Click for current blog: QUESTION: Royal changeling, yes or no?
In Act IV Scene 3, when pressed by the King to tell where he’s left the body of Polonius, Hamlet responds with seemingly pointless wordplay:
The King deplores Hamlet’s criminal lunacy, but is Hamlet really nuts? Or is he only faking? His responses may be inappropriate, but maybe they have a meaning that he’s hoping the audience sees, even if the King can’t. By worms he means the maggots who are “e’en at” Polonius, but why “politic”? Why “convocation”?
Most critics accept that Polonius was based on England’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, who was known to boast that he was born in 1521, the year the convocation of clerics and politicians known as the Diet of Worms collected in the little German town of the same name, where they proceeded to condemn Martin Luther for heresy, the moment in time often marked as the true beginning of the Reformation.
But why on earth does Shakespeare take the time to have his frantic hero make arcane jokes about the Reformation? Why, as numerous scholars have shown, is the whole play steeped in Reformation language and concerns? Why does Shakespeare make Hamlet’s university Wittenberg, where Luther kick-started the Reformation when he nailed his 95 complaints to the door of the local church?
Although the Reformation began as a religious movement, the establishment of an English government based on Reformation policies was Burghley-Polonius’s lifelong goal. Does the author mean that as Burghley’s body is being dissected by maggots, his life is being dissected by historians and the politicans who will gobble up his wealth and his offices once he’s gone? Or is the play on the word worms simply one of those “quibbles” (puns) for which, as Samuel Johnson noted, Shakespeare was always willing “to stoop from his elevation.” Surely, as is so often true with Shakespeare, the answer is “both.”
Today, Authorship scholars like us are the politic worms who are “e’en at” Polonius-Burghley and all of Shakespeare’s characters, plots, and sources, dissecting the records so we can lay bare the bones of truth about the man who really wrote the Shakespeare canon, and why he and his constitutents thought it so necessary to hide his identity.
What you’ll find here
After 20 years of research into the Authorship Question, I have a scenario that I believe is the truth, or comes close to it. Facts are useless if they don’t tell a story. It’s a complicated story, and would take a book of many volumes to tell in detail. Better to tell it in a series of blogs and essays, with the more detailed closeups in articles you can read or download in pdf format. This way you can follow your own train of thought through links in the text.
BLOG: Click here for current commentary and responses to your questions.
SHAKESPEARE WHO? Essays on the Authorship Question.
OXFORD: Essays on the leading candidate, his life, his colleagues, his career.
SOURCES: Articles that support various points in my scenario, some by other Oxfordian scholars, some by myself, many published first in The Oxfordian; links to online articles; and a bibliography.
QUESTIONS: Ask it here and I’ll answer through the blog. Be yourself or, if you’d rather your colleagues at the university don’t spot your name, make one up, no one will ever know, including me.
The search field replaces the index in a book; type a keyword into the box (i.e., Marlowe, Bacon, Venus and Adonis, etc.) and a list of essays that mention it will appear.
