The Well-Wishing Adventurer: A Personal Interpretation of the Title Page of Shake-speare's Sonnets, Part 2 by Isabel Gortázar

SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609

TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.

As I said in my previous chapter, Our Ever-Living Poet, I must now propose and interpretation for the second part of the Dedication: Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?

The coincidence of dates, as well as the word adventurer, makes it inevitable to consider the facts related to The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia.

This elaborate title distinguished between two types of people involved in the “Virginia Company”: Adventurers and Planters. The term Adventurers was used for the stockholders, the entrepreneurs, who rarely went to the Colony but followed the progress of their investment from London. The term Planters referred to the men who actually went to Virginia as settlers, and for this they received a share in stock. They included craftsmen, artisans and gentlemen, as well as their women and children.

As I said, the coincidence of dates in 1609 is interesting. The sonnets were entered into the Stationers' Register on May 20 (and published by Thorpe the same year).¹ The Second Charter of the Virginia Company was signed by King James three days later on May 23, and the Flagship The Sea Venture² sailed towards America ten days later, on June 2, together with eight other vessels.

A digression: The Sea Venture was wrecked in Bermuda on July 28, four days after the fleet was hit by a storm. In September 1610 a ship arrived in England bringing a detailed report written by one William Strachey, with the title: A True Reportory of the Wracke. This document, written as a private letter to an unidentified lady, was dated July 15, 1610 but was not published until 1625, so it is unlikely that anyone not connected to the Company of Adventurers (or with the lady in question) would have been able to read it. Orthodox scholars have observed the similarities between Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Strachey’s document; I entirely agree that such similarities exist, in my opinion beyond reasonable doubt of simple coincidence. Moreover, I think that another report (anonymous), published by the company in 1610, also found its way into the play. However, this is matter for another essay.

But how could all this transoceanic business have anything to do with Shake-speares Sonnets? In any case, if the well-wishing adventurer were connected with this particular “venture," he would be someone who had shares in the company, not necessarily someone who was setting forth on his way to America.

So, who WISHETH what to whom? As T.T. is the author of the Dedication, he should be the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth; also, the Dedication is unambiguously addressed to Mr WH. Therefore, leaving aside elaborate conjectures as to possible hidden meanings, and considering only the syntactic/grammatical point of view, it seems that Thomas Thorpe is the adventurer who wisheth all those nice things to Mr WH. Thus:

THE. WELL.WISHING.ADVENTURER, THOMAS THORPE,
(IN. SETTING. FORTH.)
WISHETH TO. Mr W.H.
(THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.)
ALL. HAPPINESS.AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED. BY. OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.

Perhaps the way to understand the second part of Thorpe’s Dedication is to simply set our minds back to 1609: The Virginia Company, with its jargon of adventurers and planters, would probably have been the talk of the town for months, so that the word adventurer could have become the trendy adjective to be applied familiarly to anyone embarking (no pun intended) in a (daring) commercial enterprise.

If Pembroke’s reaction was such as may perhaps be inferred by the withdrawal of the volume,³ it is possible that Thorpe saw the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets as a daring adventure. The reference to an adventurer, meaning an investor or an entrepreneur, such as a publisher, may have been clear to Thorpe’s contemporaries if not to us.

In his letter to Blount, on the publication of Marlowe’s Lucan, in 1600, Thorpe already used a convoluted, sarcastic and somewhat cryptic language to complain about the negative behaviour of some prospective patrons. It seems that Thorpe had been expecting one of Blount’s former patrons (in the circle of your Patronage), to take an interest in Marlowe’s work (the First Book of Lucan in this case). As books in those days were dedicated to aristocrats, I think we may assume that such was Thorpe’s intention, as his letter to Blount indicates; it also suggests that his eventual decision to dedicate the volume to Blount was due to the evasive and discourteous behaviour of one or more of such patrons.

Whether Thorpe’s letter is referring to Southampton, Pembroke or Thomas Walsingham, we will probably never know. But what we might infer from its content is that by 1600, the year the Lucan was published, Marlowe’s name had become too embarrassing socially and/or too dangerous politically, so that his former friends among the nobility may have been wishing to distance themselves from it as much as possible.

Which raises the question as to whether perhaps the use of the hyphenated name for Shakespeare happened to be in some way indicative of the changing value of Marlowe-shares, or Marlowe-prospects, over the years.

If this were the case, we might wish to consider the fact that although some printers, such as Valentine Simmes and Richard Field, and some publishers, such as Edward Blount and Matthew Law, were more or less consistent in the form they spelt the name, there seems to be no repetitive pattern in the choice of any one form of spelling which might be attributed to simple inertia or automatic repetition on the part of printers and/or publishers.

