Congratulations to Dr. Ros Barber and her book deal with Sceptre.
I have valued Ros's major contributions to this blog over the past few years. She is also a fellow co-founder of The International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, a group a few of us formed in 2009 in order to promote the theory that Christopher Marlowe may have authored many of the works attributed to Shakespeare.
Ros is the first person in the world to complete a PhD in Marlovian authorship theory. Her PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). She has published articles challenging the orthodox biography of Marlowe in academic books and journals, including the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Her essay "Was Marlowe a Violent Man?," which was presented at the Marlowe Society of America conference in 2008, is featured in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). A published poet, her latest poetry collection, Material (Anvil 2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was funded by Arts Council England. Emmerich Anonymous Sam Riley Marlowe
Super news, Ros!
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.THE MARLOWE PAPERS
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
The Case Against Oxford as Shakespeare
Peter Farey's "The Wrong Candidate," "Oxfordians and the 1604 Question," and "Questions All Oxfordians Must Answer"; Daryl Pinksen on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as straw man and the weak case of de Vere as Shakespeare; Donna Murphy on the many problems with the Oxford theory; Isabel Gortázar's "Nor Oxford Either!"; and Sam Blumenfeld's disqualification of de Vere as Shakespeare.Emmerich shakespeare frontman
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Questions All Oxfordians Must Answer by Peter Farey
(this post originally appeared on November 23, 2009)
In my earlier piece "Oxfordians and the 1604 Question," I showed how in dramatic verse between the 1580s and 1620s there was a steady move away from the constant repetition of the regular end-stopped iambic pentameter by the increasing use of open lines and feminine endings.
I also showed graphically how Shakespeare’s plays exhibited a change in the same direction although—if the dates used are similar to those estimated by most Shakespearean scholars—the rate with which his use of these techniques increased was even greater than that of his contemporaries. The increase was nevertheless surprisingly consistent and the correlation between the estimated latest date for when the play was written and the frequency with which either or both of these techniques was used extremely high.
I have shown these figures with an extended range, because I want to compare this chart with one based upon dates assumed by Oxfordians, and their dating necessarily starts much earlier.
In fact there is no agreed Oxfordian chronology as such, although there have been various theories and conjectures about when the plays were written. The nearest thing to a recently published one at the moment appears to be in a Wikipedia entry entitled “Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays – Oxfordian” which is largely based upon estimates given by Charlton Ogburn in his seminal Oxfordian work, The Mysterious William Shakespeare.1 We are promised a more generally accepted one eventually, but as yet this is all we have to work with. Let’s see (below) what happens when we use the latest dates they suggest instead of those given by Elliott and Valenza.2
The reason I use the latest date in each case is that the counts of both open lines and feminine endings were obtained from the texts of plays as they have come down to us—in fact the Riverside edition—so what is needed is the nearest date we can find to the one in which the verse must have stabilized to more or less what it is today. This means that earlier versions of the plays, no matter who actually wrote them, are for these purposes quite irrelevant.
What can be seen quite clearly is that the hugely valid trend identified with orthodox dating is completely wrecked, the necessary correlation between the date and the usage rate ignored, and the need to squeeze everything in before Oxford’s death (in 1604) shamelessly evident. The difficulty Oxfordians must necessarily have in finding a chronology which avoids these problems is that it is also essential for them to provide evidence, whether internal or external, in support of each chosen date, and it seems that they have as yet found no way in which this can be done.
Even this, however, is by no means the greatest problem created for them by the increasing use of the two techniques over the years, since most Oxfordians tend to claim that almost all of Shakespeare’s plays had in fact been written by 1598.
Here I have listed all of the Shakespeare plays considered by Elliott and Valenza, and sorted them in ascending order according to the rate of their usage of open lines and feminine endings. Where appropriate, I have indicated in each case (1) if the play was included in the list of Shakespeare plays published by Francis Meres in 1598, (2) if it’s been shown not to have been in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire when Meres’s list was published, and/or (3) if Elliott and Valenza gave it a date after 1604.
Here then are those questions which—according to the title—I say must be answered by anyone before they have really earned the right to call themselves true Oxfordians.
1) As most Oxfordians claim that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays had been written by 1598, what explanation would you give for Meres including in his list, published that year, only those with the lowest frequency of open lines and feminine endings?
2) As the use of open lines and feminine endings is no longer of any real significance in the way plays are dated by Shakespearean scholars, what explanation would you give for all 11 plays given a "post-1604" date by Elliott and Valenza appearing among the 13 plays with the highest usage rates?
The odds against either of these things happening just by chance are so astronomical that there must be a reason for each of them. The obvious reasons are that Meres referred only to those “Shakespeare” plays which had been written and performed by then, and that the Elliott and Valenza chronology is fairly accurate. Unfortunately, neither of these options is available to Oxfordians.
So, over to you guys! Oxford wasn't Shakespeare
Peter Farey
© Peter Farey, November 2009 Emmerich Anonymous
Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years. His Marlowe Page is one of the most respected sites about Marlowe on the web. He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.
Are Oxfordians backing the wrong candidate? Click here for a fascinating analysis of how Marlowe compares with de Vere on Shakespeare authorship criteria.
Notes
1Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984.
2Elliott, Ward and Robert Valenza. "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants." Computers and the Humanities 30, 1996. pp. 191-245.
In my earlier piece "Oxfordians and the 1604 Question," I showed how in dramatic verse between the 1580s and 1620s there was a steady move away from the constant repetition of the regular end-stopped iambic pentameter by the increasing use of open lines and feminine endings.
I also showed graphically how Shakespeare’s plays exhibited a change in the same direction although—if the dates used are similar to those estimated by most Shakespearean scholars—the rate with which his use of these techniques increased was even greater than that of his contemporaries. The increase was nevertheless surprisingly consistent and the correlation between the estimated latest date for when the play was written and the frequency with which either or both of these techniques was used extremely high.
I have shown these figures with an extended range, because I want to compare this chart with one based upon dates assumed by Oxfordians, and their dating necessarily starts much earlier.In fact there is no agreed Oxfordian chronology as such, although there have been various theories and conjectures about when the plays were written. The nearest thing to a recently published one at the moment appears to be in a Wikipedia entry entitled “Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays – Oxfordian” which is largely based upon estimates given by Charlton Ogburn in his seminal Oxfordian work, The Mysterious William Shakespeare.1 We are promised a more generally accepted one eventually, but as yet this is all we have to work with. Let’s see (below) what happens when we use the latest dates they suggest instead of those given by Elliott and Valenza.2
The reason I use the latest date in each case is that the counts of both open lines and feminine endings were obtained from the texts of plays as they have come down to us—in fact the Riverside edition—so what is needed is the nearest date we can find to the one in which the verse must have stabilized to more or less what it is today. This means that earlier versions of the plays, no matter who actually wrote them, are for these purposes quite irrelevant.
What can be seen quite clearly is that the hugely valid trend identified with orthodox dating is completely wrecked, the necessary correlation between the date and the usage rate ignored, and the need to squeeze everything in before Oxford’s death (in 1604) shamelessly evident. The difficulty Oxfordians must necessarily have in finding a chronology which avoids these problems is that it is also essential for them to provide evidence, whether internal or external, in support of each chosen date, and it seems that they have as yet found no way in which this can be done.Even this, however, is by no means the greatest problem created for them by the increasing use of the two techniques over the years, since most Oxfordians tend to claim that almost all of Shakespeare’s plays had in fact been written by 1598.
Here I have listed all of the Shakespeare plays considered by Elliott and Valenza, and sorted them in ascending order according to the rate of their usage of open lines and feminine endings. Where appropriate, I have indicated in each case (1) if the play was included in the list of Shakespeare plays published by Francis Meres in 1598, (2) if it’s been shown not to have been in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire when Meres’s list was published, and/or (3) if Elliott and Valenza gave it a date after 1604.
Here then are those questions which—according to the title—I say must be answered by anyone before they have really earned the right to call themselves true Oxfordians.
1) As most Oxfordians claim that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays had been written by 1598, what explanation would you give for Meres including in his list, published that year, only those with the lowest frequency of open lines and feminine endings?
2) As the use of open lines and feminine endings is no longer of any real significance in the way plays are dated by Shakespearean scholars, what explanation would you give for all 11 plays given a "post-1604" date by Elliott and Valenza appearing among the 13 plays with the highest usage rates?
The odds against either of these things happening just by chance are so astronomical that there must be a reason for each of them. The obvious reasons are that Meres referred only to those “Shakespeare” plays which had been written and performed by then, and that the Elliott and Valenza chronology is fairly accurate. Unfortunately, neither of these options is available to Oxfordians.
So, over to you guys! Oxford wasn't Shakespeare
Peter Farey
© Peter Farey, November 2009 Emmerich Anonymous
Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years. His Marlowe Page is one of the most respected sites about Marlowe on the web. He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.
Are Oxfordians backing the wrong candidate? Click here for a fascinating analysis of how Marlowe compares with de Vere on Shakespeare authorship criteria.
Notes
1Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984.
2Elliott, Ward and Robert Valenza. "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants." Computers and the Humanities 30, 1996. pp. 191-245.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
How Did Marlowe Learn Spanish? by Isabel Gortázar
The first scene of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, such as was published in 1598, with the introduction of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, may be telling us why Shakespeare chose to inspire his Falstaff - one of his wittiest, best beloved characters - in a Kentish1 Lord accused of heresy2 and immorality,3 eventually burned at the stake by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1417. From the Knights Templar to Giordano Bruno, accusations of heresy were often accompanied by accusations of immorality; neither Sir John nor Kit Marlowe were exceptions to this rule.
Henry IV Part One (1HIV) is generally believed to have been written in 1596, and it may be relevant that also in 1596, after the death of Lord Hunsdon on July 23, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, was appointed Lord Chamberlain. The new Lord Chamberlain seems to have been no friend of the players for some unknown reason,4 but he died in March 1597 and on February 25, 1598, 1HIV - Falstaff included - was entered into the Stationer’s Register prior to publication the same year. Also in that year, Thomas Creed printed The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, an anonymous play5 that however had been licensed for publication since May 14, 1594.
Evidence points to 1586 for the date of composition of Famous Victories. We do know that Derrick, the clown character, was originally played by Richard Tarlton, the Queen’s favourite jester who died on September 3, 1588, and we also know from Tarlton’s Jests 6 that the play was performed in London some months before March 1588. The presumption that William Shakespeare was the author of 1HIV has, naturally, prevented scholars from accepting that Famous Victories could have been written by the same man; in 1586-8 William Shakespeare was nowhere on the theatrical or literary scene.
In his book The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories, Professor Seymour M. Pitcher,7 while agreeing on 1586 as the probable date of composition of the original play, argues that Kit Marlowe could not be its author because the play contains comic scenes.8 My own view of Famous Victories is that Marlowe is dropping hints like hailstones, at least in the revised version that includes Oldcastle.
The play introduces Sir John in the very first scene, line 15. Immediately the stage direction changes Oldcastle’s name to Iockey, a diminutive of John. However, there may be other reasons for this nickname. The Jockey is one of the figures in the French pack of cards that circulated in Europe from the late fifteenth century. The Jockey card, which is understood to derive from the Fool in the Tarot pack, has no value in itself but is used to suit the interest of the player. Likewise, the Oldcastle character in the revised play doesn’t seem to fill any special role that might justify its addition. As to why Marlowe would turn Sir John into Jockey Falstaff, we might find the answer in Saxo Grammaticus's Amblett9 and its offspring, Hamlet, two characters that choose the role of Fool for self-protection.
