6. Return of the Bassano-ites

Why Jodi Picoult is so, so wrong about Shakespeare

Just when you thought it was safe, Jodi Picoult springs up again with her claims that Emilia Bassano ‘actually wrote’ Shakespeare. She did this in an interview on the Princeton University website, no less; and what’s worse is that the interviewer doesn’t challenge her.

She explains how she came to the idea. Picoult read Elizabeth Winkler’s book about it, you see. The only problem is that Winkler, having been told by Shakespeare experts that she was wrong about her wild idea, continued to press on, fondly imagining that there was some kind of concerted effort to suppress her. Unfortunately, Winkler’s claims are just fantasy. Picoult laments that objections to this theory only come from people who’ve studied Shakespeare in academia. To which my response is: well, duh. If a chemistry expert told you that you were wrong about your theory in chemistry, you’d accept it, wouldn’t you?

The grave of Susannah Hall, with a sign on it, showing the marital arms of Susannah Hall, impaling Shakespeare and Hall.

The Bassano “case”, if we can even dignify it with that name, comes from Picoult’s belief (based on Winkler) that Shakespeare’s daughters were illiterate. This is a fallacy, for many reasons; not least that Picoult'’s projecting her idea of what a playwright should be onto the past. Firstly, whether or not Shakespeare’s daughters were literate has no bearing on the authorship of his plays. (Many aristocrats were illiterate even up to the time of Elizabeth I; reading and writing were also taught differently, so that you might be able to read but not write, and vice versa.)

Secondly, the fact is that we do have evidence that Susanna Hall, Shakespeare’s daughter, was literate. We know less about Judith, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Susanna has her own epitaph:

Witty above her sex, but that's not all,

Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall,

Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this

Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse.

Then, passenger, hast nere a tear

To weep with her that wept with all

That wept, yet set herself to chere

Them up with comforts cordiall?

Her love shall live, her mercy spread

When thou hast nere a tear to shed.

She shares her father’s wit and sense of salvation: a good clue that she might also have been able to read and write. We also have her signature, which over at Oxfraud they have shown must have taken a long time to practice. (They also note that she gave a book to Colonel Richard Grace.) So we can assume with a high degree of certainty that she was literate.

But more than that, she might have known Latin. Lena Cowen Orlin, in her excellent book The Private Life of William Shakespeare, suggests that the inscription on Anne Shakespeare’s tomb might have been written by her:

“Ubera, tu mater, tu lac vitamq[ue] dedisti”.

It’s not particularly elegant Latin, and as Orlin points out, it’s in a daughter’s voice. The Latin for John Hall (Susanna’s husband) is not particularly elegant either: “Hallius hic situs est medica celeberrimus arte.” ) [Hallius is buried here, most famed in medical art.] The placement of “celeberrimus” between medica and arte shows some knowledge of Latin poetry.

Both could have been written by someone with a basic knowledge of Latin - and why couldn’t that have been the witty Susanna? John Hall’s gravestone was “bare for at least fourteen years” after he died, and then when Susanna was buried next to him, it read: “Ne tumulo, quid desit adest fidissma coniux [sic] / Et vitae comitem nunc quoq[ue] mortis habet.” Orlin gives the translation “Lest in the tomb he might want, his most faithful wife is now here / And he now has in death the companion of his life.” Doesn’t that sound like a wife’s perspective?

As for Judith: she was used as a witness in a legal document, but we have little else of her; however, the family that she married into, the Quineys, were certainly literate and very occupied with trade in and out of Stratford. We have a letter from Richard Quiney (Judith’s father in law) to Shakespeare; Quiney’s correspondence includes a letter from Quiney’s 11 year old son, in Latin, in which he adapts Cicero, and there are letters from Abraham Sturley written entirely in Latin. Elizabeth Quiney managed businesses in Stratford. Shakespeare deniers would have Stratford inhabited by illiterate clod-hoppers; they refuse to believe that it was full of intelligent, thoughtful, well-read and educated people. On the balance of probabilities, I would say it is highly likely that both of William Shakespeare’s daughters were not only literate, but relatively well-read as well.

Not that this has anything to do with whether Will wrote his plays or not. Of course he did. But I hope that those who try to wrench him into positions of their own making might start to think otherwise.

NEWS

This week, I was on a panel at the Writers’ Summit at the London Book Fair, talking about what it’s like to be a writer in relation to publishers. My fellow panellists were the psychological thriller writers Penny Batchelor and Mark Edwards. We discussed agents, advances, promotion and all the rest of the nuts and bolts of the business of publishing. I was particularly struck with the fact that some self-published writers spend £20k a month - yes, you read that correctly, a month - on online advertising. Well, I suppose you have to speculate to accumulate…

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