Why I didn’t review Shapiro

I didn’t review Shapiro because I didn’t read his book.

I used to pay attention to Stratfordians. I’d argue with them, pointing out the holes in their logic, pointing to the facts, the “smoking guns,” that require a courtier, a more sensible dating scheme, an explanation for the gaping anomalies in the Stratford biography. When they ridiculed the Shakespeare authorship question I got serious. When they purposely misinterpreted facts I got angry. When they refused to listen I got sad.

Round and round I went on SHAKSPER with the postdocs and pseudo-scholars as they tirelessly repeated the mantras instilled in them by their professors. When finally they began beating the drum for the notion that great fiction doesn’t have to arise from personal experience, I should have realized that it was an exercise in futility, but I soldiered on, thinking that there might be lurkers whose minds were less closed to reality. If so I never saw any hint of it.

Then of course there was HLAS, created in part by Oxfordians Bill Boyle and Marty Hyatt as a forum for an open online discussion, which soon turned into a verbal Fight Club, with the Shakespeare authorship question nothing more than a focal point for the verbal art of ad hominem vilification. If HLAS (humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare) is still in operation I’d be very much surprised to hear that it’s changed. Fighting is always so much more exciting than reasoning.

When they said Oxford’s poetry was terrible I demonstrated how different it was even then from the morose tone of the poetry being written at the time and known to literary historians as “the drab era.” If any of them had ever bothered to read this stuff, to actually compare Oxford’s poetry with Turberville or Churchyard, they never uttered a peep.

When they brushed off Oxford as dying before The Tempest was written I pointed to the obvious factors that link that play to the 1595 marriage of his daughter to the Earl of Derby (since then Stritmatter and Kositsky have shown even earlier origins); to the fact that back in the 1570s it was his tutor, Sir Thomas Smith, whose plan for colonizing Ireland is considered by historians today to be the starting point for all subsequent plans to colonize America (Quinn 103, Armitage xx), including Jamestown, where the ship was headed that was wrecked in Bermuda, the supposed source of the 1611 Strachey letter; to the fact that Smith’s family were close friends with the Stracheys in their hometown of Saffron Walden, Essex (it was their grandson who wrote the famous letter); and so on. It hasn’t changed a thing. We continue to hear, ad infinitum, how The Tempest and any number of other plays (never enumerated) were written too late to be by Oxford.

When they claim that knowing nothing about Shakespeare is perfectly understandable––since so little is known about writers like Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, or John Webster, why should we know any more about Shakespeare than we do about them?––I never dared to explain how Greene was early Shakespeare, Nashe was early Francis Bacon, and Webster Mary Sidney. I may be willing to stick my chin out now and then, but I’m not insane.

How they love to ridicule the fact that there are so many candidates. Francis Bacon? No way. Christopher Marlowe? Un-uh. Mary Sidney? C’est ridicule! Yet the historic picture based on the fact that there is no evidence that these writers even knew each other never raises a single eyebrow. Do they actually know any great writers personally? Have they ever researched the lives of other great writers in the kind of depth that would cause them to wonder why this group was so different? No, because to a left-brainer, the only reality is the one written down on paper. To admit that there might be something else is to open a can of really evil, dangerous right-brain worms. Run away! Run away!

Their favorite tactic of course is to call us “snobs” for thinking that only an earl could have had the kind of education revealed by Shakespeare’s works. There’s really no rejoinder to the stupidity of this, except to point out that if in fact William of Stratford had had such an education, we’d surely know about it, just as we know about the educations of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, neither one of them earls or even close.

The major problem, as I have come to realize, is that students of literature never attempt to relate what they know of the history of the period (not so much nowadays it would appear) to its literature, its writers, their publishers and printers, nor do they think to relate the mysteries of an earlier period with similar situations closer to us in time. This disconnect begins in school where, in history class, sound-bytes on the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation, the Inquisition, the burning of witches (i.e. women) in France and heretics (i.e. scientists) in Italy and Spain, are forgotten the day after the quiz, while in English class they learn that Shakespeare was “above” writing about current events or using his life as a background to his works. Two little boxes, side by side on a mental shelf, one labelled History, one Literature––never the twain to meet.

I used to think this was more or less purposeful, that “none are so blind as those who will not see,” but now I think it’s not so much that they won’t see than that they simply can’t. Raised from childhood on multiple choice questions and term papers that rarely require anything more than regurgitating a teacher’s favorite ideas, most academics become so immersed in a left brain approach to everything they deal with that by the time they write their dissertations and their introductions to new editions of Shakespeare, their right brains have pretty much dried up and blown away. This is bad news for the culture at large, as nature clearly intended the left brain to function as the servant to the right brain. It’s a killer for those questions that require cross-disciplinary thinking. It’s interesting that current studies suggest that animals use their left brains mostly for locating food, their right brains for warning of the approach of predators. Substitute tenured professorships for food and the Beatles’s apple bonkers for predators, and you have a nice little metaphor for our present predicament.

Luckily, now that we have google and the internet, we can simply ignore them. Already Shapiro’s book is fading from view. Google alerts hasn’t turned up a new review in a couple of weeks. No biggie, for the left-brainers will have a new one out in no time, written by and for the academics and their admirers, as they continue to reassure themselves that the Shakespeare authorship question is only for the lunatic fringe.

I respect the efforts of the Oxfordians who continue to take them on. More power to them, though I doubt that it will make a dent in their thinking or in the thinking of those who lay out good money for their books. The French Impressionists did not take the art world by storm by meeting the Royal academicians on their own turf. No revolution, whether bloody or merely intellectual, ever began by playing footsie with the establishment, and the revolution we call the English Literary Renaissance was both intellectual and bloody. And a hell of a lot more interesting than either the Stratford story or the hyperbole of its proponents.

“Awfully decent of him”: Sobran reviews Shapiro

As defenses of the Stratford biography continue to arrive in bookstores in a mainstream effort to stem the tide of authorship inquiry, hyped by other academics and other left-brainers in online reviews, I can’t help but think I should join the debate. I could get a review copy and add my two cents––so why don’t I? For one thing, since I’m still mostly preaching to the choir here, I think it’s more useful to promote the Oxfordians who who can get their reviews published in mainstream journals. I hardly have time to read the books stacked and waiting, books with the kind of information that’s truly useful, as more Stratfordian groupthink is not.

But basically, it’s just a matter of “been there done that.” I’ve argued in private and in print with Ward Elliott and in public with Alan Nelson. I went at it with the coneheads on SHAKSPER. I watched Beauclerk debate Louis Marder and Stritmatter debate Terry Ross and have read David Kathman at length. I finally realized that these folks aren’t being stubborn in the face of reality. It’s not that they won’t see it, it’s that they can’t.

Most academics are herd animals, they follow the leader, usually the head of the English Department at their university. If she tells them that William’s the man, it never occurs to them that she might be wrong (and if it does, he’s better off elsewhere, for there he’ll never prosper). For over a century believing in William has been the English Lit ticket to preferment, to tenure, to getting published, to getting the juicy stuff, what there is of it. It took 200 years before they would even allow the plays to be performed at Cambridge or Oxford, longer before they began teaching him. They scoffed at the idea that there was anything of value in Shakespeare, like some scoff today at classes in film or popular music.

