Is This William Shakespeare?

Apologies, first of all, for my absence from the blog for a little while.  Things have been busy on a number of fronts.

My very good friend Steve Wadlow has created an excellent website around the painting in his family's possession.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been working with Steve for over two-and-a-half years now, examining this remarkable portrait.

It is, as far as I'm concerned, a particularly good, near-contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare.  For more information, please visit Steve's Is This William Shakespeare? website.

One of the pages of the website - entitled "TECHNICAL" - shows some images created by Lumiere Technologie in Paris.  Of those, one clearly shows the "touching up" which had been done, at a later date, to cover up the visible damage to the left eye socket.

Another image, which is presented in the same animated graphic, shows a clear line running down the left cheek of the portrait from the outside of the left eye.

These lines are a feature of Shakespeare portraiture.  If you can find an image of the Shakespeare portrait which now hangs in the old schoolroom at King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford-upon-Avon (where Shakespeare is presumed to have gone to school), you'll see a very similar line to that made visible on the Wadlow portrait by the technological wizardry of Lumiere.

One day, when the ultra-conservative mafia is no longer in a position to dictate what is known, and what is not allowed to be known, about Shakespeare, the Wadlow portrait will be recognised for what it is - the face of Shakespeare.

And maybe - just maybe - that time isn't so far away.

Do check out Steve's website.  It really is very good indeed.

Confirmation Bias

It's a fair point.

A journalist has put it to me that "it was not in the interests of [the Channel 4/Arrow Media] documentary makers to debunk the Beoley skull.  It would have been a much better story for them if they had found a skull that could be Shakespeare's."

I wholeheartedly agree.  It would have been a much better programme if proper consideration had been given to the Beoley skull.

Here's why I think that didn't happen.

Stage 1: Cognitive Dissonance

We all have our own sets of prejudices and firmly held ideas about the world, based on what we've been taught and told, our cultural background, political and religious beliefs, and so on.  When someone comes along with evidence that challenges one or other of those firmly held ideas, some if not all of us can react pretty strongly, as if we were under physical attack.  The fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.  The person goes into a state of denial.  They cannot accept this new evidence because it clashes with what they already believe, and to engage with it might throw their entire world-view into crisis.

Example: when I met with the documentary director, she surprised me somewhat by saying, "You don't believe the skull is Shakespeare's."  I told her that I was uncomfortable with the concept of belief, in these circumstances, but that I was roundabout 98.9% convinced that it is.

Why did she assume that I didn't believe that the skull might be Shakespeare's?  Hadn't she been briefed on who I was, what I'd written and published, how I'd been involved in the process so far?

When I showed her some of the evidence, including the graphic illustrations in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? book highlighting the specific comparisons between the Beoley skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, she said "I can't see it."

Small wonder, then, that having told me they'd want to film me going down into the vault ("How do you think you'll feel, seeing the skull for the first time?") and giving a potted account of Langston's story, they later decided to dispense with my services and film somebody else going down into the vault and describing Langston's story ... someone who doesn't think that the skull is Shakespeare's.

Because as far as the director was concerned, the skull couldn't be Shakespeare's.  The idea was too radical.  It challenged her firmly-held set of beliefs about life, the universe and everything.

Stage 2: Confirmation Bias

Having decided that the Beoley skull couldn't be - mustn't be - Shakespeare's, the documentary was prepped along those very lines.

Let's say you've heard or read something which challenges your deeply-held convictions, triggering cognitive dissonance.  You want to fight back, to reassure yourself, to put your previous ideas back together and be comfortable with them again.  So you go hunting for evidence.

Not any old evidence, of course.  You look for the evidence that supports your point-of-view.  Any other evidence, especially anything that confirms the thing you didn't like hearing, has to be ignored, denied, mocked or destroyed.  What you want - what you need to overcome that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance - is anything that agrees with what you want to believe.

Anything else has to go.

So, in comes the reassuring Shakespeare expert who told the church court hearing into the application to remove the skull for analysis that the Rev C.J. Langston's account of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found was nothing but "Gothic fiction".

Out goes the guy who provided you with evidence that the story was written by someone who knew what he was on about.

The original plan, to have an actor present the programme, is ditched.  An actor might ask awkward questions.  Instead, a historian is hired - one less likely to challenge the consensus - so as to give the show an air of irreproachable authority.

A facial reconstruction expert who had previously commented on the photos of the skull - and then denied ever having seen them - is approached with a laser scan of the Beoley skull.  Though she is briefly glimpsed superimposing the scan of the skull over the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare from the First Folio of 1623, this will not be discussed or commented upon in the show.

(Before the crypt was opened and the scan was made, and before Dr Caroline Wilkinson had seen it, the director tried to convince me that Beoley and the skull would not form a significant part of the programme, that they weren't expecting any results, and when - shock horror! - I mentioned Dr Wilkinson, that she wouldn't be doing any facial reconstruction or anything else with the skull, for that matter.  Would I mind signing a form and promising not to mention her name?)

The expert offers a tentative opinion based on insufficient evidence, and that is pounced on.  PROOF, ladies and gentlemen!  The proof we've all been waiting for!  Everything we previously believed was true!  The Beoley skull story was just a myth!

(Except that, having scanned Shakespeare's grave in Stratford, Kevin Colls, archaeologist, began to suspect that the first half of Langston's story might, in fact, be true.  He has vowed to keep looking for the missing skull.  And good luck to him.  He could spend the rest of his life doing that, now that the Beoley skull business has been kicked into the long grass.  So, nothing to worry our pretty little heads about there, then.)

I have very little doubt that, within a week or two of the director being appointed to oversee the making of the documentary, any hope that the skull would be properly examined had gone right out of the window.  From that point on, the programme was essentially biased in one particular direction.  The Beoley skull theory must be disproved, even if it means surrounding ourselves with people who don't believe it, discarding all the available evidence and any uncontrollable witnesses, asking one expert for their opinion, and then misrepresenting what that expert actually said.

Of course, it would have made a better programme if the skull had not been so summarily debunked, and on the basis of hardly any evidence whatsoever.

It would have made a much better programme.  And it would have paved the way for a more intensive and detailed examination of the skull.

But that wouldn't have helped get rid of that nasty sense of cognitive dissonance, would it?  So it didn't happen.

History Repeats Itself

At the start of Who Killed William Shakespeare? (the contract for which I signed four years ago today) I tried to explain how, in the second half of the 18th century, a metropolitan elite - or what we might now call "The Establishment" - seized control of Shakespeare's memory, rudely dismissing what the locals knew and creating their own version of events.

Significantly, they achieved this partly by losing as much evidence as possible and ignoring or misrepresenting the rest.

Well, old habits die hard, and the net result of last night's Channel 4 documentary seems to have been as damaging, hopeless and borderline-farcical as David Garrick's infamous Shakespeare "Jubilee" of 1769.  Back then, hordes of educated sophisticates descended on Stratford-upon-Avon, much to the alarm and consternation of the natives, who were abused and mocked by the visitors.  Then Garrick went home and produced his own show, which made out that only he and his supporters really knew or cared about Shakespeare, and the locals up in Warwickshire were rustic clowns with no idea about Stratford's most famous son.

Shakespeare's Tomb spent an awful lot of its time showing us pretty pictures of Stratford.  For some reason, a man who had conspired to try to prevent the documentary team from investigating the Beoley skull was given a prominent part in the programme as the authority on all things Shakespearean.

The programme stuck to the party line about the story published by the Rev C.J. Langston in 1879 and 1884 concerning the theft of Shakespeare's skull and its discovery at Beoley.  Even though the programme makers had been given abundant evidence that the Vicar of Beoley had identified himself as the author of the story, and that a surprising number of details in the story are verifiable, that was all ignored.

The skull at Beoley was scanned and then Dr Helen Castor and Kevin Colls sat with Dr Caroline Wilkinson, who showed them the scan on her screen.  The conversation went something like this:

Wilkinson: "This little bit here suggests that it might be dark greyish."

Castor: "So you're saying it's black?"

Wilkinson: "Well, we have to be cautious ..."

Castor: "No - you're saying it's black!"

Cue press release: "Skull is black."

I've altered the wording slightly.  But when an osteoarchaeologist/biological anthropologist tweets: "I'm intrigued #ShakespearesTomb - how did you come to the conclusion it was a 70yr old woman?! Magic new ageing techniques?!" you do have to ask how conclusive the results really were.

