Michael Prescott's Blog

Book review: North by Shakespeare

Recently I had the opportunity to take an advance look at North by Shakespeare, by Michael Blanding, which is now in print. It's an unusual work in some respects. For one thing, the author himself is something of an agnostic on the subject of Shakespearean authorship. More important, North by Shakespeare deals only in part with arguments pertaining to the origins of the plays, while devoting a good deal of time to the academic obstacles faced by anyone mounting a challenge to Shakespearean orthodoxy. As a study of the monolithic resistance of the professoriat to new ideas, it's applicable to many more areas than Shakespeareana. 

 

The hero of the book is Dennis McCarthy, a self-taught scholar who had already made respected contributions to the field of biogeography before becoming intrigued with the idea that Shakespeare's plays, in their original form, were authored by Thomas North. North is best known today as the translator of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, and his translation is demonstrably a key source for some of Shakespeare's historical plays, notably Antony and Cleopatra, which includes whole passages of North's translation, lightly revised to change North's prose into blank verse. North also translated The Moral Philosophy of Doni, a book of animal fables that proved immensely popular in his day.

 

Of course there are many claimants to the title of "the true author" behind the Shakespearean corpus. I've written elsewhere of the many reasons why it's unlikely that a provincial from Stratford-upon-Avon, educated in a one-room schoolhouse probably for no more than a few years, could have become the erudite, multilingual, aristocratically well-connected poet and playwright we know as William Shakespeare. But how good a job does North by Shakespeare do in presenting Thomas North as the man behind the curtain?

 

 

To begin with, I found the book fascinating, well paced, consistently compelling, and nicely balanced between open-mindedness and cautious skepticism. What I most related to were the accounts of the Shakespearean academics who simply refused to consider Dennis McCarthy's theory – for instance, one professor who averred stiffly, "I stand by William … I believe in William from Stratford-upon-Avon." This sounds less like a statement of objective scholarship than the recital of a religious creed.

 

McCarthy was surprised to discover that the Shakespearean academics were far more closed-minded than the biogeographers whose theories he'd previously challenged. This was no revelation to me. Sadly, the evasion and rationalization among Shakespearean professionals can be truly prodigious. I've been told in condescending terms that the identity of the author is irrelevant and unimportant, since the plays should be judged purely on their own merits. This — after more than a century of scouring every historical record for the slightest reference to the Stratford man. Even today, on the rare occasion when a new scrap of documentary information turns up about William's life, it's greeted as a discovery of historic significance. And yet, in a classic instance of doublethink, the same people who pore over every smallest archival document possibly connected to the Stratford man tell us that the details of his life are utterly insignificant.

 

In his initial enthusiasm, McCarthy was keen to insist that North wrote the plays, even publishing a quickie book on the subject. I read this book and discussed it here. Later, McCarthy quietly withdrew the book from publication and tried his best to memory-hole it, a decision I found baffling at the time. North by Shakespeare clarifies the situation, explaining that McCarthy learned that the book constituted an insuperable barrier to entry into academia.  

 

Blanding does an excellent job of acquainting the reader with the complicated ins and outs of the authorship controversy. I might have preferred a little more discussion of the aristocratic elements in Shakespeare's writing, such as his firsthand knowledge of falconry and bowls (two pastimes restricted to the aristocracy). I was a bit disappointed when Blanding repeated the old trope that partisans of the Earl of Oxford are motivated by snobbery, since I think the real motivation has more to do with the (to us) obviously aristocratic and court-insider elements of Shakespeare's works. If the author of Anna Karenina were unknown, we would certainly look for him among the Russian aristocracy, because the book is immersed in that world. On the other hand, if the author of Crime and Punishment were unknown, we would not look for him among aristocrats, because his book is set solidly in the world of the hoi polloi. It's not a question of snobbishness in the one case or egalitarianism in the other, but of divining the author's circumstances from the characters and incidents he chooses to portray.

 

But the book's focus, naturally, is not on Oxford but on North, and it is remarkably effective at making a case for him. I do think the case could be strengthened by an exploration of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems and especially his sonnets, mentioned only in passing. Though notoriously difficult to interpret, the sonnets appear to contain autobiographical content – for example, Sonnet 107 is conventionally seen as a commentary on the release of the Earl of Southampton from the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth. When I mentioned this issue to Michael Blanding, he informed me that Dennis McCarthy has done considerable work on both the poems and sonnets, but prefers to retain this material for his own publication down the line.

 

The parallels McCarthy has discovered discovered or, in some cases, conjectured between North's life and Shakespeare's body of work are consistently interesting, though perhaps not always 100% persuasive. McCarthy argues, for instance, that Hamlet's meditations on mortality were inspired by North's seemingly hopeless position at one point in his military career, when it appeared that he and his troops faced certain death at the hands of the invading Spanish. It's an interesting notion, but in truth, we don't have any idea what North may have been thinking under those circumstances. On the other hand, mainstream writers have imputed all sorts of connections between presumed events in the Stratford man's life and the content of the Shakespearean works. These connections are at least as tenuous as any that McCarthy suggests. (I would argue, however, that the connections between the life of Oxford and major characters and events in Shakespeare's plays are considerably more specific and convincing. But that's another story.)

 

I'm very much in agreement with McCarthy's idea that Shakespeare's so-called "late romances" (except for The Tempest) are actually early and rather primitive (even juvenile) works that were staged after the author's death, when he wasn't around to complain. It has always struck me as bizarre that serious scholars think Shakespeare descended from the heights of Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Macbeth to the comparative drivel of Cymbeline and Pericles. Ben Jonson called Pericles "a mouldy tale," which may imply that it was an old play exhumed from well-deserved burial.

 

Another point in North's favor is that he very likely attended the elaborate festivities at Kenilworth Castle in honor of Queen Elizabeth, festivities that were clearly referenced in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Oxford is known not to have attended, having been abroad at the time. I've always found his absence to be a distinct weakness in the Oxfordian thesis. Moreover, in North, we have a writer of established greatness (his translation of Plutarch has never been surpassed) who treated some of the same themes that obsessed Shakespeare – and who is also the only writer Shakespeare quotes nearly verbatim in his works; in contrast, the few surviving poems under Oxford's name are not of Shakespearean quality (Oxfordians excuse them as early efforts). And while Oxford died in 1604, obliging his partisans to redate The Tempest, North's date of death is unknown. 

 

A curious pamphlet posthumously attributed to the satirist Robert Greene, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, as analyzed by McCarthy, provides further support for the North thesis. In the pamphlet, a gentleman scholar, strapped for cash, is enlisted by a traveling player-impresario to provide him with material. The pamphlet concludes with an animal fable, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," calling to mind the fable-filled Moral Philosophy of Doni and suggesting, perhaps, that the gentleman scholar is meant to be seen as the translator of that work. North is known to have had severe financial difficulties, which could explain why he stooped to the discreditable occupation of playwriting. (Oxford, too, had financial difficulties, but he lived on a larger scale, and I doubt that the revenue from the plays would have made a dent in his mountainous debts.)

 

One odd thing about North by Shakespeare is that it doesn't seem to fully acknowledge that it's about an authorship controversy. More than once McCarthy insists to Blanding that Shakespeare "wrote every word" attributed to him during his lifetime. This strikes me as bizarre, since his own theory directly undercuts this conclusion – unless by  "writing every word" he means copying over what North wrote. If it is true that the Stratford man served as a play broker and producer (à la Ben Jonson's "poet-ape"), and that the plays he acquired were lengthy, elaborate, sophisticated works originally intended for performance at court, then he must have had  them shortened and simplified for public performance, and may also have added vulgar comedy and action for the entertainment of the groundlings. Still, such revisions are a far cry from "writing every word." I doubt, in any case, that the Stratford man did the editing himself, any more than a movie producer sits down with the script and rewrites it. Then and now, this is the kind of work that's farmed out to a journeyman writer available on the cheap.

 

Most likely, this circumlocution is a defensive move on McCarthy's part, intended to shield him from slings and arrows launched by the Shakespearean orthodoxy. In a sense, he seems to want to eat his cake and still have it – to suggest strongly that North was the original author of the plays, while at the same time insisting there was never any cover-up or conspiracy and that the Stratford man deserves the credit. To me, it's a somewhat intellectually incoherent position, but these are the desperate lengths one can be led to when facing the brick wall of academic dismissal. 

 

Whether you take it as a new contribution to the authorship debate, an examination of the stubborn closed-mindedness of academia, or a portrait of an iconoclastic autodidact on a mission, North by Shakespeare is a lively and provocative read. Though I'm not necessarily convinced that North is the solution to the puzzle of Shakespearean authorship, I certainly think McCarthy's thesis deserves serious attention. I hope North by Shakespeare helps to spread his ideas to a wide and open-minded audience. 

 

Enter Neville

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.

----

*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. 

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. 

Shakespeare's cryptic crypt

For decades, people who suspect that the works of Shakespeare were written by someone other than "the Stratford man" have looked for a decisive piece of evidence to seal the case. In the 19th century, when Francis Bacon was the most popular candidate among "anti-Stratfordians," there was something of a craze for ciphers. Enthusiasts became convinced that Bacon must have used cryptograms to conceal messages claiming credit for the works. Their assiduous - one might say fanatical - efforts yielded numerous purported hidden messages, but subsequent critics showed that these messages were obtained only by playing fast and loose with the rules of cryptography. As books such as The Bible Code have shown, it is not hard to find hidden messages in a long text if one is willing to make up the rules as one goes along.

Owing to the Baconian debacle, cryptography is largely taboo among today's anti-Stratfordians. Yet there is no good reason for this. The fact that some Baconians of a hundred years ago got carried away with cryptograms does not mean that all efforts to find a hidden message pertaining to Shakespeare are in vain. After all, the Elizabethan-Jacobean era was a heyday of cryptography. Many people practiced it, partly for amusement (wordplay was exceedingly popular), but mainly because, in an autocratic state run by a paranoid monarchy with a network of spies, it was not safe to openly express controversial thoughts. One fellow who had the impertinence to publish a pamphlet imploring Queen Elizabeth not to marry a foreigner was rewarded by having his right hand lopped off, so that he would not be tempted - or able - to write again. Playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested and tortured after papers of an atheistic nature were found in his home. Kyd blamed the papers on his sometime roommate Christopher Marlowe, who himself was scheduled to go before the dreaded Star Chamber when he was conveniently murdered. And then there was Ben Jonson, who was jailed more than once for expressing himself too frankly in his plays.

