Michael Prescott's Blog

A flame in the wind

Our commenter GregL sent me an email about an earlier thread and kindly offered to let me share it. I'm sure his experience will resonate with many of us.

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I just recently was able to read thru “The Children’s Hour” and some of the many comments circulating around AOD’s doubts as to an afterlife.

I am a little late with my take on this, but if you read this you will understand why, and its direct relationship to the arguments advanced by AOD and others.

My mom took gravely ill about eight days ago. My wife and I spent the last week running to and from the hospital and finally spending 24 hours a day there the last few days. On her last day, the doctors told me she had no chance, all they could do was prolong her life in intensive care. I asked her if she wanted to try intensive care or possibly go to Heaven.

She said, “Heaven.”

Then this kind and gentle woman, unable to say more than two or three words, and later no words, began to comfort us. She showed a courage, grace, and poise in the face of death that I could never achieve. Holding hands, and expressing her love, she slowly drifted off to unconsciousness. She had lived with me the last two years of her life. I asked her to, if she could, come back home and give me a sign that she was OK.

She spent about eight hours slowly dying. She was a religious, kind, loving mother. She was preceded in death by her husband, her son, and her grandson. Her death came as a peaceful cessation of breathing as we told her we loved her. But, Michael, not even a hint of any near-death experience. No angels, no comments that loved ones were there, no lightening of the room. Nothing.

I left the hospital both crushed by her leaving and in despair at the lack of any “event” surrounding her passing. Like yourself, I have read and studied everything regarding a life after death. Expecting something wonderful receiving nothing, I ruminated about how trivial the so-called “evidence” for an afterlife seemed before the immensity of death. I felt empty and that my mom was truly gone.

In my house I had set up a monitoring system between our bedroom and my mom’s downstairs. We had to help her to the bathroom at night and would listen for her call.

Okay, when I woke up the morning after her passing, I lay in bed still numb from the events of the past day. Then, her voice, fairly loud and distinctive called my name in a kind of drawn-out fashion, “Greg!” It seemed to come from her room.

What to make of this now? Like a flame dancing in the wind I now move between despair and hope, a dichotomy of opposing beliefs. Probably never to be resolved until my own passing. I hope I see her there. 

Once more into the breach

Note: From time to time, I put up a post on the Shakespeare authorship controversy. I realize this subject is of little interest to most of this blog's readers, but I continue to be stubbornly intrigued by it. 

INTRODUCTION

Years ago I wrote a brief essay on William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby, as a possible candidate for the authorship of the Shakespearean canon. Since then I’d largely forgotten about old Stanley, having become more interested in today's leading candidate, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. But a newly released book, William Stanley as Shakespeare, by John M. Rollett, got me musing on Stanley again.

This is not the place for a detailed recapitulation of the standard arguments used by dissenters (like me) as to why William Shaksper of Stratford is unlikely to be the true author of the original works. Those who are interested can find my short essay on the subject here, or my various blog posts here, or they can read John Michell's Who Wrote Shakespeare? or many other books. Suffice it to say that the erudition, multilingualism, detailed knowledge of European locales, insider's knowledge of affairs at court, obsession with lineage and the "blood royal," contempt for commoners, familiarity with aristocratic pursuits like hawking, and willingness to address controversial topics that got ordinary writers imprisoned or tortured – all combine to negate Shaksper as the author, though he undoubtedly did play a significant role in bringing the plays to the public stage in his capacity as a play broker, impresario, and front man.

The true author, as Walt Whitman shrewdly observed, appears to been one of the "wolfish earls," or some other nobleman – a person who knew about the cutthroat politics of merrie olde England from the inside. Over the decades, many candidates have been proposed, with the Earl of Oxford currently leading the “wolfish” pack.

Incidentally, it’s not the case, as some orthodox authorities maintain, that no one doubted Shakespeare's identity before relatively recent times. In fact, Shakespeare's contemporaries were clearly intrigued by the puzzle of his name. Rollett notes that John Marston and Joseph Hall ascribed Venus and Adonis to someone they dubbed "Labeo,” apparently their codename for Francis Bacon. William Covel wrote the name “Shakespeare” in a marginal note alongside the works of Samuel Daniel. The satirical play Return to Parnassus has a character quote lines from Romeo and Juliet as his own, prompting another character to quip, “Romeo and Juliet: o monstrous theft! I think he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniel’s.” Other writers hinted at Sir Edward Dyer or made reference to an unnamed "masking" nobleman. Evidently the appearance of Shakespeare's works in print prompted a good deal of gossipy speculation about who this supposed “William Shakespeare" really was, with various possibilities being thrown around: Samuel Daniel? Francis Bacon? Edward Dyer? It seems that, for a while at least, nobody knew and everyone was guessing. This guessing game, needless to say, has continued to the present day.

