Jonathan Bate and the Shakespeare authorship question

I know, I know Shakespeare fans are all (or mostly?) fed up with the authorship question, but in case any anti-Stratfordian wanders to my blog, here are some interesting passages from Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare: 

“If there is one thing we can say for certain about Shakespeare’s plays it is that they were written by a man of the theatre. An early play like Titus Andronicus was composed under the influence of the hit plays of the late 1580s, notably Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta; a middle play like Hamlet was intricately bound up with the rivalry between the adult and children’s acting companies around 1600; the late plays were responsive to Fletcher’s innovations in the writing of tragicomic romance and the King’s Men’s purchase of the lease on the indoor playhouse at Blackfriars. Countless technicalities of staging in every one of the plays reveal that only a professional theatrical insider could have written them.” (Ch.3)

A related point is later made by James Shapiro in Contested Will. 

“There were times when Shakespeare was thinking so intently about the part he was writing for a particular actor that in jotting down the speech headings he mistakenly wrote the actor’s name rather than his character’s. We know this because compositors passed on some of these slips when typesetting his foul papers.” (Section “Four: Shakespeare”) 

The plays therefore had to be written by someone working in the company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, not an aristocrat sitting somewhere away.

Speaking of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the most popular candidate among anti-Stratfordians, Jonathan Bate mentions that he died in 1604, and says:  

“Insofar as Looney and later Oxfordians address the problem of chronology at all, they have to argue that the later plays were written before 1604, kept in manuscript, and subsequently revised by the players with topical allusions to post-1604 events added in. But this argument is fatally flawed in the cases of Macbeth and The Tempest: the former does not merely allude to the Gunpowder Plot, it is a Gunpowder play through and through, while the latter could only have been written after the publication of Florio’s translation of Montaigne in 1603 and the tempest that drove Sir George Somers’ ship to Bermuda in 1609.

Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the technical changes attendant upon the King’s Men’s move to the Blackfriars theatre four years after their candidate’s death…” (Ch.3) 

This is a fact that all Shakespeare scholars discuss and anti-Stratfordians conveniently ignore: Blackfriars, unlike The Globe, is an indoor theatre and candles couldn’t burn unattended for the entire length of a play, therefore plays had to be divided into 5 acts so the candles could be replaced between acts. 

“The plays written after Shakespeare’s company began using the Blackfriars in 1608, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale for instance, have what most of the earlier plays do not have: a carefully planned five-act structure.” (ibid.)

Jonathan Bate also mentions another often ignored fact, that many contemporaries knew Shakespeare and spoke of him as a writer—Bate mentions several names and writes about them at length. I don’t know how anti-Stratfordians explain that to themselves and others—was everyone, especially Ben Jonson, part of the conspiracy?  

But I won’t write more about anti-Stratfordians. There is ample evidence that Shakespeare, the author of the plays, was Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon. 

See my blog post about Bill Bryson and the Shakespeare authorship question.