Author Peter McIntosh, University of Tasmania professor of history Michael Bennett and Rodney Croome at Hobart Bookshop launch of McIntosh's Who Wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets? May 26, 2011 in Hobart, Tasmania.
Photo credit: Martin Fieldhouse, Madhouse Photography
Tasmanian Peter McIntosh, PhD, who spoke at the Shakespeare Authorship Conference at Concordia College in 2009 recently launched his book Who Wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets? published by Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, Australia. McIntosh's new book develops the ideas first presented in a 2003 book on the topic of Elizabeth I as author of Shakespeare's Sonnets titled Shakespeare’s Sonnets – An Elizabethan Love Story (Otakou Press). Speaking of his approach to this study, McIntosh said:
Like many people I was introduced to Shakespeare’s works at school, but became interested in the Sonnets much later after noting that although they are almost certainly biographical they bear no relationship at all to the known facts about Shakespeare’s life. From this starting point it is a logical step to speculate that the Sonnets may have been written by someone other than Shakespeare. To investigate this hypothesis I adopted the scientific approach of seeing whether it was possible to correlate the personal events and ‘happenings’ mentioned in the Sonnets with real-life events as documented in the lives of prominent Elizabethans. This correlation approach seemed to work, and I think it reveals the identity of the subject of Shakespeare’s poems, as well as telling us more about the author of the Sonnets. I wrote the book to let people know the results of my research.At the May 26, 2011 launch party at The Hobart Book Shop in Hobart, Tasmania, social activist Rodney Croome praised McIntosh for his courage in a moving speech titled "On doubt and science . . . " posted in its entirety on the Walleah Press blog. Croome opens his speech with these words:
Shakespeare is a god.
He is praised not only as the greatest writer in English but as “the greatest man who ever lived” by Lytton Strachey and as “the most influential man in history” by one of his contemporary biographers. For Thomas Carlyle Shakespeare was a “Saint of poetry”, for Henry Melville “a kind of deity”.
And like all gods, there is very little direct evidence that Shakespeare created the glittering works attributed to him. What we know of him is scant and inauspicious. His contemporaries hardly mention him. His acclaim was almost entirely posthumous.
This dearth of information about Shakespeare the man and author has opened the door to doubters and infidels of every stripe. Among Shakespeare’s defenders, nagging doubts about the Bard’s authorship have also generated a kind of fundamentalism, as doubt often does, that admits no inquiry into the issue and damns the inquirer.
Among the former group, the doubters of Shakespeare and believers in other gods like Bacon, Marlow or Oxford, we can count Henry James, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Derek Jacobi and many others.
Among the latter group, the fundamentalists, we can count many of experts who feel the issue is resolved and who wouldn’t be seen dead at an event like this.
I probably fall in between these two groups. Like other Shakespeare agnostics, weary of the debate, I have been known to ask “what does it matter who wrote Shakespeare?”.
Into this ever-bitter war of faith against doubt, heresy and know-nothingness strides Peter McIntosh.
In his new book on the authorship of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Peter makes the point that his approach is about looking directly at the evidence without preconceptions, in line with his training and temperament as a scientist.
Who Wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets? by Peter McIntosh is available for purchase online from Ginninderra Press for $18.50 Australian minus the GST tax, plus $13 Australian for overseas shipping. For more information, contact stephen@ginninderrapress.com.au.
An excerpt from "Chapter One -- The Sonnets Enigma" is reproduced below with the permission of the author:
One of the most curious enigmas of
literary history is how little Shakespeare’s contemporaries have told us about
the great English writer.
