Greenblatt’s “Will in the World”: not

Beleaguered perhaps by the rising enthusiasm for Oxford as Shakespeare, as our world of Shakespeare enthusiasts entered the 21st century, two academics have once more taken it upon themselves to provide us with William of Stratford scenarios, not so new as slightly refurbished. Curious to see how they deal with the thousand and one still unresolved anomalies that attend “the Shakespeare Problem,” (E.K. Chambers’s term for “problems of chronology”: when were the plays written?, and “problems of authenticity: who wrote them?) I began with the one from 2004, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World.

After introducing us to Shakespeare’s accomplishments, how he

turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history. . . .

Greenblatt asks, “How did Shakespeare become Shakespeare?” Alas, this is not a question he is capable of answering, for all that he has to offer is the same old dodge, tarted up with descriptions of 16th-century Stratford and London, laced with facts and events that have no relevance, or very little, to how the plays got written, and so heavy with the kind of conjecture that must fill in where facts are scarce, it’s hard not to separate the wheat from the chaff, there being so very little wheat.

Those of us who read biographies to find out more about the famous persons who interest us should see immediately that, once again, this is far from what anyone would normally consider the biography of a real human being. Nor can we explain its failure to communicate Shakespeare’s life story as a natural loss of information from a long distant time, for why should we know more about Alexander the Great, who lived 2400 years ago, than we do Shakespeare, a mere 400, and at at time when letter writing was at a peak and the Stage a subject of intense public excitement and fascination? Why should we know so much more about Ben Jonson, a playwright from Shakespeare’s own time, than his far greater contemporary? And why isn’t the first question to be dealt with, now, after 400 years of silence, the reason for this strange and unexplained lack of information?

There’s no biography here, no story, no drama, no pathos, no real narrative, only a few anecdotes, many of them concocted by the Academy or its precursors to explain why a particular play was written, or what connection, if any, might be drawn to the life of someone about whom so very little was ever recorded, none of which shows any resemblance to the life of any real theatrical genius (Oscar Wilde? Leonard Bernstein? George Balanchine? George Gershwin?), that is, the only connection being the name that was purchased by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men because they had to have something to put on the title pages of the plays when they finally began publishing them. As for the fact that the first two times it was used on a published play (after four years of anonymous publishing) it was hyphenated, well, “nothing here folks,” just another example of how nobody involved in creating the London Stage knew what the heck they were doing.

Professor of Humanities at Harvard and editor of the Norton Shakespeare, Greenblatt is considered a founder of the “new Historicism,” one of those bloody neologisms that have wreaked so much damage on the teaching, and study, and love and understanding, of English literature, ever since the universities in their wisdom began replacing reading and discussing the great works with language science (philolology, semiotics).

Whatever “the New Historicism” is supposed to convey it certainly doesn’t include much history. The realities of the period during which the plays were written, far from the ground out of which they grew, provide little more than a shifting and sketchy backdrop to the same old fairy tales: pleasant descriptions of 16th-century Stratford and London; pastel acquatints; bathroom wallpaper. We might be watching one of those old travelogues from the 1930s and’40s with which Turner Classic Movies fills out their programming, “and now we say goodbye to old sixteenth-century London . . . .”

Since history provides no support at all for the Stratford biography, what Greenblatt relies on instead are centuries of academic conjecture: “All biographical studies of Shakespeare necessarily build on the assiduous, sometimes obsessive, archival research and speculation of many generations of scholars and writers.” After 400 years of consistent failure, wouldn’t you think the greatest need might be to go back to the beginning and start over? Not so. It seems “Historicism” means little more than recycling every cockamamie workaround that 400 years of dealing with the Great Anomaly (the lack of any real evidence, not only for Shakespeare, but for the broader phenomenon, the London Stage) has managed to produce, for Greenblatt has organized his attempt at a biography, not so that we can come to know the man who gave us the great plays––clearly that’s impossible, at least for someone associated with a university––but so, as he puts it, that readers can “find their way through the immense forest of critical resources”! Well who but a postdoc gives a hoot about “critical resources”? This is supposed to be a biography!

Says Greenblatt, “the surviving traces of Shakespeare’s life are abundant but thin.” (12). By abundant he means that thanks to centuries of archival digging by scholars like Malone, Halliwell-Philips, Schoenbaum and dozens of others, we know far more than we need to know or care to know about William’s exceedingly humdrum life in Stratford, while by thin he means anything that connects him to London or the Stage. Scholars have filled volumes with the Stratford records; the records that connect him to the Theater can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Says Greenblatt

After . . . sifting through most of the available traces, readers rarely feel closer to understanding how the playwright’s achievements came about. If anything, Shakespeare often seems a drabber, duller person, and the inward springs of his art seem more obscure than ever. Those springs would be difficult enough to glimpse if biographers could draw upon letters and diaries, contemporary memoires and interviews, books with revealing marginalia, notes and first drafts. Nothing of the kind survives. (13)

Survives? What evidence is there that originally there was something worth surviving? What this otherwise unexplainable absence suggests is that in fact there were never any letters, diaries, memoires, etc., that mention William as an actor or a playwright, for had there been, there would simply be NO GOOD REASON why the evidence failed to survive when so much else has survived.

Why on earth would no one have ever paid any attention to William of Stratford had he in fact been the author of these popular plays? Why so much attention to Jonson and nothing to Shakespeare? When does common sense kick in? Is it going to take another 200 years before this anomalous lack of evidence brings those who have the means to publish around to pondering for reasons why Jonson and not Shakespeare?

Greenblatt asks, “Where are [William’s] personal letters? Why have scholars ferreting for centuries failed to find the books he must have owned––or rather, why did he choose not to write his name in these books, as Jonson or Donne or many of his contemporaries did?” How about because William couldn’t write, as evidenced by the six shaky signatures? How about because he couldn’t read? How about because he wasn’t Shakespeare?

The education problem

Says Greenblatt, “The work is so astonishing, so luminous, that it seems to have come from a god and not a mortal, let alone a mortal of provincial origins and modest education.” Modest education? What education? The only evidence that William could write so much as his own name (and even that not well or completely) are the six wobbly signatures on legal documents that are all that 200 years of digging has managed to unearth from the voluminous records that have been the focus of scholarly attention for the past 200 years. The only letter we know of that was ever written to William was never answered (or perhaps, never sent?).

The only possible support for the idea that he had any education at all is because, well, there was a grammar school in Stratford, and of course the great Shakespeare had to be educated, evidence or no evidence. Yes, the author had to be educated, but is the man who could not even spell his own name that author? Nor does “modest” accurately describe the kind of education revealed by everything attributed to Shakespeare, the depth of his knowledge of the Law, medicine, horticulture, astronomy, astrology, the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome, of contemporary France and Italy, much of it foreign even to the most highly-educated of his contemporaries.

We are told what books Shakespeare “must have read.” Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that William had read anything. There are no books listed in his will. This and similar other difficult facts are “explained” by the academics as normal for the period. Many owners of books neglected to list them in their wills. Perhaps. But points like this simply add to an increasingly large set of facts that suggest, if they do not out and out prove, that William was illiterate, such as the fact that his entire family signed legal papers with an x, or that no member of his family had anything to say with regard to his fame as a playwright.

About his career as the author of the most popular plays in London, it seems his family and their neighbors knew nothing, for had they known there would certainly have been a record of it. The notion that his son-in-law Dr. Hall, who remarked in his diary on having treated their neighbor, the playwright Michael Drayton, might have mentioned his playwright father-in-law in notebooks that got burnt with the trash, is typical of how academics deal with the fact that Hall, who did mention his father-in-law elsewhere, never mentions his fantastic career. The three passing references to William’s presence in London that are all the record provides as evidence of a London career (nonpayment of taxes in 1595 and ’96, and a sojourn of indeterminate length in 1604 with a family of haberdashers) that these are sufficient to support his theatrical fame would, for anyone but an Oxbridge historicist, be far from sufficient. Nor is there any mention of valuable theater shares in his will.

Greenblatt’s version: nothing new

For those who haven’t read one of the orthodox Shakespeare biographies, Greenblatt faithfully follows his predecessors. Bored with family life in provincial Stratford (parents, siblings, wife and three children), Will takes off for London. Maybe hooking up with one of the London touring companies that pass through from time to time, the professional actors it seems do not hesitate to share with him the secrets of their trade, teaching him to sing, dance, fence, play an instrument, speak with a London accent, and memorize their repertory.

Or, another theory, maybe it wasn’t only boredom but trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy, that sends the youthful genius off to London, probably not for poaching rabbits as an earlier invention had it, maybe something having to do with religion, which, as Greenblatt mentions in passing, was something of a problem back then. This version has William, if not holding horses, then beginning by revising plays by an assortment of earlier (nameless) writers.

The University Wits

When it comes to the University Wits, Greenblatt willingly repeats a number of ancient falsehoods, among them that George Peele was a “reveler” who “died of the Pox,” something Peele’s biographer has proven to be a bad rap foisted on the early playwright after his death. Playing fast and loose with a subject that nobody really knows anything about, Greenblatt claims the Wits were “snobbish” towards the self-educated William, who prudently held himself aloof when he “saw that they drank for days and nights at a time and then, still half drunk, threw something together for the printer or the players.” He misses the joke in “Harvey’s” Second Letter, swallowing whole the tongue-in-cheek claim that their leading playwright, Robert Greene, died of an overdose of “pickled herring.” Is he unaware, or is he simply not interested in the fact that Pickle Herring was the name of a famous clown character, something like the Comedia’s Scaramouche? Was Greene’s death a joke? And who was Robert Greene anyway? Questions like these are to be avoided. Radioactive, they threaten the holy of holies, the Stratford biography.

Yet Greenblatt does see, as so many of his colleagues do not, how all (but one) of the Wits “quickly followed [Greene] to the grave”––even as he fails to acknowledge any connection between their disappearance in the early 1590s and the concurrent series of brutal attacks on Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, by the Privy Council under the newly-appointed Secretary of State, Robert Cecil. Whenever any real drama threatens the peaceful tenor of his narrative, he quickly cools it with placid adjectives. According to Greenblatt, for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, threatened by the loss of their means of livelihood in 1596, body blows like the loss of their theaters and the deaths of their patron and manager were nothing more than “disconcerting.”

William’s life in Shakespeare’s plays

Greenblatt’s attempts to locate events in William’s life in the plots of the plays are noteworthy for their utter irrelevance. His notion that William’s shotgun wedding was the source for Romeo and Juliet’s romance is little short of pathetic. His claim that the unhappy marriages in Shakespeare derive from William’s own marriage because they have “an odd, insistent ring of truth,” could be said of almost anyone. He sees Prospero’s concern for Miranda’s virtue an extension of William’s concern for his own daughters, though it’s questionable how well he could possibly have known them, having, according to Greenblatt, spent their growing and marrying years in far off London. As for William’s anger towards his son-in-law because his will shows a series of interlineations that cut him off, that hardly comports with Prospero’s intention to see Miranda happily married to the noble Ferdinand. Nor, for obvious reasons, does he extend this imagined connection with his daughters to the venomous daughters of King Lear.

Other views are equally conflicted. Marlowe was a brilliant dramatist, the inventor of blank verse and a threat to the Crown at the same time that he was a spy for the Crown, a counterfeiter, and a violent brawler. Similarly Shakespeare, Jonson’s “soul of the age, the delight, the wonder of our Stage,” was a play-patcher who cribbed his ideas from lesser writers and worked in partnership with sundry co-authors while showing “little or no interest” in the fate of his published works.

There are a fair number of out and out untruths. It seems that Stratford’s Forest of Arden, backdrop for so many scenes in Shakespeare, was in fact little more than a few patches of woods; having long since been encroached upon by the growth of small farms, so that all that remained of it by William’s time was the name. Nor was tanning John Shakspere’s trade, as Greenblatt states, because while tanning hides was tangential to wool dealing, it was a totally separate industry.

However limited by his precursors, Greenblatt is not entirely without logic when it comes to the plays themselves. He sees that Shakespeare had no reverence for the Church as an institution and that his “powerful prelates” are uniformly “disagreeable.” Suggesting that Shakespeare could not allow Falstaff to have a scene or two in Henry V because that play had to remain true to its purpose to rouse patriotic sentiment, is probably at least partly why the popular character was killed off in the second act. (Another might be because Will Kemp, doubtless the comedian who made Falstaff a household word, had left the Company by the time Henry V took its final form, and no one up to the part had yet been found to take his place.) He also grasps the purpose of the first seventeen sonnets and is aware that sonneteering was a “game of courtiers,” though he doesn’t try to explain how the humble Will managed to play the sophisticated game with such subtlety and skill.

How long, O Lord, how long?

When will someone of Greenblatt’s experience, intelligence and academic standing have the courage to admit the impossibility of proving that William of Stratford could possibly have written the Shakespeare canon? When will the Academy turn its attention to what should have been the central question from the start: What happened to the records that could tell us who did write it? There’s the story, folks. There’s the missing narrative, the drama, the history, the pathos. There’s where the truth lies, and where we’ll find it, and so much else, when we begin to look for it in the right places.

Oxford’s “monstrous adversary”

While it may be understandable why the Academy would cling to the Stratford biography as yet another manifestation of the human tendency to prefer the tried and untrue to anything too radical, there is a peculiar intensity to its hatred for Oxford that provokes curiosity. Why would academics like Lawrence Stone choose him as its poster boy for what he calls “ an antipathetic group of superfluous parasites”? Why would Alan Nelson choose to believe convicted traitors like Henry Howard and Charles Arundel over one of the Queen’s favorites? It seems there’s more to this than meets the eye, nor are we going to understand what Oxford has been up against, both during his lifetime and ever since, until we know what it is.

As described in the previous blog, at the launch of the winter holiday season of 1580-’81, Oxford, then at his peak of his popularity at Court, went down on his knee before her Majesty and an assortment of the nation’s top peers and officials to ask forgiveness for having illegally attended Catholic Mass with His cousin Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundel. The Queen, taken by surprise in holiday mood, had all three detained while she went on with her big annual party. Letting Oxford go free the following day, she had Howard and Arundel put under arrest with Christopher Hatton, where Howard remained for four months, Arundel then removed to the Tower where he remained a good deal longer.

We know this from letters written home by the French and Spanish ambassadors, from the questions Oxford gave rackmaster Norton so he could interrogate them and from their own statements in defense. The French ambassador waited several weeks before informing his king, doubtless until he could be certain about what was going to happen to himself since he had been implicated along with Howard and Arundel.

Dismissed as “libels” from the start, the statements that these two (and a third conspirator, Francis Southwell) produced in their own defense consisted of nothing but an attack on Oxford’s character. Clearly their strategy was not so much to prove their innocence, something it’s clear they could not do, as to portray him as a fiend whose sole purpose in life was to do as much damage as he could to his dear friends, those whose only purpose in life was to honor and serve her gracious Majesty, yadda, yadda, yadda. According to history, no one at the time believed what they said since Oxford continued to live in freedom while they remained under constraint, nor is there any indication that any of their assertions were ever verified by the courtiers they named as witnesses to his wickedness. Why then has the Academy chosen to believe them and not Oxford?

If we choose to believe the record, it’s obvious that Howard was guilty as charged, since Walsingham, who devoted the following three years to tracking down evidence with which to indict him, had him and another conspirator, Thomas Throgmorton, arrested in late 1584 for their part in what would come to be called “the great treason.” Also according to history, as soon as he heard that Howard and Throgmorton had been arrested, Arundel demonstrated his innocence by immediately departing for the Continent where it’s believed he authored that scathing piece of sedition, Leicester’s Commonwealth.

How is it then that at the turn of the present century English Prof. Alan Nelson had no trouble finding a university publisher for his so-called “biography” in which every incident in Oxford’s life is framed in the light of these libels? Titled Monstrous Adversary, a phrase he took from one of Arundel’s thrusts, Nelson, it seems, is so enamored of these accusations that it hardly matters that it came via two of the worst individuals in Elizabethan history, both arrested and imprisoned, Howard with Throgmorton, who was later tried and executed for treason, while Arundel’s guilt was demonstrated by the rapidity with which he hightailed it to the Continent following news of Howard’s arrest. (Where Wikipedia’s biographer of Arundel got the notion that he and Howard were “eventually cleared” is a mystery; the history of the incident is clear.)

The “greatest wastrel of them all”

The only possible explanation is that Nelson’s way had been prepared well in advance by centuries of damning references by historians, journalists, novelists, publishers and reviewers. Forty years earlier, in The Crisis of the Aristocracy, historian Lawrence Stone labeled the Earl of Oxford and the rest of Burghley’s wards as an “antipathetic group of superfluous parasites” with Oxford as “the greatest wastrel of them all” (6, 172). Nor was this anywhere close to the beginning of this onslaught, for by the time Stone got hold of it, Oxford’s name had long been disdained by historians whose information came to them through the Cecils, whether through their control of the State papers or their vast collections at Hatfield House (notably by Dugdale in his Baronage of England, 1675, repeated by Sidney Lee in his DNB biography of Oxford c.1890).

The sorry fact is that every English historian, biographer, journalist or novelist who ever had cause to mention Oxford’s name in passing has felt it compulsory to introduce it with a pejorative, such as “the notorious Earl of Oxford,” as he was called by John Lyly’s biographer Warwick Bond. “The profligate Earl of Oxford,” “the obnoxious Earl of Oxford . . . the violent . . . dissolute . . . feckless . . . atheistic . . . arrogant . . . supercilious . . . spoiled . . . pathologically selfish . . . ill-tempered . . . disagreeable Earl of Oxford,” to list but a few. To the early Stage historian C.W. Wallace he was a “swaggerer, roisterer, brawler.” To Burghley’s biographer Conyers Read he was “a cad . . . a renegade . . . an unwhipped cub.” To literary historian A.L. Rowse he was “the insufferable, light-headed Earl of Oxford.” To Nelson he was, and doubtless still is: “notorious . . . insolent . . . sinister . . . a mongrel” (this last because his mother’s family, the Goldings, were only gentry!).

