Longtime readers of this blog know that I sometimes take a break from our usual psi-related content to write about another outré topic, the Shakespeare authorship controversy.
I won't reprise my reasons for disbelieving the standard story about the prodigy from Stratford, who overcame the handicap of an illiterate household and a meager education in a one-room schoolhouse to become the most polished writer in history, conversant with aristocratic pursuits like falconry and bowls, knowledgeable about court intrigues and political machinations, and able to write without penalty 0n forbidden topics such as the deposition of a king.
But I will add one piece of evidence that came to my attention recently, which, along with other, similar writings from the period, shows that "Shakespeare" or, as it was often printed, "Shake-spear," was known to be a pseudonym. In 1603, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, the pamphleteer Henry Chettle composed this verse criticizing a noted poet for remaining silent:
Nor doth the silver tongued Melicert
Drop from his honeyed muse one sable tear
To mourn her death that graced his desert
And to his lays opened her Royal ear.
Shepherd, remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death.
The verse, which appears in Englandes Mourning Garment, contains a clear reference to Shakespeare in the final line, pointing to Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. The author of Lucrece, addressed as "Shepherd" (a common term for poets), is identified only as Melicert. The reference is to Robert Greene's 1589 novel (or "prose romance") Menaphon, in which Melicertus, a gentleman, disguises himself as a shepherd in order to enter and win a poetry competition. In other words, he conceals his identity and rank in order to practice the art of poetry.
The book where I learned of Chettle's little jibe is Henry Neville Was Shakespeare: The Evidence, by John Casson and William D. Rubinstein (the Melicert quote is on page 142). It's one of several books to come out in the last few years advancing the case for Henry Neville, a courtier and politician of the Elizabethan-Jacobian eras, as the author of Shakespeare's works. Although I've long been partial to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the best candidate, I have to say that the case for Neville is worth considering.
Casson and Rubinstein focus largely on the books from Neville's personal library, many of which still exist and have been annotated by hand. Relying on comparisons of the handwriting in the margins with the handwriting in Neville's extent letters, they make the case that most of the marginalia were written by Neville himself. They go on to point out parallels between the highlighted passages and material in Shakespeare's plays.
Another line of argument involves comparing the use of highly unusual words and phrases in Neville's correspondence and in Shakespeare's writings. Some of these words and word combinations were used by no other writers in that era, according to a comprehensive database search.
One advantage of the Neville hypothesis is that his lifespan neatly dovetails with the generally accepted dates of writing and publication for the plays. The Oxford hypothesis, on the other hand, is complicated by the fact that Oxford died in 1604, and, according to the conventional wisdom, many of Shakespeare's plays were written later. Oxfordians counter that the dating of the plays is uncertain and that the "later" plays may actually have been written much earlier. All we know for sure is the date of first publication or first known performance, and it's possible that the first known performance was actually a revival of an old play - not an uncommon practice for the acting companies of the time, who needed a steady supply of material. In support of this, they point to Ben Jonson's characterization of the late play Pericles as a "moldy tale," which they take to mean "old," though the description might simply refer to the play's old-fashioned subject matter.
Oxfordians also dispute the claim that any post-1604 sources or political events inspired the later plays. In particular, they take issue with the argument that Macbeth is heavily informed by the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, or that The Tempest is based in part on the so-called Strachey letter, a privately circulated 1610 missive describing a shipwreck in the Bermudas.
Some of these points are more convincing than others. Personally, I think the 1604 date of Oxford's death is a stumbling block to his candidacy, and that Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest almost certainly include material that can be dated later. The stumbling block is not necessarily fatal; perhaps this post-1604 material was added by some other playwright (it's generally accepted that portions of Macbeth were written by Thomas Middleton), but all in all, there's a quality of special pleading in these arguments.
Incidentally, as Casson and Rubinstein point out, it's unlikely that William of Stratford would ever have seen the Strachey letter, access to which was restricted to shareholders in the Virginia Company, which sponsored the Bermuda expedition. Henry Neville, on the other hand, was a director of the Virginia Company.
