Shakespeare’s hardy audience

To understand a person, or a people
it helps to know what childhood was like for them and how family relationships were formed. According to Lawrence Stone, author of The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977), 16th-century English family relationships tended to be weak, that is, weak in real relationships, bound by genuine love and affection. The social group of most importance was the extended family, the community. Personal relationships were submerged in this wider group to an extent we see today only in a few isolated communities like the Amish or the Hasidim. That these communities were often spread over a wide area, particularly on the higher levels, and considering the difficulties of travel then, that relatives might go years without seeing each other in person adds to the picture of a collection of emotionally cool relationships, connected by blood and self interest but little else.

If the Elizabethans were a hardy lot, withstanding the plague, malaria, wars, duels, the little Ice Age, and a diet that, except in summer, consisted of beef, bread and beer, it may be because the harsh treatment they recieved in infancy and childhood eliminated the weakest at the outset. The death rate among infants and children was so high that it was not unusual for a woman to have anywhere from eight to twelve children in hopes that two or three might live to maturity. If now and then this meant that so many lived that the parents went bankrupt raising, educating, and marrying them properly, it may have seemed less of a risk to dynastic-minded 16th-century parents than the disaster of leaving no progeny at all.

Birth was a dangerous passage for both mother and baby, due to the ever present threat of childbed fever, hemmorage, or both weakened by her poor diet and restrictive clothing. Once past that hurdle the infant had another series of trials to overcome before there could be any assurance of its survival. Immediately after birth it was placed with a wet nurse, often a poor woman who took in more than one baby. It would be she who would see to its care for the first year or two (81). Standard procedure was to keep the infant “swaddled,” that is, tightly wrapped in strips of fabric and bound to a board so it could not move its arms or legs (161). The board could be laid flat or hung up on a peg, where the poor creature remained until its nurse had time to feed or wash it.

Once weaned and potty-trained, it was returned to its parental home where it was consigned to a nursery along with its siblings or perhaps a cousin or two in the care of a nanny, most likely an unpaid member from a lower rung of the extended family rather than, as would be true in later centuries, a hired nurse or governess. Here the child had little more than a passing acquaintance with its parents, whose busy lives prevented them from anything more than an occasional visit during which the children were expected to perform as before a panel of judges.

At seven or eight they were considered too old for the nursery, and so would be placed outside the home, the boys with a tutor, or a family that provided a tutor, the girls with a family who used her like a little servant (167). While boys received some education, education for girls depended on the nature of the surrogate family. Both boys and girls so placed were expected to serve the household in some capacity, whatever their rank. The purpose of this placement was to enlarge the all important network of relationships with families higher on the social scale. This was meant to guarantee both children and parents some degree of social advancement.

This is not to say that these surrogate families were necessarily cruel, in fact, they might have been kinder than the child’s own parents, who, according to Stone, apparently thought it proper to present the sternest possible surface towards their offspring. Children were trained to give their parents almost idolatrous respect, addressing them with a ritual greeting, kneeling before them to ask their blessing (171). Nor was this something that parents were in any way ashamed of, since displays of affection were thought to give children the dangerous idea that they could do as they pleased. To this end they were flogged, sometimes brutally, on a regular basis, by governesses, parents, and schoolmasters, that the sins they were born with be driven out of them before they got too old for correction (163). The famous book, The Scholemaster, by Roger Ascham, was written following a discussion over a goup of boys who had recently run away from an over-zealous schoolmaster.

In families of property, the oldest boy, the one who would inherit the family titles and estates, got the most attention, with some going to the second oldest, in case the oldest should die. This hierarchy was impressed on the others, who were taught to give their oldest brother the same kind of respect they gave their parents, resulting in relationships fraught with jealousy and envy (156). If, as often happened, the father died before the heir reached maturity, he (or where there were no sons, she) became the property of the Court of Wards, to be sold to the highest bidder, who had full use of his estates until he came of age, by which time he or she often found themselves married, will they nill they, to their guardian’s son or daughter (182).

Although Stone ignores the possible connection between these behaviors and the policies and beliefs of the Reformation, we can’t help but wonder if the notion of original sin didn’t have a great deal to do with their harsh treatment of their children. Born in sin, it seems as though it was up to the little sinner whether or not he or she had the chutzpah to survive to adulthood. The beatings and constant lectures sound like one more outcome of the soul-deadening regime imported from Geneva. As much evidence shows, these processes left the nation’s children vulnerable to mistreatment of the worse sort, suggesting a society plagued by the kind of asocial griefs and horrors later dramatized by John Webster and John Ford.

When we contrast this with the childhood we envision for the Earl of Oxford, surrounded at birth and for the following four years by a community of adoring females, followed by eight years with a man who, if perhaps no more demonstrative than anyone else in his time, was clearly humane in his dealings with students and his own family, we have some ground for understanding the source of the joie de vivre, the sheer joy of living, that shines through his lighter works, and can better understand how gratefully audiences turned to his early comedies after the depressingly grim efforts of his immediate predecessors.

Oxford’s career

Its almost as though Fate arranged events so that Oxford’s early years would lead to his particular achievement. Having been tutored for eight years by the nation’s top Greek scholar, a renowned orator who owned in the original Greek the ancient poets Pindar and Homer and the ancient dramatists Sophocles and Euripides, this was followed by several years in London at Cecil House with Lawrence Nowell, the scholar who rediscovered Anglo-Saxon by reading polyglot manuscripts in both Old English and Latin. During his early years in the country with Smith, Oxford had come to know country folk of every description, hearing their tales and learning what made them laugh, and after Cecil House came a decade at the royal Court where he experimented with poems, madrigals and stories performed by the choristers from Paul’s Cathedral, interspersed by a year in Italy where the Comedia dell’Arte was just blooming and Andrea Palladio was experimenting with the accoustics of round theaters made of wood.

Not only was Smith fluent in Greek, he was famous at Cambridge for his ability to recite passages out of Homer and other works in Greek and Latin. Surely he would have been pleased to recite some of these for his little student’s benefit during the years when, exiled from Court, he had nothing else to do. Thus we can assume that, not only was Oxford able to read these works himself as he got older, he knew from very early how they sounded to the ear, having benefitted by his tutor’s recitations. Smith would also have required that de Vere memorize some of these himself, for memorizing such works was the standard method in those days for teaching ethics and manners as well as style and grammar.

While with Smith, de Vere’s quest for interesting and exciting stories helped drive him to learn the languages in which they were buried as quickly as possible so he could read them for himself. No doubt his rapid facility pleased his tutor, but it may also have caused him concern, for extraordinary abilities in the young were considered prodigies (like the hair and teeth ascribed to Richard III at birth) and as such could be seen by the ignorant as machinations of the Devil. It seems that, as a boy, Smith had taught himself in much the same way, so his brilliant little student could not have had a more understanding or supportive tutor. However, having invested so many years in the boy’s education, and having no interest in performance art himself, Smith must have been dismayed by the uses to which his star pupil was putting his education at a Reformation Court where having too much fun was frowned upon.

Oxford was living with his tutor at Ankerwycke during the years Smith was renovating Hill Hall in Essex, something that those who have studied its architecture ascribe in part to the Roman architect Vitruvius, whose book (in four languages: Latin, French, Italian and Spanish) is listed in Smith’s 1566 library list, and in which the ancient genius describes how sound can be amplified in round theaters made of wood. One of Smith’s friends was the explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, while one of his students was that historian of exploration, Richard Eden. Smith’s knowledge of the Law, Roman history, distilling, horticulture, medicine and hawking are also reflected in Shakespeare’s works.

Arriving at Cecil House at age twelve, Oxford was immersed in the excitement over translating into English important works in Latin and French for William Cecil’s campaign to educate the English in the ideals of the Reformation. The young students from the nearby London law colleges who were doing these translations were also translating tales from Boccaccio, plays by Seneca, Ariosto and Machiavelli, and poetry by Petrarch, Ronsard, and Tasso. This they did for each other, not for Cecil, whose interest in literature did not extend beyond Latin interpretations of Calvinist doctrine. Of course Oxford joined in. A poet by nature, a patron of the arts by heritage, what else would he have done?

Surely one of his first acts as a patron was to arrange for the results of these translations of Renaissance artistry in the first of the anthologies that began to appear at that time: Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, published in 1565. Included were stories related by Herodotus, Boccaccio, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Aelian, Livy, Tacitus, Quintus Curtius, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, Matteo Bandello, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, and Queen Marguerite de Navarre, most of them found in either Smith’s or Cecil’s library, and from which in coming years he would take many of the plots and characters for his comedies and dramas. The sources for both his English and Roman histories were also to be found in Smith’s library, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans in several languages, Edward Halle’s history of the Wars of the Roses, plus all of the original sources that went into creating Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Birth of the London Stage

His plays were too popular to contain within the walls of the Court. A public bereft of its traditional mummings and processions by a harsh Reformation government was hungry for entertainment, so during the 1570s his plays began to escape the Court by way of the choristers, who, after performing them for the Queen, would head back to the little stage at Paul’s Cathedral to perform them for Londoners for several weeks throughout the winter holiday. The young choristers at Paul’s had been playing for the public for some years before Oxford got to London. They were the first to perform plays at Elizabeth’s Court, replacing the masques that were her chief entertainment during those early years in the 1560s.

Like other noblemen of his rank, Oxford’s father had maintained a corps of musicians and actors who entertained his friends and constituents in other parts of his domain, and probably also at Court. When he died, these actors and musicians had to find work elsewhere. It’s possible that some of them ended up with the Earl of Leicester who had been given by the Queen, via the Court of Wards, the use of the Oxford estates while de Vere was underage, so that the company that’s gone down in history as the first to be identified in Elizabeth’s reign, Leicester’s Men, may have included at least one or two actors who had once been members of the 16th earl’s retinue.

The evolution of his style

The earliest evidences of Oxford’s style are, if not all of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then those parts that appear later in Shakespeare, and Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, published around the same time, where the similarities in style are so close to the Ovid that that alone should claim it for the same author. The translations of Ariosto’s I Suppositi as The Supposes, which appears later as the sub-plot in Merchant of Venice, and Jocasta, a translation of a French translation of Euripides’s The Phoeniciae, also has echoes in Shakespeare. Poems like “Framed at the front of forlorn hope” or “Fain would I sing but fury makes me fret” from his mid-teens, reveal the kind of verse that was popular when he first came to Cecil House.

Unlike others writing then, Oxford dares to vary the numbing drumbeat of the traditional fourteen-syllable iambic line by adding or removing syllables. Traces of the euphuism that will peak in the late ’70s with his Euphues novels can be heard in the introductory verse to Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, published, probably by Oxford, in 1563. Later, in searching for a style that could match or equal the styles of the Spanish, French and Italians, he and the other creators of the English Literary Renaissance would experiment widely, not only with versification and syntax, but with every other aspect of style.

Because the academics are so clueless when it comes to understanding the rebellious, anti-establishment nature of the dawning ELR (Elizabethan Literary Renaissance), they not only fail to see their need for anonymity, they fail to understand their efforts to develop, not a recognizable style, as would later writers, but in their efforts to hide their identities, a flexibility of style, even a variety of styles. In our hunt for the truth behind the pseudonyms, the initials, and the proxies, we must dig deeper than surface characteristics to the personalities, the beliefs, themes, passions, hatreds, that motivate an individual’s creativity. Just as it can be difficult to discern the difference between a late Mozart and early Beethovan, it can be difficult to separate one voice from another, and indeed, one writer’s early voice from his or her later voice (Yes, her––Mary Sidney was a founding member of this crew of ELR instigators) or even, as in Bacon’s case, from one pseudonym to another. By his early twenties Oxford’s style had evolved to the kind of poetry found in his Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and his introductory poem to Bedingfield’s Cardanus Comfort. Clearly he had moved away from the incessant alliteration of the 1560s and was broadening his language.

