What, can the Devil speak true?

As you no doubt are aware by now, my scenario for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon is not the standard view. The standard view is the one most people have grown up with, the one that sees William of Stratford as the author of the works of Shakespeare, the view backed by university academics, even more so by their supporters, the ones who write most of the articles in response to our questions, and most of all by pop biographers, who, lacking anything substantive, garnish theirs with what they hope are zesty details of life in 16th-century Warwickshire and London.

Ours is so much a better story, why won’t they listen?

For the most part, academics are a very different strain from the artists that they study. If the facts as they are presented don’t add up, they don’t see it because they don’t understand what makes their subject tick. Focused on the trees, they hardly know there is such a thing as the forest. And once having arrived at the pinnacle of Shakespeare studies, the very button on the cap of the Humanities, they are not about to question what lies (pun intended) beneath that pinnacle. One recent literary “historian” got, so we’re told, a million dollar advance on his glossy version of the Stratford myth.

There’s nothing strange about this. In every area of human endeavor there are those who more or less blindly follow tradition and its rules without allowing themselves (or anyone else) to question them. As for Shakespeare, most academics don’t really care who he was; it’s the text that interests them, not the author; as far as they’re concerned, the less about him the better. When, after 300 years of ignoring him, the universities finally accepted his plays as worthy of their attention, they were perfectly happy with the author as presented to posterity by Ben Jonson, the lifeless woolman stuffed into artist clothing, stuck on a pole, his propped arm pointing towards Stratford.

Academics get to the positions of authority they occupy by being well-behaved all through school, getting good grades by giving their mentors the answers they want to hear, then getting them to sign on as advisors on their dissertation committees so they can get their PhDs and all that goes with it. Once tenured, they produce books in which they dedicate their examination of the symbolism of “eye of newt” to these same mentors. By the time they’ve reached a point where thinking for themselves is no longer a threat, they’ve forgotten how, that is, if they ever knew. And if the questions do begin to eat away at the edges of the Stratford myth, they’ve become too committed to Stratford through the books and articles they’ve published to allow them entry. How ironic that Shakespeare’s “alms for oblivion” got nothing better for him than these latter day Holofernes.

They get away with it by ignoring the big arguments––like why there’s nothing in this supposed great writer’s handwriting but six clumsy legal signatures––while focusing on details. For instance they defend the Stratford story by saying, “contrary to authorship views, there’s more than enough evidence that William Shakespeare wrote the works.” What they mean by this is that the name Shakespeare is on various title pages, while documents in Stratford testify that someone of that name lived and died there and sued his neighbors. What they don’t tell you is that there is nothing solid to connect the title pages with the man who lived in Stratford. Or with the man who spent a few months in rented quarters in two different neighborhoods in London. Or with Jonson’s Sogliardo. Nothing times a thousand still equals nothing.

The ultimate irony of course is the obvious fact that we need the academics. Or, perhaps I should say that we need authorship scholars in academia. The excruciating amount of time, effort, and money it takes to track down documentation in the English libraries and archives requires that this be taken on by professionals, either backed by a university or by patrons who are not seeking some particular result. How many archived references to the Earl of Oxford have academics ignored since the authorship question first raised its annoying head a century and a half ago? How many during the century before that, since he was not the focus of their inquiry? Until the universities open their doors to the question or enough disinterested, deep-pocketed patrons appear, we must struggle along with only our God-given common sense and what facts have slipped past, first the 16th and 17th-century censors, and now the Stratfordian defense.

We also have another sort of adversary. Almost as much of a barrier as the academic who has no understanding of artists or interest in a realistic biography is the Oxfordian who has no understanding of history. If we do not honor the truths of history, if we continue to be enchanted by soap opera fantasies that do violence to genuine historical and psychological truth, we will never gain the respect of the History departments, who realistically are the only ones in any position to do the necessary research, since the English departments simply don’t care.

How was it he put it? “If circumstances lead me, I will find where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed within the center.”

Amen to that.