PART ONE

But what of William Stanley, Earl of Derby? Why should he be in the running?

There are actually some very good reasons to consider him, which Rollett elucidates in his highly readable new book. I can’t list them all, but I’ll give some highlights.

First, we know that Stanley was intimately involved with the theater. He sponsored his own theater troupe, which put on most of Shakespeare's plays. A letter from his wife mentions how thoroughly absorbed he was in the activities of the acting company, while two intercepted letters from a Jesuit spy report that Stanley in 1599 was “busied only in penning comedies for the common players." Even though no plays or poetry in Stanley’s name have survived (his ancestral home, with all of its records, was burned to ashes by the forces of Oliver Cromwell), we can be sure he was a writer and the man of the theater.

Second, there are many curious connections between Shakespeare and the Stanley family. Three of William Stanley's relatives have tomb inscriptions reportedly written by Shakespeare; these verses compare well in style and content to some of Shakespeare's sonnets. In Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, the poet Edmund Spenser, after praising William Stanley's recently deceased elder brother Ferdinando, immediately proceeds to praise a poet he calls “Aetion,” often taken as a reference to Shakespeare. “Aetion" means "man of the eagle," and Stanley's crest was of an eagle bearing off an infant. 

The "eagle and child crest" of the Derby coat of arms. The top part depicts an eagle holding an infant. 

Third, whoever wrote the history plays seems to have gone out of his way to put William Stanley’s ancestors in the best possible light. Their roles are frequently exaggerated, and their more troublesome qualities are whitewashed.

Fourth, Stanley is likely to have been present at the court of Henri of Navarre shortly after the events that inspired Love's Labour’s Lost. And the character of Holofernes in that play is quite possibly a sendup of Richard Lloyd, the loquacious and pedantic tutor who accompanied Stanley on his European trip and who wrote a pageant of the “nine worthies” that may well have served as the inspiration for the ludicrous pageant on the same topic put on in the play.

Fifth, sonnet 125, which begins “Were it ought to me I bore the canopy …” would make literal sense if applied to Stanley, who was fifth in line to bear the canopy at James I’s coronation.

Six, many of the themes of Shakespeare's works – a marriage torn apart by irrational jealousy, a younger brother overshadowed by his older sibling, a fascination with alchemy and the occult – were major themes of Stanley’s life, although to be fair, the same themes can be found in the lives of other candidates (though not William Shaksper).

Seventh, Rollett – with the help of Jones Harris – discovered what may be an acrostic message in the First Folio. In Elizabethan times, acrostics, cryptograms, and other forms of wordplay were extremely popular. One of the more common uses of an acrostic was to spell out the name of an otherwise anonymous or pseudonymous author. The method involved setting down a list so that the first (or last) letter of each line, when read downward, would disclose the author's name. In the list of actors at the beginning of the First Folio we read (bold emphasis added):

Augustine Phillips
William Kempt
Thomas Poope
George Bryan
Henry Condell
William Slye
Richard Cowly

The last letter of each of these names, reading down, spells out “Stenley.”

It might be objected that "Stenley" is not "Stanley," but the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were not over-scrupulous about spelling, especially when applied to hidden messages. Since none of the actors' names ended in “a,” an “e” was substituted. Rollett notes that the “t” was provided by spelling William Kemp’s name as “Kempt” – the only time known to us when this variant spelling was used.

Finally, there's what Sherlock Holmes might have called the curious case of the corrected quartos. In 1622, quarto editions of both Richard III and Othello were published. A year later, both plays were included in the First Folio. The Folio versions appear to have been set in type directly from the quartos, inasmuch as they reproduce specific typographical  errors from the quarto printings. Yet there are hundreds of changes in the text, including superior word choices and whole new dialogue passages. It looks very much as if someone went through the quartos by hand, emending them with marginal or interlinear notes. 

As I said, these two quartos were printed in 1622. By then, William Shaksper was long dead, as were the Earl of Oxford and some of the other authorship candidates. William Stanley, however, was very much alive – and would live another twenty years. Could he have hand-corrected the quartos to ensure higher quality copy for the definitive Folio edition? Would anyone other than the author take the time – or have the presumption – to revise and emend these old plays?

In sonnet 136, the author says plainly, “… my name is 'Will.'" This could, of course, be simply a reference to the pseudonym William Shakespeare. Or it could be a ribald pun, since "will" was Elizabethan slang for genitalia.

But there is yet another possibility. Maybe the sonneteer was none other than William Stanley, Earl of Derby, who signed his name – not William – but Will.

