The Shakespeare Conspiracy - Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman

I'm a sucker for the who-really-wrote-Shakespeare genre. Let's get it straight, though - I don't for one moment that Shakespeare of Stratford was largely responsible for most of the plays that appeared under his name in 1623. He probably wrote most of Titus Andronicus and nothing of Comedy of Errors. For the late great plays - say, 1600 to 1610 - he wrote the vast majority but never all of the texts, which is why they are the best plays. He wrote very little of The Tempest or Timon of Athens or indeed Taming of the Shrew, which are mostly by John Fletcher. The so-called witty dialogue (or, as I prefer to think of it, space filler) in trash like Much Ado, As You Like It, is Thomas Middleton, and Middleton also wrote the witchy stuff in Macbeth. It is simply not possible for him to have written 37 plays in blank verse in a career of barely twenty years. Try it and see. Nor was it required. Stage plays were a team effort in Jacobeathan times, just as TV series are now. Shakespeare in his prime was team leader. He came up with the core plot, wrote the big speeches, and had final cut on the contributions of those lower down the food chain. The only bits he couldn't control were the clown bits (Will Kemp and Robert Armin), which is why they are so toe-curlingly bad. The reason nobody in Stratford seemed to notice he was a playwright is that they didn't know and didn't care; there was no theatre locally, and so far as the neighbours knew he was a prosperous merchant with a big house and two daughters likely to come with decent dowries. It is simply not true that we know more about other playwrights of the period. We know more about Marlowe because he was a spy, a student and he was murdered. He was also, in my opinion, a much more original writer who invented the form (Shakespeare was a better man of the theatre). Try, for example, to trace the life of Shakespeare's collaborator Fletcher, or Fletcher's collaborator Beaumont, or the omnipresent Middleton. All of them had longer careers than Shakespeare. All had the occasional hit. All effectively vanished without trace. Nor is it a credible argument that Oxford or Bacon wrote the plays under pseudonyms. There was absolutely no reason to - Queen Elizabeth and King James both loved the theatre and any aspiring favourite could win big kudos by being theatrical, hence so many patronised acting companies. Bacon was a decent writer of factual prose, Oxford's surviving fragments are amateurish in the extreme.

Having got that off my chest, what of The Shakespeare Conspiracy? Well, Phillips and Keatman get my attention because they accept that the merchant of Stratford wrote the plays. They tackle the other question, why is so little known? They conclude it's because he was a spy. Well, Marlowe certainly was, Jonson might have been (personally I think he just grassed up his peers) and Anthony Munday, a playwright of almost zero merit, probably was. To support their theory they revert to the game of literary clues. Ingeniously they take the frontispiece of the Sonnets and the mysterious Mr WH. How is WH the 'onlie begetter' of poems that the title credits to Shakespeare? They spot that there are superfluous full stops everywhere. Take one out and you get Mr W Hall, who they have traced in the records of the spymasters. Was this Shakespeare's alias when working undercover? They say yes, obviously, ignoring the quibble that everyone Hall was associated with in the archives did not use an alias. They then go on to try and link Shakespeare with the Gunpowder Plot, which is silly but no more so than the Bacon or Oxford theories. They argue that Shakespeare ended up related by marriage to several of the plotters - an argument so complex that I couldn't make head nor tail of it.

Great fun. The best of its type that I have come across lately. To be read for sheer amusement and to learn more about conspiracy than  about Shakespeare the man.

Ted Hughes: An Unauthorised Life - Jonathan Bate

When Bate's book came out at the end of 2015 I thought, here it is at last - a comprehensive, authoritative, objective analysis of Hughes's life and work.  I thought it was an odds-on favourite for the big literary prizes.  It didn't go on to win.  I now know why.

Bate brings very little that's new to the table.  This is understandable, given that Hughes lived all his professional life in the media glare, his grim personal life far outweighing his literary output, save where, at the beginning and end of his career, the two were the same.

Bate began the work as an authorised life, with the full support of the notoriously controlling Hughes Estate. He fell from favour when he started throwing in more extra-marital lovers.  He comes across as somewhat petulant, therefore, when discussing the two women who, until just after the book came out, controlled the Estate.  Hughes's sister Olwyn, who died earlier this year, is treated harshly.  Bate is by no means the first writer on Hughes or Plath to do so, but Olwyn was sister and agent and even publisher (through the Rainbow Press) and was thus the last surviving participant in the process.  Bate makes one very unsavoury inference which, without the proof that can never be produced, is unpardonable.  Hughes's second wife Carol is understandably offended by those who dwell on the scurrilous side of the great man's activities and she is not a poet,  Bate's solution is to ignore her more or less entirely.  His assessment of her character boils down to young, uneducated, irrelevant - yet she was Hughes's wife for the thick end of thirty years.  She ran his home and raised his children.  She should be treated better than this by any objective biographer.

Considering the poetry Bate is naturally on confident ground - he is, after all, Professor of English Literature at Oxford.  I didn't see that many original insights, though.  Hughes might have been inspired by Wordsworth and Yeats but he ploughed his own poetic furrow and I felt that Bate rather overplayed the parallels.  On Robert Graves and The White Goddess, which Hughes later took forward in his own Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Bate really came into his own, treating the now old-fashioned and eccentric theory with fairness and thoroughness because however off-beam it might seem to us, this was a concept deeply held.

I was irked and frustrated that there is no discussion of the early plays for radio, which after all paid the bills during the period most people are interested in - the Plath years.  It doesn't bother me so much but anyone who wants to know more about Hughes's writing for children (other than The Iron Man) will be equally frustrated.

Is The Unauthorised Life worth reading?  Yes - absolutely.  Is it definitive or even a significant advance towards a definitive understand of Hughes's life or work?  Not, not at all.