The Rule of Law: Jude Law IS Hamlet

During a three month London adventure in 1999, I got (thanks to Dan Wright) the opportunity to see Jude Law in John Ford’s T’is Pity She’s a Whore at the Young Vic. Impressed by Law’s ability to express the most intense anguish, I’ve been hoping ever since, first, that he’d do Hamlet (instead of one lame movie role after another) and second, that I’d be able to see him do it. Both wishes just came true: not only has Jude Law done Hamlet, but (once again, due to the kindness of friends) I got to see him do it on Broadway! And I was right. What a Hamlet!

Hamlet is tricky, even for the best actors. It’s become such a museum piece, there are so many famous sililoquies, every avid Shakespeare fan has a favorite performance to which they match each new approach, so that watching the play runs the risk of turning into a sort of Olympics of the Stage, where the actor playing Hamlet is not so much enjoyed as he is rated, in the same way that Olympic figure skaters get rated during their performance, feat by feat, by TV commentators.

Law sweeps this away with the utter naturalness of his style. Sililoquies flow from him as easily as he greets his old school friends or rants at Ophelia. Shakespeare’s 400-year-old language runs as trippingly off his tongue as if it were his own most natural form of expression, yet there’s none of that jack-hammer rat-a-tat-tat that some use when reciting Shakespeare, apparently in an effort to spew out the bloody awkward stuff the way they do their own native slang.

I think this is largely because Jude Law is as much a dancer as he is an actor. He expresses the beautiful but strange language as much with his body as he does with his voice. Together the two, the voice and the body, create a satisfyingly complete whole in a way that I can’t remember ever seeing before. Anger possesses him utterly. Anguish torments every fibre. How perfectly Shakespeare has captured these emotions in words and how perfectly Law renders them, his gestures flowing, not from the words themselves, but from the emotions they are meant to express. Today, thanks to television, we have all seen, over and over, how real people respond to disasters or the deaths of people they love, and so we can’t help but know how at such moments, words failing, it’s the body that reacts. With his dancer’s sense of timing, Law also knows how to pause before reacting, something many actors either never learn or tend to forget in production. It’s such an energetic performance, I can’t imagine how he can do it, not only night after night, but twice on matinee days.

Unfortunately there’s little good to be said for the rest of the production. Law’s gutsy approach was not echoed by a single other member of the cast. Apart from the King, who did prove a strong and convincing match to Hamlet’s energy, the rest simply entered, exited, stood or walked about as though waiting for something exciting to happen. Horatio was particularly disappointing, less an antique Roman than a pool hall shark. The set and lighting are good, providing some interesting accents to the action, but the costumes, modern suits in shades of gray, not only disappear into the gray walls and black floor of the castle set, but seem totally out of place. With no chairs or benches to relieve the need to stand, what group of twenty-first century people would choose to spend more than a minute or two in this cold, empty, castle foyer?

Now that my wishes have been fulfilled I have a new one, that Jude Law will repeat his performance on film, with costumes and sets that match, a Horatio whose body language speaks of his strength and dependability , a sober Gertrude who knows deep down right from the beginning that she’s damned, so that her son has only to remind her of it, and . . . and . . . oh, Michael Palin and Terry Jones as the gravediggers! Hey, let’s shoot for the moon!

Unfortunately when it comes to Ophelia, it seems the role is unplayable. Since it’s very likely that the Countess of Montgomery had a say in the publication of the First Folio, she could well have had something to say about the final version of her own mother’s unhappy fate and death. For whatever reason it seems impossible for any young actress (or director) to actually bring her to life, at least, I’ve never seen it done. With Jude Law directing, maybe we could see an Ophelia who really cuts loose. Wishes do sometimes come true.

Shakespeare’s patrons-who were they?

Born as the crest of two waves, the German Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, crashed into each other, the great poet and playwright blended these two often incompatible energies into the culture that has been England’s ever since. Under the constraints of the Reformation, the passions that went into painting, sculpture, and architecture in the Southern European Renaissance, in England went into language: a bare stage, good costumes, superb actors, and the great human stories we know as Shakespeare, stories whose sources are to be found in the libraries where the Earl of Oxford spent his childhood.

