Twins theory had been thought about, added to and discussed for ten years by the time of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. There had been no mention of it anywhere else as far as we could see. If it was going to be offered to a wider audience, 2016 looked like as good a time as any. It was thought perhaps a letter to The Times, or similar, might be a suitable place for it.

The Anniversary edition of the Times Literary Supplement on April 22^nd was a special edition, Shakespeare 400 Years On, featuring contributions from eminent writers on the subject. In his piece, In pursuit of Shakespeare, Michael Pennington asked a few questions to which there were unlikely to be satisfactory answers, such as,

Why Shakespeare wrote a series of comedies directly after his son’s death…Or why he mourned the death of his son Hamnet by writing a searing speech of grief for Arthur’s mother in ‘King John’ when the audience knows Arthur isn’t dead at all.

Perhaps we could help. The following week, the TLS very kindly printed our modest proposal on the letters page, that,

Perhaps it was because Hamnet, and his twin sister, Judith, were not his children but were fathered by Hamnet Sadler, the family friend in Stratford whose wife was called Judith, traditionally identified as godparents.

We were most gratified, finally putting the idea on record in such an august publication in front of a worldwide audience of literary cognoscenti. But not everybody was as pleased with it as us. The letter didn’t generate much response on the letters page. There were a few replies in which correspondents took up their own issues generated by what we had said but none engaged with the paternity issue either for or against it.

There was some reaction on Twitter, which was there to be found if one looked for it. It was led by Prof. Stanley Wells, who was then as yet still to be knighted, Honorary President of the Birthplace Trust who tweeted,

One can only hope that the fatuous letter in @TlS suggesting that Hamnet Sadler fathered Shakespeare's twins is intended to be funny.

But, no, it wasn’t.

Prof. Wells was followed in by Paul Edmondson after which a representative of Oxford University observed that there was no evidence, another academic picked up that Judith wouldn’t be in the graveyard as we had said because it had been cleared a number of times since those days – which wasn’t really the point - and the objections reached a high point of incredulity by asking, ‘whatever next, Shakespeare was Venusian?’ The derision was extended to the TLS itself with the publication of the letter cited as symptomatic of the paper being not as good as it used to be and falling behind its rivals.

It never occurred to us to sign up to Twitter, which was probably beneath our dignity, to take up such points because, as they had found, the short form of the medium does not have the capacity to explain why not. Those who had taken the trouble to express their objection to the theory hadn’t given us any hint as to why it wasn’t possible.

We were not Oxfordians, or Mark Rylance, daring to suggest that the Stratford man was not the author of his own plays. We had been great admirers of his work since school and trips from Gloucester to the RSC productions in Stratford. We didn’t regard ourselves as ‘controversialists’ as Prof. Wells advertises himself. We just wondered if an alternative reading of the life had been missed. And it doesn’t rewrite the life very radically in the light of the long-standing suspicion of an unhappy marriage, the long periods of separation and the questions that had always been raised about the ‘second-best bed’ in the will.

We were as much non-plussed as disappointed, not only by the underwhelming reaction, its entirely negative response and summary dismissal but people will believe what they want to believe and we left it at that until finding we had time to set it out as best we can and, like any theory, it is open to amendment, augmentation or evidence to the contrary.

Select Bibliography

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De Grazia, Margreta, Putting Horns on the Bard, How Shakespeare came to be seen as a cuckold  (TLS no. 6264, 21/4/23)

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                                           Ungentle Shakespeare, Scenes from His Life (Arden, 2001)

Edmondson, Paul, and Wells, Stanley, ed., The Shakespeare Circle (Cambridge, 2015)

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