According to the opening stage direction, the action of this first scene takes place on the Eve of St John the Baptist, 1410, so seven years before Sir John was burnt at the stake. And here is an uncanny coincidence: 1586 + 7 = 1593. Needless to say, if the date of the action were meant to be a clue, it would have been added after 1593; in Stow’s Chronicles we read that “Upon the eve of St John the Baptist (1410) the King’s son (was) in Eastcheap…”10
Pitcher makes a convincing case that the character of Oldcastle was not present in the original version, and also that the play shows internal evidence of having been revised, perhaps more than once. It may be that the character of Oldcastle was introduced at the time when the play was licensed for publication in 1594, and that he was part of the new (possibly meaning “revised”), harey v mentioned in Henslowe’s Diary as being performed several times by the Admiral’s Men in 1595 and 1596.
Contrary to Stratfordian theory, the main point of the revision of Famous Victories introducing Sir John might have been to strengthen a connection between the heretic Oldcastle and the Clown Falstaff, in which case it could be the very reason for Lord Cobham’s hostility. For what it’s worth, Cobham’s son and heir, Henry Brooke, is understood to have been an enemy of the Earl of Essex.11 In any case, the Stratfordian proposal that the name of Oldcastle was changed to Falstaff to please the Brookes does not explain why in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the author gives the names of “Ford” and “Brooke” to a foolishly jealous husband.
As I have said, Sir John Oldcastle is introduced to us in scene 1:
Hen.5: But sirs, I marvel that sir John Old-castle comes not away: Sounds!
See where he comes.
(Enters Jockey).12
How now Jockey, what news with thee?
Jockey: Faith my Lord, such news as passeth! For the Towne of Deptford is risen with hue and crie after your man, which parted from us the last night and has set upon, and hath robed a poor Carrier.
Hen.5:
Sownes! The villain that was wont to spy out our booties.
Jock.
I my Lord; even the very same.
Since one contemporary anti-Lollard song referred to Sir John as “a robber,”13 these lines could be read to say that the thief who has escaped from Deptford, the villain that was wont to spy (our booties), is even the very same as Sir John.14 A parallelism is hereby created between Jockey Oldcastle and Christopher Marlowe, a heretic and a spy that had escaped from Deptford.
Immediately after this exchange, three commoners arrive on the scene, one of which is called John Cobler.15 Scenes 7 and 10 take place outside his house, and we are introduced to Mrs Cobler, a shrewish, quick-witted woman (one is tempted to surmise that her Christian name is Katherine).16 Since the Queen’s Men had been performing in Faversham in 1586, 1588 and 1591, the author may well have had recent occasion to be reminded of Mrs Cobbler’s lashing tongue.
Later, scenes 16 and 17 raise an important matter of language. In scene 16, in the battlefield in France, John Cobler and his companions are told that they must speak French if they want to save their lives. John shows his knowledge of French with the words: Commodevales, Monsieur? On another part of the battlefield, in scene 17, a French soldier who has taken Derrick prisoner calls him villiago.
These words provide us with some interesting information. It would seem that the author had either been in contact with Spaniards, perhaps in the Netherlands, at any time before he wrote this play, or these two scenes were added later.
The word Comodevales seems to be a corruption of the Spanish salutation: Como le va? (How are you doing?). The French alternative would be: Comment allez vous? The word villiago appears to be a mixed corruption of two Spanish words: bellaco and villano. Shakespeare uses villago in 2 Henry VI (IV, 8, 42), possibly written in 1591.17
Notwithstanding the fact that we are supposed to be in the battlefields of France (hence the obvious Monsieur), these verbal exchanges place the author either in Spain or in Flanders. So we must face the question as to where and when did Marlowe, or indeed young Shakespeare, hear the common salutation ¿Cómo le va? as well as the familiar bellaco. It seems that the word bellaco was a favourite insult among the Spanish soldiers in Flanders, but it would also have been used everywhere in Spain.
Here is a short digression about the historical background and relevant dates: In October/November 1585, The Earl of Leicester had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Forces in the Netherlands following a treaty signed between the Queen and Count Maurice of Nassau,18 by which the English were to provide support of troops and money to the rebels, against Spain. To guarantee this agreement, the English would have the government (and revenues) of two towns, Flushing and Brill. Sir Philip Sidney, Secretary Walsingham’s son-in-law, was appointed Governor of Flushing and Sir Thomas Cecil, eldest son of Lord Burghley, was appointed Governor of Brill.
By this treaty the Queen was actively declaring unprovoked war on Spain, allegedly in the cause of religious freedom, a freedom that was far from existing in her own country. Philip II was of course outraged, and started preparing for retaliation.
Sidney arrived in Flushing in late November, and in December Leicester travelled to The Hague. On September 22, 1586, in the Battle of Zuphten, the Spanish troops, led by Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, confronted the allied English and Dutch forces, led by the Earl of Leicester. Sir Philip Sidney was wounded and died twenty-six days later. The Earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson, was also present. Within the next four years Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham were also dead and Essex had married Sidney’s widow, Lady Frances Walsingham.
This is the (broad) historical background that brings us to 1591/2 and Marlowe’s intriguing visit to Flushing, where Robert Sidney had succeeded his brother Philip as Governor.
So, had Kit Marlowe been sent on some errand either to Flanders or to Spain, between 1586 and 1591?
One thing is clear, these pseudo-words, comparteve and villiago, must have been heard, either by him or whoever repeated them to him, as they would not have appeared in any written text.
Then, on February 26, 1592, approximately one month after Marlowe had been sent back from Flushing accused of forging English coins,19 The Lord Stranges Men gave the first performance of The Jew of Malta. It seems Kit’s command of Spanish had greatly improved by now if we are to judge by Barabas’s comments: Hermoso el placer de los dineros (“Wonderful is the pleasure of monies”)20 and: Bueno para todos mi ganado no era21 (which might be oddly translated as “My earnings were not good for everyone,” or – absurdly - “My cattle was not good for everyone”). Neither of these phrases is good Spanish, not even good sixteenth-century Spanish, particularly when you read them in the first (1633) edition of The Jew, where the abominable spelling may have been due to an unclear MS. Nevertheless, Barabas’s comments are a far cry from comodevales.
This suggests that sometime between composition of Famous Victories and 1591/2, Marlowe had been among Spaniards long enough to improve his knowledge of the language. There is also Ithamore’s preference for the Spanish wine of Rivadavia: Rivo Castiliano!,22 later claimed by Prince Hal, who quotes Ithamore when he cries: Rivo, says the drunkard! (IHIV II, 4, 109).23
While a short visit to Spain may explain the Ribadavia, had Marlowe been Arbella Stuart’s “Morley,”24“ a lengthy absence between 1586 and 1591 seems impossible. Alternatively, given the imperfect syntax of Barabas’s phrases, he may have been improving his Spanish by reading.
Sarah Gristwood,25 describing Arbella’s life at Hardwick Old Hall in the early 1590s, writes: “Here Arbella studied Hebrew and Spanish, reading Virgil and Plutarch as well as the Bible.”
And it so happens that the Bibliotheca Hispanica, by Richard Percyvall and Dr D'Oylie, was published in 1591; it contained a grammar with dictionaries in Spanish, English and Latin.26 And although that does not explain where the author of Famous Victories heard the words commodevales and villiago in 1586, it seems that by 1591 he had the necessary tools to make progress in the language.
Perhaps thanks to Bibliotheca Hispanica Marlowe was later able to read Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana Enamorada,27 the main source for The Two Gentlemen of Verona.28
Which I find reassuring; we are used to the idea that William Shakespeare obtained “the gift of tongues” directly from the Holy Ghost, but I’d rather not be tempted to imagine that Marlowe had been similarly blessed.
© Isabel Gortázar, February 2011
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
Notes
1Though born in Herefordshire, Sir John had married in 1408 the heiress of the Cobham estates, which made him one of the most important landlords in Kent.
2Sir John was a Lollard, a follower of John Wycliffe’s doctrine.
3For the controversy on Sir John’s character, see Bullough, Geoffrey. 1966. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 4, pgs. 168-171.
4Bullough. Op. cit. Vol. 4, pg 171.
5The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Containing the Honourable Batell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Majesties Players. LONDON - Printed by Thomas Creede, 1598.6Tarlton’s Jests and News Out of Purgatory. Ed. Halliwell-Phillips, pg 24.
7Pitcher, Seymour M. The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories. Alvin Redman: London, 1962.
8On the subject of Marlowe and Comedy, see Ros Barber's "Marlowe and Comedy."
9The story of Amblett occupies part of the third and fourth books of Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum (c.1185).
10Stow, John. 1580. The Chronicles of England, from Brute until this present year of Christ. pg. 573. Ref Pitcher: Op. cit. pg. 200.
11Bullough. Op.cit. Vol. 4, pg 156.
12 I.e., Oldcastle.
13Bullough; Op. cit. Vol. 4, pg 169.
14Modern editions give this line as Ay, my Lord, even the very same. I am quoting from a facsimile of the original 1598 edition.
15John Marlowe was a cobbler.
16Marlowe’s mother’s maiden name was Katherine.
17A third word, Comparteve, used by Derrick also in scene 17 has no obvious explanation.
18Count Maurice was the second living son of the assassinated (July, 1584) William the Silent, Prince of Orange.
19Robert Sidney’s letter was dated January 26, but documents from the Continent were usually dated according to the Gregorian calendar year, so Marlowe might have left Flushing on January 16.
20Jew of Malta (II, 1, 67).
21Jew of Malta (II, 1, 39).
22Jew of Malta (IV, 446): Hey, Rivo Castiliano! A man’s a man!
23Rivo is probably a reference to a white wine of Ribadavia, in Galicia, Spain, mentioned also by Cervantes. The word riva, derives from the Latin ripa, riverside.
24“One Morley” was, on and off, tutor to Arbella Stuart from approx. 1587 until September 1592. During the time that Marlowe was in Flushing, Arbella had been staying in London.
25Gristwood, Sarah. 2003. Arbella: England’s Lost Queen. Bantam: 2003, pg.120.
26Percyvall, Richard. Bibliotheca hispanica. Containing a grammar, with a dictionarie in Spanish, English, and Latine gathered out of divers good Authors: very profitable for the studious of the Spanish toong [...] Imprinted at London by John Jackson for Richard Watkins, 1591.
27Published in Valencia in 1559. Although the author was Portuguese, the text was written in Spanish. The first English translation appeared in 1598 and there was a French translation, (1578, 1587). Ref: Boullough. Op. cit. Vol. 1, pg. 206.
28Two Gentlemen of Verona, first published in 1623, is one of the plays mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598).
Henry IV Part One (1HIV) is generally believed to have been written in 1596, and it may be relevant that also in 1596, after the death of Lord Hunsdon on July 23, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, was appointed Lord Chamberlain. The new Lord Chamberlain seems to have been no friend of the players for some unknown reason,4 but he died in March 1597 and on February 25, 1598, 1HIV - Falstaff included - was entered into the Stationer’s Register prior to publication the same year. Also in that year, Thomas Creed printed The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, an anonymous play5 that however had been licensed for publication since May 14, 1594.