Oxford’s development and survival as an artist was largely due to his patrons, surely among the best a writer ever had. He sank low at times, but not so low that he ever had to quit writing, at least, not for long. One of the most important research projects remaining to be done is on these patrons. Burghley, Sussex, Walsingham, Hunsdon, Charles Howard, Southampton, the Pembroke brothers, are the leading figures, but there were others as well who contributed to his survival in various ways. Even when they were disgusted with him, as Hunsdon must have been when the bum took up with his mistress, they kept him afloat because they knew his value. For the great ministers of that time who had the dreams and aspirations of both Italian and Reformation humanism alive within, he was the great instrument of their policy, though this would be fully realized only when he was gone, as so well expressed by Ben Jonson in his dedicatory Ode in the First Folio.

Historically Oxford’s role in Early Modern theater is as a patron, a role that tends to get lost in the argument over his role as a writer, but his involvement as patron of the arts and sciences went a good deal deeper than what shows on the historical surface. He patronized musicians and composers as well as other writers, and was praised by them as one of themselves. When looking for a model for Oxford within our own times, the composer and pianist Leonard Bernstein comes to mind, an entertainment genius of the same all-encompassing nature, only, shall we say, considerably less fearful of recognition.

One question that hasn’t been dealt with yet, so far as I know, has to do with the company maintained by Oxford’s father. Were they, perchance, the one we know as Leicester’s Men in the 1560s? When Earl John died in 1562, Elizabeth gave Leicester control of the Oxford estates. Though there’s no sign of it (so far) in the record, that could mean that he inherited what had been the sixteenth Earl’s acting company? Unlike our world today, the arts community was very small. Leicester’s Men were a handful of Court actors, some the same men who later became the core of the company that called themselves Hunsdon’s Men and operated out of Burbage’s Theater, just up the street from Fisher’s Folly. Were some of these the same men who, decades earlier, had performed John Bale’s King Johan in Ipswich in 1561, just prior to the Queen’s entertainment at Hedingham Castle? It’s worth considering.

Why the cover-up continued after Oxford’s death

John Shahan pushed me hard in his comment on my response to Alex McNeil’s question. Sometimes an exchange that follows a blog gets lost in the drift, but this is too important to let that happen, so I’ll respond here to some of his more pertinent points. If you missed it in full, it follows Alex’s question.

John: Why was the cover-up maintained after his death? It’s a separate question that you haven’t answered. It’s a good question, and one that many people ask when they come to the controversy for the first time. We should have a good answer at the ready, and providing an explanation of why he would have kept hidden during his lifetime doesn’t cut it. It sounds evasive to answer a question other than the one that was asked.

I wasn’t being evasive, I was being too general. His authorship would have been kept a secret after his death for exactly the same reasons that it was kept a secret during his lifetime, the same reasons that all the covers he used throughout his life remained in place, the same reasons that Mary Sidney’s descendents never revealed all she wrote or that Francis Bacon never revealed himself as a “hidden poet.” And for some of the same reasons that got Christopher Marlowe murdered or transported.

If I got lost providing background it’s because it’s so difficult for people today to understand the realities of Shakespeare’s time. However, there is one that might stand out a little better than most: namely the fact that so many of his characters satirized respected and high ranking members of the Court community, some portrayed as buffoons, some involved in scandalous love affairs, some even accused of murder! That they might possibly be identified with these infamous characters would have had these highly status conscious people, their retainers and descendants, in a real tizzy.

As long as William of Stratford was known as the author, the originals of these characters were protected, but had the Pembrokes and the Kings Men revealed the truth about the authorship they would have had an extremely serious situation on their hands. This is one of the reasons why the publication of Oxford’s collected plays took as long as it did. It had to wait until the Earl of Pembroke achieved the Court position where he finally had the power to take the matter of its publication into his own hands, overpassing the wishes of some who would have preferred that everything Oxford ever wrote be destroyed.