Oxford got off to a bad start with historians during his roaring twenties. Having left a record of feuds with his fellow courtiers (albeit no murders), later, when he was creating the two City stages and busy writing plays to keep the actors busy, because he kept a low profile, there’s nothing to offset the record of his youthful pecadillos. Filling the gap left by this absence of information, we have only his in-laws whose hands-on control of the record for some 50 years means that only the letters and other documents that reflect well on themselves (and badly on those that displeased them) survive, giving historians no choice if: 1) they were to do research at Hatfield House; and 2) if they were to attract the attention of an Establishment publisher.

Yet much of the problem remains Oxford’s own fault, for if in fact it was he who lampooned Leicester as Robert Shallow and Philip Sidney as Master Slender in Merry Wives, Hatton as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, William Brooke Lord Cobham as Oldcastle/Falstaff, not forgetting William Cecil as Polonius or Robert Cecil as Richard III, this would certainly be cause enough for these men and their families to hate him, and for both his friends and his enemies to approve the need for secrecy when it came to identifying the author of the plays that, by the 1590s, had become so popular that by then all efforts to stop them were doomed to failure.

If Oxford was Shakespeare then he was a genius, and as the biographies of geniuses invariably attest, life with such a one is never easy. We must have compassion for Burghley when he groans to his diary: “no one can envy me this match!”

Howard’s Revenge

None of this, however, has done Oxford the kind of posthumous damage that’s attributable to the Howard-Arundel libels, the long, slow-acting revenge that lay more or less dormant for centuries in the disorganized CSP, the Calendar of State Papers. until Looney’s book sent the Stratford defenders in search of something with which to ward off this new and most dngerous threat to the sacred biography. There, just waiting to explode, they found the libels. Thence cometh the storm of pejoratives, overkill for a reckless aristocrat, but well deserved for a “monstrous adversary, who would as soon drink my blood rather than wine” as Arundel put it, with the kind of rhetorical flourish that so delights a middle class historian with a bloody toff in his sights (Nelson 214).

These libels, available on Nelson’s site in the original spelling and on Nina Green’s Oxford-Shakespeare.com in modern spelling, might seem pretty tame to us today. Bored, restless, angry at the Queen for trusting Hatton with duties for which he felt he was more qualified, drinking more than he ought, Oxford may have exaggerated the glories of Italy and lied about what he had really been up to on his trip to the Continent in 1574. He probably bad-mouthed the Earl of Leicester, whom he had good reason to hate, and may well have made some outrageous comments about some aspects of the Bible, but that he would share with Howard and Arundel plans to murder almost every leading figure at Court is absurd. Obviously none were murdered, or even attacked, nor, so far as we know, did any one of them confirm any one of Howard’s accusations, himself a figure of dubious reputation, already under suspicion of plotting against the state and blamed by many for involving his brother in the plot to marry him to the Queen of Scots, the plot that ended his life.

However these charges were perceived at the time, none would strike anyone today as anything close to the venality of Howard and Arundel’s complicity with England’s enemies. But there is one charge that, while not taken any more seriously at that time than any of the others, would swell in years until it may be what has cost Oxford his posthumous reputation, the real reason for all those otherwise groundless pejoratives. This was the charge that he “polluted” his young pages.

A certain hysterical tone

In researching the history of the Early Modern Stage, there was something about the tone of some of the “Documents of Criticism” in Volume IV of Chambers’s Elizabethan Stage that a strangely familiar ring. At some point it came to me: the tone with which the 16th-century preachers thundered against theaters and plays had the same shrill tone we hear when today’s evangelicals, inheritors of the Devil and his lust for sinners, rant against gays, legal abortion, and Planned Parenthood, all connected in some way with that great bogey of the evangelical reformers, sex.

It seems that 19th-century academics, infected by the homophobia to which the entire English establishment had succumbed by then, caused them to fasten on Howard’s charge with the same sick excitement that the idea of sex between men was arousing in the English at large. When Delia Bacon’s theories on the Shakespeare authorship question named Oxford as one of the group led by Francis Bacon that (she theorized) had co-authored the plays, anyone pursuing what was known about Oxford could easily have found the Howard-Arundel libels in the State papers.

With the same hysterical enthusiasm that had women turning out by the thousands to stone the victims of their mania (Louis Crompton, Byron and Queer Love), Howard’s accusation, however unproven and ignored by his contemporaries, was too compelling to treat objectively. Thus, although Stone and his predecessors would appear to base their hatred of Oxford on his treatment of his in-laws and the reckless sale of his inheritance, the tone of their pejoratives can only be explained by these libels, in particular the charge that at that time had the entire 19th-century British establishment in a state of frenzy, the one that allowed them to label him with the uber-pejorative homosexual, for nothing else in the record could possibly justify the intensity of this 19th-century hatred for a long-dead nobleman.

The very term homosexual derives from this period, when the sexual inquisition sought to justify its methods by lending them a scientific tone. The term used in Oxford’s day and for centuries after, was sodomite, the basis for the uniquely English curse “sod off!” meaning “fuck off!” or the term “poor sod” for someone in trouble.

Seeking what could possibly connect the homophobia of the 19th century to the hysterical rants by 16th-century evangelical bishops against the London Stage, one factor was evident, both derived from an irrational fear of sex. It was not until other aspects of the latter half of the sixteenth century revealed a connection that the reason for this sex-revulsion appeared. This was the same general period when: 1) puritanism took hold as the ruling policy of the English Reformation, growing and spreading until it culminated in the civil war of the 17th century with its 20 years of puritan control of society, and 2) the syphilis epidemic.

Calvin, syphilis, and original sin

Early in the 16th century, when Luther’s Reformation lashed out at the corruption of the Church and the nations of northern Europe moved to take control of their lands and wealth away from Rome, these grim political and economic issues came with a great nostalgia for what many imagined was the purity and simplicity of the early Christian Church. When the protestants who fled under Mary returned under Elizabeth, they formed a united front in Parliament and on the Privy Council (John Neale, Elizabeth and her Parliaments, Chapters I and II) that determined so much about the nature of the English protestant church from then on. Mary’s Catholic bishops along with the more measured tenets of the Lutherans back from Frankfurt were overwhelmed by the numbers and wealth of those returning from Strasbourg and Geneva where they had absorbed John Calvin’s beliefs and policies. So harsh, so frightening, so restrictive were these that it must beg the question how they were able to attract so many followers.

As explained in 1989 by the sociologist Stanislav Andreski, professor of comparative sociology at the Polish University in London, the answer lies in the fear of syphilis which, as the English were all too aware by the time of the exiles’ return, was spread through sexual intercourse. Having seen, or experienced, the suffering it caused, not only to the victim, but also to his wife and their children, and even, as they were surely already aware by then, to their children’s children, at a time when every major phenomenon was seen as an act of God, how else was this blow to the very root stock of the human race to be interpreted by the protestant bishops and their congregations other than as punishment for their sexuality? “In Adam’s fall, we sinnéd all.”

For a frightened and vulnerable population, halfway measures would not do. The pendulum of public concern swung, not to a rational call for caution, but all the way to the opposite extreme: a rigid puritanism that saw all pleasure as the pathway to sex and sex as the pathway to damnation. And as plays were meant to give pleasure, therefore plays must be sinful and the Stage the “sink of all sin.”

Here then was the explanation for the hysterical tone of outraged condemnation in the fulminations of the Elizabethan preachers and City officials as they demanded that the theaters be “plucked down.” While the officials dwelt primarily on the dangers of public infection, the preachers believed that the real problem was the sinful nature of the stories, the “lascivious writhing” of the actors, and the fact that men and women sat next to each other in the audience. For the Elizabethan evangelicals the door to the theater was the entrance to Hell. In November 1577, one Thomas White, from the outdoor pulpit at Paul’s Cathedral, brayed forth a sermon that, when printed, filled 98 pages. “See,” he cried:

the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth them; behold the sumptuous theater houses, a continual monument of London’s prodigality and folly. But I understand that they are now forbidden because of the plague. I like the policy well if it hold . . . for a disease is but . . . patched up that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of plagues is sin . . . and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays! (Chambers 4.197)

The almost 200 pages in small type that Chambers devotes to “Documents of Criticism” attest to the intensity of this campaign to eradicate these doorways to damnation. Clearly, a writer or patron who had a reputation to protect would have wished to keep his connection to the London Stage as private as possible.

There can be no doubt that the English Reformation with its focus on purity of religion and lifestyle and, most of all, its negative attitude towards sex and all sources of pleasure, was turned in this direction by the horrors of this new disease. Possibly brought in from the New World, possibly a more virulent strain of a milder form found in North Africa, wherever it came from it spread terror throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, where its effects are still to be seen in the harsh puritanism of extremist Islamic sects like the Taliban.

While earlier historians rarely acknowledge factors like weather or disease as a root cause of political evolution, the increasing relevance of sociology has shown that epidemics like the plague and influenza have had as much or more to do with social change as anything else, and although a lasting sense of shame seems to have prevented both sociologists and the medical establishment from including syphilis in their studies, there can be no doubt that it’s the major reason for both the rants of the 16th-century bishops and the century-long epidemic of homophobia in the 19th that exiled Lord Byron and destroyed Oscar Wilde.

While historians of the Reformation tend to focus on factors like the malfeasance of Catholic prelates, the corruption of the papacy, and the need of the northern European states to establish their own political authority, these fail to account for the harsh nature of the religion that it spawned, in particular the focus on sex as original sin. Nor do they attempt to explain why this harsh, unforgiving and joyless religion should have taken such a powerful and unrelenting hold on the population at large. That it was the fear of syphilis that fueled the sex-averse nature of the English Reformation explains a great many things about the history of that period and many things also about our own time and the cruel attitudes towards women and homosexuals that continue to infect American culture. (Recall who it was who first stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, driven by what beliefs.)

The role of the scapegoat

Why the fear of sex that still haunts the Church of England should have shifted to gay men towards the end of the 18th century, culminating in the ferocious homophobia of the 19th, must have something to do with the unpleasant tendency of human societies to relieve its anxieties by turning its most vulnerable minority into a scapegoat.

Louis Crompton, one of the first of the late 20th-century scholars to confront the Academy with its own insidious brand of homophobia (the all-male universities throughout the ages were just as inclined to “inversion” as were the priests and monks of the Catholic church), tells the story in his introduction to Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (1985). When the wave of liberalism that swept Europe in the late 18th century decriminalized same-sex relations throughout Europe, rather than move with the liberal tide, England fell victim to one of the cruelest epidemics of mass hysteria ever known in the West.

For roughly 50 years, Englishmen accused of having sex with other men were subjected to the most horrifying mistreatment. Tortured by the guilt engendered by centuries of indoctrination in the extreme belief that they were born sinners, the English reverted to a stone age method of exorcising their communal sense of guilt and shame. Hatred of gay men became a sort of communal mental illness that infected English society from the lowliest reader of tabloids to the highest levels of the political system, as can be seen by how it was used by the Uriah Heeps of English society to destroy men of otherwise impeccable repute, driving those who did not dare to challenge it either to exile or suicide.

Jeremy Bentham, one of the few English writers who dared to write against this epidemic, (though not daring enough to publish it), describes the expression on the face of one such judge: “He had just come from the Circuit. For an offense of the sort in question he had just been consigning two wretches to the gallows. Delight and exultation glistened in his countenance; his looks called for applause and congratulations at the hands of the surrounding audience” (Crompton 21, 30).

Threatened with imprisonment by the slightest accusation, tried by hanging judges, those who escaped the rope or prison were condemned to the pillory. Rendered helpless by this inhuman device, his head held fast in one hole, his hands in others, forced to stand for hours in some public location bib enough to hold the largest possible number of people, police stood by while he and his friend were subjected to the violence of crowds that could number in the tens of thousands (Crompton 21). Screaming abuse, these would pelt them with rotten vegetables, mudballs, dead animals, even bricks and stones, for hours on end. Nor was this for the act itself; since that was difficult to prove (telephoto lenses had yet to be invented) so new laws had to be created so that the police could arrest men socializing at gay clubs just for “attempting to commit sodomy”!

It did not help Oxford’s case that several of these 19th-century gay bars were located on “Vere Street,” although this had nothing to do with the 17th Earl, since it got that name in the 18th century from Sir Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford by the 2nd creation, who at that time owned and developed the area just northwest of the theater district, where Oxford Street and Harley Street are still located.

“Degraded and useless beings”

The barbaric nature of this sexual inquisition is remindful of the stone age ritual whereby primitive communities rid themselves of collective evils by burning, drowning, or stoning to death a “scapegoat,” some vulnerable member of the community whose punishment would expunge the sins of the community at large. In The Golden Bough, anthropologist James Frazer describes such a ceremony as found in an ancient Greek document:

Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the public expense, . . . At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred garments . . . and led through the whole city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might fall on his head. He was then . . . stoned to death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats. (Bough 509).

The word scapegoat shows how at some point back in the Stone Age this ritual got transferred from a human to an animal, goats perhaps because they are apt to be mischievous and self-willed. Draped with objects symbolic of wickedness, the innocent creature would be stoned by the community until it was driven out of the village and into the cruel and inhospitable wilderness.

Yet while laws have kept pace (however slowly) with the drive towards human rights, scapegoating has continued, erupting whenever humanitarian feelings weaken in the face of increasing tensions, the only difference being the chosen outcasts: witches for causing droughts and diseases; Protestants for heresy; Catholics for treason; southern black Americans for being “uppity”; Jews and gypsies for anything and everything. Even today, Sharia Law allows people of the rural Middle East to stone to death a neighbor accused of adultery. That for a good 50 years, the 19th-century English found it useful to relieve public tension by hanging, or allowing mobs to stone to death, one or more helpless men a year, driving others to exile or suicide, is but one instance in the long dark history of these orgies of violence.

So potent was the hate generated by this prejudice, so dangerous did it become even to discuss it, that no one dared to protest for fear they would end up tarred with the same brush. Nineteenth-century journalists used catchphrases that enabled them to refer to homosexuality without naming it. The DNB, launched in 1885, continued to avoid any mention of it in the lives of their subjects; that some famous figure “never married” is as far as it would go. Men became afraid to show each other affection, in public or in private, for fear someone would “get the wrong idea.” Handshakes took the place of hugs, roughhousing, or anything that might cause the prurient, themselves starved for affection, to “get the wrong idea.” Yet even to this day young boys continue to be sent away to be raised by strangers at boarding schools, where, sadly, they are far more vulnerable to sexual abuse than they would normally be at home, cared for by someone who loves them enough to protect them.

Shakespeare and history

Shakespeare, whose name did not reach public awareness until five years before the end of Elizabeth’s forty-year reign, became famous only after 1610 when his company, the King’s Men, was first allowed the use of their great indoor theater in the Blackfriars precinct. With this as their major venue, and King James as their major patron and his Queen as their greatest fan, their reputation, and the reputation of their playwright, soared.

Thirty years later, as Court enthusiasm for plays diminished under Charles I (his Queen, raised in Paris, preferred the masques of Inigo Jones), for Shakespeare had become old-fashioned. Vanishing along with the theaters during the 20-year Puritan Interregnum, he was returned to favor in the 18th century by connoisseurs like Pope, Johnson, Garrick and Malone. Even so, it was not until the turn of the 19th century, when, based on Malone’s edition of 1783-90, actors like Edmund Kean and Sarah Siddons began performing him as originally written, that an educated public took to him with the enthusiasm of the early Stuart period.

With Shakespeare’s genius proclaimed by poets like Coleridge and Swinburne came a resurgence of interest in his identity. Sadly, this interest collided almost immediately with the tidal wave of homophobia then engulfing the English. With Malone’s edition of the Sonnets, finally published in their original order and form with the bowdlerized “she” replaced by the original “he,” a horrified doubt struck the British Establishment: was the great Shakespeare a homosexual?

Suddenly all interest in discovering the truth about the authorship withered away as the Academy bound itself with hoops of steel to the inoffensive Stratford biography; better an illiterate peasant than a filthy sodomite! Nor had attitudes improved by 1920 when Looney introduced Oxford as a potential candidate. Although the last sodomite had been hanged in 1835, sex-hatred was on the rise again. It was still possible to ruin a man’s reputation and career merely by accusing him, or to destroy him physically, as the fate of Alan Turing, the long-unsung hero of World War II, demonstrates, to the eternal shame of the 20th-century British.

Long discredited by historians who confined their researches to the collections at Hatfield House and the Calendar of State Papers, Oxford’s threat to the sacred dating scheme rendered him vulnerable to the Academy’s version of scapegoating. Henry Howard’s long buried bomb lay ticking in the archives. No matter that it was created by a traitor desperate to save himself from the hangman. No matter that it was only an accusation, one that was never proved or verified by any supposed witness. As with the men who had been pilloried a half century earlier, no proof of such a charge was needed. The accusation was enough. No amount of evidence of a great education, of a lawyer’s knowledge of the law, a scientist’s knowledge of science, a doctor’s knowledge of medicine, a Queen’s good opinion, could withstand the shame of the accusation. Doubly shameful! Triply shameful! Here’s where it remains within the Academy to this day!

His “wounded name”

It’s because of Howard’s accusations, not those that accuse Oxford of telling lies, of getting drunk, of “polluting” all the noblewomen in England, of bad-mouthing the Queen, it’s the accusation that he molested his pages that has denied the Earl his true place in history. While Stone in 1964 withholds the true basis for his denunciation, referring to him only as a violent wastrel, Nelson in 2000 lets no opportunity pass to explain every action of Oxford’s life as motivated either by his violent nature, based on his behavior in his early twenties, or the pathological sexuality Nelson conjures up out of every possible situation.

Ignoring Oxford’s stated reason for bringing the teenaged singer, Orazio Cogno, back with him from Italy––because he knew the boy’s superb singing voice would please the Queen––Nelson must needs interpret this in the light of Oxford’s insatiable lust. The presence of a “little tumbling boy” that Burghley claimed was one of only four servants in Oxford’s household in 1583––testimony to his role as master of the Children of the Chapel––is of course just more evidence of his depravity. And so forth and so on throughout the entire hagiography.

Rather than evidence of Oxford’s monstrous wickedness, isn’t this rather evidence of Nelson’s diseased imagination? He appears to be similarly skewed at other points as well, describing Oxford’s mother as “lusty” when there’s no historic justification for the term, or Anne Cecil as “by all accounts a nubile beauty,” a flat out lie, since the only contemporary description of Anne is the tepid “comely,” which, going by the lifelike image on her great tomb, would seem a polite exaggeration.