In such an atmosphere, secret messages were often a necessity; and it is known that such messages were exchanged among the conspirators in the plot to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the throne. Elizabeth's government even maintained a cadre of crypotologists to decipher intercepted communications among foreign Jesuits, domestic recusants, and other enemies of the embattled Protestant regime.

In short, ciphers were widely used in that era, and were a natural way of restricting information to a narrow circle. But can any such messages be found in texts pertaining to Shakespeare? I know of at least two possibilities. One of them, involving the publisher's introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets, was discussed on this blog a while ago. The other involves the Shakespeare monument in Stratford.

The monument has a curious history. An early sketch and engraved illustration of the monument depict the figure of a lean, grim-looking fellow leaning on what appears to be a sack of wool. In the monument as it stands today, the wool sack has become a cushion, and the figure is blank-faced and portly, with a quill pen in hand. Either the initial sketch was remarkably inaccurate, or sometime during the various repairs and restorations performed on the monument, the sculpted figure was considerably remodeled.

The original engraved illustration, and the monument today.

In any event, what interests us here is the inscription on the monument. For what follows, I rely almost entirely on a 2009 paper by David L. Roper, who subjected the inscription to cryptographic analysis, with provocative results.

The first two lines of the inscription are in Latin; they compare Shakespeare, somewhat inaptly, to Nestor, Socrates, and Vergil. Homer, Sophocles, and Ovid would have made more sense, but we'll let that pass. The second line of the Latin inscription is indented, the only line of text on the monument to be set off. It consists of 34 letters.

Below this, and separate from it, is a six-line epitaph in English. It mentions no works attributed to Shakespeare. It neglects to mention his first name or any members of his family. It spells his name "Shakspeare," without the medial e between the k and the s, even though the name was spelled Shakespeare or Shake-speare on virtually all of the writer's publications. (The most common spelling of the Stratford man's name was Shakspere, and this may have been how he spelled it himself, though his signatures are so poor that it is impossible to be certain.)

There are other peculiarities in the inscription. It tells us to "read if thou canst" what is written there - a rather odd injunction, since the illiterate would not be able to read even those words. It has inconsistent spellings of whom and whome. It abbreviates that as yt and this as ys (the y was an English character called a thorn, pronounced "th," and still seen in Ye Olde Country Inn and the like). It uses the word sieh, unknown in English then or since; either the German word sieh has been inexplicably used in place of the English word see (as Roper thinks) or it sieh is a kind of "typo" for sith, meaning since (as I think).

Well, spelling in that era was not standardized, which could explain whom/whome. And it takes less room to carve yt than that, or ys than this; the engraver might have been trying to conserve space. And sieh? Maybe he was just not very literate - though if so, he was in the wrong occupation.

On the other hand, maybe there's more here than meets the eye. Maybe that's why the epitaph begins: "Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast? Read if thou canst ..." This could be interpreted as: "Don't merely glance at these words; spend some time on them and find, if you can, their hidden meaning."

David Roper did spend time on them, using a common cryptographic technique called Equidistant Letter Sequencing, which was known and used in the Jacobean era. The method, which he describes in detail in his paper, requires arranging the text in the right number of columns. When the correct number is chosen, a message will be read vertically in some (though not all) of the columns. Of necessity, some columns will contain gibberish, but others will spell out words that form a coherent statement.

The key to the cryptogram is the number of columns. This can be obtained by trial and error, as Roper describes. But there is another option - namely, the number itself can be suggested by something on the page. Look again at the Latin inscription. As mentioned earlier, the second line - the only indented line, and the line that appears immediately above the English epitaph - contains 34 letters. What happens if we create a series of columns (technically a variation on the Cardan grille) that is 34 letters wide?

David L. Roper's 34-column grid of the monument's inscription (source: Roper's online paper).

We get a fair amount of gibberish, as expected with this method. But we also get the following message, reading downward, one cluster at a time:

SO TEST HIM I VOW HE IS E VERE DE

Well, that's interesting. It would be more elegant if it read ... HE IS E DE VERE, but Roper argues that since there isn't room to place De Vere on the grid in a single column, a transposition was necessary. And it might be pointed out that even E. Vere would be enough to signify a certain nobleman of the period.

Note that in order to get this message, we must read the u in monument as a v. However, this is not as arbitrary as it sounds. For one thing, the word is actually inscribed MONVMENT, as the above photo shows. For another, u and v were used somewhat interchangeably at the time (as the inscription of the word monument itself demonstrates; see also envious, quick, nature, and thou).

Roper identifies another cluster, although this one requires taking the word SHAKSPEARE (written horizontally) as part of the message. This may or may not be playing fair. He defends his reading on the ground that the word would be too long to render vertically, and because two other words in the cluster overlap with it. At least one blogger disagrees and finds this part of the decryption suspect. In any case, the cluster reads:

AS HE SHAKSPEARE ME IB

Putting this all together with appropriate punctuation, we have:

SO TEST HIM: I VOW HE IS E. DE VERE AS HE SHAKSPEARE; ME, I.B.

An alternative reading is suggested by the above-mentioned blogger:

HIM SO TEST: HE I VOW IS E. DE VERE AS HE SHAKESPEARE; ME, I.B.*

The sequence of words depends on whether you read each column in order from left to right, or whether you start with the uppermost column, then proceed to the next-uppermost column, and so on (working within each cluster). Either way, the gist is the same.

Incidentally, "Me, John Doe," though it may sound clumsy to modern ears, was a standard way of signing a legal document in that age. For instance, Mr. Shakspere's will was signed, "By me William Shakpsere." (This is the last of the six signatures in the image above. The first three words appear to have been written by the lawyer who wrote the will, while the name Shakspere is scrawled in noticeably different - and much inferior - handwriting, presumably by the testator himself.)

I.B., Roper believes, was Ben Jonson. He was known to sign his name with the initials B.I., with an I substituted for a J in the Roman style. However, Roper does not explain why the initials are reversed. Since two-letter words are easily formed by chance, since I.B. does not match B.I., and since the second he is not really necessary to the sense, I'm inclined to think the full message is:

SO TEST HIM: I VOW HE IS E. DE VERE AS SHAKSPEARE.

Roper tells us that a Professor Burgstahler of the University of Kansas prepared a complete range of grills, running the gamut from 5 columns to 55 columns, and none of them other than the 34-column grid yielded a coherent message. Of course, in most grids some short words will be formed by chance, but only in the 34-column grid do they add up to a message, and that message mentions "Vere."

Who is Vere? Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the leading candidate among anti-Stratfordians today - not because of this possible cryptogram, which was unknown until recently, but for many other reasons, most involving detailed parallels between his life and the events of the plays.

Roper observes that the oddities of the inscription are explained by the cryptogram. He writes:

WHOM in line 2 is spelt WHOME in line 3. The added 'E' provides the 'E' in 'TEST.'

THIS in line 3 is abbreviated to YS in line 4. The abbreviation provides the 'S' for 'TEST.'

THAT is abbreviated to YT in line 5. This abbreviation allows the correct positioning of 'T,' 'H,' 'W,' 'I.' ...

The German word 'SIEH' has been introduced to provide 'I' and 'E' for 'ME' 'I.B."

WRITT is given an extra 'T.' This allows the second 'E' in 'VERE' and the initial 'B' to be positioned correctly.

As I said, I'm inclined to discount much of the last cluster, but the bizarre use of sieh, which makes "ME IB" possible, does make me wonder if Jonson signed his name after all.

Of course, all this could be nothing more than a coincidence. Much of the text, read vertically, is meaningless, and it is possible that the seemingly meaningful parts are accidental. On the other hand, the strangeness of the inscription with its many irregularities and omissions, the indentation of the 34-letter line directly above it, and the appearance of Vere in the only grid out of 50 that yields a coherent statement, all combine to make a pretty good case for cryptographic wordplay.

If that case is valid, then we might say that it was Mr. Shakspere of Stratford who was the real cipher.

====

*As mentioned, the other analyst (who posts anonymously, as far as I can tell) does not endorse the last cluster as part of the message, but I've added it to parallel Roper's reading.

Update, February 16, 2018: Rather surprisingly, Dennis McCarthy seems to have repudiated his book North of Shakespeare, withdrawing it from sale and even claiming (in a brief discussion with me on Facebook) that he never said Thomas North wrote the canonical plays included in the First Folio.

You can judge for yourself. Here's the promotional copy from North of Shakespeare, with my emphases in bold:

No conspiracies, no speculation, just the documented proof that Sir Thomas North wrote the plays and that Shakespeare merely adapted them for the public stage. Yes, Shakespeare wrote everything clearly attributed to him while he was alive; yes, all the Shakespeare-era title pages were correct; but as "North of Shakespeare" shows, most of the plays attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime and even up until 1620 are not the same plays that everyone now believes he wrote. "North of Shakespeare," written by the acclaimed scholar-author of "Here Be Dragons" (Oxford University Press -- 2009), exposes extraordinary, documented information that overturns everything we had once believed about Shakespeare. Specifically, a thorough analysis of seven rare documents has confirmed that the impoverished, war-weary scholar-knight, Sir Thomas North, was the one who actually penned the original "Shakespearean" masterpieces and that Shakespeare had merely adapted North's plays for the public stage. Moreover, a careful examination of the actual title pages of the dramas published while Shakespeare was alive and even up until 1620 -- combined with a study of all relevant comments from his contemporaries -- reconfirms this same fact. The true story of North and Shakespeare, unlike all other speculations over authorship, whether put forth by orthodox scholars or intelligent dissidents, is devoid of all conspiracies, hypothetical behind-the-scenes-intrigue, or outlandish and dastardly motives. What remains is one exceedingly simple explanation, confirmed repeatedly by numerous documents and multiple lines of evidence, that unknots confusion, settles the paradoxes, and, once and for all, solves the mystery of Shakespeare....McCarthy will now transform our view of Shakespeare in the same way that his past works have helped change our views on the history of life and Earth.

