The
Making of a Confirmed Shakespearean
"A Desperate Contrivance": Shakespeare in a Chamber Account
Divide and Confuse: Shakespeare in Augustine Phillips' will
The Longest Ellipsis: "Frontline" and The Shakespeare Mystery
From Whole Cloth: A Moth in a Wardrobe Account
Upon the publication of Shakespeare, In Fact
Muddling A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Monumental Fraud? The Stratford Bust – One More time
"Shake-hyphen-speare": One More Time – Again
I have wondered how different things might have been if, say, I took refuge from a blizzard in an empty cabin high in the Rockies and the only reading matter was the labels on food containers and Charlton Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, the textbook for the authorship of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare by Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As the storm raged on for days, I worked my way through the con- tainers (and their contents) until all that remained was that book and began reading. Might I too have succumbed to its cajoling prose, its array of facts that suggested thorough, authoritative scholarship, its well-woven tapestry of “circumstantial evidence,” its insinuating, persuasive conclusions?
I will never know. My introduction to The Mysterious William Shakespeare was quite different. In February 1989 I got an invitation from the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable in Los Angeles to address their members on the authorship controversy. I was specifically asked, as an independent scholar unbeholden to “professional Shakespeareans” and without an academic standing to protect, to investigate the scholarship that convinced many in its membership that Will of Stratford was not the author and persuaded most of that many that the Earl of Oxford was. When I accepted it was suggested I begin my investigations with Ogburn’s book.
The
“Desperate Contrivance”: Shakespeare in a Chamber Account
To get a sample of what was in store for me I decided to begin with references to the Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s first published works, the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, in which he is identified as the author in the dedications of each. But glancing in the index my eye was drawn to “Southampton, Mary Browne, Countess of, 65-66.” I turned to page 65, where I found the subject was a document very familiar to me, an account with the payment of £20 by the Treasurer of the Chamber of Queen Elizabeth’s household for the performance of two play at court during the Christmas festivities in 1594. In modernized form, it reads:
To William Kempe, William Shakespeare & Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, upon the council’s warrant dated 15th March 1595, for two several comedies or interludes shown by them before her Majesty in Christmas time last past, viz, upon St. Stephens Day [December 26] & Innocents Day [December 28].
So this was it! My introduction to the sleuthing of “the greatest detective story there ever was,” my baptism by fire – an entry among dozens just like it, worded in choice Elizabethan bureaucratese? What could be wrong with that?
“William Shakespeare,” that's what. What’s he doing here? That is, what’s a then obscure actor, an “upstart crow” of a playwright, doing in the company of Kemp, the most famous comedian, and Burbage, the greatest actor of the Elizabethan stage, to begin with? And why is this the only time that Shakespeare is listed among the payees for a court performance? More important, in unspecified “contemporary documents” (says Ogburn), the Lord Admiral’s Men are known to have performed at court on Innocent’s Day.
What makes a court performance still more improbable is that, on very same day, these same “servants to the Lord Chamberlain” are recorded as having performed The Comedy of Errors for the Christmas revels of the society of lawyers of Gray’s Inn.
Evidently something suspicious is afoot. Aha! A clue! The Treasurer of the Chamber at this time was Sir Thomas Heneage, who died in October 1595, leaving three years of unaudited accounts and the reckoning for the money in the Chamber treasury. The responsibility for this fell to his widow, who happens to have been the dowager Countess of Southampton, the mother of the very earl to whom Shakespeare’s poems had been dedicated. Fourteen months later, the story goes, the queen sent the bereaved lady a letter demanding payment of more than £528 in treasury funds. What was the poor woman to do?
Ogburn tells us. With unaudited accounts and an apparent discrepancy in treasury funds, the countess invented payments in the Chamber Accounts, among which was the one to the Chamberlain’s Men. In order to make what Ogburn terms her “desperate contrivance” look on the up and up, she put in “William Shakespeare” as one of the payees. Not only was he known to her from his dedications of his poems to her son, she was also privy to the knowledge that he was “the directing hand in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, the chosen agency by which Shakespeare’s plays were introduced to the company.” In other words, she also knew that “Shakespeare” was the semi-secret identity of Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford.
So plain a document, so many doubts, so plausible a tale. Can it be that there isn’t something wrong here?
Let’s begin with the company Shakespeare kept in this account, Kemp and Burbage. Kemp, it is true, was an already popular comedian famed for his jigs; but Burbage was previously an undistinguished actor who rose to greatness as the interpreter of Shakespeare’s greatest roles. As for Shakespeare himself, in joining this ensemble formed only several months earlier, he became the first resident playwright of an acting company, and it is a good bet that the comedies performed at court were his. Clearly he belonged in this company. Furthermore, while it is true that this is the only time Shakespeare was a payee, it is also the only time Kemp and Burbage were payees (a routine task that was usually performed subsequently by their fellow player John Heminges for the next 35 years). It may be the unique deputation that presented itself to receive the payment for their troupe’s first court performance might have been in the way of a celebration; the formal arrival of what was to become the greatest acting ensemble of its age, and possibly any other.
What about the “contemporary documents” that put the Admiral’s Men as the troupe that performed at court on Innocents’ Day? Actually, the “contemporary documents” prove to be only one document, this very same Chamber Account. A survey of these accounts reveals that two entertainments or more at court on a single date were not at all unusual. As a matter of fact, on “Twelfth Day at night” (January 6) 1601, four companies appeared at court (the Chamberlain’s, Lord Admiral’s, the Earl of Derby’s and the Children of the Chapel Royal).
More vexing is whether the Chamberlain’s Men could have played at court and at Gray’s Inn on the same day. Or so it would seem.
Notice that the 1601 account specifies that on Twelfth Day they played “at night,” whereas the 1595 account states the play performed by the Chamberlain’s company was on “Innocent’s Day” only, indicating it was performed during daylight hours. Day and night performances are so defined throughout the Chamber Accounts.
The court in 1594 was at Greenwich Palace, only several miles down the Thames from the River Fleet, which in turn passed some yards from Gray’s Inn. An entertaining account of the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn that year was preserved in the Gesta Grayorum, and in it we learn that the festivities did not begin until nine o’clock “at night,” which started with speeches, followed by “dancing and reveling with gentlewomen,” and after “such sports,” at last “a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players.” In the short days of an English December, the actors would have had plenty of time to get from a daytime performance at Greenwich to make their booking at Gray’s Inn late into the night.