Oxford’s treatment by the Academy, a product of the Cecils’ rage, the Howard libels, and the homophobia still rampant within the airless think tanks of the Academy and its spinoff, the Birthplace Trust, is its version of a lynch mob thirsting for violence with nouns as bricks and adjectives as rotten vegetables.

Shakespeare and sex

The Shakespeare canon is sexy, there’s no denying it. And while there are undeniable hints of male-male passion in the plays, why should that upset us? Perhaps as with the seacoast of Bohemia, Shakespeare is telling us something, something the world may not want to know but that nevertheless is true. If we have any experience at all with the theatrical community, are we surprised that the man who created the London Stage may have been what today we would label a bi-sexual? A great propounder of the virtues of nature, of the pollination of flowers by bees, the propagation of apples by grafting, the behavior of stallions when a nearby mare is in heat, most of the relationships he so convincingly dramatizes are those that portray how nature has contrived to propagate the human race by the complex, difficult and sometimes hilarious methods required to combine the genes of a Beatrice and a Benedick so the human race can continue.

As for sex with boys, it’s anyone’s guess. Mine, based on some years of studying my fellow humans, is that men do not molest children unless they themselves have been molested in childhood by a male friend or relative, often one they trusted, even loved. The nature of Oxford’s years with the honorable Sir Thomas, the unlikelihood that Smith would have risked allowing him unsupervised time with anyone he didn’t thoroughly trust, or that any of Smith’s servants would have dared to violate this trust, suggests that unlike so many men at that time, Oxford escaped this kind of damage to his emotional integrity, which, to my way of thinking, makes it most unlikely that he would have ever molested a child himself. Like so much else in this story, this too is merely conjecture, yet how are we to know the truth about anyone’s sex life? I believe we see the truth in Julius Caesar, when Brutus asks his page to sing for him, then, when the boy falls asleep, tenderly decides to let him sleep.

John Vyvyan has written eloquently and convincingly that Shakespeare’s true religion was love, a heady mixture of platonism, medieval courtly romance, and Christian agapé. Certainly the sonnets written to and for the Fair Youth are all about love; if sex plays a part in them, it’s not obvious, as it is in those to the Dark Lady.

What then did he want from the youth? Surely it was his love; he says so, over and over. But to the descendants of Calvin and the 20th-century survivors of 19th-century homophobia, love can only mean sex. Well, certainly love is not incompatible with sex, but by no means are they the same thing. As he puts it in Sonnet 129:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Not to trust!––surely that is the point, genuine love is all about trust. As he shows in Winter’s Tale and Othello, if not to the purgatory of Calvinism, it leads to the hell of jealousy, the tragic destruction of trust. Only true love, and the trust that goes with it, can survive the years. He says it one last time in Sonnet 116, clearly written when his time with the Fair Youth had passed: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove”:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If we must conjecture

If, as we believe, the poet was the Earl of Oxford and the youth was the Earl of Southampton, then we know a few things that earlier researchers may not. Thanks to Claes Schaar and his supporters, we know that the majority of the Sonnets were written in the early 1590s. We also know that this was when Oxford was at his lowest point, bankrupt, his wife and oldest friend dead, his followers departed, his in-laws out to deprive him of access to the Stage and Press that he spawned out of his great need to communicate with those fellows of a like mind that he could reach no other way. Living in a hostelry near the river, “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” he wrote the Sonnets because he was desperately in need, not just of patronage, but of love, the genuine kind, the kind that’s not Time’s Fool, that “bears it out, even to the edge of doom.”

Southampton, though still in his teens, was probably living by then in his family manor near Gray’s Inn where he had been enrolled in 1589. More or less on his own for the first time in his life, he too was in need of love. His own father long since dead, his relationship with the mother from whom he’d been separated since he was six years old, fraught with the tension that accompanies the relationship between many a teenaged male and his mother, young “Rosely” had no friend to sustain him, as Oxford had Rutland and Sussex. Burghley, his guardian, was obviously less interested in him than what could get from him, if not entry to the peerage by marrying him to his granddaughter, then a sizable chunk of his inheritance.

Much as Sussex was to Oxford when he was Southampton’s age, the Earl of Oxford was to Southampton, a man of his own class, one who knew from experience what it was like to grow up under Burghley’s thumb, to be young, alone, and inexperienced at a turbulent Court where everyone seemed to want something from him. What’s most likely is that they first met when Burghley was urging the youth to marry Oxford’s daughter, and that Oxford, happy to assist, wrote the rather conventional first seventeen sonnets during the autumn of 1590 for Southampton’s seventeenth birthday. Known ever since as the “marriage sonnets”; the lad was touched, he responded, and they met.

A bond was formed out of their mutual need, a bond that probably lasted at full strength for about three years, at which point Southampton, having reached his majority and grown a beard, found himself capable of making his own way at Court, at which point he turned to the one to whom he would give his allegiance from then on, the Earl of Essex, the Rival Poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets. By that time, Oxford, having married again, living in the kind of comfort he was used to, was too busy providing the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with new plays to spend hours perfecting sonnets to a youth who, now dangerously allied with Essex, seemed to be approaching that “edge of doom.”

As for the nature of the passion expressed in the Sonnets, why should we care? The rabid curiosity that has driven what seems to be a prurient concern over something that shouldn’t be our business, we can now see as a product of the period when a rising interest in Shakespeare’s identity was destroyed by their apparent same-sex context. Poisoned by the sex-hatred inspired centuries earlier by a long-forgotten fear of disease, academics have been driven ever since to stick with the impossible Stratford biography, rendering useless all subsequent attempts to bring order to the plays, the early quartos, their dates of composition, and their connection to the history of the period and the life of their author.

If we must conjecture, what seems most likely is that Southampton, who had spent part of his childhood in his father’s homosexual household, and who in his teens was accustomed to wearing makeup and dressing like a girl, was already well-versed in homosexual sex-play by the time he and Oxford became friends. If read from the viewpoint of an older man whose role, rather than Southampton’s lover, was that of a surrogate father whose job it became to help encourage him as a lover of women, a necessity if he were to marry one and succeed in continuing his line. After all, Oxford’s own sexual needs were being satisfied at that time by the Dark Lady, then by the new wife whose every thought was bent on providing him with an heir. Its unlikely that, himself in his forties, he would have had the testosterone for much more than that.

In any case, what should matter most to the literary scholar is that it was the time spent writing these sonnets, two years or so before the Queen set him up with a wealthy young wife and Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon got him writing again for the Stage, as he wrestled with the fourteen-line format of the sonnet, that gave him the command of the language that today we recognize as Shakespeare. And surely it’s about time that we let him take us to that better place where it’s love that conquers all––not sex, which leads to jealousy and the loss of trust––but the kind described by Plato, the kind that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

The present nauseating addiction to sex, if not to the thing itself, then to imagining it and to the nasty concern with what other people may be doing in private, is one of the long-lasting results of the terror instilled in human hearts back in the 16th century when they first awoke to the horrors of syphilis. The fear of desire this created, one that’s led to a fear of touch, which over time has tended to diminish in some segments of our culture, even in some poor souls to destroy, the natural ability to feel tenderness, or if felt, the ability to express it.

Beginning with Elizabeth’s reign and continuing on through the centuries of Church of England Establishment thinking, how many middle-to-upper class English boys whose souls did not utterly wither for lack of loving nurture, taken from their mothers at birth to be nursed by a professional wet nurse; ignored, beaten, and humiliated by their parents; sent to boarding schools at age six or seven where they were frightened and beaten by teachers, humiliated and sexually abused by older boys (Lawrence Stone, in his 800-page work of sociological fact about the Elizabethan era, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (1977), provides the background for this statement, most notably on pages 100-01, 106-7, 111-12, 132, 167, 171, 496, 493); how many of these boys, desperate for a little happiness, found it in the literatures of the French Pléiade and the ancient Greeks and Romans? How many have been finding it ever since in Shakespeare and the great English poets who have followed in his wake?

Regarded in this light, how is it that Oxford managed to throw off the repressions of “the drab era” to write from a place filled with so much passion and exuberance that we may see him as having rescued happiness itself from the Calvinists whose threats of eternal damnation were being thundered from every pulpit, every published sermon and religious text? It may be that along with the privileges of his social status, Edward de Vere (pron. d’Vayer) was granted another gift. If, as seems most likely, he was raised from birth to four by a company of ex-nuns, that it was their love, the murmured sound of their voices in the kitchen, their shared laughter at the table, the warmth of their shared embrace, that provided a subliminal memory, one that sustained him through all the tempests and soul-destroying politics of the years ahead, the deeply-held knowledge that there actually was such a thing as unconditional love.

Viewed in this light, his works can be seen as a constant effort to find again in the laughter and tears of his audiences, something of that nourishing love. Though the source lay beyond the reach of memory, was it not this that gave him his life’s purpose, to bring joy and spiritual awakening to those he admired, retribution to those he hated, and a living to the actors and musicians he loved for their power to move him emotionally and who loved him for his determination to use everything at his disposal to provide them with a living and a sense of their true importance?

There’s nothing new under the sun

There’s a lot about the situation brewing in Washington D.C. right now that’s similar to the one in which Oxford found himself in 1580. As detailed by biographers Conyers Read (1925) and Robert Hutchinson (2006), Secretary of State Walsingham was in the midst of an ongoing effort to locate the source of rumors that either the French or the Spanish or both were planning an invasion of England. Such an attack by the Catholic mainland had been staved off for decades by the Queen’s marriageability. So long as the great Continental powers had hopes of marrying their way onto the English throne the nation was relatively safe from attack. But by the 1580s, with Elizabeth approaching her fifties, marriage was no longer a viable option.

According to Hutchinson, neither the Queen nor her Lord Treasurer were showing enough of an interest in what Walsingham feared was a looming disaster. Eager for peace, unwilling to face the prospect of planning for an expensive confrontation with Spain, Walsingham was forced to fund out of his own pocket the intelligence gathering he needed since neither Elizabeth nor Burghley were doing anything to help him track the sources of what would come to be known as “the Great Treason.”

Spymasters Walsingham and Comey

Who can deny that this sounds similar to what’s going on right now in Washington, or that efforts by members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to get to the truth about Russia’s efforts to control our 2016 presidential election, locating who on the White House staff were colluding with the Russians, plus FBI Director Comey’s request for more funding to help with the investigation, doesn’t resonate with Walsingham’s efforts to get funding for his investigation? That the Russian tyrant is doing this by hacking into emails and Twitter may differ from building a great Armada of warships, but only in method, for there’s no difference in purpose, the Continental Princes’ to take over Whitehall, Russia’s to take over the White House.

Oxford, having allied himself with his Catholic cousins, Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundell, found himself in a painful quandary. For several years he had been deeply involved with another of Howard’s cousins, one of the Queen’s maids of honor. Weary of Court life and its restrictions, angry at Elizabeth for not giving him anything more important to do than create entertainments, in love with Mistress Vavasor, eager to share his life with her and escape his stifling ties to the Cecils, he was probably considering taking his cousin Henry Howard’s suggestion that the two of them elope to the Continent, something that Howard promised would be supported by Philip II, who was willing to pay handsomely for any English nobles that Howard could enroll in what Oxford was beginning to see was more than just the chatter of a small group of embittered outsiders.

Oxford’s motivations

Despite what historians have to say about this, it’s clear from Shakespeare’s works that his apparent interest in Catholicism had nothing to do with his own religious inclinations. Raised by Sir Thomas Smith, a sternly idealistic Protestant humanist, doubtless he was curious about the culture that his tutor and his guardian were so determined to stamp out, the culture that, throughout the centuries, had produced the most beautiful works of art and literature, works that he admired and that Calvinists like the Cecils seemed to detest. For this reason, plus his urge to succor those who, like himself, were inclined to fall afoul of authority, he had made friends with his declassé Catholic cousins, who, despite their bad reputations, got access through him to the inner circles of the Court community.

At some point it must have become clear to him that what his cousins were proposing smacked of treason. Behind the enrolling of disaffected noblemen like himself lay what he must have begun to grasp was a conspiracy of some dimension, one that threatened the Queen, who, however angry he was, he did not want to see harmed or replaced by some Spanish grandee. Worse, if the truth about the conspiracy came out, he himself would be seen as guilty of treason, which, for that matter, may have been more like when than if. To make things even more troubling, his lover was pregnant. What was he to do?

During the weeks leading up to the winter holiday during which the plays he’d written for the Court would be performed, either he approached Walsingham, or more likely, Walsingham, suspicious of Oxford’s erratic behavior and guessing that something was afoot between him and his Catholic cousins, made him aware of the desperate necessity to discover who in England was acting as an agent for the Spanish. Historians, ignorant of Oxford’s relationship with Smith and of Smith’s relationship with Walsingham, miss the likelihood that Walsingham and Oxford were close. (Howard acknowledged this in his libels.)

Aware of the danger he was in, Oxford decided to cooperate with Walsingham, who, aware of the Queen’s feelings for Oxford, saw this as an opportunity to alert her to the dangers that he, alone, had so far been powerless to awaken. Thus Oxford’s decision to “tell all” and throw himself on her mercy before the entire Court as they gathered in the Presence chamber at the outset of the Christmas holidays seems more like a plan than a moment’s madness. While this public performance may seem bizarre for something that might normally be done in secret, that he chose a moment when the number of courtiers present was swelled for the winter holidays suggests that by so doing there could be no misinterpretations nor rumors, since everyone who might ordinarily be tempted to twist the truth to fit their own perspectives had no one to deceive since all were present to see and hear it for themselves. Flustered, in holiday mode and with no appetite for dealing with such grim matters as she welcomed her constituents to the year’s season of entertainment, the Queen had Oxford, Howard and Arundell confined. Oxford was released the following day, doubtless so he could attend to the Court’s entertainment, but his cousins remained under lock and key for months.

As today we await the outcome of the efforts by the House and Senate Intelligence committees to get the testimony of former FBI Director Comey regarding what he knows about who in the White House was colluding with the Russians, Comey’s decision to say nothing unless he can say it in public can’t help but remind us of Oxford’s (and most likely Walsingham’s) decision that his revelation be made to as large a segment of their community as was possible in those days without cameras, iphones, and television.

In the event, Oxford’s testimony appears to have hurt no one but himself, as it gave rise to the libels penned by Howard and Arundel that have ruined his reputation with historians every since, while at the time their accusations of treason continued to stick to him, inspiring his great studies of such matters in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. It would take Walsingham almost four years before he successfully tracked the conspiracy to a member of the Spanish ambassador’s household, who, threatened with the rack, spilled all he knew about the French and Spanish plans to attack England. But what it did accomplish at the time was that it awakened the Queen to the danger she was in. Finally, in July of 1582, Walsingham began getting the funding he needed, funding that continued to increase through the years leading up to the showdown with the Spanish Armada. By then the nation was sufficiently prepared, and with the help of some violent storms, England was saved, as hopefully will also be the case with our American democracy.

Eliminating trolls: Readers have alerted me to the damage done by anti-Oxfordian trolls which so far seems limited to changing links in my blogs and pages to one of their pages. For this reason I’ve decided to forgo including all but the most necessary links. If you find that a particular link takes you to some bizarre site, please let me know so I can fix it. Also, they’ve preempted the name politicworm for a group they’ve created on Facebook, so please be aware that I have nothing to do with that FB page except to provide the trolls with something to deride.

Passing the hat: Readers who would like to help finance this study can do so by making a gift on Amazon to stephanie@politicworm.com. This allows me to get books that can provide more than one borrowed from a library. For this I am very grateful, as this kind of work cannot be funded in any other way. Even a small amount helps.

Oxford’s authorship in a nutshell

This seems like the right time to restate the argument that lies at the heart of all the material collected here over the past decade and a half. It’s a complex thesis, based on a multitude of lesser arguments. A monolith like the Stratford biography, and all the anomalous notions that have accrued to it over the centuries, will not be replaced with a single article, blog, or book.

Stated simply, the argument, as presented here, holds that the name that adorns the works that laid the foundation for the English we speak today was purchased from its original possessor by the acting company that performed the “Shakespeare” plays. That company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was forced to do this when, after roughly a decade of performance, it became evident that the plays would have to be published, which meant that there had to be a name on the title page where by tradition there could be seen the author’s name. Since the real author could not be named (for a whole host of reasons), for the first four years of publication there was nothing but a blank on the plays published at that time where the author’s name should have been.

It was William of Stratford whose name was chosen to fill this slot primarily because it lent itself to a pun that describes the author as shaking a spear. Thus, although it was a real name, one that a real living and breathing individual could answer to, it was also a signal to the handful of readers who cared about such things that it represented someone who found it necessary to hide his identity. Such tactics were nothing new at that time. One of the major failures of the academics who publish on this issue is their blindness to the constant use of anonymity, pen names, pun names, mythological names and initials that we see on and in all these early works, which said academics report without noting it as rather unique in the history of literature, thus relieving them of any need for an explanation.

The issue of who actually wrote these incredible plays, who was actually meant by the pun name Shake-speare, remained well below the horizon of public awareness until midway through the 19th century. When it finally reached the public through Delia Bacon’s book it launched the present inquiry as one candidate after another was proposed and discussed until 1920 when a British schoolteacher introduced the Earl of Oxford, at which point all oddities and anomalies finally clicked into place. We’re now three years from the centennial of that revelation, and still the argument remains just that, an argument. So why keep trying? Why is this particular argument so important?

Because it matters who wrote the Shakespeare canon! The shibboleth: “we have the plays, what does it matter who wrote them?” is nothing more than a tiresome excuse for ignorance. Does it really matter all that much to most of us whether the earth is round or flat, or that it goes around the sun, rather than the other way round, or that my desk is made, not of wood, but of atoms and electrons, or that the water in my glass is actually a combination of two kinds of gas? If these matter, then surely the source of the language we share with millions of others all over the world matters!

Scorned for centuries as brazen, brash, and bawdy, it was not until a later generation of wits and poets discovered the depths in Shakespeare and the beauties of his language that gradually he’s become revered as one of the greatest psychologists of all time. Even so, the dullness of the philologists who have inherited the plays continues to maintain this ignorance of how he fought with his pen to keep ancient Humanism (Platonism) alive at a time when it was in danger of being destroyed by the ugly visions of hellfire and damnation thundered from the pulpit by Calvinists who, having commandeered the English Reformation, made use of it to spread their hateful doctrine.

