Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: Implications for Shakespeare Biographers by Daryl Pinksen

In Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the author argues that top-level mastery of any discipline cannot be achieved without sustained and concerted effort, usually from an early age, until something like ten thousand hours of focused practice have been logged. Gladwell’s goal is to expose as Romantic delusion the notion that “outliers,” his word for individuals who achieve world-class mastery, are the outcome of geniuses inevitably rising to the top—often in spite of their environment. In Outliers, Gladwell marshals a chorus of evidence to make his case.

The defining example Gladwell presents is a longitudinal study which tracked violin students in Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. All of the students had begun the violin around age five, and all had evidenced exceptional skill; this was their ticket into the academy. The study asked the students about practice habits, and followed the students into their professional lives. What the researchers found was stunning. For the first few years, when all students were practicing at roughly equal intensity, there was little difference in their ability, but as time went on, the proficiency gap began to widen, and there was only one factor that correlated with proficiency—practice time. Here is an excerpt from Outliers discussing the ramifications of the study’s findings:

By the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totalled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totalled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totalled just over four thousand hours.

Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totalled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours.

The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.¹

One can see how such findings might be important for Shakespeare’s biographers, for the story of Shakespeare’s rise from rural glover’s son to the greatest writer in English history is frequently held up as an example of “genius”—nature—triumphing over environment. Shakespeare was a “natural” poet, who picked things up as he went along, absorbed what he could from books when he had the chance. His genius was so profound that his rise to poetic excellence was virtually pre-ordained at birth. This makes a great story, but is it credible?

Although Gladwell never mentions Shakespeare, what he has to say in Outliers gives us new insights into the conventional Shakespearean biography, for the truth uncovered about the violin students appears to be universal:

"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again."²

By 1593, the best plays in England were written by two poets who, we are told, followed very different paths, yet ended up producing work very similar in style and substance, each exhibiting an equal world-class mastery—Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

We can easily account for Marlowe’s achievement of mastery: He was granted a scholarship to the elite King’s School in Canterbury, and from there a Parker scholarship³to Cambridge (bestowed upon boys who could read music, sing, and compose verse), first for a Bachelor of Arts, and then continuing on scholarship for his Master of Arts. Marlowe perfected his ability to “make a verse” by translating Ovid’s Latin Amores into sophisticated English verse, the first vernacular translation of that work. Marlowe began to write plays while still at University, each work moving, by steep steps, toward mastery of his chosen field.

Shakespeare’s path had to have been very different. We do not know, but given his father’s position in the community it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school. It is thought he could not have stayed more than seven years, leaving at the age of fourteen. From then he must have worked, most likely in Stratford, since at age eighteen he married a local girl and began raising a family. By the age of twenty-one, he and his wife have three children, raising them in Stratford. Then the record goes blank. It resumes again when the first plays attributed to Shakespeare make their debut in London in the early 1590s. No one knows where Shakespeare was, or what he was doing, between starting a family in Stratford and debuting as a playwright in London, with plays which were immediately the equal of, if not better than, Marlowe plays written at nearly the same time.

How did Shakespeare achieve this feat? No one knows, but what is made clear in Gladwell’s book is that “genius” is an insufficient explanation. You also need roughly ten thousand hours of practice, a very difficult thing to achieve, as Gladwell explains:

It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be enough time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.⁴

This description applies perfectly to Christopher Marlowe. But could it also apply to Shakespeare?

If the research in Outliers is any indication, in order to produce plays and poetry which equalled Marlowe’s in refinement and skill, in the same time span, Shakespeare must have logged a similar amount of time studying and practicing as Marlowe (that they were the same age makes comparison easier). The burden rests on Shakespeare’s biographers to try and explain how this might have happened, or how it was even possible.

Those of us who argue that Christopher Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare have an explanation of where this fully-fledged Shakespearean mastery came from that is consistent with the research gathered in Outliers. We know that Marlowe (as is assumed of Shakespeare) was born a genius, but it was his environment, the lucky breaks he got in his childhood, his access to books, his scholarships, his leisure time to study and practice, his time to converse with other like-minded individuals, that made him, by 1593, arguably the greatest poet-playwright in England.

Shakespeare’s current biographers are wise enough to realize that “genius” is not a sufficient explanation, and they range far and wide to try and account for the incredible phenomenon of “Shakespeare”: He spent his youth as a page in the house of a nobleman; he was a teacher; he was a law-clerk; he patched up plays while on tour with acting troupes; he browsed book-sellers stalls and ended up equalling the learning of the university-educated. Since Shakespeare did achieve this mastery, the reasoning goes, one or more of these explanations must account for it. It is difficult to see how, though. Between working and raising a family Shakespeare had much going against him, perhaps as much as Marlowe had going for him. Gladwell’s summary also serves us here:

We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society.⁵

This explanation fits Marlowe’s story; could it also fit Shakespeare’s? What Shakespeare did or did not do during his formative years is unknown, and will probably remain unknown. But could he have had the opportunities, and the sheer number of hours necessary, to become a playwright who was able to write plays and poems at the same level of mastery as Marlowe’s in the same time-frame? This is not a question borne of snobbery, the usual retort tossed out when this issue is raised. Rather, it simply asks for an acknowledgment of the way the world actually works.

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, August 2010

Daryl Pinksen, a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, is the author of Marlowe's Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, Grand Prize Winner of the 17th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

¹Gladwell, Malcolm. 2008. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company. p. 39.
[One of the many wonderful articles by Ericcson and his colleagues about the ten-thousand-hour rule is K. Anders Ericcson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363-406.] Outliers Notes pp. 288-9.
²Gladwell. 2008. p.40.
[Daniel J. Levitan talks about the ten thousand hours it takes to get mastery in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), p. 197.”] Outliers Notes p. 289.
³Archbishop Matthew Parker’s scholarship was awarded to boys who could "at first sight to solf and sing plainsong" and to be "if it may be, such as can make a verse." http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/MarlowePartI.html
⁴Gladwell. 2008. p.42.
⁵Gladwell. 2008. p.67.

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More Doubts About Will: The Swan Song by Isabel Gortázar

I proposed in Part 2, "Enter Iago," that The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice was a thoroughly revised text in respect of The Moor of Venice performed at Court in November 1604, as the name of Iago could not have been part of that performance. Let me repeat the relevant facts: The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice was entered into the Stationer’s Register (SR), by Thomas Walkley, on October 6th 1621, one day after Ben Jonson had been appointed Deputy Master of the Revels (DMR), and eleven days after the death of Mary Sydney, Countess of Pembroke on 25th September; the First Quarto (1Q) Othello, 160 lines shorter than the First Folio (FF) version, was published by Walkley in the early months of 1622.

The hypothesis I wish to propose here is that Marlowe re-wrote The Moor of Venice, turning it into what we know as the 1Q Othello in the spring/summer of 1621, and revised it almost immediately after the Countess died, adding 160 lines, many of which are dedicated to Emilia, including a long speech for the vindication of women. A further indication that Othello was probably revised long after 1616 may be that it is the first of the Quarto plays to be published with Act divisions.

Seeing that between the publication of the 1Q and the printing of the FF,¹ (seven years after William Shakespeare’s death), those 160 new lines appeared out of nowhere, Stratfordians maintain that Shakespeare wrote the FF Othello in 1604, Iago included, and that Walkley’s 1Q is a shortened or “cut” version. In this respect, the possibility that Emilia’s death may refer to the Countess of Pembroke’s demise on 25th September 1621 would allow us to conjecture that a living Shake-spear was still revising his last play sometime after that date.²

Iago’s wife does not die in the source story, nor does she die in the 1Q; in the FF, however, Emilia dies singing like a swan:

Emilia (FF, V, 2 lines 244-6):
What did thy song bode, lady?
Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan.
And die in music. (Etc.)

