The Shakespeareance of a Lifetime (Or Two) by Geraint Jonathan

There’s a quality peculiarly magnificent to certain enthusiasts, particularly those whose enthusiasm tipped over into outright crankery, or what was perceived to be such. It depends, I suppose, on what it is has gripped the enthusiast’s imagination; a person’s overriding obsession with, say, the history of mirrors may induce a groan or a shake of the head in those utterly uninterested in the history of mirrors;  similarly, an obsession with Shakespeare will send to sleep persons not given to worrying about Shakespeare. And Shakespeare, of all writers, has worried the minds of many. In the words of scholar Ivor Brown, “Shakespeare stands alone in his spawning of cranks and bores as well as of erudite scholars and devotees of genius.”  To which one might add a note of gratitude on considering the former. Certainly the byways of Shakespeare-lore would be marginally the poorer without its tales of the grandiose and/or driven amateur.

As an example of unshowy dedication, there’s none finer than that of American couple Charles and Hulda Wallace. It was their trawling through the archives at London’s Public Records Office brought to light some priceless biographical nuggets; in 1909 they discovered documents concerning Shakespeare’s role as a witness in a deposition involving his landlord – the details of which, uniquely, pin the playwright to a specific time and place, May 1612, and reveal him to have been a lodger at a house on Silver Street, Cripplegate. The Wallaces also uncovered documents relating to Shakespeare’s financial dealings at the Globe as well as to his purchasing of property at Blackfriars in1613. Predictably, Charles and Hulda, being American, were held in some disdain by the grandees of English scholarship, and it would be another hundred years before their contribution was fully acknowledged – glowingly so – by Charles Nicholl in his riveting book The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. For the Wallaces, however, the hours spent cooped up in dusty archives eventually took their toll, Charles becoming ever more erratic and not a little paranoid – his paranoia doubly compounded by the sneer of welcome always given his and Hulda’s discoveries. Eventually the couple returned to America, their Shakespeare adventure done.

Of a noisier and seemingly more ‘deluded’ timbre altogether is the case of Robert ‘Romeo’ Coates. Born in Antigua in 1772, Coates was educated in England and, on inheriting his father’s vast fortune at the age of 35, made his home in Bath, Somerset. Deeply enamoured of Shakespeare, he determined on an acting career but managed only to appear in a few amateur productions. He therefore took matters into his own hands: using his considerable wealth, he hired his own theatrical troupe and embarked on a short tour, treating England to some of Shakespeare’s classics, with himself in the leading roles. The performances became news. Tragic scenes were said to leave audiences helpless with laughter; Coates at times broke off mid-speech to address some particular heckler. He dressed in outlandish costumes of his own design; he forgot his lines; he became so fond of death scenes he frequently insisted on repeating them; fellow actors often tried to remove him from the stage. His most ‘celebrated’ role was that of Romeo; in one production, his Romeo went at Capulet’s tomb with a crowbar; in another, his diamond-studded garments proved so tight a fit the seat of his pants split open mid-peroration.  Hard however not to hear in these anecdotes the note of something tricksterish at work; Coates was not insensible of the reactions he provoked, hence perhaps his pronouncing himself England’s greatest living Shakespearean actor. For seven years audiences paid good money to see just how bad an actor he was; what few people knew was that all proceeds from every show were duly shared between various local charities. Coates as parodist-extraordinaire?  As post-modern in his jest circa 1812 as many a satirist/prankster active two hundred years later? A fanciful notion, to be sure, but the likes of Coates would doubtless have found fond place in Shakespeare’s world; his like would rub shoulders with many a minor character of equally inflated aplomb.

In a similar vein, it’s impossible to imagine Shakespeare himself not being bemused, entertained, intrigued, even moved, by the clamour of voices declaring him to have been somebody else entirely. The case of Delia Bacon, for one, would surely have stirred his sympathies, made for an unpatronising  portrayal, one not reducible to some quaint notion of madness – or of Woman Wronged.

It was Delia’s 1857 tome The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded kickstarted the idea that ‘William Shakespeare’ was the collective alias adopted by a scholarly cabal of Elizabethan notables – among them Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and, most notably of all, and the driving force behind the deception, Sir Francis Bacon; as part of the ruling elite they were keen to influence the masses in ways politically favourable to themselves, and so it was they co-wrote the plays attributed to the Warwickshire bumpkin-turned-actor.  Delia’s book was roundly mocked. Undeterred, she sought the support of literary lions like Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom were charmed by her warmth and intelligence. Whatever Delia’s book lacked in the way of evidence to support her claims, she herself was evidently a woman of some personal force.

Born in Ohio, the first thirty years of her life are described as “uneventful” – a euphemism for her not being married. In her mid-30s she fell in love with a man some ten years her junior; when she discovered that her beau was in the habit of entertaining his friends by reading aloud from her letters, she was devastated, and broke off all contact. For several years she avoided society, tried her hand at writing fiction, and, somewhere along the line, became so enthralled by the Bard of Avon that she saw behind his plays and poems the sure hand of her illustrious namesake. (Nowhere, incidentally, does she claim familial kinship with Francis Bacon himself.) In 1852, with funds acquired from some of her wealthier supporters, Delia sailed for England and spent almost a year living in St Albans, Francis Bacon’s home town. Eschewing conventional methods of research, she spent much of her time absorbing the various ‘energies’ of the town. But by the time she returned to America, in 1857, Delia’s literary preoccupations had given way to a belief that she was, in fact, the Holy Ghost, and it was not long before she was committed to a mental asylum, where she died two years later at the age of 48.

With a slight shift in perspective, however, Delia Bacon would not be so out of place in a roll-call of what might be called Superspinsters, particularly those of the 18^th and 19^th centuries – women like Mary Anning, Isabella Bird, Louise Michel, Mary Astell. Delia may not have contributed to any branch of science, or travelled to remote lands, or stormed any barricades – nor indeed written a memorable line, but her obsessive quest, however misguided, acquires lustre when viewed in light of the unpromising prospects afforded her. Emerging from a long depression – following her lover’s betrayal – she had, for the most part, lived the last ten years of her life according to her own lights. Meanwhile the industry she spawned shows little sign of running out of steam.

What the bumpkin-actor would have made of her is anyone’s guess, but, going on the evidence of his plays, a note of pathos would have surely sounded, and Miss Bacon’s quest been given its place.

For Shakespeare’s character Parolles, in All’s Well That Ends Well, things don’t end so well at all and he is exposed as a liar, a coward, a cheat, a braggart – yet for him too, as for any living soul, “there’s place and means”.  So too, one imagines, for every Shakespeare conceived – no matter how disturbed the mind that conceived him or what cause he is made to serve or how ludicrous the new guise given him. He can take it. He’s been taking it for years. He’ll be taking it for many more. The rest is not silence, far from it.

Geraint Jonathan