Evidence points to 1586 for the date of composition of Famous Victories. We do know that Derrick, the clown character, was originally played by Richard Tarlton, the Queen’s favourite jester who died on September 3, 1588, and we also know from Tarlton’s Jests 6 that the play was performed in London some months before March 1588. The presumption that William Shakespeare was the author of 1HIV has, naturally, prevented scholars from accepting that Famous Victories could have been written by the same man; in 1586-8 William Shakespeare was nowhere on the theatrical or literary scene.
In his book The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories, Professor Seymour M. Pitcher,7 while agreeing on 1586 as the probable date of composition of the original play, argues that Kit Marlowe could not be its author because the play contains comic scenes.8 My own view of Famous Victories is that Marlowe is dropping hints like hailstones, at least in the revised version that includes Oldcastle.
The play introduces Sir John in the very first scene, line 15. Immediately the stage direction changes Oldcastle’s name to Iockey, a diminutive of John. However, there may be other reasons for this nickname. The Jockey is one of the figures in the French pack of cards that circulated in Europe from the late fifteenth century. The Jockey card, which is understood to derive from the Fool in the Tarot pack, has no value in itself but is used to suit the interest of the player. Likewise, the Oldcastle character in the revised play doesn’t seem to fill any special role that might justify its addition. As to why Marlowe would turn Sir John into Jockey Falstaff, we might find the answer in Saxo Grammaticus's Amblett9 and its offspring, Hamlet, two characters that choose the role of Fool for self-protection.
According to the opening stage direction, the action of this first scene takes place on the Eve of St John the Baptist, 1410, so seven years before Sir John was burnt at the stake. And here is an uncanny coincidence: 1586 + 7 = 1593. Needless to say, if the date of the action were meant to be a clue, it would have been added after 1593; in Stow’s Chronicles we read that “Upon the eve of St John the Baptist (1410) the King’s son (was) in Eastcheap…”10
Pitcher makes a convincing case that the character of Oldcastle was not present in the original version, and also that the play shows internal evidence of having been revised, perhaps more than once. It may be that the character of Oldcastle was introduced at the time when the play was licensed for publication in 1594, and that he was part of the new (possibly meaning “revised”), harey v mentioned in Henslowe’s Diary as being performed several times by the Admiral’s Men in 1595 and 1596.
Contrary to Stratfordian theory, the main point of the revision of Famous Victories introducing Sir John might have been to strengthen a connection between the heretic Oldcastle and the Clown Falstaff, in which case it could be the very reason for Lord Cobham’s hostility. For what it’s worth, Cobham’s son and heir, Henry Brooke, is understood to have been an enemy of the Earl of Essex.11 In any case, the Stratfordian proposal that the name of Oldcastle was changed to Falstaff to please the Brookes does not explain why in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the author gives the names of “Ford” and “Brooke” to a foolishly jealous husband.
As I have said, Sir John Oldcastle is introduced to us in scene 1:
Hen.5: But sirs, I marvel that sir John Old-castle comes not away: Sounds!
See where he comes.
(Enters Jockey).12
How now Jockey, what news with thee?
Jockey: Faith my Lord, such news as passeth! For the Towne of Deptford is risen with hue and crie after your man, which parted from us the last night and has set upon, and hath robed a poor Carrier.
Hen.5:
Sownes! The villain that was wont to spy out our booties.
Jock.
I my Lord; even the very same.
Since one contemporary anti-Lollard song referred to Sir John as “a robber,”13 these lines could be read to say that the thief who has escaped from Deptford, the villain that was wont to spy (our booties), is even the very same as Sir John.14 A parallelism is hereby created between Jockey Oldcastle and Christopher Marlowe, a heretic and a spy that had escaped from Deptford.
Immediately after this exchange, three commoners arrive on the scene, one of which is called John Cobler.15 Scenes 7 and 10 take place outside his house, and we are introduced to Mrs Cobler, a shrewish, quick-witted woman (one is tempted to surmise that her Christian name is Katherine).16 Since the Queen’s Men had been performing in Faversham in 1586, 1588 and 1591, the author may well have had recent occasion to be reminded of Mrs Cobbler’s lashing tongue.
Later, scenes 16 and 17 raise an important matter of language. In scene 16, in the battlefield in France, John Cobler and his companions are told that they must speak French if they want to save their lives. John shows his knowledge of French with the words: Commodevales, Monsieur? On another part of the battlefield, in scene 17, a French soldier who has taken Derrick prisoner calls him villiago.
These words provide us with some interesting information. It would seem that the author had either been in contact with Spaniards, perhaps in the Netherlands, at any time before he wrote this play, or these two scenes were added later.
The word Comodevales seems to be a corruption of the Spanish salutation: Como le va? (How are you doing?). The French alternative would be: Comment allez vous? The word villiago appears to be a mixed corruption of two Spanish words: bellaco and villano. Shakespeare uses villago in 2 Henry VI (IV, 8, 42), possibly written in 1591.17
Notwithstanding the fact that we are supposed to be in the battlefields of France (hence the obvious Monsieur), these verbal exchanges place the author either in Spain or in Flanders. So we must face the question as to where and when did Marlowe, or indeed young Shakespeare, hear the common salutation ¿Cómo le va? as well as the familiar bellaco. It seems that the word bellaco was a favourite insult among the Spanish soldiers in Flanders, but it would also have been used everywhere in Spain.
Here is a short digression about the historical background and relevant dates: In October/November 1585, The Earl of Leicester had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Forces in the Netherlands following a treaty signed between the Queen and Count Maurice of Nassau,18 by which the English were to provide support of troops and money to the rebels, against Spain. To guarantee this agreement, the English would have the government (and revenues) of two towns, Flushing and Brill. Sir Philip Sidney, Secretary Walsingham’s son-in-law, was appointed Governor of Flushing and Sir Thomas Cecil, eldest son of Lord Burghley, was appointed Governor of Brill.
By this treaty the Queen was actively declaring unprovoked war on Spain, allegedly in the cause of religious freedom, a freedom that was far from existing in her own country. Philip II was of course outraged, and started preparing for retaliation.
Sidney arrived in Flushing in late November, and in December Leicester travelled to The Hague. On September 22, 1586, in the Battle of Zuphten, the Spanish troops, led by Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, confronted the allied English and Dutch forces, led by the Earl of Leicester. Sir Philip Sidney was wounded and died twenty-six days later. The Earl of Essex, Leicester’s stepson, was also present. Within the next four years Leicester and Sir Francis Walsingham were also dead and Essex had married Sidney’s widow, Lady Frances Walsingham.
This is the (broad) historical background that brings us to 1591/2 and Marlowe’s intriguing visit to Flushing, where Robert Sidney had succeeded his brother Philip as Governor.
So, had Kit Marlowe been sent on some errand either to Flanders or to Spain, between 1586 and 1591?
One thing is clear, these pseudo-words, comparteve and villiago, must have been heard, either by him or whoever repeated them to him, as they would not have appeared in any written text.
Then, on February 26, 1592, approximately one month after Marlowe had been sent back from Flushing accused of forging English coins,19 The Lord Stranges Men gave the first performance of The Jew of Malta. It seems Kit’s command of Spanish had greatly improved by now if we are to judge by Barabas’s comments: Hermoso el placer de los dineros (“Wonderful is the pleasure of monies”)20 and: Bueno para todos mi ganado no era21 (which might be oddly translated as “My earnings were not good for everyone,” or – absurdly - “My cattle was not good for everyone”). Neither of these phrases is good Spanish, not even good sixteenth-century Spanish, particularly when you read them in the first (1633) edition of The Jew, where the abominable spelling may have been due to an unclear MS. Nevertheless, Barabas’s comments are a far cry from comodevales.
This suggests that sometime between composition of Famous Victories and 1591/2, Marlowe had been among Spaniards long enough to improve his knowledge of the language. There is also Ithamore’s preference for the Spanish wine of Rivadavia: Rivo Castiliano!,22 later claimed by Prince Hal, who quotes Ithamore when he cries: Rivo, says the drunkard! (IHIV II, 4, 109).23
While a short visit to Spain may explain the Ribadavia, had Marlowe been Arbella Stuart’s “Morley,”24“ a lengthy absence between 1586 and 1591 seems impossible. Alternatively, given the imperfect syntax of Barabas’s phrases, he may have been improving his Spanish by reading.
Sarah Gristwood,25 describing Arbella’s life at Hardwick Old Hall in the early 1590s, writes: “Here Arbella studied Hebrew and Spanish, reading Virgil and Plutarch as well as the Bible.”
And it so happens that the Bibliotheca Hispanica, by Richard Percyvall and Dr D'Oylie, was published in 1591; it contained a grammar with dictionaries in Spanish, English and Latin.26 And although that does not explain where the author of Famous Victories heard the words commodevales and villiago in 1586, it seems that by 1591 he had the necessary tools to make progress in the language.
Perhaps thanks to Bibliotheca Hispanica Marlowe was later able to read Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana Enamorada,27 the main source for The Two Gentlemen of Verona.28
Which I find reassuring; we are used to the idea that William Shakespeare obtained “the gift of tongues” directly from the Holy Ghost, but I’d rather not be tempted to imagine that Marlowe had been similarly blessed.
© Isabel Gortázar, February 2011
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
Notes
1Though born in Herefordshire, Sir John had married in 1408 the heiress of the Cobham estates, which made him one of the most important landlords in Kent.
2Sir John was a Lollard, a follower of John Wycliffe’s doctrine.
3For the controversy on Sir John’s character, see Bullough, Geoffrey. 1966. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 4, pgs. 168-171.
4Bullough. Op. cit. Vol. 4, pg 171.
5The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Containing the Honourable Batell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Majesties Players. LONDON - Printed by Thomas Creede, 1598.6Tarlton’s Jests and News Out of Purgatory. Ed. Halliwell-Phillips, pg 24.
7Pitcher, Seymour M. The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories. Alvin Redman: London, 1962.
8On the subject of Marlowe and Comedy, see Ros Barber's "Marlowe and Comedy."
9The story of Amblett occupies part of the third and fourth books of Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum (c.1185).
10Stow, John. 1580. The Chronicles of England, from Brute until this present year of Christ. pg. 573. Ref Pitcher: Op. cit. pg. 200.
11Bullough. Op.cit. Vol. 4, pg 156.
12 I.e., Oldcastle.
13Bullough; Op. cit. Vol. 4, pg 169.
14Modern editions give this line as Ay, my Lord, even the very same. I am quoting from a facsimile of the original 1598 edition.
15John Marlowe was a cobbler.
16Marlowe’s mother’s maiden name was Katherine.
17A third word, Comparteve, used by Derrick also in scene 17 has no obvious explanation.
18Count Maurice was the second living son of the assassinated (July, 1584) William the Silent, Prince of Orange.
19Robert Sidney’s letter was dated January 26, but documents from the Continent were usually dated according to the Gregorian calendar year, so Marlowe might have left Flushing on January 16.
20Jew of Malta (II, 1, 67).
21Jew of Malta (II, 1, 39).
22Jew of Malta (IV, 446): Hey, Rivo Castiliano! A man’s a man!
23Rivo is probably a reference to a white wine of Ribadavia, in Galicia, Spain, mentioned also by Cervantes. The word riva, derives from the Latin ripa, riverside.
24“One Morley” was, on and off, tutor to Arbella Stuart from approx. 1587 until September 1592. During the time that Marlowe was in Flushing, Arbella had been staying in London.
25Gristwood, Sarah. 2003. Arbella: England’s Lost Queen. Bantam: 2003, pg.120.