---

(Original post) 

I realize that most readers of this blog aren't too interested in the Shakespeare authorship question. But it's been on my mind lately. Since I'm currently out of commission with a sinus infection, I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'm rereading Dennis McCarthy's North of Shakespeare. Though a little overenthusiastic and occasionally repetitious, the book makes a strong case for the proposition that William Shakespeare was a play broker and producer who revised other people's plays for popular performance. (Sabrina Feldman's book The Apocryphal William Shakespeare advances a similar argument.) 

 In the course of rereading McCarthy's book, I was reminded of one particularly knotty problem for the whole issue of the plays' origins.  It involves a scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Oberon, King of the Fairies, addresses his servant Puck.  

 

OBERON 

 My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest

Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,

To hear the sea-maid's music.

 

PUCK

I remember.

 

OBERON

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness.

Fetch me that flower ...

 

It should be obvious that the elaborate description of the mermaid on the dolphin's back, the roiling sea, the mad stars, and Cupid's love arrow is largely irrelevant to the apparent point of the dialogue, which is that Oberon wants Puck to retrieve a certain flower for him. But where did all these extraneous details come from? 

As McCarthy observes, 

That this is an allegory involving Queen Elizabeth has been known since the early 1700s when one of the first Shakespeare scholars, Nicholas Rowe, noted that the "fair vestal [i.e., virgin] throned in the west" is obviously the "Virgin Queen" of England. But every aspect of this fantastic vision … also coincides with the events of a water show presented by the Earl of Leicester on behalf of the Queen at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. According to eyewitness accounts, a boat in the castle-lake had been fashioned into the shape of a dolphin and had a singer in the guise of Arion riding on its back. Musicians with instruments were inside the dolphin, the sweet music thus emanating from its belly, and Arion sang with the melody. The pageant also included an 18 foot figure of the Sea-King Triton with his fishy serpent-like body … The poet George Gascoigne described him as "Triton, in the likeness of a mermaid."

An anonymous article in the Edward De Vere Newsletter tells us, 

There are two contemporary accounts of the Earl of Leicester's entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth in the summer of 1575. The first of these is the Langham Letter, the other is The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth, attributed to George Gascoigne (1542-1577), although on doubtful grounds, since the first edition of 1576 was printed anonymously and its author speaks of Gascoigne in the third person. 

The article goes on to point out serious discrepancies between the two accounts and concludes that the Langham letter was not written by an actual attendee, inasmuch as the writer of the letter makes no reference to the foul weather that required the cancellation of certain outdoor events. Further confusing the issue, the Langham letter is sometimes ascribed to someone named Leneham, not Langham; the identity of the author is not known with certainty.

Despite these complications, it is clear that water pageants played a large part in the Queen's entertainment. Here is the Gascoigne account:  

The next thing that was presented before her Majesty, was the delivery of the Lady of the Lake; whereof the sum was this. Triton, in likeness of a mermaid, came towards the Queen’s Majesty as she passed over the bridge, returning from hunting: and to her declared, that Neptune had sent him to her Highness. . . .

And here is the Langham account: 

Well, the game was gotten, and her highness returning: came there upon a swimming Mermaid (that from top to tail was an eighteen foot long) Triton, Neptune's blaster: who, with his trumpet formed of a wrinkled whelk, as her Majesty was in sight, gave sound very shrill and sonorous, in sign he had an embassy to pronounce: anon her highness was come upon the bridge, whereunto he made his fish to swim the swifter, and he then declared: how the supreme salsipotent Monarch Neptune, the great God of the swelling Seas, Prince of profundities, and Sovereign Seignior of all Lakes, Freshwaters, Rivers, Creeks, and Gulfs: understanding how a cruel knight, one Sir Bruce sans pity, a mortal enemy unto ladies of estate, had long lain about the banks of this pool in wait with his bands here: to distress the lady of the lake. . . .

In either case, the basic idea is that, after a day of hunting, the Queen stopped on a bridge and was addressed by an outsized figure of Triton. In one account, Triton is depicted as mermaid-like, while in the other, he is apparently riding a mermaid. 

According to Gascoigne's version, Triton "soundeth his trumpet, and spake to the winds, waters, and fishes," urging them to calm themselves. Presumably this connects with the Langham letter's reference to the trumpet blast - a "sound very shrill and sonorous" - that preceded Triton's announcement. 

The Newsletter article continues: 

After Triton's prologue, the allegorical centerpiece of the water pageant took place: in accordance with Merlin's prophecy that the Lady of the Lake "could never be delivered but by the presence of a better maid than herself," the Lady's oppressor, "Sir Bruce sans pity", was forced to withdraw by reason of the Queen's mere presence upon the bridge overlooking the lake. In the account in the Letter, the Lady of the Lake (with Triton nearby, still riding his "Mermaid") then approached the Queen to express her gratitude. [spelling modernized - MP] 

The corresponding part of the Langham letter brings in the figure of Arion, an ancient Greek poet who became the subject of a myth in which he was saved from drowning by a dolphin. The image of Arion riding a dolphin and singing his verses was commonplace in Elizabethan art. 

The letter reads: 

… and the lady [i.e., the Lady of the Lake] by and by, with her two Nymphs, floating upon her movable Islands (Triton on his Mermaid skimming by) approached towards her highness on the bridge: as well to declare that her Majesty's presence hath so graciously thus wrought her deliverance, as also to excuse her not coming to court as she promised, and chiefly to present her Majesty (as a token of her duty and good heart) for her highness' recreation with this gift, which was Arion that excellent and famous Musician, in tyre and appointment strange well seeming to his person, riding aloft upon his old friend the Dolphin, (that from head to tail was a four and twenty foot long) and swimmed hard by these Islands: herewith Arion for these great benefits, after a few well couched words unto her Majesty of thanksgiving, in supplement of the same: began a delectable ditty of a song well apted to a melodious noise, compounded of six several instruments all covert, casting sound from the Dolphin's belly within, Arion the seventh sitting thus singing (as I say) without.

Gascoigne, however, makes no mention of Arion and instead has Proteus, a different mythological character, sing to the Queen. 

From thence her Majesty passing yet further on the bridge, Proteus appeared, sitting on a dolphin’s back. And the dolphin was conveyed upon a boat, so that the oars seemed to be his fins. Within the which dolphin a consort of music was secretly placed, the which sounded: and Proteus, clearing his voice, sang this song of congratulation, as well in the behalf of the Lady distressed, as also in the behalf of all the Nymphs and Gods of the Sea ...

Whether Proteus or Arion, it is clear that a singer sat astride an artificial dolphin, and that music emanated from this construct. 

Fireworks were also part of the festivities. The Langham letter tells of three separate fireworks shows, while the Gascoigne account mentions only one. 

The letter reports the first display: 

So passing into the inner Court, her Majesty (that never rides but alone) there set down from her Palfrey, was conveyed up to chamber: when after did follow so great a peal of guns, and such lightning by firework a long space together: as Jupiter would show himself to be no further behind with his welcome, than the rest of his Gods: and that would he have all the Country to know: for indeed the noise and flame were heard and seen a twenty mile off.

And the second: 

At night late, as though Jupiter last night had forgot for busyness, or forborne for courtesy and quiet, part of his welcome unto her highness appointed: now entering at first into his purpose moderately (as mortals do) with a warning piece or two, proceeding on with increase, at last the Altitonant displays me his main power: with blaze of burning darts, flying to and fro, [g]leams of stars coruscant, streams and hail of fiery sparks, lightnings of wildfire a [= on] water and land, flight and shot of thunderbolts: all with such continuance, terror and vehemency that the heavens thundered, the waters surged, the earth shook, in such sort surely, as had we not been assured the fulminant deity was all but in amity, and could not otherwise witness his welcoming unto her highness, it would have made me for my part, as hardy as I am, very vengeably afeared. This ado lasted while high midnight was past.

And the third: 

… so was there abroad at night very strange and sundry kinds of fireworks, compelled by cunning to fly to and fro and to mount very high into the air upward, and also to burn unquenchably in the water beneath: contrary ye wot, to fire's kind. This intermingled with a great peal of guns: which all gave, both to the ear and to the eye the greater grace and delight, for that with such order and art they were tempered: touching time and continuance, that was about two hours' space.

Meanwhile, Gascoigne's more subdued account gives us only one fireworks show: 

On the next day (being Sunday) there was nothing done until the evening, at which time there were fireworks showed upon the water, the which were both strange and well executed; as sometimes, passing under the water a long space, when all men had thought they had been quenched, they would rise and mount out of the water again, and burn very furiously until they were utterly consumed.

To review. The poetical passage speaks of 1) a singer on a dolphin's back, 2) a turbulent sea growing civil, and 3) stars flying madly. This corresponds to 1) the dolphin-boat and singer, 2) the calming of the waters enacted by Triton, and 3) one or more fireworks displays. 

The passage also speaks of a misplaced bowshot aimed at an "imperial votaress," which, as McCarthy points out, references the unsuccessful attempt by Leicester (Robert Dudley) to win the Queen's hand: 

Even Cupid shooting an arrow at the Vestal Queen, and missing, fits perfectly because Leicester was attempting to use these grand festivities to woo Queen Elizabeth. Leicester's romantic efforts failed, and he ended up married to Lettice Knollys. 

Indeed, the whole event was a bust for Leicester, who had hoped to secure the Queen's promise of marriage, which would have meant the kingship for himself. Instead, they quarreled - possibly over the very Lettice Knollys whom Leicester eventually married - and according to one interpretation, the Queen angrily decamped from Kenilworth seven days ahead of schedule. 

So tight is the fit between the Shakespearean passage and the events at Kenilworth (both the public events and those behind the scenes) that mainstream scholars have long accepted it as a reference to the 1575 gala. But there is a problem. How did Will Shakespeare of Stratford, 11 years old in 1575, know anything about Leicester's party? 

