More Doubts About Will: Enter Iago by Isabel Gortázar

In my previous chapter we have seen that, according to a Life Trustee of Shakespeare’s Birthplace,¹ not until the spring of 1622, the Monument to SHAKSPEARE was finally erected in the Chancel of Trinity Church in Stratford. Had this been the only oddity in relation to William Shakespeare who had died in 1616, we might have been tempted to ignore it, but it was not the only oddity; here is another one.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice was entered into the Stationer’s Register (SR) by Thomas Walkley on October 6, 1621, one day after Ben Jonson was appointed Deputy Master of the Revels (DMR), and ten days after the death of Mary Sydney, Countess of Pembroke on 25th September. Othello is the only one among the 36 plays in the Canon to have been registered after William Shakespeare’s death and before the appearance of the First Folio. These and other facts lead me to believe that Marlowe re-wrote the text of The Moor of Venice, turning it into the First Quarto Othello (1Q) in the spring/summer of 1621, and revised it almost immediately after the Countess died, adding 160 lines, most of which are dedicated to Emilia, including the scene of her death.

There are two points to be made here: 1) That the text of Othello is not the same as the old Moor of Venice, by Shaxberd,² and 2) that the 1Q is not a “cut” version of the First Folio, as most scholars maintain because this would be the only explanation for those 160 lines, had they been originally written by William Shakespeare before 1616. I will deal now with the first point and leave the second for the next chapter.

When the 1Q Othello was printed, early in 1622, it included, as we know, a villain called Iago. This villain’s name could not have been in The Moor of Venice that was performed in the court of King James in November 1604. There are two Briton kings, Jago and Iago, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain; King James descended from the Briton kings, was proud of the fact, and reading one’s family history is a universal foible. But that is not all. The name Iago derives from Iacob, and its variants in different languages include James, Iacob, Jacques, Jaime, Jacobo, Diego and Iago, these last four in Spanish.

Even if neither the King nor the Master of the Revels had ever read Monmouth’s History linking the name Iago to a Briton king, we must remember that in those days many official documents were written in Latin. In those documents, James’ name would appear as Iaco., or Iacob., both short for Iacobus; the sound of these abbreviations is phonetically almost identical to Iago. The name of Othello’s wicked lieutenant spoken in a play would have sounded to an educated audience (such as the audience at court) exactly like the Latin abbreviation of the King’s name.

As I say, Iago is one of the variants of the name of St. James the Elder. According to an Arian³ legend, James (or Iacob) was Jesus’ eldest brother who fled from Jerusalem after the crucifixion. He settled down in the northwest corner of Spain, in the place that is now known as Santiago de Compostela, a famous place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, well-known to Shakespeare.⁴ The Arian Goth⁵ kings who had ruled Spain for four centuries, converted to Catholicism at the time of the Arab invasion in 711 AD; eventually, Saint Iago graduated from an Arian prophet to a Catholic saint by “performing a miracle” at the battle of Clavijo (844 AD) against the Moors. He thus became the patron saint of Spain and to this day his nickname continues to be Saint Iago the Moor-killer (Santiago Matamoros).⁶

It would be wilfully self-deceiving to believe that King James and his courtiers would not have recognized the Spanish name of Saint Iago the Moor-killer so appropriate for Othello. The coincidence, if it were a coincidence, would be of pig-flying standards. The Peace Treaty between England and Spain was signed on August 28, 1604, and when The Moor of Venice was performed at court, in November, the court was still full of Spaniards.

In a letter to Sir Ralph Winwood (January 1604/5), Dudley Carleton, that indefatigable chronicler of court gossip, writes: "On Twelfth Night… we had the Queen’s Maske at the Banquetting House…The Spanish and Venetian Ambassadors were both present and sate by the King in State …"⁷ The name of Saint Iago the Moorkiller could not possibly have passed unrecognized by the Spanish Ambassador if he were also present during the performance of The Moor of Venice. Such a name, given to a villain, would be a major political and diplomatic blunder.

But even if we allow for the uncanny nature of coincidences, and even if the author pleaded ignorance, he would have been ordered to change the name. If the whole range of Shakespearian scholars propose that the name of Sir John Oldcastle was changed to John Falstaff in order to spare the feelings of the Brooke family, are we to believe that the Master of the Revels decided to ignore a name that was offensive to the King and to his guests? The author’s idea of using a Venetian story in a play to be performed in the presence of the Venetian Ambassador was probably a good one, as King James was obviously making an effort to flatter the Venetian Ambassador; but it would have been daft to flatter the Venetian Ambassador while insulting the Spanish one, by giving to the villain of the play the name of Saint Iago Matamoros.

Which, of course, means that those names would not have appeared in The Moor of Venice that was performed many times all along the reign of King James. Which also means that, had Will Shakespeare (let alone any candidate that had died earlier) decided to insult King James with his dying breath, Thomas Walkley would have kept the MS in a drawer for many years, while the original, Iago-less, Moor of Venice continued to thrive on the stage.

Looking for confirmation of my theory, I have not been able to find a single mention of the names Othello and/or Iago, in reference to The Moor of Venice in performance, on any records, accounts, diaries, or similar documents, during King James’ lifetime, not even after the publication of the 1Q and FF. The name of Desdemona appears, however, in some reports, after 1604.

Modern scholars take for granted that Othello and The Moor of Venice are one and the same play, so one may come across misleading headlines then to find that, in the contemporary document itself, only the name of Desdemona is given and the Moor has no name, while the villain is not even mentioned. The following is a good example. I quote from G. Salgado’s Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare. (Emphasis in bold).