With the return to England of his cousin Francis Bacon in 1578, Oxford was glad to help the eighteen-year-old get started by publishing his Shepherd’s Calender, under the pseudonym Immerito, the kind of insider’s pastoral portrait of the literary community of the Court he would continue to produce during his youth as The Faerie Queene, both later attributed to a government functionary off in the wilds of southern Ireland named Edmund Spenser. Calling himself E.K., Oxford beefed up the slender volume with a lengthy “gloss,” a running commentary on Bacon’s characters, language, style and archaic words. When this is compared with his introduction to works he published by his friends, Clerke’s Latin translation of The Courtier and Bedingfield’s English translation of Cardan’s Comfort, it’s clearly the same voice.

There are touches of the elaborate style that will come to be known as euphuism in these early works that will increase until they hit a peak with his Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit, a romanticized version of Oxford’s adventures in Italy, published in 1578 and attributed to his secretary, John Lyly, followed two years later by Euphues His England, also attributed to Lyly. Oxford did not invent euphuism, it came to him from several sources, but it had become a fad at Court, where much like the later phenomenon of préciosité at the Court of Louis XIV, courtiers attempted to converse with each other in the kind of witty figures of speech that he came close to parodying in Euphues, and several earlier works like Pettie’s Petite Pallace, attributed to George Pettie, possibly his former classmate at Oxford, and Zelauto, a dry run for Euphues, which he attributed to another secretary, Anthony Munday.

Euphuism was such a hit that when the children performed for the Queen at Christmas in the 1570s, they were expected to speak in this style, so when Oxford was banished from Court for impregnating Ann Vavasor, I believe that Francis Walsingham, then Secretary of State, gave Bacon the task of providing these plays. Despite his stylistic flexibility, euphuism did not come easily to Francis, whose tendency to ramble was the antithesis of the rapid twists and thrusts of Oxford’s euphuism.

The plots and characters of plays like Campaspe and Endymion were based, like the plots and characters of The Faerie Queene, on Court gossip. Distressing reactions by the Queen had taught those in charge of her entertainment that although she enjoyed seeing her Court portrayed in a humorous and gently teasing way, if a playwright crossed the line her anger could be deadly, so holiday plays had to be written by someone not only well-versed in insider gossip, which someone like John Lyly was not, but sensitive enough to know where and how to draw the line. Such a writer was Francis Bacon.

Enough comedies!

While exiled from Court in the early 1580s for his affair with Ann Vavasor, Oxford, now based at Fisher’s Folly in Shoreditch, turned away from euphuism, child actors, and Court comedies to create philosophical and political works for Burbage’s adult actors to perform before the audience that meant the most to him, the “gentlemen” of the Inns of Court, the lawyers and parliamentarians located in the West End. For them he wrote early versions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, and Coriolanus, all of which touched on issues that were important to his audience, his patrons, and to him personally. These he produced at the little school theater he and his patron, Lord Hunsdon, had built in the Liberty of Blackfriars, just over the City Wall from the West End.

This, his first quantum leap in style, was motivated by anger at the Queen and Leicester and rebellion toward the Cecils. Possibly excepting the 1603 quarto of Hamlet, none of these early versions are still in existence today. A clue to his style of the time is The Spanish Tragedy, later ascribed to Thomas Kyd, probably one of his secretaries at that time. Several scholars have detailed its similarities to Hamlet.

With his return to the Court in 1583, sponsored by the new Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham, Oxford developed another style, one that could communicate more easily with provincial audiences. Walsingham’s need for plays that the newly formed Queen’s Men could take to the coastal communities where it was feared that Catholics might welcome the Spanish, gathering to attack, spurred early versions of what became Shakespeare’s history plays. Again, we know most of these only from their later versions, but the early quarto of Henry V, known as The Famous Victories, can give us a sense of their original style, along with two that never made it into publication. These were Thomas of Woodstock, the prequel to Richard II, and Edmund Ironside (aka “War hath made all friends”) which portrays the struggle of one of England’s earliest kings against the Danish invaders.

Also in the late 1570s and early 1580s Oxford began publishing stories modeled on Boccaccio and Greek romances. Some he published as by George Pettie, some as by Thomas Lodge, most as by “Robert Greene,” these inexpensive paperback pamphlets were the earliest peeps of what one day would become the British popular press, and where within a decade Oxford’s early plays would find their path to publication via the so-called early quartos.

Trouble in Illyria

Like the single cell that doubles when the organism reaches a certain size, the burgeoning London Stage saw a second round theater created in 1587, this one created by the entrepreneur Richard Henslowe, where Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn entertainmed the working class apprentices south of the Thames with the popular Tamburlaine, too popular where the Crown was concerned. Soon more trouble arose when a clever dissident calling himself Martin Mar-Prelate began publishing witty diatribes against the Anglican Establishment. Oxford and Bacon pitched in against both, but the damage was done. Seen by the Cecils and other Court conservatives as responsible for the creation of the media, the London Stage and the commercial Press, Oxford and Bacon did their best to put out the fires started by Marlowe and Mar-prelate, but they were helpless to prevent the calamities heading their way.

The Cecilian revenge

With the death of Oxford’s wife in 1588, Anne Cecil, her father moved to cut back Oxford’s power, calling in his debts to the Crown so he was forced to sell Fisher’s Folly and dismiss his secretaries. Then with Walsingham’s death in 1590, the Cecils took over his offices, Burghley filling in as Secretary of State while Robert took over his crew of black ops agents. Together they went after the theater community that, in their view, had gotten out of control. They shut down Paul’s Boys, dissolved the Queen’s Men, and damaged Henslowe’s operation at the Rose Theater by arresting Marlowe on a charge of atheism and having him either murdered or transported out of the country.

Cut off from his power base, Oxford turned to poetry, writing Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, which he dedicated to the young patron who helped pay for their publication, and whom he hoped to see married to his daughter. Burdened by debt, grief, fear of old age and remorse for the wife he’d mistreated, at a loss with no company to write for, he filled in the empty hours by writing sonnets to his young patron and the mistress who was giving him another sort of grief. As he wrote a new voice began to take shape, an amalgam of all his earlier experimenting. Thus occured his second quantum leap in style, which in a few years would be producing the earliest of the works we know as Shakespeare.

Having rid himself of the Robert Greene insignia in advance of the coming Cecilian pogrom, when he saw that to rescue his reputation as England’s greatest poet from his old rival Sir Philip Sidney, whose sonnets were thrilling the reading audience that he and Bacon had created, he was driven to publish Venus and Adonis, his printer helped out by offering the name of one of his hometown neighbors, a name that could double as the kind of pun that would alert Court and Inns of Court readers to his identity as author while maintaining his anonymity with the general public. The following year one of his old patrons stepped in to create a new Crown company, one that required revisions of his old plays. Establishing ownership through registration with the Stationers, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with James Burbage and his son Richard at the helm, began planning to turn the Parliament Chamber at Blackfriars into a grand new theater in time for one of the Queen’s rare parliaments, due to open in October 1597.

But unfortunately for the Company, having finally squeezed the office of Secretary of State out of the nervous Queen, Cecil now had the power of the most potent post in the government. One after another he removed the theaters and patrons that Oxford relied on to see his works performed, including the Blackfriars stage where they would have been able to entertain the members of Parliament.

Whether or not Cecil was in fact responsible for the deaths of Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon in 1596 or theater manager James Burbage in early 1597, or the patron of Marlowe’s company, Lord Strange, in 1594, their suspicion plus the simple need to survive drove the Company to publish a brutal new version of Richard III in which the members assembling for the 1597 Parliament could not possibly see the wicked tyrant as anything but a portrait of Robert Cecil. Cecil would continue to gain power through his manipulation of the Queen and then King James, and his destruction of the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and his own Cobham inlaws, but his reputation was damaged beyond repair.

Thus it was largely to protect himself from Cecil that, with the death of Elizabeth and the advent of King James, he obtained the right to remove himself to the safety of the Forest of Waltham, where given peace and quiet and the protection of the King, he experienced the final quantum leap in style, the glorious versions of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, some of them in time to see his youngest daughter Susan (his Cordelia) married to the nephew of his old adversary, Philip Sidney. To achieve the total privacy he needed to complete his great work, he arranged that the records would reflect that he had died, a ruse he portrays in one of his last plays, Measure for Measure.

That he chose June 24th for this disappearing act was another signal to his literary and Masonic community that he was only dead in name, that being the traditional date for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Freemasons and one of the four major holidays of the seasonal year. That he actually died on this date was a coincidence so unlikely as to be impossible.

For three decades the Company continued to produce the plays he left them, most of them years of great success, far beyond what most theater companies have ever managed to achieve. When his son-in-law, the Earl of Montgomery, and Montgomery’s brother, the Earl of Pembroke, finally published his collected works in 1623, the obvious fact that so many of his characters were based on Court personalities was papered over by hints that directed attention towards the man with the punnable name, a provincial who could not possibly have known enough about the Court to have portrayed those leading figures whose relatives were still alive, and whose descendants would continue to desire anonymity for generations, right up to this very day .

Thus the major problem of Oxford’s final years, keeping his papers safe from the Cecils, was accomplished and the great plays were saved for posterity, though sadly, at the cost of his name.

Apologie for poetic license

This overview of a long and complicated career will be considered merely another one of my “flights of fancy” by those Oxfordians who have dedicated themselves to imitating the philologistical left-brainers who claim authority over anything related to Shakespeare, an exercise in futility in my view. As the great Duke Ellington once sang, “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” which is as true of history, even literary history, as it is of life, swing here meaning story. Without story there’s no drama, no motivation, no clash of wills, no paradox, irony or pity. There’s nothing but data, a pile of facts, a Frankenstein’s monster without a heart, the only thing that, however sturdy his arms and legs, will bring the wondrous monster to life.

With overviews like this, statements of fact must by necessity be heavily condensed and bridged with conjecture, but be assured that my conjectures about Bacon, Mary Sidney, Marlowe, Alleyn, of Oxford’s flight to the Forest of Waltham, are based on evidence too massive and detailed to be included in a step by step account of his career in anything less than three volumes in very small type for which I have no time or energy and can imagine no readers.

I’ll always be more than willing to respond to requests for specific references.

Stanley Wells quotes The Oxfordian

It seems that a watershed moment for Authorship Studies took place a year and a half ago at the 2011 World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, when Dr. Stanley Wells, the eminence grise of Shakespeare Studies, General Editor of the Oxford Series and honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, not only mentioned an article from the 2002 edition of The Oxfordian, but dwelt rather heavily on it in his lecture––even more surprisingly, naming its author, Andrew Werth, and the fact that he’s an Oxfordian; “For which we mustn’t condemn him,” said Wells, provoking an appreciative titter from the audience. Hey, after centuries of being ignored, a little paternalism ain’t so bad.

The article in question, “Shakespeare’s Lesse Greek,” makes the case for the author’s knowledge of Greek, still widely regarded as an impossibility. In an easy style, devoid of mind-numbing geek-speak, author Andrew Werth laid out the facts that make it evident to all but those indoctrinated from undergraduate days with Stratford cult beliefs, that there’s enough evidence of Shakespeare’s knowledge of Greek literature that during his time were not yet translated into Latin or English, that suggests that Ben Jonson’s dismissive phrase in the First Folio: “though he had small Latin and less Greek . . .”, was either a cheesy attempt to damn his rival with faint praise or, simply––for whatever reason––flat out lie about his education.