Most agree that Polonius was a demeaning portrait of Lord Burghley, something that would certainly have been as obvious to members of the Elizabethan Court community as it is to us today. If, as I believe, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and other of his more serious and philosophical plays were written, not for the Court or the public, but for his Inns of Court audience, it could mean that Elizabeth never saw them, or if she did, not in the versions that we know from the First Folio. Thus it’s possible that Burghley never saw himself derided as Polonius, or his daughter portrayed as a lunatic and a suicide. For who would tell him? There were no newspapers, so there were no reviews. All publication was tightly controlled. By whom? By Lord Burghley.

Were it ever to become public that it was the Earl of Oxford who had created these popular characters––so popular that they made the Lord Chamberlain’s-King’s Men a fortune––how long do you think it would have taken the public audience to connect Oxford’s father-in-law with Polonius, his wife with Ophelia, his political adversary the Earl of Leicester with Claudius, or his Queen with Gertrude? How long to connect Richard III with Robert Cecil, Mildred Burghley with Volumnia in Coriolanus, Southampton with the Fair Youth, Philip Sidney with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Emilia Bassano with Cleopatra, and so forth.

Oxford’s own daughters were the daughters of Ophelia, the granddaughters of Polonius. That, plus the fact that his youngest had married a Pembroke, shows that however you look at the cover-up, by 1615 when Pembroke finally got the office of Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, putting him officially in charge of the Court Stage and the King’s Men, publication of the First Folio was as much a family affair as it was a literary event. Pembroke wanted the plays published, but he also wanted to protect his family and his community from scandal and, not least, himself from the odium that would be inevitable were he to allow these connections to be revealed.

If it’s a good talking point you’re after, maybe this will do. Yet even here we run into the problem of readers not understanding enough about the period to get it. Again the main problem is our inability to grasp how small were these communities, and how static. Where our communities today consist of thousands, many of whom are no more to us than names, theirs consisted of a dozen, two dozen names, in positions that may have changed only once or twice over a lifetime. During Elizabeth’s reign the number of peers went from 60 to 25! Our communities are in continual flux; as one worker, neighbor, merchant leaves for greener pastures, retirement, or intensive care., another takes their place. The only way that things changed in Oxford’s time was through death.

We can say these things, but do they sink in? Do we really understand what it meant to live in what to us would seem intolerable constriction while under the constant threat of death for ourselves, our children, our loved ones, whether by disease (no doctors) or by violence (no police)? Added to the equation must be their ignorance of science, of medicine, even of their own history––a problem that Oxford’s history plays were intended to address.

The closest thing we have to their peers, their kings, queens, earls and countesses, knights and ladies, are celebrities. Of these we have so many that, as happened a few days ago, I can see someone introduced to an audience on television, an audience of cheering thousands, as one who has sold millions of platinum records and received a cartload of important awards, someone I’d never heard of before. And while their handful of important persons changed only when one died and was replaced by another, ours are continually changing, usually simply by disappearing into anonymity, beauty queens into middle-aged matrons, sports stars into businessmen, some onto the pages of history, a history already jammed with names and faces.

The problem isn’t only of numbers and stasis, it’s one of attitude. We have no respect for our celebrities. Largely due to their numbers, their lack of background, the ephemeral nature of their importance, they seem to exist largely as vessels for our scorn. Their very renown calls forth efforts to bring them down, to expose them, to show the world their weaknesses. These Elizabethan celebrities had no photographers with telephoto lenses to catch them with their pants down, they were known to their people only from a dignified distance, dressed in crimson, ermine, and gold, or from copies of stately portraits. Descended from the heroes of past glories, they came as close to living gods and goddesses as humans could. Their lessers might hate them and blame them for hard times, but they did not, they simply could not, disrespect them.

When Shakespeare came along and revealed these gods and goddesses as human beings with problems and weaknesses like themselves and their neighbors it was fascinating, yet for all their speculation, they did not know, they could not know, how closely based they were on the real thing. To have known who among those distant and admired figures were the real models of these fools and villains was simply more information than the culture could bear. As a general statement, that may be putting it a little too strongly, but not by much.

John: Lots of authors use pseudonyms to conceal their identities during their lifetimes without the cover-up continuing after they die. So why was Oxford different?