“Othello at Oxford.” This is the modern title given to the document by Salgado. However, this is the original document translated from the Latin:

Sept. 1610
-In the last few days the King’s players have been here. They acted with enormous applause to full houses…. They had tragedies (too) which they acted with skill and decorum and in which some things, both speech and action, brought forth tears.-
-Moreover, that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, although she always acted her whole part supremely well, yet when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.⁸

As we can see, despite the deceptive headline, not only is the - supposed - name of the title role, Othello, not mentioned in the letter, but the character, let alone the name, of the villain is ignored. Can we imagine a modern spectator, after watching Othello, to focus his report on the famous Desdemona and her husband and failing to mention Iago at all? In this letter, the only name mentioned is Desdemona. Likewise, in Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi⁹ the men in the novella that Shakespeare used as source for The Moor of Venice have no names; only Disdemona has what Cinthio describes as an “un-auspicious name”: dis-daemonie = dis-spirited, unfortunate, witless.

Not until the 1640s have I found some items that contain the male names. One is a posthumously published poem by Leonard Digges (d.1635), prefixed to an edition of Shakespeare’s poems dated 1640, which includes the line Honest Iago, or the jealous moor. Another one is a comment by “Abraham Wright (1611-1690), Vicar of Okeham, who kept a common-place book, probably in the 1640’s, for the benefit of his son."¹⁰

Othello, by Shakespeare: A very good play both for lines and plot, but especially the plot. Iago for a rogue and Othello for a jealous husband, 2 parts well penned. Act 3, the scene betwixt Iago and Othello, and the 1st scene of the 4th Act between the same shew admirably the villainous humour of Iago when he persuades Othello to his jealousy.

This is a report in which we recognize the Othello that we know. In the 1640s, Wright goes straight to the heart of the play, which is no longer the fate of the witless Desdemona who makes the mistake of marrying a Moor, but the tragedy of Othello and the perfidy of Iago. He writes about the men and Desdemona is not even mentioned. Here we find at last that the jealous Moor has a name and also that the villain called Iago is an important character, which was not the case in the Latin letter of 1610.

In Othello, Shakespeare departs from Cinthio’s novella in many ways, introducing various changes, most of which spoil the logic of the plot and are, moreover, apparently unnecessary, unless they have a special meaning, which I believe they have. But I’ll leave it at that for the present.

Meanwhile, until somebody finds some text that includes the names of Othello and Iago in reference to The Moor of Venice, previous to the 6th of October 1621, I must infer that Marlowe drastically revised the play shortly before that date, giving the name of the king to the most treacherous character in the Canon. And the only logical explanation I can find for any author doing this would be not just that he had an axe to grind with James, but that he was, like Cassio, “past all surgery”; in other words, that his personal circumstances (such as a terminal illness, or suicidal despair), had placed him beyond caring what "King Iago’s" reaction might be.

Because, unless we accept the possibility that the author of Othello was Christopher Marlowe, perhaps kept “in the cold” till then by a deceitful King James, we find ourselves with no author. By 1621 only Francis Bacon and Mary Sidney (until 25th September) among the proposed candidates were “officially” alive. I doubt that Mary wrote the 1Q Othello and as for Bacon, neither before that time, nor, particularly in 1621 would he have dared to insult the King in that way. Having been convicted of corruption for taking bribes in May 1621, only James stood between him and imprisonment, as well as total bankruptcy, had he been enforced to pay the colossal fine demanded by his peers.

So here is the chain of events thus far:

1616: April 23rd: William Shakespeare dies.
1621: September 25th: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, dies, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, her death seems to be registered in the new 160 lines of the FF Othello, (which would mean those 160 lines were written after September 25th).
1621: October 5th: Ben Jonson is appointed DMR, and therefore responsible for the censorship of new plays.
1621: October 6th: Thomas Walkley registers the 1Q Othello.
1622: Early months: Walkley publishes the 1Q Othello under the name of William Shakespeare.
1622: March: Ben Jonson loses his job as DMR.
1622 April: The refurbishments in the Chancel begin and, apparently, the Stratford Monument is finally erected.

(To be continued.)

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, April 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.

¹Fripp, Edgar I. Shakespeare’s Stratford. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. pp. 72-74.
²As the name of the author appears in the Revels Accounts for November 1604.
³By “Arian” I refer to the doctrine of the Bishop Arius. (4th Century AD.)
⁴In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena proposes to go on pilgrimage to Saint Jacques le Grand, the French name for Santiago de Compostela.
⁵Spain was ruled by Goths between the 4th and 8th Centuries. I find this interesting in reference to the line “Ovid among the Goths," in As You Like It.
⁶For what it is worth, the joint names of Othello and Iago give us the following anagram:
O IA (mes) GO TO HELL. Also: O IAGO TO HELL
⁷Sawyer, Edmund. Memorials of Affairs of State (etc.). London. 1725.
⁸From a letter in Corpus Christi College Library: Ms ccc 304 ff 83v and 84r. Ref. G. Salgado, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances. 1590 – 1890.
⁹Giovanni Batista Giraldi, also known as Giraldi Cinthio: Gli Hecatommithi. Venice. 1565
¹⁰G. Salgado. Op. cit.

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Christopher Marlowe: Secret Agent Man

Yes, Marlowe did have the kinds of high-level connections to possibly stage his own death on May 30, 1593, in Deptford in order to escape torture and a possible death sentence. Marlowe, of course, had been arrested on May 20 on charges of heresy and was released on bail. There's also the Baines Note submitted to the Privy Council on May 27 that accused Marlowe of far more serious offenses.

Click here and check out this rather imposing letter Cambridge University authorities received in 1587 when they were set to deny Marlowe his Master's Degree. As Peter Farey writes, "Before the award of the M.A. in 1587, some rumours had apparently been circulating that he [Marlowe] intended ('was determined') to go to Rheims and, having gone, to remain there. This would normally mean training for priesthood at the Catholic College at Rheims, with the probable intention of eventually returning to England as a Catholic subversive."