Some of Werth’s points are dismissed by Wells as “vitiated” by recent “discoveries” of Shakespeare’s collaboration with writers like Fletcher, Jonson, and Peele (our turn to chuckle) . Yet, said he, “in other respects they seem strong.” As indeed they are! Good for you, Dr. Wells, and good for me and Andy, and Dan, and Charles, and Bill, and all those who, years ago, when The Oxfordian was still in the planning stage, saw a moment like this as the very goal at which such a journal would be aimed. There’s no way to know how Andy’s article reached Dr. Wells, but reach it it did! And where one has gone before, others will surely follow.

Wells focuses in particular on the section of the article in which Werth deals with Sonnets 153 and 154, the final two of the collection. As a pair, these two form a category all their own. Though the versification of these two is no different from the rest of the sonnets, the subject and tone are unique. The characters addressed in the first two long sections do not appear, nor are these final two cast in the same intimate and passionate mode as the rest.

Obvious translations, Wells mentions Helen Vendler’s theory that they were school exercises, another example of the current academic eagerness to amplify the capacities of the Stratford grammar school to the level of a university (and not a little ridiculous considering the poems’ naughty sophistication), but on point as impersonal examples of a poet’s expertise, the kind that, in Shakespeare’s time were the mark of an accomplished courtier. Poems like these were usually written as a graceful gesture, possibly for the birthday of a patron, or for someone to whom the poet wished to demonstrate his ability to deal with a mundane topic in the most elegant possible manner. First written by a fifth century Greek, the pair migrated from one collection to another, sometimes included, sometimes not. Typical of the kind of divertissment on a minor topic that characterized such poems, these focus on the baths that the Greeks and Romans used as both healing founts and places where men could relax together.

Scholars have tracked Shakespeare’s source for this pair to the Greek Anthology, a collection of epigrammata first accumulated sometime in the first century BC, and added to over the years, most notably in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, primarily in manuscript and almost always in the original Greek. Since the beauty of an epigram lies in a tight blend of sense and sound that resists translation, the anthology had continued its passage through time mostly in its original language, with copiers doing as did Shakespeare, rendering personal versions in their own languages, until 1603 when a Latin version was published in England. (Werth explains this in some detail in an end note on page 27.)

Thus the problem for the Academy has always been, where and how did Shakespeare come across these epigrams, and in what language? Although almost as frequently referenced by poets as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it’s hard to locate anything resembling a solid publishing history for this famous anthology, for with its long history of manuscript distribution, of divisions of text in one version, amalgamations of texts in others, what’s most likely in my view is that the poet transcribed the originals from a manuscript in Greek, either one he himself owned, or that he borrowed from a friend.

Oxford and Essex

My personal view is that these two sonnets were written in 1589-91 as a gesture of friendship towards the Earl of Essex during his rise to power. After inheriting Leicester House in 1588, Essex enlarged and extended it. In 1590 it was recorded as having 42 bedrooms, a picture gallery, a banqueting hall, a chapel, and outbuildings, among them an old Roman bath built on a freshwater spring just steps from the river. I recall seeing early photos of it in a book, which one I can’t remember (along, alas, with a great deal else). It may be the one that still exists at the end of Strand Lane, just north of the Temple gardens. Wikipedia dismisses the possibility that this is the bath in question because it lies where history places property belonging to the neighboring mansion, Arundel House, but so much has changed over the years on this valuable bit of turf, where boundaries that defined the original houses would change with the fortunes of their owners, so what belonged to Essex at the time may well have included it. Certainly his name is all over that area. Or there may have been another bath built over a second spring nearby.

As part of his campaign to raise himself at Court, Essex in the early 1590s was patronizing all sorts of people and projects at the same time that Oxford, having suffered a series of disasters, was in desperate need of support for his Stage. Already pouring his poetic energies into sonnets for the young Earl of Southampton, that he would have recast these choice bits of literary caviar into sonnet form as a means of asking Essex for his patronage is as likely as anything. If, as has been suggested, the poems refer to baths as a cure for the pox, for which Essex is thought to have required medication from the physician Lopez, this would date them to the period in question, before Oxford’s marriage to Elizabeth Tresham in 1592, certainly before 1594 when Essex turned so viciously on Lopez, or 1596 when he was in disrepute for having an affair with Oxford’s daughter, the Countess of Derby. Whoever was responsible for publishing the Sonnets in 1609 must also have had a copy of these poems, and wanting to make sure they got published, stuck them on the end, after the two major sections.

Shakespeare’s Latin

Before exploring Werth’s argument for Shakespeare’s Greek, Wells spent time discussing the importance and universality of Latin. T.W. Baldwin having assured him that Shakespeare must have been competent in Latin due to the probable curriculum of the Stratford grammar school, Wells is happy to accept evidence that allows the author at least some education. According to Wells, the townsfolk of Stratford were wont to converse with each other in Latin while the boys at the Stratford grammar school were so fluent that they were not allowed to speak any other language during school time. Optimistically he adds, “when we discover Shakespeare’s own letters, they will probably be in Latin.”

Certainly there were people in Stratford, and in every English town of any size, who could read and write and even speak Latin, but it would have been a fairly narrow circle consisting of the schoolmaster, his assistant, the town clerk, perhaps even the vicar and a handful of local bookworms. Sixteenth-century Stratford was hardly an intellectual center. It was a manufacturing town whose only importance beyond its own neighborhood was the market it held once a week, primarily to sell wool and other smelly products of sheep-raising like leather, charcoal and paint. To that end, it also brewed and sold a good deal of ale, another smelly process. Students at Eton may have been required to speak Latin at all times, but Eton was a boarding school, which Stratford was not.

According to Wells, what Shakespeare didn’t learn from the Stratford School he learned from the University Wits: Marlowe, Peele, and Nashe, who kindly provided the poor fellow with a “surrogate university,” then were happy to collaborate with him on those plays that seem to lack the necessary Shakespearean verve. That the Wits, who were so committed to mentioning each other in their dedications, never thought to mention their brilliant student and collaborator from Stratford has apparently not struck the good professor, at least, not hard enough to give him pause. As for the local grammar school, surely it was capable of bringing bright boys up to the level where they could enter one of the universities, even further for a particularly brilliant boy, but again, there is absolutely no evidence that William was such a boy. What evidence there is suggests he was unable to write even so much as his own signature.

That Shakespeare understood the lingua franca of all of Europe fits with Wells’s chosen topic: “Shakespeare as a Man of the European Renaissance.” But oh dear, there’s that darned biography again! While thoroughly Renaissance in his writing, it seems Shakespeare was “circumscribed” in almost every possible way. He was not, like Sidney, a courtier, warrior, patron, the embodiment of chivalric ideas, etc. He never travelled. Nor was he versatile, like Bacon, a philosopher, equally fluent in Latin as in English and author of many varied works. According to Wells, Shakespeare was “exceptionally limited”; circumscribed in both ambition and accomplishment, he wrote no books, no stories, nothing but a few poems and plays for the public.

With Oxford as author, such peculiarities vanish. The author is fully revealed as the thorough-going Renaissance man his works suggest. Half the translations on which he based his plays and poems were more likely than not his own doing, published under other men’s names, as were half or more of the plays and novellas attributed to those University Wits that have no biographies to speak of, as well as the Italian tales from books attributed to William Painter, Thomas Lodge and George Pettie. With Oxford, Gulliver stands tall, and the Liliputians diminish to their proper stature.

Shakespeare’s Greek

While Andrew Werth, then an undergraduate at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, has gone on to higher things (a career in music), his opening thrust has since been followed up on by Dr. Earl Showerman, whose series of articles for The Oxfordian and the online journal, Brief Chronicles, dig deep into the facts surrounding Shakespeare’s knowledge of Greek drama, adding immensely to Werth’s opening salvo.

Stanley Wells, now in his eighties, is perfectly positioned to open the Academy to the Authorship Question by letting it be known that he would like to see it allow the question a place in the scholarly dialogue that takes place in journals and at conferences. Authorship scholars have been shamefully mistreated for centuries. If someone of Wells’s stature could tilt the scales a little our way, giving us a chance to speak at conferences and in mainstream journals about what we’ve discovered, Shakespeare Studies would take on a terrific new attraction for students, genuine research would begin, and whatever the truth may be would eventually come to light.

We may not have it ourselves, not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but what we do have are solid answers to most if not all of the questions that academics have been asking ever since English Departments first came into existence at the universities, which in some cases was not until the second decade of the twentieth century.

A right jolly old elf, Wells has the power and possibly the wisdom, to see the potential to Shakespeare Studies of the truth about the authorship of the Shakespeare canon. Who knows, people might actually begin to read again the classic sources that inspired Shakespeare and so many other great writers. Who knows, those of us who still see ourselves as humanists might live to see another literary Renaissance, something our culture is so badly in need of.

Here’s Wells’s lecture at the World Shakespeare in Prague, July 2011.
(Many thanks to Earl and Marty for passing on the information.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpAN9ToZcw

How Shakespeare saved Christmas

What has Shakespeare to do with Christmas? He only mentions it twice by name, and then only in passing. It’s clear from the name that Twelfth Night takes place during the Christmas holidays, but nothing in the play itself connects the behavior of Sir Toby and his friends to a particular holiday, at least not to us today. Yet of all the paths that lead to our present celebration of Christmas, the one forged by Shakespeare is the widest and surest, leading as it did through the barren desert of the puritan Reformation to give back to the English, not the feudal style of merry-making, but through his creation of the London Stage, the joys of Theater and all that has developed from it, school plays and amateur theatricals, films and television. While the Stage began as a compensation for the loss of the old processions, it shows its origins through the furnishings of many of his plays.

No more cakes and ale

The puritans who represented the more extreme beliefs that were brought to England in the 1540s with the Swiss Reformation did not condone the kind of merry-making that had always been associated with Christmas and the period after it leading up to Lent. With their insistence on a lifestyle and a form of worship that adhered to what they believed came directly from the Bible, they regarded all festivity as evidence of papistical excess, a backsliding into the evils of Sodom and Gomorrah, the worship of Baal, of witchcraft, sorcery. Following Calvin, the reformers eliminated all but four of the scores of feast days associated with the Catholic saints. While Christmas was one of the four, it was a Christmas sadly bereft of its pagan trimmings––no decorating of trees, no burning of yule logs, no St. Nicholas, no mistletoe, no wassail bowl, no filling the halls with boughs of holly––no fa la la la la.

The church itself, once their beautiful and beloved halfway house to Heaven, was no longer festive. Painted walls were whitewashed over. The gorgeously carved rood screens and statues of the saints were broken up and burnt in bonfires in the streets. The stained glass windows that portrayed the lives of the saints were smashed to smithereens. The gold and silver candelabra were appropriated or stolen; the use of candles for anything but necessary light was denied. The raised altar was replaced by a plain table in the center of the nave. Priests were not allowed to wear anything but black. Processions were forbidden.

Difficult as this was to bear throughout the year, it was hardest of all during the holiday period that included Christmas, for centuries the major moment when the laboring classes got a much-needed break from the year-round struggle to wrest sustenance from the soil and the sea. Most of northern Europe was frozen from mid-November through mid-March. Forced indoors, farmers and fishermen spent the winter months mending gear, visiting friends and relatives, eating, drinking, dancing and singing––in other words, making merry. Beloved traditions reflected origins in Stone Age rituals, in particular the processions that circled through the parish, from and back to the church again: mumming and disguising, the Boy Bishop, the Hobby Horse, the Morris Dancers, the Green Man––all forbidden. Bishops who sided with their parishoners ended up in the Tower.