The biggest weakness of the Nevillian hypothesis is that there's relatively little evidence for Neville's interest in poetry and theater. There is some evidence: the famed Northumberland manuscript, whose cover page lists the titles of two Shakespeare plays and the attribution "William Shakespeare," was owned by Neville, who may have written those notes himself (this at a time when Shakespeare had not been publicly identified as a playwright). Both Neville's father and grandfather participated in plays at the royal court, and his father helped establish the first Blackfriars Theatre (an outdoor playhouse, not the later indoor Blackfriars where some of Shakespeare's works were acted). A 1599 poem addressed to Neville, written in Latin, refers to "the kindly company of Muses who sing through you, granting you various arts: the refined Thalia [Muse of Comedy] giving you the eloquence to pour forth what You Will."* Neville was a friend of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher, and all of them were members of the Mermaid Club. He was also a friend of the poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose work influenced Shakespeare, and his closest friend may have been the Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Still, unlike Oxford, Neville was not a literary patron; he published no poetry under his name or initials (one brief unpublished poem, an amusing trifle, survives); he wrote no introductions to published books; he did not surround himself with writers or host the kind of literary salon that Oxford established; and he was never celebrated as a poet or playwright in his lifetime. Oxford, conversely, was counted as leading the list of "the best for Comedy amongst us" by Francis Meres in a noted pamphlet, though it's possible that his placement on the list owed more to his rank than to his talent.
Furthermore, certain books known to have been essential to Shakespeare are no longer part of Neville's collection, notably Plutarch's Lives, which was used extensively as a source for the Roman plays and is even paraphrased in parts of Antony and Cleopatra. Of course, it's possible that Plutarch and other volumes were once part of the collection and simply disappeared into other people's hands over the last 400 years.
I'm sufficiently intrigued by the Neville hypothesis to have ordered a second book on the subject and to have investigated a couple of relevant websites. One of them is Ken Feinstein's blog, which includes information on a catalog of Neville's books that includes titles missing from the extant collection (it's unclear to me if Plutarch is among them), and another is James Leyland and James Goding's blog, which, among other things, covers the Melicert reference discussed above.
A common objection to any question of Shakespeare's authorship is that the doubters are almost never credentialed Shakespearean scholars. That is true in this case. John Casson is a retired psychotherapist. William D. Rubinstein is a professor of history who taught at the University of Wales and Deakin University (Australia), and who currently serves as adjunct professor at Monash University. On the other hand, many prominent persons arguing the case for the orthodox position also are not credentialed scholars in this field. David Kathman, who maintains a website arguing that "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare," is "a Chartered Financial Analyst who makes [his] living as a mutual fund analyst," yet his arguments are routinely quoted as authoritative. (He does have a Ph.D. in linguistics, but it's not clear that this is more relevant than Rubinstein's status as a history professor.)
Orthodox scholars will sometimes point out that anti-Stratfordians don't publish in recognized academic journals, but this is a Catch-22, since those journals make it a policy not to consider anti-Stratfordian submissions. (Similarly, mainstream publications refuse to accept any parapsychology articles "on principle"; parapsychologists are then criticized for not publishing in those journals.)
Do I think Sir Henry Neville was Shakespeare? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to be convinced. The one thing I remain certain of is that William Shakspere (as he spelled it, when he remembered to add the final "e") of rural Stratford, whose parents, wife, and grown daughters were illiterate, who as far as we know owned no books, and whose handwriting survives only in a few rudimentary, barely legible signatures ... is not the author of the world's greatest literature.
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*The words "what You Will" probably don't refer to the play of that name, which was written later, but the capitalization of Velles, Latin for you will, arguably suggests a pun on the name Will. The Latin quae velles can also be translated "what you wish," "what you like," or "what you command," but according to an 1861 Latin-English lexicon, the Latin verb volo has these definitions: 1) "to be willing, to will"; 2) "to command, to ordain, to determine"; 3) "to wish, to desire"; 4) "to mean, to denote, to signify." So "will" is the principal definition.
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