26Percyvall, Richard. Bibliotheca hispanica. Containing a grammar, with a dictionarie in Spanish, English, and Latine gathered out of divers good Authors: very profitable for the studious of the Spanish toong [...] Imprinted at London by John Jackson for Richard Watkins, 1591.
27Published in Valencia in 1559. Although the author was Portuguese, the text was written in Spanish. The first English translation appeared in 1598 and there was a French translation, (1578, 1587). Ref: Boullough. Op. cit. Vol. 1, pg. 206.
28Two Gentlemen of Verona, first published in 1623, is one of the plays mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598).
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Well-Wishing Adventurer: A Personal Interpretation of the Title Page of Shake-speare's Sonnets, Part 2 by Isabel Gortázar
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609
TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
As I said in my previous chapter, Our Ever-Living Poet, I must now propose and interpretation for the second part of the Dedication: Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?
The coincidence of dates, as well as the word adventurer, makes it inevitable to consider the facts related to The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia.
This elaborate title distinguished between two types of people involved in the “Virginia Company”: Adventurers and Planters. The term Adventurers was used for the stockholders, the entrepreneurs, who rarely went to the Colony but followed the progress of their investment from London. The term Planters referred to the men who actually went to Virginia as settlers, and for this they received a share in stock. They included craftsmen, artisans and gentlemen, as well as their women and children.
As I said, the coincidence of dates in 1609 is interesting. The sonnets were entered into the Stationers' Register on May 20 (and published by Thorpe the same year).1 The Second Charter of the Virginia Company was signed by King James three days later on May 23, and the Flagship The Sea Venture2 sailed towards America ten days later, on June 2, together with eight other vessels.
A digression: The Sea Venture was wrecked in Bermuda on July 28, four days after the fleet was hit by a storm. In September 1610 a ship arrived in England bringing a detailed report written by one William Strachey, with the title: A True Reportory of the Wracke. This document, written as a private letter to an unidentified lady, was dated July 15, 1610 but was not published until 1625, so it is unlikely that anyone not connected to the Company of Adventurers (or with the lady in question) would have been able to read it. Orthodox scholars have observed the similarities between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Strachey’s document; I entirely agree that such similarities exist, in my opinion beyond reasonable doubt of simple coincidence. Moreover, I think that another report (anonymous), published by the company in 1610, also found its way into the play. However, this is matter for another essay.
But how could all this transoceanic business have anything to do with Shake-speares Sonnets? In any case, if the well-wishing adventurer were connected with this particular “venture," he would be someone who had shares in the company, not necessarily someone who was setting forth on his way to America.
So, who WISHETH what to whom? As T.T. is the author of the Dedication, he should be the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth; also, the Dedication is unambiguously addressed to Mr WH. Therefore, leaving aside elaborate conjectures as to possible hidden meanings, and considering only the syntactic/grammatical point of view, it seems that Thomas Thorpe is the adventurer who wisheth all those nice things to Mr WH. Thus:
THE. WELL.WISHING.ADVENTURER, THOMAS THORPE,
(IN. SETTING. FORTH.)
WISHETH TO. Mr W.H.
(THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.)
ALL. HAPPINESS.AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED. BY. OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
Perhaps the way to understand the second part of Thorpe’s Dedication is to simply set our minds back to 1609: The Virginia Company, with its jargon of adventurers and planters, would probably have been the talk of the town for months, so that the word adventurer could have become the trendy adjective to be applied familiarly to anyone embarking (no pun intended) in a (daring) commercial enterprise.
If Pembroke’s reaction was such as may perhaps be inferred by the withdrawal of the volume,3 it is possible that Thorpe saw the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets as a daring adventure. The reference to an adventurer, meaning an investor or an entrepreneur, such as a publisher, may have been clear to Thorpe’s contemporaries if not to us.
In his letter to Blount, on the publication of Marlowe’s Lucan, in 1600, Thorpe already used a convoluted, sarcastic and somewhat cryptic language to complain about the negative behaviour of some prospective patrons. It seems that Thorpe had been expecting one of Blount’s former patrons (in the circle of your Patronage), to take an interest in Marlowe’s work (the First Book of Lucan in this case). As books in those days were dedicated to aristocrats, I think we may assume that such was Thorpe’s intention, as his letter to Blount indicates; it also suggests that his eventual decision to dedicate the volume to Blount was due to the evasive and discourteous behaviour of one or more of such patrons.
Whether Thorpe’s letter is referring to Southampton, Pembroke or Thomas Walsingham, we will probably never know. But what we might infer from its content is that by 1600, the year the Lucan was published, Marlowe’s name had become too embarrassing socially and/or too dangerous politically, so that his former friends among the nobility may have been wishing to distance themselves from it as much as possible.
Which raises the question as to whether perhaps the use of the hyphenated name for Shakespeare happened to be in some way indicative of the changing value of Marlowe-shares, or Marlowe-prospects, over the years.
If this were the case, we might wish to consider the fact that although some printers, such as Valentine Simmes and Richard Field, and some publishers, such as Edward Blount and Matthew Law, were more or less consistent in the form they spelt the name, there seems to be no repetitive pattern in the choice of any one form of spelling which might be attributed to simple inertia or automatic repetition on the part of printers and/or publishers.
A sort of pattern emerges, however, when we consider the dates.4 During 1598/1599, when the name of Shakespeare appears in the plays for the first time, the hyphenated form is used in about half of the non-anonymous Shakespeare Quartos published in those two years. The percentage drops to zero for the thirteen Quartos of plays published between 1600 and 1602; not a hyphen in sight, except for the poem, The Turtle and the Phoenix, printed by Richard Field for Edward Blount in 1601. Within those years, the disgrace and execution of the Earl of Essex would have left Marlowe lost in the continent, without a patron and without a job; so what did he do to survive, and was it something so questionable that his London friends turned their backs on him?
The percentage in the hyphenation goes back to an approximate 50% between 1603 (so after the Queen’s death) and 1607, and, in 1608 it raises to an unprecedented 100% for the three Quartos published that year, including 1Q King Lear. Then, in 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets was the only volume to appear with the hyphenated name against 1Q Pericles and 1Q Troilus and Cressida, which bore the full name, plus an anonymous 3Q Romeo and Juliet.5
Does this basic schedule for the use of the hyphenated name tell us anything? I honestly don’t know, but the figures I have just quoted may give us food for thought. (A proper analysis of a hypothetical, date-based pattern would exceed the scope of this essay.)
So let’s go back to the sonnets. By the expression the well-wishing adventurer, Thorpe might be referring both to his own adventure in publishing a book of sonnets by Marlowe (that EVER LIVING POET combined with the name Shake-speare was a give-away), and to the Adventurers in the Virginia Company, the list of whom was headed by the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke (whose initials, by the way, happen to be HW and WH, respectively).
But leaving aside all the uncanny coincidences, if the Mr WH of the seventeen sonnets was William Herbert after all, Thorpe’s good wishes were perhaps no less appropriate for being cryptically worded. And if the publisher had already been offended nine years earlier by the evasive and impolite treatment of some of Marlowe’s former patrons, that may have tempted him to write his equivocal Dedication to one of them.
So let me re-interpret:
TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING (seventeen) SONNETS: Mr WH. (Master William Herbert)
ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT ETERNITIE (immortality)
PROMISED (to Master William Herbert, in the said sonnets)
BY OVR EVER LIVING POET (Christopher Marlowe).
WISHETH THE WELL WISHING ADVENTURER (Thomas Thorpe), IN SETTING FORTH (launching this book).
© Isabel Gortázar, January 2011
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
1I cannot seriously consider the date, May 20 - the date of Marlowe's arrest - to be anything but an uncanny coincidence.
2A colleague has argued that Marlowe went to America in The Sea Venture. See: Gamble, C. Shake-speare’s Voyage to America. (Capella Archive, 2006).
3Shortly after publication, Thorpe’s volume disappeared from circulation; in 1640 one John Benson used all but eight of the sonnets as the basis for a badly compiled book called Poems: Written by Will Shake-speare. Gent., which included poems by other people. Thorpe’s Quarto texts were not properly published again until 1709. Ref: Booth, Stephen: Shake-speare’s Sonnets (Yale NB, 2000).
4I wish to thank Ros Barber for sharing with me her detailed chart, in reference to the publication of Shakespeare’s Quartos and Octavos. 5Printed by John Windet for John Smithewick. As an example of the apparent randomness in the publishing pattern: In 1622, two Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, both printed by William Standby also for John Smethwicke, appeared, one anonymous, the other with the author’s name hyphenated.Emmerich Rylance Anonymous Shakespeare
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609
TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
As I said in my previous chapter, Our Ever-Living Poet, I must now propose and interpretation for the second part of the Dedication: Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?
The coincidence of dates, as well as the word adventurer, makes it inevitable to consider the facts related to The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia.
This elaborate title distinguished between two types of people involved in the “Virginia Company”: Adventurers and Planters. The term Adventurers was used for the stockholders, the entrepreneurs, who rarely went to the Colony but followed the progress of their investment from London. The term Planters referred to the men who actually went to Virginia as settlers, and for this they received a share in stock. They included craftsmen, artisans and gentlemen, as well as their women and children.
As I said, the coincidence of dates in 1609 is interesting. The sonnets were entered into the Stationers' Register on May 20 (and published by Thorpe the same year).1 The Second Charter of the Virginia Company was signed by King James three days later on May 23, and the Flagship The Sea Venture2 sailed towards America ten days later, on June 2, together with eight other vessels.
A digression: The Sea Venture was wrecked in Bermuda on July 28, four days after the fleet was hit by a storm. In September 1610 a ship arrived in England bringing a detailed report written by one William Strachey, with the title: A True Reportory of the Wracke. This document, written as a private letter to an unidentified lady, was dated July 15, 1610 but was not published until 1625, so it is unlikely that anyone not connected to the Company of Adventurers (or with the lady in question) would have been able to read it. Orthodox scholars have observed the similarities between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Strachey’s document; I entirely agree that such similarities exist, in my opinion beyond reasonable doubt of simple coincidence. Moreover, I think that another report (anonymous), published by the company in 1610, also found its way into the play. However, this is matter for another essay.
But how could all this transoceanic business have anything to do with Shake-speares Sonnets? In any case, if the well-wishing adventurer were connected with this particular “venture," he would be someone who had shares in the company, not necessarily someone who was setting forth on his way to America.
So, who WISHETH what to whom? As T.T. is the author of the Dedication, he should be the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth; also, the Dedication is unambiguously addressed to Mr WH. Therefore, leaving aside elaborate conjectures as to possible hidden meanings, and considering only the syntactic/grammatical point of view, it seems that Thomas Thorpe is the adventurer who wisheth all those nice things to Mr WH. Thus:
THE. WELL.WISHING.ADVENTURER, THOMAS THORPE,
(IN. SETTING. FORTH.)
WISHETH TO. Mr W.H.
(THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.)
ALL. HAPPINESS.AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED. BY. OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
Perhaps the way to understand the second part of Thorpe’s Dedication is to simply set our minds back to 1609: The Virginia Company, with its jargon of adventurers and planters, would probably have been the talk of the town for months, so that the word adventurer could have become the trendy adjective to be applied familiarly to anyone embarking (no pun intended) in a (daring) commercial enterprise.
If Pembroke’s reaction was such as may perhaps be inferred by the withdrawal of the volume,3 it is possible that Thorpe saw the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets as a daring adventure. The reference to an adventurer, meaning an investor or an entrepreneur, such as a publisher, may have been clear to Thorpe’s contemporaries if not to us.