Academics are good with details, with focussing in on a small area and putting it in order, one reason why we have so much good material to work with. But they’re no good at putting the bits together. It seems never to occur to them to check how or if these chunks of scholarship fit together. Not only can’t they see the forest for the trees, they don’t even know there’s a forest. They’re good thinkers or they wouldn’t have gotten where they are, but they can’t think outside the box they were handed along with their diplomas. Most of them have been inside the left-brain academic box since they were six years old and so they don’t even know there’s a great multi-dimensional world outside it.

Authorship scholars have a fully functioning right brain, which warns them when gaps appear in the record; academics don’t. They can follow a trail of published facts, but if it takes them off into some empty wilderness it seems never to occur to them that something might be wrong. Unable to imagine that anyone who knows the facts could be so blind, we accuse them of bad faith, but the truth is that, they simply can’t see the big picture. Like the vain glamour girls in the days before contact lenses who refused to wear glasses, everything farther away than fifteen inches is a blur. They refuse to talk about anything but the little facts they can see up close, not the big ones that are so obvious to anyone who bothers to dig a little deeper .

It never seems to strike them how very peculiar it is that we know so much about Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe and so little (that makes sense) about their far more important contemporary. We can track Marlowe from a childhood at the Canterbury School to teen years at Cambridge to his twenties at the Rose Theater and Tamburlaine to his death in Deptford. We can track Jonson from the Westminster school to the lowlands army to acting, then writing, for the London companies, then to his long association with the Lord Chamberlain’s-King’s Men and the Pembrokes. In both of these the events of their lives, their known associations, and the plays they created all fit together like pieces of a puzzle to produce a believable scenario. How is it that the academics don’t see the difference between these two genuine stories and the Stratford fairy tale?

Nevertheless, although I can’t take the time myself, it’s still a delight to hear our side of the debate articulated by someone with the skills of Joe Sobran as in his recent review of Shapiro’s Contested Will.* There’s no point in throwing facts at defenders of the Stratford faith, they bounce right off. Why not take it easy on them, as Joe does with Shapiro. After all, as should be clear, their time is coming to an end. And we have much to thank them for.

*Many thanks to Sam Robrin for supplying the link to Sobran’s review.

They all knew each other

It’s hard for us today to understand why a writer would wish to hide his identity. We live in a society where, to get ahead in life, one must become known to as many people as possible. We go to particular colleges where we can meet the right people, we “network,” we get on websites like Facebook and Myspace, we are fascinated by celebrities; magazines and television people make their livings reporting on their lives and showing pictures of their faces.

This is one reason why so many Americans, young ones in particular, are focused on achieving fame. In a world where there are so many people, such quick turnovers, such constant movement, changes in personnel, entire companies relocating over vast distances, even to foreign countries, a trend that’s been spreading and expanding for generations, more and more there seems to be no other way to feel important or needed than to become world famous, or at least as famous as possible. For this reason we have a hard time understanding why someone would actually not want to become famous. In a world where fame seems necessary to establish identity, it seems unnatural that a writer would want to hide his identity to the point where it could get permanently lost.

We need to keep in mind how very small were the communities involved in this question. If we don’t we’re in danger of being so blinded by today’s world-view that much of what this story is about won’t make sense. Where today we have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of publishers and published writers, hundreds perhaps thousands of would-be playwrights, far more than any one person can know personally or even that they exist, Elizabethan readers could count the published writers of that time, those they could identify, on the fingers of one hand.

While today we see the world more as an ocean of vast if vague possibilities, dotted here and there by islands of what is known, all of it subject to change, most Elizabethans still saw themselves as members of a handful of small overlapping communities that saw only occasional changes. Think in terms of a small town, where changes to the population occur only through childbirth, death, and the occasional newcomer out to find better work or escaping from trouble somewhere else. Think in terms of a high school where no one ever graduates, where the football captain and the homecoming queen take those roles with them into old age.

This stable universe was changing; economic pressures and other factors made it seem to many at that time that there was far less stability than their fathers had known, but seen from today’s perspective, it was stable to a degree that most of us no longer expect or even understand. Unconsciously we always have the sense that there are many unknown people out there just beyond the perimeter of our consciousness. If we are uncomfortable with the people around us, we can make changes, get divorced, move to a different neighborhood, get a different job. Their options were far fewer. Basically they were stuck with each other.

They were also stuck with themselves, that is, everyone they knew knew everything there was to know about them, about their family history, for good or ill, ugly rumors, misbehaviors, plus their own feelings of guilt and oppression. Until we understand this we won’t understand what the Revels meant to them, those annual moments of emotional release, of social reversal when they could hide their burdensome identities and play at being the Hobby Horse or the Green Man. Until we understand this we won’t understand what the birth of the London Stage meant to the Elizabethans.

So please try to keep in mind that this story calls for a cast of tens––not thousands, not even hundreds. There may still be an unknown figure here and there that time will reveal, but for the most part, be assured that every role in this scenario was played by someone well known to the others, and probably well known to history as well. This in itself should suggest at least one reason for their need for secrecy. With this and with every other factor, think small town, think small town high school.

The other major factor to keep in mind is dates. The series of events I propose is based primarily on a time structure of dates that unfold within the reality of the small size of the educated Elizabethan arts community and the necessary conclusion to be drawn from that fact, which is that they all knew each other very well. Everything good, everything bad. With this comes some understanding of the author’s power and consequently his need for secrecy. He was the Hobby Horse of his community, their Martin Mar-Authority figure. He was their Green Man.

That darn name!

Who was Shakespeare?

If we anti-Stratfordians are ever successful at raising the issue, the question will someday be opened where it belongs, in the Halls of Academe; academe, a word that the true author took from Greek, knowledge of which he had acquired in childhood from his tutor, the man who put Homeric Greek on the curriculum at Cambridge university in the 1540s.

Meanwhile we can work to unravel the Gordian knot that prevents so much discourse from taking place, that the author’s protectors so cleverly left in the way of discovery. Because the name means different things to different people, we never get past the first confusion. To me and others who have realized that William of Stratford simply could not possibly have written the works of Shakespeare, the name Shakespeare has come to mean the author of the works, so we are agreed that the name does not mean the man who was born with it, it refers to the man who made it famous, whoever he turns out to be.

“I thought Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare is, and always has been, less a person than a body of work. We refer to Shakespeare as we refer to Mark Twain or Lewis Carroll. When we speak of Lewis Carroll, we don’t mean Charles Lutwidge Dodson, the stammering Oxford math professor, or to Mark Twain as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the quondam steamship tyro and printer’s apprentice, or Ellery Queen as the Brooklyn cousins who made up the name for their author cum fictional detective; we mean their works, their books, their stories. Just so, when most of us speak of Shakespeare we don’t mean either William of Stratford, deer poacher, butcher’s apprentice, or Edward de Vere, rascally Earl of Oxford––we mean the plays and the poems that continue to delight us.

It’s the name Shakespeare that brings on the confusion over the authorship, so if we’re to understand each other, if we’re to sort out the confusion caused by the name, we need to define what we mean by it. When I began writing about Shakespeare I stuck the name Hopkins (that of a revered ancestor) in between my given and my family name for this very reason, to distinguish me from the 13 other women named Stephanie Hughes I found when I googled my name. (By now there would probably be 113!)