We can reasonably conclude, from the Privy Council letter to Cambridge, that Marlowe was partaking in significant intelligence activity on behalf of Queen Elizabeth's secret service.

As Daryl Pinksen writes in Marlowe's Ghost, the letter "shows the regard in which the young intelligence agent was held by the most powerful men in the English government."Marlowe spy theory

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Shapiro's Straw Man by Daryl Pinksen

James Shapiro, perhaps wisely, chose to focus his efforts in Contested Will on countering the claims of the Oxfordians, the soft underbelly of Shakespeare skepticism. A ready-made straw man, Oxford was just begging for Shapiro to knock him down. The case for Marlowe, on the other hand, as the possible author of the Shakespeare works, is fundamentally different. Rather than obsessively trawling the plays for supposed biographical linkages to our candidate's life, the case for Marlowe is founded upon stylistic similarities between his work and the works of Shakespeare. That, and an examination of the unusual circumstances that led to the Coroner's Report of Marlowe's "death" in 1593.

While our case is not dependent on finding biographical linkages in the plays, we disagree with Shapiro's assertion that the lack of agreement between the biographical and literary Shakespeare is irrelevant. The Shakespeare writer worshipped the Roman poet Ovid, a poet whose work was filled with self-reflexive autobiography and fervent wishes for literary immortality. Shake-speare's Sonnets likewise appear to be filled with self-reflexive autobiography, and dozens of the sonnets speak of achieving literary immortality. This is exactly what one would expect from a follower of Ovid. Shakespeare skeptics and believers alike all agree that Shakespeare's biography cannot match the content of the sonnets, and we all agree that Shakespeare the man displayed no concern about his plays or poems as a means of achieving literary immortality. This leaves readers with two choices: either question Shakespeare's authorship, as we do, or claim, as Shapiro does, that the autobiographical content in the sonnets and their pre-occupation with literary immortality were mere literary conceits, clever fictions. We do not find this latter claim convincing. It makes little sense that a poet could be heavily indebted to Ovid, yet remain unaffected by Ovid's influence in his own work. It is precisely this sort of rationalization that spawned and continues to fuel Shakespeare skepticism.

Here is why the case for Marlowe is different: Unlike all of the other Shakespeare claimants, what is fundamental to our case is that the arc of Shakespeare scholarship is replete with words like "emulation," "imitation," "absorption," "echoing," and "disciple" when comparing the early Shakespeare works with the works of Christopher Marlowe. Here is a recent example from Robert Logan's 2007 Shakespeare's Marlowe: "Of greater significance than the point at which the sense of emulation emerges as documentable evidence is the firmness with which Marlowe’s influence rooted itself in Shakespeare and developed, for it continued to thrive for 18 years after Marlowe’s death, roughly from 1593-1611, the remainder of Shakespeare’s career." Logan's opinion is not new, or unusual. It reflects a centuries-old consensus of Shakespeare scholarship that Shakespeare learned to write by studying and copying Christopher Marlowe. Some of us ask the question, "What if this is simply Marlowe, continuing to write plays which he could no longer publish in his own name?" This seems like a reasonable enough hypothesis, one worth weighing next to the assumed theory that Shakespeare, a man with a very different background than Marlowe's, chose to launch his career by closely imitating him, to say nothing of his duplication of Marlowe's literary interests and erudition, and then continued to echo him throughout his career.

Marlowe's problem, our problem, is that he was declared dead on June 1, 1593, and never seen alive again. To be clear, for him to have written the works of Shakespeare would require that Marlowe's death had been faked, and that he had lived the rest of his life under a new identity. It's a tall order, but people in Marlowe's shoes - about to face prosecution, torture, and execution - have all wished for the opportunity to escape without fear of pursuit, and some of them do make good on the attempt. Arrested on charges of heresy, with the Baines Note of Marlowe's Blasphemies just delivered to the Privy Council, and another accused seditious writer named John Penry abruptly executed, Marlowe's mind would unquestionably have been occupied with finding a way out. Unlike other accused heretics, Marlowe had the connections to make an escape a reality. If his options were to either stick around and wait for the axe to fall, or to use his talents, connections, and resources to vanish and start a new life under a new identity, the choice seems obvious. The Coroner's Report itself is routinely regarded as an implausible telling of what really happened. Shapiro's cohorts say the dissembling covered up a murder. We say that the most rational explanation is that it provided a cover for Marlowe to escape prosecution.

Shapiro casually tars all Shakespeare doubters with the same brush, implying that the Marlowe case, like the Oxfordian and Baconian ones, is dependent on reading Marlowe's life out of the plays. This is simply false. The case for Marlowe is different. It is based on comparisons of Marlowe's work to the Shakespeare plays and poems. One can hardly blame Shapiro for characterizing the debate in this way, but it is misleading. If there are legitimate grounds for doubting Shakespeare, and we believe there are, there is one, and only one writer with the proven ability to write verse at a Shakespearean level. That writer is Christopher Marlowe.

Daryl Pinksen 

© Daryl Pinksen, 2010   Emmerich Shakespeare Anonymous Rylance

Daryl Pinksen, a regular MSC contributor, is the author of Marlowe's Ghost, Grand Prize Winner of the 17th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

Click here for "The Case Against Oxford as Shakespeare," a compilation of some of this blog's articles on the Oxford theory.

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Peter Farey on Marlowe Authorship

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (Aristotle)

When you're ready to entertain the possibility that Christopher Marlowe may have written at least some of the works attributed to Shakespeare, there are many excellent resources: this blog and the website of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, for starters. Peter Farey's Marlowe Page is also a must. Peter, who has contributed to this blog, has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years. His website is a goldmine of fascinating and highly meticulous scholarship on the Marlowe theory. You may wish to start with his "Hoffman and the Authorship," "Marlowe's Sudden and Fearful End," and "A Deception in Deptford" essays.