And the answer appears to be, not conclusive at all.  But right there, on screen, the expert was cornered and forced to make a definitive statement which, as she had tried to point out, couldn't really be made.  This instantly became a Truth Universally Acknowledged.

Of course, if the programme-makers had bothered to explore the existing research into the similarities between the skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, as well as Rev C.J. Langston and his skull story, we'd have got something more nuanced.  But they didn't want that.  They didn't even want any suggestions from the one and only witness called.  They wanted an Unequivocal Statement indicating that the skull is of no interest whatsoever, so we can all move on.

In the meantime, the folks at Beoley seem to be up in arms over the way they've been treated (see comment under previous blog post).  A geologist informs me that anyone who started a university paper claiming that Shakespeare's skull was stolen from the grave, based on the evidence shown in the programme, would be in very big trouble.  And now I hear from somebody else who helped out with the documentary, but who went unpaid and uncredited.

So what happened - apart from two years wasted (in my case)?

The best I can suggest is that, for a good long while, as the documentary project was being developed, it was all in the hands of an intelligent and amicable person who worked hard to bring all the relevant parties together and to lay the foundations for a genuinely interesting, and potentially startling, investigative programme.

Then a director was hired, along with a couple of producers.  The development producer stepped aside.  From that point on, things quickly began to unravel.

It was as if the "metropolitan elite" had come to town, determined to put the locals back in their place.  Yes, use them for as long as they're useful.  Then dump them.  They're not important.  Their local knowledge and their research are irrelevant.  They might as well be on zero-hours contracts.  We don't need to worry about them.

But the POSH people, the ones who've been on TV before, THEY'RE important.  Better still, they can (by and large) be trusted not to stray from the script.

Remember, we're not here to rock any boats, folks.  Langston's story is anonymous - got it?  The skull at Beoley?  Pah!  Who cares?  Skull, no skull, what's the difference?  Let's have some nice shots of Stratford, talk to some nice people, then back to London as quick as we can.

And if an expert isn't being quite as emphatic as we'd like in denying a very promising lead, we can force her - Inquisition-like - to say what we want her to say, and we can do it on camera, just in case anybody else feels like being properly scientific about all this.  No one will notice.  The press release will already have told everybody what we want them to think.  Now, where's my BAFTA?

It's shocking to realise how much hard work and good will was completely and utterly trashed in such a short space of time, by people who were new to the project, and what an unashamedly wasted opportunity the programme turned out to be.  Our knowledge of Shakespeare and the fate of his skull wasn't advanced one iota.  If anything, we've gone backwards.  And the programme-makers are surely patting themselves on the back for stirring up much ado about nothing and making a very pretty looking documentary that avoided upsetting their sophisticated metropolitan friends.

Meanwhile, the rest of us continue the ongoing work of trying to find out and publicise what really happened to Shakespeare and his skull.

By the way - that subsidence in the chancel at Holy Trinity Church, under Shakespeare's gravestone?  That's Will Shakespeare turning in his grave.

Shakespeare's Skull - Setting the Record Straight

The news broke on Sunday evening.  Could Shakespeare's skull have been found? Why Church ruling means we may never know ran the headline in The Telegraph.  Since then, the story has gone around the globe.

It came as a surprise, partly because those of us involved in the story have been keeping pretty quiet about how it's all going (hence the lack of blogging in recent months) and partly because it is, in fact, old news.

I was informed - by a TV producer - back in March that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester had turned down our application for a faculty to remove the rogue skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley for forensic analysis.  That judgement came after a consistory court hearing, paid for by the TV production company and held as a sort of appeal against the Chancellor's previous ruling, made some six months before, that we had no real grounds to justify the exhumation of the skull.

I'll come back to the Chancellor and his rulings in a minute.  The first question, I guess, is: why did the news suddenly break this weekend, when the decision to deny us the faculty was made months ago?

I can only suggest that it's because a TV documentary is about to go into production, with the story of the Beoley skull playing a part in that forthcoming documentary.  And, I suspect, somebody is out to scupper that documentary, and its findings, before the camera even starts rolling.

Some background: I first picked up a hint that Shakespeare's skull might not be in Stratford ten years ago.  After a while, I tracked down the story - and I've been working on it, one way or another, ever since.

Charles Jones was born in Alcester, Warwickshire, in 1837, the son of an attorney.  He grew up in Alcester, and the neighbouring parish of Wixford, and studied theology in Birmingham before taking holy orders.  By the 1870s, he was Rector of the small parish of Sevington, close to Ashford in Kent.

It was while he was in Sevington that, in 1879, he did two interesting things.  First, according to The Times of 26 September 1879, he changed his name, adopting his mother's maiden name of Langston.  Secondly, he published a story in the Argosy magazine, that October, under the nom de plume of "A Warwickshire Man".

Langston's extraordinary tale was entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen".  It described how a local doctor had been inspired by a conversation around the dinner table at Ragley Hall to steal Shakespeare's skull from the grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.  This was apparently because Horace Walpole, the antiquarian, had offered George Selwyn MP 300 guineas if the latter could acquire the skull of Will Shakespeare for him during David Garrick's farcical Shakespeare "Jubilee" in 1769.  According to Langston, Dr Frank Chambers recruited three local ne'er-do-wells and stole the skull, but could not agree terms with Horace Walpole.  Chambers arranged for the skull to be returned to its grave, although the story ended with some doubt in the air as to whether this had actually happened.

Langston's story did not come out of nowhere.  There was something of an international debate raging at the time, initiated in part by Hermann Schaaffhausen, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn, who in 1875 published a piece calling for Shakespeare's skull to be exhumed.  Others were equally keen to examine the skull of the Bard, principally to know what he looked like and to compare the skull with the supposed death mask of Shakespeare, which is now in the library at Darmstadt Castle.  Langston's story appears to have been a deliberate attempt to attract attention to the possibility that Shakespeare's skull was not in the grave at Holy Trinity Church after all.

Rev. C.J. Langston had to wait a few years before someone took the bait.  Then, in 1883, the Shakespeare scholar Clement Mansfield Ingleby published his own proposal to disinter Shakespeare's Bones.  In a footnote, Ingleby praised How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen by "A Warwickshire Man" for its amazing "vraisemblance" - its likelihood, or believability.  All bar the concluding part of the story which, Ingleby felt, wasn't up to scratch.

C.M. Ingleby was rewarded with a letter from Rev. C.J. Langston, sent from the Vicarage at Beoley, Worcestershire, and dated 2 January 1884.  In this letter - a copy of which I have received from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. - Langston identified himself as the "compiler" of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen (thereby undermining the claims that "A Warwickshire Man" has never been identified) and added, "Further revelations are in progress which will probably set at rest this much agitated question."  That question being, should Shakespeare's skull be exhumed from his Stratford grave?

Langston was as good as his word.  Later that year - 1884 - he published an engaging booklet, price one shilling, which he entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found".  The first part was merely a reprint of the story he had published in the Argosy, five years earlier.  The second part described how the narrator had finally tracked "THE VERITABLE SKULL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" down to a private family vault beneath a chapel in an "outlandish parish".  That chapel was the Sheldon Chapel, built in about 1580 by Ralph Sheldon on the side of St Leonard's Church, Beoley - the very church of which Langston was now the Vicar.

Langston's story is without doubt intriguing.  There were two important aspects, in particular, which struck me when I first read it.  They chimed with my own research into Shakespeare.  And so I resolved to dig a little deeper.

After several weeks spent combing through census records and the like, I had discovered that most of the individuals named in Langston's remarkably detailed accounts had been real people and were in the area during the period in which Langston's story was set.  These included some extremely obscure local personages - like the grave-robbers recruited by Dr Frank Chambers - and an ancestor of Langston's, Lieutenant Joseph Langston of the Royal Marines, who appears to have been a close friend of Frank Chambers's.  The places were real, and the people were real ... so could the story have been true?

Well, no.  I doubted it very much - and Langston himself was cagey about how much of his story was fact and how much was fiction.  All the same, a Church of England clergyman had, over the space of five years, published two halves of a minutely detailed and meticulously researched account of how Shakespeare's skull had been tracked down to the funerary urn which once held the viscera of Ralph Sheldon.  Ralph Sheldon, a wealthy Catholic, died three years before Shakespeare and was related to him by marriage, via the Sheldon-Throckmorton-Arden nexus of Catholic families in the Midlands.