In his letter to Blount, on the publication of Marlowe’s Lucan, in 1600, Thorpe already used a convoluted, sarcastic and somewhat cryptic language to complain about the negative behaviour of some prospective patrons. It seems that Thorpe had been expecting one of Blount’s former patrons (in the circle of your Patronage), to take an interest in Marlowe’s work (the First Book of Lucan in this case). As books in those days were dedicated to aristocrats, I think we may assume that such was Thorpe’s intention, as his letter to Blount indicates; it also suggests that his eventual decision to dedicate the volume to Blount was due to the evasive and discourteous behaviour of one or more of such patrons.
Whether Thorpe’s letter is referring to Southampton, Pembroke or Thomas Walsingham, we will probably never know. But what we might infer from its content is that by 1600, the year the Lucan was published, Marlowe’s name had become too embarrassing socially and/or too dangerous politically, so that his former friends among the nobility may have been wishing to distance themselves from it as much as possible.
Which raises the question as to whether perhaps the use of the hyphenated name for Shakespeare happened to be in some way indicative of the changing value of Marlowe-shares, or Marlowe-prospects, over the years.
If this were the case, we might wish to consider the fact that although some printers, such as Valentine Simmes and Richard Field, and some publishers, such as Edward Blount and Matthew Law, were more or less consistent in the form they spelt the name, there seems to be no repetitive pattern in the choice of any one form of spelling which might be attributed to simple inertia or automatic repetition on the part of printers and/or publishers.
A sort of pattern emerges, however, when we consider the dates.4 During 1598/1599, when the name of Shakespeare appears in the plays for the first time, the hyphenated form is used in about half of the non-anonymous Shakespeare Quartos published in those two years. The percentage drops to zero for the thirteen Quartos of plays published between 1600 and 1602; not a hyphen in sight, except for the poem, The Turtle and the Phoenix, printed by Richard Field for Edward Blount in 1601. Within those years, the disgrace and execution of the Earl of Essex would have left Marlowe lost in the continent, without a patron and without a job; so what did he do to survive, and was it something so questionable that his London friends turned their backs on him?
The percentage in the hyphenation goes back to an approximate 50% between 1603 (so after the Queen’s death) and 1607, and, in 1608 it raises to an unprecedented 100% for the three Quartos published that year, including 1Q King Lear. Then, in 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets was the only volume to appear with the hyphenated name against 1Q Pericles and 1Q Troilus and Cressida, which bore the full name, plus an anonymous 3Q Romeo and Juliet.5
Does this basic schedule for the use of the hyphenated name tell us anything? I honestly don’t know, but the figures I have just quoted may give us food for thought. (A proper analysis of a hypothetical, date-based pattern would exceed the scope of this essay.)
So let’s go back to the sonnets. By the expression the well-wishing adventurer, Thorpe might be referring both to his own adventure in publishing a book of sonnets by Marlowe (that EVER LIVING POET combined with the name Shake-speare was a give-away), and to the Adventurers in the Virginia Company, the list of whom was headed by the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke (whose initials, by the way, happen to be HW and WH, respectively).
But leaving aside all the uncanny coincidences, if the Mr WH of the seventeen sonnets was William Herbert after all, Thorpe’s good wishes were perhaps no less appropriate for being cryptically worded. And if the publisher had already been offended nine years earlier by the evasive and impolite treatment of some of Marlowe’s former patrons, that may have tempted him to write his equivocal Dedication to one of them.
So let me re-interpret:
TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING (seventeen) SONNETS: Mr WH. (Master William Herbert)
ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT ETERNITIE (immortality)
PROMISED (to Master William Herbert, in the said sonnets)
BY OVR EVER LIVING POET (Christopher Marlowe).
WISHETH THE WELL WISHING ADVENTURER (Thomas Thorpe), IN SETTING FORTH (launching this book).
© Isabel Gortázar, January 2011
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
1I cannot seriously consider the date, May 20 - the date of Marlowe's arrest - to be anything but an uncanny coincidence.
2A colleague has argued that Marlowe went to America in The Sea Venture. See: Gamble, C. Shake-speare’s Voyage to America. (Capella Archive, 2006).
3Shortly after publication, Thorpe’s volume disappeared from circulation; in 1640 one John Benson used all but eight of the sonnets as the basis for a badly compiled book called Poems: Written by Will Shake-speare. Gent., which included poems by other people. Thorpe’s Quarto texts were not properly published again until 1709. Ref: Booth, Stephen: Shake-speare’s Sonnets (Yale NB, 2000).
4I wish to thank Ros Barber for sharing with me her detailed chart, in reference to the publication of Shakespeare’s Quartos and Octavos. 5Printed by John Windet for John Smithewick. As an example of the apparent randomness in the publishing pattern: In 1622, two Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, both printed by William Standby also for John Smethwicke, appeared, one anonymous, the other with the author’s name hyphenated.Emmerich Rylance Anonymous Shakespeare
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Was Marlowe Shakespeare? Ros Barber Interviewed
Ros Barber is the first person in the world to complete a PhD in Marlovian authorship theory. Her PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her first degree was in Biological Sciences. A founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, she has published articles challenging the orthodox biography of Marlowe in academic books and journals, including the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Her essay "Was Marlowe a Violent Man?," which was presented at the Marlowe Society of America conference in 2008, is featured in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). A published poet, her latest poetry collection, Material (Anvil 2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was funded by Arts Council England.
Click here for Ros's exclusive article for MSC, "Stanley Wells and the Cobbe Portrait," one of this blog's most popular posts.
Order Ros's debut novel today!
"It’s enough to strike despair into the heart of James Shapiro, author of Contested Will, as well as the hearts of all the other Shakespeare experts who refute the so-called 'authorship controversy'." (Financial Times)
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.THE MARLOWE PAPERS
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Our Ever-Living Poet: A Personal Interpretation of the Title Page of Shake-speare's Sonnets by Isabel Gortázar
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609
TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
It seems presumptuous to propose yet another interpretation to this Dedication, as T.T. (presumably the publisher Thomas Thorpe), seems decided to thwart our attempts. For reasons that we may try to guess, Thorpe created this riddle, which must however have a solution, if only we can find it.
Starting with the title: SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: As we know, the book contains a series of 154 sonnets which, according to this title, had been written by somebody calling himself SHAKE-SPEARE. Academia has therefore concluded that the author was William Shakespeare of Stratford.
However, the Dedication (1609), says the sonnets were written by OUR.EVER.LIVING.POET. An ever-living poet is meant to be a dead poet and William Shakespeare did not die until 1616; therefore, this SHAKE-SPEARE must be another Shakespeare. The use of the hyphenated name also suggests a pseudonym, which means we need to find a famous poet, dead, but ever-living (because famous), who may have used the alias of SHAKE-SPEARE, and who therefore has at least a reasonable chance of being also the author of other works published under the same hyphenated name: for example, six out of the nine Quartos, including King Lear, published between 1603 and 1608, and later attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.
Luckily, my candidate, Christopher Marlowe, could be said to be “ever- living," as he was officially dead and famous, and nevertheless (in my opinion) still alive in 1609. Since I personally believe many of the sonnets point directly at Marlowe’s predicament in, and after, 1593, I am persuaded that the EVER.LIVING.POET, Christopher Marlowe alias SHAKE-SPEAR, was the author of the sonnets (as well as the 36 plays in the First Folio).
In his dedication Thomas Thorpe appears to be doing two things: a) Dedicating the sonnets to “the only begetter” Mr WH; and b) Wishing the best of luck to some adventurer on his setting forth. I shall deal with a) here, and leave b) for another day.
So, who is Mr W.H. and what does Thorpe mean by calling him “the only begetter”?
In theory, the “begetter,” Mr WH, should be the author of these sonnets, but in this case the author already has an alias: Shake-speare. It would have been perverse on the part of Thomas Thorpe to give two different aliases to the poet in the same book. So we must look for another possible meaning for the word “begetter.” The OED gives us “Begetter: 4 (fig and transit): To call into being." So not necessarily the author, nor the inspirer, but someone so essential to bring about the act of creation, that the author is bound to recognize this person as the only/real originator of such act.
The rhetorical device of adding the word only emphasizes this. If Thorpe had been referring to the author he could have said so: To the author; but no, he uses the ambiguous word begetter and emphasizes its ambiguity by adding a rhetorical only. The idea that this only has something to do with the sonnets being all by the same hand is not convincing. The begetter of all these sonnets might have been the author, but the only begetter is the person who caused the sonnets to exist; he is the only reason why the sonnets were written at all.
Shakespeare uses this rhetorical device in Henry V (IV, 8):
King Henry:
Come, go we in procession to the village.
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take the praise from God
Which is his only.
According to this, King Henry obtained the victory at Agincourt, but only God caused the victory to happen. God was, therefore, the only begetter of the victory, and all praise was due to him.
So, Mr W.H is someone inextricably connected with the creation of the sonnets, and his identity is being masked, probably on purpose. Apparently Mr W.H does not wish to be identified either with the sonnets, or with the ever-living poet, which may be understandable if the poet was the embarrassingly ever-living, Christopher Marlowe.
And here we come up against the fact that the 154 sonnets are definitely not all dedicated to, or written for, the same person. There is no way we can defend the possibility that Mr W.H is the Dark Lady, for example. But what about the redundant word INSVING? Why did Thorpe not write simply: TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS?
Agreed, all 154 sonnets are in a way ensuing, but the word is redundant, so I propose that the unnecessary word INSVING means that the sonnets dedicated to Mr WH are only the first seventeen sonnets, those immediately ensuing the dedication page, all seventeen of which clearly constitute an item, or “collection,” in themselves. (OED: To ensue, 4, intr: to be immediately subsequent, etc.1485). The word ensuing is the origin of the expression en-suite, implying immediacy.
So, Mr WH could be the only begetter of the ensuing first seventeen sonnets, perhaps because it was on account of Mr WH that the sonnets were written at all. These first seventeen sonnets are dedicated to a young man, encouraging him to marry and beget children; it has been suggested that the occasion was the said young man’s seventeenth birthday.
There are two favourite candidates for the role, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Southampton was already an earl on his seventeenth birthday, in 1590, so that calling him Mr W.H, even at that time, would be impertinent and incorrect. Also, had the sonnets been written by Marlowe in 1590, Thorpe could not have published them in 1609 under the name of Shake-speare without spilling a lot of beans.
Whereas, William Herbert was seventeen in 1597, before he had succeeded to the earldom, so he was at that time plain Mr W.H. As it happens, in 1597, William Herbert had entered in negotiations with Lord Burghley to marry Bridget De Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter and the Earl of Oxford’s second daughter. The negotiations were unsuccessful, as Herbert seems to have demanded that the full dowry be paid in advance. Although Lord Burghley was trying to marry his granddaughters into the aristocracy, it seems that Herbert made excessive difficulties and the marriage did not take place.
Focusing on William Herbert as Mr WH, let us imagine that in 1597, Marlowe (perhaps prompted by the boy’s mother, Mary Sidney) wrote those seventeen sonnets to William, encouraging him to marry Bridget De Vere. The boy was the reason why the sonnets were written. The event of his seventeenth birthday “called the sonnets into being”; had it not been for this anniversary, the sonnets would not have been written.
So maybe, in 1597, the author dedicated the seventeen sonnets to William Herbert with the words:
TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS: Mr W.H. ALL HAPPINESS AND ETERNITIE.