You can also check out Peter in the PBS Frontline documentary Much Ado About Something. Click here for an excerpt (Peter appears at 1:05 and 5:24 in the clip).

I can tell you from experience that Peter welcomes quality debate on the authorship issue - he has over 4000 posts to internet newsgroups, by the way. But a gentle warning: you'd better arrive to the debate very prepared!Emmerich Anonymous Film

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Doubting William Shakespeare: Problems with the Stratford Case, En Breve

" . . . when we look closely at the man, we are struck by the image of someone very unlike the man revealed in the works."

Let's reflect on what the scholars say, courtesy of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society. Click here.

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Marlowe's Ghost: Writer's Digest Top Honors!

Daryl Pinksen's Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare beat out 2,600 entries and is the Grand Prize winner of the 17th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

Click here for Daryl Pinksen's interview with Writer's Digest.

The March/April print issue of Writer's Digest, featuring the interview with Daryl, is on newsstands now.

From print issue: "[Pinksen's Marlowe's Ghost] was selected for its solid writing, functional design and the fascinating, careful case he builds for his premise. As competition judge and author Anthony Flacco notes, 'Whether or not one accepts Pinksen's position that Christopher Marlowe was actually William Shakespeare, his arguments are precise, thorough and compelling.'"

Congratulations to my friend and MSC contributor, Daryl Pinksen.



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Góngora, Marlowe, and Hero and Leander

At the core of Erich Segal's "Hero and Leander: Góngora and Marlowe" (Comparative Literature, Vol. 15, No. 4; Autumn, 1963) is how iconoclastic Marlowe and his lesser known Spanish contemporary Luis de Góngora are in their treatments of the classical Hero and Leander myth. "There is in both poems," argues the Harvard classicist Segal, "a complete absence of romantic emotion," supplanted by mock-heroic comedy and "ironic condescension." Segal documents how in Góngora's Hero y Leandro, we find comic reduction, a tone of artificiality, a Hispanified realism to the story, and a "remarkable" lack of sensuality. In addition, the prevailing theme is the non-heroic "love is all foolishness." With Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Segal documents the poet's likewise "emotional detachment" and an equally non-heroic theme of how love is "all lust." Contrasted with Góngora's comic reduction, writes Segal, Marlowe opts for far-fetched hyperbole to caricature his characters, "who soon become like huge balloons in a Mardi Gras parade. Both are equally valid techniques of comic devaluation; it is Marlowe's Brobdignag to Góngora's Lilliputia." I was most amused by Segal reminding us of Marlowe's fondness for hyperbole, and how in Hero and Leander Marlowe "out-Marlowes Marlowe in comic excess." We should find it striking, concludes Segal, how Marlowe and Góngora, two Renaissance contemporaries, both opted to take comic swipes at the romantic love tradition.

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More Doubts About Will: The Curious History of the Chancel in Trinity Church, Stratford by Isabel Gortázar

I would like to begin by thanking my colleague Peter Farey for his work on the Stratford Monument,¹ which led me to the conclusion that there is more in William Shakespeare’s resting place than meets the eye. Inspired by this suspicion, I started to investigate. Here are my findings.

In his book, Shakespeare’s Stratford (1928),² Edgar I. Fripp, a Life Trustee of Shakespeare’s Birthplace, writes as follows:

In 1593, the Chancel of the Church was in a bad state, and the Corporation moved Lord Treasurer Burleigh (the Chancel was Crown property) to compel the tithe holders to put it in repair; and not long after obtaining it as a grant from the Crown, they proceeded to bring pressure upon these gentlemen, of whom Shakespeare was one, and to sell or let the right of burial within its walls. Shakespeare was buried here in 1616; but it was not until his Monument was erected, or was about to be erected, that they had the place made less unworthy of its illustrious dead, and we may suspect that George Quyney, the reading-minister from 1620 to 1624, was largely, if not chiefly, responsible for the reparation.³ […] The Chancel was pronounced "ruinous" in 1618, the Corporation resolved to "bestow some charges" on keeping it "dry" in 1619, and they were presented by Quyney and the churchwardens (one of whom was Richard Tyler⁴) for its "decay" in April 1621. In 1621-2⁵ the walls were mended and "painted" and the windows "glazed," and the building was presentable, for the first time since the Poet’s interment, when his old friends and fellow actors of the King’s Company paid their one and only visit to Stratford, presumably to see his Monument, in the Summer of 1622. (My italics.)

So, according to this information, William Shakespeare, as one of the tithe-holders, had been buried in the chancel in 1616 and, if the right of burial was sold or let, the fee may have been by measure of the ground to be covered by the tombstone (as was the case in Westminster Abbey), which might explain the small tombstone (about one meter long),⁶ clearly insufficient to cover the coffin of a normal man, unless, like Ben Jonson, Shakespeare had been buried vertically.

In British History Online we read the following:

This great dramatist and contemporary of Shakespeare was buried in the north aisle, and on a plain stone over his grave are to be seen the words "O! rare Ben Jonson"- an epitaph perhaps the more forcible for its quaint brevity. These words are said to have been cut by a mason for eighteen pence paid him by a passer-by, "Jack Young." Mr. R. Bell, in his "Life of Ben Jonson," writes, "The smallness of the surface occupied by the gravestone is explained by the fact that the coffin was deposited in an upright position, possibly to diminish the fee by economy of space. The tradition that Jonson had been interred in such a manner was generally discredited until the grave was opened a few years ago, when the remains of the poet were found in an erect posture."

Was Shakespeare buried vertically? Although nobody has suggested such a thing, Schoenbaum⁷ mentions a report from the late seventeenth century, according to which “they […] laid him full seventeen foot deep, deep enough to secure him.” “But [he adds] this seems unlikely so close to where the Avon flows." He also tells us that by the mid-eighteenth century the gravestone had to be replaced, because it had sunk below floor level. This suggests a really deep hole, subject to precisely that kind of upsetting influence from the proximity of the river. But why would they dig such a deep hole? Perhaps the report was mistaken anyway, because seventeen feet would be an exaggeration even for a coffin placed in an upright position.