We need names in order to communicate with each other. And, although, as the Bard himself put it, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; conversely, to call a daisy a rose would cause confusion. Just so, when it comes to dissecting the authorship problem, since it is his name that has been the primary cause of confusion, it is to eliminate that confusion that I refer to William Shakespeare of Stratford as William of Stratford––as English a name as ever was.

Where there is cause to write his family name, I spell it Shakspere, one of the more common spellings used by the clerks in his home town and before the world followed the version used by the London acting company on the various title pages and documents that ever since have constituted the paper trail meant to demonstrate authorship. Since we would never have known or cared anything about William of Stratford had it not been for the great writer who used his surname, I believe it’s the writer who made the name famous who deserves it, not the man who traded it for a big house, a coat of arms, a monument in his local church, and the right to call himself “Gent.” William’s defenders should be satisfied by this decision, for clearly the man was well-paid for its use, and so far as we know, he never complained.

In any case, it’s far from clear that the name as we know it from the title pages and legal documents was the same name, either as spelled or as pronounced, by William and his family and their Stratford neighbors. Spelling, of course, was all over the map in those days, and Shakspere was a rather unusual name. Although there were other Shakespeares in England at the time, they were not numerous, and most of them lived in Warwickshire where it was spelled in almost as many different ways as there were clerks and scriveners to inscribe it in the town record books, where the variety of spellings reflects their interpretations of how they heard it. We have no spelling of the name by any of the Shakspere family, since none of them could write their names, including, obviously, William himself.

Some of these spellings strongly suggest that the name was not pronounced as we pronounce it today. Spellings that begin with “Shaks,” “Shacks,” “Shax,” or “Shags” suggest that, for William’s family and neighbors, the first syllable ended, not after the e, giving the a a long sound (as in bake or rake), but after the s, giving it a short sound (as in axe or sacks). In addition, the occasional spelling of the second syllable as “pyere” or “pyeer” suggests that this part of the name was similar to the French pronunciation of the name Pierre.

In our view, the most likely derivation of the name was an anglicization of the French given name, Jacques-Pierre, which was, and still is, pronounced “Shax-pyair,” or, “Shak-es-pyair.” (The French pronunciation has some soft g in it, but is really closer to sh.) As French for James Peter, Jacques-Pierre was a favorite with French Catholics, as it combines the names of two of the Galilean apostles, James and (Simon) Peter.

The French have always liked double names; there are a handful of Jacques Pierres on google.com. (I’m particularly taken with the California vintner: Jacques Pierre Schlumberger.) Since we can finally accept the evidence that the Shakspere family were Catholics, it’s a good bet that, on his father’s side, William was descended from a French workman or bond servant (of the sort often known only by their given names) who imigrated to England at some point during the Norman diaspora that followed the Conquest in 1066.

Among scores of other possible spellings that have been accumulated by scholars from the scrolls and ledgers that constitute what remains of Stratford town records, the modern spelling, S-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-a-r-e, does occur, but it was not the predominant spelling until the 17th century when the title pages of his plays and published references derived from them had made the long a spelling famous. As for the pronunciation, surely it was pronounced as we do today by those who bought the published plays in London, while in Stratford the pronunciation continued as it had always been. Thus over time, as the fame of the canon spread, the pronunciation changed from from the Stratford “Shax-pyair” (accent on the second syllable), to today’s “Shake-spear” (accent on the first). Why the change? Because the second spelling and the pronunciation it evokes, creates a pun.

The name’s the game

I believe that William Shakespeare was chosen as stand-in or proxy for the nation’s leading playwright primarily because of his name. He had other virtues, for instance that he was located far enough away that London gossip would not reach his community of wool dealers and ale brewers anytime soon. That he was illiterate was also a boon, because he would not try, as did Anthony Munday, to palm off his own work on printers as that of his famous boss. As a member of a well-known Catholic family, in that cruelly prejudiced time, he knew how to keep a low profile, and as a man with a large family to care for and no great skills of his own, the money was most welcome.

But his real selling point was none of these, for these could be found in hundreds of Williams throughout the land. It was the addition of his wonderful surname that won him the great windfall, because although spelled William Shakespeare, a name that could be proven to be the real name of a real person, it also holds a magnificent anagram, one that could not possibly be an accident: Will I am shake spear. “I am Will” who “will shake [a] spear!”

This punning anagram, sailing past the heads of the hoi polloi (and today’s academics) signaled to the inner circles of his audience––those with an ear for puns––that the author himself was a fictional being like his own Doll Tear-sheet. If they were among that elite minority who could read the Greek philosophers and dramatists in their own language and liked to refer to themselves as Athenians, they would catch the reference to Athena, patron goddess of Athens, always portrayed with a spear in one hand and a helmet of invisibility on her head. And should anyone tried to publish their own stuff under that name, or otherwise cause the hidden author grief, he would shake his spear at them. Though but a little spear, the kind one dips into an inkwell, it drew blood all right, so much so that to stay alive and keep on writing, the Athenian who shook it on the London Stage had to keep his helmet of invisibility on at all times.

I believe that it was in this manner that an anglicized French name that had no connection with shaking a spear became, through a slight modification in spelling and pronunciation, the pen name of England’s greatest and most famous writer. And it was also in this manner that William, son of John, husband of Anne, father of three, acquired the biggest house in Stratford, and was able to give his wool-dealer father the social elevation he craved, providing him with a family coat-of-arms and a monument in the local church, himself acquiring enough money to invest locally in land and in buildings in London, hoard grain in time of famine, and take his Warwickshire neighbors to court over a handful of silver.

Anti-Stratfordians should never sneer or laugh at William, for it’s largely due to his ability to keep his mouth shut over two long decades that “the grand possessors” were finally able to get the First Folio published. One scholar’s term for William, “prudent,” seems particularly apt, and though his great silence was no doubt based on self-interest (and perhaps a bit on his suspicion of neighbors out to bring grief to recusant Catholics), it has worked worked well for us, for the true author and his actors, and for the wider worlds of the Theater and English letters.

Shakespeare for snobs?

I pay attention to the blogs that mention the authorship question. Those that rail against or make fun of it have two points they make consistently (and only two, repeating, like parrots, what they’ve heard from others), that Oxford died before “some of Shakespeare’s plays were written,” and that we’re snobs to think that only a nobleman could have the education. Well, the first isn’t true, if they’d bother to do some easy research (like read this blog), and the second is true, as they would know if any of them knew anything at all about 16th-century England or the facts, the genuine facts, about William of Stratford.

Shakespeare is so much a part of our lives, only those who spend a lot of time reading or hearing his words realize how often the words and phrases in newspaper headlines, television interviews, and ordinary conversation are his. Reach for a phrase to express the highest thought, and it will usually be his. He was the great flower of the English Renaissance, and our language and thinking is still permeated with the perfume of his poetic thought. Steeped in the aphorisms of the Greeks and Romans, he turned them into English, beautiful English, the kind only a poet can craft, and made them accessible to those who speak English for as long as English is spoken.