If anything matters beyond the getting and spending of our daily dollar, surely it matters who it was that accomplished this amazing feat, plus others for which he’s yet to be credited. For not only did he write these ground-breaking plays, more than any other single being, it was he who created the forum whereby they reached their audience, the rash of purpose-built theaters that housed what we’ll call the London Stage, at the same time leading the handful of writers and printers who launched the commercial periodical press, which we’ll call the British Free Press. Taken together, these two, the infant Stage and the infant Press, constituted the first manifestations of what today we call the Media, the Fourth Estate of Government, the vox populi, the voice of the people. If Shakespeare was not the only harbinger of what we’ve come to call Freedom of Speech, he was certainly one of the most effective.

These plays were not merely entertainments spun to tease a lord or set a lady laughing. Even the comedies, but certainly the dramas and the tragedies, were pleas for human understanding (“O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”) and at a moment in time when they were not merely welcomed but desperately needed. Further, that they have been purposely and determinedly divorced from their true source, not just by the authorities at the time, but by the author himself and his closest supporters, is in itself a tale worth telling. If we’re to fully understand the history of the English-speaking peoples, who they are and what they’ve done with the language he created, it’s essential that we know this story.

Born into chaos

The author, it seems, was born into hiding. His father, scion of one of England’s oldest and most prestigious families, appears to have been the product of an ancient bloodline sliding into the decadence inevitable to such very old families, but from which Oxford was saved perhaps by his mother’s less rarified genes. His great uncle, the 14th Earl, an ignominious wastrel, had spent his heritage on a Disney World version of a feudal palace which collapsed into ruin not long after his death at age twenty-six. The 15th Earl, stripped of several of his ancient prerogatives by the disease-crazed Henry VIII, managed to hang onto the earldom, but shortly before Oxford’s birth, his father, the 16th earl, came perilously close to losing it to the greed of Protector Somerset, uncle of Henry’s son, the Boy King, Edward VI.

Although Earl John and his domain were saved by the palace coup of 1549 during which Somerset was overthrown by his own Privy Council, he and his domain remained vulnerable to whatever determined gang would next take over the Crown. That was John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, but with the death of the poor little King four years later, Northumberland and his followers were themselves overthrown by a nation nostalgic for a time not all that long ago when Church ales and merry-making had not yet become the road to damnation.

The bloodbath, however, was far from over, as Edward’s sister Mary, a determined Catholic, proceeded to marry Philip of Spain, son of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Their interest in the marriage alliance was invested in the hope that they could reestablish Catholicism in what under Edward and Somerset had become the most dangerously heretical nation in Europe.

As the merry-making that followed their marriage fell silent, and the nation prepared for a new round of treason trials, hangings and burnings, Earl John and his supporters did what they could to prepare. The Oxford domain was particularly vulnerable due to its location along the coast that faced those European nations where Protestantism had taken deepest root and was most threatening to the European Catholic hegemony. Earl John himself was suspected of complicity in the first Protestant effort to overturn Mary’s rule, the so-called Dudley conspiracy of 1555.

As Shakespeare demonstrates in more than one of his plays, in nations ruled by the whims of heredity, underage heirs of monarchs, and of great noblemen as well, were particularly vulnerable during moments of national revolution. As the Christmas holidays of 1554 came to a close, and Mary’s henchmen began gearing up for the bloodbath with which she hoped to end the great heresy perpetrated on her people by her brother, the four-year-old heir to the great Oxford domain was removed from the dangers threatening his unstable father. Quietly, without notice or surviving letter, he was placed with the man who would be his tutor and surrogate father for the next eight years of his life.

Thus it was due to the political chaos of the time that Sir Thomas Smith, former Secretary of State under Somerset, and before that Vice-Chamberlain of Cambridge University, was given the humble task of “bringing up” the boy who would give the world the Shakespeare canon. It was this great educator, statesman, polymath and follower of Plato’s philosophy who gave Oxford the education that we see reflected in the works of Shakespeare, an education to which almost no one else in England at that time could have had access. Among the hundreds of books in Smith’s library were the plays of the great Greek and Roman playwrights, Euripides, Sophocles and Plautus, favorites at that time for teaching boys Greek and Latin due to the fact that their plots and characters were better suited to capture the restless attention of teenagers than the proverbs of Erasmus or the letters of Cicero.

The hiding continues

With his removal to London in 1562, the twelve-year-old Oxford found himself a member of a coterie of young translators employed by Secretary of State Sir William Cecil and his friend Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, as they sought to get the major works of Calvinist doctrine translated from Latin and French into English. As for this crew of translator-poets, most of them six to ten years Oxford’s senior, would this budding genius have forced himself to sit by modestly, constrained by the tradition that forbade peers of the realm from competing with ordinary artists, or would he, unable to resist, reveal his talent by tackling the most demanding translation of all, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, famous as ancient Rome’s masterpiece of Latin literature, its first four books published just three years later under the name of his uncle, the translator Arthur Golding? Is it just my wild imagination that hears in Golding’s Metamorphoses the same youthful voice, in a meter and rhyme scheme similar to the ground-breaking poem Romeus and Juliet (attributed to another member of the Cecil House coterie), and published almost as soon as he arrived in London?

By 1573, desperate to escape the Court and those servants who were forever spying on him for his father-in-law, Oxford’s genius for disappearing is rather humorously revealed in Alan Nelson’s account of his preparation for a journey to Ireland (that never took place). Over five pages (100-104) Nelson details efforts by Burghley’s agents to pin him down long enough to get his signature on papers that, doubtless, put Burghley in control of his estates, should he die while overseas.

Let them quibble as they would, by late 1574, Oxford had the Queen’s permission to travel to Italy, and travel he did. While it’s unlikely that he managed to ditch all those who who seemed most likely to report back to Burghley, or that over the summer of 1575 he sailed the Mediterranean totally without companionship, there remains no evidence that he took anyone with him on that supreme adventure. No one, at least, whose name has survived.

He vanishes from the record

With his return to England in April of 1576, followed by the sudden appearance in London of the first two commercially-successful purpose-built theaters in English history, the kind of reporting that tracks him during his early days at Court dries up almost completely. While a poem or two surfaces in anthologies, his own efforts to get himself and other poets published appear to cease. Why? Because he has begun what has become a lifelong concentration on producing plays for the Court, the public theaters, and most significantly, the parliaments that gathered in London every three or four years, and which provided him with his most influential audience, leading men of education and significance from all the shires and towns of England.

Playwriting had several advantages over publishing. First, since only a handful of Londoners could read at that time, plays could reach a far greater audience; second, it satisfied his appetite for dramatic action in ways that poems and tales were lame by comparison; and third, it did not rouse the anxieties of the authorities as did published works since no one outside the Court establishment paid any attention to who was writing the scripts. His coterie knew; the officials knew; but neither the public nor the outside reading world knew, and most of these did not care. So long as he wrote nothing objectionable to the world view purveyed by the religious and political authorities of his time (most notably his in-laws) he was allowed to continue. Even Burghley was doing what he could in 1580 to assist the Earl of Oxford’s acting company in gaining access to the universities (something the universities continued to reject).

Yet sooner or later a break was bound to come between two such differing world views. With the banishment from Court that followed his affair with the Queen’s Maid of Honor in 1581, if it cut him off from Her Majesty’s favor, it also meant he was free to give vent to his own personal concerns in plays for his favorite audience, the “gentlemen of the Inns of Court,” from the eastern half of Westminster. In works that erupted from his frustrations with the Court, his fury at the Queen and his rivals for her favor, and his knowledge of English and Roman history, it was then that he wrote The Spanish Tragedy, plus the earliest (now lost) versions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and The Merchant of Venice, plays that would certainly not have pleased either the Queen or his Calvinist in-laws.

Brought back to Court in 1583, probably by his tutor’s old State Department friend, Sir Francis Walsingham, now Secretary of State, who needed him to help launch the newly formed traveling company, the Queen’s Men, for them Oxford wrote early versions of what would later evolve into plays like Edward III, Henry V, King John, plus some that never made it into the canon, such as Thomas of Woodstock and Edmund Ironside.

The coming of Shakespeare

When his wife died just before the attack of the Armada, Lord Treasurer Burghley, furious with his son-in-law for his perceived mistreatment of Anne, not to mention his mistreatment of Burghley himself as Polonius (and perhaps also Shylock), put a stop to his obnoxious play-making by seeing to it that his credit was destroyed. Forced to sell his home of ten years and disband his staff of secretaries, Oxford spent three years, from 1589 through 1591, in penurious disgrace. During this period, while the Stage too was under attack by his in-laws, he occupied himself with writing sonnets, some to his one remaining patron, the young Earl of Southampton, others to Emilia Bassano (Lanier), mistress of the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, who shortly would reinstate him as the main provider of plays for the newly-created Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

Thus was launched the company that would bring fame to the plays that Oxford, doubtless glad to be back with his favorite team of actors and now, in his forties, at the peak of the matured style that we know from the First Folio, would mostly recreate from plays he’d written originally for the Court and parliamentarians over the past twenty years. Some, chiefly old comedies like As You Like it and Love’s Labor’s Lost, he revised to suit the temper of the times; some, like The Merry Wives of Windsor and Antony and Cleopatra, he wrote in response to current issues.

Because Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon worked hand in glove with his son-in-law, Lord Admiral Charles Howard, both long time patrons of the London Stage, to bring an end to the theatrical chaos created by Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, who, now as Secretary of State was using his power to destroy the London Stage, they formed new companies which, doubtless they promised the Queen, would conform to their new set of rules.

Henceforth there would be two licensed companies: the Lord Admiral’s Men, patronized by Howard, would operate out of the Rose Theater on Bankside; the other, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, out of Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch. Plays that in times past had been shared between the two companies were to be divided, with those that Oxford was interested in revising assigned to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and those that he no longer cared about, or that had become so identified with Edward Alleyn, the leading actor at the Rose, assigned to the Lord Admiral’s company. These they identified by stating on the title page what companies had performed that particular play.

At this point the issue of what author’s name to put on the published plays arose in such a way that it simply could not be dismissed. For the first four years, from 1594 to 1598, the Company simply ignored the problem by leaving blank the space where the author’s name was normally placed. Then, in the fall of 1597, with the opening of the Queen’s ninth parliament, came the inevitable showdown between the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and Robert Cecil, who had eliminated the most popular playwright in London and most recently saw to it that there would be no theaters available to them for the near future. Clearly Cecil was determined to destroy his brother-in-law’s bully pulpit before it could trouble him during his first turn before Parliament as the Queen’s new Secretary of State.

Oxford shakes his spear

Faced with the loss of both their theaters, their father and manager James Burbage having died following the previous holiday season, and their great patron and protector, Lord Hunsdon, having also died recently and suddenly, Oxford unleashed the devastating power of his pen. Revising his earlier and milder version of Richard III, now, with Richard Burbage as the evil King, adopting Cecil’s perpetual black attire, his manner of speaking and his wobbling walk , Burbage and Company trashed their enemy to such an extent that, despite the official heights to which, as first Baron Cranborn, then Earl of Salisbury, he eventually rose, there was from then on no more hated man in all of England.

This showdown, while almost totally erased from history, obviously demanded adjudication by the only one in a position to do it, namely the Queen. Though missing from the record, the results clearly left Oxford and his company untouched (she could not do without her holiday solace), while Cecil, officially as powerful as ever, was forced to live from then on with his unofficial reputation utterly and permanently destroyed, a situation that must have lent a bitter and resentful force to the vicious brutalities with which he would rule England under King James until his death in 1612.

Interest in the authorship of this play, which must have thundered through the pubs and wine shops both in London and in the towns throughout England to which the MPs returned early in 1598, each with a copy of the published play in his pocket, must have been what finally compelled the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to publish a second edition of Richard III, this time with a name on the title page. Thus was the name of the humble wool dealer’s son from the market town two days journey from London to escalate into a permanent and everlasting brand.

Richly recompensed for the use of his name, the wool dealer’s son soon bought himself the biggest house in his hometown; for his respected sire he bought the crest that had once been denied him as “without right,” and ordered an impressive monument to be placed in the local church in which his father’s bust, clutching a sack of wool, dominated a spot high on the wall beside the altar.

Years later, when both William of Stratford and his wife were past questioning, the vicar of Trinity Church, would enjoy emoluments brought him by a team from London whose job it was to replace the image of the mustachioed Shakspere Sr. with a more gentlemanly figure and the woolsack replaced with a quill pen and a pillow. Whatever had once been the message, if any, beneath the bust, was replaced by something in Latin that seemed to suggest that William Shakspere had been something of a modern Nestor, a character from ancient history whose only importance was due to how old he had been when he died. Nothing to do with drama or literature. No mention of Plautus or Euripides.

Meanwhile, the Burbages’ company, protected by the Queen and raised to an even greater level of importance by her successor, who demonstrated his patronage in a way that she never had by allowing them to call themselves The King’s Men, went on to ever greater acclaim and great financial success. Of course by this time the official name of their playwright had become so installed in men’s minds that there could never be any possibility of changing it, even if the Company, or the Court, had wished to do so, which they most certainly did not, for reasons that were not only political, but deeply personal to those involved. Thus was the brand name irrevocably wedded to the canon, and so was also launched the centuries of failed attempts to bring their location in time and their relation to the events reflected in the plays into alignment with the biography of the illiterate original owner of the name, whose birth date, sometime in April of 1564, presented such a problem when it came to dating the plays.

Our evidence

What evidence is there at for this scenario? If there is as yet no “smoking gun,” there is certainly enough to support what we describe here. Without the slightest doubt it’s the Stratford biography alone that is the sole cause of what the uber-academic E.K. Chambers identified in 1925 as the two major aspects of “the Shakespeare Problem”: “Problems of Authenticity”: i.e., who actually wrote the canon; and “Problems of Chronology”: i.e., the issues created by the 15-year displacement forced on scholars by the impossible birth date of William of Stratford.

With the Earl of Oxford as the true author, all of these problems vanish. The plays appear right where they so obviously belong in the timestream of historical events; all the early plays that “foreshadow Shakespeare’s style,” and that academics have been forced to attribute to various nameless or weaker writers, take their proper place as the missing Shakespeare juvenilia; and Shakespeare (the poet) is finally free to jump to the forefront as the original inspiration for writers like Marlowe, Daniel, and Chapman––not, as the Stratford biography demands, the other way round.

A word to the wise: the trolls retreat to Facebook

I appreciate it when defenders of the Stratford faith show an interest in my work, but inevitably it becomes impossible to maintain a cordial discourse where one side knows nothing of the other side of the argument, and clearly has no intention of pursuing it, or if pursued, only to focus on the sort of details that are all that they are capable of seeing from the low levels of understanding where their educational limitations have left them.

Arguments at this level quickly become a waste of time, as I know all too well, having made similar attempts over the years, for instance on HLAS (humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare), the online forum for authorship discussion established many years ago by two Oxfordians, which I left when it descended to the level of a schoolyard brawl. The same was true on SHAKSPER, where, despite the prohibition of any mention of the Earl of Oxford, we were allowed to discuss such questions as whether great literature can ever be produced without an emotional connection to the author’s own life and experience. No amount of quotes from great authors or examples from their biographies were sufficient to sway the left-brainers from the absurd notion that no such personal experience is necessary or that it even matters––a clear case of distorting reality to fit a particular case, since nothing has ever been located that could connect the plots and characters of Shakespeare with the life of William of Stratford.

I created this blog in 2009 because it gave me control over a forum wherein I was free from this kind of frustration, and free I intend to remain. Having recently cleared the decks of a handful of impertinent comments, I see that these rudeniks have retaliated by creating a group on Facebook for which they’ve appropriated the name of my blog, where they are free to amuse each other with the kind of comments that are no longer welcome here, on the real politicworm. Readers who are curious to see what they have to say please keep in mind that while they may have appropriated my brand, I myself have nothing to do with these guys except for the rather pleasant feeling that to cause this kind of a ruckus I must be doing something right!

NB: Please understand that even probing comments will always be welcome if politely presented. Also know that a particular question can often be answered by typing a keyword into the search field in the upper right hand corner of every page. If I, or one of the authorship scholars whose works are posted here, has written on that subject, this will bring a list of posts and pages that deal with that particular issue, and in much greater detail than I go into when replying to a comment.

We need a new paradigm

There are several factors that continue to block our access to the truth about the Shakespeare authorship, and until these have been overcome, or better, simply bypassed, we will continue to be without the kind of access to archives and established publishers that we deserve. What are these factors? First there’s the age of the mystery: 400-plus years is a long time, and, however absurd it may seem to us, the Stratford paradigm is so deeply rooted in the English-speaking mindset that attempts to chop it down leave little more than scratches.

Second: there’s the missing evidence. As all come to realize who research the infancy of the Stage and Press, whenever a particular paper trail reaches the point where it should have something to tell us, it tends to disappear––sometimes permanently, sometimes to reappear once the crucial moment has past. The conclusion is inevitable: someone got to the records before us, someone who didn’t want anything to remain that could connect the rise of the London Stage and the periodical press with the patronage and activities of government officials.

Third: there’s the religious nature of the argument: Shakespeare has become an icon (as Shakespearean Harold Bloom puts it, “the secular Christ”). Icons are sacred and cannot be questioned, no matter how absurdly irrelevant to human nature and common sense. Winston Churchill spoke for many with his response to those who wanted to know his take on the problem of Shakespeare’s identity. Said he, “I don’t like to have my myths tampered with.” And there’s Charles Dickens, who wrote: “The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery. . . . I tremble every day lest something should turn up.”

Finally: there’s the attitude of the universities, who––however grudgingly––acquired their present authority over all things Shakespeare when the first English Lit departments arose from within their departments of Philology at the turn of the 20th century. Having opted to treat him as they would an ancient artefact where its author was impossible to identify, these have continued ever since to refuse to consider any discussion of Shakespeare’s. While not stating openly that authors don’t matter (a stand promoted by Laputians Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Paul de Man and their students, and their students’ students, and their students’ students’ students) the universities and their co-conspirator, the Birthplace Trust, continue to (silently) adhere to the commonplace: “We have the plays; who cares who wrote them.”

We can, of course, continue to confront these and similar hoggish attitudes with reasonable arguments, but since none but a small percentage of born contrarians are likely to pay any more attention to us now than they have already, it might profit us to take a look at how we’ve been approaching the issue.