One wishes that in this age of scientific resources, the Stratford authorities (or whoever) would do a proper research on that grave, even if they decide to hang some fetish round their necks while they are doing it, to avoid the fearful curse. While I would not wish to discourage the English scientists who might undertake this necessary bit of archaeology, I believe I should mention the following story. On June 19, 1941, a group of Russian scientists opened Tamburlaine’s tomb in Samarkand despite the curse inscribed on it; the curse threatened that if the tomb were disturbed a catastrophic war would ensue for those responsible. Two days after the tomb was opened, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.⁸

Dramatic digressions aside, another thing that strikes me as odd reading Fripp’s text, is that the chancel should have been "ruinous” by 1618. Buildings do not easily become "ruinous" in two years, and yet Shakespeare was buried there in 1616. John Combe, whose monument is placed in the North East corner of the chancel, had died in 1614, leaving in his will (unlike Shakespeare), a provision of "three score pounds" for its erection. Combe’s monument was carved by Gerard Johnson (or Gheeraert Janssen), the same man who, apparently not till 1622, carved Shakespeare’s Monument, according to Sir William Dugdale.⁹

The conclusion must be that in 1614 the chancel was in relatively good condition. But, was it still in good condition in 1616? It must have been at least decently so. One would have expected that, having buried their most illustrious citizen there the corporation would take the trouble to keep the place reasonably "presentable," unless of course nobody (not just Shakespeare’s London friends but literally nobody) ever went there to visit the tomb. Otherwise, how could the chancel be "ruinous" only two years later? And if it was indeed "ruinous" in 1618, why did they wait till 1622 to make the building “presentable, for the first time since the Poet’s interment”?

Are we to believe that the greatest poet the Western world has known, was buried in a derelict chapel, in a small grave that has no name to it, but only four doggerel lines, the first two of which are a paraphrase of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander?

Good friend for Jesus’s sake forbear,
H&L: (…) Gentle youth forbear
To dig the dust enclosed heare.¹⁰
H&L: To touch the sacred garments that I wear.

And, as we see, the fourth line is a curse, such as the curse inscribed in Tamburlaine’s tomb:

Bleste be ye man y’spares these stones,
And cursed be he y’moves my bones.

Was that four-line inscription the only information carved on the tombstone in 1616? Because if the Monument to SHAKSPEARE was not erected until 1622, as Fripp suggests, the tomb itself would have been nameless during the first six years.

Whatever the answer to that question, when they finally got round to erecting the Moniment,¹¹ not only did they get his name wrong but also his age was mistaken, because Shakespeare could not have been 53 on his 52nd birthday.¹² Next to his, we find the tomb of his wife, Anne Hathaway, who had died in August 1623; but by then, Shakespeare’s grave had been given "a habitation and a name" by virtue of the adjacent Monument.

Finally, it seems that, although William Shakespeare in his elaborate will had left them "xxvis viii Apeece to buy them Ringes," his theatre colleagues, Heminge and Condell (Burbage died in 1619), never took the trouble to visit their friend’s grave in Stratford until the Summer of 1622.

To resume: According to a Life Trustee of Shakespeare’s Birthplace who seems to have done a thorough research on the matter, the small grave that Dr. Hall paid for the burial of his famous father-in-law, was placed in a derelict chapel, in an anonymous grave, with a clumsy but unequivocal homage to Christopher Marlowe. And, yes, isn’t it an extraordinary coincidence? Shakespeare’s tomb, like Tamburlaine’s, is cursed.

So, two Marlovian lines and a curse like Tamburlaine’s, that was for six long years the only information carved on Shakespeare’s gravestone. Or was it? A possibility that suggests itself looking at all these facts is that something must have happened late in 1621 or early in 1622, so that, by the spring of 1622, there may have been some good reason for refurbishing the chancel, changing the tombstone, and, finally, erecting the SHAKSPEARE Monument.
(To be continued.)

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, January 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.

¹See: Peter Farey's "Shakespeare’s Monument?" The Marlowe Society Newsletter, Autumn 2004, and "The Stratford Monument: A Riddle and Its Solution" http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/epitaph.htm.
²Fripp, Edgar I. Shakespeare’s Stratford. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. pp. 72-74.
³George Quyney died in 1624, at the age of 24. His physician was Dr. Hall, Shakespeare’s father-in-law.
⁴Richard Tyler had been one of Shakespeare’s boyhood friends. His name is however deleted from the will and replaced by Hamnet (or Hamlett) Sadler.
⁵This date probably means the works began between 1st January and 25th March of 1622 (New Style, or Gregorian). In England, the New Year (Old Style, or Julian) started on 25th March, Lady Day. So, if the work was finished by the summer of 1622, Fripp’s dating suggests it had started before the end of March.
⁶According to Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s grave is only three feet seven inches, about half the size of his wife’s. (Ref: Diana Price's Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001).
⁷Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Complete Documentary Life. Revised edition. Oxford University Press, 1987. p. 306.
⁸For a more detailed account of this fascinating horror story, see: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/the_curse_of_tamerlane/ .
⁹In The Diary of Sir William Dugdale (published 1827), we find the following entry for the year 1653: “Shakespeares and John Combes Monuments, at Stratford-super-Avon, made by one Gerard Johnson."
¹⁰Ref C. Hoffman: The Man Who Was Shakespeare. London: Max Parrish, 1955. p. 230.
¹¹Moniment, with the i in bold: As it appears in Jonson’s Prefatory Poem in the FF. Perhaps from the Latin monire, “to warn."
¹²His birthday, that is, if he had been born on April 23rd 1564, as is generally believed (but not proven), given the known fact that he was christened on the 26th. Had he been born one day later, on the 24th for example, on 23rd April 1616, Shakespeare would have been fifty one years old. Curiously enough, Christopher Marlowe, born in February 1563, Old Style (1564, New Style, see footnote 5, above for Old Style, or Julian, calendar), on 23rd April 1616 was two months into his fifty-third year. See my essay: "Let’s Talk of Graves and Worms and Epitaphs." The Marlowe Society Newsletter Nº 27, Autumn 2006.