A sort of pattern emerges, however, when we consider the dates.⁴ During 1598/1599, when the name of Shakespeare appears in the plays for the first time, the hyphenated form is used in about half of the non-anonymous Shakespeare Quartos published in those two years. The percentage drops to zero for the thirteen Quartos of plays published between 1600 and 1602; not a hyphen in sight, except for the poem, The Turtle and the Phoenix, printed by Richard Field for Edward Blount in 1601. Within those years, the disgrace and execution of the Earl of Essex would have left Marlowe lost in the continent, without a patron and without a job; so what did he do to survive, and was it something so questionable that his London friends turned their backs on him?

The percentage in the hyphenation goes back to an approximate 50% between 1603 (so after the Queen’s death) and 1607, and, in 1608 it raises to an unprecedented 100% for the three Quartos published that year, including 1Q King Lear. Then, in 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets was the only volume to appear with the hyphenated name against 1Q Pericles and 1Q Troilus and Cressida, which bore the full name, plus an anonymous 3Q Romeo and Juliet.⁵

Does this basic schedule for the use of the hyphenated name tell us anything? I honestly don’t know, but the figures I have just quoted may give us food for thought. (A proper analysis of a hypothetical, date-based pattern would exceed the scope of this essay.)

So let’s go back to the sonnets. By the expression the well-wishing adventurer, Thorpe might be referring both to his own adventure in publishing a book of sonnets by Marlowe (that EVER LIVING POET combined with the name Shake-speare was a give-away), and to the Adventurers in the Virginia Company, the list of whom was headed by the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke (whose initials, by the way, happen to be HW and WH, respectively).

But leaving aside all the uncanny coincidences, if the Mr WH of the seventeen sonnets was William Herbert after all, Thorpe’s good wishes were perhaps no less appropriate for being cryptically worded. And if the publisher had already been offended nine years earlier by the evasive and impolite treatment of some of Marlowe’s former patrons, that may have tempted him to write his equivocal Dedication to one of them.

So let me re-interpret:

TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING (seventeen) SONNETS: Mr WH. (Master William Herbert)

ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT ETERNITIE (immortality)
PROMISED (to Master William Herbert, in the said sonnets)
BY OVR EVER LIVING POET (Christopher Marlowe).

WISHETH THE WELL WISHING ADVENTURER (Thomas Thorpe), IN SETTING FORTH (launching this book).

© Isabel Gortázar, January 2011

Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
¹I cannot seriously consider the date, May 20 - the date of Marlowe's arrest - to be anything but an uncanny coincidence.
²A colleague has argued that Marlowe went to America in The Sea Venture. See: Gamble, C. Shake-speare’s Voyage to America. (Capella Archive, 2006).
³Shortly after publication, Thorpe’s volume disappeared from circulation; in 1640 one John Benson used all but eight of the sonnets as the basis for a badly compiled book called Poems: Written by Will Shake-speare. Gent., which included poems by other people. Thorpe’s Quarto texts were not properly published again until 1709. Ref: Booth, Stephen: Shake-speare’s Sonnets (Yale NB, 2000).
⁴I wish to thank Ros Barber for sharing with me her detailed chart, in reference to the publication of Shakespeare’s Quartos and Octavos. ⁵Printed by John Windet for John Smithewick. As an example of the apparent randomness in the publishing pattern: In 1622, two Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, both printed by William Standby also for John Smethwicke, appeared, one anonymous, the other with the author’s name hyphenated.Emmerich Rylance Anonymous Shakespeare

Was Marlowe Shakespeare? Ros Barber Interviewed

The idea that Christopher Marlowe faked his own death and fled to the continent, writing as "William Shakespeare" in exile, has never been the subject of serious academic research. Ros Barber, who recently completed the first PhD in the subject, is interviewed by former BBC World Service journalist Tim Grout-Smith as part of a media training course run for postgraduate researchers at the University of Sussex.

Ros Barber is the first person in the world to complete a PhD in Marlovian authorship theory. Her PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her first degree was in Biological Sciences. A founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, she has published articles challenging the orthodox biography of Marlowe in academic books and journals, including the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Her essay "Was Marlowe a Violent Man?," which was presented at the Marlowe Society of America conference in 2008, is featured in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). A published poet, her latest poetry collection, Material (Anvil 2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was funded by Arts Council England.

Click here for Ros's exclusive article for MSC, "Stanley Wells and the Cobbe Portrait," one of this blog's most popular posts.


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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

Our Ever-Living Poet: A Personal Interpretation of the Title Page of Shake-speare's Sonnets by Isabel Gortázar

SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS
Never before Imprinted:
By G. Eld for T.T. 1609

TO.THE.ONLY.BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER.LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL.WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.

It seems presumptuous to propose yet another interpretation to this Dedication, as T.T. (presumably the publisher Thomas Thorpe), seems decided to thwart our attempts. For reasons that we may try to guess, Thorpe created this riddle, which must however have a solution, if only we can find it.

Starting with the title: SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS: As we know, the book contains a series of 154 sonnets which, according to this title, had been written by somebody calling himself SHAKE-SPEARE. Academia has therefore concluded that the author was William Shakespeare of Stratford.