It was only after I had started putting together the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means (The History Press, 2013) that I discovered, to my surprise, that there is a spare skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Better still, that skull had been photographed by Richard Peach for The Village, a local magazine, in September 2009.  Peach had been put onto the story by Morris Jephcott, a villager who now lies buried in Beoley churchyard.  Like others in the village, Jephcott believed the story of the skull to be substantially true.

When I first saw Richard Peach's excellent photos, my eye was drawn to two parts of the skull.  My research had already suggested that there should be some sort of damage or discoloration to Shakespeare's right forehead, just above the eye.  And then there is the evidence of the Droeshout and Chandos portraits of Shakespeare, which both show a distinct swelling on the outside edge of the left eyebrow.

Startlingly, there was an area of actual damage and discoloration clearly visible on the right side of the skull, above the right eye, and on the outside edge of the left eyebrow, where the bone is broken, jagged burrs poke out in the exact same spot where, in the Droeshout and Chandos images, there is clear evidence of a noticeable swelling or injury.

Over the next nine months, while I wrote Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I went back to the photos of the skull time and time again, comparing them with the death mask and portraits of Shakespeare.  I met Richard Peach and studied the photos he had taken of the skull in as much detail as I could.  Little by little, I spotted more distinguishing features and anomalies, linking the skull to the Shakespeare images, which I graphically illustrated in my book:

Such as the thin scar across the bridge of the nose on the death mask, which seems to correspond to a couple of small, triangular puncture wounds on the inside of the left eye socket.  It would appear that a sharp pointed weapon - a poniard - was driven into the eye socket here, forcing the left eyeball forward (hence the "wall-eye" look in the Shakespeare portraits);

Or the distinctive depression, high up on the forehead, very near the top of the frontal bone, which looks a bit like a crater on the skull and is clearly visible in the Shakespeare portraiture (including the so-called Davenant Bust of Shakespeare, which belongs to the Garrick Club, and the half-length effigy of Shakespeare in his funerary monument in Holy Trinity, Stratford, not to mention the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio, which replicates the depression very faithfully);

Or the strange jagged lines running down and across the cheeks of the death mask and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery), amongst others, which appear to show the damage to the cheekbones and maxilla (upper jaw) instantly visible on the skull;

And so on.  In March 2014, I was invited to give a paper on these matters, which I entitled, "The Faces of Shakespeare", at Goldsmiths, University of London.  That paper was later published in the university's GLITS online journal.

By then, I already knew that a television documentary company was looking into all of this, with a great deal of willing help and co-operation from the Vicar and churchwardens of St Leonard's, Beoley.  Plans were drawn up to extricate the skull and subject it to a range of scientific examinations, including radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis.  The application was submitted to the Diocese, with the full support of the church, for a faculty to remove the skull for laboratory tests.

Sadly, although the advisers to the Chancellor (chief legal officer) of the Diocese were rather in favour of the project, Sir Charles Mynors - the Chancellor himself - was sceptical.  As such, he was only doing his job, and I believe he did so as assiduously as anyone could want.  It would have been natural and proper for him to have sought the opinions and advice of leading Shakespeare experts.  And I have no doubt whatsoever that they gravely misled him.

I know of no one who has looked into Langston's story, researched it, and followed it through to an analysis of the skull identified by Langston as Shakespeare's.  No one.  Until, that is, I undertook that research myself, publishing the results in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and The Faces of Shakespeare (plus, I might add, in my forthcoming biography of Sir William Davenant, due out next February).  No one has ever looked into this.  Nobody from Stratford, to the best of my knowledge, has ever shown the slightest interest in Langston and his story or been moved - by curiosity, if nothing else - to inspect the skull.  No one.

Rather, the line coming out of Stratford has been consistent.  The experts don't want to believe the story, so they rubbish it.  They pretend that it's "folklore" (which it isn't), that the skull was returned to Stratford (which it wasn't), and that Langston only published his story to raise money for the restoration of the church (which doesn't stand up to reasonable scrutiny).  Indeed, there are reasons for believing that Langston made little if any impact with or money from his publication, and certainly not enough to repair his church, if a rather forlorn and desperate letter he sent to James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips in 1887 is anything to go by (I have a copy of that letter too - again, Langston identifies himself as the author of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen, only now he is living in Bath and looking for someone who will actually pay him for an article he has written entitled, Shakespeare in his cups.)

The point needs to be made: the Shakespeare experts have gone to quite extraordinary lengths to bury the story of Shakespeare's skull, written by a local clergyman with local knowledge.  It doesn't fit in with their idea of Shakespeare, so it must be ignored, ridiculed, rejected out of hand.  They have refused to look into it and they certainly don't want anybody else to go delving.  The very subject is taboo.

And I'm pretty sure that when Sir Charles Mynors, in all good faith, approached them for their expert opinion, they just showered him with their prejudices.  Which is not, in fact, expert opinion.  Truth be told, they've never bothered to research or investigate the story at all.  Ever.

And now, shortly before filming starts on the TV documentary, a story mysteriously appears out of nowhere in The Telegraph, and then all across the world, rubbishing the very idea that the story of the skull is anything other than "Gothic Fiction".  Sir Charles Mynors had found no evidence to link Shakespeare to the skull.  Of course he hadn't.  Because the Shakespeare fraternity had absolutely no idea that such evidence exists, and if they did, they certainly weren't going to let Sir Charles know about it.

The last thing they want is for someone actually to study the skull, forensically, and compare the idiosyncrasies of the skull - all those dinks and dents and breakages - with the portraits of Shakespeare.  Still less to compare the skull's DNA with a sample taken from one of the descendants of Shakespeare's sister.  You'd think, if they were so sure of themselves, they'd say, "Why not?  Go ahead!  You'll be proven wrong."  But that's not what they've done.  Rather, they've tried to obstruct a legitimate investigation.

There is evidence linking Shakespeare to the skull, be it Langston's painstakingly researched (if somewhat fictionalised) accounts, the visible similarities between the skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, or the links between Shakespeare and the Sheldons, whose funerary vault his skull apparently shares.

Or how about this?  The story began, so Langston claimed, with Horace Walpole's offer to George Selwyn MP of 300 guineas in return for the skull.  Horace Walpole was in a better position than most to know that Shakespeare's skull was not in Stratford but underneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Walpole's "intimate friend" and neighbour in Twickenham - he jokingly called her his "wife" - was Lady Browne, born Frances Sheldon, in Beoley.

There is also the matter of why Rev. Charles Jones chose to change his name to Charles Jones Langston just as his first instalment of the story was going to press.  Could it have had something to do with the fact that, shortly after Shakespeare died in 1616, his "cousin", Thomas Greene, promptly resigned his post as steward and town clerk of Stratford-upon-Avon?  The man elected to replace Greene as town clerk was one Anthony Langston.  On 18 August 1619, this same Anthony Langston witnessed a deed by which Shakespeare's old friend and colleague, Henry Condell, conveyed some property in Worcestershire to Edward Sheldon of Beoley.  Was Rev. C.J. Langston seeking to highlight his ancestral link to Anthony Langston, town clerk of Stratford and a man who had a connection with both the co-editor of the First Folio and the son of Ralph Sheldon, in whose funerary urn Shakespeare's skull was allegedly found?

The Chancellor's judgement that no evidence exists to justify the proper forensic examination of the Beoley skull was wrong.  Not his fault, though.  He was misinformed or misguided by those very experts he had turned to for advice.

The same experts who, I suspect, are now trying to undermine the TV documentary about these things by letting the world know that we have been debarred from running DNA tests on the skull and so the case might well never be proven.

One really needs to ask - what are they so afraid of?

Mind Body Spirit

Just because you haven't heard a lot from me lately, doesn't mean I've not been busy.

Quite the reverse, in fact.  Interesting research trips to Oxford and Bristol for my biography of Sir William Davenant (nearing completion), lecturing at the University of Worcester, Shakespeare Tours and Ghost Tours in Stratford-upon-Avon, and a new project which I'm not going to tell you about.