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Marlowe and Shakespeare Similarities: What the Scholars Say

Let's put to rest the notion that Marlowe must be ruled out as a possible author of the Shakespeare plays "on literary grounds."

Click here for the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society's take on the closeness between the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare - a closeness supported by two centuries of mainstream Shakespearean scholarship. And there's also Daryl Pinksen's pieces on the style issue and the Mendenhall experiment.

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In Plain Sight: What the Witness Protection Program Can Tell Us About Shakespeare by Daryl Pinksen

I. Marlowe’s problem

When Christopher Marlowe met with Robert Poley, Ingram Frizer, and Nick Skeres at Deptford on May 30, 1593, a raft of potentially fatal charges against him had just been circulated around the Privy Council, courtesy of Marlowe’s nemesis, the devious Richard Baines. In Marlowe’s last known conversation with Thomas Kyd — the playwright lately tagged as a collaborator with Shakespeare on the anonymous Edward III — Marlowe made it clear that he intended to flee England for Scotland, and urged Kyd to do the same. Unfortunately, both Marlowe and Kyd were arrested before either had a chance to escape the coming repression.

Marlowe’s arrest on May 20, 1593, would hardly have dampened his impulse to run; rather, it would have underlined the sense of urgency. Given these circumstances, along with the fact that the men present at Deptford with Marlowe had associations with Marlowe’s patron Thomas Walsingham, and the spurious explanation given by these men in the Coroner’s report, it seems at least possible — likely, one could argue —that Marlowe had made good on his plan to escape.

What we do know is that in early June 1593, Marlowe was pronounced dead, he was believed dead, and after that, so far as we know, he was never seen alive again. In spite of this, the soon-to-follow plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare — a man who, biographically, is arguably one of the most un-writer-like writers of all time — do sound like Marlowe, and scholarship has been making note of this similarity for centuries.

The claim made by Marlovians is that Marlowe’s death had been faked, as a ruse to allow him to escape to some unknown location and begin a new life with a new identity without fear of pursuit. This speculation is understandably met with scepticism, and the whole thing is usually dismissed as an impossible, conspiracy-fuelled fantasy. But is it really so far fetched? Reports of people faking their death (or rather, failing in the attempt) surface every few months. This is not now a novel concept, nor would it have been then. And assuming a new identity in order to escape pursuers is even more common. The witness protection program in the U.S., WITSEC, with similar programs in dozens of countries, routinely creates new identities for people they are trying to protect. The public finds neither of these scenarios preposterous in a modern context; movies, TV shows, and books have made them familiar to everyone.¹

What makes this story sound so incredible is neither the “faked death” nor the “new identity” scenarios themselves, both of which are now common enough to border on the mundane. The problem lies in who it is we’re talking about — Shakespeare. The fact that the works of Shakespeare function as quasi-religious texts for millions of his literary devotees heightens the emotional content of any discussion of authorship. To those disturbed by the suggestion that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare, they should take comfort in the fact that there is no incontrovertible evidence of Marlowe’s survival after 1593. All we have to work with, and perhaps all we will ever have to work with, are the surviving texts and the accompanying documents.

Nevertheless, these texts do tell a story beneath the stories and reveal a psychological profile of their creator which sounds far more like the work of a disgraced exile writing under an assumed identity that an actor/theatre producer/grain merchant from Stratford. If the writer of the Shakespeare plays was Marlowe, presumed dead, in exile, struggling to survive under a new identity, then an examination of those works, in concert with observations from WITSEC, may reveal some noteworthy similarities.

II. How WITSEC keeps people alive

The Federal Witness Protection Program grew out of a need to protect mob witnesses from certain assassination. After several expensive and often failed attempts to protect witnesses with guards, the originator of the WITSEC program, Gerald Shur, soon realized that “the most efficient way for the government to protect a mob witness was by giving him a new identity and relocating him to a new community.”²

Once a witness is accepted into the program, there are a few simple rules witnesses are expected to follow. First, witnesses and their dependents must undergo a legal name change. WITSEC provides all of the accompanying documents for the witness and their families, but will not provide falsified documents such as death certificates — even though this would undoubtedly ensure a higher level of safety, the government needs testimony from live witnesses. Second, they cannot tell anyone from their old life about their new identities or where they have been relocated. Third, they cannot tell anyone they meet, including people they date or even marry, about their old identities. Fourth, they must not return home. This last restriction has proven unbearable for many, as sometimes “the desire to go home and get back in touch with one’s family and friends would become overwhelming.”³

As tough as the program was for the many criminals who were relocated, it was even harder for the small number of noncriminals who found themselves trapped with no other way out than to go into WITSEC. Agents strongly cautioned these noncriminals about how gruelling their new life would be. As Gerald Shur put it, “being relocated was something I would not wish on anyone. The only reason to do it was if it was your only hope to stay alive.”⁴

The strain that separation from their past lives put on noncriminals was agonizing, and it had a profound influence on their psyches:

The small number in the program who were not criminals found this transition overwhelming, even torturous. Having to give up their identity and live a life that to all appearances eradicates one’s past was deeply disturbing for them. Many felt themselves trapped in two different worlds. Within the safety of their family, they shared a past — a heritage, memories, actions, relationships — that they were forced to deny every day as they lived a lie at work or with friends and went about their daily routines not only in an alien place but in a totally new guise. Relocation destroyed their sense of self. ⁵

