Where I agree or differ

Not long after getting involved in the Authorship Question (1986) I realized that questions of authorship went beyond just “who wrote Shakespeare?”  There were too many authors who, like William of Stratford, had biographies that were too full of holes to hold real water.  There were also Court writers other than Oxford who had reputations in their own time unbacked by any evidence today.  This was simply too tempting a mystery to resist, so in I plunged.  Now, over two decades later, I have a scenario that works for me.  Whether or not it works for others remains to be seen.

Not everything in this scenario is new with me, of course, and I’ll do my best to acknowledge what is not, but there is much that is new and much that no doubt will raise hackles.  Please keep in mind that I don’t by any means make the claim that I am offering the ultimate truth. Considering that the facts that we have to work with are too few to create a coherent story, my goal from the start has been to create a story that puts those facts that we do have, all of them, in place.

Yes, where the record is completely missing I’ve had to create a bits of bridgework out of probabilities taken from history, psychology, and the biographies of other great artists, but I make it as clear as I can that that’s what I’m doing.  Does the story live?  Does it work as a coherent whole from first to last?  That’s been my goal from the beginning and that’s what I’m offering here.

What you’ll read here that’s not new with me:

• William of Stratford sold his name to the true author so that he could hide his identity.
• The Robert Greene canon was written by Shakespeare (the playwright). Several Baconians came up with this long long ago.
• Individual works published as by George Gascoigne, Arthur Brooke, Richard Edwards, Arthur Golding, George Pettie, John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Watson, Thomas Kyd, are Shakespeare’s juvenilia. A number of Oxfordians and Baconians agree with this.
• Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the Shakespeare canon.
• The Robert Greene canon was written by Oxford.  At least one other leading authorship scholar agrees with this.
• Francis Bacon and Mary Sidney Pembroke wrote considerably more than was published under their names. Most orthodox scholars who study one or the other agree with this.
• Francis Bacon wrote a number of important policy papers during his early years that are either anonymous or provisionally attributed to others. Many orthodox Bacon scholars agree with this.
• Not all 16th and early 17th century title pages are 100% factual, particularly those for imaginative or original works.  Although most orthodox scholars would agree with this, strangely they continue to base their conclusions on them anyway.
• It was not William of Stratford but the actor and theater manager Edward Alleyn who was portrayed as Shake-scene in Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte. Two other scholars that I know of agree with this, one a Stratfordian, the other a Marlovian.
• The Dark Lady of the Sonnets was Emilia Bassano Lanier, famous today as the first published English feminist and first woman to publish a book of her own writing under her own name. Several respected orthodox scholars agree with this.
• The Rival Poet of the Sonnets was the Earl of Essex. One other leading Oxfordian scholar agrees with this.

What I propose that (I believe) is new:

Not just William of Stratford, Robert Greene, John Lyly and Thomas Watson (who have been suggested) but also Edmund Spenser, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Kyd, John Fletcher, and John Webster (among others) acted as stand-ins so that important Court writers could get published;

Not just Oxford, but at least two others, Francis Bacon, and Mary Sidney Pembroke, used stand-ins to publish their most important imaginative works.

Francis Bacon was the true author of most of the Spenser canon, the John Lyly plays, and all of the Thomas Nashe canon.

Mary Sidney Pembroke was the true author of the John Webster canon and at least one play attributed to John Fletcher.

The so-called late “romance” plays of Shakespeare are actually the earliest of his plays to make it into the canon, though altered in varying degrees by various Jacobean editors.  The real reason for placing them so late is to preserve the time frame of the Stratford biography.  No other reason holds water.

There was no early comedy period followed by a later tragedy period. Right from the beginning (comedy: The Supposes; tragedy: Jocaste), Shakespeare (Oxford) alternated between comedies and tragedies, often approaching the same topic from opposing points of view.

Although there was a shift into and then away from things like pastorals, euphuism, and sonnet cycles, there was no great stylistic shift on Shakespeare’s part from masculine to feminine endings.  From the start these represent two different moods that he adopted depending on the nature of the particular piece he was writing.

Organizing the Queen’s Men was not the anomaly in Francis Walsingham’s career as Secretary of State as it’s portrayed by his biographers, but a clue to the fact that it was he who was the primary patron of the Court Stage during the period when he dominated the Privy Council (1583-89).  That this is not obvious is not because it didn’t happen, but because he was as secretive about this as he was in everything else, and probably also because all his papers disappeared shortly after his death.

It was Francis Walsingham who brought both Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe into the writing group known as the University Wits.  This was a group of writers and musicians based at Fishers Folly who were dependent on Oxford and/or Walsingham for support during Walsingham’s years as Secretary of State, 1583-89.

It was Oxford who, in the early 1580s, discovered the teenaged Edward Alleyn at Alleyn’s family inn two doors down from Fisher’s Folly, and it was Oxford who began his training as an actor at Burbage’s Theater a short walk up the road at Norton Folgate.  After breaking with Oxford and Burbage in 1587, Alleyn and Marlowe crossed the river to produce Tamburlaine with Henslowe at the Rose.  It was chiefly this act of betrayal that drove Oxford and Bacon to snipe at Marlowe and Alleyn in Greene’s Perimedes and Menaphon, culminating in Oxford’s denunciation of  ”Shake-scene” in Groatsworth. Alleyn’s temerity in revising Oxford’s plays added fuel to the fire of his wrath.

Following Walsingham’s death in 1590, his duties as spy-master were taken over by Robert Cecil, whose first act as Principal Secretary pro tem was the complex sting operation that rid the government of Christopher Marlowe, and a year later, of Marlowe’s patron Lord Strange.

And, more generally, that:

The London commercial theater, England’s greatest contribution to the European Renaissance, was a rebirth of the ancient “pagan” merry-making that the Reformation had driven underground, or rather, into the halls, priories, and chantries that had been emptied by Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries that in the late 1570s, with Oxford’s help, metamorphosed into the theaters of the English Renaissance.

By creating the first successful year-round commercial stages in London, Oxford, his friends, his actors, his patrons and his audiences, were responsible for the first major step towards a modern functional democracy in the West.

Oxford’s tutor and surrogate father, Sir Thomas Smith, was responsible for the wording of that most august and respected cornerstone of the Anglican Religion, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

Providing (some of) the evidence for these claims is what this blog is all about.