 

PART TWO 

That's the case for Stanley, in a nutshell (which, Stratfordians and Oxfordians would say, is just where it belongs). Now for the counterarguments. 

Stanley isn’t a perfect fit. The author of the sonnets repeatedly describes himself as old and worn out ("beated and chopped with tanned antiquity" – sonnet 62), yet Stanley would have been in his thirties at the time when the sonnets were probably written. (William Shaksper, four years younger than Stanley, makes an even poorer fit.) 

John Marston, in The Scourge of Villainy, seemingly describes Shakespeare as a poet “whose silent name one letter bounds” – i.e., whose true but unspoken name begins and ends with the same letter. This is true of Edward de Vere, whose name begins and ends with the letter “e,” but not of William Stanley in any formulation of his name and title that I can come up with.

The purported acrostic is interesting, but the contemporaneous acrostics listed by Rollett as bona fide examples of the technique are much less ambiguous, involving longer names such as Josquin des Prez and Roger Marbecke. The appearance of “Stenley” partway through the list could simply be an accident. Indeed, it was pointed out to me by the combative Stratfordian Tom Reedy that the last letters of four consecutive names later in the list spell out "Dyer," as in Edward Dyer, another authorship candidate!

It's also problematic that we know so little of Stanley's life; as a younger son who was not expected to inherit the earldom, his early years were little chronicled, except in a romantic ballad about his foreign travels, Sir William Stanley's Garland, which can't be relied on for accuracy. 

And of course the total absence of poems or plays in Stanley's name is a serious gap in the evidence. Oxford left some poems of varying quality, and was often praised for his talents as a poet; Stanley left nothing and received no such praise, at least in any clearcut form. If not for the Jesuit spy's intercepted letters, we would have no reason to think Stanley ever fancied himself a writer.

A possibility not explored by Rollins, but examined by A.J. Evans in his book Shakespeare’s Magic Circle, is that Stanley and de Vere may each deserve partial credit for the works. At first sight this sounds like a stretch, but it may gain a little credibility when we consider that (a) both earls were known for their obsessive interest in the theater, and (b) they were closely connected on a personal level, Stanley being de Vere's son-in-law. With this in mind, we might imagine de Vere as the originator of most of the works, with Stanley as his later collaborator. This would account for the revisions made to the 1622 quartos for their 1623 Folio publication – revisions made by Stanley – and also for the references to the poet's age and disgrace in the sonnets – which would suit the older and, at times, out-of-favor de Vere.

Such a collaboration is hardly unheard of in the world of theater. If anything, collaboration was probably more common in those days than it is today, as writers were often called upon to revise or update existing material originated by someone else. Sometimes only the last writer to have had a hand in the project received authorial credit – if anyone did. 

After so many centuries, with the real story concealed in enigmatic references decipherable only to those in the know, and with all the original documents long lost, it may be impossible ever to untangle just what happened. Maybe that's part of the appeal of the authorship controversy; it offers endless fuel for speculation and debate, with no prospect of a definitive resolution.

 * * *

For more on the case for Derby, see The URL of Derby website or John M. Rollett’s William Stanley as Shakespeare. 

The children's hour

Inspired by Amos Oliver Doyle's comments in the last thread, I originally wrote this as a comment in response. But I decided it could be published as a whole new post, thus filling this blog's greedy maw for another day. 

AOD wrote,

However, I am currently in a doubting mode and am becoming nonplussed by the multitudinous written evidence on many fronts suggesting survival of consciousness after death of a body. I don't know why it is so hard for me to believe it since I have accumulated a mountain of evidence myself of various types that should convince me. I am at a point where I don't know what more it would take to convince me other than to have a near death experience myself or perhaps a telephone call from my mother in Summerland.

He also mentioned that he was alive in 1940, which by my math makes him around 75 years old.

With that in mind ...

I think that in many cases, human beings start out in life feeling rather lightly attached to their physical existence. Look at the crazy chances some kids take, and even the apparent attempts at suicide by very young children who go out of their way to eat bleach or jam their fingers into a wall socket. Young children seem nonchalant about NDEs and past-life memories, as if there's nothing at all unexpected about such things. Some talk casually about where they were before they were born, and how they chose their mommy and daddy.

But as we grow older, we often become more firmly anchored to the earth. Endless repetition of physical experiences starts to convince us that this world is all there is. We forget whatever we knew or intuited in our early childhood (often we forget our early childhood entirely), and we become creatures of the physical world, for better or worse.

We're a bit like players in a game who start off not taking it too seriously but become more committed to it as it wears on, until eventually it's all that matters to them.