III. “Shakespeare” and WITSEC

So what does WITSEC have to do with Shakespeare? A careful reading of the plays and sonnets allows us access into the mind of their creator, no matter how guarded he was about avoiding personal revelations. That he was unusually guarded for a writer of this period is generally accepted; in Stephen Greenblatt’s superb Shakespeare biography, Will in the World, he poses the question, “Why is everything [Shakespeare] wrote — even in the sonnets — couched in such a way that enables him to hide his face and his innermost thoughts?”⁶

Greenblatt’s reading of the Shakespeare canon is illuminating. In Will in the World, Greenblatt is fascinated by the recurrence time and again in the Shakespeare plays of the themes of loss of self, hidden identity, exile, banishment, and scandal. Greenblatt regards it as a fascinating mystery:

Again and again in his plays, an unforeseen catastrophe … suddenly turns what had seemed like happy progress, prosperity, smooth sailing into disaster, terror, and loss. The loss is obviously and immediately material, but it is also, and more crushingly, a loss of identity. To wind up on an unknown shore, without one’s friends, habitual associates, familiar network — this catastrophe is often epitomized by the deliberate alteration or disappearance of the name and, with it, the alteration or disappearance of social status.⁷

Granted, these themes were not exclusive to the work of Shakespeare, they were common plot devices in the plays of many of his contemporaries. But none of those other writers displayed the depth of preoccupation with these themes that Shakespeare did. Why Shakespeare? Shakespeare’s life — the biographical Shakespeare — betrays nothing to provide a credible explanation. He was well off enough by the early 1590s to afford a partnership in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and his wealth and social status only continued to climb throughout his career.

So what lies at the root of this strong undercurrent in Shakespeare’s plays? There has been speculation that Shakespeare was a “hidden Catholic” and that fear of being found out created this pre-occupation. Or perhaps Shakespeare was embroiled in the English intelligence service, as Marlowe had been, and this led to fear of a downfall similar to Marlowe’s. Maybe, as Greenblatt suggests, it stemmed from his father’s financial troubles, back when William was a teenager, and this experience had seared itself into his consciousness. None of these explanations sound convincing. Perhaps we need to consider that this preoccupation was born of the author’s direct experience, making it impossible for him to eliminate or disguise in his writing. If this is the case, then we must abandon Shakespeare, but need look no further than Christopher Marlowe.

What Stephen Greenblatt is describing in Will in the World sounds exactly like the psychological profile of an exiled writer living under an assumed identity. Compare Greenblatt’s description above to this description from WITSEC agents about the impact that relocation had on noncriminal witnesses:

Noncriminal witnesses . . . had to deal with a deeper problem. The psychologists described it as loss of identity, dignity, and self. . . . A noncriminal witness explained . . . “In giving up our pasts we paid a heavy price, because what you are as a person is based on where you came from and the people who love you.” ⁸

If the works of Shakespeare were not written by Christopher Marlowe, a disgraced poet in exile, his old name destroyed, his old life destroyed, then how else are we to explain Greenblatt’s observations? That Marlowe authored these plays is the simplest explanation, and yet to accept it would mean that Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1593 would have to have been faked.

One wonders how the psychological impact of living under such a condition might manifest itself in a writer’s work. Perhaps Stephen Greenblatt has already provided the answer, for it is not merely loss of identity, banishment, and disgrace that permeates the work of the writer of the Shakespeare plays. As Stephen Greenblatt tells us:

Shakespeare’s business throughout his career had been to awaken the dead.⁹

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, 2010

Daryl Pinksen, a regular MSC contributor, is the author of Marlowe's Ghost, Grand Prize Winner of the 17th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

¹The TV drama “In Plain Sight,” which debuted on the USA network in 2008, deals with WITSEC agents and those in the program living under new identities. See: http://www.usanetwork.com/series/inplainsight/
²Earley, Pete, & Gerald Shur. WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program. New York: Bantam Dell, 2002. p.84.
³Ibid., p. 93, 274-5.
⁴Ibid., p. 368.
⁵Ibid., p.10.
⁶Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004. p.173.
⁷Ibid., p.85.
⁸Early and Shur, op. cit., p. 388.
⁹Greenblatt, op. cit., p.376.

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"Mr. W.H.” and the Well-Wishing Adventurer by Peter Farey

Around this time last year, in an answer to one of Carlo's questions on this blog, I briefly referred to the question of who the “Mr. W.H.” of the Sonnets really must have been, and the implications this might have for the Marlovian theory. Although this is covered fairly fully in my essay “Hoffman and the Authorship” (from which I have unashamedly cut and pasted some of what appears below) it occurs to me that it might be helpful if I say a bit more on that question here.

The book of Shake-speares Sonnets was registered with the Stationers' Company on 20th May 1609: “Tho. Thorpe. Entred for his copie under the hands of master Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes,” and was printed “By G.Eld for T.T.,” who is naturally assumed to be the Thomas Thorpe who registered it, and also the “T.T.” who signed the well-wishing message printed after the title page, as shown below.


Calvin Hoffman took the “only begetter ... Mr. W.H.” to be the inspirer of the Sonnets, claiming that it was Thomas Walsingham—the “W.H.” coming from the, if hyphenated, name "Walsing-Ham." This wasn’t all that improbable if it is assumed (as E.A. Webb’s Walsingham pedigree has it)¹ that Walsingham was a few years younger than Marlowe. As is now clear, however, Thomas was born in 1560/61, and was therefore some three or four years older than the Sonnets' author.²

Yet throughout the Sonnets before the “Dark Lady” ones (i.e. all those up to Sonnet 126), there are references to how much older the writer is to the man he is addressing, such as:

How can I then be elder then thou art? (S 22)

T'is thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy daies, (S 62)

Against my loue shall be as I am now
With times iniurious hand chrusht and ore-worne, (S 63)

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonesse,
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport, (S 96)

O thou my louely Boy who in thy power,
Doest hould times fickle glasse, his fickle, hower: (S 126)

By far the most popular candidates for the “W.H.” mantle have been either the third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley (born between nine and ten years after the author), or the third Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert (born some sixteen years after him), both of whom seem far more suitable because of the age factor. This assumes that what Thorpe calls

THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
must be the inspirer of them, and therefore the person to whom at least most of them must have been addressed. Opponents of this theory have pointed out that to address a belted earl as “Mr.” at that time would have been inconceivable, and that Wriothesley's initials were the wrong way round anyway.

