The Absolutely True, Indisputable, and Definitive History of the Shakespeare-Authorship Controversy

(It Arose From The Fact He Adapted Old Plays)

In the centuries-old battle over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, conventional scholars and their skeptical counterparts have created two different narratives about when and how the debate first began. On the one side, orthodox scholars reasonably contend that no one ever doubted Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays that bear his name till hundreds of years after he died—not until the mid-nineteenth century—the Victorian period—when the snobbery of the era enticed a few eccentrics to declare it impossible that a poor, glover’s son could have written such masterpieces. Not true, the anti-Stratfordians retort, doubts about authorship can be traced back to the 1590s during Shakespeare’s first years in London.

Which side is right? Both sides, in a way. But the scholars and their opponents are like the fabled blind men holding various parts of the same elephant—all thinking it a different animal. Professors and editors, of course, are correct that no one ever doubted that Shakespeare was a playwright until the nineteenth century. But it is also true that while Shakespeare was alive and in the decades and centuries afterward, people repeatedly documented that Shakespeare was not the original author of the plays attributed to him. He merely adapted those plays for the stage. As will be shown, it was Shakespeare’s use of old plays—old plays that were, like the vast majority of the plays of the Tudor era, never published—that started the inquiry in the early nineteenth century as to who the original author or authors of the plays were. And it was this question that then led to more extreme anti-Stratfordian claims, such as the incorrect belief that Shakespeare was not a playwright—or even an illiterate stooge of some nobleman trying to hide his identity.

Shakespeare Adapted Old Plays

The documentation that Shakespeare frequently remade old plays is unambiguous, and no one denies it. As we will see in future Substack posts, numerous pre-Shakespeare references to these plays confirm their existence, and, the first title-pages of the plays that carried Shakespeare’s name or initials gratuitously indicate they were adaptations too. In fact, twentieth-century Shakespeare scholar C. A. Greer studied the history of all the plays in the canon, suggesting “the possibility, if not probability, that Shakespeare had a source play for most if not all of his plays.”^[i] New Cambridge editor Giorgio Melchiori not only acknowledged such early versions but pronounced Shakespeare “an expert at remakes of old plays for the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men.”^[ii] Perhaps most aptly, Shakespeare scholar James J. Marino wrote: “How many old plays he revised is an argument for another chapter, but in some cases, Shakespeare was clearly collaborating diachronically with an earlier playwright, building upon elements of the older work to create a new whole.”^[iii] 

The reason the original author or authors never published these plays (it was Sir Thomas North, by the way, who originally wrote them—a fact that seems to irritate many on all sides of the debate) is that essentially no one ever published their plays during the early Elizabethan era, and thousands have been lost. For example, Leicester’s Men, the Earl of Leicester’s theater troupe (for whom Thomas North wrote nearly all his plays), produced plays for the Queen at court or at Noblemen’s manors for nearly thirty years, but none of their plays were ever printed and none have survived. Regardless, what is important about Shakespeare’s methods is that they led to the authorship question that continues to make news to this day.

Below are eight examples of people alluding to Shakespeare’s use of old plays, beginning when he was alive and continuing into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.