But - hold your horses, folks, because it looks like there might be a fair few blog posts in the offing.  The Grail is out, later this month.  Indeed, a correspondent in Washington State has already posted a photo on Facebook showing his pre-ordered copy, which arrived by post today.  So it's kind of out there already.

And here's my first guest blog post on the subject, courtesy of the wonderful Mind Body Spirit Magazine.

More to come ...

The Faces of Shakespeare

Morning, all!

I'll be on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire local radio this morning, talking about the story of Shakespeare's skull.  There have been developments in that arena, but I can't go public with them just yet.

HOWEVER ... Goldsmiths, University of London, have just published their GLITS e-journal for the past year, and my illustrated paper on The Faces of Shakespeare - Revealing Shakespeare's Life and Death through Portraits and Other Objects is the second item on the menu.

Here's the link to my paper in the Goldsmiths GLITS journal.

More to come later.

Gunpowder Treason - a 400 Year Old Lie

96 people died at the Hillsborough Stadium on 15 April 1989.  Even as the full scale of the disaster was becoming apparent, the authorities - police, politicians, the press - were concocting a story about it.  It was all caused by drunken football fans, they said.  Those same fans had picked the pockets of the dead and urinated on the paramedics who were trying to help.

We now know that that story was a pack of lies, although it took more than two decades for the truth to come out.  But what had happened was a political elite, composed of extremists, had cooked up and spun a false yarn designed to demonise a perceived enemy.  That enemy was, (a) football fans, who were seen as hooligans, and (b) the people of Liverpool, who remained obstinately opposed to the socio-economic insanity of Thatcherism.  The disaster provided an excuse for the State to denigrate those who seemed unable to fight back while, at the same time, covering up its own incompetence.

So what has that got to do with the Gunpowder Plot?

Well, we now know the truth about Hillsborough, 25 years ago, and few commentators would have the gall to repeat the lies told by the police and the government back then.  We do not, however, know the truth about the "powder treason", 409 years ago, because historians insist on repeating the lies.

The Radio Times reports that BBC2 has "just given the green light to Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot".  "It's a total retelling," says the writer, "which uses the interrogation of Fawkes's number three, Thomas Winter, who gave away the whole story."

Okay, before we go any further ...

Fawkes was not the ringleader.  That was Robert Catesby.  Guy Fawkes was essentially a hired hand.  Arguably, Thomas Wintour was Catesby's number three.  But did he give away the whole story?

"We restage the interrogation and get inside the plot, which was huge", continues the writer, Adam Kemp, breathlessly.  Restage the interrogation, hunh?  That'll be interesting.  I can only assume we will mention the fact that Thomas Wintour had been shot in the shoulder when he and his comrades were finally cornered by a local posse.  Whether he would have been capable of composing his ten-page confession in neat handwriting is open to doubt.  But the signature on the confession - a rather bold "Thomas Winter" - wasn't his own.  He spelled his name "Wintour".

Note that Adam Kemp referred to "Thomas Winter".  He's using the name used by the Jacobean government, not the individual whose name it actually was.  Which means that his "total retelling" will, in all probability, be exactly the same version of events as that which was cooked up at the time by government ministers.  It won't be a "total retelling" at all.  Just another re-tread.

He goes on: "They would have got everyone under one roof, the royal family and the entire governing elite and bishops.  There is truly nothing that can come close.  It really was big,"

Yes, it was.  It would have been enormous.  If it had happened.  And yet, truth be told, there never was even the slightest risk that the king and his lords would be blown to smithereens.  Not a chance in hell.

Let's start with the gunpowder.  It was sourced from the Tower of London, where the government (which had the monopoly on gunpowder) kept its supply under the supervision of Sir George Carew.  Carew, a government insider, had just become Baron Carew of Clopton.  He somehow managed to let Clopton House, his estate just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, to the gunpowder plotters.  Nobody seems to have thought that was odd.  But the government resolutely blocked an investigation into how the gunpowder had been removed from the Tower.

How much gunpowder was there?  Good question.  A credible source said one barrel.  Guy Fawkes confessed to secreting twenty barrels in the Parliament building.  Sir Robert Cecil, who knew more about the plot than anybody, wrote of there having been 34 barrels.  The figure eventually settled on was 36 barrels.

So nobody was quite sure how much gunpowder had been involved, and no explanation was ever given for its mysterious disappearance from the government's store.  A large quantity of gunpowder was returned to the Tower a couple of days after Fawkes's arrest and was registered as "decayed".  Its constituent elements had separated.  It would never have blown up anything, let alone the royal family and entire governing elite.  There wouldn't even have been a puff!

Reliable witnesses saw the real ringleaders - Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy - emerging from Sir Robert Cecil's house in the early hours of the morning, just days before the plot was discovered.  That's like the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings being spotted sneaking out of 10 Downing Street a few days before they detonated their rucksacks on crowded tubes and buses (except, of course, that the gunpowder plotters explosives were "decayed" and weren't going to blow up).  Thomas Percy himself was a government insider, in the king's service at the time.  His job was to make sure that the plot proceeded and to implicate his kinsman, the Earl of Northumberland, whom Sir Robert Cecil has sworn to destroy.

Catesby, on the other hand, spent much of the year leading up to the plot's discovery trying to trick Father Henry Garnet into condoning the plot.  The government repeatedly delayed the opening of Parliament so that Catesby would have more time to incriminate Garnet.  Catesby was aided in his attempts to entrap Garnet by William Parker, Lord Monteagle.  Monteagle was eventually credited with exposing the plot and rewarded handsomely - every mention of him in the plotters' confessions was redacted.  Both Catesby and Percy, who had engineered the plot, were killed, rather than taken alive, on the instructions of Sir Robert Cecil.

The simple fact is that the Gunpowder Plot never really was.  True, some of its members were ardent Catholics who joined what they believed would be a blow for freedom.  But the main players were government stooges (William Shakespeare - who was alarmingly close to the events - made this clear in his plays, Macbeth and Coriolanus).  In other words, the Gunpowder Plot was pretty much the same as every other plot of its time.  These supposed "plots" were "discovered" on a more-or-less annual basis, and they all followed the same pattern - a good example being the Babington Plot of 1586.  A Catholic patsy was lured into a fake conspiracy by government agents, who then "discovered" the plot which they themselves had manufactured.  There was massive publicity, and the Protestant extremists at the heart of the government got to enact the policies which they'd been hankering to put into place: the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots - a Catholic contender for the English throne - or the execution of Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England.

The constant repetition of the government's lies about the Gunpowder Plot is an offense to history.  It amounts to a 400-year propaganda campaign, and it speaks volumes that British historians would rather regurgitate the falsehoods about Catholic militancy than investigate the truth about Protestant duplicity.

The Gunpowder Plot is more than just an iconic incident-that-didn't-happen.  It led to the English Civil War; John Pym and John Milton were obsessed with it.  Like so many others in those paranoid times, they had swallowed the lies spouted by the likes of Sir Robert Cecil (for his own personal gain).  So successful were the propagandists in broadcasting the cooked-up story of the Gunpowder Plot, it fuelled the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the fanatics for decades.  Arguably, it continues to fuel our irrational fears of some nefarious, fanatical "enemy within" which is "out to get us" because it "hates our freedom".  That sort of nonsense has been doing the rounds since the Gunpowder Plot, and it's precisely why the plot was invented.  Fear is a useful tool of government.

Historians repeat the Gunpowder Plot lie for a simple reason.  Englishness has always been difficult to define.  It's easier to explain what being "English" means in terms of what it is not - Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, French, etc. - than in terms of what it is.  That is why the English lay claim to a "tolerance" and a sense of "fair play" which they so seldom exhibit.  If they were honest with themselves, they'd have to say that the simplest way to be "English" is to hate, fear and abuse anyone who isn't.  But that problem created its own national myth, embroidered by generations of Whig historians anxious to justify every atrocity and outrage of our past as a necessary part of our Manifest Destiny.  The State had to persecute Catholics because the Catholics wanted to blow up the State (even though they never did; never actually came close).  To be English is to be Protestant.  The Catholics were, ipso facto, the enemy - like those football supporters who died at Hillsborough.  They were "not on our side", so they could be slandered.

