Attached to the north chancel wall overlooking this grouping is the famous life-size painted bust that Edmond Malone ordered whitewashed in the eighteenth century, though it has since been repainted. It shows Shakespeare with a quill and a staring expression and bears the message:

Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?

Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed

Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom

Quick nature died’ whose name doth check this tomb

Far more than cost, sith all that he hath writ

Leaves living art but page to serve his wit.

Since Shakespeare patently has never been within the monument, many have puzzled over what those lines mean. Paul Edmondson has made a particular study of the Shakespeare graves and memorial, but happily agrees that it is more or less impossible to interpret sensibly. “For one thing, it calls itself a tomb even though it is not a tomb at all but a memorial,” he says. One suggestion that has many times been made is that the monument contains not the body of Shakespeare but the body of his work: his manuscripts.

“A lot of people ache to believe that the manuscripts still exist somewhere,” Edmondson says, “but there is no evidence to suppose that they are in the monument or anywhere else. You just have to accept that they are gone for good.”

As for the heroes of this chapter, Henry Condell died four years after the publication of the First Folio, in 1627, and John Heminges followed three years later. They were buried near each other in the historic London church of Saint Mary Aldermanbury. That church was lost in the Great Fire of 1666 and replaced by a Christopher Wren structure, which in turn was lost to German bombs in World War II.

Chapter Nine. Claimants

THERE IS AN EXTRAORDINARY- seemingly an insatiable-urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other than William Shakespeare. The number of published books suggesting-or more often insisting-as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.

Shakespeare’s plays, it is held, so brim with expertise-on law, medicine, statesmanship, court life, military affairs, the bounding main, antiquity, life abroad-that they cannot possibly be the work of a single lightly educated provincial. The presumption is that William Shakespeare of Stratford was, at best, an amiable stooge, an actor who lent his name as cover for someone of greater talent, someone who could not, for one reason or another, be publicly identified as a playwright.

The controversy has been given respectful airings in the highest quarters. PBS, the American television network, in 1996 produced an hour-long documentary unequivocally suggesting that Shakespeare probably wasn’t Shakespeare. Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times have both devoted generous amounts of space to sympathetically considering the anti-Stratford arguments. The Smithsonian Institution in 2002 held a seminar titled “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”-a question that most academics would have thought hopelessly tautological. The best-read article in the British magazine History Today was one examining the authorship question. Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be-I weep to say it-Elizabeth I. Perhaps the most extraordinary development of all is that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London-built as a monument for his plays and with aspirations to be a world-class study center-became, under the stewardship of the artistic director Mark Rylance, a kind of clearinghouse for anti-Stratford sentiment.

So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment-actually all of it, every bit-involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact. Shakespeare “never owned a book,” a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.

Daniel Wright, a professor at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, and an active anti-Stratfordian, wrote in Harper’s Magazine that Shakespeare was “a simple, untutored wool and grain merchant” and “a rather ordinary man who had no connection to the literary world.” Such statements can only be characterized as wildly imaginative. Similarly, in the normally unimpeachable History Today, William D. Rubinstein, a professor at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, stated in the opening paragraph of his anti-Shakespeare survey: “Of the seventy-five known contemporary documents in which Shakespeare is named, not one concerns his career as an author.”

That is not even close to being so. In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605-that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be-Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I. He is identified on the title pages as the author of the sonnets and in the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groat’s-Worth of Wit. John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil.

The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them. As the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate has pointed out, virtually no one “in Shakespeare’s lifetime or for the first two hundred years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship.”

So where did all the anti-Stratford sentiment come from? The story begins, a little unexpectedly, with an odd and frankly unlikely American woman named Delia Bacon. Bacon was born in 1811 in the frontier country of Ohio into a large family and a small log cabin. The family was poor and became more so after her father died when Delia was young.

Delia was bright and apparently very pretty but not terribly stable. As an adult, she taught school and wrote a little fiction, but mostly she led a life of spinsterly anonymity in New Haven, Connecticut, where she lived with her brother, a minister. The one lively event in her secluded existence came in the 1840s, when she developed a passionate, seemingly obsessive, attachment to a theological student some years her junior. The affair, such as it was, ended in humiliation for her when she discovered that the young man was in the habit of amusing his friends by reading to them passages from her feverishly tender letters. It was a cruelty from which she never recovered.

Gradually, for reasons that are not clear, she became convinced that Francis Bacon, her distinguished namesake, was the true author of the works of William Shakespeare. The idea was not entirely original to Delia Bacon-one Reverend James Wilmot, a provincial rector in Warwickshire, raised questions about Shakespeare’s authorship as early as 1785. But his doubts weren’t known until 1932, so Delia’s conviction was arrived at independently. Though she had no known genealogical connection to Francis Bacon, the correspondence of names was almost certainly more than coincidental.

In 1852 she traveled to England and embarked on a long and fixated quest to prove William Shakespeare a fraud. It is easy to dismiss Delia as mildly demented and inconsequential, but there was clearly something beguiling in her manner and physical presence, for she succeeded in winning the assistance of a number of influential people (though often, it must be said, they came to regret it). Charles Butler, a wealthy businessman, agreed to fund the costs of her trip to England -and must have done so generously, for she stayed for almost four years. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave her an introduction to Thomas Carlyle, who in turn assisted her upon her arrival in London. Bacon’s research methods were singular to say the least. She spent ten months in St. Albans, Francis Bacon’s hometown, but claimed not to have spoken to anyone during the whole of that time. She sought no information from museums or archives and politely declined Carlyle’s offers of introductions to the leading scholars. Instead she sought out locations where Bacon had spent time and silently “absorbed atmospheres,” refining her theories by a kind of intellectual osmosis.