This kind of immersion in the literature of ancient wisdom and the beauties of poetry and rhetoric can’t be picked up in books along the way, even today. It arises out of high level dinner table conversation with adults steeped in the subject, out of continual application to books that are ready to hand, by stimulating conversation with others who know and love poetry, by hearing beautiful prose and poetry read aloud, and it has to begin early. In Shakespeare’s case it began with the removal of little Edward de Vere to the home of the great Greek scholar and statesman, Sir Thomas Smith, in 1554, with whom he would study Greek and Latin literature and history and English history for 8 years.

Smith didn’t care for music, so it wasn’t until de Vere came to live with William Cecil in London and was involved in Court activities that he heard live music by professional musicians on a regular basis and acquired training in and keyboard and stringed instruments himself. Since later he was acclaimed as having enough musical skill to be considered a professional, it may be that Shakepeare’s poetry was the product of one who was at heart a musician, who, as a child was not yet able to make music with instruments, so made it instead replacing the sounds of music with the sound of words, through rhymes, alliteration, and meter.

In his dedication to Shakespeare’s Collected Works, Ben Jonson compared Shakespeare to a smith who must sweat to work the metal at white heat, hammering it into shape. Those who take the craft of writing seriously know that it takes hours of thought to create prose that’s pleasing to both mind and ear, and although great poetry is sometimes born all of a piece (as was Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening or Coleridge’s Kubla Khan), it can only come from a mind continually steeped in poetic thought.

If there’s one thing that unites the Stratfordians who call us snobs (besides their ignorance), it’s their prejudice against aristocrats. If it turned out that Shakespeare was a black African, would they call us anti-white? Do they have some image of Bertie Wooster in mind, helpless without Jeeves? What about the great aristocrats? Henry V? Or Oxford’s own ancestor, the 13th Earl, patron of the arts, the indefatigable warrior who survived an ignominious defeat, the execution of his heir, and imprisonment for ten years to defeat Richard III in battle, handing over the English throne to the Tudors? What about Lord Byron, the immensely popular poet who sacrificed his life for the cause of Greek freedom? What about Alexander the Great, son of King Philip of Macedon, who brought Greek civilization to half the world? What about the painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec? What about Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha?

Oxford was only half aristocrat, anyway. Although it’s true that his father was the direct descendant of a Norman aristocrat dubbed Earl by William the Conqueror, his mother was simple entry, while Smith, his surrogate father, was the son of a local farmer. As an artist, Oxford was, in many ways, an outcast from his own tribe who preferred the company of other artists to members of his own class. There are more reasons than one why his identity as Shakespeare was hidden, but surely the major reason was the way he portayed his aristocratic friends and relatives as characters in his plays, some with cruel satire. He could satirize them because he knew them! And because they knew it, they would not, could not, allow his identity to be revealed. Did this “torture” him, as some Oxfordians have held? It may have caused him moments of frustration, but given the choice between continuing to write, or not, he chose to continue writing.

There was another potentially great poet, one from Oxford’s own class (though on a lower level) who, seeing what it meant to get a reputation as a poet, did choose to stop writing, or at least, to stop using his own name: Thomas Sackville, Ld Buckhurst. His was the first voice that had anything like the sound that would later transform the language. He wrote several of the scenes in the first modern play, Gorboduc, produced at Court in 1561, a year before de Vere came to London. Had Sackville continued, it might have been he who won the glories reserved for Shakespeare (the Poet), but Sackville retired from the poetry arena early, explaining in a poem, Sackville’s Old Age, that such toys were not for him. Did this have anything to do with Elizabeth’s willingness to promote him, lavishing him with promotions and perquisites that ended by raising him, as the Earl of Dorset, to Oxford’s level, allowing (some might say forcing) Oxford to slide into bankruptcy, giving him almost nothing he ever asked for?

Did the Lord Chamberlain’s Men choose to hide their playwright’s identity behind someone else’s name have anything to do with the fact that only months earlier the only other playwright close to his level, Christopher Marlowe, had been assassinated by government agents?

What do you think?

Once more into the breach, dear friends

Those of us who have spent enough time researching the authorship question to realize that it’s simply not possible that William of Stratford wrote the Shakespeare canon need to remember, when arguing the question with his defenders, that old saw: a good offense is the best defence. Keep moving the argument back to the anomalies, back to the facts, back to the fact of the anomalies.

For instance, does it make sense that the most innovative writer of all time chose to rewrite the works of lesser writers rather than come up with his own unique plots? Who else did that? Not Milton. Not Byron. Not Keats, Shelley, Blake, none of them! Not even other playwrights from Shakespeare’s own time. Yet orthodox scholars have him copying Marlowe’s style, borrowing entire plots, characters and all, from Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, stealing tropes from Samuel Daniel, one indigestible anomaly after another that, as per the White Queen’s advice to Alice, we’re to swallow without demur. “Open wide! Say ahhh!”

With Oxford, on the other hand, the only thing we have to swallow is the not nearly so absurd idea that he chose to hide his identity. Taken with a few spoonfuls of literary history such as the exile of Ovid, the martydom of Cicero, the burning of Tyndale, the fatwa that kept Salmon Rushdie in hiding for years, one might conclude that hiding his identity during the repressive regime of the early English Reformation might have been a rather clever maneuver, one that kept him going well into his fifties while Marlowe never made it past his twenties.

Whenever they raise the issue of his dying before The Tempest was produced, Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky now have their evidence of its early composition online, available to all to read, recommend, and pass along in emails to interested friends, including the rather amusing tale of how the Shakespeare establishment has been fighting to keep The Tempest in its little tiny teapot. S&K have got a book on this at the publisher’s. Hammer away at it, friends! Don’t let it drop!

When they raise the issue of Oxford’s lack of obvious involvement in the Stage, relegating it to the brief appearances of companies like Lord Rich’s players or Lord Berkeley’s Men, point out the fact that, however minor his connections appear in the record, and however brief, they cover a longer period than any other patron or playwright except Ben Jonson. Note how every momentous development in the history of the Stage seems to happen under the Earl of Oxford’s nose. This, along with the published statements of his abilities in The Arte of English Poesie and Meres’s Wits Treasury, should be more than enough. That is, it’s more than enough when taken together with the theory that he hid his identity! Don’t let them divide and conquer by arguing the one issue without the other! The reason why his name appears so infrequently is the same reason as his use of another man’s name! They are part and parcel of the same argument.

Don’t let them use dating schemes like that put forth by E.K. Chambers, on which so many Stratfordian conjectures rely, all based on late dates like publication and the time constraints of the Stratford biography, or the one brought forth by Elliott and Valenza’s Claremont Clinic, in which we learn––quelle surprise!––that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare (astonishing!). The fact is, these word studies can’t possibly work in Shakespeare’s case. Why? First: because he rewrote so many of the plays, some more than once, over many years, so what date should we use? And second: because his writing style changed so radically over the years, as did styles in general. Every time they raise the issue of dates, hammer it home why there’s simply no way to date these plays. That is, there’s no way unless we use Oxford’s biography. For an example of how the biography, plus the history of the Court community, can help with dating, see Hamlet and The Spanish Tragedy and Dating the Shrew.

“I will find where truth is hid, though it were hid within the centre”!