It really is time to put the lie of the Gunpowder Plot to bed.  And I doubt very much indeed that the BBC's Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot will even try to do that.  No.  Just going by the title alone, it seems most likely that it'll be yet another repetition of the old, old lie, designed to excuse the most vicious persecution of English citizens who happened to be Catholic. 

Such a slavish acceptance and repetition of past propaganda isn't history, though.  It's telling fairy tales for political purposes.

A Warning to the Curious ...

... or "How History Works" (Part II?).

I was flicking through this book the other day.  It's on sale at Tudor World in Stratford, where I'm currently doing the odd Shakespeare Tour and Ghost Tour (and great fun they are, too).  What's more, the "Horrible Histories" Gruesome Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon is actually dedicated to the owner, and the phantom residents of, the Tudor World property.

I admire Terry Deary's achievement.  His entertaining brand of History-Without-The-Dull-Bits appeals to young and old, no doubt to the despair and disapproval of the more academic types out there.  And he does a good job of digging up those obscure facts and stories which tend to be omitted from the standard accounts.  In that respect, his Gruesome Guide to Stratford is probably a helluva lot more interesting than the typical guidebook.

He even includes the story of Shakespeare's skull!  Yes, the local "legend" which I spent months researching for Who Killed William Shakespeare?  So, extra marks there for Mr Deary.  Except that he concludes his short account of Shakespeare's missing skull with the information that the skull was safely returned to the Stratford grave.

Almost every account I read of the legend of Shakespeare's skull, as originally recounted by "A Warwickshire Man" (Rev. Charles Jones Langston) in his 1884 publication, How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found, ends with the information that the missing skull was returned to Stratford.

This recurring "fact" intrigued me while I was researching the story.  You see, thanks to the infamous "curse" on Shakespeare's gravestone, the town of Stratford, and Holy Trinity Church, have always been rather diffident about opening up his grave.  So how, I wondered, had they managed to get the skull back into the grave, sometime in the late 19th century, without anyone noticing, and with no record surviving of the grave having been reopened?

It puzzled me for quite a while.  And then, while I was starting work on the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare? - a breakthrough!  The skull is still inside the crypt at Beoley Church.  It was NEVER returned to Stratford. 

Various photos of the skull were taken at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries - on those rare occasions when the crypt was opened up for an architect's inspection - and those photos prove that the skull stayed exactly where Rev. C.J. Langston found it: in the vault beneath the Sheldon Chapel.

Okay, so ... Why do so many accounts of the story end with "The skull was returned to Stratford", when it quite evidently wasn't?

I've never yet managed to track down the source of that little bit of historical misinformation.  I don't know who first decided that the skull had probably been returned to its owner, or who first sneaked that falsehood into the legend.  But here's the thing: ever since that bit of false information was added to the story, it has been repeated, over and over again, whenever somebody stumbles across the legend, including, of course, Terry Deary, when he included the tale in his "Gruesome Guide" to Stratford.

I'm not attacking Mr Deary.  But I am questioning the way that, once a lie has been introduced into the historical account, it tends to stay there, repeated over and over again, until it becomes a "fact".

I've blogged previously about the will which names Anne/Agnes Whateley, the woman William Shakespeare was first given a licence to marry.  Because Samuel Schoenbaum failed to find that particular will, he concluded that Anne Whateley was a clerical error: she never existed.  And because Sam Schoenbaum said that, it became "The Truth"!  Anne Whateley: the woman who never was.  But she did exist.

The case of Anne/Agnes Whateley and the case of Shakespeare's skull are somewhat similar.  In both instances, something has been introduced to the approved story of Shakespeare which doesn't suit the peddlers of that orthodox account.  Whenever that happens, it seems, the race is on to quash that little problem.  With any luck, something will quickly get sneaked into the historical record which neutralises the threat posed by that rogue story.  So, Anne Whateley, we are led to believe, "did not exist".  The skull "was returned to Stratford".  Neither statement is true, and yet both have been repeated ad infinitum.

The skull story is particularly intriguing, in this regard.  Given that Stratford has, on the whole, sought (a) to ignore the story of Shakespeare's skull - and the actual existence of that spare skull at Beoley, and (b) to rubbish the story whenever someone mentions it, you do have to wonder.  If, as the Shakespeare folks in Stratford insist, the missing skull simply could not have been Shakespeare's, then why is it so important that we all believe it was returned to Shakespeare's grave after Rev. C.J. Langston discovered and identified it?  Isn't that a case of having your cake and eating it?  If it never was Shakespeare's skull, then there's no need to put out the false rumour that it was returned to Shakespeare's grave. 

I think the claim that the skull was returned to Stratford was a deliberate attempt to "close down" the story.  An interesting legend, yes, but no need to get excited because the skull came back to Stratford anyway.  Certainly, definitely, no need to probe any further.  Like the mysterious Anne Whateley, the skull doesn't exist.  At least, it doesn't as long as you don't go looking for it.

So, someone set a hare running.  To stop anyone from really investigating the strange tale of Shakespeare's missing skull - as told by that pillar of respectability, a Victorian clergyman - somebody made up the part about the skull having been returned to Stratford.  Which it never was.  But that's what you'll keep reading is what happened.

Unless you read Who Killed William Shakespeare? of course!

Seriously, though.  History is not, or should not be, a Wikipedia entry, which anyone can alter as they see fit.  The facts matter.  Anyone who "plants" a piece of misinformation - such as "the skull was returned to Stratford" - is deliberately misleading people.  And the people who seem most easy to mislead are historians, who keep repeating the lie, if only to make sure that you don't go getting any ideas.

Apologia

I've been remiss.  Dreadfully so.

The only thing I can say in my defence is that I have been busy writing my biography of Sir William Davenant (Shakespeare's Son) and enjoying myself giving tours in Stratford-upon-Avon - some days, you might see me in doublet and breeches, leading a troupe of tourists or students from one Shakespearean site to another, whilst on Saturday evenings I guide intrepid visitors through the dark delights of Tudor World on Sheep Street, every Ghost Tour threatening to yield at least one supernatural experience.  So, yes, I've been busy.

Added to that, my paper on The Faces of Shakespeare is about to be published by Goldsmiths University; Moon Books will soon be publishing Naming the Goddess, to which I contributed a chapter, and my own The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion is currently passing through the Moon Books production process.  Oh, and I've also been quietly working on a project based on events in 1964-65 for a company set up by a very good friend of mine from my drama school days.

So I hope you'll forgive the radio silence.

Anyhoo - my great buddy and artistic collaborator on The Grail, Lloyd Canning, got a fantastic four-page spread in this month's Cotswold and Vale Magazine, including (as you can see) the cover shot.  Lloyd's amazing images really came out well in the magazine, and The Grail got a good mention (as well as my Who Killed William Shakespeare?), which means that we're all very chuffed.  A hearty CONGRATS to Lloyd for the well-earned and much-deserved publicity.

I'll try to post another update very soon.  I promise.

Call Ye Midwife

More from the wonderful world of Davenant research.

Liza Picard's book on Restoration London is a witty little treasure trove of stuff.  The book describes "Everyday Life in London 1660-1670" and it does so beautifully.  I was particularly struck by the section on the Medical Risks of Birth and Infancy.

Midwives, it seems, were generally in a hurry to get to their next patient.  If the mother's waters hadn't broken, the midwife wasn't going to hang around.  A specially sharpened fingernail, or the sharp edge of a coin, would slit the amniotic sac, and then the baby would be yanked out.

Such was the hurry that the midwife would be unlikely to wait for the afterbirth to be expelled.  That, too, would be grabbed and pulled out.

Midwifery was a pretty good way of killing baby and mother.  Bacteria would be transferred from one mother to another by the midwife who had just tugged baby and the afterbirth out of one womb before moving on to the next.

 

The skull in the crypt at Beoley Church, which I suggest in Who Killed William Shakespeare? was Shakespeare's, is rather interesting in this respect.  There is an oval depression, mid-brow, near the top of the frontal bone.  Heading down the left side of the temple, the skull is uneven, with a ridge sloping down across the brow and slight depressions on either side of it.