Because it is a known myth that swans sing immediately before their deaths, Emilia’s expression may be taken simply as a reference to such myth. However, the OED acknowledged in 1612 the epithet of “swan” as applicable to singers and poets.

Her admiring friends referred to Mary Sydney, Countess of Pembroke, as the swan of Avon, because the Wiltshire River Avon flows among the grounds of her home, Wilton House near Salisbury. I suspect that Jonson’s line in the Introductory Poem³ was meant for her.

Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights along the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James?
Actually, one wonders whether William Shakespeare was ever called the Swan of Avon, until later scholars took it for granted that Jonson’s poem must refer to him, on account of the river, but of course Jonson is talking about the Thames.

My conjecture is that Emilia’s death, singing like a swan, is a reference to Mary’s death, and was included by Marlowe after September 25th, but not in time to appear in the 1Q, published, as I have said, in the early months of 1622. If this were so, that would explain why Thomas Walkley would publish an incomplete version of Othello, instead of the full text. It is logical to suppose that the MS registered on October 6th, was all the text there was at that moment, and that those missing 160 lines were later added by the author, in time to be included in the FF.

No one has been able to explain satisfactorily why, when printing the 1Q, Walkley would take the trouble to remove, for example, the Willow Song, the death of Emilia, and some beautiful lines such as these:

Othello (FF: V, 2, lines 270-275):
Be not afraid, though you do see me weapon'd;
Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.
Do you go back dismay'd? 'tis a lost fear;
Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires. Where should Othello go?

This is indeed an anxious question: Where should Othello go? One might be tempted to conjecture that the death of Mary Sidney had left him without his last refuge in England; this added speech reads like a suicide note. Because Othello already had a suicide speech in the 1Q,⁴ this further insistence about his journey's end and the reference to his utmost sail may conceivably be telling us that the author is dying somewhere across the Channel, in the Continent where he has spent the last almost thirty years of his life.

Marlowe’s late revision would finally explain a small detail that has puzzled scholars: In Q1 Othello (Q1, 1. 3 – 345, corresponding to FF I. 3- 701), we find the word acerb: “acerb as the coloquintida”; this word was changed to bitter in the FF: “bitter as coloquintida,” a natural revision towards simplification, from the rare word to a familiar one. Acerb is not recognized in the OED as an English word until 1657, so an editor cutting/editing the FF manuscript would have had to pick up the word from the source story, in Italian. In M. R. Ridley’s Arden Edition of Othello (1962), the editor simply explains this away by saying that “It is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare wrote acerb and not bitter since no actor, compositor, or editor would be likely to substitute the rare word for the common.” But the reverse is also true, as no actor, compositor, or editor is likely to have known what acerb meant at all! The coloquintida⁵ (OED, 1565) is a medicinal herb that grows in warm regions. I wonder how many people in an Elizabethan audience would have ever heard about such an herb, let alone known that it has a very bitter taste; therefore, the words “acerb as coloquintida” might have been unintelligible to most of them.

Shakespeare got the word acerbissimo from the original Tale by Cinthio,⁶ who uses it in a completely different context, when he explains that the Lieutenant’s love for Desdemona had turned to the bitterest hatred (odio acerbissimo) because the lady did not return his affections. We are used to Orthodox academics assuming that William Shakespeare knew Italian, but, in this case, he surpasses all expectations, showing that not only he knew the meaning of the superlative acerbissimo, but he was also familiar with Italian suffixes, so that he could coin a new adjective in English, acerb, by removing the particle issimo. However, as the word that we find in the FF is not acerb, but bitter, we need to be told who, in the chain of people allegedly involved in “cutting” and editing the FF manuscript for Walkley’s 1Q, had the nerve and the knowledge to remove the perfectly adequate English word, “bitter,” and substitute it for the non-existing word, “acerb." Unless, of course, there was a living author, a linguist, revising Othello between 6th October 1621, when the 1Q was registered, and the summer of 1622, when the full text of the play was included in the FF.

So where was Marlowe at the end of September 1621? If I were writing a work of fiction, I might propose that he was ill and away in the Continent when Mary Sidney died, which news he would have heard several weeks later; alternatively, he may have been at Mary’s bedside till she died. In this second scenario he might have delivered the 1Q Othello MS in person to Jonson before leaving the country, when, after Mary’s death, her two sons, the Inimitable Pair, sent him packing. His anxious question would be added in the last revision: Where should Othello go?

Wild speculations aside, the facts appear to suggest that Marlowe made the final revision of Othello after September 25th, and my hunch is that he then either died or killed himself. If he were abroad, Jonson may not have been aware that such a revision existed when the 1Q was printed early in 1622, but he might have known that Marlowe was finally dead. In his edition of the 1Q, Walkley thought it necessary to write a Prologue signed by himself on account of the author being dead… Although this appears to be obviously referring to William Shakespeare, dead six years earlier, we might wonder whether Jonson already knew that Iago could at last be introduced under cover of the early censorship, without further risk to the author. Here is the 1Q’s title page:

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
As it hath been diverse times acted at the Globe and at the Black Friars, by his Majesty’s Servants. Written by William Shakespeare.”

Despite this information, and for reasons that shall be explained later,⁷ I find it unlikely that the text published by Walkley may have been the property of the King’s Men. Since 1604, the King’s Men had been performing The Moor of Venice, not Othello.

I believe Othello to be the last of Shakespeare’s plays, his “swan song” as well as Emilia’s. In it, Christopher Marlowe skilfully weaves the strands of the principal events that led to his destruction and, eventually, to his death in exile and ignominy. In order to tell his complex story Marlowe turned around the common usage of having one actor play several roles; instead, he used each character to represent several real people, according to ingeniously interweaved sub-plots and meaningful names. He also used several characters to represent the same person in different moments of his/her life. He assumed that his audience and readers would be familiar with the relevant historical people and events. Alas, in that he was deceived by history itself: the clues that would have been obvious to his educated contemporaries are lost to many academics and readers today. But this is not the place to explain the full story that I believe is told in Othello.

The use of the same plot and similar title as the earlier play would have been a ploy to avoid close scrutiny from the censors, who would have taken for granted (as everybody does to this day) that Othello was the same play as the old Moor of Venice of 1604. The entry in the SR says: "Thomas Walkley. Entred for his copie under the handes of Sir George Buck, and Master Swinhowe warden, The Tragedie of Othello, the moore of Venice." This seems to clear Jonson of all responsibility; nevertheless, his presence as DMR may have been the unique circumstance that made such registration possible. If so, Jonson probably took an enormous risk by allowing Othello to be entered into the SR. In fact, coincidence or not, Buck was declared insane and removed from his post shortly after the 1Q Othello appeared in print and Jonson was also removed from the post of DMR in March 1622. Maybe writing that obscure Introductory Poem in the FF was the price he had to pay for this audacity, and for his loyalty to his unlucky friend.

One cannot help wondering at Hamlet’s farewell lines to Horatio,⁸ such as they appear in the 2Q (1604):

O god Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

Why would Hamlet’s name be so badly “wounded”? It was Marlowe’s name that needed redressing, and he knew that only the recognition of his authorship of the Shakespearian Canon would clear his name forever.

(To be continued in Part 4.)

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, July 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.

¹According to W.W. Gregg (The Shakespeare First Folio, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955, pg 371) Othello was printed between August and September 1623, so in the late stages of the printing process.
²For my objections that Francis Bacon, alive in 1621, may have been the author of Othello, see Part 2: "Enter Iago."
³In the First Folio (1623).
⁴Another coincidence: In the suicide speech of both the 1Q and FF, Othello makes a reference to Aleppo, one of the most famous conquests of Tamburlaine.
⁵Its full name is Citrullus colocynthis; it grows in some parts of Asia and the Mediterranean.
⁶G. Giraldi Cinthio: Gli Hecatommithi, Venice, 1565.
⁷See part 4: Pending publication.
⁸In his play Poetaster, (c1601) Ben Jonson represents himself as Horace; in his edition of Poetaster (The Revel Plays, Manchester University Press) Tom Cain wonders whether Jonson meant Ovid to represent Marlowe or Shakespeare (!).