The sonnets insistently advise the youth to marry and beget children in order to obtain happiness and “eternity” (immortality); thus, Mr WH would be immortalized both in the poet’s rhyme and in the life of his descendants:
“But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.” (Sonnet 17)
Another indication that this may be the case is the reference that Francis Meres makes in his pedantic Palladis Tamia 1, published in 1598 (so within a year after William Herbert’s birthday on April 8, 1597). In his work, Meres refers to Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets.” Now, it would be difficult to think of the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets as “sugared.” In those 154 sonnets we find lines of love, envy, despair, regret, disappointment, etc.; in other words, Shake-speare's sonnets encompass the whole gamut of human emotions.
Whereas the first seventeen sonnets could well be described as “sugared.” The author is writing them for a young man of whom he is obviously fond, to be read during a private party, probably a family gathering, on occasion of his birthday and in reference to the marriage prospects about which he is making such difficulties. This seems to be confirmed by Meres’s clarification: his sugared sonnets among his private friends. Indeed, if the sonnets were NEVER BEFORE IMPRINTED, a private reading, possibly at Wilton House, in April of the previous year, was the only chance for anyone like Meres to have been acquainted with their “sugared” contents.
Eventually, Herbert seems to have rejected the sonnets as well as the proposed bride, so perhaps Marlowe left the batch (possibly with its dedication) either to Thorpe or to Edward Blount (or to Mary Sidney), who waited for the first opportunity to publish them.
Obviously, if a powerful man like Pembroke did not wish to be connected with the sonnets, Thorpe had to make his identification difficult (but eventually not impossible), and, just as the best place to hide a man is in a multitude, the best place to “hide” seventeen sonnets is among over one hundred sonnets dedicated to various people.
Pembroke must have been furious when the sonnets were published, especially because I suspect there are several, later, sonnets dedicated to the same man.2
Thorpe’s book seems to have disappeared shortly after publication. Daryl Pinksen quotes3 Kenneth Muir (1979) on this subject: “But as very few copies are extant, it seems possible that the volume was suppressed; (…) the publisher would not have withdrawn a profitable volume because of complaints from the author, but he would doubtless have succumbed to pressure from a member of the aristocracy.”
And now I would need to tie this first part of the Dedication to the second. Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?
With the reader’s permission I will deal, as I said, with this second part in a separate instalment.
© Isabel Gortázar, December 2010
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
1Meres, Francis. 1598. Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury.
2See Gortázar, Isabel: Tamburlaine's Sonnets
3Pinksen, Daryl. 2008. Marlowe's Ghost. p. 202.
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609
TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
It seems presumptuous to propose yet another interpretation to this Dedication, as T.T. (presumably the publisher Thomas Thorpe), seems decided to thwart our attempts. For reasons that we may try to guess, Thorpe created this riddle, which must however have a solution, if only we can find it.
Starting with the title: SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: As we know, the book contains a series of 154 sonnets which, according to this title, had been written by somebody calling himself SHAKE-SPEARE. Academia has therefore concluded that the author was William Shakespeare of Stratford.
However, the Dedication (1609), says the sonnets were written by OUR.EVER.LIVING.POET. An ever-living poet is meant to be a dead poet and William Shakespeare did not die until 1616; therefore, this SHAKE-SPEARE must be another Shakespeare. The use of the hyphenated name also suggests a pseudonym, which means we need to find a famous poet, dead, but ever-living (because famous), who may have used the alias of SHAKE-SPEARE, and who therefore has at least a reasonable chance of being also the author of other works published under the same hyphenated name: for example, six out of the nine Quartos, including King Lear, published between 1603 and 1608, and later attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.
Luckily, my candidate, Christopher Marlowe, could be said to be “ever- living," as he was officially dead and famous, and nevertheless (in my opinion) still alive in 1609. Since I personally believe many of the sonnets point directly at Marlowe’s predicament in, and after, 1593, I am persuaded that the EVER.LIVING.POET, Christopher Marlowe alias SHAKE-SPEAR, was the author of the sonnets (as well as the 36 plays in the First Folio).
In his dedication Thomas Thorpe appears to be doing two things: a) Dedicating the sonnets to “the only begetter” Mr WH; and b) Wishing the best of luck to some adventurer on his setting forth. I shall deal with a) here, and leave b) for another day.
So, who is Mr W.H. and what does Thorpe mean by calling him “the only begetter”?
In theory, the “begetter,” Mr WH, should be the author of these sonnets, but in this case the author already has an alias: Shake-speare. It would have been perverse on the part of Thomas Thorpe to give two different aliases to the poet in the same book. So we must look for another possible meaning for the word “begetter.” The OED gives us “Begetter: 4 (fig and transit): To call into being." So not necessarily the author, nor the inspirer, but someone so essential to bring about the act of creation, that the author is bound to recognize this person as the only/real originator of such act.
The rhetorical device of adding the word only emphasizes this. If Thorpe had been referring to the author he could have said so: To the author; but no, he uses the ambiguous word begetter and emphasizes its ambiguity by adding a rhetorical only. The idea that this only has something to do with the sonnets being all by the same hand is not convincing. The begetter of all these sonnets might have been the author, but the only begetter is the person who caused the sonnets to exist; he is the only reason why the sonnets were written at all.
Shakespeare uses this rhetorical device in Henry V (IV, 8):
King Henry:
Come, go we in procession to the village.
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take the praise from God
Which is his only.
According to this, King Henry obtained the victory at Agincourt, but only God caused the victory to happen. God was, therefore, the only begetter of the victory, and all praise was due to him.
So, Mr W.H is someone inextricably connected with the creation of the sonnets, and his identity is being masked, probably on purpose. Apparently Mr W.H does not wish to be identified either with the sonnets, or with the ever-living poet, which may be understandable if the poet was the embarrassingly ever-living, Christopher Marlowe.
And here we come up against the fact that the 154 sonnets are definitely not all dedicated to, or written for, the same person. There is no way we can defend the possibility that Mr W.H is the Dark Lady, for example. But what about the redundant word INSVING? Why did Thorpe not write simply: TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS?
Agreed, all 154 sonnets are in a way ensuing, but the word is redundant, so I propose that the unnecessary word INSVING means that the sonnets dedicated to Mr WH are only the first seventeen sonnets, those immediately ensuing the dedication page, all seventeen of which clearly constitute an item, or “collection,” in themselves. (OED: To ensue, 4, intr: to be immediately subsequent, etc.1485). The word ensuing is the origin of the expression en-suite, implying immediacy.
So, Mr WH could be the only begetter of the ensuing first seventeen sonnets, perhaps because it was on account of Mr WH that the sonnets were written at all. These first seventeen sonnets are dedicated to a young man, encouraging him to marry and beget children; it has been suggested that the occasion was the said young man’s seventeenth birthday.
There are two favourite candidates for the role, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Southampton was already an earl on his seventeenth birthday, in 1590, so that calling him Mr W.H, even at that time, would be impertinent and incorrect. Also, had the sonnets been written by Marlowe in 1590, Thorpe could not have published them in 1609 under the name of Shake-speare without spilling a lot of beans.
Whereas, William Herbert was seventeen in 1597, before he had succeeded to the earldom, so he was at that time plain Mr W.H. As it happens, in 1597, William Herbert had entered in negotiations with Lord Burghley to marry Bridget De Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter and the Earl of Oxford’s second daughter. The negotiations were unsuccessful, as Herbert seems to have demanded that the full dowry be paid in advance. Although Lord Burghley was trying to marry his granddaughters into the aristocracy, it seems that Herbert made excessive difficulties and the marriage did not take place.
Focusing on William Herbert as Mr WH, let us imagine that in 1597, Marlowe (perhaps prompted by the boy’s mother, Mary Sidney) wrote those seventeen sonnets to William, encouraging him to marry Bridget De Vere. The boy was the reason why the sonnets were written. The event of his seventeenth birthday “called the sonnets into being”; had it not been for this anniversary, the sonnets would not have been written.
So maybe, in 1597, the author dedicated the seventeen sonnets to William Herbert with the words:
TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS: Mr W.H. ALL HAPPINESS AND ETERNITIE.
The sonnets insistently advise the youth to marry and beget children in order to obtain happiness and “eternity” (immortality); thus, Mr WH would be immortalized both in the poet’s rhyme and in the life of his descendants:
“But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.” (Sonnet 17)
Another indication that this may be the case is the reference that Francis Meres makes in his pedantic Palladis Tamia 1, published in 1598 (so within a year after William Herbert’s birthday on April 8, 1597). In his work, Meres refers to Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets.” Now, it would be difficult to think of the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets as “sugared.” In those 154 sonnets we find lines of love, envy, despair, regret, disappointment, etc.; in other words, Shake-speare's sonnets encompass the whole gamut of human emotions.
Whereas the first seventeen sonnets could well be described as “sugared.” The author is writing them for a young man of whom he is obviously fond, to be read during a private party, probably a family gathering, on occasion of his birthday and in reference to the marriage prospects about which he is making such difficulties. This seems to be confirmed by Meres’s clarification: his sugared sonnets among his private friends. Indeed, if the sonnets were NEVER BEFORE IMPRINTED, a private reading, possibly at Wilton House, in April of the previous year, was the only chance for anyone like Meres to have been acquainted with their “sugared” contents.
Eventually, Herbert seems to have rejected the sonnets as well as the proposed bride, so perhaps Marlowe left the batch (possibly with its dedication) either to Thorpe or to Edward Blount (or to Mary Sidney), who waited for the first opportunity to publish them.
Obviously, if a powerful man like Pembroke did not wish to be connected with the sonnets, Thorpe had to make his identification difficult (but eventually not impossible), and, just as the best place to hide a man is in a multitude, the best place to “hide” seventeen sonnets is among over one hundred sonnets dedicated to various people.
Pembroke must have been furious when the sonnets were published, especially because I suspect there are several, later, sonnets dedicated to the same man.2
Thorpe’s book seems to have disappeared shortly after publication. Daryl Pinksen quotes3 Kenneth Muir (1979) on this subject: “But as very few copies are extant, it seems possible that the volume was suppressed; (…) the publisher would not have withdrawn a profitable volume because of complaints from the author, but he would doubtless have succumbed to pressure from a member of the aristocracy.”
And now I would need to tie this first part of the Dedication to the second. Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?
With the reader’s permission I will deal, as I said, with this second part in a separate instalment.
© Isabel Gortázar, December 2010
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
1Meres, Francis. 1598. Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury.
2See Gortázar, Isabel: Tamburlaine's Sonnets
3Pinksen, Daryl. 2008. Marlowe's Ghost. p. 202.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Worth Repeating: Shakespeare, Businessman...
Click here for Anthony Kellett's "William Shakespeare, Businessman - Forgotten Genius," one of this blog's most popular posts (and which has generated/provoked many reader comments).
Monday, December 20, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Donna Murphy Wins Hoffman Prize
Congratulations to Donna N. Murphy for co-winning the 2010 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe. She is only the third person to do so for a work which supports the view that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare (the others being Peter Farey and Michael Rubbo). Her entry, “Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of Early English Anonymous Plays,” attempts to provide some evidence for the authorship of certain anonymous Elizabethan plays. Donna explains that her analysis "employs a new technique involving Matches and Near Matches."
