Contested Will Read Online Free

would also prove to be the pattern of a Shakespeare claimant: a writer of high lineage mistaken for someone of humbler origins, whose true identity deserved to be acknowledged.
    I’ve not been able to discover who forged the Cowell manuscript; that mystery will have to be solved by others. His or her motives (or perhaps their) cannot fully be known, though it’s worth hazarding a guess or two. Greed perhaps figured, for there is a record of payment for the manuscript of the not inconsiderable sum of £ 8 8s – though this document may have been planted and we simply don’t as yet know when or how the Cowell manuscript became part of the Durning-Lawrence collection. But, given how much time and care went into the forgery, a far likelier motive was the desire on the part of a Baconian to stave off thechallenge posed by supporters of the Earl of Oxford, who by the 1920s threatened to surpass Bacon as the more likely author of Shakespeare’s works, if in fact he had not done so already. A final motive was that it reassigned the discovery of Francis Bacon’s authorship from a ‘mad’ American woman to a true-born Englishman, a quiet retiring man of letters, an Oxford-educated rector from the heart of England. Wilmot also stood as a surrogate for the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays: a well-educated man believed to have written pseudonymously who refused to claim credit for what he wrote and nearly denied posterity knowledge of the truth.
    All of the major elements of the authorship controversy come together in the tangled story of Wilmot, Cowell, Serres and the nameless forger – which serves as both a prologue and a warning. The following pages retrace a path strewn with a great deal more of the same: fabricated documents, embellished lives, concealed identity, calls for trial, pseudonymous authorship, contested evidence, bald-faced deception, and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined.

ONE
SHAKESPEARE
    George Romney, ‘The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions’, engraved by Benjamin Smith, 1799

    Portrait, from Samuel Ireland, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Head and Seal of William Shakspeare (London, 1796)
Ireland
    For a long time after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, anyone curious about his life had to depend on unreliable and often contradictory anecdotes, most of them supplied by people who had never met him. No one thought to interview his family, friends or fellow actors until it was too late to do so, and it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that biographers began combing through documents preserved in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. All this time interest in Shakespeare never abated; it was centred, however, on his plays rather than his personality. Curiosity about his art was, and still is, easily satisfied: from the closing years of the sixteenth century to this day, his plays could be purchased or seen onstage more readily than those of any other dramatist.
    Shakespeare did not live, as we do, in an age of memoir. Few at the time kept diaries or wrote personal essays (only thirty or so English diaries survive from Shakespeare’s lifetime and only a handful are in any sense personal; and despite the circulation and then translation of Montaigne’s Essays in England, the genre attracted few followers and fizzled out by the early seventeenthcentury, not to be revived in any serious way for another hundred years). Literary biography was still in its infancy; even the word ‘biography’ hadn’t yet entered the language and wouldn’t until the 1660s. By the time that popular interest began to shift from the works themselves to the life of the author, it was difficult to learn much about what Shakespeare was like. Now that those who knew him were no longer alive, the only credible sources of information were letters, literary manuscripts or official documents, and these were either lost