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John Matthew alias Christopher Marlowe by Peter Farey

On 30 May 1599, six years after the apparent death of Christopher Marlowe, a man presented himself for admission to St. Alban’s, the English college at Valladolid in Spain. In the college register—the Liber Alumnorum—he is identified as Jo(hann)es Matheus (John Matthew), but in the right margin is written al(ias) Christopherus Marlerus (Christopher Marler—or Marlowe?). Although not all of those who believe Marlowe to have survived 1593 take this to be the same man, there are several who do.

So let us take a look at just what we know or can surmise about him, and in particular whether he is a John Matthew using Christopher Marlowe as an alias, or a Christopher Marlowe calling himself John Matthew. In doing this I must thank Ros Barber, Michael Frohnsdorff, Isabel Gortázar and John Baker, each of whom has provided valuable and relevant information.

The main reason why the arrival of this man at Valladolid is known about is because of a letter discovered by Leslie Hotson and transcribed in his The Death of Christopher Marlowe.¹ It was written from Pisa in Italy by William Vaughan to the Privy Council and includes the following:

1602, July 4/14. I thought it the part of her Majesty's loyal subject in these my travels to forewarn the Council of certain caterpillars, I mean Jesuits and seminary priests, who, as I am credibly informed by two several men, whose names, under your pardon, according to promise, instantly I conceal, are to be sent from the English seminary at Valladolid, in the kingdom of Castile in Spain, to pervert and withdraw her Majesty's loyal subjects from their due obedience to her. I have therefore sent notice to some of you from Calais in France of some such persons, and of their dealing, the one of whom, George Askew, as he then termed himself, being made priest at Douay in Flanders, is taken, as I understand, and lies prisoner in the Clink. . . .
In the said seminary there is . . . one Christopher Marlor (as he will be called), but yet for certainty his name is Christopher, sometime master in arts of Trinity College in Cambridge, of very low stature, well set, of a black round beard, not yet priest, but to come over in the mission of the next year ensuing. . . .

So in 1602 Vaughan has learned from two different people of this man at Valladolid who "will be called" (i.e. wants to be known as) Christopher Marlor, and who had an M.A. from Trinity College in Cambridge.

Before admission at the English College the applicant was questioned and the answers recorded in their Liber Primis Examinis. Here he had told them that he was born and educated in Cambridge, that he was 27 years of age and had been at Cambridge University for seven years, gaining both B.A. and M.A. degrees.² Marlowe the poet/playwright would have been 35 years old by then.

When we look at who was at Trinity at about the right time, however, we find both a John Matthew and a Christopher Morley. This is what J. A. Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses³ has to say:

MATTHEW, JOHN. Matric. pens. from TRINITY, Michs. 1588; scholar from Westminster; B.A. 1592-3; M.A. 1596. One of these names of Tortworth, Gloucs., minister. Will (P.C.C.) 1628.

He matriculated from (was accepted at) Trinity as a pensioner (one who pays for his keep) in the Michaelmas (Autumn) term, having been awarded a scholarship to pay for it on his behalf.

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER. Matric. pens, from Trinity, Michs. 1578; B.A. 1582-3; M.A. 1586. Fellow. Will proved (V.C.C.)⁴

This Christopher Morley was therefore somewhat older, but held a fellowship at Trinity most probably—as we shall see—during the whole time that John Matthew was there. Before looking at that, however, let us first see what we can find out about the earlier life of John Matthew.

According to the Liber Primis Examinis, he told them that he was 27 years old when he arrived in Valladolid, and Venn tells us that he went to Westminster school. One entry in the parish register for St. Margaret, Westminster, may therefore be relevant—a John Mathew, son of William Mathew, was baptized there on 24th August 1571, which would indeed make him 27 on that date. Furthermore, another John Mathew, son of Thomas Mathew, was baptized in St. Clement Danes, Westminster, on 14 October 1571.⁵

Whether either of them was the same John Matthew or not, this would place him at Westminster School in the years leading up to 1588, and make him a contemporary of Ben Jonson, a year younger than him, who is believed to have been there from about 1579. Another contemporary, some 8 years older but not leaving until 1589, was the Welshman Hugh Holland, who over 30 years later would contribute a sonnet to the First Folio, maybe at his schoolfellow Jonson's request? That all three later converted to Catholicism may be a coincidence, but maybe not?⁶

John Matthew left Westminster for Trinity in 1588, followed there a year later by Hugh Holland. As we can see above, he achieved his B.A. in 1592-3 and M.A. in 1596. In that same year, the year of his departure from Cambridge, Christopher Morley died. That Morley was still at Trinity is indicated by the fact that the records apparently show him as being present until the year of his death, 1596.⁷ Whether Matthew was there when it happened or not, he would have certainly known about it.

According to the Liber Primis Examinis (in Louis Ule's translation),⁸ the applicant for admission "was converted to acknowledge and profess the Catholic faith by Father Thomas Wright, and he was later received into the church by Father Hugo, at that time delayed in the Clink prison for fifteen days, before he left England ..."

Father Wright had returned to England from Valladolid, after some 18 years in Europe, on 8 June 1595. One of Anthony Bacon's sources in Spain, Anthony Rolston, had been instrumental in ensuring his safe return, with Bacon getting him the protection of the Earl of Essex.⁹ His activities nevertheless got him imprisoned a year or so later. So the "conversion" most probably happened within that first year, while Wright was still closely associated with Anthony Bacon and Essex (and also while a certain Monsieur Le Doux was under their protection too).

From England, our man "was sent to St. Omer (in France) with letters of recommendation by Father Garnet of the Society of Jesus." The College at St. Omer (Audomaropolis), founded by Robert Persons in about 1591, was established for the education of Catholic laymen, and not those aspiring to priesthood.

At Valladolid "he humbly asked admission to this college that he might become a priest and be sent to do the work of the Lord in England." From the College's Liber Alumnorum: "Joannes Matheus (alias Christopher Marlerus in the right margin) Cantabrigiensis admissus est in hoc Collegium die 30 Maii an° 1599." John Matthew alias Christopher Marler (?) of Cambridge is admitted into this college on 30 May 1599.

At this point we are faced with the main question. What was his true identity? John Matthew of Westminster or Christopher Marlowe of Canterbury? What would have happened in each case?

1) John Matthew, of Westminster and Trinity, B.A. and M.A., arrives there with two companions and seeks admission. He gives them true information about himself, other than where he was born and went to school (perhaps protecting his family?). He says that he would like to use a pseudonym from now on, however, and chooses the name of one of the Fellows at his college with whom he had been closely associated for eight years or so, but who had died three years earlier. From then on he is known as Christopher Marlowe (in various forms), "master in arts of Trinity College in Cambridge" as both he and the origin of his pseudonym were.

2) The "dead" playwright Christopher Marlowe, of Canterbury and Corpus Christi, B.A. and M.A., arrives there with two companions and seeks admission. He tells them a pack of lies about who he is, pretending for no obvious reason to be John Matthew, a real and still living person some eight years younger than himself (with an M.A. from Trinity) whom he presumably knew about, although there is no evidence to support this assumption. He says that he would like to use an alias from now on, however, and chooses his real name, the single most dangerous name (for him) that he could possibly use.