One detail helps them. Kenilworth is only 11 miles from Stratford. Certainly, the Queen's visit would have been known in Stratford, and possibly Will's father, John Shakespeare, took him there to see the crowds and the excitement. But could father and son have obtained admission to the gala? McCarthy notes that Shakespeare biographer Stephan Greenblatt found it unlikely. Greenblatt wrote:

John Shakespeare, a Stratford Alderman at the time, was too insignificant a figure to have got very close … but it is certainly conceivable that he took his son Will to glimpse what they could of the spectacles … 

Note that there is no evidence whatsoever that either John Shakespeare or his son Will even went to the affair. If they did go, they would probably not have been allowed on the grounds. But maybe Will snuck in and watched from hiding? Some writers have speculated to that effect. There is no evidence for that, either, of course, but even if it were true, he still could have known nothing about the behind-the-scenes drama of Leicester's play for Elizabeth in marriage. 1575 wasn't 1975; there was no People magazine to clue in the hoi polloi on the romantic escapades of the elite. 

Moreover, would any commoner have risked offending the powerful Leicester and the even more powerful (and unpredictable) Elizabeth by making such an obvious reference to court gossip? That kind of talk could get Everyman an up-close-and-personal meeting with Richard Topcliffe, England's most experienced torturer. This was, after all, a society in which a pamphleteer who implored Elizabeth not to accept a foreign prince's hand in marriage was rewarded for his pains by having his right hand chopped off. 

Everything about the Midsummer Night's Dream passage points in a very different direction. And since I'm an Oxfordian, at this point I would love to play my trump card and say, "Will may not have been there, but Oxford was!"

Sadly, I can't do this … because Oxford, in fact, was not there. He was traveling in Europe. 

This is not a problem for McCarthy. His candidate for the authorship is not Oxford, but Thomas North, the celebrated translator of Plutarch's Lives. McCarthy finds many parallels between specific phrasings in the Shakespearean corpus and North's works. These can be found at his website. He also argues that Shakespeare's most beloved heroine, Rosalinde of As You Like It, was a dramatization of North's daughter Elisa (and that North's play preceded and inspired Thomas Lodge's novel Rosalynde, conventionally taken as its source). In fact, he believes that the plot of As You Like It is directly connected to the facts of North's own life. As for Kenilworth, he assures us that North was among the guests, though I am not sure what his evidence is for this. (I'm not saying he doesn't have evidence, just that I'm not sure what he's citing. North's life isn't particularly well documented.) 

At any rate, for those of us who are not Northians (if there is such a word), the Kenilworth festivities are a head scratcher. Neither Will Shakespeare of Stratford nor Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, can plausibly be placed at the event. Yet the author of A Midsummer Night's Dream certainly seems to have been there. True, it could be argued that the playwright simply read Langham or Gascoigne and got his information secondhand. But then why make so much of it? Why would Will Shakespeare know or care about a party that took place when he was still a child? Why would Oxford harp on an event he hadn't even attended? 

The Newsletter piece suggests an answer, though it is speculative and may be too much for some readers to swallow. As noted, the authorship of the Langham letter has not been established with certainty. Langham actually was present at the Kenilworth gala, while the writer of the letter apparently was not, inasmuch as he got so many details wrong. So if the letter wasn't written by Langham, who was the author? The Newsletter piece opines that it was Oxford, who (as the true Shakespeare) was the only member of Elizabeth's court who had the literary talent to pull off the 18,000 word epistle, described as "a minor masterpiece." 

The letter was published three times and met with great success in each edition. According to the Newsletter, it "is immensely entertaining, and depicts the Queen and her court in a very favourable light. … The Letter represented some of the best public relations material that had ever been written, or would ever likely be written, about [Elizabeth and Leicester]."

Moreover, 

If Oxford was, as has been suggested, the true author of the Langham Letter, then the following scenario perhaps merits consideration. Oxford wrote the Langham Letter in advance of the July 1575 entertainment at Kenilworth, and arranged with William Patten to have it published and distributed to members of the court circle while the entertainment was taking place. Because Oxford was away from England at the time, the details in the Letter reflect what he knew in advance of the plans for the July 1575 entertainment, but also reflect, to a large degree, the 1572 entertainment at Kenilworth, at which he was present.

All might have gone well but for certain events which Oxford could not have foreseen. In the first place, the weather in July 1575 was poor. Since many of the shows and spectacles were designed to take place outdoors, a number of them were perhaps cancelled due to inclement weather. The entertainment thus did not measure up to the version given in the Letter. But more importantly, there seems to have been an emotional contretemps between the Queen and Leicester while she was staying at Kenilworth. 

The idea, it seems, was that Leicester and his guests would have the fun of reading a detailed description of the events while they unfolded, written by someone who wasn't even there. Owing to changes in the scripted performances, unpredictable weather, and emotional firestorms, Oxford's humorous effort fell flat. Still, having invested a great deal of effort in the enterprise, he would naturally remember it, and so it's not surprising that some of those same vivid details would occur to him when writing Oberon's address to Puck. 

Or maybe not. There could be some other explanation. Hell, maybe Thomas North is the guy, after all. 

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about, in between honking into a tissue and coughing up phlegm.

Dear Diary ...

I'm back. Took a hiatus from blogging, not out of choice, but because a) a hurricane devastated my hometown, and b) I was without power for almost ten days, requiring me to c) hopscotch from one motel to another across New Jersey, during which time I d) acquired a respiratory infection. Oh, and e) I was also bummed out by the results of the election. 

One thing I learned during my enforced absence is that lately I've been spending too much time in front of my computer. So while I do intend to continue to blog, I hope to cut back a bit. More quality, less quantity. Nah, who am I kidding? Just less quantity. In terms of quality, it will be the same old crap you've come to count on. 

Having just read a very good book of Shakespearean criticism by John Vyvyan, titled The Shakespearean Ethic (which, by the way, I found out about through a Facebook post by the Oxfordian scholar Roger Stritmatter), I've had my mind on the Bard. As regular readers know, I think that the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. This position is rejected by nearly all mainstream academic scholars. Some of their arguments are certainly worth considering. Others, however, are surprisingly weak. One in particular that strikes me as not only weak but just plain silly goes as follows.

The whole authorship question, they say, is a waste of time, because it simply doesn't matter who wrote the plays. All that matters is the works themselves. We don't need to know anything about the author, because the texts give us everything we need. In fact, knowing more about the author would only serve as a distraction and an impediment to analysis. It would reduce the works to mere romans a clef, literary games in which the sole purpose is to divine the real identities of thinly fictionalized characters. People like those obnoxious and amateurish Oxfordians have no interest in literature per se; they are interested only in solving the supposed riddle of the author's identity, reducing the greatness of his art to a mere parlor game, a hunt for clues. If they were genuinely interested in Shakespeare's literary accomplishment, they would realize that the details of his biography are irrelevant. Who cares who wrote Shakespeare? As the old joke has it, "The works of Shakespeare were not actually written by William Shakespeare, but by another man of the same name." Smirk. 

Now I say this is nonsense. Admittedly, it can claim some kind of intellectual justification from deconstructionism, a trendy aesthetic theory that allows the critic carte blanche in interpreting artistic works, with little or no concern for the intentions of the creator. But like many ivory tower abstractions, deconstructionism enjoys little traffic with the real world. In fact, in the world of common sense and hands-on research, the idea that the details of an author's life are unimportant or irrelevant to the analysis of his output has no support at all. No one would claim to be a serious scholar of, say, Tolstoy without first learning the story of his life. The same is true of any analysis of Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Melville, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald … you name it. 

We don't have to go far to prove this claim with respect to Shakespeare. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, assiduous efforts have been made to track down every scrap of information about the life of William Shakespeare of Stratford and/or the life of the author publicly identified as William Shakespeare. Scholars have combed archives in search of any letters written by or to Shakespeare, any documents he may have signed, any records that may have survived from a hypothetical stint as a law clerk, any records of his hypothetical job as a schoolmaster, and of course any manuscripts of his plays and poems. Not very much as been found, as Diana Price documents in her book Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography. Some juicy finds turned out to be frauds; Shakespearean aficionados were so desperate for any paperwork pertaining to their idol that unscrupulous characters stooped to forgeries. Other finds were genuine but not very illuminating. There are no letters written by Shakespeare, and only one that was ever written to him – a letter asking for a loan, which apparently was never sent. There are no documents of any work as a clerk or schoolmaster. There are scattered records of financial and legal transactions; Shakespeare was litigious, pursuing people through the courts for small sums. Needless to say, no manuscripts have turned up. For other writers of the period, there are – at least in some cases – considerably more ample records. Ben Jonson, for instance, has an exceptionally well-documented life, which includes letters, manuscripts, and journals.

The relative paucity of Shakespearean materials seems to have led scholars to the peculiar position summarized above, much as the fox's inability to seize the grapes led him to conclude that the grapes were probably sour anyway. In this case, the scholars, having exhausted all their efforts in a fruitless quest for Shakespearean arcana, have now decided that such arcana would be useless, even if they had found any.

But how serious are they, really?

Let's perform a little thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow some workmen restoring one of the oldest houses in Stratford-on-Avon accidentally punch through a wall, exposing a hidden compartment. Inside, a remarkable treasure – the diary of William Shakespeare!

The discovery is at first greeted with skepticism, an understandable reaction given the history of forgery in this field. But before long, extensive tests prove beyond any doubt that the diary is genuine. It establishes that William Shakespeare of Stratford really is the author of the plays and poems that bear his name. But it does much more than that. It gives the context for each of his works. It indicates what he was thinking and feeling and going through as he devised and later revised each of his immortal works. It indicates who were the targets of his satirical thrusts – the real people lambasted as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and Polonius in Hamlet, among many others. It explains his intentions, his understanding of the aesthetics of literature, and the philosophical and religious ideas underpinning his worldview. It sketches out his main literary and intellectual influences, and the major themes that obsessed him – themes rooted in the events of his personal life.

If we take the sour grapes argument seriously, none of this would matter to the literary world. Nobody would be excited about it, or even particularly interested. All this first-hand information would be an irrelevance and a distraction. It would not clarify our understanding of Shakespeare, but instead would muddle it. The diary would be, at best, a minor footnote in the history of Shakespearean criticism.