 

These features - the oval depression and the ridge - are visible in portraits of Shakespeare.  The "missing link" between the skull (which disappeared) and the portraits is almost certainly the "Death Mask of Shakespeare" in Darmstadt Castle:

  

  

The depression and ridge are present on the death mask (dated 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death), and since this was probably the model for most of the portraits, we see the same features in some of the more familiar images of Shakespeare.  They are present, for example, in the Cobbe portrait:

  

 

And, indeed, in the Wadlow portrait:

  





 

And on others.  These distinguishing features, along with other "defects" visible on the face, are what I now look for in order to determine whether or not an image of Shakespeare s genuine.

 

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I focussed on the very noticeable depression high up in the middle of the forehead.  It can be seen very clearly on the Shakespeare bust in his funerary monument in Stratford Church:

  

 

In the well known Chandos portrait in the National Portrait Gallery:

 

 

 

And on the Davenant bust of Shakespeare at the Garrick Club:

  

 

Among others. 

 

But by focusing on that depression as one of the key indicators that the portraits were based on the death mask, and the death mask replicates the actual face of the man whose skull is in the crypt at Beoley, I neglected to consider the ridge and grooves to the side of the main depression.

 

I concluded - wrongly, I fear - that the depression was a sunken fontanelle, caused by malnutrition or dehydration in early childhood.

 

I now suspect, and I made the point in the paper on The Faces of Shakespeare, which I gave at Goldsmiths, University of London, a couple of months ago, that the depression near the top of the frontal bone and the ridge and grooves beside it are connected.  They are finger marks.

 

I had begun to think that the midwife had grasped his skull with her left hand during the delivery.  Her thumb had impressed itself into the soft bone of his cranium, and her first two fingers left their marks alongside.  The pattern of the depressions indicates that she gripped his skull a bit too tightly.  When the bones of his skull hardened, the finger marks remained; indeed, it may be that their presence caused the coronal suture to fuse a little oddly, leaving a sort of raised wiggly line running up from the sides of his head.

 

The description of midwifery practices given by Liza Picard in her book on Restoration London confirms the possibility, at least, that Shakespeare might have been forced out of his mother's womb by an over-enthusiastic or impatient midwife.  I've argued elsewhere on the blog that Shakespeare wasn't a very tall man (which is why his skull seems "undersized"), and it may be that he was from his mother's womb "untimely ripped". 

 

Quite simply, he wasn't ready.  But maybe the midwife had been called because the mother's health was at risk.  Or he was believed to be due.

 

Perhaps the woman nicked the sac with her jagged fingernail, reached in, gripped the skull with her left hand (the right hand underneath) and pulled.  There is no reason to assume that the midwifery profession had changed very much in the hundred years separating Restoration London from Elizabethan Stratford.

 

Shakespeare bore the marks of the midwife's fingers all through his life.  And they are still visible - on his portraits, on the busts, on the death mask ... and on the skull at Beoley.

Shakespeare Week

Now you didn't think I'd forget Shakespeare's birthday, did you?

Not his 450th birthday, surely?

Of course not.

It's been a busy week.  And I've found myself biting my tongue quite a lot, as the media celebrates the Other Shakespeare - the Shakespeare who is really very little more than a Trademark.

It started for me with a fantastic afternoon at the Tree House Bookshop in Kenilworth, where I gave a talk about Who Killed William Shakespeare? and signed some books for the start of their Shakespeare Festival.  If you happen to be in the Kenilworth area, I can highly recommend a visit to the Tree House Bookshop - it's a lovely, relaxing place to browse second hand books, to lounge in their sofas, drinking tea or coffee.

Wednesday was, of course, Shakespeare's birthday.  And the "We Love Coventry and Warwickshire" website was kind enough to host a wee post of mine, entitled Two Years to Find Shakespeare.  Pretty self-explanatory, I'd hope.

I then had a piece published by my beloved Review Group on their wonderful blog, this one entitled - what else? - Happy Birthday, Shakespeare.

And now I'm looking forward to the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival, and my talk/book signing there this coming Tuesday on Who Killed Shakespeare?  Advance bookings appear to be pretty good, but if you are in or near Shakespeare's hometown on the afternoon of 29 April, come along - there's tea and cake!

So, you can't really accuse me of not celebrating Shakespeare's birthday.  But, as I hope my various talks and blogs have made it clear, we might not really be celebrating Shakespeare.  Not yet.  We're pretending we are, but we're still allowing the experts to keep us in the dark about him.

But that will change soon.  And I'll have a lot more to tell you about "Shakespeare's Son", Sir William Davenant, as my work on his biography progresses.

TTFN!

Paradigms Lost

It's the cruellest month, according to T.S. Eliot.  For me, though, it's a month of teaching, talking and signing.

The big one will be Stratford Literary Festival, where I'm appearing on Tuesday 29 April.  Naturally, I've been giving some thought to what I'll talk about on that occasion.

All being well, I'll be showing a lovely, large, blown-up poster of the "Wadlow" portrait, around which I based my paper given at Goldsmiths, University of London, last month (see left: we made Page 2 of the South London Press).  That, in itself, will probably be pretty controversial - introducing a "new" portrait of Shakespeare to the town.

But there'll be more to the talk than a discussion of the portrait.  I'm currently inclined to talk about the pendulum of history, and the way that a false view of history is often maintained for political reasons.

There are two major periods I'm tempted to analyse.  I opened my book Who Killed William Shakespeare? with an examination of the second half of the 18th century and the process by which Shakespeare was quite deliberately forgotten.  Of course, Shakespeare wasn't forgotten - we've all heard of him - but who he was, that was forgotten.

I'll talk about Shakespeare's mulberry, which was chopped down by an intolerant clergyman, who then went on to demolish New Place, Shakespeare's grand home in Stratford.  I'll talk about the discovery of the Jesuit Testament of the Soul, which had been signed by Shakespeare's father, John, and hidden among the rafters of the Shakespeare Birthplace (the testament vanished from the study of the Shakespeare scholar, Edmond Malone, probably because it's existence was somewhat embarrassing).  I'll also talk about David Garrick's farcical "Shakespeare Jubilee" and its impact on our understanding of Shakespeare - more than anything, the Jubilee established Shakespeare as the national poet, the "Immortal Bard", while simultaneously cutting him off from his roots - and raise the matter of the Rev. James Wilmot, a vicar who retired to a village near Stratford and first put forward the silly theory that somebody other than Shakespeare must have written the plays.

So - between 1755 and 1785, the real Shakespeare was forgotten, and a national myth erected in his place.  But there's another period I find interesting.

One hundred years on from the time in which the real Shakespeare was determinedly forgotten, attempts were being made to establish who he really was.  The death mask, found in Germany, which Professor Richard Owen, superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, concluded was the model for the Shakespeare funerary monument in Stratford, was exhibited in the town as Shakespeare's Death Mask on the 300th anniversary of his birth.  The discovery of the death mask had prompted numerous scholars to call for Shakespeare's grave to be opened, and his skull extracted so that it could be compared with the death mask.

At the height of this furore, Rev. Charles Jones Langston published his story of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found.  Found, that is, in the private family crypt beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley Church, 12 miles from Stratford.

The powers that be in Stratford currently refuse to discuss the death mask or the skull and pour scorn on the very idea that either might have anything to do with Shakespeare.

However, there is no evidence that anyone connected with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has taken the trouble to investigate the death mask (now in Darmstadt Castle) or the skull at Beoley.  To put it simply, they're not remotely interested in the death mask or the skull.  And they don't want anyone else to be interested in them either.

Rev. Charles Jones Langston published the first half of his extraordinary account of How Shakespeare's Skull Was Stolen in October 1879.  That same year, the Comedie Francaise came to London, bringing with them a play entitled Davenant.  The play was based on the long running rumour that Sir William Davenant was Will Shakespeare's natural son.

I find it odd, looking back, to see that some of the finest minds throughout Europe were so concerned with exploring possibilities - that the death mask was Shakespeare's, that the rogue skull in the crypt at Beoley was Shakespeare's, that Davenant was Shakespeare's son - and were willing and eager to put those possibilities to the test, scientifically-speaking.  I'm currently researching Sir William Davenant for a new biography (it'll be published by The History Press in 2016) and have just received a copy of a short book published in 1905; based on a dissertation he had written, John David Ellis Williams' book is entitled Sir William Davenant's Relation to Shakespeare: With an Analysis of the Chief Characters of Davenant's Plays.

At around the same time as Ellis wrote his dissertation, other experts were carefully studying and measuring the Darmstadt death mask and comparing their measurements - broadly successfully - with those of the Shakespeare effigy in his Stratford funerary monument.