It has also been suggested that the arrival of the party at Valladolid on 30 May must have been planned deliberately to coincide with the date of Marlowe’s alleged death. We are therefore asked to believe that three people set off from St. Omer at the northern tip of France to travel over 800 miles (and across the Pyrenees) to Valladolid in north-central Spain, but before setting out decide to time their departure and adjust their speed to make sure that they arrive precisely on a date which happens to be the anniversary of what was probably the worst thing that ever happened to one of them, and which he is also presumably unable to divulge to the others? I find this impossible to believe.

Since, with or without the coincidence of dates, the first of those two options is clearly so much more likely than the other, let us see whether any of the rest of the Matthew/Marlowe story works against it.

First, we need to go back to William Vaughan's letter of 1602, the one in which he says he has been told by two different people that in the seminary there is "one Christopher Marlor (as he will be called), but yet for certainty his name is Christopher, sometime master in arts of Trinity College in Cambridge."

A couple of years earlier, in his Golden Grove, Vaughan had provided the best description of Marlowe's death to appear until, largely because of his words "Detford" and "Ingram," the inquest details were discovered in 1925. In this he wrote of "Christopher Marlow by profession a play-maker," saying "it so hapned, that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had inuited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, he quickely perceyving it, auoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed."¹⁰

So the first person Vaughan, on hearing the name, would be reminded of would have been the playwright, whereas there is no reason to think that John Matthew knew anything about Marlowe at all, tucked away as he had been in Cambridge for almost the whole of Marlowe's short career.

Matthew must have been using the identity of his friend from Trinity, but Vaughan—recognizing the name of the supposedly dead "atheist" Marlowe—thought that the Privy Council should be told about it just in case it really was the same man. He apparently knows nothing of an alias, but says that the man "will be called" (says his name is) Christopher Marlor. The surname may not be precisely the same as "Marlow," but there is no doubt the Christian name is right: "but yet for certainty his name is Christopher."

There is no reason to think that Vaughan himself knew what the dead poet would have looked like, but he obtained a description of the seminary man from his sources so that the Council might be able to ascertain if it was in fact Marlowe. He was "of very low stature, well set, of a black round beard." Further information to enable them to identify him—Marlowe’s qualifications most probably being unknown to him—is that this man was "sometime master in arts of Trinity College in Cambridge." This would certainly have ruled the playwright out, even in the unlikely event that the physical description had not!

Returning to the English College at Valladolid, we see that Matthew had taken the oath (fecit iuramentum) on 2 February 1600, was ordained priest (factus est sacerdos) in September 1602 and, as Vaughan had predicted, was sent into England in early spring 1603 (missus est in Anglia 1603 primo vere).

In England, he seems to have managed to remain at liberty pursuing his mission for over a year, but was eventually arrested and locked up in the Gatehouse prison from 3 August until 23 September 1604.¹¹ Amongst the Gatehouse bills it says: "Committed by my Lo: Chief Justice Christopher Marlowe, alias Mathews, a seminarie preist oweth for 7 weeks and 2 daies being close prisoner at rate of 14s the week 5li 2s. For washing 2s 4d. -- 5li 4s 4d."¹² The order in which the names were given would not have implied (as it perhaps would today) that the first name was the "real" one. In fact, the entry preceding it is identical other than the names, which, according to Anstruther, has the pseudonym first. Although Anstruther cites the pardon rolls (C.67/9) as referring to "a cleric named John Matthew alias Marley of the City of Canterbury" it in fact says Cambridge, not Canterbury,¹³ and therefore reflects his Valladolid claim that he was born and educated there. In passing we may note that this may well have applied to his alter ego Christopher Morley. Another Christopher Morley (although clearly not the same one) was married in All Saints, Cambridge, on 14 November 1568.¹⁴

These records pose a problem, whether he really was John Matthew or the playwright Christopher Marlowe.

1) If it was John Matthew operating under the Marlowe name, why was he prepared to divulge his real name too? Could it be that any possible danger to his family had passed? There was a William Matthew who apparently died early in 1603 and may have been his father. Since he was pardoned, perhaps the revealing of his true identity was a price he had to pay. There is also the possibility, of course, given his mentor Father Wright's connections with Anthony Bacon's network of agents, that Matthew had been a double agent all along.

2) If it was Christopher Marlowe using John Matthew as an alias, the question of why he would reveal his real name to the Lord Chief Justice and risk having it passed on to Popham’s colleagues is totally inexplicable. Whitgift had died earlier that year, but Richard Bancroft—his successor-in-waiting as Archbishop of Canterbury—would have been just as much of a danger to Marlowe as Whitgift would have been. Whether they had been privy to what really happened to Marlowe in 1593 or not, any news his arrival in London in 1603/4 reaching the ears of Bancroft would have surely meant his real death this time. For any return to England, deep cover (as in the case of Monsieur Le Doux?) would have been absolutely essential.

It may seem a bit surprising that all that happened to him (given the purpose of his being sent back into England) was banishment, but this does not appear to have been all that unusual by then. For example, according to the DNB entry for Thomas Wright, above, some 30 priests—including Wright—were banished at the time of James's accession in 1603.¹⁵

Anyway, according to Anstruther, "He set out again for England from Douai 10 Dec 1604."¹⁶ After this the trail would have gone cold had it not been for that comment by Venn: "One of these names of Tortworth, Gloucs., minister." Was this our John Matthew? One is reminded of the theory that the double agent Richard Baines (having been ordained priest at Rheims before his discovery and confession) finished up as rector of the parish of Waltham in Lincolnshire.¹⁷ Could it be that John Matthew, as suggested above, really "had been a double agent all along"? An interesting possibility, enhanced by his having been "converted" by Father Wright, who had been helped in his 1595 return to England by Anthony Bacon's agent Anthony Rolston.¹⁸

If it was our John Matthew, his will was proved (by which time he would have had to be dead!) by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (P.C.C.) in 1628.

To conclude, the interesting story of John Matthew (choosing the name of his friend Christopher Morley as an alias) makes complete sense to me. The story of it having been a surviving Christopher Marlowe (picking from goodness-knows-where the name of someone there is no reason for him ever to have heard of, let alone known any details) really makes no sense at all.

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, July 2010

Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 12 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.

¹Hotson, Leslie J. 1925. The Death of Christopher Marlowe.
²Ule, Louis. 1992. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1609): A Biography. p. 448.
³Venn, J. A. 1903. Alumni Cantabrigenses. p. 161.
⁴Venn, http://www.archive.org/details/p1alumnicantabri03univuoft. I am grateful to Ros Barber for explaining to me that VCC refers to the records of the Vice-Chancellor’s Court.
⁵Family Search website http://www.familysearch.org
⁶Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004.
⁷Ros Barber discovered that the 1589-1592 Buttery records from Trinity show Christopher Morley as being present throughout that time. The last recorded payment for his fellowship was in 1596, however, and his will was proved by the University Vice-Chancellor’s Court, indicating that he must have still been there when he died.
⁸Ule, p. 448.
⁹LPL Bacon Papers MS.651 f.232-2.
¹⁰Vaughan’s words as transcribed in A.D.Wraight and Virginia F. Stern’s In Search of Christopher Marlowe. 1965. p. 307.
¹¹Anstrother, Godfrey. 1968. The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558-1850, Vol 1. His source is given as The Catholic Record Society (CRS 53, 266).
¹²Ule, p. 501.
¹³I am grateful to Isabel Gortázar for pointing out this inaccuracy in Anstruther’s work.
¹⁴Family Search website http://www.familysearch.org
¹⁵Oxford DNB.
¹⁶Anstruther, citing (DD 63—Douai Diaries [CRS 10, 11]).
¹⁷In an article by Constance Brown Kuriyama, accepted by Charles Nicholl. But Roy Kendall, showing Baines would have had to be in two places at once, refutes this idea in his Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys Through the Elizabethan Underground. 2004. p. 114.
¹⁸Oxford DNB and LPL Bacon Papers MS.651 f.232-2 (Copy of letter from another agent, Anthony Standen, to Anthony Rolston).