Lots? Who? Who of Oxford’s social stature? Who in his time, or the time before his, or the time after his? Not all statements have to be substantiated, but this is crucial. Who else of his status in the Elizabethan era published works of the imagination under his (or her) own name? I don’t know of a single one.

John: There’s a difference between knowledge and belief, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we fail to make the distinction. That’s what Stratfordians do.

Having repeated this twice I assume you’re taking me to task for making unsupported statements. I’ve made it clear from the start that my purpose with this blog is to provide a scenario that accounts for what facts we have, not just a few here and there, clustered around one or two circumstances (such as the writing of the Sonnets), but as many as possible. I did a lot of substantiating of statements while I was editing The Oxfordian. That was important, but this, however different, is just as important.

We’ve had most of the facts on Oxford for decades, and where have they gotten us? Facts are to story as flour, water, salt and yeast are to bread; the ingredients, not the thing itself. We can eat bread, we can’t eat flour, water, salt and yeast. Creating a story out of facts is like mixing, kneading, and finally, baking. We are not inventing the bread, what form it takes depends solely on the ingredients. All we’re doing is assembling them, giving them a thump or two, and letting them rise into a living story.

To be convinced, hearts must be touched as well as minds, something that can’t be be done without characters and a plot. What’s most real about us are not the facts of our lives, but our stories. To understand the past, we need more than dates of battles, we need heroes and villains, tyrants and underdogs, damsels in distress. Without these, the audience leaves at intermission. No one understood this better than Shakespeare.

There’s another reason for what I’m doing. The Stratford bio as generated by Ben Jonson and others has sent generations of Shakespeare enthusiasts on an utterly fruitless 400-year-old wild goose chase through the archives in search of something that will reveal a believable Shakespeare story. While true stories must be based on facts, it’s also the case that the search for facts will go off-track quickly if there isn’t a logical scenario in place directing it where to look. How do we get such a scenario? By doing what I’m doing, filling in the blank areas with informed guesswork.

Hopefully there will be some, or at least one, who’s located close enough to the relevant archives who gets sufficiently intrigued by what I’m proposing to begin looking where I’m pointing. Centuries of investigators have read the letters of Burghley, Walsingham, Alleyn, Pembroke, and others, looking for something, anything, about Shakespeare. Nothing anywhere near this scale has yet been done for Oxford. Who knows what he or she will find once they begin to look?

The Fight for the Court Stage

The Court Stage fell under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain of the Household. A sort of super-butler in charge of everything “above stairs,” he was important enough to be guaranteed a seat on the Privy Council. Elizabeth’s first Lord Chamberlain, Lord Admiral William Howard of Effingham, an inheritance from her sister’s reign, was not only kept on but was given several lucrative posts by the grateful Queen: a close relative, he had been her staunchest protector on Mary’s Privy Council. Later, his oldest son, Charles Howard, would play an even more significant role at Elizabeth’s Court as Lord Admiral, Privy Councillor, and patron of the company that made Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn superstars.

It was the Lord Chamberlain’s job to decide what kind of entertainment to provide for each event, great and small, daily or for grand occasions, and to make sure that they went off smoothly. If properly used it could be a powerful political tool since it was the nearest equivalent to a Royal Public Relations office. Such may not have been to Howard’s taste, however, for from her coronation, Elizabeth had allowed her favorite, Lord John Dudley, to have charge of it.

How much Dudley was actually involved with the entertainers, most of whom were also inherited from previous reigns, remains to be seen. He was probably much more involved with the military aspects of his duties as Master of the Horse. We can guage what kind of entertainments he favored while he was in charge by the bash he threw at Kennilworth in 1575 (the summer that Oxford was away in Italy)––lots of old-fashioned masking with skits where actors pretending to be spirits came out of the woods to sing or recite long dull poems to the Queen filled with lavish comparisons to goddesses along with the not so subtle suggestion that she ought to marry Leicester.