Rival candidates or Shakespeare’s coterie?

First, not unlike the academics, we tend to see only what we want to see, ignoring everything else. We read a book that awakens us to the Authorship Question by promoting one or another of the Shakespeare candidates––Bacon, Derby, Oxford, Marlowe, Raleigh, Philip Sidney––and from then on our interest settles only on facts that support him (or her: Mary Sidney and the Queen have also been nominated). Here we tend remain, gathering in conferences and online groups, writing articles for newsletters, journals and blogs dedicated to examining our particular candidate while studiously ignoring the others. This is easy due to the fact that along with no evidence for the creation of the London Stage, there is almost no evidence that these candidates had any contact with each other.

Take Oxford, for instance. The only evidence connecting him with another candidate is his spat with Philip Sidney on the royal tennis court, which was followed by some masculine huffing and puffing over a duel that both knew the Queen would never allow. His handful of appearances in the record point only to his activities as a patron of the Stage with only a poem here and there in the early anthologies to indicate his status as a poet. Were it not for the Meres comment in Wit’s Treasury (1598) that he, along with Richard Edwards, was once “best for comedy,” we would have no evidence at all that he had ever been a playwright.

As for the second greatest literary genius of the age, Francis Bacon, not until 1596 when, at age thirty-five, he published the first edition of his Essays, is there anything to show that he was in any way involved with the literary community surrounding him at Gray’s Inn. The only evidence of any connection with Oxford is found in a letter from Oxford to Robert Cecil (Oct 7 1601) in which he refers to his “cousin Bacon,” not as a writer, but as his lawyer. (Meanwhile, Bacon’s undeniable involvement in the Shakespeare phenomenon is evident from the survival of the file known as the Northumberland Manuscript.)

The Earl of Derby’s connection to the theater community is based on his patronage of the second company of boys at the Second Blackfriars Theater, 1599-1601, and that apparently he continued to patronize his brother’s traveling company well into the 17th century. The isolated comment that he was “penning plays” found in a letter from one nonentity to another in 1599 [Chambers 2.127) is hardly sufficient to take him seriously as a Shakespeare candidate, even though he was certainly closely connected to Oxford from 1595 on by virtue of his marriage that year to Oxford’s daughter Elizabeth.

Gabriel Harvey, never a candidate himself, but a writer whose name can be found here and there throughout the period in question, is hard to connect in any real way with any of the candidates that he mentions in the marginalia with which he garnished his books. He does at least have a potential connection to Oxford in that both were tutored by Sir Thomas Smith, a neighbor of the Harvey family in Saffron Walden, where, after Oxford was off to London, Smith took young Gabriel on as his protégé, helping to get him a fellowship at Cambridge. Oxford and Harvey were definitely in each others company on the occasion of Harvey’s grand faux pas, the interminable speeches he wrote to introduce himself to Court society at Audley End in 1578.

As for the University Wits, the ghostly writers whose pamphlets circa late 1580s through early ’90s deserve recognition as harbingers of what was becoming the London periodical press, recognition of them as a group did not come until centuries later with the scholars who studied their works. The only personal connections from their own time are the complimentary mentions of each other in their pamphlets. Later evidence of their activities and whereabouts rarely show them involved in each other’s lives to any notable extent.

Last but hardly least, while Christopher Marlowe is occasionally associated with the Wits, his rise to fame occurred without hints of a personal relationship with any writer other than the scrivener Thomas Kyd, whose own claim to authorship rests on the shaky provenance of a single early play. By the mid-to-late ’90s, a second generation of poets, playwrights, and pamphleteers––Jonson, Marston, Hall, Harrington, Barnes, etc.––would reveal their mutual awareness through the epigrams with which they taunted each other, but since they used phony names it’s impossible to establish their identities with any certainty.

The result of this lack of certainty is that academics, trained to go only where the recorded facts lead, have provided us with a worldview wherein none of these writers have any connection with each other. Whatever form their lives may have taken, as portrayed by their biographies in the DNB or on Wikipedia, it would seem that, apart from suggestions that they were copying each other’s style, they were almost totally unknown to each other in any more intimate way than through their writing.

Well of course they knew each other! Writers write as much for their fellow writers as they do for their community of readers. Hints are rife that particular works were written with friends “figured darkly forth” so that only the author’s coterie will understand who is being praised or ridiculed. Why then are attempts to see “through the glass darkly” to the truth about the authors and their relationships with each other dismissed by the Academy as useless, without value, a waste of time? Is it because that truth might turn out to be something that the Stratford defenders, fearful of the consequences to their own reputations, not only don’t want to know, they don’t want anyone else to know?

Surely, if we are ever to locate the truth about the period in question, so much is missing from the record that it can only be by creating a convincing scenario, one based on human nature and on the nature of other writers, actors, audiences and publishers as demonstrated throughout time. Though Shakespeare himself was hidden, not all of his associates are so impossible to unveil. Sooner or later it will be by discovering and community that will define, by outlines suggested by those who were most involved in creating the London Stage and periodical press, where the Master ends and the others begin.

We can bypass the problems listed above by creating several levels of study. First, a description of the political history of the Elizabethan era and those that preceded and followed accompanied by a timeline of important events. Second, the literary history of the period, with a timeline of important works, plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare, Lyly, Greene, Spenser, Sidney, anonymous and others. Finally, biographical sketches of the candidates, their rivals, patrons, and enemies with descriptions and dates for the major events of their lives. When these layers are aligned with each other in time and place, a believable narrative will simply emerge like an image in the photographer’s developing bath.

The necessary narrative

Until now we’ve focused almost entirely on arguing with the Academy, on pointing out the absurdities in their scenario. Forgetting that the best defense is a good offense, we’ve allowed them to define the grounds for argument. This of course has not sufficed. Because there’s no brilliant rabbit poacher escaped from the clutches of a local knight; no horse-holder cum play-patcher shooting overnight to theatrical stardom at age twenty-nine, inevitably we find ourselves tilting with windmills, and imaginary windmills at that. This exercise in futility has us going in circles, repeating the same arguments over and over. We need to move to an arena of our own choosing, one where logic, not hindsight, prevails.

The greatest weakness of the Stratford paradigm is not its absurdities, but its utter and total lack of a believable narrative. Provide a compelling narrative, one that accounts for the creation of the Stratford fable, one that is close enough to the truth to lead researchers into areas where there might be meaningful evidence, and we will win the day, if not with everyone, then with enough intelligent readers that Authorship Studies will continue as a viable, honorable, and necessary branch of English Literature, one that mends the rift between literature and history, and that eventually will lead to a much needed rebirth of humanism at the university level.

As far back in history as the Greeks and Romans, the Stage has always been a political forum, both for those working for the government, and those seeking to improve it, or to replace it. The Stratford paradigm ignores the political realities of the Elizabethan and Stuart period for the very good reason that it was created to mask what otherwise would have been far too obvious to Shakespeare’s public audience. That public is gone. It’s time to do as I believe the true author did, to reach beyond the defenders of the Stratford biography just as he reached beyond the Court audience that his evasions were intended to protect to the public audience that, ignorant of the political issues that so concerned his enemies, were free to respond to his deeper messages , the humanism that is what has created the great and lasting audience of which we are members.

Yes, it’s true that we have the plays, thanks to the true author’s willingness to sacrifice his identity to the political necessity of separating himself from them. And yes, it’s obviously true that to the academics for whom the Stratford biography has become a religion, it does not matter who actually wrote them. But for those of us today afraid that humanism may be dying, largely due to the refusal by the Academy to allow the human element, the story of how they came to be, it does matter who wrote them. It matters a very great deal. And we should work together to find a way to tell the story as it happened historically, and forget about trying to convince those who, in an earlier time, would have had us burnt at the stake for refusing to believe that it’s the earth that circles the sun, not the other way round.

Why Queen Elizabeth remained a virgin

In studying the Elizabethan period a few things have come clear that were not before, among them the peculiar nature of the Reformation focus on Sin, or to be more precise, on sins related to sex. In fact, in Reformation tracts the word sin alone may be taken as a synonym for sex, for none of the other cardinal sins. Greed, for example, which expanded exponentially at that time, while labelled sinful, while deplored by writers of government policy and lashed from the pulpit, was not, as was sex, the inevitable route to the fiery furnace. And not just illicit sex, but all sex. According to Calvin, any pleasure from sex, even between husband and wife, was considered Lust, making those who found pleasure in it, even in just thinking about it, ripe for damnation.

This is truly bizarre. How on earth did these reformers expect to persuade humans that desire, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” is something that humans, or any earthly creatures, can do without? Not only is sexual climax one of the greatest (and easiest) pleasures offered by nature––one that, because it alone brings life into existence, should be considered sacred, and was considered sacred from the Stone Age well into the medieval period––how did the religious reformers of the 16th century manage to persuade so many that it was something to be feared and hated?

More to the point, what led them to this bizarre, even dangerous, position––dangerous considering that without sex, or more particularly, without desire, there would eventually be no more Protestants? The Catholic Church was less enthusiastic about sex than its pagan forbears, but did agree that procreation at least was sacred, though only when it took place within the bonds of holy matrimony. Perhaps because the Church understood that “no sex meant no little Catholics,” what it regarded as sin were chiefly sexual practices that prevent procreation: masturbation, homosexuality, coitus interruptus, and most forms of birth control.

Though it reached its peak during the Reformation, the seeds of this anti-sex campaign had been sown long before by the Hebrew bible in which Adam and Eve “fall” into sin when, having eaten the apple, they realize that they have genitals and then figure out what to do with them. Throughout the centuries dominated by the Church, unmarried men and women were segregated into communities of monks and nuns. This did not prevent desire, but at least it made consummation more difficult. The Church was also largely willing to care for the unwanted children that were the result of illicit sex, bringing them up in convents as loyal servants of the Faith. But once Luther and Calvin got hold of the Church, all forgiveness was impossible; even infants who died shortly after birth went straight to hell unless they had been baptized first. As Calvin put it (1536)––

Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls “works of the flesh” (Gal 5:19). And that is properly what Paul often calls sin. The works that come forth from it–such as adulteries, fornications, thefts, hatreds, murders, carousings–he accordingly calls “fruits of sin” (Gal 5:19-21).

Apparently murder was less distressing to Calvin’s God than either theft or sex.

Nor was the Reformation the source of this pan-European anti-sex campaign, for at about the same time that the Reformation took up the fight, the Catholic Inquisition, instituted to weed out religious heresy, erupted in an hysterical pogrom directed against women, burning them at the stake as often for witchcraft or “misleading their children” as for practising pagan or Jewish rituals. “Over the 160 years from 1500 to 1660, Europe saw between 50,000 and 80,000 suspected witches executed. About 80% of those killed were women. Execution rates varied greatly by country, from a high of about 26,000 in Germany to about 10,000 in France [and] 1,000 in England . . . .”

Why women? The only plausible answer is that because they arouse desire in men they were seen as tempting them to engage in sinful acts and thus leading them to damnation. We may see this as a perverse belief system and something that our culture has (largely) outgrown, but just because we don’t follow this line of thinking today, doesn’t mean we can ignore its long terms effects.

That back around the dawn of history the Patriarchy managed to eliminate women from the hierarchy of all the modern religions, and gradually from all positions of authority, can be attributed to simple male animal territoriality. However sweet and reasonable they can be as individuals, as a group men are competitive beasts, so relegating women to the kitchen and laundry was a simple matter of eliminating one big chunk of the competition. What happened in the 16th century was different. This was hacking at the roots of the tree of life while rendering desolate millions of addle-headed believers. (Those interested in the realities of this terrible belief system, still very much alive and functioning today in evangelical churches throughout the mid-west, will get an insight by viewing videos of current evangelical preaching on You Tube.)

The question is not just why did Luther and Calvin believe such terrible things, it’s even more perplexing why on earth so many people accepted them. However radical, the answer is simple enough: one word: syphilis.

Disease a factor in history

Understanding the diseases rampant at a particular time is necessary if we’re to see it clearly, particularly when certain aspects remain hidden as is true with the authorship question. The diseases rampant in 16th century England were, in no particular order: the bubonic plague, the ague (malaria), the small pox (smallpox), and the great pox (syphilis). Though there were certainly others, these seem to have had the most consistent influence on the culture, though, the plague excepted, their effect on history is generally ignored.

Although the plague was no less terrible than when it first struck Europe in the 14th century, by Elizabethan times it hardly affected the lives of those prepared to avoid it, for its habit, if not its cause, was understood so well that those who could would simply pack up and head for the country, where they would remain until it died out.

It tended to strike every ten years or so, first appearing with warm weather in the funky areas around the docks where ships brought it from abroad (exactly how was still a mystery), and from whence it spread, again by unknown means, to the poorest and most crowded areas of the city. It was most virulent in the heat of mid-to-late summer, dying away with the coming of cold weather. Plague years were sometimes preceded by an outbreak in the summer of the preceding year, to return more destructively the following year, after which it died out. Or it could return the year following a particularly harsh outbreak for a lesser outbreak.

Property was particularly vulnerable during a plague year since it was difficult to adequately protect unguarded manors. It was hard to get workers to dig graves and otherwise help get rid of the bodies, so the air stank of rotting corpses, which was blamed for spreading the contagion. Bodies buried in churchyards were put into common graves as soon as they came in each day, five or six at a time, covered with a sprinkling of lime and dirt to prevent contagion. The Court spent the worst part of plague years holed up at Windsor Palace.

Malaria

The English were also used to malaria, as is seen by how often their letters mention the ague. It’s worth suggesting that only those who lived far from wetlands, sluggish streams or stagnant ponds were entirely free from the periodic attacks of joint pain, chills and fever, which as yet had no cure. Once bitten by the anopheles mosquito, rife in England at that time, he or she would be subject to attacks off and on for the rest of their lives. A severe attack could mean death to a child or someone already ailing from another disease.

Smallpox

This highly contagious disease was also well known to the English of the 16th century. It occured sometimes occasionally and sometimes in epidemics, always by direct or airborne infection through contact within 6 feet or so of someone who was sick. The progress was rapid, over a period of three days or so, and and often fatal. Pox, an alternate spelling of pocks, identifies a disease most notable for a rash or pimples, which, with smallpox, covered the face and other parts of the body, often leaving them disfigured, “pockmarked,” for life. The Queen had a bout with smallpox in 1562 which caused her ministers to fear for her life, but she recovered, apparently without scars. The one who did get scarred was her faithful lady-in-waiting, Lady Mary Sidney, mother of Philip and Mary, who was infected while attending her mistress. It’s said that her face was so badly scarred that she never again appeared in public without a veil over her face.

Syphilis

While these were all familiar to the English and had been for centuries, a new and virulent strain of what later came to be called syphilis appeared in Naples in 1495, from whence it spread fairly rapidly throughout western Europe. Concentrated in the port towns where sailors from Italy and the Far and Middle East indiscriminently exchanged bodily fluids with English prostitutes (first noted in England in 1497) who then spread it to clients who took it to their wives and mistresses throughout the nation. By this means, within a generation it had arrived at the doors and the beds of the great as well as the humble.

Unlike smallpox or the plague, which struck suddenly, death occuring within days, syphilis was slow; slow to appear; slow to develop. Understanding of its deadly nature must also have been slow. Even today arguments continue regarding its symptoms, which are often hard to diagnose. Where smallpox appears openly on the face and hands, the great pox first appeared in those areas most hidden from view, on the genitals. Following an early outbreak, these lesions would appear to heal, so the patient would consider himself or herself cured of one of the lesser STDs, and so continue to have sex, not realizing what they were doing to their partners, or what it could do to their families, since a man could infect his wife, who would then bear children with the inherited version of the disease.

Due to its varying symptomology, the Pox, as it was most commonly termed, could well have masqueraded for years as one of several other venereal diseases for which there were folk remedies, so its devastating nature would have become apparent only gradually over time. For while smallpox and the plague come fairly quickly to a crisis after which the patient is either dead or gets well, the bacilli that cause syphilis continue to spread deep within the cells of various parts of the body where they proliferate, gradually over the years bringing about the more obvious symptoms, the stinking, suppurating sores that won’t heal, or the deterioration of the bones of the face, most notably the nose. The only cure that was at all effective, ingesting mercury, was almost as devastating as the disease.

Because the symptoms could vary so widely depending on what organs had been compromised, because the disease could appear to have healed, going dormant sometimes for years, and because the effect it had on childbirth (the miscarriages, the stillbirths, the sickly infants, the children who only got sick later in life) were slow to be understood, it would have taken time for the pox to have shown itself in all its horror to the religious leaders who could only explain it in terms of original sin, that sex itself was the curse, God’s punishment on Adam and Eve for aspiring to forbidden knowledge. It also explains why their congregations, shocked and terrified, were so willing to follow Calvin and his fellow reformers down the path of stringent self-denial.

It was also why Queen Elizabeth had not only a dislike of sex, but genuine horror, fearing as she certainly must have what was the true cause of her father’s, her sister’s, and her brother’s terrible illnesses and what the results might be should she become pregnant. Much as the English historians continue to deny it, seeking ever more arcane explanations for Henry’s insane behavior towards the end of his life, no one who researches the matter can fail to agree that the disgusting nature of his illness, the troubles all his wives had conceiving and if they conceived, giving birth to healthy infants, were all due to the disease that all the Court either knew for a fact or guessed, was due to syphilis contracted during one of the many sexual peccadilloes with which he entertained himself in his youth. And even as the delicate sensibilities of the historians continue to prevail, there can be no argument that most of the Court under Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth would have believed the cause of the king’s insanity and his wives failures to produce a healthy heir to have been syphilis. This then, was the true cause why Elizabeth not only never married, but also why, despite her obvious delight in surrounding herself with handsome men, she would never have allowed herself to have sex (that is exchange bodily fluids) with any of them, taking refuge in the Greek myths of virginal goddesses like Diana and Phoebe.

This is the primary reason why sex was forbidden at Elizabeth’s Court; why the word “filthy” was inevitably used whenever reformers referred to sex; why books of sexy stories like Painter’s Palace of Pleasure were condemned as dangerous filth by Reformation pedagogues like Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor; and why those who transgressed her anti-sex edicts were punished so severely. This is also largely why the men (and women) who translated these works and had them published invariably hid their identities and why printers and publishers used ambiguous language on the title pages and in the front material of these and , so that the reform censors would pass them without reading further.

