The truest poetry is the most feigning

In the sixteenth century, Deptford was both different and the same as it is now. There were no high rise tower blocks and backed up motorised traffic struggling to get through the Rotherhite tunnel, nor would there be the occasional mislaid tourist up from Greenwich and the market wouldn’t have had racks of Domestos and Andrex knocked off through the backyard of the Tesco’s distribution warehouse, but still, there would have been festering vegetable waste in the drains, an undercurrent of violence, of poverty through aimless men sitting around on street corners and it would persist as one of London’s forgotten areas. Back then it was dominated by the Royal Naval dockyards sitting on the estuary side of London, defending against potential invasion and aiding smugglers for a coin. Deptford was convenient for drafting in drunken lost souls from around the city. Deptford was the end of London, the last point before a lifetime aboard the waves whether that was the way you wanted to go or not. It was a place that people came for looking for trouble.

One imagines the Dog and Gun has changed little since then. It is a traditional boozer with a marvellous range of ales, but it lurks down a side street amongst a relatively run down estate and when I last went in there three men sitting along stools at the bar turned and stared, their gaze warned me to mind my own business.

It was a similar establishment, I imagine, where Christopher Marlowe holed up after his arrest for heresy in 1593. At the time, Marlowe was one of the most famous men in the land. A playwright extraordinary, dandily dressed, handsome like a cherub and possibly an Elizabethan spy. What he was doing in Deptford, amongst the rough and tumble of rum drinking sailor dens is unclear, as is so much about his life and death. Perhaps he was hiding out amongst the dregs of the city for the false glamour of it all; perhaps he was about to embark on some secret foreign mission or to flee for asylum abroad. All we know is that he became embroiled in an argument that ended with a rapier penetrating his right eye and then his brain. He bled to death in the gutter outside down amongst the urine and turnip cores and fish intestines and the thousand other dead men of a generation. The man arguably destined to be the greatest playwright of his age was cut down in some booze filled row, or silenced for the too many secrets he had in his head. Too fast too young is not, after all, a twentieth century concept. Marlowe went down aged twenty-nine having already lived a life.

The title of the bard rather than merely being a bard could have been within his grasp. The incredible Dr Faustus may have only been the first building block towards a canon unrivalled for half a millennium, Instead the title was taken by his contemporary, the no doubt equally raucous, but significantly less glamorous, playwright, actor, husband, father, middle of the road man from the middle of the country, William Shakespeare. Or was it?

Unsurprisingly for a death that involved the threat of high treason, religious defilement, whispers of then-perversion, the alleged perpetrators dying is custody and a handsome, quick-tempered dramatist, strange myths linger around Marlowe’s death. The most common is that he faked his own death in Deptford, hoped on a clipper headed out to sea and spent the rest of his life ghostwriting Shakespeare’s plays from a Tuscan retreat whilst conducting the odd act of espionage for the Queen and Country.

As anyone stumbling over a review of what looks like a pile of trite melodrama masquerading as historically accurate film, Anonymous, knows there are conspiracy theories are abound that Shakespeare was nothing more than a front for a wide range of alternative playwrights. The film decides that the Earl of Oxford is the real man behind the pen. “People like me don’t write plays, people like you do” he declares, whereupon, in the trailer I had the misfortune to see the other evening, he tosses a manuscript in the face of a half naked young William, who has presumably been disturbed from a drink-sodden evening defiling a pub wench, as an actor’s bohemian, even if the concept hadn’t been invented yet, lifestyle demands.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was put forward as the real writer of the canon in 1920 by, the appropriately named, J Thomas Looney. The basis for this is the intricate knowledge of the royal court system Shakespeare displays, the fact that Oxford was a champion of poetry and art and was probably Shakespeare’s patron whilst William himself was an uneducated oik, and that many of the plays, especially Hamlet, reflect de Vere’s own life. In other words, they’re nothing but shrouded autobiography. This ignores the fact that Shakespeare was appointed to the royal court and that many of the plays are based on other fictional works or actual history. Shakespeare was a precursor to the likes of Neil Gaiman, the sort of author who happily pinches bits here and there of different myths and half-remembered legends until some sort of flimsy fictional shroud comes into being.