Matches are word juxtapositions occurring no more than once elsewhere within forty years of the works in question in the searchable Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, while Near Matches are those occurring no more than fifteen other times within EEBO’s over 20,000 records. (For an example of how she elsewhere employed EEBO to ascertain authorship, see Donna N. Murphy, “The Cobbler of Canterbury and Robert Greene,” Notes & Queries 57 {2010}: 349-52). She is particularly intrigued by Matches that seem to occur at the subconscious level. For example:
Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage:
Not only do these two plays share the only occurrences in EEBO of “Ston*” within ten words of “beat* forth,” they additionally juxtapose “soul*” plus “and make*.” The passages share a deep connection, yet do not appear to be one man imitating another.
Despite winning the Prize, Donna has no immediate plans to publish her essay. Rather she sees it as a work in progress. "I hope to publish some of my findings in the next few years," she explains, "but not until I've undertaken further linguistic investigation of Thomas Nashe."
Click here for Donna's article "Could the Earl of Oxford Have Written the Works of Shakespeare?," which first appeared on this blog in November 2009. Emmerich Anonymous
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.
Matches are word juxtapositions occurring no more than once elsewhere within forty years of the works in question in the searchable Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, while Near Matches are those occurring no more than fifteen other times within EEBO’s over 20,000 records. (For an example of how she elsewhere employed EEBO to ascertain authorship, see Donna N. Murphy, “The Cobbler of Canterbury and Robert Greene,” Notes & Queries 57 {2010}: 349-52). She is particularly intrigued by Matches that seem to occur at the subconscious level. For example:
Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage:
A woeful tale bids Dido to unfold,Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 1594 Quarto:
Whose memory, like pale death’s stony mace,
Beats forth my senses from this troubled soul,
And makes Aeneas sink at Dido’s feet. (II.i.114-7)
The poor remainder of AndroniciThe First Folio version of Titus replaces “souls” with “brains” (V.iii.131-4)
Will, hand in hand, all headlong cast us down,
And on the ragged stones beat forth our soules,
And make a mutuall closure of our house. (K3v-K4r)
Not only do these two plays share the only occurrences in EEBO of “Ston*” within ten words of “beat* forth,” they additionally juxtapose “soul*” plus “and make*.” The passages share a deep connection, yet do not appear to be one man imitating another.
Despite winning the Prize, Donna has no immediate plans to publish her essay. Rather she sees it as a work in progress. "I hope to publish some of my findings in the next few years," she explains, "but not until I've undertaken further linguistic investigation of Thomas Nashe."
Click here for Donna's article "Could the Earl of Oxford Have Written the Works of Shakespeare?," which first appeared on this blog in November 2009. Emmerich Anonymous
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Allusion or Illusion? William Covell's Gaveston by Ros Barber
A Shakespeare allusion containing what has widely been considered an error, if read as correct, suggests that a Cambridge University contemporary of Christopher Marlowe understood "William Shakespeare" to be Marlowe’s pseudonym.A belief is a perceptual framework. The nature of human neurology is such that our perceptions are filtered through our beliefs, and where we meet data which conflicts with a strongly held belief we will either not register the existence of the anomalous data at all, or will consider it to be an error and discard it as insignificant.
An experiment by Bruner and Postman in 1949 demonstrated that subjects exposed to a pack of playing cards that included anomalous cards (a black four of hearts, for example) repeatedly failed to identify any problems with the pack. Only with longer and repeated exposures did certain individuals begin to register the anomalous cards, and even then, they often couldn’t identify what exactly was wrong with them. Some did not register the anomalies no matter how long or how often they were exposed to them.1
It is important to our general functioning in the world that we keep our perceptual frameworks fairly rigid; thus even when the brain does identify a piece of data as anomalous, we tend to simply explain it away as an error or fluke. Fugelsang, Stein, Green and Dunbar, studying scientists at work in their laboratories, discovered that in over half of the scientific experiments they studied, the results were inconsistent with the scientists’ predictions, and that scientists were reluctant to consider that data as "real."2 The surprising finding was usually classified as a mistake: "perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale."3 "The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn’t understand," said Kevin Dunbar, one of the neuroscientists involved. "It’s as if they didn’t want to believe it." Even after scientists had produced the anomaly consistently, they would often choose not to follow it up. The research of Fuselang, Dunbar and others demonstrates that despite their discipline’s reputation for impartiality, scientists are not immune from confirmation bias: the human tendency to seek out and give attention to data consistent with one’s initial theory.
Confirmation bias is probably the greatest danger to those of us with an interest in the Shakespeare authorship question. Non-Stratfordians are accused of it more than most – and often quite rightly – but as you would expect of a basic function of human neurology, it affects orthodox Shakespeareans too. Indeed, I would contend it is the orthodox scholars’ lack of engagement with significant quantities of anomalous data – that is, data inconsistent with the orthodox theory of authorship – that spawned the authorship question in the first place. Here, I will look at just one of the numerous anomalies that are no longer anomalous when viewed from a Marlovian perspective.
One of the earliest allusions to Shakespeare as an author is a marginal note in William Covell’s Polimanteia (1595). The note reads:
All praiseKatherine Duncan-Jones and H.R.Woudhuysen explain his apparent error thus:
worthy.
Lucrecia
Sweet Shak-
speare.
Eloquent
Gaveston.
Wanton
Adonis.
Watsons
heyre.
Carried away with enthusiasm, Covell appears to have added Piers Gaveston (1594?) – strongly influenced by Shakespeare but written by Michael Drayton – to Shakespeare’s authentic poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594).4It seems odd that Covell would make such a mistake given the prominence of Michael Drayton’s name on the dedicatory epistle accompanying Piers Gaveston, but an error must necessarily be assumed under the orthodox narrative.
However, it is perfectly possible that Covell was not making a mistake, but rather recognised that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were written by the same author who had depicted Piers Gaveston in Edward II, a play which preceded Drayton’s poem both in performance and publication. Gaveston in Marlowe’s play is at least as eloquent as Drayton’s narrator, and the play opens with Gaveston speaking for two dozen lines before anyone else says a word. It is worth noting that Covell is connected to Marlowe’s Cambridge years, being a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge – whose alumni included Marlowe’s "nemesis" Richard Baines - at the same time that Marlowe was a student at Corpus Christi. Covell gained his BA in 1585 (the same year as Marlowe) and his MA in 1588 (the year after Marlowe).
The idea that Covell believes Shakespeare to be a pseudonym for Marlowe is strengthened by his observation that the author is "Watson’s heyre." It is well-documented that Marlowe was a friend of Thomas Watson (nine years his senior), both from the legal accounts of the Hog Lane incident,5 and from the published dialogue between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey. There is no evidence whatsoever that Thomas Watson was connected with Shakespeare of Stratford, though it has long been recognised that the author of Shake-speares Sonnets was familiar with Watson’s work.6 If we allow ourselves to read Covell’s comment from a Marlovian perspective, no error exists – Covell is saying that Marlowe, the man who put eloquence in the mouth of Piers Gaveston and was the natural heir to Thomas Watson, was the author (as "Shak-speare") of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece.7
This does not in any way count as proof of Marlowe’s authorship of Shakespeare’s narrative poems. It is, however, one of many examples of how the historical data reads differently when viewed through different interpretive frameworks, and demonstrates clearly how an "error" according to orthodox scholarship can be read at face value and treated as correct when viewed through a Marlovian lens.
© Ros Barber, November 2010
Ros Barber (www.rosbarber.com) is the first person in the world to complete a PhD in Marlovian authorship theory. Her PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her first degree was in Biological Sciences. A founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, she has published articles challenging the orthodox biography of Marlowe in academic books and journals, including the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Her essay "Was Marlowe a Violent Man?," which was presented at the Marlowe Society of America conference in 2008, is featured in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). A published poet, her latest poetry collection, Material (Anvil 2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was funded by Arts Council England.
Notes
1Bruner, J. S., and Postman, Leo (1949). "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm." Journal of Personality, XVIII, 206-23.
2Fugelsand, J. A., Stein, C. B., Green, A. E. and Dunbar, K. N. (2004). "Theory and Data Interactions of the Scientific Mind: Evidence from the Molecular and the Cognitive Laboratory." Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 86-95.
3Lehrer, J. (2009). "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up." Wired Magazine.
4Duncan-Jones, K. and Woudhuysen, H. R. (Eds.) (2007). Shakespeare's Poems, Arden Shakespeare, 5.
5Details of the Hog Lane affray can be found in any Marlowe biography, but the definitive account remains Eccles, M. (1934) Christopher Marlowe in London, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
6According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Watson's sonnets "appear to have been studied by Shakespeare." Harvey, P. S. (1969). The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 874.Emmerich Anonymous
7Unlike Shake-speares Sonnets, the hyphen here is accounted for by the requirements of the text’s layout.Shakespeare Anonymous
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Sunday, November 14, 2010
Book Collecting and the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy by Samuel Blumenfeld
(this article originally appeared in the Fall 2010 newsletter of The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies)
Anyone embarking on writing a book about the Shakespeare authorship question cannot know in advance what he or she will find in that solitary but wonderful search through the hundreds, if not thousands, of books already written about the Elizabethan era and its writers. And so I began my own journey at the age of 73 in 1999 and wrote the final chapter eight years later in 2007. In the interim I had gained a literary education equivalent to a Ph.D.
Writing on such a subject automatically turns one into a book collector, a haunter of antiquarian bookshops and internet sources. There is no greater delight than coming across a book which has that single bit of vital information you are looking for. At first I thought I would have to go to England for research, but I was amazed at how much information was available in books already published. But it also became clear that there were still many books that needed to be written about the events and people in the Elizabethan era. There is still a lot more to know.
Once the manuscript was completed, I was anxious to get it read and published. I had already sent out sample chapters to the usual trade publishers hoping to find an enthusiastic editor anxious to offer a contract. My old contacts in the New York book publishing business were gone, and the younger generation of editors were not interested in what I had written.
I then tried university presses and found a delightful editor at the University of Virginia Press who was intrigued by the subject. I sent her the manuscript of over a thousand pages, which she asked me to cut down. Which I did. She then sent copies to two scholarly reviewers who complimented me on my writing style, but did not think the book should be published. I could never understand why they came to such a negative conclusion. One of the reviewers never returned his copy.
In any case, after sitting on the book for almost a year, the Virginians turned it down. Fortunately, I found a publisher in North Carolina, McFarland, who specialized in publishing well-researched books for the library and academic market. Which meant that I would never be able to retire on the proceeds from the sales of the book, but at least I had a handsome looking tome I could hold in my hand and perhaps sell at lectures. Its final title was The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection
.
I had actually become interested in the authorship controversy back in my days at Grosset & Dunlap, where I was editor of The Universal Library, their quality paperback line. One day, back in 1956, a man by the name of Calvin Hoffman came to my office to urge me to publish a paperback edition of his book, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare
. Hoffman had studied the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare and came to the conclusion that they were all written by one man, Marlowe.
But hadn’t Marlowe been killed in a barroom brawl at the age of 29? Hoffman said he was not, and that the so-called murder was a faked death staged by his employers in the Secret Service to save him from Archbishop Whitgift’s inquisition. I read the book and became convinced that Hoffman was right. We published his book, and I’ve remained a Marlovian ever since.
Forty years later I decided to write my own book on the subject, using the methods of a detective to prove beyond any doubt that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. That meant reading all of Marlowe and all of Shakespeare, which I did, and which proved to my satisfaction that Christopher Marlowe was indeed the author of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, most of which were written in exile. Shakespeare, a good businessman, was the perfect front for the hidden author.