“A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross”!

“Once more into the breach . . . “!

The Authorship: the Big Picture

What are we to think about Shakespeare? Is he who he said he was, who Ben Jonson and the academics say he was, or was he someone else? Have we been diddled by Jonson all these centuries, and if so, why? And does it really matter?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, but then what does? Does it matter who won Olympic gold this year, or who gets appointed to the Supreme Court? How many people care about these things? What percentage of the population gives a damn about almost any question you can think of, including who killed Jack Kennedy?

It’s said that when George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest, he replied, “Because it’s there”––actually another authorship question since some think that a journalist made it up, but no matter who actually said it, it’s a good answer and it works for Shakespeare too. For Shakespeare looms as large in the history of English letters as Everest looms on the Himalayan horizon. Why do we want to know the answer to the question of who actually created the language we speak? Because it’s there.

Why “the big picture”?

If we knew who wrote the works we wouldn’t need anything but a little background along the edges, but not knowing, not knowing for sure, we must go to the background, for the truth leaves clues wherever it occurs. As I got deeper into the story it began to expand, from the works themselves to the life of the supposed author to the lives of other English authors and their works, both those with writer’s biographies and those without, to the lives of the patrons and of the Queen they served, their politics, alliances, relationships and beliefs.

It spread to the story of the Continental poets and playwrights, to the history of the Reformation and beyond that of the European Renaissance. From the works it spread to their sources (which, it turned out, were often in languages other than English), to the kind of education available to the writers, to the ancient and Continental works that inspired them, and on to the realities of literature itself, how it gets created and by what kind of artist. And finally to questions of freedom of speech and freedom of enterprise. A big picture indeed.

Ultimately we’ll never be able to tell Shakespeare’s story in a convincing way without telling the whole story, if only in bits and pieces, from the historical and psychological angles as well as the literary. Not only will the big picture bring illumination to the history of the period, it may help to bring understanding to something that’s in danger of being lost, the important and true purposes of Art, the nature of artists––as different from other human creatures as are butterflies from bees.

To put it as simply as possible, Shakespeare’s identity got hidden because he was so closely involved with the history of his time and with its movers and shakers, those in a position to hide the things they wanted hidden, that his identity became one of those things.

Merkel’s view of Titus Andronicus

Hi Marie: Having promised to read your material online (The First Mousetrap) and consider your theory that Titus Andronicus is an allegory for the fate of the Howard family, I am half convinced that you’re right, even more than half. I have to hold off a bit because I don’t see the kind of clearcut connections between the play and the Howards, the kind we can see with some of the other plays, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right, or at least on the right track. An early version of the play may well have been more clear. As with plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet, plots and characters were sometimes revised to fit later situations, so the version of Titus that ended up in the First Folio could also reflect such revisions, not necessarily by Shakespeare.

I don’t see that you claimed anywhere in your chapters or introduction that the author was the Earl of Oxford (did you and I missed it?). In fact, you make a few comments that seem to connect its creation with William of Stratford. Once Oxford is seen as the author, a possible connection with the Howards becomes much stronger. They were his family, he was in their camp from his early 20s to his early 30s, and with Sussex and then Hunsdon as his patron (1572-’82) he had every reason to write in their defence. Also, with Oxford as author, he would have had no need of Holinshed, for his primary source would be his Howard cousins, whose family history lay at the tips of their tongues.

You ask (rhetorically) if it’s possible to see Titus as Sir Thomas Smith. Of course not, but it’s certainly possible to see in young Lucius’s notalgic wish to sit again on his grandsire’s knee a reference to how de Vere may felt at times during the five months he was left alone at Queens’ College. In his first year or two with Smith, at age four and five he would still have been young enough to be taken onto his tutor’s lap for comfort or instruction. I believe that the five months at Cambridge must have been a very lonely and stressful time for a little eight-year-old. I think it’s entirely possible that when he wrote the part about Lucius he was recalling this moment. I believe he was recalling this same period when, in King John, he visualized Prince Arthur living with a man who had been ordered to kill him, begging for his life, then trying to escape. Not that de Vere’s Cambridge tutor, Thomas Fowle, had any such wicked intention, but it wasn’t his tutor he was recalling, only his own childish fears. (It’s clear from Fowle’s biography that he was a hot-head.)

You point to the family relationships among the early patrons of the Court Stage, something worth repeating. All three of the patrons who worked to get control of the Court Stage in the 1570s (and to keep it from then on) were direct descendants of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, your candidate for Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. To repeat: these were the Earl of Sussex, Ld Henry Hunsdon and Ld Charles Howard. Howard relations of lesser rank were also the first and second Masters of the Revels, Edmund Tilney and Sir George Buc. In short, almost everyone in charge of what got produced, both at Court and beyond, until the Pembrokes took over in 1615, were men descended from the 2nd Duke of Norfolk.

Most place Titus early, but in my view never early enough. I’ve long seen it as the one early play that made it into the canon unrevised (at least, unrevised by Shakespeare). We have other unrevised plays from that time, but they’re considered anonymous or are attributed to other writers. The stilted, pompous language of much of it, the unreal female characters, the exceedingly impressionistic treatment of history and use of Senecan horror tropes all suggest a very early origin. These factors suggest that it was written by Oxford no later than his early 20s and possibly even in his late teens. If written when he was 17 or 18, the reference to Lucius’s mother giving him Ovid would have been in time for Oxford’s mother to have seen the play.

It’s been suggested (by others? by you?) that Tamora, Queen of the Goths, represents Mary Queen of Scots. If this is about the Howards I don’t see how she could be anyone else. Black Aaron could represent Bothwell and his baby represent the future James I. Mary’s marriage to Darnley, the birth of James, the murder of Darnley, her marriage to Bothwell and flight to England all took place when Oxford was 17 and probably still spending most of his time at Cecil House where Mary was feared, hated and demonized, possibly to an extent that doesn’t come through in the records. (English history is still confused about Mary; as of now, the most detailed and trustworthy version of her life and fate is John Guy’s 2004 biography.)

It was what to do about Mary Queen of Scots that was the over-riding subject of political concern just as Oxford entered the adult world of Court politics and Inns of Court theater (The Supposes and Jocaste at Gray’s Inn 1566-’67). So it makes sense that among his first attempts to entertain this community with something original would have been this effort to present the Howard case in Senecan technicolor. That his close connection to Cecil House reflects William Cecil’s embroilment in Scottish affairs at this time, not only in Titus, but also in first versions of Macbeth and James I, also makes sense.

Other parts of the play may reflect later events. Oxford’s writing for the Court and Inns of Court went into high gear in 1572 when Sussex took over as Lord Chamberlain and began his push to take the Court Stage away from Leicester. A rewrite of Titus may show his reaction to the execution of his cousin Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk that same year.