It also explains how the sexuality of young, vital Court poets, repressed by the dangers of yielding to impulse and intensified by the frustration of repression, burst forth in long sequences of sexually-charged poetry, long narrative poems about love and sex like Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and why during the decade of sonnet cycles addressed to cold disdainful dames, some, like Astrophil and Stella and Shake-speare’s Sonnets, exceeded 100 verses! Repressed by the sex hatred of the reformers and the fears of the Queen, desires that could not be allowed expression in any other way found release in reams of verse, some of it glorious––the lotus flowering from the heap of dung that was the terror inspired by this horrible disease.

Trolls and tribulations

This has been a tough week for a lot of Americans, myself included. Hit with rough words, not once but twice, my sense of myself as purveyor of truths relevant to the Shakespeare authorship question has taken a beating at two levels, first of veracity (factual reliability), and second of artistry (style). The first came from an anti-Oxfordian troll of the sort that tends to haunt social media, but who managed to find his way onto my blog where he snarled at the idea that Oxford got his Shakespearean education from his childhood with the once-famous scholar and statesman Sir Thomas Smith. The second came from an editor who took it upon himself to alter (without my permission) the opening sentence of a recently-published essay on the Cecils’ attempt to destroy the London Stage in the 1590s, because, as he put it, “you are generally wordy” and not inclined to self-edit what he sees as my “sensational word choices” and “long-windedness.” Ouch!

Regarding the troll

Most trollery just get trashed. The advantage of a blog over Facebook groups and other online platforms is that a blogger can reject what’s irrelevant or just plain nasty before it goes public. As a genuine scholar I welcome honest criticism that provides the necessary vetting of fact and conjecture, but when criticism devolves to mudslinging, all possibilty for reasonable discourse is lost. Worthwhile intellectual forums all require a modicum of courtesy; without it anything of value gets lost in the “shock and awe” of battle. What Benedick called “paper bullets of the brain” may not shed blood, but they do tend to kill sweet Reason.

Nevertheless, the issue of what to keep and what to reject gets most critical when, as in this case, Mr. Troll is so well-versed in the history of the issue that the points he raised must be taken into consideration. Cleverly he has perceived that I (stupidly) had based my evidence for Oxford’s Shakespearean education too heavily on two points: Mary Dewar’s 1964 biography of Smith in which she states that Oxford came to Smith during the winter of 1554; and second, the label Smith gave in his notebooks to a room in his home at Ankerwycke, “My Lord’s chambre,” where he lived from 1552 to 1558. Assuming that the latter must refer to Oxford, a lord from birth, since it did not appear that Smith had the sort of connection to any other lord at that time that would merit his having a room named for him, left me open to Mr. Troll’s intelligent suggestion that it could have refered to Bishop John Taylor, a colleague of Smith’s at Edward’s Court, who, as Dewar noted, came to Smith at the same time as the four-year-old heir to the Oxford earldom. Taylor had died not long after, perhaps, as M. de Troll suggests, in the very “chambre” so named.

That Bishops were honored as Lords, is undeniable, as is the fact that Taylor died not long after arriving at Smith’s. As for the fact that by then the protestant Taylor had lost his post as Bishop and been “deprived” of his office by the catholic Queen Mary, that may not be relevant since the English were always inclined to continue calling their colleagues and friends by their titles, even after they lost them to the interminable political reversals of that dangerous period. As for the troll’s claim that Taylor was “beloved” by Smith, that may be, as it may also be that Smith simply felt indebted to his old tutor for certain estates that Taylor had passed along to him during Taylor’s brief time as Dean of Lincoln (ODNB). Any satisfactory elucidation of these points seeming too far out of reach, “My Lord’s chambre” must now move from reliable evidence for Oxford as the Lord in question to the level of probability. Such is the nature of our inquiry, based as it is on such small bits of evidence, always vulnerable to new insights and information. But how much better it would have been had the discussion taken place in an atmosphere of collegial discourse.

The troll cannot deny that Smith was Oxford’s tutor. That’s a proven fact which can’t be denied, much as he might want to. However, having realized the importance that the nature of the environment surrounding Ankerwycke holds as the source of the imagery that, as shown by Caroline Spurgeon, dominates the Shakespeare canon, Mr. T. attempts to show that it was such a terrible place to live that no one in his right mind would have placed the young Oxford heir there. Based on a letter in which Smith complains about the damp that came with the summer rains, Troll’s effort to dismiss Ankerwycke is pathetic. Had it been as terrible as he claims, Sir Thomas would never have purchased it from the Crown nor taken the trouble to build a 21-room mansion there, nor would he, when he moved to Hill Hall, have passed it on to his brother, whose decendents continued to inhabit the site until they sold it in the mid-17th century. The beauties of that area are still to be seen by the many visitors who visit it each year. The only things missing today are the manor itself and the great royal Forest of Windsor that then lay on the other side of the river to the west. To the south the great wetlands known as the Runnymede Water Meadow still offers nesting ground and a waystation for flocks of migratory birds, including the very ones mentioned by Shakespeare.

As for the editor

As for the editor who spoiled my opening sentence, clearly he differs from myself in his opinion of what constitutes good writing. Perhaps he learned to write where the prevailing paradigm was always to keep it short and to the point, newspaper style. Like the piano teacher who failed to teach me to play because learning to play songs meant less to her than how I held my fingers; he may have been graded on how well he denied himself anything colorful or complex. Perhaps he began on a newspaper, where the prevailing style was aimed at a sixth grade readership. Perhaps he began as a technical writer where color of any sort (description, humor, sarcasm) would be out of place. Maybe that’s where he learned that “wordy” or “long-winded” writing is, ipso facto, bad writing.

I do not now nor have I ever had “a style”! To me, style arises out of what a writer needs to express to a particular audience at a particular moment in time, which means that how he or she writes will be molded by what is to be expressed and for whom. Having worked for years as a copywriter for publishers and ad agencies, I know this all too well. What I prefer of course is to write in the manner of those writers whose works I enjoy reading, people who write with color, with witty asides and the kind of cultural references that only those who have done a lot of reading will catch. This kind of writing makes me feel like my own lifetime of reading hasn’t been wasted; that I belong to an important and exalted elite. I may fail at writing like this, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Regarding long “wordy” sentences

Long sentences have a place in good writing. Is Francis Bacon long-winded? Is Marcel Proust “wordy”? And even if they are, do we care? Sometimes there is just too much to be said on a particular point that to cut it up into separate sentences would damage the integrity, the wholeness, of the thought. Sometimes a particular thought is so important that the writer would actually prefer, should the reader lose his way, that he be forced to return to the beginning of the sentence and read it over again! With well-chosen modifiers and clauses a great deal of information can be packed into a single sentence that if parcelled out into separate sentences would take up half a printed page.

I am fond of 19th-century novels. Written back when there was no competition from radio, television or text messaging, Austen, Galsworthy, Dickens, Henry James, Hardy, Tolstoi, can still bring the reader more completely into another time and place, and keep her in the company of interesting characters for days, even weeks on end. For those who did not live where there were concerts and plays, nothing was too long, no amount of description too tedious, no narrative too elaborate, as the shelves filled with collections in old bookstores attest, but some of these old books can still provide a richness of vicarious experience that few modern novels possess. Hemingway’s terse style, born of his indoctrination as a war reporter, came to replace Scott Fitzgerald’s richer and more colorful style. Description was cut down to a single adjective or two. Evocative phrasing was somehow not sufficiently masculine. Tough guys don’t need modifiers; “Just the facts, m’am.” Finally, not even the facts matter, just the attitude, grim, tired, bored, and very, very dull; interesting plots are replaced by sex, lots of it, all from the male perspective of course. Replaced by sex and violence, plots and characters have become vapid stereotypes.

Ornaments and lights

Maybe I’ve been too influenced by my subject. While I can’t claim to live up to his Shakespearean standard, it’s obvious that, in his time, Oxford had much the same problem with his peers as I had with this editor, for when he began writing, the accepted style was just as restrictive though in different ways. Labelled by C.S. Lewis “the drab era,” the prevailing paradigm at the time that he came to London required stilted, colorless prose, and poetry that could not move beyond the Petrarchan model whereby disdainful dames refused lovers who responded with stultifying morbidity on the likelihood of immiment death. It was a style in keeping with the prevailing religious adherence to Calvinism, with its fear of the Devil and his ability to drag the unwary sinner down to the fiery furnace should he give way for an unguarded moment to the human need for pleasure and happiness.

Nurtured by Smith on the great works of Greek and Roman literature, Oxford’s native creativity could not help but burst these bonds, and that it cost him the approval of his peers, and most particularly of his Calvinist in-laws and their coterie, is evident in the disclaimers that accompany the poetry that first began to be published with his arrival in London. As Oxford puts it in his introduction to Clerke’s Latin translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier:

I shall not write about the great neatness and excellence with which [Clerke] has depicted the ornaments of the virtues in personages of the highest rank. I shall not repeat how he has described the notable viciousness, silly character, uncouth and boorish manners, or unhandsome appearance that exist in those who are incapable of being courtiers. He has represented whatever exists in human conversation, intercourse and society that is either decorous and polite, or unsightly and debased, with such a quality that you seem to see it before your eyes.

The man who wrote about such important matters (even though he was no mean stylist) has been enhanced by this new light of eloquence. For now the Latin courtier has once more shown his face at our court (as if returned from that city of Rome wherein the pursuit of eloquence thrived), having an excellent appearance, equipped with consummate endowments, and wonderful dignity. This is the achievement of friend Clerke, accomplished with unbelievable genius and singular eloquence. For he has revived that dormant sweetness of speech he possesses; for these most worthy matters he has recalled the ornaments and lights he had set aside. Therefore he is to be lauded and heaped with all the greater praise, that he has made such things, great as they are, yet more so by adding these lights and ornaments.

For who has expressed the significance of his words more fully? Or shone a more elegant light on the dignity of his sentences? If more serious matters come up in the discourse, he renders them in words more ample and grave, but if everyday and witty, he uses clever and witty ones. Since, therefore, he employs a pure and elegant vocabulary, writes his sentences with good style, prudence, and clarity, and employs an overall manner of eloquence marked by dignity, an excellent work must needs flow and derive from these things. It strikes me as such, with the result that, when I read this Latin Courtier, I seem to be hearing Crassus, Antony and Hortensius conversing of these things.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by blogging. No longer constrained to pack the most pertinent information into the first few paragraphs in case the newspaper editor has to cut off paragraphs at the end, no longer forced to keep to a certain length because the magazine must keep its editorial material from exceeding the amount allowed by the space devoted to advertising, perhaps I ramble. But if so there are obviously some who see no harm in it, for after eight years of blogging I still get somewhere between one or two hundred hits a day. Somebody out there likes me, or at least likes the way I write.

“She who must not be named”

At this tense moment in America’s struggle to get a Commander in Chief by the means afforded by our democracy, because the better candidate is a woman, the issue of American misogeny has arisen in ways that it hasn’t since women finally got the right to vote in 1920. If not, then why has this intelligent, supremely-qualified candidate for office been labelled so “untrustworthy” that even her supporters feel they have to accept what appears to be the judgement of the majority? Has history and our own experience not taught us the abiding lesson that to be female is to be, ipso facto, less important, less intelligent, less worthy of high office or acclaim than even the most dangerously unqualified male?

And why else does an editor of a certain scholarly journal feel he has the right to edit my writing without my permission, to justify it by calling me “wordy” and “longwinded” as though somehow, despite his lack of experience, he is qualified to edit and dismiss me in ways he would not dare to had I a name like John or George, for indeed, all he knows of me is my given name, which apparently reeks of unworthiness.

And why else does the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship fail to acknowledge the creator of their scholarly journal, The Oxfordian, which having lasted the longest of any similar journal, and which, during its first ten years, published some of the most important articles ever published by any authorship journal, and which also, during that time, published some of its board members’ articles for the first time? And why does the only reference on the SOF website to the history of The Oxfordian have nothing but this to say?

The Oxfordian, published since 1998, is “the best American academic journal covering the authorship question,” according to William Niederkorn, formerly of the New York Times . . . . In Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (2013), Stratfordian scholar Prof. Stuart Hampton-Reeves adds that under Michael Egan’s editorship (2009-2014), The Oxfordian “deserves credit . . . for insisting on a higher standard of academic rigour.”

A higher standard than what? Who was it that actually set the standard for scholarship that from 1998 to 2009 had The Oxfordian accepted by the Modern Language Association of America and shelved at the Library of Congress?

Unravelling the Mystery: The Professor and the un-Countess

Reviewing Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe by Chris Laoutaris; Penguin, 2014

The great mystery, of course, is how and by what means the London Stage was brought to life during one of the most repressive periods in Western History. Laoutaris focuses on a small piece of that mystery, namely why the great Blackfriars theater, built in 1596 in the heart of London to stage the plays of Shakespeare, was shut down by order of the Queen’s Privy Council within weeks of its projected opening, then never allowed its use by the company that created it for almost ten years.

His premise, that it was the petition created by Lady Russell, Robert Cecil’s aunt and the self-appointed doyen of the Blackfriars district, that was what caused the Privy Council to close the theater, thus forcing the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to move their operation across the river, is hardly new. Actually, despite the thundering claims of the title, there’s very little here that’s new, and what there is must be fished for in a sea of florid prose, almost 500 pages of it (in the paperback edition anyway), some of it in the cheesy “heart-pounding” style that literary historians have recently adopted from pop novelists like Dan Brown. I suppose this is meant to fool us into thinking that, like the optimist who dug his way through a room full of horse poop certain that there was bound to be a pony in it somewhere, the reader will eventually find satisfaction if the premise is simply repeated often enough. (Where are the editors? Where are the grammarians?)

Even the title is misleading: Shakespeare and the Countess, for of course Laoutaris, prize-winning professor from University College London, can show nothing that actually connects Shakespeare with Lady Russell or with anything, for that matter. Nor, in fact, was Russell ever a Countess, despite her great desire to be one. Nor was the move from Shoreditch to Bankside made by Shakespeare, but by James Burbage who never called himself “Shakespeare’s man.” In fact, the title is just another absurd effort, perhaps by the publisher, to use Shakespeare’s name to sell a book that has nothing to say about Shakespeare, certainly nothing new.

Laoutaris’s effort to make something out of some obscure connection between a member of a remote branch of the Arden family and the Throgmorton plot, plus his attempts to interpret bits of the plays in its light is just one more effort by the Academy to turn chalk into cheese. As for “the battle,” all Laoutaris dares to describe is a minor skirmish. He’s not about to go anywhere near the real fight.

The almost Countess and the not really Shakespeare

As everyone already knows who has been over this ground at least once, Elizabeth Hoby Russell ne Cooke, sister-in-law to Lord Treasurer William Cecil Lord Burghley and the aunt of soon-to-be Secretary of State Robert Cecil, was (probably) responsible for the petition that just before the winter season of 1596, robbed the Burbages of the beautiful new theater which they had just created in the Old Parliament Chamber in the Liberty of Blackfriars. Nor is it news that two years later it was the loss of this theater that led to the dismantling of their aging public stage in Shoreditch, and its resurrection across the river as The Globe. Nor is there anything new in the fact that the names of Shakespeare’s printer, Richard Field, and his company’s patron George Carey, were included in the list of signers, a fact that is certainly interesting––though hardly “astounding” or “shocking.”

All of this has been known for donkey’s years, though few may be aware that what we have today is not the original of the petition, if there ever was one, but a copy in which the signatures are all in the same hand! This is fine for those who can swallow whole the gargantuan anomaly that there ever was such a thing as a literary genius who couldn’t even write his own surname the same way twice. And although Laoutaris avoids the obvious conclusion offered by history that the closing of Hunsdon’s theater was something that Robert Cecil would have found a way to do had there never been a petition, he does provide us with some interesting new items that strengthen that conclusion.

History has gone along with the petition’s claim that the issue for the signers was the noise and disruption that a public stage would create in what they wished to keep as a quiet residential district. This is a dodge for at least two reasons. First, ever since the friars departed in the 1530s, the Liberty of Blackfriars was not and never had been a quiet residential district. Established as a “liberty” by Edward I in 1276, it had ever since enjoyed the freedom guaranteed such priories to provide folks in trouble with sanctuary from arrest by local officials. As such it was a place where social outsiders of all sorts sought refuge and ways to survive. All of the theaters built in the 16th and early 17th century were built in liberties, along with printshops, artists’ studios, and a variety of small manufacturies.

Second, Russell and most of her signers had personal reasons for wanting the theater shut down that had nothing to do with keeping the peace. Russell, who moved to Blackfriars in 1581 with her husband, Francis Russell, heir to the Bedford Earldom, was also attracted to what may have been the largest enclave of evangelicals to be found inside the City. Born as one of the five Cooke sisters, daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI, his passion for the stricter forms of Calvinism was acquired in Strasbourg during Mary’s reign along with men like John Cheke, James Haddon, John Bale, and a handful of future deans and bishops of the English Church, Nowell, Grindal, Sandys and Aylmer.

This passion Sir Anthony transferred to his five daughters, whose educations in the Greek and Latin fundamentals of Church history placed them at the forefront of English evangelism. Four were then married to men who would soon be raised to power by Queen Elizabeth: Mildred to William Cecil Lord Burghley, Anne to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Catherine to Sir Henry Killigrew, and Elizabeth, first to Sir Thomas Hoby, then to John Russell, heir to the Earl of Bedford (who unfortunately died before his father, thus cheating his wife out of the title of Countess). Elizabeth in particular used her education and language skills to wheel and deal within a governing community uniquely trained to respect such things. Immediately upon moving to Blackfriars in 1581, she did what she did wherever she went, she took over the leadership of the little St. Anne’s congregation, where she encouraged the hiring of radical ministers.