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Christopher Marlowe – Flight or Banishment? by Peter Farey

Although we Marlovians - almost by definition - share a belief that Marlowe's death was faked, there is rather less unanimity about just who was and who wasn't also involved in the deception. This paper sets out my own thoughts on the subject.

One thing needs to be cleared up straight away: there is no evidence that the Court of Star Chamber had shown any interest in Marlowe's doings. He was arrested on behalf of the Privy Council, appeared before the Privy Council, was released on his indemnity by the Privy Council, and commanded to report daily to the Privy Council until licensed to the contrary. Furthermore, the reports of his alleged wrong-doings seem to have gone only to Privy Council members. Although most of the meetings of the Council in the latter half of May 1593 were held in the Star Chamber at Westminster (rather than at Nonsuch, where the Queen and Court were), and although members of the Privy Council also served as members of the Court of Star Chamber, this court as such was not involved.

There can be little doubt, however, that Marlowe was in trouble. One may dismiss some of the individual accusations made by those informing against him as either inaccurate or exaggerated, but taken all together they paint a fairly clear picture of someone who had genuine atheistic beliefs (whatever that meant), who attempted to persuade others that these were right, and who had even written a book on atheism which he had used possibly more than once as the script of a lecture intended to persuade others to this opinion.

The main thrust of the campaign currently being pursued by Archbishop Whitgift was anti-presbyterian and anti-puritan, but we can still be fairly confident that he would have considered these activities no less deplorable than those of Barrow, Greenwood and Penry - all of whom were tried and executed around then for things they had written. And we may assume, I think, that on the Privy Council both he and Lord Keeper Puckering would have been pushing hard for similar action to be taken against Marlowe. Voices would surely have been raised in his defence too - by Lord Burghley, Lord Admiral Howard or Sir Robert Cecil perhaps - but if Marlowe was in trouble it was nevertheless primarily with the Privy Council itself.

If Marlowe had decided to escape inevitable punishment by faking his own death, therefore, his choosing of Thomas Walsingham to help him - as he clearly must have done given Walsingham’s links with everyone there - may seem a bit strange. Until only four years earlier Walsingham had been working as an important functionary in the intelligence network of his close relative Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's spymaster and until his death in 1590 a leading member of the Privy Council. This could be fairly easily explained away, of course, but if the two of them did join forces to fake the death some of their other decisions are rather harder to understand.

For example, if I had been engaged in a project intended to outwit the Privy Council I don't think I would have chosen a venue owned by someone related in some way to two of its members, as Eleanor Bull apparently was. Nor would I have chosen a location within the verge (i.e. within 12 miles of the Queen), which was therefore not only within the special jurisdiction of the Privy Council but would ensure that the one coroner in the country closely connected to the Privy Council, William Danby, would have to hold the inquest.

Similarly, one might question their choice of accomplices. In Nicholas Skeres we have someone who had served under the Earl of Essex for several years and only a month earlier as a witness before the Court of Star Chamber declared that the Earl (who would have attended in his capacity as a recently appointed Privy Council member) was his "Lord and Master."¹ Robert Poley was certainly employed directly by the Privy Council at this time, nearly all of his warrants being signed by Vice-Chamberlain Heneage on their behalf. In fact, of all the people involved in the attempt to escape the clutches of the Privy Council on that fateful day, Thomas Walsingham's servant Ingram Frizer seems to have been the only one not to have some connection with it!

No, what we really must infer from this is that at least one or more members of the Privy Council were involved in some way. But if so, who? The Council consisted of different factions, so whoever it was would have been putting their careers and possibly even their lives at risk should a member of one of the rival factions find out. There is a likelihood, as I have discussed here earlier,² that Nicholas Skeres's Star Chamber Court appearance a month earlier had put him out of favour with Essex, but this would have made him even more eager to ingratiate himself with the Earl. Could any of the others really trust him? And Robert Poley was widely known as duplicitous, Sir Francis Walsingham having even written that he was loath to "lay himself open" to him.³ A simple word from either of them directly or indirectly into the ear of Archbishop Whitgift could have been catastrophic for any Council member or members acting on their own. Would any of them have really been prepared to take such a risk on behalf of Christopher Marlowe, no matter how much "good service" he had done for Her Majesty in the past nor how potentially valuable his brilliance as a poet/dramatist might be? I think not.

For me, therefore, it really is very hard to believe that the death-faking was performed without there having been some sort of agreement at Privy Council level as Louis Ule first suggested.⁴ Unlike him, however, I see this as a compromise between the Cecils (mainly) on the one hand, who wanted him saved, and Whitgift and Puckering (mainly) on the other, who wanted him dead. The Queen's tacit approval would also be sought. He would be not only banished for life, but would become a "non-person" too. By their doing this he would be seen by the masses to have been struck down by God for his transgressions,⁵ but his undoubted genius would survive in a way that might prove useful to the state. I note that it was Whitgift and Puckering who, with Chief Justice Popham, actually signed John Penry's death warrant for that most unusual (but possibly essential) time of day, and that it was Puckering who changed the words on the Baines Note from "died a sudden and violent death" to the more equivocal "came to a sudden and fearful end of his life."⁶

Lord Burghley was apparently quite ill at this time, so it may also be worth noting that he nevertheless attended more Privy Council meetings than any other Privy Counsellor over this period, apparently not once missing any of the eleven meetings held between 11th May and 12th June. The 31st of May - between the "death" and the inquest - is particularly interesting, when at the Star Chamber in the morning he attended a Council meeting with Whitgift and Puckering (the opposition?) and one at Nonsuch in the afternoon with Essex, Hunsden, Heneage and Robert Cecil (the supporters?).

My conclusion is in fact that the whole Privy Council knew and, with varying degrees of conviction, agreed to it. As I see it, this is the only way in which the risk to anyone involved could be sufficiently reduced, unless they themselves spilt the beans! If it were discovered, it could be brushed aside as a Privy Council decision, and any alleged perjury excused on the basis of the inquest having in any case been null and void.⁷

Whitgift's going along with this might seem very strange at first, despite his above-mentioned role in the provision of John Penry's body at just the right time. Although I am usually reluctant to read hidden meanings into the texts, however, there is a passage in As You Like It (the play with so many apparent references to Marlowe) in which I cannot but believe the symbolism to be deliberate:

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)

I'm not sure why the snake (who doesn't appear in the original story) is female, but that it forms a noose around the man's neck and threatens to stop his mouth is surely meaningful. I understand that the basic colour of ecclesiastical vestments changes to green at Pentecost (i.e. when Marlowe "died") and stays green for the six months until Advent. That an Archbishop's vestments would have gilt trimmings goes without saying, especially someone as showily extravagant as Whitgift was.⁸ The identity of the lioness, who was male in the original story, with the royal disposition (and "udders all drawn dry"!) also seems clear. They are together on this, and Marlowe will be in no danger from either of them as long as he "doth seem as dead."

The publication of plays registered with the Stationers' Company at this time was subject to the approval of Whitgift or his colleague Bancroft. As You Like It was registered in 1600, but this was not converted into permission for it to be published until over twenty years later, and after the deaths of both the Queen and Whitgift. It therefore seems to me that this may well have been one of the reasons why.

Finally, it is worth saying that such a scenario would be far more likely to work in ensuring both Marlowe's accepting the "sentence" and his continued silence on the subject. With any other situation it would be just the fear of what might otherwise be done to him which would buy his obedience, whereas with this one the ultimately more powerful carrot of eventual forgiveness, return, and recognition could be promised, whether such an end was ever really on the cards or not.