Oxford’s earliest contributions to Court entertainment most likely consisted of musical numbers and interludes, brief comic turns that led one song or dance to the next for the various children’s companies to perform on holidays. These, the Children of the Windsor Chapel, the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, and Paul’s Boys, were the Queen’s favorite performers. Each little troop consisted of eight to twelve boys whose chief job during Catholic times had been to sing the Royal Mass, but who were also taught by their masters to dance and enact “dumb shows” (pantomimes) and comic “interludes” for special occasions. Both the London prep schools performed plays as well, sometimes for the Court.

Enter the Earl of Sussex

But Leicester’s (Dudley’s) control of the Court Stage was threatened when the Earl of Sussex took over as Lord Chamberlain. History ignores this, as it ignores most of Stage history, but we can be certain that Sussex was determined to return jurisdiction over the Court Stage to his office, that of Lord Chamberlain, where it belonged by long tradition. Leicester and Sussex had hated each other for years, and neither was going to let the other have any more power than he could help. As noted by McMillin and Maclean: “What happened to Leicester’s Men after 1574, when they would seem to have had the future in their hands, is one of the mysteries of theater history. Leicester’s Men lost their dominance at Court during the middle 1570s. . . .” (15). I hope to take a close look at some point at the probable scenario behind this mystery.

In any case, to facilitate his effort to resume the office that was his by tradition, I believe that Sussex invited Oxford, well known to him from the 1569 war with the border earls, to expand his contributions to Court entertainment to include full scale plays and probably also concerts, dances, and poetry readings. As a result, 1573-79 was certainly Oxford’s heyday at Court. By 1579 he would have been writing for both the boys and for the adult actors who in five years would be heading the Queen’s Men. They were termed Leicester’s Men in the record books, but in reality at this early time they were simply the actors who provided most of the adult entertainment at Court.

Literary historians have been limited by their adherence to the names of acting companies, derived from their patrons. To see the reality it’s necessary, whenever possible, to look past the names to the individual actors, particularly the lead actors, their patrons, and the always changing circumstances. The continual focus on the company names by historians has caused no end of confusion. History is made by individuals, not names.

Enter Walsingham

In 1581, shortly after the winter holiday season, the Queen banished Oxford from her “Presence” for getting her Maid of Honor pregnant and (not least) attempting to escape to Spain. This left no one to write the witty holiday plays that she had come to expect. The various children’s companies, some from local schools, filled in that December with old plays and material by their masters––Gurr calls it “the quiet season of 1581-82” (Companies 175)––but everyone involved in Court entertainment knew something had to be done to improve the situation before the next holiday season rolled around. Since that was about the time that Sussex began to fail, Walsingham, the Queen’s Principal Secretary, may have already have begun to consider a solution.

Walsingham was living at that time at The Papey, a manor just inside the Bishopsgate Wall and just around the corner from Fisher’s Folly on the other side of the City Wall. Plans to create a Crown company, the Queen’s Men, came to light early in 1583, but, like most things, they would have originated earlier, possibly from conversations between Oxford and Walsingham at The Papey, at Fisher’s Folly, or even at The Pye, the inn that lay between the two houses.

This was the period when Walsingham was beginning to get special funding for the anti-papist campaign he and Burghley were urging on the Queen and Parliament. New funds would have enabled him to privide Oxford with money to hire secretaries and apprentices. This would explain why these writers, later known to literary history as “the University Wits,” dedicated their works to Francis Walsingham, calling him their Maecenas, a traditional term for a patron. From the Wits at the Folly Walsingham hoped would come plays both for the children’s companies to entertain the Queen, and for the Queen’s Men to take on the road as a public relations maneuver, winning hearts and minds in advance of the attack from Catholic Spain that he knew was coming (McMillin).

With fears of the newborn commercial theaters rising among Church and City officials, with the excitement surging through the acting community from the power this was giving them, Walsingham may have feared that he was about to ride the whirlwind. A nervous man, in constant pain from an ulcer or other painful condition, his need to keep everything as hidden as possible has also hidden the courage with which, much like Churchill three centuries later, he faced one of England’s most crucial showdowns with Continental power.

Why was it so hard to protect the newborn commercial stage? Why such need for secrecy? Read on.