In any case, his involvement with the play, and with the Howards, would necessarily have ended in 1580-’81 when he broke with Norfolk’s brother, Henry Howard. This fight was no tiff between friends, but a deadly duel in which Oxford accused his cousin of treason and Howard accused Oxford of murder and pederasty. Once Oxford saw his cousin as the Iago who had broken up his marriage and so deeply damaged his wife’s reputation, most of his nastiest villains would be based on Henry Howard, something that could not have escaped the man’s acute paranoia. Even if we could somehow account for the old-fashioned style, it’s unlikely that ever again he’d write anything that might seem in any way to promote the family that seemed determined to destroy him throughout the early ’80s. (The dedication of Robert Greene’s Tritameron of Love (printed 1587, but probably written two years earlier, may have been a deliberate effort to show that Philip was not included in Oxford’s blacklist.)

I do not believe this play was written for performance at Court. If it was, then it was not about the Howards. To have performed such a crudely violent play before the Queen, one that ripped open unhealed wounds, would have been sheer lunacy. It is said that no one ever mentioned her mother in Elizabeth’s presence. No one, least of all Oxford, would have dared to touch her deepest and most personal anxieties in this way. Most likely he wrote it for his favorite audience, the “gentlemen of the Inns of Court.” Many early versions of his best plays can be seen as pleading a particular case to this audience of lawyers.

I don’t agree that a great dramatist like Shakespeare would ever change character personas in midstream, with Titus representing Thomas Howard at one point and Henry VIII at another. If this is what’s happening it must have been done by some later reviser. No doubt Shakespeare did sometimes conflate historic noblemen with their descendants, not only for dramatic purposes, or because peers and their heirs were known by the same titles, but because, at that time, men and women were still seen less as individuals than as limbs of a single ongoing entity, the Family. In this way kings could be addressed as “England,” or “France.” However, to conflate a character with his enemy or his moral opposite would be to utterly lose the message, something no dramatist would ever do, not even one still learning the ropes.

The problem may be with rewrites. In my view, Oxford would not have cared about this play after 1581, but anything by him would have been valuable later. It may be that Henslowe had one of his writers do some surgery on it that left it making very little sense in terms of finding the original source. If the original reflected the kind of political dynamite that you suggest, there would have been more than one reason for such a revision.

Your material is very well-written and easy to follow, difficult where such a complicated story is concerned. I know how hard it is to make a complex narrative clear for readers. Shakespeare turned to drama, but we can’t do that, can we? My hope is that someday we’ll be able to see how and where every play fits into the true story, not only of Oxford, his tutors, patrons, and the other writers, but of the entire Elizabethan period. So I’m happy to see that you are on the case. More power to you.

Evidence for Oxford’s childhood with Smith

Sometimes a single fact can become the key to an entire period in history. Oxford’s childhood with Sir Thomas Smith is that sort of key, not just to complete our picture of Oxford’s life, but to complete the picture of Oxford as Shakespeare, and beyond that, of Shakespeare as central to the history of England during what may well have been the most crucial period in her history and absolutely the most crucial period in her literary history and the history of the London Stage.

By establishing Smith as Oxford’s surrogate father, the Aristotle to his Alexander, the Plato to his Aristotle, the Leopold Mozart to his Amadeus, we have the riches of Smith’s library where dozens of titles provide the sources for some of Shakespeare’s most valued works. We have, through Smith, the source of Shakespeare’s legal and distilling metaphors, his ascetic attitude towards food, his lack of religious bias, his Platonic philosophy. Through his years at Ankerwycke we have the source of his river, gardening, and hawking metaphors (as noted by Caroline Spurgeon), his sympathy for animals, the forest’s deer, the meadow’s rabbits and birds, the garden’s caterpillars and snails. In Smith, we have four of Shakespeare’s most vital characters, Holofernes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, Thomas of Woodstock from Richard II Part One, Gonzalo from The Tempest, and, greatest of all, Friar Lawrence from Romeo and Juliet.

We also have a number of smaller though tighter connections, such as the metaphor of a haggard hawk for a wayward woman, something Smith touches on twice in the few quotes provided by his biographers, or, in the advice Polonius gives Laertes, the advice to noblemen written by Smith during the period that Edward was living with him (Strype 53-5). With all of this securely in place, ipso facto: Oxford was Shakespeare––evidence that comes later is simply icing on the cake. And with Oxford confirmed as Shakespeare we can also complete our puzzle of the entire period, of all of the missing literary history, and even much of the mainstream history, for Shakespeare and his works are as central to the history of the Elizabethan era as is Elizabeth herself, or Burghley, Bacon, Raleigh, or Drake. Thus while Smith is the biggest missing piece of the Shakespeare puzzle, Oxford is the biggest missing piece of the Elizabethan Court puzzle.

This is what makes it crucial that we ground our view of Oxford’s childhood with Smith in provable facts. It was largely my purpose when, driven by an offhand remark by Mary Dewar in her biography of Smith, I spent six weeks in England in 2004 (funded by a fellowship raised by Dr. Daniel Wright of Concordia University) to see three of Smith’s notebooks for myself. These, two in the library at Queens’ College Cambridge and one in the archives at the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, seemed at first to offer nothing. I didn’t realize until later that one did in fact hold one of the clues that I was seeking. Not all clues are of equal weight, but as it happens, this one’s a pip.

In each of the two notebooks at Queens’ College are inventories, the same except in minor wording, one written in 1561, one in 1569, in which he notes the 20 rooms at Ankerwycke, listing the contents of each. In the first, #49, a room on the upper floor between his father’s room and the maid’s chamber is labeled “In my L. Chambre.” In the 1569 inventory in notebook #83, page 123, a similar list is headed with the words: “In my Lorde’s Chambre.”

In my L's Chambre — 1561 inventory of Ankerwycke rooms, “In my L’s Chambre”

By “My Lorde” Smith must have meant de Vere, who, born “Viscount Bulbeck,” was considered a “lord” from birth. Smith was punctilious about terminology, particularly where social distinctions were concerned, so he would never have made a mistake by called somebody a lord who was not, in fact, a lord. Strype “supposes” that by “my Lorde” Smith meant the Duke of Somerset (170), but that’s impossible since Ankerwycke wasn’t finished until 1553, by which time Somerset was dead, nor would someone as self-righteous as Smith have wished to memorialize a master with whom he had had such profound differences. It could not be Cecil, since from 1550 until Elizabeth’s accession Cecil kept his own household at The Parsonage at Wimbledon not far from Ankerwycke, nor did Cecil become a lord until 1571, long after Smith had drawn up these inventories. Other than these, there is simply no lord other than de Vere who could possibly have had his own room in Smith’s home.

When we add this evidence to the phrase “brought up in my house” from the 1576 letter to Cecil, we should have enough to place Oxford with Smith for the better part of eight years, and in so doing, add to his story the riches of experience he gained as a child in a traditional country manor with all that that implies, as I’ve detailed in a number of blogs, pages, lectures, and articles. Among many other puzzle fits, this scenario provides a reason for de Vere’s placement at Queens’ College for five months in his ninth year, Queens’ being Smith’s alma mater, and Smith needing that time to assist Cecil with preparations for Elizabeth’s accession, a hard fact for which we have more than enough evidence.

De Vere was still with Smith when the first list was written. As for the 1569 inventory, although Oxford was no longer a member of Smith’s household, that Smith would continue to use his name for the room is seen by how he continued to call the room next to de Vere’s “my father’s chambre,” although Smith’s father died the summer of 1557.