This leaves the question of the authenticity of this Chamber Account itself. I contacted the holder of the relevant documents, the Public Record Office in London, and had the generous assistance of David Thomas. It turns out that Ogburn’s source regarding the letter from Queen Elizabeth to the countess cited a transcript in the Calendar of States Papers Domestic, which incorrectly assigned it to “39 Elizabeth” (the 39th year of her reign, 1596). The queen’s warrant itself is dated “16 December 38 Elizabeth” 1595, and the account noted receipt of the £528 on the very next day. There was, then, no money owing when the countess submitted the Chamber Accounts, which were formally audited between January and March 1597.
Which leaves the question this whole tale hangs on: was there ever a discrepancy, a sum of money unaccounted for? The queen’s communication to the countess states that she had made two previous payments totaling some £796, and “We require immediate payment of the balance of £528. 18 [shillings] 6 [pence] to the treasury of the Chamber.” No hint of a problem of bookkeeping, no suggestion of unaccounted for funds. Simply, in the quaint ways of Elizabethan England, her late husband’s duties as Treasurer of the Chamber expired upon his death. An interim treasurer (William Killigrew) had been appointed days earlier; his first account was made on the same day as the queen’s warrant.
As Ogburn addeth, so does he taketh away; which he did in his version of the entry in the Chamber Account. He left out a clause in it that bears significantly on his assertion that it was a “desperate contrivance” by Countess Southampton, which is that the payment to the actors was made “upon the Council’s warrant dated at Whitehall 15th March 1595.” The “council” happens to be the Privy Council, and it was this body that authorized the payment to the actors in the first place. As the lengthy period of the audit suggests, the Chamber Account entries were scrutinized thoroughly; for these accounts were formal Exchequer documents to assure the collection of revenues and to prevent fraud. This one, like the rest of its time, was signed by Lord Treasurer William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Fortescue. A fraudulent claim that a payment was made upon a Council warrant is not a thing even a desperate countess would contrive, in fear of winding up in even more desperate straits.
Divide and Confuse: Shakespeare in Augustine
Phillips’ will
My thoughts then turned to another document: the will of Augustine Phillips, dated May 4, 1605. How would Ogburn explain a bequest to William Shakespeare in document that was made more than ten months after Oxford died?
The first thing he would do is identify Phillips as “of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” nothing more. He was probably one of the charter members of this company when it was formed in 1594, and served in it as a player and shareholder. He was perhaps the man who played roles requiring “gravitas,” for he was chosen to speak for the troupe regarding the command performance of Richard II on February 7, 1601, that was the prologue to the Earl of Essex’s rebellion the next day. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were brought under the patronage of King James on May 19, 1603, Phillips is named on the patent; he was still in the troupe in March 1604, where his name is second to Shakespeare’s in the grant of scarlet red cloth to the players for the long-postponed festivities celebrating the coronation of the king. In other words, he was one of the King’s Men as well the Chamberlain’s, and it seems a sure bet he knew who Shakespeare was, and that he was alive and well, when he drew up his will.
We now discover that Ogburn is confused by Shakespeare’s role in the will itself. On page 31, with the usual squall of ellipses, his excerpt reads, Phillips “bequeathed ‘unto and among the hired men of the Company of which I am of … the sum of five pounds … to be equally distributed amongst them.’ First of those to be named was ‘my fellow William Shakespeare.’” This suggests that Shakespeare was only one of the hired men, the occasional actors who were neither on the king’s patent nor shareholders in the company, and was to get an equal cut of five pounds when it was divvied up.
Ogburn again ponders the will on page 111, where he says Phillips left “a bequest to his ‘fellow’ William Shakespeare among others – whatever construction may be put upon that.” Consider, this is the same man who skillfully deconstructed the grammar of Ben Jonson’s famous phrase in his First Folio eulogy to Shakespeare, “though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek,” and determined that it was written in the “conditional mood … in the conclusion of sentences of rejected condition,” and thus what Ben was actually saying, suitable to the well-tutored De Vere, is “even if you had small Latin and less Greek.” But in regard to Phillips’ will, he is puzzled by what he can possibly have meant by calling Shakespeare his “fellow.” Let’s reconstruct this portion of the will and find out; it reads:
Item, I give and bequeath unto and among the hired men of the company of which I am of which shall be at that time of my decease the sum of five pounds of lawful money of England to be equally distributed amongst them. Item, I give and bequeath to my fellow William Shakespeare a 30 shilling piece in gold. To my fellow Henry Condell one other 30 shilling piece in gold.
This is followed by bequests of twenty shillings a piece to others he also calls his fellows: Lawrence Fletcher, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cooke and Nicholas Tooley; in addition to a generous bequest of 40 shillings and personal items to his apprentice Samuel Gilburne. The overseers of his will were Heminges, Burbage and William Sly, who were each to receive “a bowl of silver of the value of five pounds.” Of these eleven men, ten are named among the “Principal Actors in all these Plays” in the First Folio (Fletcher was omitted).
There is, after all, absolutely no confusion about whether the Shakespeare in the will was a hired man of the company, as Ogburn first makes it appear. The bequest to the hired men, not one of whom is specifically named, is formally set apart from those to his “fellows” by the word “Item” that precedes their bequests. And it cannot go without comment that in his two items on the will, separated by eighty pages, Ogburn omits the specific bequest to “his fellow” Shakespeare of a thirty shilling gold piece. Ultimately, there is no confusion about what Phillips meant when he called Shakespeare his fellow: he was a fellow actor, a fellow in the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, a comrade and an equal. Nor can there be any confusion about why Ogburn devised this tangled version of the will.
The Longest Ellipsis: “Frontline” and The
Shakespeare Mystery
At about the same time, along came an example of this tactic – in reverse. Whereas Ogburn put eighty pages between his remarks on Phillips’ will, 33 pages were removed from a book in order to make the case that De Vere had to hide his identity as the author of the famous plays and poems on the PBS Frontline mockumentary The Shakespeare Mystery. I learned about this program the day after it was originally shown on April 18, 1989, which turned out to be to my good fortune. Not many days later, I saw it on a videotape. Just about halfway through, the scene moves to the Round Room of the British Library. As the camera pans around it, the voice of Al Austin, the “correspondent” and co-scriptwriter of the program, is heard:
[L]iterary critics of the period called de Vere one of the greatest Elizabethan poets and ‘the best for comedy.’ If he did write comedies and great poems, what happened to them? One of Looney’s [J. Thomas Looney, the founding father of Oxfordianism] disciples came across a possible answer in another old book.
(Close-up of Austin sitting at a desk.) This one. The Arte of English Poesie, written in 1589, thirteen years after De Vere supposedly put down his pen. (Opens book and reads from a page.) It says: “I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it, of which number the first is that noble gentleman Edward, Earl of Oxford” – Edward De Vere. (A page from the book appears on the screen; the camera slowly zooms in on it as Austin repeats pointedly:) “Or else suffered it to be published without their own names.” (“. . . without their own names to it” in the text is then highlighted.)
