‘What’s in a Name? How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare’

by Susan Dwyer Amussen

Manchester University Press 2026

Reviewed by Andrew Hilton

The Shakespeare ‘authorship question’, namely the quest to identify a more likely author for the most admired texts in world theatre than the lowly son of a Warwickshire glover, seems set to run and run. First sown in the mid-nineteenth century, the field of candidates is crowded and still growing. Among the names most often heard are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and – currently – Emilia Lanier (née Aemilia Bassano; 1569–1645), a possibly black, possibly Jewish woman who was a poet, a musician and, also possibly, a courtesan in Elizabeth I’s court.

These are fundamentally conspiracy theories; they all posit a conspiracy of silence and subterfuge that allowed the plays to be credited to Shakespeare for almost three centuries before the lie was detected and the search for truth began. Why?

Irene Coslet, the author of The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby, published this year by Pen and Sword Books, answers that question very succinctly:

“Historians have not managed to explain how the Stratford man, a semi-illiterate moneylender, managed to gain such a level of erudition.”

How could a member of the lower middle class – the argument goes – without a university education, and working as a mere actor, have possibly penned the greatest writing in English?. That is the question, born – I believe – of sheer snobbery: class snobbery and intellectual snobbery. Intellectual excellence, indeed genius, is not confined to any class, and the lack of a university education no more debars one from being able to write Macbeth and King Lear than the experience of one qualifies one to write them. As for the ‘semi-literate’ jibe above, this is comprehensively contradicted by what historians of the period can tell us in detail about the free grammar school education that we are 99% certain Shakespeare received at the King’s New School in Stratford.

One such person is Susan Dwyer Amussen, a social and cultural historian, author of What’s in a Name? How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Her account of the grammar school education is detailed and persuasive and really should rebuke all those who assume that only at one of the two great universities could an Elizabethan boy acquire an education in the classics, learn to read and speak Latin, and to recite, learn and perform the plays of Terence and Plautus. The grammar schools provided all this, in contrast to the Universities which were focussed on preparing the clergy. It is true that there is no surviving class roll to prove that Shakespeare attended the New School, but given that his father was a Freeman of the town (and in 1568, when William was four, its Bailiff, or Mayor) it is virtually inconceivable that he didn’t.

It is this chapter, ‘A Grammar School Education’, in this very readable and informative book that provides the strongest argument for Shakespeare being Shakespeare. However – and I hope I am not being unfair in this – I do suspect that Amussen, an expert in the world of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, has first written an engaging account of that world that has then become bookended – in Prologue and Epilogue – by reference to the authorship debate, for it is barely mentioned in the main body of the text. Could it be that someone along the line has suggested that the old controversy would offer a more marketable hook than yet another survey of Shakespeare’s life and times? It certainly hooked me and provoked this review.

But for the virtues for Amussen’s book, they are many. She begins with a survey of the tools available to the historian of the period – the church records of baptisms, marriages and deaths, surviving wills and inventories, property records, government records, court records and any personal or literary texts – and then goes on to describe Shakespeare’s Stratford, a town centrally placed in the country, a meeting place and a staging post, regularly visited by touring theatre companies; a town of perhaps 2,500 that astonishingly sustained no fewer than 22 glovers, of which Shakespeare’s father, John, was one.

She then journeys with Shakespeare to London, a magnet then, as now, for the ambitious young from across Britain and beyond; already an international city, its population expanded, largely thanks to incomers, from perhaps 120,00 in 1560 to perhaps 200,000 in 1600, making up 5% of the population of England. Entering the City, as he likely did, from Fleet Street via the Ludgate, she is mistaken to imply that William would have been impressed by the sight of Old St Paul’s famous lead-covered wooden spire – it had been destroyed by fire in 1561 and not replaced – but the cathedral itself would have been impressive enough, as would the city’s no fewer than one hundred churches. Most of the population lived within the city walls – the famous ‘square mile’ – but the suburbs were enlarging, including of course the Southwark area, to become famous for its theatre, its bear-baiting pit and its brothels.

There is a wealth of detail about this great city – its politics, its theatres, its pageantry and spectacle, its industries, its apprentices and its terrifying bouts of the plague – and Amussen is an engaging and authoritative guide. I would like to have learnt more – if more is known – about the practicalities of making theatre at the Globe, particularly on the size of Shakespeare’s companies (from my own experience I speculate he may have had casts as large as fifteen), and the use of ‘boys’ to play the female roles. How old might they have been when playing Rosalind, Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra? Were they apprenticed as young as the six-year old Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale and did they then grow up through those great female roles to play the old women and the old men and even become shareholders in the company alongside Shakespeare, Burbage and others? Here, perhaps, the historian’s sources dry up.

As a guide to the context for Shakespeare’s development into the greatest writer of his age I recommend this book without qualification; it is simply a very good read. For a more complete debunking of the ‘authorship question’ I recommend instead the chapter entitled ‘The Man from Stratford’ in Jonathan Bates’ Mad about Shakespeare, a book I reviewed on this site some months ago. It is erudite but also gloriously funny; and if you cannot laugh at the absurdities of the conspiracy theorists you can only rage at their attempts – and they include distinguished members of our theatrical profession – to deny William Shakespeare the credit for work that has shaped our culture and remained unparalleled across the world.

Andrew Hilton founded Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory in 1999 and led it until 2017.