By examining an actual document, its visual appearance can add to what its text and authorship have to tell us. For instance, in the letter in which Smith finally turns to the issue of Oxford’s treatment of Burghley upon his return from Italy, that Smith was more emotional at the end than he was anywhere else in the letter is obvious from the condition of the paper at this point. The pen was pressed so hard on the paper that the ink is darker here and the stroke thicker than anywhere else in the letter, so hard that the acid in the ink had eaten away the paper at that spot to a degree that it threatened to render a few of the words unintelligible. I showed it to the librarian in the Manuscript Room at the British Library, suggesting they do something to preserve it before it crumbles completely.

Deconstructing Sonnet 107

My friend Hank Whittemore, with whom I differ on several key points, has asked about my take on the problematic Sonnet 107.

Over the four centuries that English speakers have been discussing Shakespeare, there have been many battles over the Sonnets, who they were written for, when they were written, and whether or not they were about something real or were just a literary exercise. Although beautiful and important, I’ve tended to steer clear of discussing them partly because they’re so short on facts that nothing can be proven and, largely for that reason, because they’ve given rise to so many bizarre interpretations.

Then in 1999 I found myself preparing for an SOS Society conference where the Sonnets were a focal point, so I devoted several weeks to reading everything I could find on the subject going back to the 19th century. (An article I wrote later expanding on that lecture, The Story of the Sonnets, provides a good deal more detail for those who are interested. There’s also a Sonnets bibliography with comments on the books I found of most interest.)

Traditions of sonnet cycles

Some years ago I got into a fight with the usual coneheads on Hardy Cook’s listserv, who eagerly pounced on my statement that the best writing comes from experience, from enduring the emotions and insights that come from Life itself. Isn’t this what Keats means with “truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all ye know and all ye need to know”? Keats was speaking to fellow artists and philosophers, of course––who else bothers about the relationship between Truth and Beauty? Certainly not the coneheads that were dominating SHAKSPER.

Believing that most if not all the plays (the good ones) were written out of Oxford’s own experiences and emotions, of course I believe that the Sonnets were as well; that is, they were written at a time when he was going through experiences like those described in the Sonnets. That others in like case over the centuries have found solace in Shakespeare’s Sonnets attests to their power, a power that comes from how accurately, and with a thousand subtle details, they describe experiences common to many readers, which is, of course, why they’ve remained in print for centuries, and why we need to look to common experiences for reasons why he wrote them.

It was Petrarch who introduced sonnets to the West. My guess is that like other sweets: stringed instruments, perfume, sugar, and Courtly Love, they originated in Persia (Iran), migrating to Italy via the cultural transfer from the Middle East to Venice in the 14th century. Traditionally a sonnet cycle is a narrative of sorts, describing day by day, hour by hour, verse by verse, the progress of a passion from its dizzying enception to its final spasm. We call these sonnets love poems in English, but the term the Elizabethans preferred was passion.

Love is too limiting a term for an experience that contains so many feelings, some anything but sweet––loneliness, loss, jealousy, envy, hurt feelings, remorse, disgust, even hate. Poems written after the things they describe are over differ from those written as they happen. Sonnet cycles, when they are genuine, are like raw footage, unedited, pungent, detailed, revealing themes through a process of repetition and insight that’s closer to life itself than the reflection of life we call memoirs.

It’s part of the tradition of the sonnet cycle that the poet doesn’t reveal the true identity of the beloved. An offshoot of the Courtly Love tradition, Petrarchan sonnets echo the yearning of a chivalrous knight for the beautiful but chaste wife of his lord. Bound to him by oaths of fealty, this Courtly Love trope adds a further bond between lord and vassal, whose sacred passion for the lady can never fade because it’s never fulfilled; (the role the Virgin Queen demanded from her favorites). Such poems are proofs of that love (“oblations, poor but free”), but only the lady herself is to know who is meant by “Stella,” or “Diana,” or “Phillis,” or “Caelica.” For the Poet to let slip anything that reveals the source of his passion is to betray his Muse, another kind of romantic pose, but still one of great artistic authority by Oxford’s time.

And because, as a narrative in verse, a sonnet cycle is meant to follow such a passion as it unfolds, I believe that, following Oxford’s death, those published his sonnets saw to it that (for the most part) they were published in the order he intended. Whoever had control of Oxford’s literary estate would have had great respect for it as literature. Notions that when he died he was careless about leaving his papers where just anyone, including family members who cared more about their image than they did literature, might have gotten hold of them, shows a lack of understanding of how great artists feel about their work. Having promised that he was going to leave a portrait of the Fair Youth for posterity to admire, he would certainly not have played fast and loose with their vehicle. Whoever got his papers also got strict instructions on what to do with them. This is simply common sense.

Oxford may have given up on Southampton himself (all passions must come to some kind of end), but he would never have given up on the poems that his love for him brought forth. As he says in his farewell Sonnet, #126, Nature who has been so kind to Southampton, allowing him to keep his good looks well into his maturity, will have to cash him in sooner or later: “She may detain, but still not keep her treasure;/ Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,/ And her quietus is to render thee.” In time the Fair Youth will cease to be both a youth and fair, but, as their author well knows, if properly published, the love poems he inspired will never lose either their beauty or their truth.

A great deal has been made of the fact that Shakespeare’s muse was a boy, not a lady. To the shame-based society that the Reformation made of the English, that’s been an awful shocker. However, if we pay attention to the poems it seems clear that the Poet’s desire is less sexual than emotional, the desire of a man for a son (Oxford was without an heir when he began writing them), and most important to an artist, for a muse whose charisma is potent enough to inspire his art. Unfulfilled desire is the force that keeps it going. It’s the number one Rule of Romance: fulfill the desire and the magic ends. The question here being, desire for what? My answer: a son-in-law whom he could love as though he were his own and, not least, a theater patron with solid credit.

Dating the sonnets

Back in 1999, I spent a good deal of time back seeking genuine scholarship on the dating of the Sonnets. I finally found it in a book titled Elizabethan Sonnet Themes and the Dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (AMS 1962, 1973). The author, Claes Schaar (writing for a Danish press, and so less constrained by hometown anxieties over identities), sticks strictly to the protocols of literary dating. Basing his conclusions on the work of two scholars, one a German (pub 1884), the other an American (pub 1916) who apparently had no knowledge of his German predecessor (190). Since these groundbreakers there have been others, all with similar results.

Ignoring the Stratford biography or any consideration of who the principles might have been, by comparing the language to that of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the only works by Shakespeare whose dates are solid, they place most or all of the Sonnets somewhere in the early 1590s: “. . . the vast majority of the sonnets we have examined seem thus to have been written between 1591-92 and 1594-95” (Shaar 185). Their findings are corroborated by other scholars replicating their efforts, one being G.P.V. Akrigg, Southampton’s biographer, who gives an impressive list of scholars who agree that their language also places them close to the Folio versions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet, which have been dated, by topical references and by language similarities to the two dated narrative poems, in the early 1590s (203).

Sonnet 107

All of this is by way of introducing Sonnet 107, which, although not considered one of his greatest, has probably caused the most discussion since it alone seems bent on revealing everything that he was so careful to hide in the other 125. Not only does it go out of its way to identify the Fair Youth as the Earl of Southampton and to locate him, and by extension the surrounding sonnets, to 1603 when he was released from the Tower by King James, it’s also written in a different style.