Although the rural districts far from London were better able to keep some of the old antics, Londoners, closely watched by a series of die-hard puritan Mayors, could not get away with anything that hinted at a return to making merry. When the boy king’s death in 1553 put his Catholic sister on the throne there was a brief reprieve. But with Elizabeth’s coronation in 1559, the reformers returning from their exile stepped directly into important political positions, their determination to see reform strengthened by having spent the years of Mary’s reign in Frankfurt, Strasburg or Geneva, listening to the most adamant creators of the Protestant Reformation.

An Elizabethan Christmas

When it came to Christmas and other holidays, Queen Elizabeth was in something of a hard place. She owed her throne to the reformers, yet personally she was drawn to the Old Faith and its lavish celebrations, in particular music and dancing. She was also bound to provide a festive atmosphere for the visitors and ambassadors from countries that still kept holidays in the old style. A compromise was achieved early in her reign by switching from the expensive masques that had been the Court’s version of mumming and disguising to the more sedate, seated observation of holiday plays, interspersed with musical interludes, mostly provided by members of her staff and paid for by her courtiers. The acting and singing were done by the boy choristers who sang for her and her entourage in the palace chapel during devotions, then entertained on a dais in the dining hall , the instrumental music provided by her staff of England’s most accomplished musicians. With costumes provided by the Revels department, it was all done on the cheap.

All elements of this entertainment came from within the Court and its circle of providers. Where then did the plots and characters, the text of the plays come from? Though plays consist of nothing but talk, and talk is cheap, these plays were not all that easy to write. They had to be entertaining without overstepping the bounds of Court etiquette or offending a laughter-loving but hypersensitive female monarch. Plays require conflict to be interesting, but for these plays the conflict could not reflect the grim religious and political issues that were what she dealt with day to day. They had to be funny without being bawdy. In short, to succeed, they had to be written by someone aware of what would please and what would not, in other words, an intelligent and sensitive Court insider.

Unfortunately the strictures of the Reformation had left the English literary community at one of the lowest points in its history. Known to historians as “the drab era,” the poetry was crabbed and dense, its themes morose and depressing. This was not surprising considering that the Reformation tended to see poets (playwrights were called poets) as liars, and poetry (anything that qualified as imaginative literature) as an instrument of the Devil. As with most Renaissance courts, all good courtiers wrote poetry just as they played the lute or virginals and could sight-sing complex madrigals, but these were pastimes and unfortunately writing witty plays requires rather more than an hour or two snatched from running at the ring or playing Primero.

Along came Shakespeare

Of course he wasn’t known as Shakespeare then, in fact he wasn’t “known” at all. He was a member of one of the Court coteries that prided itself on its writing, but which member wasn’t always clear, except within the coterie itself. Fearful that being labeled a poet would mean loss of any hope of advancement, at least one gifted young writer openly condemned it as a “toy,” vowing to give it up. But the youth who would someday be published as Shakespeare had that ineffable gift that time and again meets the moment with just the right stuff. Protected by his high estate from the slurs of the less able, he began providing the kind of dramatically exciting and witty entertainment for the winter holidays at Court that would someday make it one of the most famous in Europe.

The talented boys who performed these plays came from the middling levels of society. Usually discovered by their grammar school teachers, they were brought to Court or to Paul’s Cathedral, given the equivalent of a basic grammar school education, and trained to work with her musical consorts, singing the complex works of composers like William Byrd so that the Queen and her entourage could move through the day accompanied by music, as we do today by means of ipods and radios.

Clever lads, the boys easily memorized the lines given them to perform these early comedies. Enchanted by their little satin suits and mammoth ruffs as they trilled the witty lines that they themselves may not have fully understood, they would continue to be the favorite entertainers of the childless Queen throughout her reign. However, since she was also a tightwad with everyone but her male companion of the moment, she and her ministers looked aside when the boys and their masters would continue to perform a play written for a Court holiday in the halls of wealthy householders whose donations helped to defray the cost of the boys’ upkeep.

Thus it was that the great breakthrough occured. What began as a few holiday plays in the London homes of the wealthy spread, bit by bit, to more public venues like the little stage at Paul’s Cathedral where the choristers trained to sing the Service were allowed to entertain the public during the holidays. There’s nothing more exciting for a theater company and its patrons than an enthusiastic audience, so the temptation to go commercial was hard for these financially struggling music masters to resist. That, plus the fact that Londoners were desperate for entertainment, plus the most important fact of all, that the plays were so good––so much better than the silly antics that in former years had been provided by amateurs recruited from the City guilds to provide holiday entertainment for the City.

Birth of the London Stage

Starved by the Reformation for the merriment they craved, the London public had begun to frequent the theater inns in ever-increasing numbers. City inns built on a square, surrounded on three sides by two or three stories of rooms accessed by an open passage that faced the central courtyard, were able to show plays performed on the second level overlooking the courtyard. Performances at the inns lasted through the winter holidays, ending with the beginning of Lent, and beginning again in June. By adding this to travelling on the circuit to the bigger towns, actors began to get the kind of work that they could count on throughout most of the year.

Seeing this, patrons of the major companies, some of them members of the Queen’s Privy Council, began to plan how to take advantage of this growing public audience and the growing mastery of their acting companies. Politicians at heart, they saw the advantage of going with the flow, working it to their own advantage. The Church on the other hand hated it, and fought the growth of the London Stage with every weapon it could muster, but it had only itself to blame for denying its parishoners their beloved season of good cheer.

In 1575, royal permission was finally granted to the young lord with the golden pen to travel to France and Italy where he could discover methods of theater production along with ways that it might work for, not against, Authority. Persuaded by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, Elizabeth and her chief minister, Lord Burghley, saw an advantage in promoting a theater that could be monitored and controlled as opposed to fighting the one that was growing helter skelter without their consent. Within days of the young lord’s return in 1576 the first purpose-built year-round commercial stage began rising on a well-travelled road just outside the City in an ancient Liberty where the puritanical City fathers had no control. That summer the adult company that gathered around the builder of the theater, James Burbage, began entertaining the public, two to three thousand at a sitting. And whose plays do you think they were performing?

Six months later, a little stage in a school created to train the Children of the Queen’s Chapel in their holiday entertainments for the Court opened in the old Revels offices in the Liberty of Blackfriars, also outside City control, at the edge of the most important audience in England, the lawyers and parliamentarians who spent their days in or near the law courts of Whitehall in what today is known as London’s West End. And whose plays do you think the boys were performing there? And possibly also––occasionally, advertised only to a select few through word of mouth––by Burbage’s adults.

Thus it was that the youth with the gifted pen whose plays would someday be published under the name Shakespeare, began gathering the audiences that would make the London Stage the wonder of the western world, spreading his magic first to Germany, then to all of Europe, then to the world. Born from the Queen’s need for cheap entertainment at the winter holidays, “speaking daggers” on government policy at the little stage at Blackfriars to the members of parliament during their Christmas break, Shakespeare brought to a nation starved for happiness in the winter holidays the London Stage and with it the English Literary Renaissance.

That Shakespeare understood and rebelled against the Reformation’s idea of what constituted good writing is clear from Oxford’s prologues to Clerke’s Latin translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) and to Bedingfield’s Cardanus Comforte. The ideal held out for writers by the Reform community was Thomas Hoby’s English translation of Castiglione’s Courtier. Try reading a bit of it, or something by George Turburville, and you’ll see what Oxford was confronted with by his contemporaries as he came of age. Luckily he had been trained to a higher level by his tutor, Sir Thomas Smith. Luckier yet he had that adventuresomeness of spirit that allowed him to fly free, not only of the turgid style of his contemporaries, but of the ancient styles learned at his tutor’s knee, ever seeking a fresher vision, a more direct and immediate means of communication.

For O, for O, the hobby horse is forgot!

Did Shakespeare see his career as saving Christmas and all holidays for a people beaten into submission by a heartless, sin-obsessed Authority? Perhaps not, but it seems likely that among the various forces that drove him over the years, one was the need to save for posterity some of what was good about the feudal culture that was under such severe attack by the Reformation, if not merry-making specifically, then the kind of hospitality, the noblesse oblige, that saw to it that widows and orphans were not forgotten, that everyone shared in the holiday, no matter how poor, when the true spirit of Christ, that “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” was not just cold words preached from a lofty pulpit, but actively lived at all the major turning points of the year.

In the upper Thames valley, where as a boy he had lived with Smith during Mary’s reign, the wild antics of the Hobby Horse and the Green Man could still have been seen in nearby towns and villages on Shrove Tuesday, May Day and Midsummer’s Eve. Before Hamlet sits to watch the play that will catch the conscience of the King, his otherwise pointless cry, “For O, the hobby horse is forgot” must refer to the role of the Hobby Horse, some rural Robin Hood dressed in a horse costume, whose joyous duty it was to whinny as he charged at the homes and businesses of local evil-doers (bullies, wife-beaters, malicious gossips, avaricious money-lenders, loose women) as the rowdy procession passed them, to roars from the jeering crowd. Was Hamlet using the play as in former times Oxford had seen when the Hobby Horse, given license by the ancient tradition, took the opportunity of the procession to humiliate persons whose behavior was causing trouble within the community?

As the provider for so many years of the plays that took the place of the ancient forms of public merry-making, it’s not surprising that many show their origins in the old holiday folkways. The sub-plot of Twelfth Night reflects what must have been a frequent situation during this time in many wealthy households, the battle between a widow’s overly rightous steward, and her old party dog of an uncle, with the jester, Feste––in Shakespeare’s position––caught between the two. As Sir Toby puts it to the “baffled” Malvolio, “Dost think because thou art virtuous there will be no more cakes and ale?” The Merry Wives’ torments of Falstaff end with what Oxford must have seen as a child in the villages in and around the Forest of Windsor near where he lived with Smith, a holiday ritual associated with the running of the stag, a relic of England’s Celtic origins. That Shakespeare loved these holiday rascals is clear from how often they appear on stage and how long they stay there. Falstaff and Sir Toby, if not based on the same individual, are certainly cut from the same cloth, as is Mine Host, and Bottom with his merry shout: “Where are these lads! Where are these hearts!”

With his constant focus on love, many of the ancient traditions touched on by Shakespeare were courting rituals. In As You Like It, the love poems Orlando pins on branches of trees would seem to reflect a courting tradition, though on what occasion remains a mystery, possibly St. Valentine’s Day. The forest adventures of the couples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflect a similar tradition from ancient celebrations of May Day when girls would go into the wooded meadows alone, ostensibly to gather flowers for “Mary’s Day,” whence they would be pursued by the young men of the village. This tender means of providing courting couples with an opportunity to meet privately in a romantic spring setting, was of course abhored and forbidden by the reformers, represented in the play by one of the fathers. Other Reformation figures include Malvolio and Angelo from Measure for Measure. Angelo’s message seems to be that it’s better to let the Old Nick come out in company for a few weeks a year than to keep it bottled up for years, finally to explode into some gross indecency with its aftermath of remorse.

True to the spirit of the masque, of the mumming and disguising that accompanied not only Christmas, but several of the ancient festivals, the great English Lord of the Dance hid his identity from the Blatant Beast, Spenser’s personalization of the Reformation, behind a sober mask contributed by a “prudent” burgher from the midlands, until his Book of Gladness, published in 1623 by the patrons who loved and cherished his work, spread it throughout England and from there to all the nations of the world.