My favourite bit of evidence is the suggestion that the code E.Vere appears 17,000 times in Shakespeare’s forty-odd plays. Given that it can be found in ‘every’, ‘ever’, ‘never’, and so on I’m surprised it’s not more. Still, lots of things are surprising about Shakespeare, not least that I struggled with it at school.

Even though most of what I read at the time was accompanied by pictures, I didn’t struggle with the language particularly. I may have initially found myself flummoxed by the sonnet structure and the odd archaic word, but all teenagers, except the exceptionally precocious, do. I got the lyricism and even enjoyed the, in hindsight, somewhat over-analysis of the plays. Line by line we went, seeking quadruple meaning in every pretty turn of phrase as though determined to prove that genius has to shine in every third turn of the plot. In retrospect it should have been enough to just appreciate the language’s rhythm and the clever metaphors for what they were; phrases that four hundred later still told us something new about the world and our place in it.

Anyway, it wasn’t a lack of understanding it was more that the deeper the comprehension the more I found it a little boring. Maybe it was partly because we flew through Macbeth one summer term and then spent three years dissecting Romeo and Juliet act by sodding act. I wanted to like it. I liked reading and I liked books; I theoretically liked the theatre although at thirteen had limited experience of it beyond the obligatory Christmas panto. Yet it wouldn’t quite click for me.

In many ways, I blame Romeo and Juliet and thus by proxy William himself, for my abandonment of English Literature at sixteen. The over-analysis broke down the work, the magic, so that all that was left was a combination of familiar phrases and reinterpreted myths slouching across a plot riddled with holes. Nothing was left but a bruised and bloody, used and soggy script, an idea of fiction destroyed. I didn’t want that to happen to all the other heroes I loved: Conrad’s colonial adventurers, Greene’s spies, another Marlowe, this one with a cheap suit and wry series of put downs, the myriad characters that filled up Terry Pratchett’s and Douglas Adams’ novels. They were all three dimensional beings for whom I didn’t want to understand how the mortar that held them together was nothing but words. I preferred to think of them as almost people; as though they might just about exist beyond the page, whisked from my sub-consciousness and out, out somewhere into the real world. There were, I felt, too real not to exist.

So, it was only as an adult that I finally came to Hamlet and Othello, Shylock and Lear, Benedick and Beatrice and all those marvellous histories (my enjoyment of which was no doubt enhanced by studying the war of the roses for A level meaning I understood who all the Richards and Henrys were). And slowly I began to understand that what made them great characters was their complexity. I’d missed the bleakness melancholy, the otherworldly knowing authorial hand behind Greene’s, Conrad’s and Chandler’s words. (It is, after all, hard to spot). I read instead at a surface level of black and white. Good and evil. Shakespeare’s heroes were bigger than that, because life is bigger than that. It is a contrary, mixed up, muddling block not designed to make sense. ‘Couldn’t have’ doesn’t really apply, except when based upon the laws of science. Anything is possible, even people with little formal education explaining the complexities of the heart in choice, succinct lines.

Which is why the frantic urge to attribute the canon to anyone other than William is somewhat galling. Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I’s spymaster was the first alternative suggested to the author, allegedly because there are a couple of coincidences in metaphor between the two’s poetry and the plays, allegedly, contain numerous legal terms which Bacon, as Queen’s Counsel, would have known. Toss, yet people – academics no just vain-glorious movie directors – noisily look for truth where there is no lie.

They pick on the Earl of Derby for pretty much the exact same reasons as Oxford and get no closer. And these are just the serious suggestions. After them, then it becomes pretty much anyone who could have held a pen during the same period: Francis Drake (too busy being in charge of the navy, surely, and on the wrong side of the world at several key performance dates); Anne Hathway, William’s wife (which is just odd); Ben Jonson (more famous himself at the time); Thomas Kyd (usually in the debtors prison); Thomas More (already long dead); Mary, Queen of Scots (headless); James Stuart, Kind of England and Scotland (a child and then a monarch).

