Where there’s a Will ... there’s a theory

Oct 16 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Did the true author of Shakespeare’s works scratch graffiti into the wall of Chester Cathedral? Laura Davis reports

EACH year, some 400,000 people walk through the door of the half-timbered cottage where the greatest mind in English literature is believed to have been born.

From all over the world they come to wander through the bedroom where he dreamt of mischievous sprites and dithering princes, and to visit the room where he must have muttered iambic pentameter between bites of his evening meal.

Or did he? For centuries, there has been debate over whether the son of a glove maker would have had the imagination and education to have penned the most influential works of literature ever written.

American author Henry James believed the writer’s identity to be the biggest and most successful hoax ever to have been perpetrated, Charles Dickens described it as “a fine mystery” and Oxford scholar Dr Blair Worden claims Shakespeare is the only author of note since the advent of printing for whom it is impossible to link his life and writing.

“Here was a man who could hardly sign his own name – we know that from legal documents. He didn’t know how old he was,” reveals Robert Nield, from Northwich, author of Breaking the Shakespeare Codes.

“The son of a colleague in an interview many years later said whenever the man from Stratford was asked to write anything he used to complain that he was in pain and make an excuse.”

Nield, a former physics teacher, believes that he has uncovered a series of secret messages in the form of anagrams hidden within the Shakespearean canon. He claims these point to the real author of the plays and sonnets – William Hastings, a man with connections to Chester.

In each line containing an anagram of “Hastings”, he discovered a further anagram with words crisscrossing one another like in a game of Scrabble. So, in the eighth line of Sonnet 2, “Were an all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise”, he uncovered: “Please arrange letters, find William Hastings name here.”

Sonnet 18, which has provided inspiration for generations of later writers, contains the line “Rough wondes do shake the darling buds of Maie”, which Nield rearranged to discover “Hastings hidd name, but looke here for disguised answer”.

Nield goes even further, to discover similar anagrams in the works of other authors, such as John Milton’s An epitaph on the admirable dramaticke poet, W Shakespeare from 1630.

In the eighth line, “hast built thy selfe a lasting monument”, he found “Hastings, the bashful Milton salutes thy name”.

For critics who argue that this is simply a coincidence, perhaps citing that “Hastings” contains five of the 10 most common letters of the alphabet” (according to Oxford University Press, 2004), Nield has a response prepared: “The interesting thing is that every line I’ve ever looked at with his name in has produced an anagram – not just one in 10 or one in 100. So far, there are about 350, it’s rather a lot to be a coincidence,” he says.

“But there is another way of assessing this quite simply. If you look at a text where you know for a fact nothing is hidden, say verse by TS Eliot, and you look for lines which have got Hasting’s name in and try to make anagrams out of them, they don’t work.”

With William Hastings firmly in Nield’s mind as the true author of the plays, William Shakespeare has been demoted to “the Stratford Man”, as if he had been discovered in a peat bog during an archaeological dig.

But the 50-year-old believes he had his own part to play in the mystery.

“He was paid by Hastings to act as his frontman and he was very well paid, I think, and that’s how the Stratford Man became very wealthy,” insists Nield.

“He died the equivalent of a millionaire. In those days, writers and actors did not make very much money, they all died in poverty. Where did all his money come from?”

If Nield is right, then the implications of the author’s true identity are not confined to the field of literature, but would tear apart our understanding of British history.

For Hastings, Nield claims, is none other than the illegitimate son of the Virgin Queen herself – Elizabeth I.

He backs up this theory with reference to a sonnet written in so-called “Shakespearean style” and attributed to a “Phaeton”. In classical mythology, he points out, Phaeton was the unacknow-ledged, illegitimate son of the sun god. Elizabeth I was sometimes known as the Sun Queen.