Passing the plate

Those readers who enjoy these comments on Shakespeare, his identity, and how the English Literary Renaissance managed to find its way to the light despite the efforts of Reformation politicians to stamp it out, may find it in their hearts and pockets to help with this effort. Unsupported by any organization or university, I’m sometimes at a loss to get the books I need or an occasional month’s membership to the online DNB. If you’d like to make a modest contribution towards this effort, here’s how.

Thanks for your interest. It’s what keeps me going.

Why was Shakespeare never at Court?

So many things about Shakespeare make no sense. Constantly repeated in the traditional history of the British Stage is the notion that he showed no interest in his plays once they were performed. That his name appears nowhere in any record of publication apart from title pages, that there’s no record that William of Stratford was even in London for almost a decade before his death in 1616, suggests to those attempting to explain this unique behavior on the part of a theatrical impresario that he was somehow “above” dealing with publishers.

In fact, as more recent studies have emphasized, nothing could be further from the truth. As one of the literary giants of all time, Shakespeare understood very well the importance of getting his work published. The idea, put about by biographers, that he took no interest in the publication of his plays, or by Walter Greg and company that they were utterly dependent on the whims of various actors and reporters who rewrote them for publication, violates common sense.

First, all but one or two of Shakespeare’s plays as published, whether in quarto or in the collected works known as the First Folio in 1623, are much longer than could be easily fitted into the traditional two hours “traffic” on the stage. Why write so much more than what can be produced? The answer is simple: while actors may have had no more than two hours, readers had as much time as they required. From 1594 on, Shakespeare had two venues for his stories, the stage and the press, and prepared for both according to their differing requirements; if all we have are what he prepared for publication, in some cases with changes added by later editors), well, that’s the nature of publishing (some of the so-called “bad quartos” may in fact be the texts that the actors used). If the print quality of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are far beyond that of most of the quartos, it simply argues that he had more control over the publishing of his poetry than he did over his plays. It does not mean he sat back while––per Greg and countless editors––the actors rewrote and published his writing.

Second, the commonsense explanation for the many differences between the quartos, or pamphlet versions of his plays published between 1594 and 1619 and between them and the 1623 Folio versions, is that the varying qualities of the quartos testify to the period when they were written, the worse the earlier, the better the later. Why replace this commonsense explanation with elaborate theories of reprehensible printers and unidentified spies and actors? Because the dating scheme forced on the academy by the Stratford biography won’t allow for texts that reflect styles as early in some cases as the 1570s.

This is not to say that no play text was ever pirated or rewritten by later playwrights. The effort by intelligent scholars like Brian Vickers to prove that other hands are to be found in a few of the plays can’t be discounted. But it should be noted that none of these are among Shakespeare’s best, or even his better plays. If the explanation for the variations in style in Titus Andronicus are due to later revision, not by the author but by some other writer, well, so what? The importance of Titus has little to do with its value as a performable play, more in what it tells us about where Shakespeare began, a question for literary history based on text and publication, not on whether or not we would enjoy seeing it performed today. While Vickers suggests that Shakespeare collaborated with George Peele, his evidence works equally well as the later addition to an early original once Shakespeare was gone to his ancestors. There’s no need to think, as he seems to, to see them sitting down together and discussing who will write what scene.

The same is true of Two Noble Kinsmen, what value it may have coming chiefly from the fact that Shakespeare’s name appears on its title page. That TNK tells the same story from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale as was told by a play titled Palamon and Arcite performed for the Court at Oxford University in 1566 (during which Oxford got a Master’s degree), and that a (lost) play by the same name was performed by the Admirals’s Men at Henslowe’s Rose Theater several times in the fall of 1594, the first time labeled “ne” for “newly emended,” are facts that to someone under no pressure to conform to the Stratford dates might suggest point to a single play, one written in 1566, revised by its author in 1594, and again in 1613 by John Fletcher, rather than three separate plays based on the same source. This desire to break up a work based on a particular story involving the same cast of characters into a series of works by a series of early (unnamed) writers is based, not on any hard evidence of such a process ever having actually taken place, but purely on the need to limit Shakespeare’s terminus a quo to the 1590s before which time William of Stratford was simply unavailable.

The importance of the Court

Another impression we get from traditional histories of the English Literary Renaissance is that it had only a marginal connection to the Court, and that the Stage that played so important a role in the language that emerged from Shakespeare and Marlowe grew solely out of the efforts of working class entrepreneurs like Jame Burbage and Philip Henslowe, the Court and courtier patrons stepping in to protect them only that the Queen might have her “solace” over the Christmas holidays. According to this scenario, plays performed at Court by the adult companies were, as are plays today, written for the public as commercial ventures, some enjoyed by the Queen and her minions, but none written specifically with them in mind.

Why this should be true of the adult companies when it’s obvious that plays were being written specifically for the children’s companies to perform for the Court isn’t addressed. It’s clear from the Revels accounts that what the Queen preferred for her solace were comedies performed by her young choristers. Eight of these survive, written for the chorus boys from Paul’s Cathedral and attributed to John Lyly. For the dozen or more plays performed by other boy companies throughout this period we have but one text and no authors. The Court was also the souce for a great deal of poetry that if the academics are to be believed, developed in a vacuum apart from what Shakespeare and Marlowe were writing. Prof. Stephen May’s 2002 The Courtier Poets ignores the fact that London was a small city and that the plays of both poets were not only popular with the public, but were also frequently performed at Court.

Common sense should also tell us that in a culture like the England of the sixteenth century, nothing could prosper without noble patronage, certainly nothing on the scale of the three-story theaters that dominated the landscape and that faced the kind of violent opposition that Book IV of E.K. Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage describes. The idea that Burbage and Henslowe could build their theaters where they did and keep them going for as long as they did without more assistence from their Privy Council patrons than simply the occasional letter of support is absurd. That the obvious battle over the London Stage was connected with a similar battle within the Court community and the Privy Council over its identical twin, the Court Stage, should be obvious, and would be if the English Departments who are supposed to be the guardians of truth about our literary past kept so much as half an eye on its history.

Accompanying this astigmatism is the even bigger blind spot relating to the close proximity of the Blackfriars theater to the politically influential West End. With the perfectly located public theater on the major thoroughfare into and out of Central London, one might think that this location too was the result of careful planning. But such gaps are endemic in a study that either cannot or will not see the connection between the works of Shakespeare and the politics of Elizabeth’s Court. Literary critics continue to chase their tails around Stratford while evidence of Shakespeare’s connection to the Court lies unobserved in open view.

That Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, whose patron was the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, Baron Hunsdon, whose job it was to oversee Court entertainment, next to the Queen and the Principal Secretary, the most powerful man on the Privy Council, his fingers in every political pie, his hand close to if not actually on the rudder of the Ship of State, that this was just another acting company, its popularity the only factor in its importance, is the result of Hunsdon’s efforts and those of other powerful men and women, to keep his company’s connection to the Crown as hidden as possible for political reasons should be obvious to anyone with any grasp of the history of the period.

However modest its origins were made to appear, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was in fact England’s Crown company, following the dissolution of the Queen’s Men in 1589, the second ever to be created, its official status reaffirmed when, following Elizabeth’s death and the accession of King James, it was renamed the King’s Men. Their sharers included James Burbage head of the first company ever to get a license, his son, plus the top players from both leading companies of the time.

How can the so-called critics be so obtuse as to miss the connection between the most celebrated plays of the day and the politics that raged around them and their audiences? How can they fail to understand that the London Stage was the sixteenth century equivalent of America’s John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, England’s Chris Morris? Forced by the Stratford bio to date the plays ten to fifteen years out of sync with events, they continue the mystification that was first conceived by men like Hunsdon and Burbage, Howard and Henslowe, to hide the connection between the London Stage and the Crown. How can they fail to see that the elimination of Marlowe was the act of an angry Crown towards one who brazenly and wantonly violated its unwritten agreement to treat the Crown and its religion with respect. If not the English Departments, who will write the true history of this period during which poets, one in particular, stood at the forefront of a groundswell moving inexorably towards not just talking about, not just demanding, but actually getting, freedom of speech.

While Moliére was the intimate friends of the French King’s brother, a member of French Court society; while the Poet Ronsard was born into French Court circles, the intimate of three French kings; while the Italian poet Tasso, a nobleman at the Courts of the Princes of Urbino and Ferrara, was the familiar of their highest circles; while the playwright Ariosto was the familiar of the Cardinal d’Este and the Duke of Ferrera; while the playwright Machiavelli was the familiar of the Medici; the orator Cicero the colleague of Caesar and Mark Antony; the poets Ovid and Virgil known at the the Court of Caesar Augustus; Lord Byron the intimate of the highest members of Regency society––why was the great Shakespeare never seen at Elizabeth’s Court? Why was he never even introduced?

Why does Spenser who wrote about the Court and clearly wrote primarily to entertain it, never appear at Court? Yes, there are Court figures who feature in the story of the birth of modern English literature: Sidney was an important writer as was Raleigh and Bacon, Harington and Donne. But what about Spenser? Wouldn’t it make sense that he was brought to Court, like these others, and not left to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged Irish kerns in the wilds of County Limerick?

And what about the great master, the greatest of all, Shakespeare, whose plays were performed at Court for decades? Why is Shakespeare never found at Court?

The Authorship argument in a nutshell

First there’s the name

Yes, Shakespeare was a real name; yes it belonged to a real man who had ties of some sort to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company that produced the plays and had them published. But what must strike someone first who knows nothing about the myth is that the name is a pun, a classical play on words. Not only is it a pun, it was often spelled with a hyphen on the title pages of plays, a standard way of spelling pun-names for comic characters like that female of easy virtue, Doll Tear-sheet. In fact, the first time it was used on the title page of a play, it was spelled with a hyphen (the 2nd edition of Richard III, published in 1598, was the first play to bear the name William Shake-speare).

Not only is Shake-spear a pun, but, also like Doll Tear-sheet, it describes his vocation. This author used the drama, as have so many before and after, to shake a spear at stupidity and evil. Whether you see spear as metaphor for stage prop or pen, it works as a symbol for what he was doing. How he, or more to the point, how those who published his plays managed to find a real person with a name that works as a pun and who was also willing to let them use it, is a separate issue. What’s important at first glance is that the name that first became known as the author of the plays that were so popular in London in the early 1590s were ascribed to a man with what appeared to be a pun-name, a clear indication to those who could read that the publishers were not using the author’s real name.

There’s the content of the plays

At least half are based in Italy, many derived from Italian stories. There’s no evidence that William of Stratford was ever in or could have been in Italy. At the same time it’s clear that some of the Italian stories whose plots he adapted were not available then in English, which means that whoever wrote them was able to read Italian. Academics attempt to bypass this by disdaining his knowledge of Italy, yet over time it’s been gradually proven, most recently and effectively by Richard Roe of Pasadena California, that Shakespeare knew Italy better than they did. He knew it so well that he could place his characters with total accuracy in particular places in particular cities, while using Italian terms that only someone with personal experience could possibly have known. He had to have been to Italy.