The constant recurrence of such themes in Shakespeare’s later plays may well suggest that he at least still thought it was. Referring to Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest, for example, Stephen Greenblatt wrote: "Why, if [Shakespeare] is implicated in the figure of his magician hero, might he feel compelled to plead for indulgence, as if he were asking to be pardoned for a crime he had committed?"⁹ Why indeed?

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, July 2010  Burgess Sam Riley Deptford

Peter Farey, a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, 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." Himself no stranger to official subterfuge, Peter was based behind the Iron Curtain during the "cold war" (in BRIXMIS), observing and reporting on Soviet military activity in East Germany.

Click here to reach Peter's website.

¹Nicholl, Charles. 2002. The Reckoning. p.33.
²Farey, Peter. "Nicholas Skeres and the Earl of Essex." http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2009/09/nicholas-skeres-and-earl-of-essex-by.html
³Nicholl, p.160.
⁴Ule, Louis. 1995. Christopher Marlowe 1564-1607: A Biography. p.234. David More also suggested around this time that Marlowe had been "banished to death," probably by The Queen, Burghley and Essex.
⁵See for example William Vaughan’s 1599 Golden Grove, in which he wrote: "Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work the end of impious atheists."
⁶Nicholl, pp.323-5. Trascripts of the two Baines Note versions can be found at http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/baines2.htm and http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/baines3.htm
⁷Farey, Peter. "Was Marlowe’s Inquest Void?" http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/inquest.htm
⁸I am grateful to Michael Frohnsdorff, who suggested the Whitgift connection in The Marlowe Society Newsletter 18, Spring 2002, pp.31-33.
⁹Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World. pp.376-7.

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Who wrote Shakespeare? Rylance,Jacobi,Emmerich, Anonymous,Oxford

Marlowe and Comedy by Ros Barber

It is a common misrepresentation of Marlowe that he couldn't be funny. We know there were comic scenes in Tamburlaine - the printer Richard Jones admits to having cut them out, saying, "I haue (purposely) omitted and left out some fond and friuolous Iestures, digressing (and in my poore opinion) far vnmeet for the matter...they haue bene of some vaine conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were shewed vpon the stage in their graced deformities: neuertheles now, to be mixtured in print with such matter of worth, it wuld prooue a great disgrace to so honorable & stately a historie."

Doctor Faustus contains a number of comic scenes; The Jew of Malta can be played as a farce. Anyone who saw the National Theatre's excellent production in London last year will know that even in Dido Queen of Carthage there is plenty of comic material available to a skilful company. There is also a great deal of wit (and one might say out and out comedy) in the long narrative poem Hero and Leander.

Like Marlowe's plays, the early Shakespeare plays - the Henry VI trilogy, King John, Titus Andronicus, Richard III - are generally serious in intent. The earliest Shakespeare comedy is either The Comedy of Errors or The Taming of the Shrew (depending on whose dating you go with), the latter existing in an earlier version (The Taming of a Shrew) which may, some scholars suggest, have been penned by Marlowe.

Marlowe was considered a wit in his day, and there is contemporary personal testimony to back that up: Thomas Thorpe calls him “that pure, Elementall wit Chr. Marlow," and Thomas Heywood writes that he was “renown’d for his rare art and wit.” He was friends with, and influenced by, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Watson - both famously witty men. The commonly held belief that Marlowe wasn't capable of writing comedy just doesn't hold water. It is part of what Lukas Erne calls Marlowe's "mythography." One only has to read the accusations in the Baines Note to appreciate Marlowe in full comedic flow. It was the misinterpretation of his wit as seriousness that led to his personal tragedy in 1593. Let’s not perpetuate the error.

Ros Barber

© Ros Barber, June 2010

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). 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.


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"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

By the Dim Light of Nature by Peter Farey

In about 1615, Francis Beaumont (at least it is generally assumed to be him, as it is signed F.B.) wrote a letter to Ben Jonson. It was in verse and included the following lines (15-21):

...heere I would let slippe
(If I had any in mee) schollarshippe,
And from all Learninge keepe these lines as cleere
as Shakespeares best are, which our heirs shall heare
Preachers apte to their auditors to showe
how farr sometimes a mortall man may goe
by the dimme light of Nature...

Shakespearean scholars - both those with an "authorship" axe to grind and those without - have welcomed this as a clear indication that Shakespeare lacked an advanced education. Jonathan Bate says, for example, "Beaumont specifically praised Shakespeare for writing his best lines 'by the dim light of Nature', without 'Learning'." (1997. The Genius of Shakespeare. p.70). "Furthermore," he says, "his statement that Shakespeare achieved poetic greatness without the benefit of advanced learning precisely refutes the foremost claim of all the Anti-Stratfordians, namely that the plays could only have been written by someone who had benefited from a better formal education than Shakespeare's."

Another good example of how this "information" is used is in the current version of the Wikipedia entry on the "Shakespeare Authorship Question" which says: "Contemporary playwright Francis Beaumont thought this not a disadvantage. He wrote to Jonson: 'I would let slip . . . scholarship and from all learning keep these lines as clear as Shakespeare's best are . . . to show how far a mortal man may go by the dim light of Nature'." (But does Beaumont mean that Shakespeare's best lines are "free from all learning" or that he "keeps them free from all learning"? That's quite important!)

One may forgive the omission of those words "If I had any in mee," but are the others - "which our heirs shall heare / Preachers apte to their auditors" - as unimportant as the omission might have us believe? I don't think so. The first question is why there appears to be no verb in that clause. These "preachers" will have to do something "to showe / how farr sometimes a mortall man may goe / by the dimme light of Nature," so why is there no indication of what it is? It makes no grammatical sense, does it?

The answer is that there was a meaning for "apt" back then which we have completely lost nowadays - as a verb. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the first call for anyone trying to decipher just what someone meant in days gone by) it could be "To make fit, adapt (to), prepare suitably (for)." So these preachers will apparently adapt this Shakespearean characteristic to fit what their listeners presumably want to hear.

But what possible interest would "Preachers" have in approving in their sermons what a playwright had written for performance on the stage? None, of course. Again the OED comes to the rescue with a definition of the word "preacher" which, among other meanings, was used at the time: "a person who exhorts others earnestly; a person who advocates or inculcates something by speech or writing, esp. in a self-righteous or overbearing manner; a person who or thing which imparts a lesson or commends an attitude."

So what Beaumont appears to me to be saying isn't that Shakespeare lacked learning, but that he chose (to the benefit of the overall quality of his work and particularly his "best" lines) not to display it in any obvious way. He also predicts that in the future there will be people who, perhaps "in a self-righteous or overbearing manner," will use this concealment of Shakespeare's learning to prove that he neither had nor needed any.

And isn't that exactly what has happened?

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, June 2010

Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years, and his Marlowe Page is one of the most respected sites about Marlowe. Peter'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's a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

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Shapiro's Contested Will by Samuel Blumenfeld

One must thank James Shapiro for having written a book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), that will serve as a great source of support for the assertion that Christopher Marlowe wrote the poems and the thirty-six plays in the First Folio attributed to Shakespeare. His defense of the orthodox Stratfordian position is so feeble as to invite even more claimants to the authorship of these immortal works.

Shapiro virtually eliminates Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford as possible authors of the Shakespeare canon. For that we can indeed be grateful. But because he decided not to stage a full attack on the Marlovian position, he has encouraged Marlovians to press forward to find the smoking gun that will finally establish Marlowe as the greatest literary genius in human history.

The most important task for Marlovians is to come up with irrefutable evidence that Marlowe survived his supposed death at Deptford on May 30, 1593. As for this writer, proof that Marlowe lived beyond May 30, 1593, is simply the existence of those 36 plays in the First Folio, which only he could have written. He is the only one of all of the contenders who had the proven literary genius to write those works. Of course, I recognize that this reasoning doesn't suffice for many. But until we find that document showing Marlowe lived, I'd encourage everyone interested in the subject to read all the works of Marlowe and all the works attributed to Shakespeare and to study the excellent resources provided by the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society. The Marlovian theory of authorship will then make a heck of a lot of sense (and it will certainly be an amazing intellectual journey at the very least!).