But this, of course, is absurd. The exact opposite would be true. The discovery of such a diary, besides putting the authorship debate to rest once and for all, would be a revolutionary event in Shakespearean studies. Ph.D. theses by the hundreds would be minted exploring the journal's every syllable. First dozens, then hundreds of books would be published, presenting new and much more satisfactory biographies of Shakespeare and new critical evaluations of his works. Annotated editions of the plays and poems would be produced, pointing readers to specific passages in the diary that illuminate particular verses.

Everything would be upended. Nothing would ever be the same. Shakespearean scholarship would be divided into two periods – before the discovery of the diary, and after. Whole shelves of books would be rendered obsolete. There would be movie documentaries and TV specials, theatrical readings of diary excerpts performed by Shakespearean actors, and probably a big-budget feature film depicting Shakespeare's life with an accuracy never before possible.

This is how things would work in the real world, not in the Cloud Cuckoo Land of the sour grapes scenario. And that's why I find this particular argument made by the Stratfordian establishment not merely weak but inane. Again, I'm not saying that all their arguments are equally bad. I'm focusing on this one because it's such an easy target and so ripe for demolition.

For better or worse, no such diary is ever likely to be found, either in Stratford or anywhere else, either written by the glover's son or by the 17th earl. But we do have a mass of material relating to Oxford's life – a raft of documents dwarfing the meager evidence pertaining to the Stratford man. (We even have Oxford's heavily underlined Geneva Bible, with marginal notes, which the above-mentioned Roger Stritmatter has been studying.) And I would argue that this copious evidence sheds significant light on the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of them almost as much as the hypothetical diary might do. 

For those who are interested in exactly how the Oxfordian thesis can illuminate Shakespeare, I recommend Mark Anderson's excellent 'Shakespeare' By Another Name, which relates Oxford's story to the Shakespearean corpus in detail. The book was recently reissued and is available in both print and e-book editions. 

Shreds from the whole piece

Update, February 16, 2018: Rather surprisingly, Dennis McCarthy seems to have repudiated his book North of Shakespeare, withdrawing it from sale and even claiming (in a brief discussion with me on Facebook) that he never said Thomas North wrote the canonical plays included in the First Folio.

You can judge for yourself. Here's the promotional copy from North of Shakespeare, with my emphases in bold:

No conspiracies, no speculation, just the documented proof that Sir Thomas North wrote the plays and that Shakespeare merely adapted them for the public stage. Yes, Shakespeare wrote everything clearly attributed to him while he was alive; yes, all the Shakespeare-era title pages were correct; but as "North of Shakespeare" shows, most of the plays attributed to Shakespeare during his lifetime and even up until 1620 are not the same plays that everyone now believes he wrote. "North of Shakespeare," written by the acclaimed scholar-author of "Here Be Dragons" (Oxford University Press -- 2009), exposes extraordinary, documented information that overturns everything we had once believed about Shakespeare. Specifically, a thorough analysis of seven rare documents has confirmed that the impoverished, war-weary scholar-knight, Sir Thomas North, was the one who actually penned the original "Shakespearean" masterpieces and that Shakespeare had merely adapted North's plays for the public stage. Moreover, a careful examination of the actual title pages of the dramas published while Shakespeare was alive and even up until 1620 -- combined with a study of all relevant comments from his contemporaries -- reconfirms this same fact. The true story of North and Shakespeare, unlike all other speculations over authorship, whether put forth by orthodox scholars or intelligent dissidents, is devoid of all conspiracies, hypothetical behind-the-scenes-intrigue, or outlandish and dastardly motives. What remains is one exceedingly simple explanation, confirmed repeatedly by numerous documents and multiple lines of evidence, that unknots confusion, settles the paradoxes, and, once and for all, solves the mystery of Shakespeare....McCarthy will now transform our view of Shakespeare in the same way that his past works have helped change our views on the history of life and Earth.

---

(Original post.)

Recently two books came out dealing with a similar subject–a series of plays attributed to William Shakespeare that are now seen as inauthentic for one reason or another. The books are The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, by Sabrina Feldman, and North of Shakespeare, by Dennis McCarthy. Though the authors have very different styles and take very different approaches to their subject matter, they both come up with a similar solution to the problem posed by these plays. I find their thesis fascinating and highly plausible. In this rather long post I’ll try to sketch it in, making due allowance for the complexity of the subject.

To understand this controversy, it’s necessary to know something about the publication of plays attributed to William Shakespeare prior to the 1623 appearance of the First Folio. The First Folio stands as the first complete, or nearly complete, collection, but for years prior to its publication, plays attributed to Shakespeare had appeared in quarto versions. A quarto was a cheap publication, essentially a pamphlet, corresponding roughly to a magazine or supermarket paperback book today. The First Folio was aimed at a wealthy, sophisticated readership; the book was hugely expensive, far out of reach of most people. Quartos, on the other hand, were inexpensive, disposable products that the average literate person could afford.

There were three sorts of quartos attributed to William Shakespeare prior to the First Folio:

1. So-called “good quartos.” These are versions of Shakespeare’s plays that are substantially the same as the Folio versions. There are 8 good quartos.
2. So-called “bad quartos.” These are versions of Shakespeare’s plays that are noticeably inferior to the Folio versions. They are typically shorter, lacking key scenes, and featuring compressed and degraded dialogue. There are 12 bad quartos.
3. So-called “Shakespeare apocrypha.” These are plays attributed to “William Shakespeare,” or to “W. Sh.” or “W.S.,” which have no parallels in the First Folio and are not considered to be authentically Shakespearean works. Some of these plays were published in later editions of the Folio (the Second Folio, Third Folio, etc.). Even so, they are generally dismissed from the canon today because their style, themes, and overall quality make them unacceptable as products of Shakespeare’s distinctive genius. The so-called apocrypha include such obscure works as The London Prodigal, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. There are 11 quartos in this category, more or less (the contemporary attribution of authorship to some titles is disputed).

Now, what we have here is a rather unusual situation. We have two bodies of work both attributed to the same author. One body of work–the collection of plays that constitutes the First Folio–consists of acknowledged masterpieces of English literature. The other body of work–the bad quartos and apocrypha–consists of plays that scarcely rise above the level of hackwork.

This odd situation does not pertain to other authors of the same era. We are not faced with a collection of bad quartos and apocrypha attributed to Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, or other popular playwrights. Only in Shakespeare’s case do we face the dilemma of deciding between good and bad versions of the same play, or between authentic and inauthentic contributions to the author's oeuvre.

How to account for this state of affairs? The standard response goes as follows. The bad quartos were pirated editions produced by unscrupulous actors or by thieving audience members. If it was the actors, they retained portions of the script and filled in gaps from memory. If it was an audience member, he was taking down the play in shorthand as it was performed. In either case, the printer and publisher must have known they were putting out a bootleg edition that was not authorized by the author or by whoever actually owned the playscript.

The apocryphal quartos, on the other hand, were plays written by some less successful, less popular playwright than Shakespeare. The printers and publishers of those quartos simply put Shakespeare’s name (or initials) on the title page for its commercial value. They believe that a quarto published under the name of “William Shakespeare”–or even under the initials “W.S.”–would sell better than one published under the real author’s name.

So what the conventional view amounts to is a conspiracy–or more exactly, a whole series of conspiracies–among actors who were betraying their acting companies for cash, auditors who took down the dialogue in shorthand, and unscrupulous publishers and printers who put out pirated editions of some plays and deliberately misattributed the authorship of others. And all these conspiracies continued for years, while William Shakespeare himself never objected, never fought back, never had the offending quartos removed from circulation, and while the authors whose plays had been unjustly credited to Shakespeare never voiced a peep of protest. The printers and publishers, despite their criminal practices, never suffered any penalty for these bad and apocryphal quartos. Indeed, they must have found the whole business quite profitable, while apparently Shakespeare himself, though known as a skinflint who pursued his debtors through the courts for repayment of trivial sums, was unconcerned with this substantial loss of income.

And all of these shenanigans were carried out at the expense of just one playwright, William Shakespeare, and never at the expense of any others.

Now, orthodox scholars often criticize those who are skeptical of Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays attributed to him on two grounds: first, that these anti-Stratfordian theories are nothing but conspiracy theories, which are inherently implausible; and second, that our best textual evidence is the title pages of the published works themselves, which clearly credit the works to William Shakespeare.

But note: the orthodox position is vulnerable to exactly the same two lines of attack. It too assumes a conspiracy–in fact, many separate conspiracies–whose purpose was to muddle the authorship of the works. It also assumes that the title pages of the published works are not reliable, since it rejects the prima facie evidence of the title pages of the apocryphal works.

In other words, both sides advance the idea of a conspiracy that uniquely revolved around William Shakespeare, and both sides question the accuracy of the title pages. Of course, the two sides differ in the specifics of which title pages they question and why, and what kind of conspiracy was perpetrated and by whom. But neither side can maintain its position without assuming some kind of conspiracy and some degree of inaccuracy–in fact, dishonesty–in the title pages.

Is there a way out of this conundrum? Feldman and McCarthy, arguing in separate books with different styles and emphases, say there is. At the risk of oversimplifying a complicated thesis, I’ll summarize this alternative approach below. Where possible, I’ll include quotes from contemporary (typically veiled and satirical) references to Shakespeare or from remembrances offered within the lifetime of some who knew him.

Let’s say that William Shakespeare of Stratford was talented and ambitious young man, educated only at the grammar school level, but with a natural wit, a sense of showmanship, and the ability to produce entertaining rhymes extemporaneously. (“When he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.") Finding Stratford too confining, he left town, deserting his wife and child, and toured the countryside as a maker of morality plays and a puppeteer. (“[He] can serve to make a pretty speech, for [he] was a country author, passing at a moral, for twas [he] that penned the Moral of Man’s Wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years space was absolute interpreter to the puppets.”)

After several years, he had made something of a name for himself as a smalltime impresario. The next logical step was to move to London and get involved in the theater. He did some acting, but also worked as a play broker, acquiring plays from other writers. Some of these were old plays no longer in fashion, plays originally written by an aristocrat for court performances in those days when the public theater was still in its infancy. (“At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,/ Buy the reversion of old plays …”)

These plays were long, complex, rather weighty and intellectual affairs treating of the problems of the high and mighty. Shakespeare saw commercial potential in them but knew that his unsophisticated audience would not sit still–or more accurately, stand still, since the groundlings had to stand throughout a performance–for a long, challenging production. He set to work doctoring the dramas, cutting out some of the lengthy speeches and slower scenes, simplifying the dialogue, adding elements of broad comedy and bombast–in short, popularizing these intellectually serious productions. He may have done this himself, or he may have hired writers to make the kinds of changes he required. In any event, the finished product was a commercially viable play bearing his unique stamp.