A great and witty writer is usually good company – the
sort of person who livens up a dinner party. Surely a man like Shakespeare, a
professional actor who could write such original verbal exchanges, must have
been an outstanding conversationalist and never at a loss for words.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries must have noticed and remarked on the brilliance
of the man who wrote the plays and the poems, displayed such unparalleled
penetrating insights into human nature, loved bawdy jokes, created
unforgettable humorous characters like Falstaff and Malvolio, wrote with such
an extensive knowledge of history and the classics, and expressed (for the
first time in the English language) such heartfelt personal feelings in his Sonnets? Wouldn’t a man with his wit,
originality, personality and power of expression have sparkled at the very
centre of every gathering, been idolised by literary London, and been a guest
of honour at court occasions?
But although this generation regards Shakespeare as the
most remarkable writer of the English renaissance and possibly of all time, we
have no evidence that any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries ever made an
appointment to see him, lent him a book, recorded a conversation with him,
wrote him a letter on literary matters, congratulated him on writing a play,
had a riotous party with him, invited him to give an after-dinner speech, or
considered him to be in any way remarkable. Isn’t this very odd?
In fact, in the historical record, only one communication
addressed to Shakespeare has survived. It concerns mundane monetary matters,
and was never sent. We know far more about Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived two
hundred years earlier, than we know about Shakespeare, and the Chaucer records
reveal a literary life parallel to, and in harmony with, his rise in status
from page to trusted court official, emissary and senior administrator.
There are several references to Shakespeare’s works by Elizabethans and Jacobeans:
some writers of his time refer to his wit and praise his writings. But in
Shakespeare’s lifetime there are only a couple of ambiguous references to the
character of the man himself: a student play lampoons him as ‘sweet Mr Shakespeare’
and a faint sketch of the man himself is contained in an apology written by the
publisher Henry Chettle, who describes him as honest by repute, as having a
civil demeanour and a ‘facetious grace in writing’. Such terms tell us little
about Shakespeare’s personality.
Of Shakespeare’s personal papers only his will and a few
documents relating to property, land trading and legal proceedings have
survived. He left behind no signed manuscripts, no letters, no notebooks in his
own hand, and no book collection. Just as in his life no one seems to have
noticed when he was around, so in death no one of significance in London or
Stratford seems to have noticed his departure. His will is a prosaic business
document. It contains no mention of books or manuscripts or anything pertaining
to a literary career. The total verifiable (documented) facts about William
Shakespeare are few and can be summarised in a few paragraphs.
Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, keep a diary. But
he did write something similar – a book of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets,
most of which are highly personal in nature. They appear to span several years
of his life. The meaning of many sonnets is obscure or contentious. Although
they can be collectively described as love poems, they do not follow the
Elizabethan convention for the love poem genre. This is why they are immortal –
for the first time in the English language a poet has broken with tradition and
written from the heart, not the head, about complex nuances of intimate
feelings. The great English biographer Lytton Strachey warned that the paths
trodden by those in quest of the key to the mystery of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was ‘already white with the
bones of innumerable commentators’ but added that the quest ‘seems to offer
hopes of a prize of extraordinary value – nothing less than a true insight into
the most secret recesses of the thoughts and feelings of perhaps the greatest
man who ever lived’.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
undoubtedly describe very personal issues and also contain glimpses of his
friends, references to relationships and rivals and comments about current
events. However, despite analyses in hundreds of academic volumes and research
papers, the world’s best literary minds have not yet reached a happy consensus
concerning the friends, relationships, rivals and current events to which
Shakespeare refers. The writer and editor Martin Seymour-Smith politely summed
up the failure of the scholars: ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets have had much learned ink wasted upon them.’
The theory I develop in this book is radical and some
readers will be surprised by the conclusions drawn. I ask these readers to
judge the validity of the conclusions on the strength of the evidence
presented, and on the rationality of the argument, not on any preconceptions
about what they think the conclusions should
be.
Excerpted from "Chapter One: The Sonnets Enigma" from Who Wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets? by Peter McIntosh
Personal background: Dr Peter McIntosh has a PhD in Geology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has worked in publishing in Holland and New Zealand and as a geologist in New Zealand and Australia and has written over 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Apart from geology and Shakespeare his interests are sailing, bushwalking and social chess.