The evangelicals vs the Stage

Blackfriars had been attracting radical protestants ever since 1550 when Edward VI’s grant of the district to Sir Thomas Cawarden, his Master of the Revels and a committed evangelical, gave him the freedom to dismantle the monks’ great church, mansions and quadrangle, and begin the process of rebuilding that resulted in the warren of residences, shops and little gardens that the precinct had become by the time the Russells arrived. For himself Cawarden had reserved one of the grander mansions and, as Master of the Revels, the west wing of the monks’ quadrangle which Henry VIII had used to store his party equipment. Bequeathing most of it to his neighbor and fellow evangelical, Sir William More, it was More who in 1576 had rented the old Revels apartment to Richard Farrant and his patrons for the little school that they turned into the first private theater in London. By 1581, when the Russells arrived, the little school’s rehearsal stage had been entertaining the surrounding community for almost five years, and, as Laoutaris notes, without complaints from their neighbors.

Lady Russell was bound to find the theater offensive; as a devout puritan she would have been against all theaters, and particularly alarmed by their increase. Still, she might have found it the better part of valor to have held her tongue, considering that so powerful a member of the Queen’s privy council, Baron Hunsdon, was involved in creating the Second Blackfriars theater, particularly since her son, Sir Edward Hoby, was married to one of his daughters. Instead she felt Lord Hunsdon’s presence as a threat to her control of the precinct. Laoutaris provides a quote from her letter of January 27, 1596, in which she urges Cecil to appoint the Earl of Kent to a particular position, “I beseech you, quod facis fae cita [whatever you do, do it speedily] or I fear one of the tribe will be before him Hercules Furens [with the energy of Hercules]” (228). Laoutaris explains that by “the tribe” she meant the “Tribe of Dan,” which he has discovered from other letters was code for Hunsdon and the Carey family. Russell, bent on using her influence with her relatives to bring Calvin’s Dream to life in England’s green and pleasant land, was using her connection to the Cecils to get fellow members of “the Elect” into as many key government positions as possible.

Laoutaris doesn’t bother to parse this, but what it suggests is that to Russell and her sisters, who saw all personalities and current events through the lens of their interpretations of the Bible, the Carey family were the equivalent of the biblical “tribe of Dan,” meaning that they were nonbelievers, Canaanites, Philistines, whose purposes were antipathetic to Calvin’s Dream. To the Crown politics in which she was ever inclined to dabble was added her attempts to control what happened within her local precinct, and to the moral disapproval of plays in general was added the religious loathing of a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist. For Lady Russell, the petition probably had very little to do with noise.

In January of 1596, Hunsdon still held the lofty post of Lord Chamberlain of the Queen’s Household. Two years earlier, it was he who had organized the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and who, throughout the late 1580s, had become holder of the lease to the little school stage, the First Blackfriars Theater. By the time Russell created the infamous petition, Hunsdon had added to his earlier holdings other properties surrounding the Old Parliament building, doubtless as a move towards turning it into the great theater that he and Burbage were planning to establish within the City proper. Thus it may well be the case that in 1596, Russell had cause to see Hunsdon, not only of the “Tribe of Dan,” but as dangerously intruding into what she felt belonged to her and God.

By January 1596, when she wrote so dismissively of Hunsdon, the Court was being split down the middle by Robert Cecil’s power struggle with the Earl of Essex. With so many members of the Court community married into each others’ families, the split tore families into warring halves, particularly along generational lines, the older and more conservative standing (not always happily) with the Cecils, while the younger generally backed Essex. Russell’s family too was split down the middle, her sister Anne Bacon’s sons, Anthony and Francis, siding with Essex, as did her nephew Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford, and her son Sir Edward Hoby. The only one who stuck with her and the Cecils was her youngest son Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby. Outraged by the disloyalty of her family members, Russell was driven ever more furiously to advise her nephew Robert Cecil, perhaps because he was positioned to get her what she wanted, and what she wanted at the moment was control of Blackfriars.

Cecil’s triumph

But by November, Cecil having finally been appointed to the post for which he’d been striving the past six years, that of the all-powerful Secretary of State, it may be that the petition was not all that necessary, since Hunsdon was dead by then (having been suddenly taken ill after dinner, two weeks after Cecil’s appointment), and with Cecil’s father a permanent Council member, and Cecil’s own father-in-law, William Brooke Lord Cobham, given Hunsdon’s place as Lord Chamberlain, the Privy Council was now so heavily weighted in favor of the Cecils that Robert could probably have managed to get the theater closed without any help from his aunt.

Laoutiras, of course, like most literary historians, has no grasp on the politics involved in the Cecil’s efforts to gain control of the London Stage, no notion of what it would have meant to Robert Cecil to have to face Parliament in October 1597 for the first time as Secretary of State, aware that as soon as the session was adjourned for the day, the MPs would be headed for a stage dominated by his enemies, one of them being the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s primary playwright, his brother-in-law, the Earl of Oxford. By the early ’90s the Cecils had seen to it that Oxford could no longer use his credit as a peer to continue to support the Stage, but short of killing him, they could do nothing to prevent him from writing the Henry IV plays with which, the winter of 1596-97 he and his actors destroyed the reputations of his father-in-law, Lord Chamberlain William Brooke, and Brooke’s son, Henry Cobham.

Whether or not Cecil was responsible for the death of Lord Hunsdon, or six months later the death of James Burbage, or two years earlier the death of Marlowe’s patron Lord Strange, or three years earlier, the murder of Christopher Marlowe, or six years earlier, of Francis Walsingham, each death dealing a devastating blow to the London Stage, it would have been hard for the theater community, both actors and audience, not to have been suspicious. When certain writers and actors retaliated that summer with a play titled The Isle of Dogs, a title that points to Marlowe’s murder, Cecil closed all the theaters, forcing the entire theatrical community to hit the road.

So when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned in the fall to a West End filled with MPs gathered for Elizabeth’s ninth Parliament, they came loaded for bear. With their livelihood threatened, and their manager and major patron both dead, the actors hauled out the big gun, devised over the summer by their great playwright, and aimed it right at Cecil. A version of the True Tragedy of Richard III had been revised into his caricature. Having been given by one of their supporters space to perform in one of the mansions on the river, the MPs hadn’t far to go to see Richard Burbage, cast as Richard III but dressed and behaving like Cecil, create the role that would bring him permanent fame as a great actor. And there wasn’t a damn thing Cecil could do about it. He had to ignore it. Retaliation would only confirm it. His revenge would be to erase every trace of Oxford’s connection to the Stage from the records collected by his father or within his power to survey as Secretary of State, Lord Treasurer, Master of the Court of Wards, and Chancellor of Cambridge University under King James.

Hunsdon and Field

As for their seeming disloyalty to Shakespeare in signing Russell’s petition, Laoutaris understands that by November 1596, both George Carey, the new Lord Hunsdon, and Richard Field were in something of a bind. He details how Cecil undercut Carey, how Cecil blocked his inheritance of any of his father’s offices so that all that stood between him and bankruptcy were his desperate letters to Cecil, begging his help in relieving what he termed “the burden of a naked honour,” pleas that “fell on deaf ears,” while Cecil insinuated to Elizabeth that “some thought” that Carey was behaving in a treasonable fashion. As Laoutaris puts it, in November 1596, “Hunsdon was walking a tightrope. He could not afford to anger the Queen or his mediators in the Cecil faction [meaning Russell]. His livelihood depended on it” (241-2).

As for Richard Field, first of all it must be said that printers in general were rarely bound by their personal religious or political affiliations. Printing was a business and so long as a book was properly registered with the Stationers, they were bound to print it. Now in his forties, with his own printing establishment and a family of his own, Field desired to be seen as a respectable member of his community. In addition, by 1592 he had become an important member of the St. Anne’s congregation. Nor was this purely a business move, for years earlier he had been apprenticed by his father, the tanner of Stratford, to the London printer Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot who had fled religious persecution in France in the early 60s, when, with Burghley’s protection, he became the leading printer of works of Protestant theology. Thus Field was an evangelical by persuasion, not just because of where he was located. And finally, if he had ever had a particular relationship with the Earl of Oxford, or at any time had looked to him as a patron, by 1596 Oxford himself was in so much trouble that he would have been useless to someone like Field.

There is much of use in this book, for, however inadvertently, Laoutaris includes details that are important to the fullest possible picture of the period, particularly of the family into which Oxford married, and which both made it possible for him to create the London Stage and prevented his getting much satisfaction from it, including the credit for creating it. The only problem for those of us in search of such details is the miserable style in which so much of it was written.

Occupy Shakespeare!

Many who read this blog are themselves involved in researching the truth about the authorship of the Shakespeare canon and writing about it. For you, I have a suggestion, forget the academics. Stop trying to convince them. Stop using what you believe to be their talking points to communicate what you’re discovering or thinking. Why? First, because it’s a waste of time. In fact, the better and more cogent your argument, the less likely it is that they will pay any attention to it. Why should they? Clearly they don’t really care who wrote the Shakespeare canon or we would no longer have a problem.

Second and more important, it’s going to keep you from arriving at anything substantial yourself. Acknowledging the academic viewpoint, wasting time and energy on testing or confuting it, has only one result, it keeps us going in circles. Like desperate peasants we lob facts over the castle walls, where they fall to earth without having any effect. Do we bother to argue with people who believe that the earth is flat or that it was created in six days? Such people invariably come up with arguments that mean something to them but that make no sense to those who have a broader view. Just because the flat-earthers and the Darwin-deniers no longer run the world doesn’t mean that the Stratford syndicate operates from any greater logic. We can argue until the cows come home that their story makes no sense, nothing will change until we replace what doesn’t make sense with what does. And we won’t have that until we turn away from their story and build one of our own out of documents and facts (ironically, many of them courtesy of these same academics).

This is difficult, of course, because a stronger hand has been at the record than ours is or will ever be, but no hand could eliminate everything. The truth is there to find. The story of how these great works of literature got written is a wonderful story, just as good as any its author ever wrote. In an anthropological sense it’s his greatest story, the story of his life. Gleaned from the most obscure of records, this will be an exercise performed as a great intellectual adventure by a lucky handful who are properly placed and financially supported so they can examine the records in the archives of England, take notes, and write up the results of their effort. This will involve not only a great deal of time on the computer, but also on foot via London’s underground and on English trains to the various archives in the shires. Since this is very expensive, backing by a patron is required. A corps of undergraduates from one of the English universities (not necessarily Oxbridge) would be the perfect outfit.

This is literary forensics, and it will yield results. The efforts of other scholars have shown the way. Help us go in that direction, either with your own efforts or willingness to support a London team and you’ve contributed a great deal to our study of this hidden genius, who sacrificed his identity that the English language might develop as freely as possible in the direction in which it has continued ever since.

Until we can show beyond the shadow of a doubt what does make sense, why Oxford must be accepted as the author, why his actors were forced to hide his identity, and why this great fib has continued to be perpetrated on a willing public for so long after his death, we will simply continue to spin helplessly within the academic orbit. They are not the last word, they never have been, and until we learn to ignore them and address a totally different community, one of independent thinkers, lovers of Shakespeare and his works, one that has been in existence ever since the 1570s (while the university-based English Departments date only to the turn of the 20th century) we will be forced into fringe areas. Let us simply change fringes, moving from the one where we are deemed absurd, to the continually growing fringe that exchanges information by way of the internet, and thus create a new Shakespeare Studies, one where history rules and the author is present both within and along with his text.

The need for an end run

One ploy has been to get important information about the works published by leaving the author out of it. Hoping that by focusing on some aspect of the question that can be argued without reference to a particular candidate readers can begin to see the authorship issue from a more rational viewpoint, this was the route taken by Diana Price in her Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography and more recently in Richard Roe’s Shakespeare’s Guide to Italy. When Roe decided to make the book more accessible to the general reader by leaving Oxford out of it, do you think that brought his book any closer to genuine acceptance? Or even more recently, Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky’s book on the dating of The Tempest, where they too, doubtless for the same reason, chose to leave out any discussion of authorship, focussing only on the issue of the date.

Do you think that means that any of these important works is shelved in bookstores or libraries with mainstream works on Shakespeare? Not so. While phony biographies or books on the authorship question by apologists like Shapiro get shelved with the classics, Roe and Stritmatter are stuck in some corner where they’re surrounded by books on UFOs and crop circles. On Amazon they’re grouped, not with books on Shakespeare’s Italian plays or The Tempest, but with other authorship books, some unworthy of notice. So many of the articles published in authorship newsletters fight over again old battles with the academics, articles that may interest newcomers to the issue, but that never touch the minds of academics because it’s still so easy just to ignore them.

This is all very sad, not only for authorship scholars who can’t reach our audience, not through print publishing at least, but even more so for the English departments who purvey the academic line on Shakespeare. True, they get their ideas published, and in hardback, but who reads what they write? At close to $100 a pop, only the biggest university libraries can afford to buy their books, and no one but fellow academics who need to know what else has been said about Robert Greene or Thomas Kyd, have the energy required to plow through the turgid reams of fieldspeak in which these books and articles are cast.

University English Departments are in serious trouble today, and it’s no mere whimsy on the part of a frustrated outsider to state with some authority that much of the problem can be laid to their attitude towards the authorship question. As William Chace, President and Professor of English Emeritus at Emory University, informs us in his article from 2009, now online (and any question about University English or the curriculum will bring it up among the first first links on Google, which shows how deep the concern he voices):

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land.

Chace gives a number of reasons for this, chiefly the shift to business degrees by students facing hugely expanded tuition fees, but also “the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.” How are students to see the “human good” in the garbled story they tell about the birth and spread of modern English? He complains that they’ve “dismembered the curriculum.”

What he doesn’t address is the effort, in America at least, to use English Lit, first in the universities, then in high school English classes, as a means of indoctrinating diverse populations into what was once the dominant White Male Protestant world view. How else are we to see the continued focus on books like Moby Dick, while books like Charlie Russell’s marvelous stories of the American West, Trails Plowed Under, remains ignored, or the focus on the depressing Lord of the Flies while Nordhoff and Hall’s masterful history Pitcairn’s Island, is threatened with loss. Why Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter rather than Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the most popular book in America for decades during the 19th century, still meaningful for teenage girls, and what is more, entertaining as well as instructive?

Most deadly of all where English Lit is concerned is the invasion of fieldspeak from “scientific” language studies like linguistics and semiotics, that threaten to overtake the language of Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and Eliot with gibble gabble. Nothing wrong with this, boys must have their intellectual toys, but for God’s sake keep this intellectual poison out of the undergraduate classroom, where arcane theories that should remain at the postdoc level have been allowed to invade, turning several generations of undergraduates and even high school AP English students, off for life, from anything labelled “literature.”

Not so serious, though equally awful, are the works labelled by publishers as “literary fiction” in which no ending is acceptible unless it panders to the current addiction to existentialism in which the ending seeks to prove, for the zillionth time, the notion that life is pointless. Not only boring, but really bad medicine for what ails most teenagers, who need to be told that life is meaningful, which of course it is, everywhere but in the high school and university classroom. Stop telling them what it means, let them find that out for themselves, just give it to them. Fight for a meaningful, flexible, and life-affirmative curriculum, where laughter plays its ancient and necessary role.

What is English? What is Literature?

The failure to share an understanding of what is meant by these terms has led, not only in English Lit, but all the humanities that, in English-speaking cultures, are taught in English (as opposed to math), is the primary factor in this unhappy loss of interest. Certainly students who have been turned off by AP English classes in high school are going to think twice about focussing on English Lit in college. Pehaps most deadly of all is the separation of Literature from History, a problem from the beginning that has only gotten worse over time, for without History, Literature lacks context, while without Literature, History, the record of events caused by the thrust and clash of human passions, lacks what should be its most compelling and informative voice. It is not the series of dates or tags like “Manifest Destiny” that makes history compelling, it’s the stories it tells, and how better than in the literature written at the time?

How did it happen that they ever got separated? Blame it on politics, the politics inherent in History, the politics inherent in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Defoe, Byron, Blake and Shelley, unacknowledged and suppressed in their own times, and by the politics of the Academy, where theory seeks to soar as far as possible beyond tiresome human realities. How else to explain the sorry state of that most important and necessary side of English studies, Composition, in which are combined the nuts and bolts of the language, formerly studied as the Trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric. According to Chace:

While this duty is always advertised as an activity central to higher education, it is one devoid of dignity. Its instructors are among the lowest paid of any who hold forth in a classroom; most, though possessing doctoral degrees, are ineligible for tenure or promotion; their offices are often small and crowded; their scholarship is rarely considered worthy of comparison with “literary” scholarship. Their work, while crucial, is demeaned. . . . Despite sheltering this central educational service, English departments are regarded by those who manage the university treasury as more liability than asset.

As higher ed attitudes trickle down to the high schools where graduates of university English departments do most of the teaching, students end up in college not knowing a verb from a noun, so that required English courses become a makeup for what should have been taught in the sixth through ninth grades. Today, with students focused on paring down language to what can most quickly be texted on their iphones, or the 140 characters allowed by tweeting, the ability to write a meaningful sentence, a coherent paragraph, heads towards one extreme while “literary” English, bogged in the incoherencies of novelists like James Elroy, the densities of Faulkner and Joyce, the seemingly pointless puzzles of modern poetry, head towards the other.

To say that these are the results of Jonson’s lie would be ridiculous, but that something has come full circle since then may not be. When Oxford first began to write he had the “drab era” to contend with. It wasn’t existential, it didn’t suggest that life was without meaning, but it was adamant that it was utterly without hope. Quickly he moved away from the dismal dread of his elders towards the light and laughter he found in Plautus and Terence. Condemned by Church and City officials, he hid his name, but not his light, his gift for making people laugh. Now that the 20th-century version of officialdom, the professors of philology and linguistics who have taken over the English Departments, have divested him of everything but what they consider to be the best bits of his masterpieces, and so have ruined his Studies, isn’t it time for us to do what he did so long ago, find a way to reach past the academics to the readers, hungry for the good word, that we know who wrote the works of Shakespeare, one with a real story to tell, as he so poignantly has the dying Hamlet require of Horatio.

But these are the ultimate results of two things, the big lie told by Ben Jonson back in 1623, when he claimed that Shakespeare knew only “small Latin and less Greek,” and the choice by the early English departments, formed only a little more than 100 years ago, to regard English as a branch of Philology, an origin from which it has never managed to free itself. The first denied Shakespeare his education, the second denied him his artistry. The result has left both professors and students with a Shakespeare who, thanks to Jonson, knew nothing, his accomplishment solely due to his genius, and finally, thanks to the bibliographers and philologists of the English Departments, a chimeric genius part deer-poacher, part horse-holder, part play-patcher, part plagiarizer, one without any real artistry .