I stopped the tape, rewound it, and paused when this page first comes on the screen. The last clause Austin “quotes” – “of which number the first is that notable gentleman Edward, Earl of Oxford” – is nowhere to be seen.
(Imaginary close-up of Irvin Matus at a desk in the reading room of the Folger Shakespeare Library turning the pages of a facsimile of the 1589 edition of The Arte of English Poesie.) “Ah, here it is, on page 16 – ‘I know very many notable gentlemen in the court’ … that last clause about Oxford is not here. (Begins turning more pages.) “24,25 …” (More page turning.) “36, 37 …” (Still more page turning.) “Aha! Page forty-nine!” (Come, read along with me – in modernized English):
And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of Courtly-markers, noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found it and made public with the rest, of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward, Earl of Oxford [my italics].
This chasm between the quoted clauses was also found by Terry Ross, the co-host of the “Shakespeare Authorship Page” website. When PBS announced that The Shakespeare Mystery was to be rebroadcast in April 1996, he wrote to the Frontline website for this program and, after laying out the facts, commented:
The falsified sentence that Oxfordians have created from different chapters of Puttenham is meant to persuade us that Puttenham knew that Oxford had secretly written great literature but had it published under another name. If Oxfordians would actually read Puttenham, they would see he says something very different. Oxford’s name and verse are known to Puttenham, and he is first on the list of “the rest” – that is, of those who[se] poetry is published under their own names.
Indeed, others are named after Oxford on page 49 (in descending order of rank): “Thomas, Lord of Buckhurst, when he was young, Henry, Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Master Edward Dyer, Master Fulke Greville, [George] Gascoigne, Breton, Turberville, and a great many other learned gentlemen, whose names I do not omit for envy, but to avoid tediousness, and who have deserved no little commendation.” Like Oxford, all of these men were “courtly-makers” whose works were published during their lifetimes. And note that the passage on page 49 begins: “in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of Courtly-markers” (my italics). As Elizabeth’s reign entered its fourth decade, Puttenham evidently was comparing it to an earlier time in her court when there were no inhibitions upon circulating courtier writings in print and manuscript.
Frontline put Ross’s remarks on The Shakespeare Mystery page and responded: “Your criticism derives from an apparent misinterpretation of the three words – with the rest. You are saying these words are referring to the list of ‘learned Gentlemen’ which immediately follows these three words. Whereas, we believe the words with the rest means ‘the rest’ (of those who are publicly acknowledged poets/writers).” It concludes:
And therefore we do not believe the compression of the two excerpts cited changes the meaning of what was written in Puttenham’s (actually Sir John Lumley’s) “Arte of English Poesie.” Both say the same thing: there are noblemen writing good works who don’t dare put their names to it. … FRONTLINE considered using both excerpts but didn’t because they are redundant. To have included both would, if anything, have strengthened the evidence that Lumley thought De Vere’s names as poet and author was being suppressed.
Ross’s response on his own website to Frontline’s belief that it depends on what the definition of what “with the rest” means, is straightforward and to the point: “if there were other Elizabethan poets that Puttenham had in mind, who were they? There is no other list of Elizabethan ‘courtly makers’ in Puttenham.” There is an alternative: the Oxfordians can give us a list of “the rest” – those other known courtier poets whose writings were published by that time but are not found in The Arte of English Poesie. Don’t count on it.
It may be that Frontline, despite its vigorous defense of the authenticity of Austin’s version, ultimately came to agree with Ross. In the transcript of The Shakespeare Mystery on its website, something remarkable has happened to the quotation in question. It now reads:
I know very many notable gentleman [sic] in the court that have written commendably and suppressed it again … or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it.
Yes, that’s all there is: no indication whatever that in program it was ever said, “of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward, Earl of Oxford’ – Edward De Vere.” Just as there was no indication, as Al Austin read from the book, that 33 pages of the original edition separated the “many notable gentlemen” from Oxford. And, curiously, there is in this quote an ellipsis where none is needed, but nothing to indicate the portion excised in the transcript – just as there was nothing in the program itself to suggest the 33 pages that divides the two passages – perhaps the longest ellipsis of all time.
There is something else The Arte of English Poesie has to tell us about the quality of Oxford’s writings. On page 51, Puttenham anoints those who excel in specific literary forms. Here we find:
That for tragedy, the Lord of Buckhurst and Master Edward Ferrys for such doings as I have seen of theirs do deserve the highest prize; the Earl of Oxford and Master [Richard] Edwards of her Majesty’s Chapel for Comedy and Interlude.
Buckhurst, Thomas Sackville (later Earl of Dorset), paired with a fellow member of the Inner Temple, Thomas Norton, to write the first English tragedy, which they appear to have called Ferrex and Porrex, but is better known as Gorboduc. First performed in the great hall of the Inner Temple in London on January 6, 1562, it also has the distinction of being the first drama in blank verse. It was a sensation in its time. Twelve days after its début it was performed before the queen in venerable Westminster Hall. Sir Philip Sidney proclaimed it to be the exemplar of tragic drama. To modern ears it is a collection of lengthy speeches in the style of Seneca. The identity of “Edward Ferrys” is in uncertain. Richard Edwards, Oxford’s co-prizewinner for comedy, was the author of Damon and Pythias and Palamon and Arcite, performed in 1564 and 1566 respectively.
Coincidentally, the only other source for Oxford’s purported dramatic genius, Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598), reinforces his identification with these bygone dramatists. Time and again, Oxfordians relate that Meres declared, “the best for comedy amongst us be Edward Earl of Oxford.” What follows is not mentioned. This time we find De Vere in the company of, in Meres’s words, “Doctor Gager of Oxford, Master Rowley, once a rare scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, Master Edwards one of her Majesty’s Chapel.”
Gager, William Gager, during a long residence after his graduation from the university in 1577, wrote numerous plays that were performed there, though only one, Rivales, performed in 1583, was a comedy; the rest were Latin tragedies on classical subjects. Rowley, like Ferrys, is a bit of mystery. The only Rowley in registers of Pembroke Hall during the last half of the 16th century is one Ralph Rowley. Nothing suggests he was anything but a student and nothing is known of his writings. Edwards is the same Richard Edwards named by Puttenham.
Meres separates these playwrights from the more modern, prolific and popular ones. Immediately after his mention of Edwards, he turns to the “eloquent and witty John Lily, [Thomas] Lodge, Gascoine, [Richard] Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood; Anthony Munday our best plotter, [George] Chapman, [Henry] Porter, [Robert] Wilson, [William] Hathway, and Henry Chettle” – nearly all recent or current playwrights for the public stages exclusively.
