In Michael Crichton’s ’90s whodunit, Rising Sun, a computer technician explains to the detective how she is able to discern where a video has been altered so that a third figure, the true murderer, has been successfully removed. Shadows on remaining objects can reveal a missing figure, but by 1992 (according to the novel), technology allowed for shadows to be created as well as removed fairly easily and quickly. Where the process was tedious, taking real time, was scanning for reflections of a missing figure on surfaces like glass, mirrors, computer screens, chrome, etc. Removing or creating these would have taken hours (pure fiction, I’m told.)
There can no longer be any logical reason to doubt what the forest of Elizabethan literary “shadows” all report to those willing to pay attention to both histories, literary and mainstream, and to the works themselves, both plays and books. There was a figure of great importance operating backstage during the early part of the creation of the British Fourth Estate (Stage and Press) whose presence has been (almost) totally erased from history. If, as the most observant of commentators all assert, most (all?) works of the time were in some way a reflection on current events, then ipso facto it must be true of Shakespeare’s works as well.
We authorship scholars are like Crichton’s computer geek, sitting in the dark, locked for hours to a computer, seeking a single flash of light where we’re told there can be none. As we dig through the literature of the period with its bizarre spelling and unfamiliar syntax, we are like the anthropologists who spend thousands of hours sifting through thousands of pounds of rubble on an African cliff-side, seeking bits of bone no bigger than the end of a thumb, in hopes it will fit the skeleton they’re piecing together of a 20,000 year old aboriginal.
So we sift through the texts of the period, and at second hand, through modern critical texts seeking evidence of bits we have no access to, to piece together the skeletal biography of a great artist. The bits of bone we seek are often no more than a single word, one that bears unusual significance. One of those words is shadow.
Shadow vs substance
Elizabethan s used the word shadow metaphorically for more things than we use it now. Along with those of today, they used it as a representation of something real. Paintings were referred to as shadows. So were ghosts. So too were the characters in a play, persons that vanish after the actors take their bows. This is what Puck means in his epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he says “If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended, . . .” And surely he means the play’s director when he calls Oberon “King of Shadows.” The word was also used to mean the plays themselves, as Theseus shows when he responds to Hippolyta’s description of the play of Pyramus as “the silliest stuff that ever I heard,”with, “The best are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.”
In discussing why the Queen’s Men titled their published plays as they did, scholars McMillin and Maclean point to the opening scene of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, Scene 1:
POETRY: Truth well met.
TRUTH: Thanks, Poetry; what makes thou upon a stage?
POETRY: Shadows.
TRUTH: Then will I add bodies to the shadows.
Therefore depart and give Truth leave
To show her pageant.POETRY: Why, will Truth be a Player?
TRUTH: No, but Tragedia likes for to present
A tragedy in England done but late,
That will revive the hearts of drooping minds.
(Here, I believe, we have the voice of Oxford circa the early 1580s.)
Surely this is the same meaning that Thomas Vavasor, Ann Vavasor’s uncle, had in mind in the note he sent Oxford in 1582, challenging him to a duel:
If thy body had been as deformed as thy mind is dishonorable, my house had been yet unspotted and thyself remained with thy cowardice unknown. I speak this [because] I fear thou are so much wedded to that shadow of thine that nothing can have force to awake thy base and sleepy spirits. Is not the revenge already taken of thy vileness sufficient but wilt thou yet use unworthy instruments to provoke my unwitting mind? Or dost thou fear [for] thyself and therefore hast sent thy forlorn kindred whom as thou hast left nothing to inherit so thou dost thrust them violently into thy shameful quarrels? If it be so (as I too much [suspect]) then stay at home thyself and send my abusers. But if there be yet left any spark of honor in thee or jot of regard [for] thy decayed reputation, use not thy birth for an excuse, for I am a gentleman, but meet me thyself alone and thy lackey to hold thy horse. For the weapons, I leave them to thy choice, [since] I challenge, and the place to be appointed by us both at our meeting, which I think may conveniently at Newington or else where thyself shall send me word by this bearer, by whom I expect an answer. (Nelson 295-6)
Nelson takes the phrase “that shadow of thine” to mean a relative or “parasite” of Oxford’s. This is possible (the OED allows it), but it’s not one of the major uses at that time nor do we (or obviously Nelson, or he would have been delighted to give him an identity) know of any such individual that Oxford may have been attached to during his banishment. He may not have been quite as reduced as Burghley portrayed him, but it’s unlikely he was in any condition to support some unidentified parasite. (For more on the date of this note and what Vavasor may have meant by “unworthy instruments,” check Enter Romeo.)
The Devil may be in the details, but not in all, and not always at the same level of impact. Most details are meaningful only when added to an already strong structure of fact or likelihood, without which they’re basically worthless, keys without doors. But where there’s already a strong structure in place, a tiny detail can be the key that opens the truth. It can also be a nail in the coffin of falsehood. Such nails in the coffin of William as author include the six signatures (surely Hemmings would signed these himself, had it not been illegal to do so), Jonson’s Sogliardo, and the souless nature of the Droeshout and the Bust. Keys to Oxford’s true connection to the London Stage include the three boar’s heads on the Burbage family crest.
Yet of all of these details, these bits of bone, these flashes of reflection that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were unable or unwilling to erase, this 100 percent real note from the uncle of Oxford’s lover with its crucial word shadow and reference to Oxford’s “unworthy instruments” may be the most important of all, for it not only connects Oxford to the London Stage (no one, not even Nelson, denies he was a patron), but to his use of it as an “instrument” for his own personal ends. And if it doesn’t actually put the pen in Oxford’s hand, then whose hand was it in?
One of the problems in sorting this out has that it has not been apparent until recently that not all the shadows were cast by one figure. Besides the one we call Shakespeare there are at least two others, and as time will no doubt reveal, a number of lesser figures as well. Although the hiding of the central figures did not last long, writers who felt free to use their names began to arrive only a decade or so after the first period of publication began. What needs to be recognized also is that the hiding of names continued through the Jacobean, the Carolinian periods, and after the War (when publication and production of works of the imagination came to a halt), through the reigns of Charles II, on through those of Anne and George, and indeed, all throughout the Victorian era. And indeed, how do we know that it’s not still being applied today?
So we have to sort the shadows and group them by voice, obsession, style, etc., until we can be fairly sure which shadows belong to which figure, and how many primary figures were involved. This is anything but simple since part of their fun came from creating believably different personas, and part of it came from imitating each other. going to be decided overnight, once qualified persons set themselves to the task and agree at least to some degree, what we are all looking for.
(By we I mean not only authorship scholars but that handful of academics who, having wandered off the preserve, are dealing as we are with these issues at a fairly deep level. Though their thinking continues to be skewed by the Stratford anomaly, they are corroborating sections of the picture that don’t have any close relationship to that story. (Penny McCarthy, John Vickers, TW Baldwin).
He does emerge as a real figure at crucial points along the way, so we know who he was, but the lack of facts about him, plus the immensely ironic fact that, due largely to the enmity instilled in historians by the manipulation of the record left to history by his in-laws, his figure is shrouded in shame. We can corroborate his identity by the fact, as stated by a pre-Oxfordian scholar, that “An unlifted shadow somehow lies across his memory” (Grosart 3.11/359). We have a lot of shadows without a figure, and a figure who’s an important fac