There's such a huge sense of a missed opportunity.  The second half of the nineteenth century appeared to be edging close to several breakthroughs: the formal identification of the death mask, the (re-)discovery of Shakespeare's skull, the true nature of the Shakespeare-Davenant connection (as late as 1913, Arthur Acheson was confidently identifying Sir William Davenant's mother, Jane, as the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets).  All of these developments could and should have transformed the way we think about William Shakespeare.

But they didn't.  Something went wrong, and I suspect that something was the Great War.  England, desperate to preserve its sense of self, abandoned all the new research (a lot of which was German) and reverted to its comfy, cosy national myths.  In other words, the national myth of William Shakespeare - a humble, Protestant lad, beloved of that wonderful monarch, Elizabeth I - was reinstated.  All the advances of the previous decades were swept aside.  We went back to the reactionary view of Shakespeare as the national poet of a Protestant constitutional monarchy.  This was the Whig historian's notion of Shakespeare, and it was utterly unrelated to Shakespeare the man.

We've been stuck with that false idea of Shakespeare ever since.  The propagandist myth of Shakespeare, which was formulated in the late-18th century with the intent of removing any trace or taint of Catholicism in Shakespeare's background, has continued to be taught as if it was historically accurate - nay, as if it is the only known version of the Shakespeare story.  It is this Whiggish myth that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford propagates with ruthless determination.

As if those great minds of the late-19th century had never even considered the death mask, the skull, or the likelihood that Sir William Davenant was Shakespeare's son.  No; all that must be forgotten.  We were making progress, until the reactionaries took control.  And now generations of children, the world over, are subjected to an irrelevant and misleading account of Shakespeare's life.

It is time to resume the brilliant work done by so many scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the devastating tragedy of the First World War sent us all running back home to Mamma.

It is time to continue their efforts, to achieve the goals that they were making for, and to reveal the reality of Shakespeare and his world.

None of that will happen if the Shakespeare "experts" have their way.  But we owe it to Shakespeare, and to Stratford, and to every child who must encounter Shakespeare at school.  If we want to understand Shakespeare's words, we must understand his life.  And for that to happen, we must explode the asinine myth created in the late-18th century, and resurrected in the 20th century, and pick up where the genuine experts left off.

Now - how do we think a talk like that will go down in Stratford?

Shakespeare's Crab

Bought from my local Tesco supermarket: an Old Ordnance Survey Map of the Vale of Evesham & Stratford, dating from 1892.

What caught my eye about this little map was the presence of a landmark - the so-called Shakespeare's Crab.  It is marked on the map about a mile outside the village of Bidford, on the road towards Stratford, very close indeed to Hillborough.

The story goes that the young Shakespeare and his mates were disposed to walk to Bidford one day and challenge a group known as the "Topers" to a drinking competition.  When they arrived, however, they discovered that the "Topers" had gone to Evesham Fair.  But they were invited to drink with another group, this one known as the "Sippers".  Even this proved too much for the Stratford lads, who drank so heavily that, on the way home, they all fell asleep under a crab apple tree on the wayside.  The next morning, Shakespeare's friends were eager to pit themselves against the "Sippers" again.  They roused young Shakespeare who, rather than heading back into Bidford to resume the drinking match, composed an impromptu epigram on the surrounding villages:

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillboro', hungry Grafton,
Dodging Exhall, papist Wixford,
Beggarly Broom, and drunken Bidford.

Frankly, I've never believed that this little rhyme was made up by Shakespeare.  And when we find that the earliest known use of the word "Toper", meaning a heavy drinker, came from 1661, we have to query the factuality of the legend of Shakespeare and the Crab-tree.

What fascinates me about the legend is that, as with so many local traditions regarding the Bard, it might be a polished and prettified account of something more intriguing.

For a start, Shakespeare's Crab is just a field or two away from Hillborough Manor.  In previous posts, and of course in Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I have suggested that Will Shakespeare's first Anne - Anne (or Agnes) Whateley - was a resident of Hillborough Manor.  This is indeed what local lore remembers: Shakespeare's "White Lady", his jilted lover, eked out her existence as a sorrowful recluse in the secluded manor house which belonged to a man with whom Shakespeare would later do business.

What is more, I have argued that Shakespeare fell in love with Anne ("Agnes") Whateley when he was recovering from an accident, as he seems to have indicated in his poem, A Lover's Complaint.  Anne, I believe, was a sort of unofficial or "underground" nun, serving the local Catholics in much the same way that her brothers, John and Robert, served as secret priests in their hometown of Henley in Arden.  Essentially, Anne Whateley nursed the young Shakespeare back to health.

It is worth noting that the marriage licence issued by the Bishop's court at Worcester to allow William Shakespeare to marry Anne Whateley referred to Anne as being "de Temple Grafton".  Hillborough Manor is indeed in the parish of Temple Grafton, the manor of which belonged to the Sheldon brothers of Beoley (there is a very important Shakespearean connection there, involving a skull, and the surname Whateley is much associated with Beoley and its church).  The vicar of Temple Grafton at the time was John Frith, "an old priest and Unsound in religion".  Frith's main interest in life, it would seem, lay in curing injured or diseased hawks.

My theory goes, then, that sometime in 1582, when Will was eighteen, he suffered an accident and was taken to the Catholic safe house of Hillborough Manor, a short distance downriver from Stratford, to recuperate.  His nurse on this occasion was the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton, who fell for the winning ways of the young poet.  They arranged to marry, but Shakespeare found himself dragooned into marrying another local woman, Anne Hathaway of Shottery.

The "accident", I always suspected, was the result of violence.  For the first part of 1582, young Shakespeare was on the run, hiding out (probably at Earl's Common in Worcestershire) and avoiding the government crackdown on Catholics who were suspected of having trafficked with the Jesuit priests, Father Campion and Father Persons.  By the late summer, though, he was back in the Stratford area, where he got Anne Hathaway (and possibly Anne Whateley) pregnant.

If Anne Whateley was a Catholic, as were most of her family, then Anne Hathaway was almost certainly Protestant, her father and brother expressing rather puritanical inclinations in their wills.  In the light of this, it might be worth reconsidering those twin gangs, the "Topers" and the "Sippers", especially as the word "Toper" does not seem to have been in use at the time.

A toper is a heavy drinker.  A sipper is someone who drinks one sip at a time (and yet, somehow or other, Shakespeare and his friends lost their drinking match against the "Sippers").  Could it be that these innocent-sounding names - "Topers" and "Sippers" - have been substituted for something else?

Let us suppose that the legend really recalls a kind of gang warfare - something along the lines of the deadly rivalry between the Capulets, and their retainers, and the Montagus, along with their retainers, which is dramatised in the opening of Romeo and Juliet.  Those two families are, respectively, Protestant (the Protestants wore little black caps in church) and Catholic (the Montagu family, from which Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was descended, were notable Catholics).  The gang warfare between those two tribes reflects the situation in and around Stratford during much of Shakespeare's lifetime.  It should be remembered that Richard Quiney, Shakespeare's "loving good friend and countryman", the mayor of Stratford and father to Shakespeare's future son-in-law, was murdered in Stratford by thuggish members of the puritanical Greville family in 1602.

In addition to the Greville gang, there were Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote and his men.  The Lucys and the Grevilles deliberately made life very difficult indeed for anyone tarred with the "papist" brush, and it is not too difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his little gang having various run-ins with either mob - the Grevilles or the Lucys.  Any such sectarian violence would not have reflected too well on the Bard, and so his battles with the Lucys and the Grevilles were remembered, a little more bucolically, as hard drinking competitions with groups known as "Topers" and "Sippers".

That may or may not have been so.  But I find it intriguing that young Shakespeare was long said to have taken shelter, while very much the worse for wear, under a crab-tree a mere stone's throw from Hillborough, where I have argued that young Shakespeare was patched up after an "accident".  He was already torn between two different sorts of gang - the Catholics, which included his own family and the "sacred nun", Anne Whateley, and the Protestants, including the woman he was destined to marry.  In that regard, "Sippers" might refer to Catholics, who sipped communion wine, while "Topers" might be a code word for Protestants, who showed contempt for the Catholic mass.

