James Shapiro at the Globe Theatre, London

When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I was only dimly aware that a revolution was taking place in how Shakespeare’s world and works were understood.

A decade earlier, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had been introduced to Shakespeare’s England through The Elizabethan World Picture (1943), EMW Tillyard’s slim and influential volume. We learned from Tillyard that English Renaissance culture was conservative in nature and defined by rigid hierarchy, a view confirmed by Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida on the importance of everyone knowing his place (“Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows”). Years passed before I registered how desperate Tillyard’s book was, how much it represented a futile effort to bind on to Shakespeare’s England what was fast unravelling in his own.

By the mid-1980s Tillyard’s book had all but disappeared from reading lists, along with a good deal of old-fashioned moral and character criticism. Studies devoted to race, class, gender and politics took their place, fuelled by post-structuralism and spearheaded by Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984), two brilliant books whose arguments had, only a few years earlier, seemed inconceivable. Greenblatt taught at Berkeley, Dollimore at Sussex, and their work and schools were identified with what became known, in the US, as New Historicism and, in Britain, as Cultural Materialism.

As they always have, Shakespeare’s plays adjusted easily to these changing values and circumstances. The Tempest, long seen as a play about a benevolent ruler, was now taught as a fraught post-colonial drama. The manipulative Henry V was no longer quite the hero that Laurence Olivier had portrayed in his patriotic 1944 film. The reputation of “problem” plays such as Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida soared. Ulysses’ self-interested speech on degree was now taught as a textbook example of Machiavellian hypocrisy.

At professional conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, new readings cracked old plays wide open. It was, after hearing Coppélia Kahn on the “absent mother” in King Lear, or Lynda Boose on the strawberry-spotted handkerchief in Othello, impossible to read those plays the same way again. There were also talks that were outrageous for the sake of outrageousness, most memorably Jonathan Goldberg’s “The Anus in Coriolanus.”

The winds of change even reached the quiet backwater of editing. It emerged that scholars who had been preparing the editions on which the rest of us depended had not made clear the extent to which their texts of some major plays were stitched together, often arbitrarily, from different quarto and folio versions that had come down to us from Shakespeare’s day (quartos were like cheap paperbacks and the larger and sumptuous folios the equivalent of the modern coffee-table book).

This news was hard to absorb. Surely you couldn’t just pick and choose which bits you liked from each version? Yet that is exactly what many editors had been doing. As a result, texts would now have to be unedited to make clear how early versions of the plays differed, and to discover where Shakespeare may have had second thoughts and revised his plays.

The revolution only went so far. Those transforming Shakespeare studies were rigorous in challenging outmoded ways of thinking about Elizabethan drama, but failed to address the persistent belief that somebody other than Shakespeare might have been the true author of the works long attributed to him. Maybe they had no reason to take such a claim seriously. But there’s an alternative worth considering: that when it came to the question of authorship they weren’t ready to confront some shaky biographical assumptions, assumptions they held in common with Shakespeare-deniers they viewed as cranks.

The first was the conviction that Shakespeare wrote alone. So while it was possible to claim Shakespeare was gay, straight or bisexual, a crypto-Catholic or a Protestant or a propagandist for the Tudor regime, for a very long time it remained heretical for Shakespeare professors to insist that he didn’t write the plays by himself.

The reluctance to describe Shakespeare as a collaborative writer is puzzling – especially because scholars know that co-authorship was common on the Elizabethan stage. Christopher Marlowe collaborated. So did Ben Jonson and John Marston. When the co-authored plays of John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont were published in an expensive folio in 1647 their collaborative nature was a selling point. And when The Two Noble Kinsmen was first printed, in 1634, the title page made much of the fact that it was “written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr John Fletcher and Mr William Shakespeare.”

In 1985 I was hired by Columbia to teach Shakespeare. At this time I was still unaware that three plays on my syllabus – Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and Pericles – had been co-authored. Like most Shakespeareans, I paid little attention to the largely forgotten attribution studies of the 19th century. Serious work in that field had all but died out after the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the early 20th century, Sir EK Chambers, had, in a famous 1924 British Academy Shakespeare lecture, roundly dismissed the enterprise as the work of “disintegrators”. In fact, until the past decade, the leading authorities on these matters agreed with Chambers and rejected the possibility that Shakespeare collaborated in any significant way.

Since then, thanks to the cumulative labour of scholars who began to investigate authorial habits – which playwright consistently preferred “has” and “does” and which “hath” and “doth” and so on – writers’ distinctive syntax, vocabulary and stylistic tics have become more visible.

In 1986 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s groundbreaking Oxford Shakespeare was the first major edition to concede the extent of Shakespearean collaboration, and it was clear that he had co-authored works with George Peele, Thomas Middleton, George Wilkins and John Fletcher.

This came as something of a shock for those of us teaching the plays. Even now we are still far from understanding exactly how Shakespeare and his co-authors mapped out plots, divided up responsibility, revised each other’s words and echoed each other’s styles.

We also lack a vocabulary to describe different sorts of co-authorship, including that which took place after Shakespeare’s death. Macbeth, for example, turns out to have been revised by Middleton many years after Shakespeare wrote it. He added a few songs along with the character of Hecate – perhaps 10 per cent of the play we now have. Another example, which recently made news, was Double Falsehood, Lewis Theobald’s overhaul of Cardenio, a play originally written in 1612 by Shakespeare with John Fletcher. Theobald’s 18th century adaptation was described excitedly as a “lost” Shakespeare play but, sadly, his revision is so extensive that only a few shards of the original collaboration poke through. In what sense, then, can we speak of that play as Shakespearean?