The plays were successful, and since he took a cut of the profits, he began to grow rich. Some writers were unhappy with his success, aware that he was taking credit for work that was not originally his own, and they were particularly upset by his practice of padding out some of the plays with plagiarized passages from their own works. They found him arrogant, dishonest, knavish. (“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers [i.e., a plagiarist], that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum [jack of all trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”) They mocked him as a country bumpkin who knew little Latin and pleased the unintelligent by dumbing down the intellectually demanding plays he had obtained. (“Few of the university pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down …”)

But Shakespeare didn’t care. He had found a way to succeed in the big city, to become a major name in the burgeoning theater industry. When printers asked for permission to publish his works, he agreed–and naturally they put his name on the title page. There was no conspiracy; though the plays were originally written by someone else, they had been revised and “improved” by Shakespeare himself or by hired hands acting in his stead, and as far as he or anyone else was concerned, they were his work. And of course he never objected to the publication of these quartos; quite the opposite–he agreed to it and profited from it, just as he profited from nearly everything he did.

Eventually he retired in Stratford, a wealthy man famed for his business acumen, his bravado, and his country wit. Some years after his death, those who knew the truth of the matter and who wanted to preserve the best of the plays in their original form–the plays as untouched by Shakespeare–set about compiling the First Folio. They obtained, wherever possible, the actual manuscripts Shakespeare had purchased, and even advertised this fact on the title page of the Folio itself (“Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published according to the True Original Copies”) and in the front matter (“The Works of William Shakespeare, containing all his Comedies, Histories, and Truly set forth, according to their first Original”). Naturally, they discarded the apocryphal plays, which they knew had been written by others and had no connection to the masterpieces they were seeking to preserve. If they could not find the manuscript of a particular play in its original undoctored form but wished to preserve it anyway, they had no choice but to preserve the adulterated version, as was probably the case with Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and others. They continued to attribute the plays to William Shakespeare in order to protect the privacy of the original aristocratic author, and perhaps for complicated political reasons. They did put in some clues to the actual authorship of the works, but they could not be too open about it.

If something like this were the case, it would rather neatly answer a number of questions. It would explain how and why the bad and apocryphal quartos came to be published, and why no one ever complained about their publication. It would explain why Shakespeare’s contemporaries ridiculed him as a hack, a plagiarist, and a yokel of limited education and talent, when quite plainly none of these things was true of the original author. It would explain how William Shakespeare became, in effect, the front man for an aristocrat who either would not or could not publish under his real name. It would validate the title pages of all the quartos–good, bad, and apocryphal–and relieve us of the need to hypothesize a complicated series of conspiracies among the printers. The only remaining conspiracy theory would involve the original author’s need to maintain his secrecy, and the desire of his friends to keep his secret after he was dead.

I am not saying that the above description accurately summarizes either Feldman’s or McCarthy’s viewpoint. Each writer has her or his particular take on the details. McCarthy, for instance, does not seem to think that there was any conspiracy involved even in the publication of the First Folio, though I am at a loss to understand his thinking here. But I’m not trying to get bogged down in details. What’s fascinating to me is the possibility of a new way of looking at William Shakespeare’s London career–an approach that gives him credit as a successful actor, play broker, stage producer, and adapter of difficult material–a man of natural wit, high ambition, and a certain ruthless willingness to use other people for his own ends. All of this is quite in keeping with the portrait of Shakespeare that emerges from those who knew him, remembered him, and satirized him.

It also leaves room for the mysterious figure behind the scenes–the genuine author of the Shakespearean canon, whose works were written to be enjoyed as court entertainments or as poetry, and which have come down to us very often in an altered, simplified, popularized form.

For those who are interested, I recommend both The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, by Sabrina Feldman, and North of Shakespeare, by Dennis McCarthy, for more information on this intriguing new hypothesis. Feldman’s approach is more cautious and scholarly; she takes far more time to amass her evidence before drawing any conclusions; and she does not insist that her conclusions are correct. McCarthy’s book is a quicker read, setting out its conclusions more starkly, and a good deal of it is devoted to his claim that the aristocratic author behind the works was actually Thomas North, the famed translator of Plutarch’s Lives. For the moment, I’m more interested in nailing down the career of the Stratford man than in considering yet another claimant to the authorship crown.

If you’re going to read just one of these two books, I would read The Apocryphal William Shakespeare. But both books are very much worthwhile. Even if you have no interest in the authorship controversy, you may well find them provocative. At the very least, you’ll learn a lot about Elizabethan theatrical and printing practices, and about the thorny questions that still bedevil admirers of the Bard.

I’ll give the last word to Ben Jonson, whose poem “On Poet Ape” is often taken to be a shot at William Shakespeare. Does his scathing critique sound applicable to the original author of Hamlet and King Lear, or to someone who appropriated and adulterated those works?

On Poet Ape

Ben Jonson, 1616

Poor Poet Ape*, that would be thought our chief,**
Whose works are e’en the frippery*** of wit,
From Brokage**** is become so bold a thief
As we, the robbed, leave rage and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays,***** now grown
To a little wealth, and credit on the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own,+
And told of this, he slights it.++ Tut, such crimes
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;+++
He marks not whose ‘twas first, and aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.++++

*Poet Ape = poet imitator, also poet-actor (ape = actor)

**That would be thought our chief = that would be regarded as the best poet of the age

***Frippery = used apparel; recycled garments

****Brokage = play brokering

*****Buy the reversion of old plays = purchase the rights to old plays

+Makes each man’s wit his own = takes credit for others’ work

++Told of this, he slights it = doesn’t care that he’s stealing credit

+++The sluggish, gaping auditor devours = the casual playgoer doesn’t notice

++++Shreds from the whole piece = mere fragments retained in popular editions vs. the original, uncut masterworks

Three silly arguments

Regular readers know I'm of the opinion that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. This position is, to put it mildly, controversial, and among the academic community it has not found many takers. Some of the arguments put forth by Shakespearean scholars are quite complicated and interesting; these arguments involve such things as the dating of the plays, factual errors in the plays that suggest the author was not too well-educated or worldly wise, and the testimony of the First Folio linking the plays to William Shakespeare of Stratford.

I think there are effective counter-arguments to all these positions. For instance, in my opinion, the dating of the plays, if done properly, argues very strongly in favor of dates of composition that would be too early for the Stratford man;  the so-called errors of fact, particularly pertaining to geography, turn out not to be errors at all on closer inspection (see The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by the late Richard Paul Roe); and the the testimony of the First Folio is far more ambiguous and problematic than it might appear (see Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography, by Diana Price). A very long–in fact, endless–argument can ensue in fleshing out any of these points.

But there are some other arguments made by the academics that aren't complex or interesting at all. They're just silly. Threw of the most common are examined below.

1. “The idea that Oxford wrote the plays of the works of Shakespeare originated with a fellow named J. Thomas Looney. His name was Looney; therefore his ideas are obviously loony.”

Actually, this position doesn't even rise to the level of an argument, not even a fallacious argument. It's just childish name-calling. Are we supposed to think that if the Oxfordian argument had originated with someone named J. Thomas Wise or J. Thomas Brilliant, the academics would regard the argument as wise or brilliant? It should be obvious that the man's name, even if it strikes us as funny, has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of his ideas.

For what it's worth, the name Looney is actually pronounced LOH-nee, and is a name of some distinction on the Isle of Man.

2. “Those who doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays and poems that bear his name are simply snobs.”

Here, at least, we do have an argument that rises to the level of a formal fallacy. The fallacy in question is the ad hominem–which means disputing the value of someone's ideas by pointing to some personal defect he allegedly possesses. In this case, the defect is snobbishness; we are supposed to believe that the anti-Stratfordian position is rooted in elitism and high-handedness. But even if this were true, it would not say anything about the facts and arguments made by anti-Stratfordians. It speaks only to their personal motives, which are irrelevant.

The clue that we're dealing with a fallacy here is that the position is buttressed with emotional language–that is to say, rhetoric. (The appeal to emotion by means of rhetoric is itself a logical fallacy.) The academics typically go on to say that those who are interested in the authorship question don't believe in egalitarianism or understand the genius of democracy. They don't realize that greatness can crop up anywhere, in any social class, in any conditions, at any time, in any place. They are out of step with modern, democratic society; they represent a backward-looking, retrogressive, rearguard action. Etc.

All of this, as you can see, is just a lot of handwaving meant to inspire an emotional response. It's a collection of populist platitudes, akin to a campaign speech. And it's all irrelevant. As far as I know, nobody who questions the authorship of Shakespeare's works has ever said that genius is confined to the upper classes. It's obvious that a very large number of artistic, musical, and literary geniuses have originated in the middle-class, at least in relatively modern times. (If you go back far enough in history, there's not much of a middle class to speak of.) No one doubts that as the middle class has become proportionately larger, and has grown progressively more affluent and educated, the number of creative geniuses produced by that class has risen.

The question, however, is whether the works of Shakespeare are the sort of literary products one would expect from a member of the middle class. This is a very different issue from the strawman position that a middle-class writer cannot possibly be a genius.

Suppose that the works of Tolstoy had been published anonymously, and we were left to figure out who authored them. We would certainly look first at the Russian aristocracy of the period, because it is obvious that the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina was intimately familiar with the lives of aristocrats, viewed social issues from the standpoint of a (reform-minded) aristocrat, and chose aristocrats as the leading characters in his major works. Conversely, if the works of Charles Dickens had been published anonymously, no one would think to look for the author among the British aristocracy, as it would be obvious that the author was intimately familiar with the conditions of the poor, that he had almost certainly suffered severe hardship himself, that he was sympathetic to the struggling underclass and the upwardly mobile middle class, and that he was unsympathetic to the very wealthy and the privileged elites.