The plays are all about Court life and the lives of courtiers, kings and the nobility, written from the perspective of one who knew that life and those people intimately. There’s his knowledge of games and sports, demonstrated partly by including them in his plays, partly by his use of their terms, partly by their use as metaphors, games and sports that were limited by law and expense to members of the Court community. So knowledgable was Shakespeare about the intricacies and details of Court life that German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, Duke of Lautenberg and creator of the German Empire inherited by Kaiser Wilhelm, commented upon it. Bismarck’s biographer notes that he wondered how someone,

however gifted with the intuitions of genius, could have written what was attributed to Shakespeare unless he had been in touch with the great affairs of state, behind the scenes of political life, and also intimate with all the social courtesies and refinements of thought which in Shakespeare’s time were only to be met with in the highest circles. (Whitman 135)

Yet no trace of a William Shakespeare has ever appeared in any record that shows that he was ever at Court for so much as a single moment. Why, when earlier playwrights like John Hayward, later playwrights like Ben Jonson, composers like William Byrd, musicians like the Bassano brothers, actors like Richard Tarleton, all leave paper trails of Court involvement; why when individuals with names he used for his characters like Spinola or Petruccio, appear in Court records, why is Shakespeare himself absent?

There’s his knowledge of the Law, of Medicine, of Astrology, of Pharmacology, all displayed throughout his works, sometimes by direct description, many times by uses of their particular terms or by metaphorically comparing them to a host of otherwise unrelated situations.

There’s his obvious knowledge of languages other than English

Even if the Stratford grammar school did provide sufficient Latin, which, though likely, is still an assumption; and even if William did attend, which is not proven, nor provable, since so far the only writing in his hand that has turned up in 400 years of research are wobbly signatures on six legal documents, none of them related in any direct way to the London Stage, it doesn’t explain his knowledge of French, Italian and Greek. Reseach into the sources of his plays, their plots and characters, shows knowledge of works in these languages, French and Italian stories, ancient Greek tragedies, that were not yet translated into either Latin or English in his time, and if translated, could not be found anywhere but in the libraries of educated noblemen.

There’s the lack of evidence of important patrons

In Shakespeare’s time, no writer from Shakespeare’s background ever got established without support from a wealthy patron, yet apart from his homage to the Earl of Southampton in the dedications of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, there’s no third party evidence that Southampton, or any other noble patron, ever did anything to help someone named William Shakespeare with his career as a writer or an actor.

The major share of evidence that he was an actor comes from five documents spawned by the Company that published works under that name: 1) 1595: when his name is listed once, and only once, as one of three payees for a production at Court; 2) 1603: in the official warrant for the establishment of the King’s Men; 3) 1604: in several yards of cloth given to all who marched in the coronation procession of King James; 4) 1605: in the will of one of the sharers of receipts from the Globe theater; 5) 1616: in a list of actors in two plays published by Ben Jonson; and 6) in a line that same year added to his own will bequeathing money for rings for the Company managers . This is all there is; it’s limited to this one small group of men dependent on the fortunes of the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men; and it isn’t enough to take for granted that William of Stratford was, in fact as well as official fiction, a playwright and an actor.

There’s the lack of evidence of a training period in the theater

Four hundred years of research has failed to turn up any indication that William of Stratford worked with a theater company as either an actor or a writer before he suddenly began turning out hits with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s. Scott McMillin and Mary Beth Maclean note that the Queen’s Men performed early versions of Richard III, King John, and Henry V, which suggests to them that Shakespeare must have been a member of their company, but though they have many of the actors from that Company, no trace of his name has ever appeared as working in any theatrical capacity in the 1580s.

There’s the lack of evidence of a life lived in London

No great playwright ever spent much time away from the center of his creative life, the Stage, yet there’s no evidence that William Shakespeare spent more than a few weeks away from Stratford. As Ramon Jiménez has detailed at length, no one who should have known him as a writer and an actor ever mentioned him. What great artist ever left no record of his relationships with the other great artists and patrons of his time? The record of his life in London consists of measly accounts of tax evasion and a period of residence of an indeterminate length with a family of theatrical costumers. No evidence of friendships with other writers and artists; nothing that comes close to what we know about Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, or even Shakespeare’s own (supposed) illegitimate playwright son, William Davenant.

There’s the lack of evidence that he owned theater shares

Along with the strange lack of any books in William’s will, the fact that neither he nor his wife, nor either of his daughters could write anything more than a legal signature, is the fact that he left no theater shares in his will. The basis for believing that his financial success in Stratford was due to his shares in the receipts of two theaters where the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men performed, derives from his name on warrants for the second, and references to him as a sharer in documents generated by the Company. Despite these, the fact that he left no shares in his will, and that in the litigation that attended the success of the King’s Men in the seventeenth century, where the fate of shares was the subject of lawsuits, no mention is made of what happened to his shares, suggests that he was recompensed for whatever it was that he did for the Company in some other way.

Finally, there’s the way his biography skews the dates

Most problematic may be the way the biography of William of Stratford, with its late placement in the story of the English Literary Renaissance, forces on scholars too narrow a window of time into which to fit his career. It forces them to hunt for clues to his development where they simply cannot be found. To limit the start of his career to the early 1590s, or the late 1580s at the earliest, forces them to see him beginning to produce works at or close to genius level with no apparent period of training. It forces them to interpret the early quartos of his plays as the work of earlier unnamed playwrights and others to a strange habit on the part of such an innovative genius to imitate later, lesser writers. It forces them to see the plays as written immediately before publication, putting them way out of sync with their natural placements in time, for instance, placing Henry V with its clear connection to the effort to prepare for the Spanish invasion to sometime after the Armada, when there would be no point in the stirring call to arms of the King’s St. Crispian’s Day speech.

One or two of these issues might be accounted for by the attempts of academics to arrrange the facts to fit the biography, but not all. From the pun-name used to publish his plays, his obvious knowledge of the Court, Italy, foreign languages, the Law, Medicine, Astrology and Pharmacology, all things that he could not possibly have learned from casual reading; his lack of patrons, of any evidence of a life lived in London, of an early training period, of any real evidence of acting or earning a living through the Stage, of any books, theater shares, or relationships with other artists. And finally there’s the way his dates have forced unnatural and strained interpretations of the plays and their place in the timetable of Elizabethan history.

Taken together, these loudly proclaim the obvious, that William Shakespeare of Stratford was hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for the use of his punnable name so that they could profit by the publication of his plays while allowing the educated and sophisticated courtier who wrote them to maintain his image as nothing more dangerous to the status quo than a genial and harmless patron of the arts and sciences.

Another piece of the puzzle falls in place

The name Shakespeare emerges for the first time in connection with the London Stage on the title page of the second edition of Richard III, published in 1598, shortly after the first, anonymous, edition of 1597. After several years of anonymous publication, why did the name appear at just that time and on that particular play? We’ve been examining the phenomenon of Richard III from a political viewpoint, that of the war waged by Secretary of State Robert Cecil on the London Stage. What about the play itself? What can we learn from that?

Albert Feuillerat, writing in the 1940s and into the early 1950s, made an exceedingly close study, word by word, phrase by phrase, of Richard III and several of the other earliest plays in the canon: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI parts Two and Three. The earliest to be published, they were also the first to bear the name Shakespeare. Feuillerat’s close attention to detail, to the meter and vocabulary of these plays, should command more respect than it does. That one hears his name so little is probably due to the fact that the results of his study tend to point in a direction uncomfortable for the Stratford biography, cornerstone of the academic cult.

One of the things Feuillerat brings out that should be a central point in Early Modern literary studies is the obvious fact that the repertory companies had to revise their plays every so often to keep their audiences coming back, a logical perception that should put paid to the academic nonsense about “bad quartos.” Anyone with money can build a theater. Anyone with a little chuzpah can grab a cloak and spear and do a turn on stage. But not just anyone can write a play that holds an audience’s attention, particularly one that brings them back for a second or a third time. So the plays had to be refurbished from time to time so that the producer could advertise them as “newly augmented” and thus continue to use them to bring the audiences in.

Of the six plays examined by Feuillerat, the three history plays have a further interest in that they’re closely related to a handful of anonymous plays known as the First and Second parts of The Contention between the houses of York and Lancaster, and The True Tragedies of Richard III and of Richard Duke of York. So perfectly do these fit the plots, characters, and much of the language of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard II, and the last two parts of Henry VI, that avoiding the inevitable conclusion that they are Shakespeare’s own early versions has required the kind of intellectual contortions that we’ve come to expect from the university English Departments.

The simplest and easiest and most likely explanation would be that Shakespeare wrote them himself; where else in literature do we find early versions of works by anyone but the individual who wrote the final version? But because the Stratford biography has Shakespeare placed too late for that, some other explanation had to be found. It was in search of this that Feuillerat spent 30 years deconstructing these plays, both the early versions and Shakespeare’s. Feuillerat’s close attention to the language, meter, tropes, archisms, etc. of these plays, reveals that they display four separate and definite styles, each, according to him, easily distinguished from the others, and all of them most relevant to our thesis.

Feuillerat calls the three styles, or hands, as he terms them, that preceded Shakespeare’s versions: authors A, B, and C; author A is the creator of the first version of the history plays while author C is the creator of the first versions (now lost, though traces remain) of Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. Author A’s originals were revised at some point by author B, whose work he calls “Marlowesque” and whose job it was to regularize the uneven verse patterns of A into a tight iambic pentameter. This version was then updated in the early 1590s by Shakespeare, who added humanistic touches, Shakespearean imagery, further refinements to the meter––and what Feuillerat sentimentally and not very accurately calls his “sober sweetness”––to the versions published under his name in the 1590s. (Where is there any “sober sweetness” to be found in Richard III?)

Although Feuillerat makes no effort to affix dates to the originals by A and C, his descriptions suggest that those parts written by C may go as far back as the 1560s and 70s, while A fits better with the early 80s. And although he claims at the outset that he’s able to discern where author B has overwritten A, and Shakespeare all three, he confesses in several places that he’s not all that clear where Shakespeare and C are concerned, as both are fond of similar tropes. Nor does he make the slightest effort to identify any of the three, a significant ommission considering that he published several books and articles on Philip Sidney and also on John Lyly, whose dates, one would think, would make him a prime candidate for at least one of these hands.

One problem with Feuillerat’s scenario is that he’s forced to cast Shakespeare in the role of “play-patcher,” a ringer brought in in the ’90s to update old plays, who quickly works his way up to the role of Company playwright. So once again the workaround created to deal with problems caused by the Stratford biography forces Shakespeare into a role not befitting the most creative force in English letters. If Shakespeare didn’t write these plays, if he merely updated them, what about all the others? What about Henry V, which is so obviously a rewrite of The Famous Victories? Flatly dismissing the obvious connection between Thomas of Woodstock and Richard II, as “of no significance,” he never addresses any of these issues. What about all the plays that don’t have previous versions by earlier phantom writers? When did Shakespeare begin writing his own plays? Apparently such questions are also “of no significance.”

Worse than this is the problem his scenario creates of identifying authors A and C, whose plays were so dramatically sound that, despite their questionable versification and awkward archaisms, rather than let them go, the actors saw to it that they were consistently revised over time, with improvement to the language, but rarely to the structure, placing them first among the plays to be upgraded with the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s men. It would seem that these two original authors deserve a place in English letters close to Shakespeare himself, if only we knew who they were. But of course we know who they must have been!

One of the things that struck me when I first began studying these matters was the immense disconnect between the fantasy Stage of the orthodox imagination and the limited reality of the times. The size of the community that produced these first works of genuine literature does not allow for all the ghostly figures conjured up, first by the courtiers who used one phony name after another to get published, then by later historians who, like Feuillerat, have filled the record void with any number of brilliant if nameless writers. The earliest days of the Stage, and of the popular Press that published its plays, was an outgrowth of what the Elizabethans called May Games, the mummings and disguisings of the Middle Ages that turned a few weeks in the heart of the winter into a fantasy world of feasting, masquing and role-playing. The writers were simply distilling the ancient May Games into books, entertainment via plot and character compacted into little back marks on white paper, bound into a small package that could be taken on trips and read alone at night by candlelight, that is, by people who could read.