As Schaar explains, most of the sonnets were written close in time, one after another. Schaar et al see two bursts: 1591-92, and 1594-95. These dates fit perfectly with what we know of Southampton, who really was a boy, that is, a teenager, in the early 1590s. This scenario fits the first 17, the so-called marriage or procreation sonnets, with a known event, Burghley’s effort to get Southampton married to Oxford’s daughter, Elizabeth Vere. In fact, the entire cycle fits perfectly with the biographies of Oxford (the Poet), Southampton (the Fair Youth), Essex (the Rival Poet) and Emilia Bassano (the Dark Lady).

All but a very few of the sonnets, including those that come just before and just after 107, are end-stopped throughout, that is, the expression of each thought is compressed into a phrase that pauses at the end of a line. There are a very few (I counted four) in which enjambment carries the thought over from the first to the second line, though the basic iambic rhythm remains. This style is one of the things that places the Sonnets early in Shakespeare’s career, as later he became much more relaxed about meter and enjambment.

But in 107 the opening expression ranges across not just two, or even three, but the entire first four lines! Most unusually, the iambic rhythm is gone from those lines! It’s a good strong poem, but located as it is surrounded by sonnets of a diffrent style, it sounds like someone else wrote it. Frankly, it sounds like John Donne. I’m not saying he wrote it, but that’s who it sounds like. So there are two big things that make this poem stand out in contrast to the rest of the sonnets, a violation of the tradition of secrecy, and also of a pattern adhered to throughout the entire rest of the cycle.

Cherchez le editor

My guess is that whoever published the poems inserted 107 for the very reason that it’s assumed such importance today, because it identifies the Fair Youth and it also locates the cycle at a particular point in time. Since the author took obvious pains not to identify persons or events, this would have to have been done by the editor who prepared them for publication, and who probably was in harmony with the publisher.

I can’t say for certain who might have been Oxford’s literary executor, but a very good candidate would be William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who, by 1603, when Oxford was approaching the end of his life, was better-situated than anyone else to protect the poet’s valuable papers from those who might be anxious to see them disappear. And who better to prepare them for the press than Pembroke’s own mother, Mary Sidney, who was probably already preparing another elegant edition of her brother’s works. This scenario also helps to identify the Sonnets’ dedicatee, the mysterious “Master W.H.”

Why would the Pembrokes wish to make clear what Shakespeare had left ambiguous?

I can’t answer that, but I can point to something similar that occured in 1598 with the third edition of Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, edited and published by Mary, in which she included his sonnet cycle of the 1580s, Astrophil and Stella. She also included, for the first time, a sonnet that hadn’t been in any previous edition or in any of the manuscript versions that predated their publication in print back in 1591. This sonnet, numbered 37, is the one that identifies Stella as Penelope Devereux.

It’s often assumed that #37 was left out of the cycle at first because it identified Stella, though that doesn’t explain why it then became necessary to make the identification. True, by 1598 Penelope, though married, was openly living with her lover, Sir Charles Blount, Ld Mountjoy, so by then she had little reputation left to lose. Even so, why stir the pot? Could it be to direct suspicion away from Mary, who was suffering from the ususal rumors that followed women of celebrity, in her case that she and Philip had been lovers, that Stella was Mary, and that her brother was her son’s true father (Aubrey, Brief Lives, 140)?

That Mary (and her sons) might want to direct suspicion away from herself as the object of what could be seen as a shameful incestuous passion on Philip’s part would be altogether understandable, or that Penelope Devereux, already into her scandalous relationship with Mountjoy, would be willing to let her name be used to protect Mary (Sidney makes it clear that the lust was all on his side, that Stella remained pure) is not only the stuff of romance, it’s the stuff of real life, that is, the real lives of romantic poets, who tend to take big emotional risks, much as astronauts, firemen and bullfighters take physical risks.

There was a close bond between the Devereux siblings and the Sidneys. Philip and Mary were the children of Mary Dudley, sister of the Earl of Leicester. Throughout the years while Leicester was hoping to marry Queen Elizabeth, Philip played the role of his uncle’s heir. When Leicester finally gave up and married Lettice Knollys, widow of the 2nd Earl of Essex and mother of Robert and Penelope, Philip was forced to pass on the role of his uncle’s heir to Robert Devereux,Leicester’s new stepson. As Philip lay dying of wounds in 1586 (suffered under his uncle’s command), he honored this rather mystical bond by ceremoniously handing on his sword to Essex, a bond that Essex then honored by marrying Philip’s widow. (It was this sort of chivalrous behavior that made his friends love Essex.) This bond between Essex and the saintly Philip then extended to their sisters, Mary Sidney and Penelope Devereux.

Why Oxford wrote the Sonnets

There was nothing improper about the way it started. A marriage deal was in the works to unite his daughter and Burghley’s ward, the young Earl of Southampton, so the first 17 sonnets were written in the kind of passionate terms that fathers of marriagable daughters did back then. (See Burghley’s wooing of the saintly Philip in letters to Sir Henry Sidney.) Not every father could put such sentiments into verse, but as with all such social conventions, those who could certainly would. So that’s all that was at stake with the first group, known as the marriage or procreation sonnets, in which he simply urges the youth to marry, coyly playing on his teenage narcissism. That there were 17 in the first group suggests that they were nicely copied and bound as a gift for Southampton on his 17th birthday, Oct. 6, 1590.

With the 18th sonnet the tone changes abruptly. What was fatherly affection fast becomes something much more personal and intimate. So what happened?

When Oxford met Southampton, probably after the gift of the sonnets brought them together, he was at what may have been the lowest point in his life. Now in his 40s, suddenly feeling “beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,” the boy must have represented all the things that he felt he’d lost or never had: his own vanishing youth, the son and heir he never had, the beloved friend he lost “in death’s dark night” when Rutland died in 1587, and not least, the angel he so desperately needed to continue to stage plays.

To the 17-year-old youth, Oxford may have seemed what he too had lost or maybe never had, a loving father, and one besides with the kind of access to backstage at the theater that teenagers dream of. Teenagers need love and will respond to it wherever they find it. Had this occured when Oxford was not at such loose ends the moment might have passed, but things being what they were, it threw him for a loop, as they say, and as was his habit, he turned for solace to pen and ink.

My guess is that at some point, for Oxford the passion became less about Southampton and more about the poetry. My God, this was it! This was what he’d been striving for! This was what Sidney meant so long ago when he began his own sonnet cycle by quoting his Muse: “Fool, look in thy heart and write!” The exhilaration, the loneliness, the jealousy, the empty hours, all were grist for his poet’s mill. The original emotion became less important than how to express it.

The passion passed, as all things must, but like a beautiful shell on a beach after a great wave rushes back to sea, it left something precious in its wake, the language of Shakespeare. For it was in the crucible of his love for Southampton and the combined happiness and pain it brought him, that he found the voice he’d been seeking through all the years of translating and listening and experimenting, the language we speak today, the language of modern English.

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A different take on Sonnet 107 can be found in an article by Eric Miller, a poet and independent scholar from California, published in The Oxfordian, vol 9, 2005.

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