What's in a Name by Susan Dwyer Amussen
Did Shakespeare actually write his plays?
Intellectual skepticism, properly exercised, is a civic virtue; it resists credulity and disciplines belief. Its counterfeit, conspiracism, mimics the posture while evacuating the method, substituting insinuation for inference and suspicion for analysis.
The book What’s in a Name by Susan Dwyer Amussen is an extended act of disentanglement between the two, conducted through one of literary culture’s most durable misapprehensions: the insistence that William Shakespeare of Stratford could not plausibly have authored the works long attributed to him.
The author’s intervention is notable less for what it claims than for how it reframes the question. Authorship, Amussen argues, is not a riddle to be solved by ingenuity but a historical problem to be assessed by evidence and method. That reframing immediately exposes an awkward asymmetry. While doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship circulates energetically among actors, novelists, jurists and assorted public intellectuals, it has failed to gain traction among early modern historians, a profession otherwise characterised by fractious disagreement. Such unanimity, the book implies, demands explanation rather than suspicion.
That explanation turns on the persistence of anachronism. Modern readers, accustomed to conflating genius with elite credentialism, assume that literary distinction must presuppose aristocratic birth, university education, continental travel or professional immersion in law and diplomacy. Early modern England, however, supplies none of the conditions such assumptions require. Grammar schools offered an education of formidable intensity; rhetorical training was systematic and exhaustive; social boundaries, while real, were more permeable than modern nostalgia allows; and the theatrical world of Elizabethan and Jacobean London was an aggressively collaborative, commercial enterprise. Within this ecology, an actor-playwright of Shakespeare’s provenance was not anomalous but entirely legible.
The book is careful to avoid both romanticization and defensiveness. It concedes collaboration, textual instability and the fragmentary nature of the surviving record. What it refuses is the epistemological sleight of hand that animates alternative authorship theories. These theories tend to begin with an unexamined premise—that Shakespeare could not have written the plays—and then proceed to reinterpret all contrary evidence as camouflage. Contemporaneous attributions become smokescreens; administrative records become misdirection; silence becomes proof. The resulting arguments are hermetically sealed, and therefore immune to falsification.
Against this, Amussen advances a historian’s case, cumulative and prosaic, precisely for that reason compelling. Title pages, court payments, property transactions, parish registers, dedications and the testimony of contemporaries situate Shakespeare securely within both the theatrical economy of London and the civic life of Stratford. Plays were attributed to him during his lifetime; no rival claimant emerged; his professional trajectory closely resembles that of his peers. The problem, the book insists, is not evidentiary absence but selective attention.
What unsettles modern readers is not that the record is thin, but that it is insufficiently dramatic. “Because…IF HE IS SHAKESPEARE there must be evidence that are more… THEATRICAL!”
But no. Shakespeare appears financially astute, socially embedded and professionally successful, an investor as much as an artist, a normal shareholder as much as a poet. His inner life remains largely inaccessible, but this opacity is neither unusual nor disqualifying; it is the ordinary condition of early modern biography. To treat the absence of emotional confession as a historical defect is to mistake literary expectation for evidentiary standard.
The book suggests that the authorship controversy functions less as a challenge to historical knowledge than as a symptom of cultural discomfort. Shakespeare’s posthumous inflation into a civilizational emblem has generated expectations that no archival record could satisfy. When the man from Stratford fails to resemble the monument erected in his name, disappointment curdles into disbelief. Amussen’s achievement lies in restoring proportion, demonstrating not merely that Shakespeare could have written the plays, but that, given the weight of contemporaneous evidence, it would be perverse to conclude otherwise.
I approached this book without any particular reverence for William Shakespeare himself.
The attraction lies elsewhere. What drew me was a more general curiosity about historical epistemology: by what methods, and with what evidenti standards, can the identity and work of a sixteenth-century figure be established at all? In a cultural climate increasingly hospitable to conspiratorial modes of thought, where scepticism is too often reduced to reflexive doubt, the book offers something rarer and more valuable: a demonstration of how intellectual skepticism ought to be practised. Whether the subject is Shakespeare or some other contested figure is, in this sense, almost incidental. What matters is the discipline of reasoning on display: the distinction between questioning and contrarianism, between inference and insinuation, between methodological rigour and the mere performance of disbelief. Read in this light, the book functions less as a defence of a playwright than as a case study in how serious analysis should proceed when certainty is impossible, but evidence is not.