May Games, mumming and disguising, were means by which a community trapped in its own hard reality could transport themselves into another world. Transformed by mask and costume into Faeryland, the Middle East, Africa, or, most often, Illyria, where, as Greek shepherds and nymphs they sang and played the lute surrounded by gods and goddessses. But when the party ended, and the mummers were unmasked, whom did they see but their same old neighbors? When Shakespeare’s audience demanded that the playwright be revealed, who was there to reveal? Let the names without biographeis, the authors A, B, and C, fade into the shadows whence they came. Let the masks come off.

Of course authors A and C were the same individual who, having turned 40 and, faced by the need to provide another Crown company with modish material, perfected his own earlier plays, the earliest in the style Feuillerat calls author C, the history plays by the one he calls author A. And of course the “Marlowesque” author B could have been no one but Christopher Marlowe himself, who, brought to Fisher’s Folly by Walsingham in 1584, had been given the task of regularizing the meter of the Contentions and the True Tragedies for the benefit of his new company, the Queen’s Men, “the jigging mother wits” he scorned in Tamburlaine, with unrhymed iambic pentameter (aka blank verse) which had become, in the intervening decade, the industry standard.

Thus, thanks to Albert Feuillerat, French Professor at Yale in the 1930s and 40s, we have another and extremely important piece to add to that puzzle, the Birth of the London Stage, of the Popular Press, of the Fourth Estate, of the British Media, call it what you will. Thanks to Feuillerat we have expert and thoughtful descriptions of Oxford’s voice from the early 70s, his voice from the early 80s, and Marlowe’s from the mid-80s. At some point we hope to take a closer look at his description of these voices.

Those with a taste for intelligent word studies will find Feuillerat’s book of interest: The Composition of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1953. Some parts are available online for free, but there is a downloadable version for $10.

Note: Archaelogists may have discovered the skeleton of Richard III beneath a car park in Leicester. Wounds to the back and skull are relevant to those suffered by the King at Bosworth field. The spine shows evidence of scoliosis, though not of a hunchback. They hope to get an answer from its DNA.

How old is the Authorship Question?

The standard answer to this is the late nineteenth century, when Delia Bacon’s book, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, claimed that the Shakespeare canon was not written by William of Stratford, but was the result of a collaboration of a team of courtly writers led by Francis Bacon. This, however, was only the moment when the issue was opened to the reading public at large, for the issue itself has been there ever since the first peeps of Shakespeare criticism. As Albert Feuillerat explains in his Composition of Shakespeare’s Plays (1953), the question of the authenticity of the Shakespeare canon

has been raised with more or less insistence ever since the eighteenth century. . . . Pope conjectured that in Love’s Labor’s Lost, the Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus there was nothing authentic except a few scenes and some characters (1725). . . . Similar doubts were expressed by Theobald regarding Henry V (1734), by Hanmer regarding the Two Gentlemen of Verona (1744), by Samuel Johnson regarding Richard II (1765), and by Farmer regarding The Taming of the Shrew (1767). Ritson found some disparities so evident that in The Two Gentlemen, Love’s Labor’s Lost and Richard II he claimed he could distinguish Shakespeare’s hand as easily as one could recognize the brilliant brush strokes with which a Titian might have sought to touch up a mere daub. Malone in 1790, in his often quoted dissertation on Henry VI, did not recognize Shakespeare’s hand except in some passages of the second and third parts and thought that the first part came entirely from one of Shakespeare’s predecessors. (32)

The difference between these early questioners and Delia Bacon is that they never disputed the existence of a William Shakespeare as author, however sparing his touch. As lawyers and doctors began openly questioning the Stratford biography, Frederick Fleay and the so-called disintegrators got ever more severe in limiting the evanescent Shakespeare’s involvement in the production of the canon. Clinging like drowning survivors of shipwreck to that crumbling bit of flotsam, the name itself, academics and their groupies continue to defend what, if one takes the long view, never really existed. The first public attribution, by Francis Meres in 1598, is hardly solid since it stands alone while the book that introduces Shakespeare’s name to the reading public was his only connection with the world of poetic literature. The other attribution, that found in the First Folio of 1623, is fragile in the extreme, and nothing since has done anything to solidify it, quite the reverse. We’re left with Authority’s age-old pronunciamento: “It’s so because I say it’s so.”

That someone wrote the magic and that during the 1590s the name William Shakespeare got attached to it along with a good deal else that’s questionable is all we can be certain of, and all that anyone could be certain of for a very long time. Beginning with Delia, the search began to replace the name with that of a writer whose biography made more sense, keeping Shakespeare only to identify the canon, as in A.W. Pollard’s article of 1917: “Shakespeare’s fight with the Pirates,” in which by Shakespeare he meant, not the author, but the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and their precious playbook.

The questioning has taken new turns over the years. At the beginning it must have been about who was writing the plays that began to be performed in the early 1590s. This was answered in 1598 when three of the most popular plays were published as by William Shake-spear (Richard III) or Shakespeare (Richard II and Romeo and Juliet), the same time that it (the name) was introduced to the reading public via the Meres book as the author of several other plays as well, no doubt popular plays, and of certain “sugar’d sonnets.” Some readers were already familiar with the name from the title pages of two narrative poems published four and five years earlier, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Thus towards the end of the 1590s, long after the first versions of some of the plays had been seen by audiences (the Contentions and True Tragedies), they had a name for the author, but they never had the man himself. The lack of any solid history of William’s presence in London, of letters to him from other writers or from him to other writers or from anyone to anyone else about him, suggests that the questioning must have continued, which the ambiguous wording of the front material in the First Folio was intended to put to rest. That this wording continued through later editions suggests that the questioning continued until, as Feuillerat reports, the emphasis began to shift to questions about what seemed to be other hands of far less ability.

Long story short: the authorship question has been around from the beginning, it has simply shifted focus repeatedly from one aspect to another. Where it rests at the moment, on which of several candidates actually wrote the works attributed to the Stratford money-lender, is only one stage in the long ongoing question of who actually wrote the canon, and, perhaps most important, why it’s taking so long to come up with an answer.

What is Shakespeare?

A word can mean more than one thing: a can can hold beer while to be canned can mean you can be fired from your job; you can be canned for driving with an open can in your hand. By the word can alone we can’t know which of these is the intended meaning; that can only come from the context. The meaning of “I’ve been canned” (I’ve been fired) as opposed to “it’s been canned” (what’s happened to my tomato) can only be determined by a pronoun. Can, spelled differently, can even be a place on the French Riveria and or a film festival.

Language is a tricky thing. It can hide as well as reveal. It can hide while appearing to reveal. Which is the case with the word Shakespeare. First, it can mean the great poet and playwright; second the uneducated man from Stratford-on-Avon who was born with a similar name, though not pronounced the same; third, the body of work produced by the first; and fourth, a pun involving the shaking of a spear. Which is the desired meaning can be understood by context: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet; Shakespeare was born and died in Stratford; I’ve read all of Shakespeare; the playwright shook a spear. Our problem lies with an inability to distinguish among the first three: “I thought Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.”

Writer vs. author

One good thing that came out of the semiotic mess of the mid-twentieth century is the understanding that while an author is always a writer, a writer is not necessarily an author. A writer becomes an author only when his or her writing gets published and his or her name gets printed on the title page. The two may be identically spelled, or they may not, they may not even be the same name. Mary Ann Evans was a writer, as an author she was George Elliot. Daniel Nathan and Manfred Lepovsky wrote mysteries together, as authors they were both Ellery Queen. When writing the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay were Publius. Mark Twain was really Samuel Clemens. Lewis Carroll was really Charles Dodgeson. And so forth. The list of writers cum authors is long and would probably be even longer were all clearly identified.

From the very beginning of writing there’s been an issue over the author’s name. Writing is one way of getting a message out that can’t be expressed any other way, so a large percentage of written material has come from sources that were unable to disseminate it directly through word of mouth. Notes passed in class, anonymous letters, demands for ransom, are the result of situations where the writer can’t speak without fear of retaliation. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, was probably written by priests at a time (or times) of stress when it was feared that what until then had been an oral tradition might vanish should none of those who held it in memory survive. During the Reformation and the period leading up to it it was worth a man’s life to publish the Bible or any of its parts in anything but the official Latin. With the invention of printing came two great and powerful instruments: first, the ability to disseminate writing to a far greater readership at almost a single stroke, and second, the power to hide its source.

Literature originated as speech. The rules that governed self-expression back in ancient times, known as rhetoric, were created to help orators communicate verbally with crowds in public arenas. It took centuries before these rules were altered to fit the needs of communications created solely for publication. Shakespeare, who wrote most obviously for speakers but also, as Lukas Erne makes clear, for readers as well, represents a transition between the two.

With printing, suddenly a few hours of labor by a compositor and a pressman, and there were hundreds of copies ready for distribution. With this also came the ability to cleanse the writing of the tell-tale handwriting that could lead angry authorities to the author of a manuscript, or to his secretary. No sooner were presses imported from the Continent than laws were passed and rules created to make such mystification difficult: printers were licensed, printshops were limited to a fixed number and location, censors were appointed, the name of the printer and the author had to be published on the title page. And of course as rules were created, methods were found for circumventing them, many of them used as often by the Crown as by its enemies, and far more successfully. Which brings us back to Shakespeare.

It should be obvious that Shakespeare (meaning the author) was closely connected to the Crown, that is the central government of the nation. The name William Shakespeare is not to be found on anything relating to the Stage or the theater until 1595 when it appears on a warrant for payment for a Court performance by the recently-formed Crown company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. From then on the only reliable records connecting the name William Shakespeare to theatrical matters will come from this same source, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men––later the King’s Men, sanctioned, licensed, and protected by patrons who were, if not the monarch himself or herself, leading members of the Privy Council, responsible for all matters of Crown policy and its dissemination.

Shakespeare an instrument of the Crown

The fact that from the first the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were in every respect a Crown company is rendered ambiguous by their name, which deflects, probably on purpose, their roots as a part of the Court establishment, but the name does reveal the fact that, as an instrument of the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, their primary purpose was to entertain the Court and otherwise do the Court’s bidding in terms of what plays they put on and where, the Lord Chamberlain being the second most powerful member of the Privy Council, the Queen’s cabinet. As second in power only to the Secretary of State, he was a major instrument of Crown policy, both creating it and enforcing it.

Shakespeare’s Company was preceeded by the first Crown company, the Queen’s Men; for whom the earliest versions of some of his plays were written. Following the death of Elizabeth, the Company was more formally acknowledged by the incoming monarch as the King’s Men. Their first actors and managers included some who had been entertaining the Court since Elizabeth first took the throne, first under her favorite, Robert Dudley, as Leicester’s Men, their manager and the creator of the first purpose built stage in London, James Burbage and his sons.

That from their organization by the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon in 1594 until 1611 or thereabouts, their company playwright was one William Shakespeare is a fact known and accepted by all theater historians. Towards the end of the 1590s they began to perform works by other writers, but that Shakespeare was their mainstay throughout their entire history until the Civil War shut them down, is evident from the history of publishing throughout that period and from what bits of evidence have accrued from other sources.