If we look at the works attributed to Shakespeare, we find (I think) both the point of view and the constellation of interests typical of an aristocrat of his day -- and not a very forward-looking aristocrat, at that. Even by the standards of his time, Shakespeare was feudalistic in his thinking, placing immense emphasis on the importance of “blood” or pedigree, and insisting that everybody should know his place or his station in life (see Ulysses' famous speech about “degree” in Troilus and Cressida).

Shakespeare knew a great deal about the sport of hawking or falconry, which was practiced exclusively by nobles, and the music and dance in his plays were the types found at court, not in public taverns. The main characters in nearly all of his works are members of the aristocracy or royalty. His sympathy lies with courtiers and princes. His view of the common man varies between condescending amusement and dread; commoners, when viewed singly or in small groups, are a source of humor, with their malapropisms and uncultured ways, but if they gather together into a large crowd, they can threaten to become a mob and destabilize the social order. Shakespeare shows no sympathy for social uprisings such as Jack Cade's rebellion, which he mercilessly satirizes in Henry VI, Part Two, reducing the historical Cade's justifiable grievances to such idiocies as a making it a felony to drink small beer.

We also find that Shakespeare appears to have traveled extensively throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, at a time when foreign travel was largely limited to wealthy aristocrats (and some traveling merchants, but there is no indication that the man from Stratford ever engaged in foreign trade or travel). Shakespeare seems to been fluent in several languages, including Latin, Greek, Italian,  French, and possibly Spanish, which would not be unusual for a leading nobleman of Queen Elizabeth's court but would be almost unheard of for a commoner, especially one with no university training. Shakespeare was clearly educated in the law, as aristocrats routinely were (they were expected to attend the Inns of Court so they could administer their states), while there is no indication the man from Stratford ever studied law. And so forth.

In other words, the belief that the Shakespearean works were written by a nobleman is not grounded in some obstinate snobbery but in a close and sensitive reading of the works themselves. Love's Labour's Lost alone should be enough to establish that the author was a courtier. The play, which is incomprehensible to modern readers without extensive annotations, consists of topical allusions and in-jokes about the goings-on in Queen Elizabeth's court circa the early 1580s. Not only is this date too early to plausibly ascribe the play to the Stratford man (born in 1564), but how could the son of a glove-maker who grew up in a provincial town three days' ride from London in an age without newspapers or other mass media possibly know any of these private jokes about the foreign ambassadors and their quirky personalities? It should be obvious that the play was written by a gifted courtier for the amusement of Queen Elizabeth and her entourage.

If snobbishness is the root of skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare's works, it's hard to understand how such figures as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Charles Chaplin have all entertained deep suspicions on this score. I don't think any of them is generally regarded as an anti-democratic elitist. Whitman, in particular, was distressed at the prospect that the great plays had been written by “one of the wolfish earls” of British history; as a vigorous champion of egalitarianism and democracy, he was dismayed to think that the world's greatest writer could have been his intellectual and social opposite, but his close study of the works led him to that strong suspicion.

3. Finally we have the oddest of these three silly arguments: “Those who suggest that the man from Stratford didn't write Shakespeare's works are simply jealous of Shakespeare and are trying to demean him, belittle him, and undermine his reputation.”

This again is a logical fallacy, though it may not be quite as obvious as the last one. The fallacy  is begging the question–that is, beginning  by assuming the point at issue. In this case, the open question is whether or not the author William Shakespeare is the man from Stratford. The academics who make this particular argument are saying, “We already know that the author William Shakespeare is the man from Stratford. Therefore any attempt to deprive the man from Stratford of credit for his works is an attack on the author.”

The conclusion does follow from the premise, but the problem is that the premise is question-begging. The anti-Stratfordian argument would go this way: “We believe that the author William Shakespeare is not the man from Stratford. Therefore our attempt to deprive the man from Stratford of credit for Shakespeare's works is an attempt to right a long-standing injustice by giving proper credit to the actual author.”

There's no doubt that many anti-Stratfordians do belittle and demean William Shakespeare of Stratford, and I would say this is one of the less attractive aspects of the movement. There's really no reason to put down the Stratford man, who appears to been a very successful moneylender, grain dealer, and theatrical impresario, and who was able to raise himself up to a position of some prominence in his hometown, eventually purchasing the second most expensive house in Stratford. He must have been a real go-getter, an aggressively upwardly mobile individual who pursued various avenues to wealth and eventually gained the title of a gentleman by purchasing a coat of arms for his family. I don't think he was the author of Hamlet, or any sort of author of all, but that's no reason to characterize him as a sneaking lowlife, as some anti-Stratfordians unfortunately do.

That said, from the anti-Stratfordian position, any discussion of the personality, character, or talents of the Stratford man is quite irrelevant to a discussion of the author William Shakespeare, because the author was someone entirely different.

Moreover, those who are skeptical of Shakespearean authorship often seem to hold the author William Shakespeare in higher regard than the academics do. The academics, because they have to fit Shakespeare's works into the timeline of the Stratford man's life, are led to believe that Shakespeare was an incorrigible plagiarist, borrowing turns of phrase, characters, and even whole plots and genres from authors who'd come before. The Oxfordians, by contrast, fit the works into the timeline of Oxford's life, which allows them to be dated much earlier and to be viewed as original–indeed, highly innovative–creations. The academics believe that Shakespeare was careless and sloppy when it came to details of foreign geography and customs, while the Oxfordians have gone to some lengths to show how accurate Shakespeare really was on such details. The academics say Shakespeare was writing only for money, grinding out potboilers as fast as he could with an eye to the box office returns, and trying to appeal to the unsophisticated tastes of the general public; Oxfordians, by contrast, believe the author wrote from the heart, dramatizing complex emotional and personal issues from his own life, and attempting to sway the Queen's position on a number of controversial topics, and that he was unconcerned with money or popularity.

Academics, of necessity, are inclined to say that Shakespeare, as a man, was a bit of a cipher, a nonentity, a Walter Mitty type who lived almost entirely within his own head and made so little impact on the people around him that no one recognized his genius or lamented his passing until years later. Oxfordians, on the other hand, see the author as a vibrant, larger-than-life figure who was closely involved in the major political and social upheavals of his day and lived a life of drama, color, action, and emotional intensity; moreover, they hold that his genius was certainly recognized by educated people of his day, but that few comments were made about it in print because he was writing politically sensitive material and was using a rather transparent pseudonym.

Now, which portrait of Shakespeare the artist is really more flattering to him? The conventional view sees him as a not-very-well educated hack writer who stole prolifically from inferior playwrights and poets, made up key details because he couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight, pandered to his audience for money, and made little or no impression on his colleagues or on educated readers and playgoers of his day. The Oxfordian view sees him as a highly educated and strikingly original writer who wrote from deeply felt personal experience, a world traveler who remembered and accurately reproduced even the smallest details of his wanderings, a political activist who tried to influence the great events of his day by speaking directly to his queen, and an influential genius who was heavily imitated by inferior writers but rarely acknowledged because of the cloak of secrecy that surrounded his persona.

I think the second view is the one that honors Shakespeare, while the first is the one that actually demeans and belittles him–that is, demeans and belittles the author of the Shakespearean canon by making him out to be much less than he was.

As I said at the beginning, there are other arguments made by Stratfordian academics that deserve to be taken seriously and considered in depth. By no means am I trying to suggest that all of their argumentation consists of fallacies, name-calling, or childish psychologizing.

These particular arguments, however, which show up over and over again in both popular and scholarly treatments of the controversy, really don't do credit to the academic community. They're not true arguments at all, but merely cheap debating tactics intended to cloud the issue and engender a knee-jerk emotional response. I hope to see less of them in the future. 

"Shakespeare" By Another Name

Back in 2005, I ran a post on Mark Anderson's book "Shakespeare" By Another Name, which impressed me greatly. Now the book has been released in a new, updated edition, in both print and ebook form.

The book's homepage is here. Also check out Mark's excellent blog. 

Since I'm too lazy to write anything new, I'm reposting my '05 piece below. Think of it as recycling. It's good for the environment, you know.

The only thing I would change about the post if I were writing it today is that I'm no longer so sure the case for Oxford will carry the day. I think I underestimated the enormous resistance from academe and from the general public, who are much enamored of the Stratford lad's "poor boy makes good" story. The strangely hostile response to the recent movie Anonymous (which I admit I haven't seen yet) seems to bear this out. People react as if questioning the plays' authorship is tantamount to an assault on democracy itself. The Stratford man is such an iconic figure that he is almost sacred in people's minds -- a symbol of the hidden genius of Everyman. I'm not sure any scholarly analysis can defeat such a deeply held and passionately felt conviction. 

Still, whether or not the Oxfordian thesis is ever generally accepted, I've found that it's increased my appreciation of Shakespeare's works and gives me a sense of personal connection with the author that I never had before. And that's good enough for me. 

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For a couple of years now, I've doubted the official story of William Shakespeare - the not-very-well-educated farmboy, William of Stratford (hereafter simply William), who migrated from the provinces to the big city and promptly established himself as the most eloquent writer of his age, and indeed of any age. Over the past century or more, a number of arguments have been advanced to suggest that this story, however endearing it may be, is simply not very probable. In particular, it is argued:

- that Shakespeare has a detailed personal knowledge of locations throughout the continent of Europe, but there is no evidence that William ever left England.

- that Shakespeare derived some of his material from sources that were available only in Italian, French, Spanish, or Greek, but there is no evidence that William knew how to read any of these languages.

- that Shakespeare is intimately acquainted with aristocratic pursuits, such as falconry, which were off-limits to commoners like William.

- that Shakespeare sympathizes with the aristocracy, makes in-joke references to the Elizabethan court, and seems to have personally experienced the life of a courtier, all of which is inexplicable if William wrote the plays.

- that Shakespeare had access to a considerable (and vastly expensive) library, which William probably did not.

- that Shakespeare has firsthand knowledge of traveling by sea, but there is no evidence that William ever set foot on a sailing vessel.

- that Shakespeare has firsthand knowledge of combat, but there is no evidence that William ever served in the military.

- that Shakespeare knows the ins and outs of the law and sprinkles legal terms throughout his writings, but there is no evidence that William was ever trained in the law.