Both Puttenham and Meres place Oxford among the “courtly-makers,” among the university playwrights, and the playmakers for the revels of the societies of lawyers. It is the kind of company of which Sidney approved, not at all like the writers for the public stages, of which Sir Philip very definitely disapproved. Unlike many of them, it appears that no one considered Oxford’s product worth saving or worthy of being put into print.
From Whole Cloth: A Moth in a Wardrobe Account
In October 1991 I became the recipient of personalized Oxfordian scholarly stylings upon the publication of my article “The Case for Shakespeare” in The Atlantic Monthly. The most energetic and entertaining of these came from Ruth Loyd Miller, best known for her lavish edition of J. Thomas Looney’s seminal Oxfordian work, Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
In a letter to the editor, she took particular exception to my “litany of misinformation about ‘Grooms of the Chamber’ from my chapter ‘Crimson Velvet and Red Cloth[e],’” in her edition of Looney’s book. She took specific issue with my comments regarding what she said about the 4½ yards of red cloth issued to Shakespeare and eight other members of the King’s Men in the account of the Master of the Wardrobe for the celebrations of King James’s coronation in March 1604. I had quoted from that chapter, in which she “contends ‘the clothe [sic] was issued to them not as ‘actors’ but as men of ‘The Chamber.’” She returned the favor by quoting my article, stylishly setting off the offending passage:
Plucking words and phrases out of context, Matus subreptitiously [defined as “the concealment of pertinent facts”] writes:
“The word ‘actors’ is not to be found in the account book, it is true; but beside the names of Shakespeare and his fellows the word ‘Players’ is written, large and grandly.”
Matus obviously did not examine the original manuscript book. Had he done so he would have seen the whole account is written in a perfectly grand, perfectly beautiful, clear, professional secretary hand. So much for paleography.
Since Matus made a big deal of the word ‘Players’ appearing beside the names of the nine actors, let us consider why the bookkeeper of the Wardrobe found it necessary to identify the actors by their trade, that, as “Players.” Weren’t these men so well known in 1604 that identification as “Players” would be superfluous? The inference is, though their names are well-known to today’s Shakespearean scholars, they were not so well-known in their own time by the secretaries and clerks through whose hands warrants passed for payment of their fees.
A neat change of subject. “Paleography” was not the issue. Nor do I, a today-Shakespearean scholar (nor any today- or yesterday-Shakespearean scholar, I know of), suppose that the membership of this acting company was so well known that it was superfluous to identify their profession in this account.
The issue is of course that Miller said in effect that these men were not specifically identified at all – just another bunch lumped in with the multitude that served in the royal household. No less notable in Miller’s letter is her attempt to divert attention away from how she (one might say “subreptitiously”) covers her subterfuge regarding the way these nine men appear in the document. Indeed they were not called “actors” but, as she at last acknowledged, they were called by the far more common word for theatrical performers at the time: “Players.”
So the real question is why Miller made a “big deal” that the players appeared in the Wardrobe account as “men of ‘The Chamber’” only. The answer has to do with the name they were called by before they came under the patronage of King James: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
Shakespeareans believe the lord chamberlain of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was the lord chamberlain of the royal household, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, until his death in July 1596, upon which his son George assumed his father’s title as well as patronage of the players. Oxfordians ask: might not Lord Chamberlain’s Men be just a short version of their patron’s full title, Lord Great Chamberlain? Are you surprised to learn that the Lord Great Chamberlain happened to be Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford?
According to Oxfordian mythology, upon the accession of King James, the gracious earl ceded patronage of his acting company to his monarch. But, in the coronation proceedings in 1604, she conjectures that the impecunious lord was short on servants for his “double duties” as Lord Great Chamberlain, carrying the sword of state before the king (which was in fact carried by the Earl Marshall, Edward Somerset, fourth Earl of Worcester) in his triumphal procession through the streets of London, as well as for his service as Master of the Office of the Ewrie, which entailed serving water to the king before and after the banquet.
In her letter to The Atlantic Miller wrote that, in the Looney volume, “The thrust of my article was this:”
The nine actors were furnished the red cloth (livery) as they were assigned to the entourage of some nobleman or officer of State. I suggested that nobleman was the premier nobleman of the realm, the Earl of Oxford.”
Of course there is not a shred of evidence that they were “assigned” to anyone but King James. But that’s not quite all. In that article she was somewhat more specific. Regarding Oxford’s double duties, she wrote:
Therefore, would it not be reasonable to suppose that when Lord Oxford needed extra servants to assist with special duties relating to the Office of the Ewrie and of Lord Great Chamberlain, particularly during the coronation festivities, he would call on those ready at hand – men from his companies of actors?
Since you asked, Dr. Miller, no! First of all, for ten months the nine players had been “his Highnesse servants” (as they are called on the title page of the first edition of Hamlet in 1603). Second of all, it would be more reasonable to suppose that at the time Oxford had no actors at all.
There is a reason Miller referred to Oxford’s “companies” of actors. In 1600, for the first time in ten years, there is evidence of an acting company under De Vere’s patronage. A play, The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, was published, “As it hath been sundry times played by the right honourable Earl of Oxenford, Lord great Chamberlain of England his servants.” To insure them a place at the coronation table of King James, she states: “during the first year of the new reign, there apparently was an amalgamation of the acting companies of Lords Worcester and Oxford. These were merged into Queen Anne’s Men.” The first year of James’s reign, however, began upon Queen Elizabeth’s death on March 24, 1603. But the amalgamation of the acting companies was recorded on March 31, 1602. It was dissolved within months. By August 1602, Worcester’s players alone were performing at the Rose playhouse and it was Worcester’s company only that they became the servants of James’s queen Anne. Nothing more is heard of Oxford’s company after August 1602 and it has been suggested that some of Oxford’s company were absorbed into Worcester’s. In other words, Oxford’s company was defunct at least seven months before King James came to the throne.
At this point I will concede that Miller was right about something: at the time I wrote The Atlantic article I had not seen the Wardrobe Account document. I remedied this during a visit to the Public Record Office in London in 1993. Documents for active research in other topics were my chief interest at the time, but I requested that one too. I eventually turned to it and relished the pleasure of seeing in the original what I had seen so often in print. That satisfied, I randomly put in my thumb – and pulled out a plum. My skillful thumb took me to page 43, where there is an entry (“written in a perfectly grand, perfectly beautiful, clear, professional secretary hand,” of course) The Eury, which allotted Oxford’s servants in this office “Skarlet Red cloth” for precisely three yeomen, two grooms, two pages. Evidently his needs, and the size of his retinue, had been formally determined.
