Let Shakespeare rest in peace

By Graham Cooke

Two more books about William Shakespeare have been published in the last few weeks, adding to an ever-growing collection that seeks to discover the secrets of the man behind the plays.

I am delighted that James Shapiro in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare explodes some of the downright stupid myths and conspiracy theories surrounding Will, while in The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare, Robert Winder produces a part-documentary, part novel of the last part of Shakespeare's writing career.

In a delightful bit of fantasy, he suggests that Will regrets his character assassination of Richard III and decides to write a play about Henry VII revealing the Tudors for the greedy usurpers they really were, only for the authorities to get wind of it, forcing him to can the project.

That's the great thing about Shakespeare - we have his words but know so little about his life. so we make inventions and assumptions. Writers have made their careers out of trying to prove that Shakespeare did not write a single line - it was Bacon, it was Marlowe, or some obscure aristocrat who couldn't publish under his own name because writing plays was not what gentlemen did. Four centuries after his death Shakespeare keeps his literary descendants in work. He should be pleased.

Did Shakespeare really write Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure and so on? Probably, but does it matter? Did he have help? Almost certainly, so what? It detracts not a jot from the magnificence of the words he used; of his ability to have audiences splitting their sides at Falstaff or looking on in horror at the blinding of Gloucester.

I think that sometimes we are guilty at looking at Shakespeare through modern eyes, forgetting he was a child of the late Elizabethan era. We are used to the idea of compartmentalised theatre - the playwright writes, the producer produces, the director directs and the actors perform.

Things were very different in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There were acting companies where everyone mucked in. Shakespeare was first and foremost an actor; an actor with a bit of a talent for writing admittedly who was an an asset because audiences of the day wanted a regular diet of new material. So Will got time to write, but sometimes the deadlines got on top of him, which meant others in the company and perhaps friends and associates like Marlowe helped out.

What could be more natural - and does anyone have a better explanation?

Of all the books and newspaper articles I have read about Shakespeare, nothing was more entertaining than a novel by alternative history master Harry Turtledove, who wrote of Shakespeare in an England where the Armada had succeeded and England is occupied. In his account, Shakespeare is caught up in a successful revolution against the Spanish and is rewarded with a knighthood.

Fanciful nonsense? No more, I would suggest, than the vast quantities of suppositions and inventions which have been produced under the guise of scholarly investigation over the past 50 years.

Let Shakespeare rest - the words he wrote (or may have written) will live forever.