This Gordian knot was cut by Donald Foster, however, in his “Master W.H., R.I.P.”, where he made the following comments concerning the phrase “to the only begetter”:

As it happens, Thorpe's contemporaries had precise notions of what constituted “begetting” a text. According to this popular conceit, only the (pro)creative author may be called a “begetter,” and then only if the textual offspring was self-begotten, upon the author's own “Fancy” or “Mind” or “Brain” or “Invention.” Translators do not qualify—nor do commentators, publishers, patrons, paramours, scribes, inspirers of poetry, or purloiners of manuscripts. With but one unremarkable exception, nowhere do I find the word begetter, father, parent, or sire used to denote anyone but the person who wrote the work.³

As far as I can discover, nobody has ever challenged this actual statement, or managed to find a single example of an exception other than one he had discussed. Subsequent editors tend to have either rejected or ignored it, presumably because it is difficult to see how “Shakespeare's Sonnets” could have been written by a “Mr W.H.” Most of the commentators, as is clear, also take the meaning to be that of “inspirer” instead.

G. Blakemore Evans⁴ does take issue with Donald Foster's solution (that the “W.H.” is a misprint), and makes much of that one exception (from Samuel Daniel's Delia), even though Foster made it quite clear that the normal usage is being consciously reversed by claiming that the inspirer rather than Daniel himself was the real author. As far as I can discover, however, his is the only objection to Foster’s claim. So Thorpe must really be saying that the one and only author of the Sonnets is “Mr W.H.”

This is of course not the problem for Marlovians that it would be for others. As Foster puts it,⁵ “One hypothesis, which I leave for others to expound, is that Shakespeare was not the author of Shake-speare's Sonnets.” If Marlowe had indeed survived and was now living under an assumed identity, then there is no reason at all why his name could not have had the initials “W.H.”, even with the first name "Will." As Sonnet 135 puts it:

Who euer hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will too boote, and Will in ouer-plus,

Nor need there be any problem with “our ever-living poet” either. As Foster points out, “In a fairly extensive search, I have not found any instance of ever-living in a Renaissance text to describe a living mortal.”⁶ To use it to describe someone whom the world believed to be dead, but who in fact was not, would therefore be nicely ironic. What this is doing is wishing the poet not eternal bliss, but the same immortality he has promised to the addressee in sonnets such as Sonnet 81:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,
And toungs to be, your beeing shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall liue (such vertue hath my Pen)
Where breath most breaths, euen in the mouths of men.

All of this may seem rather over the top if it is Thomas Thorpe actually writing it, however. His being the adventurer who is “setting forth” also depends upon a rather awkward requirement that the transitive meaning, “publishing,” be used without any object. But is he the actual well-wisher, or could he instead be just passing the message on for someone else?

Seldom mentioned in this context is the fact that the Sonnets were entered in the Stationers' Company Register on Saturday 20th May 1609, and just three days later, Tuesday 23rd May, the second Virginia Charter was granted:

...and that suche counsellors and other officers maie be appointed amonngest them to manage and direct their affaires are willinge and readie to adventure with them; as also whose dwellings are not so farr remote from the cittye of London but that they maie at convenient tymes be readie at hande to give advice and assistance upon all occacions requisite.... And further wee establishe and ordaine that Henrie, Earl of Southampton, William, Earl of Pembrooke, [followed by fifty other named people] shalbe oure Counsell for the said Companie of Adventurers and Planters in Virginia.”⁷

Note those "adventurers." This must have been quite big news, and it seems most unlikely that anyone other than those members or the voyagers themselves would, without good reason, have spoken of himself as an “adventurer ...setting forth” that May.

Given that the two most popular candidates for the Sonnets' “fair youth” are the first two names on that list, might not the “well-wishing adventurer” in fact be one of them? If we take it, as seems quite likely, that the poet had been sending them to his friend over many years, is it not possible for the latter to have had them published as a gift to him now, whilst taking care to protect his own identity? The strange order of the dedication makes it look as if the adventurer is Thorpe, but with the poem split at the only space there is, between “W.H.” and “ALL," and the blocks of text before and after “WISHETH” swapped to the more usual order that Foster indicated,⁸ the true message is clarified.

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H.

THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
WISHETH.
ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
I am not saying that this is something that is necessary to do, only that it makes the meaning clearer. In which case a message is being sent via Thorpe to the “onlie begetter” (author) Marlowe, on behalf of “the well-wishing adventurer” — the Sonnets’ original addressee. You know it makes sense!

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, 2009

Peter Farey's essay “Hoffman and the Authorship” is the 2007 recipient of the Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman Prize, administered annually by The King's School in Canterbury for a "distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe." He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

¹See A.D. Wraight & Virginia F. Stern, In Search of Christopher Marlowe. McDonald & Co., 1965. p.280.
²Ibid., p.282.
³Foster, Donald W. "Master W. H., R. I. P." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 102, 1987. p.44.
⁴Evans, Gwynne Blakemore. The Sonnets. New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1996. p.115.
⁵Foster, op. cit., p.48.
⁶Ibid., p.46.
⁷Text from http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~tmetrvlr/hd4a.html.
⁸Foster, op. cit., p.44.

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