Oh, by the way, if that was indeed “William Shakespeare” who marched by the side of the Earl Marshall as he carried the sword of state before King James; if that was “William Shakespeare” who lorded over the decanting of water to the king; who was the William Shakespeare that headed the list of Players in the Wardrobe Account?
Which leaves the question whether Oxford can ever have been the Lord Chamberlain that was the patron of Shakespeare’s company to be answered. A good deal of solid, documentary evidence refutes this; I will cite just two examples here. As mentioned earlier, Henry, the first Lord Hunsdon, died in July 1596, and when this company, now under the patronage of his son, next appeared at court, the Chamber account entry records a payment
To John Heminges and George Bryan, servants to the late Lord Chamberlain and now servants to the Lord Hunsdon, upon the Council’s warrant, dated at Whitehall 25 December 1596, for five interludes or plays showed by them before her majesty [my italics].
As Oxford was quite alive at the time, he evidently cannot have been the late Lord Chamberlain. That they were now the servants to Lord Hunsdon leaves little doubt that this reflects their continued patronage by the Hunsdons, father and son.
To erase any doubt, in early 1597 an edition of Romeo and Juliet was published. On the title page it states this was the play “As it hath been often (with great applause) played publicly, by the right Honorable the L[ord] of Hunsdon his Servants.” For, although George Carey inherited his father’s title and his players, the office of lord chamberlain was conferred upon William Brooke, Lord Cobham. Cobham, however, died in March 1597 and the vacant office was then given to Hunsdon. When Romeo and Juliet, “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” was printed in 1599, the title page states that it was “acted by the right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants.” (See pages 225-28 of my book, Shakespeare, In Fact.)
All of which is apart from the obvious fact that it is improbable the full title of an earl’s ceremonial office of Lord Great Chamberlain would have been abbreviated, not least of all for the very reason this would have caused confusion with the functional household office of Lord Chamberlain held by mere barons. Evidently Miller’s fabrication is made of whole cloth. And it is full of holes.
Chamber Accounts. Wardrobe Accounts. Twenty pounds. Four-and-a-half yards of cloth. Why all the fuss? Why do Oxfordians delve so deeply in to what are fundamentally little more than fancy, nicely-penned ledgers? Why do I go to such lengths to refute them? Good questions. The answer is that the Oxfordians’ desperate need to link De Vere with the acting company to which the name of Shakespeare is so intimately linked.
They need to do this because, apart from the published plays, Shakespeare’s name is on numerous documents that indicate his personal involvement in the acting companies of the Lord Chamberlains and King James. They therefore need to find a way to explain how a nobleman became synonymous with players for the public stage, to explain how he played an active role in the affairs of this company, and why it became the exclusive conduit for his works – an exclusivity that was unique at the time. Those documents are all they have to conjure some connection between William Shakespeare of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and the Earl of Oxford. Evidently they don’t.
Upon the publication of Shakespeare, In Fact
The publication of my book on the authorship, Shakespeare, In Fact in 1994, attracted some Oxfordian attention in reviews online and in print in their newsletters, as well as in personal letters to me. Most reiterated standard Oxfordian fare, which, they said, I had “overlooked.” They, however, overlooked the title of my book – Shakespeare, In Fact – which, curiously, meant just what it says. My goal was not to offer still another interpretation of the documents and allusions to Shakespeare and, with some fine tuning here, a twist or two there, to find just the right words, that perfect phrase (where other, better prose stylists had failed), and turn them into that once-and-for-all convincing biography.
First of all, I didn’t intend my book to be a biography – and it isn’t. In regard to biographies, I offer the question Jacques Barzun asked – and answered:
Why does not biography confer all the benefits of history, and more agreeably at that? The answer is that in biography, scale and proportions are skewed by the single life at the center of the world for three hundred pages.
This skewing is truer of no one more than Shakespeare. As his plays were renewed and reborn in succeeding ages, the dramatic poet for the public playhouse was put at the center of the Elizabethan Age, which became interchangeable with the Age of Shakespeare. When it came to the primacy in Elizabethan England, in the eyes of his scholars, Shakespeare won. If Shakespeare didn’t say it, if it wasn’t said about Shakespeare, or if it didn’t matter to Shakespeare, “it” didn’t matter at all. Over the years, as Brian Vickers remarked, “specialists in Shakesperian and Elizabethan drama have all too regularly constituted their subject as a self-contained enclave, cut off from the broader studies of Renaissance literature and history.”
Whether the author of the plays and poems was a nobleman or a gentleman, cutting him off from not only the broader studies of Renaissance literature and history but from the rest of the Elizabethan drama to boot, while regarding him as the focal point of the Elizabethan world, has cut us off from the author of the plays. What we get instead was put best by the belletrist Desmond McCarthy (as recounted by S. Schoenbaum): “trying to work out Shakespeare’s personality is like looking at a very dark, glazed picture … at first you see nothing, then you begin to recognize features, and then you realize that they are your own.” Shakespeare is in the eye of the beholder – and what the beholder sees is very much like himself (unless, of course, he happens to be a woman).
In other words, Shakespearean biographers, with rare exceptions, have either followed the course noted by Vickers and viewed Shakespeare though the wrong end of a telescope or, like McCarthy, discover themselves in the image of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, In Fact I recognized the need to put the facts – the Shakespeare documents and allusions – into a broader context, to find out how and where he stood in the theater of his time, and relative to the broader culture, as well as to explore the space he occupied in the “spacious age” of Queen Elizabeth.
Oxfordian criticism of my book was, on the whole, reasonably free of rancor. There were comments about my “lack of objectivity,” which nowadays means that another does not agree with oneself, who is of course absolutely, dispassionately, scientifically objective; or that I am devoid of “fair-mindedness,” or its kissin’ cousin “open-mindedness,” though their efforts to eliminate Shakespeare as the author can be so absolute and degrading to the man as to suggest that if a lightning bolt from the blue etched “It was Shakespeare” on a stone tablet, it would immediately create a good-sized band of atheists. No One with a Divine Plan can possibly have such awful taste as to have put so much genius into that head!
Muddling A Midsummer Night's Dream
There is, after all, an undercurrent of secular religion in the controversialists. The fervor of their belief in their Lord Oxford, their conviction that the laurels that should round his noble brow crowns the pate of a “stupid, ignorant, third-rate play-actor,” can move a man to tears. Charlton Ogburn likened believing that Shakespeare was the author to creationism. And then there was the correspondent who closed her letter to me: “Yours in good faith and with the hope that ere long you will experience an Oxfordian epiphany.”