Out of all seventy-nine candidates proposed, the Marlowe theory at least has some possibility behind it. Jonson was almost as good as playwright and so comes close. Someone once wrote, “I admire Ben Jonson the most, but I love Shakespeare more.” But Jonson was too prolific in his own right to fit in an extra forty odd plays and also had an ego too big to allow a piece of work such as Macbeth to appear under anyone other than his own name.

Marlowe’s Faustus is held up as the direction his work is travelling in and it is indeed excellent. Although, no Hamlet or Lear. Besides, Shakespeare’s writerly trajectory is supposed to go entertainment (comedies), royal patronage (histories), despair (tragedies), melancholy, (the hard to place romantic-comic-tragedies of Alls Well that Ends Well, the Winter’s Tale and the Tempest). Marlowe was already on the tragedy arc by the time of his death and never seemed that interested in laugh-out-loud comedies let alone conventional pandering to the monarchy’s rather dubious claim to the throne. In 1593 Shakespeare only had half a dozen plays to his name, of which only Richard III could stand up to Dr Faustus. Would Marlowe really have taken a dozen steps backwards putting out filler work until mining the vein he’d already ripped open?

But the main reasoning behind the theory that Marlowe ended up in Tuscany and writing the plays, or indeed anyone else writing the plays, is Italy itself. Two Gentleman of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, the Merchant of Venice, Othello, again and again Shakespeare’s plays are based in Italy, a country Shakespeare never visited: why? Who knows? Who cares? They certainly weren’t based on any accurate representation of Italy. In The Merchant of Venice he even forgets to mention the canals. It’s made up. It’s fiction. You don’t have to go somewhere to write about it – especially in Elizabethan England where most of your audience had never left the home counties let alone ventured further afield. And even if they had it was probably to war and one imagines that a muddy field filled with canvas shelters, the taste of adrenaline and the echo of screams in the night air looks the same whenever or wherever you may be.

Italy? Pah. That isn’t a reason. The real reason that there is this debate, is class.

Because in this screwed up country during a particularly screwed up period of time, the Victorians and their immediate hiers couldn’t comprehend that a relatively uneducated lad from the Midlands was touched by genius. He had to be either a patsy or a thief, either covering up for his social better who, for reasons which slightly escape me, shouldn’t have been writing literature of such dazzling variety and quality, or a convenient pen name for a member of the early middle classes who had at least managed to trudge up from his parent’s Kentish shoe shop and attend Cambridge, as Marlowe did. The concept of the working class kid done well was forbidden.

And at least in terms of literature it remained so until the 1950s at least when the likes of Alan Stillitoe and John Osborne emerged, blinking into the published light, fresh faced and sporting chips the size of a mine on their shoulder to tell grimy realism of the north, drink, being poor and frustrated by it and desperate for the weekend to forget the tedium and physical harshness of the week. And, unlike George Orwell or (Lord help us) JG Priestley they weren’t middle-class observers but they had actually lived what they wrote about: a not watered down by agenda.

It was but a fleeting moment when the creative flourishers from a working class background flocked towards literature. It was before rock and roll and mass market television; before the lure of easy glamour and girls was attainable with slicked back hair and a guitar. Nothing but a brief period when ale in tankards mid-afternoon, a thousand cigarettes accompanied sensible coats that kept the inevitable rain off and cheap suits as the fashion of the class rebel.

Now, in twenty-first century Britain it almost feels like we’ve taken a step backwards. Sebastian Faulks, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirwell, all three of the British writers whom I’ve read recently went to Oxbridge. Clearly this is not an exhaustive sweep of the literary establishment and I’m making a generalisation about writers who come out of Oxford and Cambridge – a generalisation which I know for a fact to be incorrect - but the real point is that this doesn’t actually matter. I loved White Teeth and Politics. A Week in December was a bit meh, but it had a couple of good moments and it certainly didn’t lack for ambition. (Although, perhaps it was Faulk’s background that prevented him from fully painting his broad society landscape that he got close to, but that’s another discussion...)

Good writing is a good writing no matter whom it comes from. This isn’t a campaign for William Shakespeare as an early working class hero; it’s just an expression of disappointment that in 2011 we’re even having that conversation about someone whom should be amongst the nation’s heroes for giving us a language with which to argue.