James Shapiro writes very sympathetically about Delia Bacon–no relation to Francis Bacon–whose obsession with the authorship question drove her finally to an untimely death in an insane asylum in 1859. But she is credited with having started the modern authorship controversy. However, it was the attempt by Baconians to find hidden codes and ciphers in the works of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare which led to that movement’s demise. It was more than the average reader could contend with.

As for the Oxford theory, Shapiro does an excellent job of revealing Thomas Looney’s positivist views and membership in the Church of Humanity, which apparently led to his interest in the Shakespeare authorship problem. He attempted to solve the problem by finding the one Elizabethan who measured up to his criteria for authorship: Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

For Looney, Shapiro explains, “The true author had to be a man whose aristocratic lineage made him a natural leader, one who–if he had been properly recognized in his time–could have changed his world. Like Comte’s great teachings, ‘Shakespeare’s’ collected works were a textbook for social and political reform: ‘How differently might the whole course of European history have unfolded,’ Looney laments, ‘if the policy of “Shakespeare” had prevailed instead of that of the politicians of his time’” (176).

As for why Oxford hid his identity as author, Shapiro writes: “There had to be a better explanation for why the greatest of poets suppressed his identity. The answer was soon found: Oxford was Queen Elizabeth’s secret lover and their union produced an illegitimate son, the Earl of Southampton. That argument, first advanced by Percy Allen in 1933, came to be known in Oxfordian circles as the Prince Tudor theory and proved deeply appealing to skeptics already convinced that conspiracy and concealment had defined Oxford’s literary life[....]To this day it has deeply divided Oxfordians" (196).

But some Oxfordians even went further in advancing the Prince Tudor theory. Shapiro elaborates: “According to its proponents, Oxford was not only Elizabeth’s lover but her son as well. The man who impregnated the fourteen-year-old future Queen was probably her own stepfather, Thomas Seymour. So it was incest, and incest upon incest when Oxford later slept with his royal mother and conceived Southampton” (196).

Many Oxfordians reject these stories. But Hank Whittemore, a New York novelist, wrote a fascinating script based on the Prince Tudor story, which he performs with much gusto at Oxfordian meetings to the delight of the attendees. I witnessed such a riveting performance in 2009 and came away with the notion that fiction, indeed, is often stranger than truth. And strange as it may seem, Shapiro himself attended one of Whittemore’s performances in November 2008 at the Globe playhouse in London.

The professor also analyzes famous men like Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, and Henry James who rejected Shakespeare as the author. Freud saw in Oxford and Hamlet his Oedipus complex acted out; Twain took apart Shakespeare’s will and biographical data. He wrote: “All I want is to convince some people that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Who did, is a question which does not greatly interest me” (141).

But from a Marlovian point of view, Henry James comes closest to our perception of the truth. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “Still, all the same, take my word for it, as a dabbler in fable and fiction, that the plays and the sonnets were never written but by a Personal Poet, a Poet and Nothing Else, a Poet, who, being Nothing Else, could never be a Bacon" (144). (Or for that matter an Earl of Oxford!)

James further wrote: “The difficulty with the divine William is that he isn’t, wasn’t the Personal Poet with the calibre and the conditions, any more than the learned, the ever so much too learned, Francis” (144).

And so Henry James agrees with the Marlovian view that the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare could have only been written by a professional poet with the poetic genius that none of the other contenders had.

On the subject of Calvin Hoffman, Shapiro writes: “Oxfordians looked on jealously when the self-promoting Calvin Hoffman generated far more attention than they could muster with his claims for Christopher Marlowe’s authorship of the plays–first with the publication in 1955 of The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare, then with his success in securing permission to open the grave of Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham in a failed attempt to unearth Marlowe’s long-hidden manuscripts of Shakespeare’s plays" (201).

Shapiro got it wrong. It was Sir Thomas Walsingham’s tomb that Hoffman gained permission to open, not the grave of Elizabeth’s spymaster.

On page 211, Shapiro relates: “On July 11, 2002 in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, a memorial window was unveiled in Christopher Marlowe’s honor. His date of birth and death are given as ‘1564?-1593.’” Another bit of sloppy editing. The window actually reads: “1564 Christopher Marlowe ?1593.” The question mark relates to the date of death, not birth.

These lapses of accuracy are inexcusable for a scholar of Shapiro’s reputation and caliber. Obviously, the fact checkers and proofreaders at Simon & Schuster were not up to the job.

Nevertheless, the book is very much worth reading as the Columbia professor provides a good deal of historical background to the authorship question as well as an amusing account of the trials staged by Oxfordians before several Supreme Court justices.

But he definitely presages the decline of the Oxford movement when he writes:

For there is always a risk that new media will reorient attention to a rival and more attractive candidate–and indeed, the recent proliferation of sites on Christopher Marlowe, no doubt energized by interest in the government conspiracy at the heart of the case for Marlowe’s faked death, may be a sign that the dominance of the Oxfordian camp may not extend much longer than the Baconian one, roughly seventy years or so. Just as the Oxfordians could attract their share of celebrities, so too could rival camps. Marlovians were please to announce a new recruit when film director Jim Jarmusch told the New York Times “I think it was Christopher Marlowe” who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. (217)

As for his defense of Shakespeare, Shapiro believes that Stratfordians play into the hands of the doubters by digging for questionable autobiographical data in the sonnets and plays. Also, he believes that attempts to conceal the true authorship would have failed, for Shakespeare was simply too well known.

He comments: “The sheer number of inexpensive copies of Shakespeare’s works that filled London’s bookshops after 1594 was staggering and unprecedented. No other poet or playwright came close to seeing seventy or so editions in print–that’s counting only what was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime” (223).

He also believes that the Bard worked closely with the other members of the theater company, creating characters for specific actors who fit the parts. The professor writes:

Take, for example, the stage directions in the First Folio edition of that early history play, The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, which reads: “Enter Sincklo and Humfrey.” John Sinklo was a regular hired man for whom Shakespeare wrote lots of skinny-man parts. Shakespeare would slip again and start thinking of Sinklo rather than the character he was playing in the draft that was used to produce the Quarto edition of The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, where his stage direction reads: “Enter Sincklo and three or four officers.” (229)

But that still doesn’t explain why, according to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s manuscripts were so clean and devoid of blots. If Marlowe had written them, they were apparently copied by a scribe minus blots and cross-outs and delivered to Shakespeare in pristine condition. The names of actors were obviously added later on when casting decisions were made.

Shapiro also relies much too heavily on the notion that Shakespeare’s imagination was the main source of his greatness. But what he fails to address is the incredible linguistic genius of the author. Plenty of writers have imagination. But no writer has equaled “Shakespeare” in his mere command and use of the language. Marlowe had already demonstrated that literary genius in the plays written before Deptford.

Contested Will is a nice but futile attempt by Shapiro to end the authorship controversy. But with Marlowe on the ascendance, as Shapiro acknowledges in his book and in recent interviews, this is only the beginning of a whole new phase in this fascinating story. I am optimistic that evidence will eventually surface proving that Marlowe lived beyond the dubiously reported events at Deptford–lest we forget, to cite one of many questions surrounding Marlowe's alleged demise, “most of the evidence in the Coroner's Inquisition, based as it is entirely upon the word of three skilful liars, must be taken with a pinch of salt,” as Peter Farey rightly argues. When that smoking gun is found, English literature will never be the same. It would also be the Stratfordians’ worst nightmare, for scholars throughout the 20th century (many of them Statfordians) have already made the case regarding the similarities in style between Marlowe and Shakespeare, or at the very least, Marlowe’s significant “influence” on Shakespeare.