It wasn’t until a few months ago that I finally announced to my undergraduates at Columbia that the play we were reading – Timon of Athens – was jointly written. I tried to explore with them the nature of that collaboration and wasn’t particularly successful. I didn’t – and still don’t – know how to make co-authorship appealing to students who have, after all, registered for a course on “Shakespeare” and not “Shakespeare and his co-authors”. This wasn’t made any easier by the fact that a few of them were relying on the New Cambridge edition of the play, which utterly rejects the evidence that Timon is co-authored, while others had the New Oxford edition, which almost surgically divides scenes and speeches between Middleton and Shakespeare, assigning a little over 60 per cent of the play to the latter, including its beginning and end.

I had better luck when I recently repeated the experiment with a group of graduate students who worked through Act 2, Scene 2 of Timon – in which Shakespeare and Middleton worked so intensely that their voices intermingle and it becomes impossible to say where one poet’s contribution ends and the other’s begins. In fact, they had far fewer difficulties with the idea of co-authorship than I did and were amused by misguided attempts on the part of an older generation of scholars to separate Shakespearean gold from Middletonian dross.

The acknowledgment that Shakespeare collaborated so extensively has obvious consequences for the last remaining orthodoxy in mainstream studies: that the plays and poems are autobiographical. To believe this is to accept that the plays are not (or not merely) imaginative creations but also recycled chunks of an author’s life. Significantly, this is an assumption shared by those who believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays since, in the absence of documentary evidence linking anyone else to the plays, they have little else to go on.

It wasn’t until the late 18th century that anyone thought of reading Shakespeare’s works autobiographically. Since then, despite the radical re-readings of his plays, it has been a position almost impossible to dislodge. But this may have to change. For it is not easy to reconcile this approach with the knowledge that at least one-sixth of Shakespeare’s plays – and half of his last 10 – were co-authored, for no one has figured out how to read collaborative plays autobiographically.

I have been a fellow traveller in the revolution in Shakespeare studies that I’ve described here. A decade or so younger than most of those who transformed the field, I was drawn more to cultural history than to high theory. When the field seemed to worship the holy trinity of race, class and gender, I wondered why it had largely ignored religion and in 1996 wrote a book called Shakespeare and the Jews. While others worked on cradle-to-grave psycho-biographies that pinned Shakespeare’s emergence as a writer on some imagined marital or familial crisis, I turned instead to a micro-history, entitled 1599, a more historically grounded account of a year in the life of Shakespeare.

Having worked on the book for 15 years, when I finished writing it in 2005 I had a clearer sense of what Shakespeare’s professional challenges were as he completed Henry V, wrote As You Like It and Julius Caesar in quick succession, and began drafting Hamlet in the same year that saw the Globe Theatre rise in London’s Southwark. I also knew more about the venues at which he performed, the local and foreign affairs that shaped his life and those of his playgoers, and the literary works he read and reworked in his plays. But what years of intensive study failed to reveal was where Shakespeare’s inner life could confidently be found in works he wrote. I’m sure that things he experienced first-hand shaped his plays but I don’t know how anyone can claim the authority to say when and where and how they did so.

Many scholars, including some of those most responsible for the transformations in Shakespeare studies, have had a hard time letting go of otherwise unsupported biographical claims that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet to commemorate the death of his son, or that The Tempest marks his leave-taking from the stage and retirement to Stratford – conveniently overlooking three subsequent collaborations with John Fletcher. The idea that these plays tell stories imagined by Shakespeare – or, in the case of Hamlet, updated by him – cannot compete with our desire to believe they are self-revealing works in which biographical fact mingles with fiction.

Since the 1990s the ranks of those who doubt that Shakespeare was the true author of his plays have grown. Prominent actors including Mark Rylance and Sir Derek Jacobi have joined those promoting alternative candidates, especially the Earl of Oxford. And it was recently reported that the director Roland Emmerich is shooting a new film, Anonymous, which should popularise the case of Oxford (who died in 1604, before Timon of Athens and four other collaborative plays were written).

Maybe this challenge will be enough to get scholars to repudiate the last, most cherished Shakespearean anachronism, one that not even the radical scholarship of the past 25 years had dared question: Shakespeare, the autobiographical artist.

James Shapiro is professor of English at Columbia University. His latest book, ‘Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ (Faber & Faber £20) is published on April 1). To order a copy for £16 plus P&P, tel: +44 0870 429 5884; www.ft.com/bookshop

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Mary Arden’s home

Much ado about Shakespeare’s birthday
The Bard’s Birthday Bash, Stratford-upon-Avon, April 22-25
The birthplace of Shakespeare will mark the day, April 26, as it has for more than 200 years, with a range of events at the properties owned and maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Sign a giant birthday card at the family home of his wife Anne Hathaway, or join some Tudor party games at the farm that was the childhood home of Mary Arden, his mother. www.shakespeare.org.uk

The Globe, Bankside, London, April 17-18
Started by Mark Rylance, the Globe’s artistic director from 1995-2005, the “sonnet” walks will take in historical sites relevant to Shakespeare’s life and works. One route leaves St Leonard’s church in Shoreditch, where Shakespeare worshipped, moving through Bishopsgate, where he once lived, down to Clink Street and the site of the original Globe, before finishing at the Globe’s current home on Bankside. The theatre will open its doors to the public – for free – on Sunday, and Bard fans will be able to explore a range of attractions across the site. www.shakespeares-globe.org

The plays
For those attached to tradition, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production of King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford sees Greg Hicks throwing himself into the role of Lear.

For an alternative take on one of the Bard’s best, Tom Morris’s production of Juliet and her Romeo, at the Old Vic in Bristol, re-imagines the (not so young) lovers’ tryst as a tale of forbidden, geriatric love in a Verona nursing home.

www.rsc.org.uk
www.bristololdvic.org.uk