Since I take this to have been a personal letter, I will not reveal the name of its author, who earlier confided to me what led to her own epiphany. Foremost, she had a double major in music and English in college and thus recognized that the author was “an educated musician.” For another, she had also “been involved since early childhood with English Folk and Morris Dancing and a member for some years of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.” Due to this training, when reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I was astounded to read a line that almost jumped off the page at me: ‘The nine-man Morris is filled up with mud’.”
How could the man from Stratford, in Warwickshire, she wonders, have known about a nine-man Morris? There had “never” been one in Warwickshire, she says, but there was one, “the only” one, in Abbotts Bromley in Staffordshire. Known as the “Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance,” she relates that it was first performed in 1226 in a celebration of St Bartholomew’s Day, and is performed there still on a date between September 5th and 12th.
Now, I have never met a
question I didn’t like, and this was an interesting one. (Who wouldn’t
be curious how nine dancing men got filled up with mud?) I made a start,
going to my standard source book for questions having to do with the
plays, The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, and there, in act two
scene one, line 98, is: “The nine man . . .” But wait, my text says,
not “man,” but “men’s” – “The nine men’s morris if
filled up with mud.”
A misprint, perhaps? An emendation by one of those 18th-century editors who refined the texts? I went to the ultimate authoritative sources, the first printing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1600, and the First Folio, the collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623. In the 1600 edition it is “The nine mens Morris is fild up with mudde,” in the Folio, “The nine mens Morris is fild up with mud.”
I then surveyed fourteen modern editions of the play – in each it was “nine men’s morris.” What’s more, whether in a footnote or a glossary, each gave some version of the meaning of the phrase, all conforming to the one in my Pelican: “square cut in the turf for a game played with counters”. “Morris” in this case turns out to be a corruption of the French word merel: a token, small coin or counter. Popular as merels in medieval Europe, it originated as a board game. Crossing the Channel, it is “One of the oldest of English games … much practiced in Shakespeare’s time,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Sports, Games, and Pastimes. There were regional variations of merels – such as marls and merry-holes – but morris won out.
When swells played the game it was on fine boards; the not-so-swells made do. Some merel boards have been found scratched on slate boulders and doorsteps, even on tombstones and castle walls. Lacking these amenities, the lines for the game were cut in the ground, a small hole was made for each morris piece, which in the outdoor version were stakes with and without bark, or stones of different shapes or colors. This version of nine men’s morris was played by, as one historian of English games and sports put it succinctly, rustics.
Rustics. Country folk. People like those who lived in or around, say, Stratford- upon-Avon? Nine men’s morris boards cut into earth gives meaning to “filled up with mud”; and this line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, coming amidst numerous images of farm and field, leaves no doubt that the context is rural. I breathed a sigh of relief for those nine morris dancers of Abbott’s Bromley.
A Monumental Fraud? The Stratford Bust – One More Time
Unlike my correspondent’s singular, personal, observations, an article by David L. Roper, “Matus, In Fact?” in a publication of the British De Vere Society, takes off on one of the Draculas of Oxfordian orthodoxy: the alleged transformation of the Shakespeare monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Indeed it seems nothing can kill it, “it” being the engraving in William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in 1656, which depicts the half-length figure of Shakespeare in the monument which Oxfordians are convinced is exactly the way it looked until a substitute was made in 1748, which is the one familiar to us.
Dugdale’s Shakespeare does, in fact, look quite different from the one the modern pilgrim sees; instead of the poet with pen poised to write on a piece of paper on a cushion, the Dugdale figure clutches to its midsection what Roper identifies authoritatively and quite specifically as a “sack of barleycorn.” For that matter, nearly every detail of the present monument differs to some greater or lesser degree from Dugdale’s.
By the middle of the 18th century the monument had fallen into disrepair since its installation not later than 1623. The opportunity to restore it was a blessing that came in the disguise of John Ward’s troupe of players. They had strolled into Stratford in May 1746, got permission to turn the town hall into a theater, and stayed on into September. In gratitude for their reception and this long respite from the road, and some inspiration from Stratford’s schoolmaster, Rev. Joseph Greene, the players put on a benefit. The beneficiary of it was to be:
the Curious Original Monument and Bust of that incomparable Poet, erected above the Tomb that enshrines his Dust, in the Church of Stratford upon Avon, [which] Is through length of Years and other accidents become much impaired and decayed; An offer has been kindly made by the Judicious and much Esteemed Mr. John Ward, and his Company, To Act one of SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS, Viz.
Othello,
or the Moor of Venice
At Stratford, on Tuesday the Ninth of this instant September: The Receipts arising from which Representation are to be Solely Appropriated to the Repairing of the Original Monument aforesaid.
This notice was preserved by Greene, whose papers include a great deal of information about the restoration in his correspondence and an assortment of documents relating to it. This includes a contract made by John Hall, the limner (that is, an artisan skilled in coloring) who was to repair and renew the monument, and which provided “that he takes care, according to his ability, that the Monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected.” For this work he asked the sum of £16. The corporation offered him no more than £12 10 shillings. Hall accepted and the agreement was signed on December 10, 1748. (The monument is discussed on pages 201-5 and 217-18 of Shakespeare, In Fact.)
Noting the sum paid Hall in my book, I remarked: “With these proceeds, the Oxfordians suppose the statue was altered to turn a grasping commodities speculator into an inspired poet.” Says the sensitive Roper of this: “He sneers at Oxfordians for supposing the that £12 10s would have been sufficient for re-modeling the bust of Shakespeare at the Stratford parish church, thereby professing ignorance that inflation has since increased this amount to a sum in excess of £6000 ($10 000).”
I greeted this with a patient smile (I happened to be practicing my patient smile at the moment). I am smiling now (or might it be an upturned sneer), for I have the pleasure of informing Roper that the fees for work such as Hall’s are not measured by inflation in the commodity market but by what artists were paid at that time. When Hall was active, a bust by a journeyman given extra for a special job might get £4 15s a week; in proximate decades the popular sculptor Joseph Nollekens paid his assistants £24 per bust, for which he charged about £125. It is seems very unlikely that £12 10s would have come near the cost of labor and materials required for the total transformation of the monument shown in Dugdale into the one which greets the gaze of the modern visitor.