In retrospect, I doubt that I would have embarked on this journey had I known in advance how difficult it would be to get such a book published. In those eight years I could have written perhaps a half-dozen books on subjects I already knew a lot about. My first ten books were on education and literacy. Again, my interest in literacy also began at Grosset & Dunlap where we published all of those series books for young readers.
An attorney friend, Watson Washburn, came to my office one day to enlist me as an advisor for his newly created Reading Reform Foundation. I asked him what the purpose of the Foundation was, and he told me that it was to get phonics back in the schools. Get phonics back in schools? Since when was it taken out? And how could you teach reading without it? He advised me to read Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read
, which I did. That’s what turned me into a critic of our public schools, and that is why years later I wrote The New Illiterates
.
We book lovers deplore the decline of literacy not only in America but throughout the English-speaking world. Despite computers, the Internet, cable television and other forms of entertainment and distraction, there is no substitute for the actual book that one can hold in one’s hands and revere as a source of ageless wisdom. Book collecting speaks of a rational civilization which values ideas, lives, and history. And for that reason, as long as there is a humane civilization, there will be writers, publishers, readers and book collectors.
© Samuel Blumenfeld, 2010
Samuel Blumenfeld, a regular contibutor to MSC, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others. His Alpha-Phonics
reading system has taught thousands of beginning and struggling readers.Emmerich Shakespeare
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.
Anyone embarking on writing a book about the Shakespeare authorship question cannot know in advance what he or she will find in that solitary but wonderful search through the hundreds, if not thousands, of books already written about the Elizabethan era and its writers. And so I began my own journey at the age of 73 in 1999 and wrote the final chapter eight years later in 2007. In the interim I had gained a literary education equivalent to a Ph.D.Writing on such a subject automatically turns one into a book collector, a haunter of antiquarian bookshops and internet sources. There is no greater delight than coming across a book which has that single bit of vital information you are looking for. At first I thought I would have to go to England for research, but I was amazed at how much information was available in books already published. But it also became clear that there were still many books that needed to be written about the events and people in the Elizabethan era. There is still a lot more to know.
Once the manuscript was completed, I was anxious to get it read and published. I had already sent out sample chapters to the usual trade publishers hoping to find an enthusiastic editor anxious to offer a contract. My old contacts in the New York book publishing business were gone, and the younger generation of editors were not interested in what I had written.
I then tried university presses and found a delightful editor at the University of Virginia Press who was intrigued by the subject. I sent her the manuscript of over a thousand pages, which she asked me to cut down. Which I did. She then sent copies to two scholarly reviewers who complimented me on my writing style, but did not think the book should be published. I could never understand why they came to such a negative conclusion. One of the reviewers never returned his copy.
In any case, after sitting on the book for almost a year, the Virginians turned it down. Fortunately, I found a publisher in North Carolina, McFarland, who specialized in publishing well-researched books for the library and academic market. Which meant that I would never be able to retire on the proceeds from the sales of the book, but at least I had a handsome looking tome I could hold in my hand and perhaps sell at lectures. Its final title was The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection
.I had actually become interested in the authorship controversy back in my days at Grosset & Dunlap, where I was editor of The Universal Library, their quality paperback line. One day, back in 1956, a man by the name of Calvin Hoffman came to my office to urge me to publish a paperback edition of his book, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare
. Hoffman had studied the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare and came to the conclusion that they were all written by one man, Marlowe. But hadn’t Marlowe been killed in a barroom brawl at the age of 29? Hoffman said he was not, and that the so-called murder was a faked death staged by his employers in the Secret Service to save him from Archbishop Whitgift’s inquisition. I read the book and became convinced that Hoffman was right. We published his book, and I’ve remained a Marlovian ever since.
Forty years later I decided to write my own book on the subject, using the methods of a detective to prove beyond any doubt that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. That meant reading all of Marlowe and all of Shakespeare, which I did, and which proved to my satisfaction that Christopher Marlowe was indeed the author of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, most of which were written in exile. Shakespeare, a good businessman, was the perfect front for the hidden author.
In retrospect, I doubt that I would have embarked on this journey had I known in advance how difficult it would be to get such a book published. In those eight years I could have written perhaps a half-dozen books on subjects I already knew a lot about. My first ten books were on education and literacy. Again, my interest in literacy also began at Grosset & Dunlap where we published all of those series books for young readers.
An attorney friend, Watson Washburn, came to my office one day to enlist me as an advisor for his newly created Reading Reform Foundation. I asked him what the purpose of the Foundation was, and he told me that it was to get phonics back in the schools. Get phonics back in schools? Since when was it taken out? And how could you teach reading without it? He advised me to read Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read
, which I did. That’s what turned me into a critic of our public schools, and that is why years later I wrote The New Illiterates.We book lovers deplore the decline of literacy not only in America but throughout the English-speaking world. Despite computers, the Internet, cable television and other forms of entertainment and distraction, there is no substitute for the actual book that one can hold in one’s hands and revere as a source of ageless wisdom. Book collecting speaks of a rational civilization which values ideas, lives, and history. And for that reason, as long as there is a humane civilization, there will be writers, publishers, readers and book collectors.
© Samuel Blumenfeld, 2010
Samuel Blumenfeld, a regular contibutor to MSC, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others. His Alpha-Phonics
reading system has taught thousands of beginning and struggling readers.Emmerich ShakespeareClick here for the blog's home page and recent content.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Under an Old Oak by Isabel Gortázar
Following Mike Frohnsdorff’s suggestion1 and Peter Farey’s further elaboration on the subject,2 here are my own thoughts about Oliver’s speech in As You Like It, below.For those of us who believe that Christopher Marlowe did not die in Deptford in 1593, but lived on to write the works that have been attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford, it is imperative to try and read in those works the information that any author, but particularly one in Marlowe’s circumstances, would have included about himself, his life in exile, his friends and his enemies, in the various texts.
As You Like It is one of the Shakespeare plays in which scholars and academics have recognized references to Marlowe, including his unclear relationship with “William of Arden," although all orthodox explanations of such references remain so far unconvincing. In this respect, I agree with Farey that Oliver’s speech may be providing us with significant information. Here is the speech again:
Oliver
Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity,
A wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back. About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush, under which bush's shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.(4.3.105-119)
Let me comment on these lines separately:
Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity,
There seems to be here an unnecessary emphasis on the fact that the oak is very old; in fact, its high top is bald with dry antiquity. The word “antiquity” evokes a mythical scene: According to one of the Arthurian legends, Merlin the magician was trapped in an oak tree by a sorceress; the magician was not dead but due to re-appear some day. Merlin was one of Marlowe’s nicknames, not only on account of the etymology of the name: Marl, Marlin, etc., but also because of Marlowe's identification with his creation, Dr. Faustus. About ten years later, yet another magician, Prospero (a Spanish name synonymous to Fausto), will find his spirit, Ariel, also trapped in a tree by a witch in The Tempest.
These possible references to the Merlin story, steeped in antiquity like Oliver’s tree, might be confirming the identity of our runaway friend. Also, the fact that he is asleep: in the induction of The Taming of the Shrew,3 Marlowe's absence of fifteen years is referred to as "a goodly nap."
Second Servingman
These fifteen years you have been in a dream;
Or when you waked, so waked as if you slept.
Sly
These fifteen years! by my fay, a goodly nap.
Back to As You Like It:
A wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back.
These lines are describing a man that has been on the run, probably in these same woods, long enough for his hair to be o'ergrown, and his clothes in rags. Considering that in As You Like It, the woods are the hiding habitat of the outlawed Duke and his followers, the fact that Oliver seems to be hiding/living in a wood would be another pointer to his being an outlaw.
(…). About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush,
Given Frohnsdorff’s suggestion that the basic colour of ecclesiastical vestments changes to green at Pentecost (about the time of the Deptford episode), I agree with Farey that this green and gilded snake may well be a reference to Archbishop Whitgift, attempting to stop Marlowe’s heretical and seditious mouth. Apparently, the snake does not let go off his intended prey until this moment, when Oliver seems to be already an outlaw in the woods, and has obviously been on the run long enough to explain his wretched appearance.
(…) under which bush's shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead
Again, I agree with Farey that this lioness may be Queen Elizabeth; as we know she died in 1603 but she would certainly have been considered an old woman in 1593. However, I personally would feel much more comfortable imagining this lioness/Queen years later, allowing for the time necessary to justify the sleeping man's appearance.
While I personally cannot accept Farey’s theory that Whitgift would have agreed to Marlowe’s banishment, I can easily believe that, given the amount of people that seems to have been in the know as to Kit’s fate, Whitgift would have found out the truth within the next few years. Banishment does not stop anybody’s mouth, only death does that, and silencing heretics was as important as punishing them.
When Richard II banished Bolingbroke, that was perceived as punishment. When Romeo was banished, that was also perceived as punishment; it was Juliet who faked her death while Romeo was punished by exile. From a politico-religious point of view the accidental death staged at Deptford was no punishment in any practical sense, since it was not exemplary. In any case, the exiled life did not silence Marlowe as we know, and stopping Oliver’s mouth is what the snake seems to be intent on, until he leaves the job to the lioness.
Putting all these thoughts together, my personal reading of the speech in question is that Whitgift, having found out over the next few years that Marlowe was still alive, made sure the Queen would never allow him to come back to life, like Merlin.
The scene depicted in this metaphorical manner is covering a period between 1594 (let’s give at least a year for Oliver’s hair to overgrow and his clothes to become rags) and the first months of 1603, when both the “snake” and the “lioness” were still alive. However, the play was entered into the SR on August 4th 1600, although its publication was stayed. This suggests two possibilities: a) That Marlowe had lost his head and was cutting his own throat by writing this speech in 1599, or, b) That precisely in 1599, given Essex’s departure for, and expected failure in, Ireland, Marlowe’s situation was anyway hopeless, and he knew it, so he no longer cared which snake or lioness he might offend. (As I have said before, I believe it was the Earl of Essex who persuaded the Queen to save Marlowe’s life in 1593 and the man who gave him employment and financial support as an agent until 1599.)
A third possibility, and the one I prefer, is that this scene was revised after the Queen’s death, perhaps for that famous performance in the autumn of 1603, tantalizingly announced in Mary Sidney’s lost letter to her son, William, by then Earl of Pembroke.
I personally have no problem with that. Oliver’s is not the only speech and/or scene in As You Like It that seems to have been added after 1600 - the surmise that Marlowe, as most creative writers, may have revised his plays, adding information over the years, seems very reasonable to me.
In any case, this clue, picked up by Frohnsdorff and Farey, suggests to me that Whitgift may have been actively instrumental in preventing the Queen from “resurrecting” Marlowe before she herself died. If, as it appears by the involvement of her Coroner, William Danby, Queen Elizabeth had agreed to the Deptford scam, she must have had some plan for a future “happy ending."
Although, of course, it would not be as simple as that. I can imagine a changing scenario, with Marlowe’s release on the balance, as influence over the Queen shifted slowly, over the next five years, from Essex to Whitgift, with the Cecils swimming with the tide, as Essex insistently blotted his political copybook.
© Isabel Gortázar, October 2010
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
Roland Emmerich Shakespeare Anonymous
1Frohnsdorff, Mike. The Marlowe Society Newsletter 18, Spring 2002, pp.31-33.
2Farey, Peter. 2010. "Christopher Marlowe: Flight or Banishment."
3See Gortázar, Isabel: The Clue in the Shrew (Revised): A Tumbling Trick.
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