Samuel Blumenfeld

© Samuel Blumenfeld, May 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. He is a former editor in the New York book publishing industry (he edited the 1960 paperback edition of Calvin Hoffman's The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare"), and he has lectured in all 50 U.S. states. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others.

See Sam on YouTube addressing the Shakespeare authorship controversy.

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Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare: Who Wrote Edward III? by Daryl Pinksen

A recent announcement¹ from Brian Vickers claims to have settled the longstanding mystery of who wrote Edward III.² The play, likely written around 1590, has come down to us without attribution, but there are clues in its style that have guided speculation about its authorship. These efforts have tended to focus on Shakespeare and Marlowe as possible authors, since the play bears apparent hallmarks of their styles, expressions and diction.

Edward III is a significant play as it spans the historical gap between Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and the early Shakespeare play Richard II. It’s a good play, good enough to be considered in the same league as the Marlowe and Shakespeare plays, but its lack of attribution has led some commentators to wonder if perhaps some third party were responsible; in the nineteenth century, J.A. Symonds speculated, without irony, that Edward III may have been written “by some imitator of Shakespeare’s Marlowesque manner."³

Vickers, noting passages in the play which reminded him of the voice of Thomas Kyd (famous in his day as the creator of the influential and successful Spanish Tragedy), used word counting software to compare the play to the acknowledged works of Kyd and Shakespeare. Vickers came to the conclusion that Thomas Kyd had written some 60% of Edward III, with Shakespeare contributing the other 40%. This raises some interesting possibilities. If Vickers is right, then it would appear that Shakespeare would have collaborated with Thomas Kyd before May 1593, and therefore before Shakespeare’s name first appeared as a writer in June 1593.

In May 1593 Thomas Kyd had been arrested after “fragments of a disputation”—portions of a book which outlined the anti-trinitarian Arian heresy—were found in his possession. He was imprisoned for some time, and according to his own account, treated harshly by his jailors. Kyd emerged from prison a scandalized and broken man, shunned by his former employer, Lord Strange (the patron of Lord Strange’s Men, the group of players which would soon evolve into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company in which Shakespeare became sharer in 1594). Kyd never worked again; despite his protestations, he was unable to re-establish his reputation and win back the favour of Lord Strange or any other theatre company’s patron. By August 1594, Thomas Kyd was dead.

Vickers assigns to Shakespeare the first three acts of Edward III, plus another scene later on, suggesting that Shakespeare’s involvement predated Kyd’s. If true, this would mean that Shakespeare could have known Thomas Kyd and worked with him during the period when Kyd was associated with Lord Strange’s players. It’s an intriguing thought, and opens up wide latitude for speculation about Shakespeare’s involvement with Kyd, as well as others in Kyd’s circle, such as Lord Strange and Christopher Marlowe. There’s only one problem: there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever met Thomas Kyd. There is however, a writer who did know Thomas Kyd, and knew him quite well—Christopher Marlowe.

Kyd’s room had been searched when he fell under suspicion of being the author of the so-called “Dutch Church Libel,"⁴ a posted threat against London Huguenots, written in blank verse and laden with allusions to Marlowe’s plays. After his release, suspicion still hung over him and Kyd wrote to Sir John Puckering asking to have his name cleared. In the course of the conversation, Kyd revealed several details about his relationship with Marlowe, who by that time had been declared dead. The papers found in his possession that got him arrested, Kyd said, belonged to Marlowe.⁵ It must have gotten mixed in with his own papers, Kyd explained, during the period when he and Marlowe were writing together in the same chamber. Kyd reported—or perhaps reminded—that Marlowe had affirmed that the offending papers indeed were his.⁶

When I was first suspected for that Libel that concerned the State, amongst those waste and idle papers (which I cared not for) and which unasked I did deliver up, were found some fragments of a disputation touching that opinion, affirmed by Marlowe to be his, and shuffled with some of mine unknown to me by some occasion of our writing in one chamber two years since.⁷

What were Kyd and Marlowe doing writing in the same chamber? Marlowe, according to Kyd, was a difficult man to deal with. If they were working on separate projects, there was no need for them to work in the same space. We do not know, but it is possible that they were working collaboratively, which would explain their writing in close quarters. If so, then their collaboration might still be in existence, given that Marlowe and Kyd were arguably the most popular playwrights in London at that time.

It turns out that Brian Vickers is not the only scholar who has done computer-assisted research trying to establish the authorship of Edward III. Tom Merriam, using a different yardstick, argued in 2000 that the play was “suggestive of a Marlovian framework, reworked and added to by Shakespeare."⁸ Merriam and Vickers both use what appear to be sound methodologies, yet arrive at very different conclusions.⁹

There is a solution which might satisfy both the literary and the historical evidence, but we would need to suspend for a moment the assumption that the Marlowe and Shakespeare plays were written by two different writers. When Tom Merriam identifies passages in Edward III that are similar to Marlowe’s and other passages that resemble Shakespeare, this is exactly what we would expect if Marlowe were the writer of both bodies of work.¹⁰ The play would necessarily resemble Marlowe’s plays in some places, and in other places would resemble the plays printed in Shakespeare’s name.

And when Brian Vickers identifies Thomas Kyd’s influence in the play, there is a ready answer for this, where none exists for Shakespeare, if it were Marlowe, not Shakespeare, whom Kyd collaborated with on Edward III. Documented evidence that he and Marlowe spent time writing together in the same chamber, during the period when Edward III was created, helps support this hypothesis.

There is a real possibility that a Marlowe/Kyd collaboration happened. The work of Tom Merriam and Brian Vickers suggests Edward III may be that play.

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, May 2010

Daryl Pinksen, a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, is the author of Marlowe's Ghost, Grand Prize Winner of the 17th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

See Daryl on YouTube discussing the Marlowe theory of Shakespeare authorship.

¹Time Magazine. “Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play.” Oct. 20, 2009. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1930971,00.html
²Full text of Edward III available online at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1770
³Brooke, C. F. Tucker, ed. 1908. The Shakespeare Apocrypha: Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays Which Have Been Ascribed to Shakespeare. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. (1967 printing at the Oxford University Press, London). p. xxii.
⁴See “Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page” for a transcription. http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/libell.htm
⁵“On 12 May, in a dark scratchy hand, one of them [Kyd’s interrogators] endorsed the document with these words:

Vile hereticall conceipts denyinge the deity of Jhesus Christ our Savior, founde amongst the papers of Thos Kydd, prisoner.

Then, in a different ink, he added: ‘wch he affirmeth that he had ffrom Marlowe’.” Nicholl, Charles. 2002. The Reckoning. Vintage: London. p. 50-51 for a transcription of Kyd’s arrest.
⁶Both Charles Nicholl (2002. The Reckoning. p. 353) and Constance Kuriyama (2002. Christopher Marlowe. p. 144) interpret Kyd’s claim of what Marlowe “affirmed to be his” was the opinions contained in the fragments, rather than the fragments themselves.
⁷Modern translation of a transcription from “Peter Farey’s Marlowe Page.” http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/kyd2.htm
⁸Merriam, Tom. “Edward III.” Literary and Linguistic Computing. Volume 15, No. 2, 2000. p.157.
⁹“[identifying co-authorship] is initially ‘subjective’, in the sense that all knowledge of the world is mediated through individual perceiving agents, but it can be formulated and tested objectively, once adequate methods have been evolved.” Vickers, Brian. 2002. Shakespeare, Co-Author. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 47.
¹⁰For a discussion of the closeness of the Shakespeare style to Marlowe’s, visit http://www.marloweshakespeare.org/MarloweScholarship.html

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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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