What’s more, the “re-modeling” of Shakespeare’s face, if true, suggests that the burghers of Stratford must have consulted an art historian. In all of the commentary on the likeness of the Bard, it has escaped notice that the poet’s features are modeled in a style of 17th-century sculpture that was common until the Restoration in 1660. Shakespeare’s head and torso in the monument is an almost typical example of the flat facial features and rigid posture of much monumental sculpture in the first half of the century. Almost. What is atypical is that someone seems to have had the idea of giving it the expression of the poet, lips parted, eyes transfixed, caught in the throes of inspiration. I know of no other attempt to impart such life-like qualities in this sculptural style. If this was indeed the first of its kind, it may explain why there is not another.
The ultimate source for the inaccuracy of Dugdale’s engraving is Dugdale himself. His sketch of the monument was the model for the engraving made by Wenceslas Hollar for Antiquities of Warwickshire. Hollar made the best of what he had – which, according to Diana Price, wasn’t very good.
Dugdale’s sketch is the subject of her meticulous study, “Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument,” in The Review of English Studies (May 1997). In regard to the figure she observes, “the head is too small, forcing an unnatural lengthening of the torso and arms; the arms stick out at an unnatural angle; and the cushion is drawn on end.” In regard to the features she says, “As with other sketches in his collection, Dugdale made no attempt to draw a facial likeness, but appears to have sketched one of his standard faces to depict a man with facial hair. Consequently, Hollar invented the facial features for Shakespeare.”
The conclusion is obvious: In the absence of an accurate and detailed model, Hollar freely improvised his image of Shakespeare’s monument. The improvisation is what disqualifies the engraving’s value as authoritative evidence. The image, printed from the same block in the revised 1730 edition of Antiquities of Warwickshire, simply carries no authority.
The renewal of the monument was completed in early 1749. On September 27, 1749, Rev. Greene wrote a letter to “my Fellow-Collegian & Table-Mate” at Oxford, the Rev. John Sympson,” regarding the latter’s request during a visit to Stratford: “You wanted me to inform you of what materials the Original Monument of Shakespeare in the chancel of our Collegiate church was composed.” Of the half-length statue he said: “the Bust & cushion before it, (on which as on a desk this our Poet seems prepared to write,) is one entire limestone,” and goes on to give details of its natural color, texture and “solidity.”
He then moves on to details of the restoration of the monument, which concludes,
care was taken, as nearly as could be, not to add to or diminish what the work consisted of, and appeared to have been when first erected: And really, except changing the substance of the architraves from alabaster to marble; nothing has been changed, nothing altered, except the supplying with the original materials, (saved for that purpose,) whatsoever was by accident broken off; reviving the old colouring, and renewing the gilding that was lost.”
Price concurs with the comment of the scholar of Shakespeare documents, B. Roland Lewis: “Greene’s letters and notes, [were] written honestly, soberly, and clearly, it is obvious that he consider[ed] the bust … to be the actual original placed in the niche by 1623.” As do I.
“Shake-hyphen-speare”: One More Time – Again
Lest the always wary Oxfordians suspect Price’s study of the Dugdale sketch is just another contrivance, another obstacle to get around or under put in their way by one of those pesky Shakespeareans, this is the same Diana Price who is the author of Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. It reveals her to be a successor to Sir George Greenwood, agnostic as to who is the True Author of the legendary plays and poems, but gnostic about who Truly It-is-not: why, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, of course.
If you are still not convinced, how about that in her book she takes issue with my evidence regarding the hyphenation of Shakespeare’s name: “Shakespeare,” as it appears on the title pages of editions of some of his plays and in a smattering of other printed texts of the time (pages 28-30 of Shakespeare, In Fact.). This, Oxfordians contend, and Price apparently agrees, is evidence that William Shakespeare was a pseudonym.
I must begin by asking the patience and indulgence of you, my reader. To argue over a hyphen – a mere “-” – seems ridiculous, I know. But it bears a great weight in the Oxfordian mythos because on its narrow shoulders hangs the full weight of their evidence that Shakespeare was indeed a pseudonym, known to those in the know. (Which begs the questions of why those in know needed a hyphen to know it.) I here endeavor to lift this burden from the poor hyphen.
Price begins her argument by disputing an example of another name of a living man that was hyphenated which I offered, Ralph Waldegrave. Waldegrave was a printer whose name first appears in the imprint of a book in 1578. Four years later he decided to put a hyphen in his name – Walde-grave – and did so in all future works from his press. Price notes this, however, was evidently Waldegrave’s choice, which “therefore makes it a poor comparison to the idiosyncratic hyphens in Shakespeare’s name.” That’s reasonable.
We are now to learn that “Shake-speare” was recognizable not as a mere pseudonym, but a “made up name.” One such example she offers is “Martin Mar-prelate,” which was “the notorious pen name cloaking the author(s) of inflammatory pamphlets critical of the Anglican Church in the 1580s.” We are also offered Master Shoe-tie in Measure for Measure, and Ben Jonson’s Sir Luckless Woo-all as “other examples of made-up names.” (The foregoing is on pages 60-61 of her book.)
Oh dear! It does appear I messed up, doesn’t it? Except for one little detail, so insignificant or so irrelevant, that Price left it out: I began my discussion of hyphenated Shakespeare with a quote from Ogburn’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare:
Orthodox professors have been unable to come up with a single case of a genuine English name similarly hyphenated in common usage [my italics].
It was to this I responded in offering Waldegrave as an example of a hyphen in “genuine English name.” Which Martin Mar-prelate is not, any more than are Master Shoe-tie or Sir Luckless Woo-all, fictitious names in fictional works both. Under any circumstances, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as a “made-up name,” being as it is both a genuine and quite common English name. What’s more, it is a name attached to one very specific person, by which he appears in numerous theatrical records and miscellaneous private and public documents (rarely with a hyphen), as well as the name by which he was on very public, constant exhibition as a player in a popular acting company.
Also too negligible for Price to mention are additional examples in my book of genuine English names that were hyphenated, including a very famous one: Sir John Oldcastle. It is, as a matter of fact, hyphenated in the epilogue of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two:
Where for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already ‘a be killed by your hard opinions, for Old-castle died a martyr, and this is not the man.”
Furthermore, when a play on this medieval Christian martyr, entitled The First Part of the True and Honorable History of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham, was printed in 1600, not only was his name so hyphenated on the title page but on the running headings at the top of each page of text as well. Except for the very first page of text, that is, where his name in the full title of the play is “Oldcastle” – without a hyphen. Hyphens come; hyphens go.
For another, Campbell is certainly a familiar, genuine English name, and Sir Thomas Campbell was certainly familiar to Londoners. He was inaugurated as the city’s mayor on October 29, 1609, with all the pageantry that went with this annual event. The pageant was devised by the all-purpose author Anthony Munday, and when his efforts were put into print the mayor’s name appeared as “Camp-bell.”