Of course, if Shakespeare had taken a fall, or been knocked on the head, he might have seemed a little drunken when he was found sprawled beneath the crab-tree.  I know of at least one scar, running immediately above his left eyebrow, which was there for much of his life, and which caused his left eyebrow to droop somewhat.  He also referred to his lameness in his poems, and so we have to entertain the possibility that he was so badly beaten at one stage that he spent the rest of his life with a limp and a pronounced facial disfigurement.

Finally, I find it interesting to note that the word "crab" can mean to criticise or to grumble, or to do something which spoils something else - the term originally having been used of hawks fighting (from the Middle Low German krabben).  John Frith, the "old priest" of Temple Grafton, was renowned for setting the broken bones of hawks.  And the inn where Shakespeare and his mates are alleged to have suffered at the hands of the "Sippers" was known as the Falcon.

The hawks in question were surely troublemakers.  Like today's "hawks", they went looking for a fight.  Their enemies were rivals in religion and local politics.  And Shakespeare, it would seem, took a pasting.  He had to be nursed back to health nearby at Hillborough, where his "White Lady" fell in love with him.  But he bore the scars for the rest of his days.

The Shakespeare Deniers

I was recently sent an electronic document - quite a large one, in fact.  The author had deconstructed the entire sequence of Shakespeare's Sonnets (in reverse order!) with the determined intention of proving that they were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (pictured).

Oxford is not the sole candidate for the enviable role of the "real" William Shakespeare, but he is certainly the front runner.  The point, though, is why should we even consider the possibility that a man who died in 1604 - twelve years before the death of Shakespeare - was the true author of the plays and poems we attribute to Shakespeare?

Let me first of all state that I have some sympathy with the conspiracy theorists who propose that Oxford (or one of fifty-or-so other candidates) actually did all the hard work, for which William Shakespeare took the credit.

I have some sympathy because the standard biography of Shakespeare is so woefully inadequate.  There does seem to be a disconnect between the picture of William Shakespeare presented by so many of his biographers and the genius behind the Complete Works.

However, it's one thing to suspect that the Shakespeare of countless biographies might not have been up to the task of creating some of the world's finest works of literature.  It's another thing altogether to leap to the conclusion that somebody else must have written them.  Such a wild leap in the dark overlooks a far more obvious, and more realistic, interpretation - that the standard biography of Shakespeare is grossly misleading.

Or, in other words, Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare.  But the Shakespeare we're told about wasn't who Shakespeare really was.

The history of Shakespeare denial is long and far from honourable.  We can trace it back to Rev. James Wilmot, who left London and moved to Barton-on-the-Heath, near Stratford, in the late 18th century.  He began to have concerns about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, wondering (in 1785) how the humbly-born Shakespeare of Stratford could have mingled so freely with the great and the good.  Clearly, it was impossible - and so somebody else must have been the real Shakespeare.

English society had changed a great deal between Shakespeare's and Wilmot's day.  The aristocracy had distanced itself from the peasantry, and to Rev. Wilmot the very idea that a middle-class lad could become friends with lords and ladies was unthinkable.

But let's consider this: Ben Jonson was more humbly-born than Shakespeare.  He went to Westminster School, but did not finish his education.  He became a bricklayer instead (although he hated it, and it haunted him for the rest of his days).  He attended neither of the universities.  And yet, Jonson freely mixed with the aristocracy, had various aristocratic patrons, lodged with a cousin of the king and became Britain's first (unofficial) Poet Laureate.

Going by Rev. Wilmot's logic, none of that was possible, and so Ben Jonson cannot have been Ben Jonson.  Somebody else must have written the plays, poems and court masques, for which Jonson took all the credit.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever made that suggestion about Ben Jonson.  We don't seem to mind the fact that he - an overweight, alcoholic bully - could have made the journey from obscurity to celebrity and enjoyed the patronage of lords and ladies.  So why do we assume that Shakespeare could not have done so?

In fact, Shakespeare's dealings with the aristocracy were fairly limited, in comparison with Jonson's.  The only patron we know of, where Shakespeare is concerned, was the teenage Earl of Southampton, who came from a Catholic family.  Shakespeare dedicated two long poems to him (in 1593 and 1594) and appears to have written a number of sonnets to the young earl.  But it was not a notably long association, and it does not seem to have survived Southampton's coming-of-age.

So the theory that Shakespeare couldn't have been Shakespeare because he lacked the appropriate social standing is utter nonsense.  Poets had aristocratic patrons; they hung around noble households.  What seems surprising about Shakespeare is that he kept his contacts with the nobility to a minimum.

The real issue, when it comes to the various "Alternative Authorship" theories, is something else.  It starts from a desire to make Shakespeare - the best writer we've ever had - into something that he wasn't: an aristocrat.  Behind this lies a very strange assumption - that only those of noble birth are capable of marvellous things.  Realistically, we know that to be untrue.  But not everybody has reconciled themselves to democracy, and there are still plenty of people out there who harbour the delusions of an earlier age.  And, if you believe that blue blood is inherently better than any other kind, it will follow that you want to claim Shakespeare for the ruling elite.

So the denialists start out with a fundamental belief (the aristocracy are universally brilliant; everyone else is an idiot) which they then seek to prove.  We call this sort of thing "confirmation bias".  You start out with a theory and then bend the evidence to suit it.

Sir Derek Jacobi - one of the more consistent anti-Stratfordian voices - once claimed that there is absolutely no evidence that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  Well, you can make that claim if you decide to exclude every bit of evidence that he did.  But you have to ignore the testimonies of Robert Greene (1592), Richard Field (1593/4), Francis Meres (1598), William Jaggard (1599), the students at Cambridge University (1601) and a host of others, including John Fletcher, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson.  Or, rather, you have to conjure up a conspiracy of epic proportions, so that the churchman Francis Meres could praise both Oxford and Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia without realising that they were (allegedly) one and the same, and Ben Jonson could collude in a ridiculous plot without giving the game away (this is probably the best argument against all the Alternative Authorship theories: Ben Jonson wouldn't not have been able to keep the secret).

Basically, everybody at the time knew that Shakespeare wrote the plays.  It wasn't until more than 150 years after Shakespeare's death that anybody began to imagine that he didn't.  And the basis for that imaginary claim was groundless - it grew out of the refusal to acknowledge the social realities of Shakespeare's time.

But here's the problem.  The Shakespeare denialists are very much like climate sceptics (or "contrarians", as they're sometimes called) or Creationists.  They've started out with a fixed idea based on a kind of blind faith, and nothing will shake their conviction.  No amount of evidence will force them to rethink.  They'll just adapt their theory, regardless of how far from reason and reality they have to travel to accommodate the inconvenient facts.

You can't argue with them, because they made up their minds before they started.  Everything becomes some strange kind of "proof" that they are right (and, consequently, anyone who points to the facts is engaged in the original conspiracy - the reasoning becomes decidedly circular).

It's all incredibly frustrating, because the denialists can lose the argument one hundred times but will still come back claiming that they've won.  Just as with climate sceptics, who get very creative with the facts, they won't give in.  Why should they, you might ask.  Well, for the simple reason that they're absolutely wrong!

There is no evidence - none at all, not a shred - that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays.  They were written by William Shakespeare, gent, of Stratford-upon-Avon (although others had a hand in a few of them).  There is no argument about this, and it is facile to pretend that there is.

But the big worry is that the obsessives who want to believe that Shakespeare simply wasn't posh enough to be Shakespeare will keep misleading the public.  If we're honest, there isn't a debate.  There are a few loud voices continually trying to shout down the experts.  There is, as it were, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

These people are trying to drag us back to a past which we ought to have got rid of.  No one in their right minds believes that only aristocrats can write well.  So let's be honest: nobody in their right minds believes that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare (including those plays which were written after Oxford's death).  It is a kind of madness to imagine that he did, and it's a madness we could all do without.

Please, devote your energies to researching who William Shakespeare really was, because that's where the Stratfordians have let us all down.  But don't take the lunatic view that Shakespeare was "illiterate".  That simply shows that you left your reason at the door when you blundered into the debate.

And stop trying to mislead people.  In my book, that's an unforgivable sin.  Whether it's climate change or who was William Shakespeare - there is no excuse for trying to force people into believing things that are not true.

Keep your madness to yourself, and stop trying to take Shakespeare from us.