Demorest presents ‘evidence’
drawn from history, biography, minute comparison of works, and
more arcane material, concerning number symbolism and an acrostic
code, amongst other things. I will concentrate here on the general
thesis put forward, and some basic problems with it.
Ignored by mainstream literary criticism, the ‘Shakespeare mystery’
continues to thrive, fuelled in recent times by the Internet,
whose wide open spaces provide attractive homes for conspiracy
theorists. In her defence, Demorest clearly venerates the poetry
of the English Renaissance. However, she can’t always steer clear
of the main motive of the so-called ‘anti-Stratfordians’- snobbery.
In her summary of the ‘authorship debate’ she claims that "Those
who accept the man from Stratford must supply him with an advisor
who is a classicist, linguist, traveler, lawyer, courtier, and
a military man. (And a more attractive record as a person)"
(p.5). Why must they? We don’t know that Shakespeare attended
the Stratford grammar school, as there are no records of attendance
before 1700, but it is not an unlikely assumption. His education
would have been more than sufficient to write the plays; nor does
his not being highborn debar him from writing about court life.
The idea of Shakespeare’s unattractiveness as a person marring
his artistic abilities is patently absurd: a connection between
behaviour and artistic achievement is hardly tenable, some of
John Donne’s more cynical ‘love’ poems would hardly endorse his
moral rectitude, for instance.
Every conspiracy needs a motive. Demorest speculates, from a reading
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as thinly veiled political
allegory, that "…Shakespeare engaged in dangerous subversive
writing. This would explain the use of a pseudonym" (pp.l0-11).
No. It would suggest that he wrote subversively. So did lots of
others, by this standard of evidence. Pseudonyms would be necessary
for all Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, if their work is
measured for potential subversion. On this shaky premise, Demorest
presents her "evidence" for Donne’s authorship. Her
argument rests on our lack of evidence of Donne’s early writings.
Talking of the posthumous (1633) volume of poems, Demorest claims
that: "Though it is impossible to date most of the poems,
modern scholars believe the greater part belong to Donne’s mature
years" (p.25). This is vague and disingenuous. Modern scholars
believe that there is no way of dating most of Donne’s
secular verse. However, the assumption has almost always been
that Donne’s secular poetry preceded his ordination at St. Paul’s
in 1615. What modern scholars believe is that too great
a dichotomy between early, secular Donne and late, religious Donne
shouldn’t be assumed, as it leads to generalisations about the
work. That is almost all we know.
Demorest, however, obscures any idea that Donne’s secular poetry
precedes the 1610s, the decade of the death of the "Stratford
man", in order to heighten the appeal of her theory that
he was busy writing all of Shakespeare’s works. Writing of Donne’s
poetry being circulated in manuscript in his lifetime, she remarks
that: "Limited availability of such writing makes it difficult
for us to account for Ben Jonson’s 1618 evaluation of Donne’s
stature as a poet: that he was ‘in some things the foremost poet
in the world"’ (p.26). Jonson’s praise is not that difficult
to account for if we look at what he is actually reported to have
said, in his Conversations with William Drummond of 1619
(not 18): "He esteemeth Donne the first poet in the world,
in some things: his verses of the lost chain he hath by heart;
and that passage of ‘The Calm’, that dust and feathers do not
stir, all was so quiet. Affirmeth Donne to have written all his
best pieces ere he was twenty-five years old." Even taking
into account the fact that this is Drummond reporting what Jonson
told him after the event, (a Jacobean version of the ‘celebrity
interview’), Jonson seems to make clear both that Donne had made
available a body of poetry, and that much of this was accomplished
in his early career; Donne was born in 1572, so the period Jonson
refers to takes us up to around 1597. Demorest’s selective mis-quotation
here is culpable, as the full text weakens her argument. She similarly
half quotes Jonson (in his Discoveries) on Shakespeare’s
"blotting". Demorest suggests that ‘blot’ means ‘cover-up’,
and twists Jonson into condemning Shakespeare/Donne’s foolhardiness
in not ‘blotting’ his subversive material; actually, as the full
context makes clear, Jonson was using his commonplace book to
point out the solecisms and non-sequiturs of Shakespeare’s
dialogue; he wants him to "blot" out the bad lines and
the dramatic padding.
It is ironic that the anti-Stratfordian movement should continue
its assaults, when it is considered that most of literary criticism
has been trying to get rid of the notion of an ‘author’ for some
time. Whether or not this is a good thing I leave for others to
judge, but its effect is indisputable. The old problems of proving
authorial intention from biography are partly what have brought
the idea of ‘authorship’ into decline. The anti-Stratfordian line
has always been that mainstream academia excludes them as part
of an elitist conspiracy. The truth is that the move from studying
‘author’ to studying ‘text’ in modern literary criticism means
that it has never mattered less who the author of a book is. But
even leaving this aside, those involved in the debate have to
use standard scholarly tools. The anti-Stratfordians have consistently
failed to do so, and Margaret Demorest’s selectivity in producing
and representing evidence does her argument no favours: half quotes
and vague generalisations may fool readers without specialist
knowledge, but are no substitute for a properly reasoned and judiciously
presented argument using all the evidence concerned.
Reviewed by Adam Rounce