How strange is it then that no evidence that a William Shakespeare was ever recorded as having been seen or introduced at either Court, Elizabeth’s or James’s? Ben Jonson, who took on the role that Shakespeare played earlier as leading author for the King’s Men was the Poet Laureate of the Court of both James and Charles I with clear ties to the King’s Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Milton and Dryden were both Poets Laureate, and as such, instruments of the Crown, purveyors of Crown policy. Molière, whose plays were written as much for the Court of Louis the Fourteenth as Shakespeares’were for Elizabeth’s, was a well-known member of the French Court community as was the poet Ronsard earlier to the Court of two French kings, and as were Ariosto and Tasso to the Court of the Princes of Este in Italy.

But at Elizabeth’s Court? Nary a trace of William Shakespeare.

Why Burghley defended Oxford

Much has been made, by Alan Nelson and other Burghley appologists, of the seemingly kindly treatment by the Lord Treasurer of his reprehensible son-in-law. I believe that William Cecil did love Edward de Vere, insofar as he was capable of loving anyone, at least at first, but there is a political side to this that must be acknowledged. Nothing Cecil ever did, whether good or bad, was without political implications.

First, it seems most likely that Cecil was the major instrument in removing de Vere from wherever he was being cared for in 1554 to the household of Sir Thomas Smith. Although Smith was a loyal constituent of the sixteenth Earl, the Smith family having been longtime residents of Saffron Walden in Essex, a short ride from the Oxford stronghold at Hedingham Castle, it was Cecil who was in a position to make the necessary arrangements, not his father the Earl, or his uncle Arthur Golding, nor Smith. As his tutor at Cambridge, Cecil knew Smith well enough to know that he would make the perfect caretaker for the precious heir to the great Oxford earldom. It was a firm belief of those reformers who instilled in Cecil the Reformation mantra that good government would occur only when young peers were raised as Protestants.

Smith was honest, honorable, sexually chaste (i.e., no pedophile), a dedicated Protestant, a great humanist scholar, and possibly the most highly regarded teacher of his time. He had no legitimate child of his own, and, most important, was essentially out of work having lost his position as Secretary of State during Somerset’s great fall, then with the return of Catholicism under Queen Mary, his place as Provost of Eton. Since Cecil was the only member of Edward’s reform government to remain (unofficially) in office following Mary’s accession, he was in a position to know when the boy had to be moved, for safety’s sake, before the anti-reform storm struck Essex early in 1555.

Cecil was also in a position to offer Smith a juicy quid pro quo in exchange for a year or two of taking care of the boy [I don’t imagine they had any idea the arrangement would continue for eight years]: Cecil happened to be in a position to arrange Smith’s second marriage to the widow of a former colleague at Court, a marriage that brought with it an excellent estate at the northern edge of the Forest of Waltham, which meant that Smith would be back in Essex, not far from his family in Saffron Walden, at an easy commuting distance from both Cambridge and London. Further, there was probably the understanding that as soon as possible, Cecil would see to it that Smith got returned to a worthwhile position on the Privy Council.

It’s very likely that Cecil, and many others, were aware from the start that Mary’s health was dicey, and that it was unlikely that she would live for more than a few years, giving him time to lay the groundwork for her younger sister to take the throne, at which point de Vere would be safe and Smith could return to his old place on the Privy Council. There’s no record of such a deal, but then there wouldn’t be. Where evidence is lacking we must go by the nature of events, human nature and common sense. We do know that once Elizabeth was on the throne and Cecil was Secretary of State––while Smith got nothing but a bone, JP for his district in Essex––he and Smith had a falling out that lasted two years. We also know that as soon as the sixteenth earl was buried, Oxford went to London while Smith went to France as the English Ambassador.

Foreign ambassador was not what Smith had in mind, but at least it meant he had a foot back in the government door. France brought mixed results for Smith. Although his embassy was a failure (as were most Elizabethan embassies) he saw some buildings that left a strong impression on him, which he explored when he returned to renovating his new home in Essex. He also had the opportunity to add important books to his library and to send some to Cecil and Walsingham.

Whether or not he had anything to do with it, the death of Earl John in 1562 enabled Cecil, by then Master of the Court of Wards, to bring young Oxford to London where he could oversee the finishing touches to his Protestant education, and, not least, to arrange for his marriage to his daughter Anne. However Oxford attempted to keep his “lewd” poems to himself, Cecil, the premiere spymaster, was probably well aware of his writing, but thought little of it so long as the boy kept it to himself. It’s interesting that two of the works of imaginative literature that issued from that community in 1565, Golding’s translation of Ovid’s The Metamorphoses and Painter’s translations of the French and Italian tales in the Pallace of Pleasure, were dedicated to the Earl of Leicester. Only scholarly works and sober works of Reformation dogma were ever dedicated to Cecil.

Cecil must have been pleased that Oxford turned out to be so popular at Court, and that his talent gave him access to the Court Stage. With the advent of the Earl of Sussex as Lord Chamberlain in 1572, Cecil, now Burghley, saw the political advantage to his own interests when Sussex, under pressure to take control of Court entertainment away from his hated rival, the Earl of Leicester, opened the door to Oxford’s control of the Court Stage, as Sussex worked to remove it from Leicester’s control. He may even have been party to the decision to let Oxford have a year in Italy to learn how to produce public theater from Francesco Andreini and theater building from Andrea Palladio.

Following Oxford’s return, Privy Council members Burghley and Leicester would have to know of plans being made by fellow Countil members Sussex, Hunsdon and Lord Charles Howard to create a public theater where the Court could control the kind of plays produced. That Oxford took the moment of his return to break with the Cecils was unfortunate for Burghley, but while his heart remained bitter, politics demanded that he do everything he could to mend the breach, partly for his daughter’s sake, but also to have some say in the process as plans continued to create a channel between the Court Stage and the public. Burghley pretty much had total control of the Press, which he had helped to create. He wasn’t about to hand over control of the Stage to either Leicester or Sussex.

The first open breach between Burghley and his former ward came with Oxford’s banishment from Court in 1581 for impregnating the Queen’s maid of honor, Ann Vavasor. Perhaps more disturbing than the insult to Burghley’s daughter, Oxford’s wife, were the plays that he was writing for the adult actors to perform at the little Blackfriars school stage, including an early version of Hamlet in which, as he heard from his sister-in-law, who lived near the theater, he himself was being parodied as Corambis (later Polonius) and that Oxford had dared to draw parallels between the recent death of Sussex and the infamous murder some years earlier of the Italian Duke of Urbino. But again, political necessity overrode all else. For the sake of Court solidarity as well as his family, Burghley had to do whatever he could to get Oxford back in the fold. The Queen looked to him to keep his family in line. He simply had no other choice. Later he whined in one of his memos to posterity, “No enemy I have can envy me this match.”

Relief came with Walsingham’s plan to create a Crown company. Oxford would return to the Court with a real and important task, to provide the new Crown company with plays that would promote understanding of England’s present danger by comparing the present stand-off with Spain to other times in history. This allowed Walsingham to create a propaganda office made up of the crew of secretaries and musicians that hung out at Oxford’s manor, Fisher’s Folly, located just outside Bishopsgate, a few steps from his own residence, the Papey, just inside the gate. With Oxford’s own credit stretched to the breaking point, Walsingham provided the funds to hire more secretaries, among them young Francis Bacon and even younger Christopher Marlowe.

These together with George Peele, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Lodge (the so-called University Wits), provided plays for the children’s companies to entertain the Queen and her visitors while Oxford concentrated on writing for the Queen’s Men and other adult companies. This is when The Famous Victories, The True Tragedies and The Contention plays were written that would be revised in the nineties as the Lancastrian history cycle (Richard II to Richard III), for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the second royal acting company. Eventually Walsingham was able to persuade the Queen to pick up at least part of the tab by giving Oxford an annuity at the same time that she provided the Secretary with the money he needed to protect England from Spain.

Although Oxford agreed to the Queen’s demand that his return to Court depended on his return to his wife, it’s unlikely that he ever again shared any real home life with Anne. He must have set up a situation where it could appear that they were a family once again, providing the Cecils with three more girls and a boy who died shortly after birth, while he continued to spend most of his time at Fisher’s Folly or one of the theaters. Unable to tolerate the interference with his life that was simply part of Burghley nature, Oxford’s remorse over what this did to Anne, and to his daughters, is reflected in the plot or sub-plot of at least six plays, from Pericles to Othello.

Several events in the late 1580s to early ’90s caused the final rupture between Milord and the Cecils. The first was the 1587 break between Christopher Marlowe and the Crown, when Marlowe and Edward Alleyn brought the anti-establishment play Tamburlaine to Henslowe’s Rose Theater on Bankside, where its popularity posed a threat to the social calm at a time of increasing political unrest. As co-creators of the London Stage, both Walsingham and Oxford were doubtless blamed by Burghley and Whitgift for this breach of contract by two of their players.

The second was the death of Walsingham in 1590, and the immediate takeover of his office and his papers by Robert Cecil, who, with the help of his father, set to work immediately to put a stop to the escapades of the Fisher’s Folly crew. Shortly after Anne’s death in 1588 Burghley had moved to end Oxford’s ability to get credit, forcing him to sell Fisher’s Folly in 1589, and Vere House at London Stone a year later (ironically to one of the major enemies of the London Stage). University Wits Robert Greene and Thomas Watson were the first to go, “dying” on the same day in 1592. Marlowe and John Penry, scapegoat for the crew that produced the antiestablishment Mar-prelate pamphlets, were eliminated within 24 hours of each other early in 1593. The patron of the company that produced Tamburlaine, Lord Strange, was murdered the following year, just as the majority of his company was being reorganized into what would soon be the new Crown company.

If Burghley had any sentiment left for the golden-haired lad whose fate he had engineered almost from birth, it was gone. Suffering from overwork, gout, and self-pity, he saw only the ungrateful son-in-law, who had fathered a fine bastard but failed to give him the heir he felt he deserved, and who had somehow managed it so that there was nothing left of the great Oxford earldom to pass along to his grandchildren. If the final version of Hamlet reveals the truth about Anne Cecil’s final hours, Burghley’s bitterness is understandable. As for Oxford, forced to work in silence and secrecy, his identity and true meaning masked by pun-names and ambiguous wording, the poet yet had one great weapon, the truth, and his actors.

It was when Cecil attacked the Company that the break flared into open warfare. Too many people cared about the Stage to let Robert Cecil destroy it. Lord Hunsdon, by then Lord Chamberlain of the Household, together with his son-in-law, Lord Admiral Charles Howard, stepped forward to save it, but when Cecil, finally having acquired the power of the Secretary of State, shut down their new theater in advance of the Parliament of 1597, leaving them with no stage of their own, with the following deaths in rapid succession of both manager Burbage and patron Hunsdon, the company itself, and its playbook were on the ropes. Out came the spear (his pen), up went the curtain, out came Richard Burbage, dressed like Cecil, his back hunched over, his imitation spot on; out came the first edition of the play for those who missed the performance; and Cecil’s reputation was done for. He still had his power, but without a good name he was helpless to accomplish anything important.

Halted in his villanous progress by the 1597 production and publication of Richard III, with its obvious portrayal of himself as the evil Lancastrian King, having chased Oxford into hiding in the Forest, he did whatever he could to erase any connection between his brother-in-law and the London Stage. Having achieved the ultimate in political power, though he survived him by only three or four years, that was enough time to burn almost everything that connected Oxford directly to the world of English literature, and everything that connected himself and his family to any of the characters in Oxford’s plays. Oxford had destroyed his good name, but he got the last laugh, destroying any connection between his hated brother-in-law and the English Literary Renaissance.