How are we to respect a study based on such a fragile and transparent foundation? How can anyone expect it to sustain, not only the works written in the language Shakespeare bequeathed us, one he created out of local dialects, Latin, Greek, French and Old English, but the histories and philosophies and even maths taught in that language? Founded on a set of lies and suppositions created to make those lies coherent, English itself is without a clear identity. What is it? No one seems to know.

“You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

. . . cries Alice, awakening to the greater reality that lies beyond the “dream” of Oxbridge. What else could her creator, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, math professor at Oxford University, have had in mind with the White Rabbit, the Red Queen, the White King, the Mad Hatter, the Tortoise who “taught us,” the gardens that Alice was either too big or too small to enter, but university professors and their fraternities and cliques. Who else were Tweedledum and Tweedledee but profs whose lesson plans were indistinguishable while they fought each other with rattling terms that no one but they could understand? Who but the Department Head was the Black Crow that frightened those two worthies into silence? Why pay attention to an accretion of nonsense too monolithic to move and too absurd to take seriously, particularly one that seems to be teetering on the brink of self-destruction, and cry, along with Alice, “you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

Friends, let us go our own way. Despite the threats to literacy of this new age of electronics, it has given us an opening to the public that’s been out of reach for questioners since the grand possessors finally realized that in order to get the great works published they would have to use the name of someone who could not be damaged himself, and who could not damage the true author.

Every single day on this blog I get upwards of 100 to 200 readers, mostly from the US and UK, but also from every other country in the world. That’s too many to account for just a few who read everything on it. It means there are hundreds more who read some of it. If some of my readers are academics, forgive my rhetoric, but please wake up and step outside the box your training has stuck you in. Read the history of the period, not just those bits that the philologists and bibliographers have picked to substantiate their equations, but all the history, most of all the history of the English Reformation and its repression of the arts, in particular the art of writing imaginative literature.

English is the first or second language of the entire world. Readers in every nation are interested in its history and the history of the genius who more than any other individual created it in its first incarnation. Let us stop trying to reach the academics huddled behind their hermaneutics and word studies. Permanently blind to the forest, they can see only the trees right in their way.

Please, let’s stop these useless attempts to bring the argument around to include Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, and the questions of authorship raised by all their lives and works. It’s going on a century-and-a-half since the question of Shakespeare’s identity first became public, and close to a century since Oxford was identified. If we haven’t brought the authorship issue any closer than we have with our present tactics, we never will.

Their power is lodged within their control of the scholarly publishing industry, a force that can promote disinformation as easily as it does genuine information, and one that reality demands must always choose in favor of the bottom line. But we are living at a time when the door is open to us outside of the feudal castle of print, and can publish for a community of like-minded readers, just as you are reading this message today within hours or perhaps days of downloading, and with the opportunity to ask questions, offer opinions, and get feedback from myself and others. It’s necessary to get things published in print, but only what supports facts gleaned from history. Study the history of the period, find those writers who created the language we use today (Shakespeare was not the only one), by all means publish in print if you can, but meanwhile, work to establish a community of internet scholars. That’s where the future lies.

Who was Hamlet?

Hamlet has always been seen as Shakespeare’s masterpiece, his chef d’oeuvre, his most fully realized character. In calling him “the secular Christ,” Yale professor Harold Bloom makes the most extravagant comparison that a Christian culture can offer. In fact, it may be that more has actually been written (in English) about this fictional being than has been written about the Savior.

Those who’ve looked into it have found it impossible to locate anything in the life of William of Stratford that corresponds in any way to Hamlet’s life and situation. He would have had to get all of it from books, but all the literary sources tracked by Bullough and others were in Latin or French in his time, most in volumes that, even had he the Latin promised by T.W. Baldwin would have required connections to private libraries that academics can only assume, since there’s no hint in William’s real biography (as opposed to the fictional versions conjured up by academics) of any such connections. The one possible reference to William’s personal life, the son named Hamnet that died at age 11, was obviously named after his friend, Hamnet Saddler, while the character in the play is just as obviously based on the life of a Danish prince named Amleth, whose story, far from popular, lay buried in a Latin history of Denmark written in the 12th century.

This and other primary souces for Hamlet Prince of Denmark are found in Oxford’s tutor’s library: the Historiae Danicae by Saxo Grammaticus, not translated into English until 1608; the Roman history of Titus Livius, Latin, not translated into English until 1600; Valerius Maximus (used in schools), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (both Latin rhetoricians). Others connect with Oxford’s years at Cecil House: Beowulf, probably translated from Old English into Latin and/or English by Laurence Nowell for the benefit of his students at Cecil House c.1563; Seneca’s plays, the Agamemnon and Troas, translated by members of the Cecil House coterie in the mid-1560s and published by Thomas Newton in 1581. The plot of the play within the play, “the mousetrap,” based on the 1538 murder of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, was still a matter for Court gossip in 1575 when Oxford was traveling from one Italian Court to another. Della Rovere having been Castiglione’s patron for many years, in his youth he formed one of the group whose conversation makes up the major portion of Castiglione’s book, The Courtier, also in Smith’s library in the original Italian (translated into miserable “drab era” English by William Cecil’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Hoby while Oxford was at Cecil House.

While most of Shakespeare’s protagonists can be matched more or less easily to some phase of Oxford’s biography, the version of Hamlet as we have it from the First Folio (1623) seems to be a sort of overview of his entire life, a figure made up of his most personal view of himself, with a plot compounded of the central experiences of his life, the loss of his Earldom through the early death of his father; the loss of the Court Stage through the death of his patron; his troubled marriage; the enemies who were out to shut him up. It is a tragedy much like the one that overtakes Oedipus, the unfolding of a dire situation into which he was born and from which he cannot excape. But unlike Oedipus, whose tragedy turns on his ignorance of the past, Hamlet’s much-vaunted indecision seems more a stoic determination to see how things will play out. Having confirmed what he has guessed by Claudius’s response to the enactment of the murder of Gonzaga, he senses that any further intervention on his part will only make things worse: “Let Hercules himself do what he may; the cat will mew, and dog will have his day.”

Like Hamlet, Oxford was born into a troubled dynasty. It’s clear that his father, the sixteenth earl, though termed “the good earl,” was not up to the task of sustaining a feudal domain that was so obviously doomed by the political and economic forces assailing it. Like Hamlet, Oxford was more interested in literature and science (returning to Wittenberg) than life at Court. Like Hamlet, he was romantically and sexually involved with the daughter of the monarch’s primary court official, Polonius/Burghley. Like Hamlet, he was jealous of her relationship with her father. Like Hamlet, he used the Stage to explain himself to the Court while claiming to entertain it. A thousand years of history had put the Earl of Oxford in the position he was in, one from which his only escape was to create two brand new arenas where he had free rein, the Stage and the Press.

In Hamlet Oxford dramatized his attitude towards William Cecil Lord Burghley, his father-in-law: “he’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps”; his attitude towards his wife, Burghley’s daughter (Ophelia): “be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny”; his bitterness over the Queen’s business-as-usual attitude while the Earl of Sussex was dying: “a beast, that wants discourse of reason would have mourn’d longer”); his disdain for the Earl of Leicester (Claudius): “that incestuous, that adulterate beast”; his astonishment at his brother-in-law’s (Robert Cecil’s) hatred: “What is the reason that you use me thus? I loved you ever”; his disgust at how his unscrupulous friends, Henry Howard and Charles Arundel (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), are conspiring to destroy him: “’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” Only the end differs, but when he first wrote it of course he had no idea how it would end. Nor do we, 400 years later.

One would think that identifying Polonius as Burghley would lead, automatically, to the identity of his daughter, and from her to the identity of her lover/husband, i.e., Hamlet, but one would be wrong, for to the so-called literary critic, history is just another form of literary fiction, something to be trimmed or amplified as needed to fit their theories, leaving the truth to the historians of wars and political coups who, equally culpable, pay no attention to literature. For who but the Earl of Oxford, England’s Lord Great Chamberlain by seventeen generations of inheritance, would have dared to describe the powerful Lord Burghley, the Queen’s Lord Treasurer as a “wretched, rash, intruding fool”––and lived to write again?

Screwing with history

Hamlet is a prime example of how the Lestradian stupidity of the officials in charge of interpreting Shakespeare has skewed the history of an entire era. While Nashe’s 1589 Preface to Greene’s Menaphon gives clear evidence of a version of Hamlet from before that date, this must needs be seen as an “Ur-Hamlet,” written of course by one of their anonymous pre-Shakespearean ghost-writers who provided the lazy Bard with so much of his material. And because no proper niche can be found for Hamlet in current events of the 1590s––where the Stratford biography has forced all dates of composition––nothing can provide anything either personal or popular that might have inspired the playwright to write the play, so the commonplace is that Shakespeare, despite his obvious connection to the Crown’s own company for forty years, never bothered his artistic head with what was going on around him. Thus is historic accuracy set aside, a thing of small importance.

Moving even further from the particular to the general, this has led to a general agreement among the Lestrades of the 20th century English Departments that there is no such thing as a compulsion among, not just Shakespeare, but all the world’s greatest writers of fiction to base their creations on aspects of their own lives. That this won’t work with Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Henri Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Stendahl, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, etc., makes no difference. One must never allow dull reality to get in the way of theory.

Recall George Orwell’s interpretation of “doublethink” and “newspeak” in his 1949 novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four? Recall Lewis Carroll’s White Queen who scoffs at Alice’s inability to believe in the impossible, while she herself has managed to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Recall as well that her creator, Lewis Carroll, that is Charles Dodgson (his real name), was a math professor at Oxford, whence cameth most, perhaps all, of the characters Alice encountered in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Recall Alice’s ultimate response, which we should all take to heart, when she cries out at the end of Looking Glass, “Who cares for you, you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

The play’s the thing

History records that throughout his twenties Oxford was riding high at Court. “The glass of fashion,” he was promoted by Lord Chamberlain Sussex, rapidly assuming the role of Queen’s favorite: (Gilbert Talbot wrote his father May 13, 1573: “My Lord of Oxford is lately grown into great credit, for the Queen’s Majesty delighteth more in his personage and his dancing and valiantness than any other.”) He was the essence of Renaissance nonchalance, of sprezzatura. He refused the Queen’s order to dance for the French envoys. He called Sir Philip Sidney a puppy. He turned the tables on his Catholic friends, Henry Howard and Charles Arundel, for attempting to suck him into dangerous treason plots as they had the Duke of Norfolk. But this ascent came to an abrupt halt when his lover, a Queen’s Maid of Honor, gave birth to his illegitimate son in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, sending the jealous monarch into a prolonged tantrum. Playing the humiliated goddess for all it was worth, the infuriating revelation that her charms were not sufficient to keep her favorites in line meant the Queen must needs turn her erring Actaeon into a villain and sic the hounds upon him.

After two months in the Tower, commiserating with the ghosts of the kings who had preceded him, some perhaps in the very same room in which he found himself; after months of house arrest and an edict banishing him from Court for an indeterminate period, the notion that once back at Fisher’s Folly Oxford would simply sit on his hands for two years while the Queen got over her hissy fit is so unlikely, well, who but the White Queens of the university English Departments could possibly swallow such a notion?

Feeling abused and unappreciated, bored with writing comedies for children to perform for the unappreciative witch on the throne, he threw himself into creating plays for Burbage’s adult team, the kind of plays he would never have dared to produce at Court. Some versions were created primarily for this team to perform for the public at Burbage’s big open air stage in Shoreditch (Romeo and Juliet); some were aimed at provincial audiences (King John, The Spanish Tragedy); most were aimed at the West End audience, the gentlemen of the inns of Court, performed by Burbage’s men on the little stage he and Lord Hunsdon had created in the Blackfriars complex shortly after his return from Italy in 1576.

Hamlet: the backstory

Having been appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household in 1572, the Earl of Sussex had named as his vice-chamberlains Henry Hunsdon, later (1594) the patron of Shakespeare’s Company, and his son-in-law Lord Charles Howard, later (also 1594) the patron of Marlowe’s Company. Sussex was determined to replace Leicester, whom he detested, as leading member of the Privy Council, which meant, among other things, taking the Court Stage under his own jurisdiction, where by long tradition it belonged. The Revels account for the early 1570s suggests that this was when Oxford, backed by Sussex, began providing plays for the various children’s companies to perform during the winter holidays.

A decade later, during the period that Oxford was banished from Court (1581-83) the Earl of Sussex began to weaken from what has since been diagnosed as consumption. As Sussex faded, Walsingham, by then Secretary of State, moved to take control of the Stage before Leicester or one of his clients could take it back. In all of England there was only one playwright who Walsingham could be certain could charm the provincial audiences into backing the Crown against the Spanish Church. For this he had to have Oxford back at Court. History relates that it was Sir Walter Raleigh who persuaded the Queen to allow Oxford to return, though what is more likely is that Raleigh was acting more in Walsingham’s interest than in Oxford’s. If I’m right about the kind of plays he was producing at the Blackfriar’s Theater during his banishment, members of the Privy Council, including Oxford’s father-in-law, may have preferred, as the saying goes, to have the rascal inside the tent pissing out, than outside, pissing in.

Since 1572, when the Pope first issued the bull that guaranteed God’s forgiveness to whoever would rid Christendom of that Whore of Babylon, the heretical Queen of England, Walsingham was preparing for the inevitable attack by the Spanish Armada. Having spent years on the Continent, he was deeply aware (to an extent that Her Majesty and Burghley were not, neither having spent any time abroad), of the inevitability of a military attack. Having had a sophisticated humanist education at Padua, where the Roman theater had never completely died, Walsingham was also aware, as had been Sussex, of the power of the stage to win hearts and minds to a cause, in this case, patriotism over religion––for the coastal towns where the Spanish were certain to strike first, were still largely wedded to the Old Faith.

“But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue”

Oxford had every reason to detest the Earl of Leicester. Not only was he a rival for the Queen’s favor, it was Leicester to whom she had given the use of his estates while he was underage; Leicester who had rudely cheated his mother of her portion of his father’s will while he was still too young and powerless to defend her. While his banishment from Court extended from months to years and his enemies were elevated in importance and allowed to attack him in the streets without reproof, Leicester, who had not only impregnated one of the Queen’s ladies but had married her in secret, was returned to favor while he had still to go about incognito in fear for his life.

From July to the end of October 1582, while he was still under banishment from Court, his brother-in-law (his sister’s husband), 27-year-old Peregrine Bertie (pron. Bartie), aka Lord Willoughby, was in Denmark to bring the Order of the Garter to the Protestant King, returning to England by November. Then again, in 1585, with the renewal of hostilities in the lowlands, Bertie was sent as special ambassador back to Denmark in October to urge the Danish king to contribute aid to the Dutch in their fight against Spain. This took some time. As the DNB puts it: “He filled his spare time with visits to Tycho Brahe’s observatory to examine the new comet the astronomer had just discovered, evidence of an enduring scientific interest.”

Having finally succeeded in getting a promise of troops, Bertie arrived at Amsterdam in March 1586, where Sidney got him a command, ultimately taking over as Commander-in-Chief of the English forces when Leicester departed in December 1587. Oxford and Bertie were friendly enough that Oxford spent time with him and his sister in June 1582 (Nelson 281), and though no letters have turned up, it makes sense that, with Oxford’s interest in the stars, his brother-in-law would have discussed with him what he saw in Denmark after his first four-month visit in 1582, and would have written to him of more recent developments during the five months in 1585 that he waited around at the Danish Court for the King to respond to his request.

This then is the backstory to the first version of Hamlet. Out of the death of Sussex; the unseemly return to favor of the Earl of Leicester whom he and many others suspected (probably unfairly) of having Sussex poisoned; Saxo’s report on the mad prince Amleth of Danish history; the 1538 murder of Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who had certainly been poisoned; his own dilemma with his wife and her family; the interest raised by Thomas Digges’s publication in the mid-1570s of evidence that the universe, rather than bounded by the ancient Ptolemaic nutshell, was actually an infinity of space filled with stars; plus reports from the Danish Court on Tycho Brahe’s observatory, Oxford created the first version of Hamlet, the one mentioned in passing by Nashe in such a way that suggests its popularity as early as 1589.

Returned finally to Court in June 1583, a week before Sussex’s death, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that, contemplete life at Court without his major patron, Milord’s temper on his return was pretty much identical to Hamlet’s as the scene opens at the Danish Court, and that he too continued to dress, and act, as though in mourning. The “inky cloak” that shows Hamlet’s grief over the death of his father, mirrors Oxford’s refusal to show an interest in the holiday festivities that until his banishment had been his primary function at Court.

Just as Hamlet, while preferring to continue his studies at Wittenberg (the reading and translating in which Oxford had been immersed since his return from France and Italy), having yielded to his mother’s wish that he remain at Court, remains disaffected until, inspired by the actors, he creates a play that puts him at risk of assassination. Returned to Court by the efforts of Raleigh and Walsingham, having tasted the freedom of writing what he pleased, Oxford had no intention of churning out the kind of comedies that pleased the Queen. Enrolled by Walsingham in creating history plays that would help to turn the mood of the coastal towns away from religion and towards patriotism, he writes The Troublesome Raigne of King John, launching a series in which, encouraged by Walsingham, Smith’s close friend during their days together in the Secretary’s office, he finally gets to engage with genuine policy issues.

The version of Hamlet that we know from the First Folio is not, of course, the version that Nashe referred to in 1589 in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon with the phrase “whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches,” or even the one Thomas Lodge referred to in 1596, referring to the ghost that cried at the theatre, “like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!” Nor even the one published in 1603, which suggests its publisher, Nicholas Ling, had waited until the Queen was gone.

The one we know is the one published the following year 1604, when the original models for all the principals but Laertes were no longer capable of being wounded. The Hamlet we know was revised from the perspective of later life, in full knowledge of the curve of events, and how “the end crowns all.” If the original “antique Roman” was Rutland, the name Horatio suggests that Hamlet’s plea to tell the truth about his “wounded name, things standing thus unknown,” was directed to his cousin Sir Horatio Vere, who in 1604 was achieving distinction on the battlefields of Europe. But not Sir Horatio, nor any other member of Oxford’s family or audience, had the audacity to broach the subject openly in print, then or for generations after. As Shakespeare put it, “the rest is silence.”