This, I suspect, is why doubt sometimes grows in people as they age. It has little to do with evidence or the lack of it, and more to do with the increasing familiarity of the physical world, and perhaps with the fact that consciousness and bodily experience are so closely intertwined during this earthly stage of development that we find it increasingly hard to imagine one without the other.

So it appears that Jesus was right, at least in psychological terms: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

A 1669 NDE

I originally intended to post this piece as a palate cleanser after the "Charlie Charlie" viral Twitter phenomenon was exposed as an ad campaign for a movie. However, I'm no longer completely sure that the tweets were a hoax. Snopes.com offers an interesting analysis that's worth reading in full. Here's an excerpt:

The UK’s Independent ... explained how most sites jumped upon the “viral marketing stunt” explanation with both feet despite the timeline discrepancy and the fact that the details of the challenge were contrary to the film’s context ...

It seems fairly evident that the connection between the social-media-driven “Charlie Charlie challenge” and the upcoming film The Gallows emerged well after the former had come and gone from Internet “trending” lists: No link between the challenge and the film was mentioned in the game’s first wave of popularity, nor was the film’s trailer referenced in mainstream news coverage prior to 1 June 2015. As the Independent noted, the social media challenge originated in a time and place far removed from any tangible connection to the film ...

While the Charlie Charlie challenge was certainly utilized with alacrity by The Gallows's marketing team, it appears that marketing tie-in was created after the fact: the film was neither an initial part of the story nor the driver (primary or otherwise) of the viral trend’s popularity.

So maybe the hoax explanation is premature.

In any case, for those who still would like a palate cleanser, or at least a change of topic, here's an interesting case study from more than 300 years ago. I found it in The Immortal Mind, by Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake, which I'm still in the process of reading. Though I've read many accounts of near-death experiences, I don't think I've come across this one before.

Laszlo and Peake write:

An early report on human NDE concerns the experience that took place in November 1669, in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England (or, in some reports, in South Wales). The report is in a religious pamphlet written by Dr. Henry Atherton and published in London in 1680. Atherton's fourteen-year-old sister, Anna, had been ill for some time, then was thought to have finally died. The woman attending to her used to the only method available at the time for ascertaining death: placing a mirror to her mouth and nose. There was no evidence of breathing. They then placed red-hot coals to her feet and received no response. She was clearly in a state of what would now be termed "clinical death." However, she subsequently recovered. When she was able, she described how she had visited heaven and was guided there by an angel. This being showed her:

"things glorious and unutterable, as Saints and Angels and all in glorious apparell." She heard 'unparalel'd Musick Divine Anthems and Hallelujahs.' She was not allowed to enter Heaven but the angel told her that "she must go back again for a while, and take leave of her friends, and after short time she should be admitted."

As predicted by her "Angel," Anna died four years later and according to the pamphlet she departed "with great as[s]urance of her happiness hereafter."

While she was in her near-death state, Anna reported seeing people she had known, all of whom had died. There was one individual who, as far as Atherton knew, was alive. However, he subsequently discovered that this individual had passed on a few weeks earlier.

The source cited is Henry Atherton, The Resurrection Proved (T. Dawes, 1680).

The account contains many of the notable features of modern NDE's, including:

• A state of apparent death in which the patient is completely unresponsive
• Visions of heavenly beings
• Ethereal music
• A barrier that prevents entry into heaven
• A heavenly being who commands the person to return to life
• The presence of deceased friends and loved ones
• Assurance of life after death that persists even after being revived

It also includes a feature sometimes observed in deathbed visions: the patient's report that a certain person had died when, at the time, this fact should have been unknown to her. And there is the interesting detail of the accurate prediction of her coming death – there would seem to be no obvious reason for a fourteen-year-old to assume that her return to life would last only a "short time," yet she did in fact die not long afterward. (The actual pamphlet, the full text of which is online, says, she died two years later, not four years as stated in The Immortal Mind.)

The pamphlet, which is quite short, makes interesting reading. It includes the further details that Anna passed through three different gates but was stopped before the fourth, "Heaven Gate," and that the angel who guided her was "all in white" and was present in the sickroom when she told her story. In modern NDEs, the ethereal beings encountered in the next life are often described as being clad in white robes.

Anna's brother, described as a "Physician in Caermarthen," naturally interpreted her story in accordance with his Protestant faith, publishing it "in this Adulterous, Atheistical and Papistical Generation, wherein neither God, Christ, Soul, Heaven nor Hell are minded; but Whoring, Swaring, Lying, &c. and, it may serve as a Curb to Vice, and a Spur to Vertue."

No doubt there are significant elements of cultural overlay in the NDE itself, such as the "hallelujahs" Anna heard. But the core elements transcend cultural differences — and can be seen to persist over more than three centuries, even to the present day.