- that Shakespeare views commoners, individually, as clowns and oafs, and, collectively, as dangerous mobs, a view that would come naturally to an aristocrat but not to a provincial farmboy like William.

- that Shakespeare weaves subtle political overtones into this plays and poetry that would probably have gotten William thrown in jail, as the commoner Ben Jonson was jailed for his "seditious" play The Isle of Dogs.

- that Shakespeare identifies himself in his sonnets as old, lame, and publicly disgraced, a description that does not fit William, a prosperous young man on the rise.

- that Shakespeare offers advice and, sometimes, warnings to the aristocratic recipient of the sonnets, something that a commoner like William would not have dared to do.

There are other arguments, but these give you the flavor of the case. But if William was not the "real" Shakespeare, then who was?

The favorite candidate today is Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford. I've read several books arguing the "Oxfordian" position. Online I found the complete text of "Shakespeare" Identified, by the first person to nominate de Vere for the role, J. Thomas Looney. (I pause for the inevitable chuckle at his funny name.) From there I proceeded to the more recent and more comprehensive book The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn, and Ogburn's much briefer introductory book on the subject, The Man Who Was Shakespeare. Along the way I encountered Joseph Sobran's Alias Shakespeare and several other interesting books, not to mention a wide variety of Web sites. (For a bibliography, see my online essay "Shakespeare vs. Shakespeare.")

Over time I became more and more persuaded that the "Stratfordian" case was weak and that William was probably a front man for some aristocrat reluctant to publish his works under his real name because of the considerable social stigma attached to writing for the common stage - and perhaps for other reasons. Still, I was not sure de Vere was the man.

I am now.

What changed my mind? A new biography of de Vere by Mark Anderson, titled "Shakespeare" By Another Name. Anderson, relying on a huge number of sources, fleshes out the earl of Oxford's life in more detail than I have previously seen - and draws explicit parallels between Oxford's life and times and the characters and plot lines of Shakespeare's works. The resulting portrait is so clear and compelling that I can only say that if Edward de Vere was not Shakespeare, he surely should have been.

Again and again Anderson shows how otherwise obscure passages from Shakespeare's plays can be understood as topical allusions to palace intrigues and matters of state that took place long before William of Stratford had ever appeared in London.

A single example must suffice. It involves Anderson's hypothesis that an early draft of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was the same play described by an antiquarian (who once had the manuscript in his possession) as "a pleasant conceit of Vere, earl of Oxford ... circa 1580." In 1580 William of Stratford was only 16 years old. Could Twelfth Night have been written so early - not by William, but by Edward de Vere? Here, much abbreviated, is Anderson's argument:

De Vere and [the courtier Christopher] Hatton were notorious rivals circa 1580, and Twelfth Night mocks Hatton relentlessly: Twelfth Night's self-infatuated clod Malvolio is a barely concealed caricature of [Hatton] ... Malvolio happens upon a prank letter designed to make him look like an ass in front of the entire household. The letter is signed "The Fortunate Unhappy" - an English reversal of the Latin pen name (Felix Infortunatus; "the happy unfortunate") that Hatton used ...

The Jesuit priest Edmund Campion ... had spent much of the 1570s preaching his message abroad, primarily in Prague ... He was arrested in 1581 and tortured. His treason trial was a farce ... Campion was given all of two hours to work on his courtroom defense. He was even denied use of pen, ink, or paper to compose his thoughts ...

In perhaps the most enigmatic scene in Twelfth Night (Act 4, Scene 2), Malvolio is thrown into a mock prison and denied pen, ink, and paper. The fool Feste cross-examines Malvolio with his characteristically witty doublespeak, tossing off an aside about a "hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink."...

[Finally] Twelfth Night captures the mood of a brief moment on the international stage between 1578 and '80 ... when King Sebastian of Portugal turned up missing in action [and presumed drowned] ...

King Sebastian of Portugal had left no heir or clear line of succession, and to make matters worse, no one was even certain that Sebastian had died in 1578. On January 31, 1580, King Philip of Spain prevailed [in the struggle for control of Portugal]. The Portuguese kingdom and military were now to be under Spain's command ...

Yet, if Sebastian washed ashore someday, he could rightfully seize the crown back from Spain and cripple the Spanish menace. Rumors persisted ... that Sebastian was still alive and preparing to make his triumphant return. Many in Elizabeth's courts had also championed the cause of Antonio, a pretender to the Portuguese throne ...

The story of Twelfth Night is in part the story of two friends, Antonio and Sebastian, who are reunited when the latter washes ashore and into the action of drama. Sebastian is widely believed to have perished at sea ...

These clear parallels illuminate the action of the play and set it in a recognizable historical context. They clarify what is otherwise obscure - such as Malvolio's bizarre imprisonment.

One set of parallels is hardly conclusive, but Anderson offers similar treatments of most of Shakespeare's works, showing again and again how the political battles, social controversies, and marital discord of de Vere's own life are reflected in the plots and characters of Hamlet, As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Othello, King Lear, and the rest.

Brick by brick, over the course of 380 pages, not to mention 30 pages of appendices and 145 pages of endnotes, Anderson builds an overwhelming circumstantial case for the Oxfordian position. As he admits, there is no smoking gun, no single piece of evidence that provides absolute proof - but the sum total of the evidence he submits ought to be dispositive to any open-minded reader.

I don't expect the walls of academe to come tumbling down just because Mark Anderson has blown his trumpet. The Stratfordians, stubborn defenders of orthodoxy, will resist the inescapable conclusions prompted by this book, just as they have resisted, dismissed, and laughed off the arguments of Looney, Ogburn, and others. But I now think that theirs is a rearguard action and a losing cause. The case has been made, and eventually it will carry the day.

Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. And sooner or later, everyone will know it.

 

The de Vere code

File this under the category of "fun stuff." I don't know if it has any significance, but it's kind of neat.

As regular readers know, I think it's likely that the works of Shakespeare were written by the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. There are many reasons to suspect that "the Stratford man" lacked the education, life experience, and courtly sophistication to pen these works. Frankly, I would think that Love's Labour's Lost alone would cast almost fatal doubt on the Stratfordian thesis, since the play is obviously a satire written by a court insider for the amusement of an aristocratic audience. Just about the only Stratfordian explanation for it would be that Will, newly arrived from a provincial farming town, promptly fell in with aristocratic patrons who regaled him with gossip and news so he could write from an insider's perspective. It's not impossible, but it strikes me as most unlikely.

People who suspect that the works were written by someone other than Will have always been prone to look for coded messages in the text. The most notorious example is Delia Bacon, who tried to prove that the real author was Francis Bacon (no relation) by discovering countless hidden communications. Sadly, most of these supposed messages proved as elusive as the canals of Mars when other people looked for them. Delia's case was not strengthened when she suffered a mental breakdown later in life, allowing her critics to say (rather unfairly) that she had been crazy all along. 

Today, most people avoid the whole subject of codes and cyphers in Shakespeare, probably fearful of following in Delia's footsteps all the way to the sanitarium. But occasionally a valiant attempt is still made, and often it involves the introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets, which - because of its peculiar layout and enigmatic language - looks an awful lot like it ought to be a cryptogram of some kind. 

As you can see, the whole thing is rather odd. It consists of three triangular blocks of text, of 6, 2, and 4 lines. Periods separate words. The sentence structure is confused; it's unclear whether the "adventurer ... setting forth" is "Mr. W.H.," setting forth on some private adventure, or the reader, setting forth on the adventure of reading the book. The term "only begetter" is unusual, and may mean the person who wrote the sonnets, or who inspired them, or who obtained a copy for publication.

Since the Sonnets themselves are famously recondite, suggesting a deeper story hidden between the lines, it is only natural to think that this introductory page is similarly multi-layered. The Elizabethans were addicted to codes and word games, and often used them to convey messages that could not pass muster with the censors; Elizabethan England was, after all, a police state with a network of spies and informers, a secret tribunal (the Star Chamber), an official torturer (Topcliffe), and a paranoid monarch whose closest confidant was the nation's top spymaster (Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley). It was also a country facing a succession crisis and leaning perilously toward civil war. Under the circumstances it would have been astonishing if the educated public had not found ways of sending or publishing concealed messages.

But is there a message hidden here? Many attempts at finding one have been made, and most are not very convincing. One of them, however, strikes me as simple and elegant enough to possibly - just possibly - have some merit.

I read about it in the Summer 2006 edition of Shakespeare Matters, the journal of the Shakespeare Fellowship, which is online in PDF form here. The article is "Some Principles of Sonnet Dedication Solutions," by David Moffat, and it starts on page 18. After examining some unsatisfactory solutions to the supposed crypotogram, Moffat tentatively offers his own. 

He notes, as have many others, that the periods between words serve as "delimiters," telling us what counts as a full word and what doesn't. Thus, "Mr. W. H." counts as three words, or three delimited items. The hyphens, as in "ever-living," are printed to resemble periods and serve the same purpose.

Now if we count the lines, we note that they come in clusters of 6, 2, and 4. One simple system of cryptography uses the layout to provide the key to the code. In this case, the key provided by the clusters and the periods might be that we are intended to read every sixth word of the first cluster, every second word of the second cluster, and every fourth word of the third cluster.  

If we do this, Moffat observes, we obtain the following:

These all by ever poet adventurer. 

Not very impressive, you say? But wait. Three details require mentioning. 

First, the name of Edward de Vere could be represented as E. Vere, or sometimes E. Ver (Ver being the older form of the family name), and, in poetry, "Ever." The word ever is also an anagram of Vere. 

Second, de Vere was certainly an adventurer. He traveled widely throughout Europe, met with many of the outstanding intellectual and political figures of his day, excelled at jousting, served his country in wartime, and was one of the most colorful figures at Elizabeth's court. He was also a highly regarded poet in his own right.

Finally, the name Edward de Vere consists of three blocks of letters: 6, 2, and 4. This may be a coincidence, but it's an interesting one. 

With only a few changes in punctuation, then, the message - if there is one - can read:

These all by E. Ver, poet, adventurer. 

Proof of anything? Not really. Even Moffat doesn't say so. 

But it does make you think ...

Merry Christmas!