These examples of Price’s excisions are but a warm up to what she omits in regard to the most common place where “Shake-speare” is found: the title pages of individual plays (known as “quartos”). In Shakespeare, In Fact I wrote that “it was a common practice in the printing trade for title-page information to be repeated from one edition to the next and even outdated references would survive one printing or more.” But Price is at the ready to poke holes in what she terms “Matus’s theory.” Let’s see.
She begins by saying that a “hyphen appeared [in Shakespeare’s name] in 45% (fifteen out of thirty-three) of the plays published before the First Folio in 1623.” It is not a mere quibble to note that her terminology is wrong. In saying thirty-three plays had been published before 1623, Price gives the impression that all but five of the 38 extant plays of Shakespeare were in print before the First Folio and close to half of these display the telltale clue that Shakespeare was a pseudonym. Instead of “plays,” the correct word is editions, and the importance of this is more than just terminology or mathematics. In fact, only nineteen plays were published before the First Folio, and Shakespeare’s name was hyphenated on the title page of only five of them. (They are: Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Part One, Hamlet and King Lear.)
But Price said his name was hyphenated on fifteen title pages. What does this mean? We get only a hint of the meaning when she observes Shake-speare was, “for example, on the 1598 and 1605 quartos of Richard III, but not on the intervening 1602 quarto.” That thing rarer than hen’s teeth: an exception that disproves the rule. Before getting to the substance of this, let’s make clear what this has to do with the fifteen hyphenated Shakespeares on the title pages of only five plays. Most of the nineteen Shakespeare plays that were published in individual editions before the First Folio were reprinted, Richard III being one of the most popular, running to six editions.
It so happens that the omitted hyphen in the 1602 Richard III is not “for example” but the only example of a hyphenless Shakespeare among thirteen editions of just three history plays. In addition to Richard III, there are quartos of Richard II and Henry IV, Part One, all of which were printed for the bookseller Andrew Wise and later Matthew Law, to whom Wise transferred his copyrights. (Curiously, Wise teamed with another bookseller, William Aspley, in publishing the quartos of Much Ado About Nothing and Henry IV, Part Two in 1600. Shakespeare’s name was not hyphenated in either. We are left to suppose, I suppose, he didn’t want to let Aspley in on the secret.)
Does the unhyphenated Shakespeare in Richard III contradict my “theory,” does it indeed disprove the rule? She notes that “the relevant title pages reveal too many arbitrary variations in wording, typeface, layout, spelling, and punctuation to support Matus’s conclusion.” This implies that these “variations” were unique to Shakespeare’s plays; that a conscious effort was made, if not a strict standard applied, in English publishing to replicate a previous edition of a given book. They weren’t. Especially not for such books as plays, which were classed among “idle books & riff raffs” by Thomas Bodley, the founder of the great library of Oxford University.
In practical terms, printers did not have only one book in preparation at any given time. The type that was used in the prior edition might have been in use for the composition of another book and, therefore, a different typeface might be used for the new edition – which would naturally alter the layout. Secondly, while it is true that a spelling might be changed here or there, a punctuation mark changed or omitted, the cause is likely to have been nothing more than an outburst of virtuosity, a personal taste, or just plain carelessness, on the part of the compositor. Put simply, the typesetter of a new edition was often given a previous edition as his model, a task that he performed with varying degrees of accuracy.
The persistence of title-page content may be best illustrated by the most popular play of the 17th century, Mucedorus, which had two earlier editions before it was printed in 1610 to include additions for a performance before King James. The title page reads:
A Most pleasant | Comedie of Muce- | dorus the King, sonne of Valen- | tia, and Amandine the Kinges | daughter of Aragon.
With the merry conceits of Mouse
Amplified with new additions, as it was | acted before the Kings Majestie at | White-hall on Shrove- | sunday night
By his Highnes Servants usually | playing at the Globe.
Very delectable and full of conceited mirth.
Thirteen more editions survive of this version of the play up to the last in 1668. There are to be sure “variations in … typeface, layout, spelling, and punctuation” in these editions. But not in the wording, which stayed the same, from edition to edition, despite the fact that the king referred to had been dead 43 years and the Globe playhouse had been torn down 24 years earlier. There are many, many more like it.
After all, in saying that “title-page information [was] repeated from one edition to the next,” I was aware of the whims of typesetters and I did not suggest that the intention of the printer in successive editions was to duplicate exactly what was on the title page of the edition before.
The last word is to be found in a book by a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who is the last word on England in that age, William Camden. In Remains of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine and published in 1605, a miscellany of minutiae that was not included in his masterpiece, Britannia, Camden gives the sources of English surnames, among which we find the names of:
Some from that which they commonly carried, as Palmer, that is Pilgrim, for that they carried Palme when they returned from Hierusalem. Long-sword, Broad-speare; Fortescu, that is, Strong-shield, and in some such respect, Breake-speare, Shake-Speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaff, Bagot, in the old Norman [etc.]
Curiously, in his chapter titled “Poems,” having quoted from some late medieval poets, he concludes:
These may suffice for some Poetical descriptions of our ancient Poets, if I would come to our time, what a world I could present you out of Sir Philip Sidney, Ed. Spencer, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben Jonson, Th. Campion, Mich. Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William Shakespeare, & other most pregnant wits of these of our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.
Here Shakespeare’s name does not have a hyphen. Perhaps this suggests a whole new area for exploration by Oxfordians: that it’s really the absence of a hyphen in Shakespeare’s name that indicates it is a pseudonym.
Which leaves something that Oxfordians have yet to produce: a single example of a hyphenated “genuine English name” that is known to have been a pseudonym in order to hide the identity of an author.
I will let these examples serve as an overview of my adventures with Oxfordian scholarship. Perhaps you have noticed, regardless of their authenticity, how very reasonable, how very appealing, Oxfordian arguments seem. They are, aren’t they? So very concise, sometimes just a paragraph or two in the story of a “real human being” (Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford).
It takes so many facts, so many unfamiliar details, to refute their arguments, and in the end we are left still with that “uninspiring figure” in “the shadowy throng of the Great” (William Shakespeare, Gentleman of Stratford). Several Oxfordians I have known share a point of view that has a popular following nowadays: facts are just distractions from The Truth. Point out the errors in the facts of an Oxfordian postulate and you may be told, as I have, “That doesn’t invalidate the argument.”
Still the facts are there. They won’t go away. For if too little is known about Shakespeare, too much is known about Oxford.
LINKS TO ONLINE ARTICLES CITED
Transcript of PBS Frontline transcript of The Shakespeare Mystery
Created Saturday, April 19, 2003
Updated