However, the Dedication (1609), says the sonnets were written by OUR.EVER.LIVING.POET. An ever-living poet is meant to be a dead poet and William Shakespeare did not die until 1616; therefore, this SHAKE-SPEARE must be another Shakespeare. The use of the hyphenated name also suggests a pseudonym, which means we need to find a famous poet, dead, but ever-living (because famous), who may have used the alias of SHAKE-SPEARE, and who therefore has at least a reasonable chance of being also the author of other works published under the same hyphenated name: for example, six out of the nine Quartos, including King Lear, published between 1603 and 1608, and later attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Luckily, my candidate, Christopher Marlowe, could be said to be “ever- living," as he was officially dead and famous, and nevertheless (in my opinion) still alive in 1609. Since I personally believe many of the sonnets point directly at Marlowe’s predicament in, and after, 1593, I am persuaded that the EVER.LIVING.POET, Christopher Marlowe alias SHAKE-SPEAR, was the author of the sonnets (as well as the 36 plays in the First Folio).

In his dedication Thomas Thorpe appears to be doing two things: a) Dedicating the sonnets to “the only begetter” Mr WH; and b) Wishing the best of luck to some adventurer on his setting forth. I shall deal with a) here, and leave b) for another day.

So, who is Mr W.H. and what does Thorpe mean by calling him “the only begetter”?

In theory, the “begetter,” Mr WH, should be the author of these sonnets, but in this case the author already has an alias: Shake-speare. It would have been perverse on the part of Thomas Thorpe to give two different aliases to the poet in the same book. So we must look for another possible meaning for the word “begetter.” The OED gives us “Begetter: 4 (fig and transit): To call into being." So not necessarily the author, nor the inspirer, but someone so essential to bring about the act of creation, that the author is bound to recognize this person as the only/real originator of such act.

The rhetorical device of adding the word only emphasizes this. If Thorpe had been referring to the author he could have said so: To the author; but no, he uses the ambiguous word begetter and emphasizes its ambiguity by adding a rhetorical only. The idea that this only has something to do with the sonnets being all by the same hand is not convincing. The begetter of all these sonnets might have been the author, but the only begetter is the person who caused the sonnets to exist; he is the only reason why the sonnets were written at all.

Shakespeare uses this rhetorical device in Henry V (IV, 8):

King Henry:
Come, go we in procession to the village.
And be it death proclaimed through our host
To boast of this or take the praise from God
Which is his only.

According to this, King Henry obtained the victory at Agincourt, but only God caused the victory to happen. God was, therefore, the only begetter of the victory, and all praise was due to him.

So, Mr W.H is someone inextricably connected with the creation of the sonnets, and his identity is being masked, probably on purpose. Apparently Mr W.H does not wish to be identified either with the sonnets, or with the ever-living poet, which may be understandable if the poet was the embarrassingly ever-living, Christopher Marlowe.

And here we come up against the fact that the 154 sonnets are definitely not all dedicated to, or written for, the same person. There is no way we can defend the possibility that Mr W.H is the Dark Lady, for example. But what about the redundant word INSVING? Why did Thorpe not write simply: TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS?

Agreed, all 154 sonnets are in a way ensuing, but the word is redundant, so I propose that the unnecessary word INSVING means that the sonnets dedicated to Mr WH are only the first seventeen sonnets, those immediately ensuing the dedication page, all seventeen of which clearly constitute an item, or “collection,” in themselves. (OED: To ensue, 4, intr: to be immediately subsequent, etc.1485). The word ensuing is the origin of the expression en-suite, implying immediacy.

So, Mr WH could be the only begetter of the ensuing first seventeen sonnets, perhaps because it was on account of Mr WH that the sonnets were written at all. These first seventeen sonnets are dedicated to a young man, encouraging him to marry and beget children; it has been suggested that the occasion was the said young man’s seventeenth birthday.

There are two favourite candidates for the role, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Southampton was already an earl on his seventeenth birthday, in 1590, so that calling him Mr W.H, even at that time, would be impertinent and incorrect. Also, had the sonnets been written by Marlowe in 1590, Thorpe could not have published them in 1609 under the name of Shake-speare without spilling a lot of beans.

Whereas, William Herbert was seventeen in 1597, before he had succeeded to the earldom, so he was at that time plain Mr W.H. As it happens, in 1597, William Herbert had entered in negotiations with Lord Burghley to marry Bridget De Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter and the Earl of Oxford’s second daughter. The negotiations were unsuccessful, as Herbert seems to have demanded that the full dowry be paid in advance. Although Lord Burghley was trying to marry his granddaughters into the aristocracy, it seems that Herbert made excessive difficulties and the marriage did not take place.

Focusing on William Herbert as Mr WH, let us imagine that in 1597, Marlowe (perhaps prompted by the boy’s mother, Mary Sidney) wrote those seventeen sonnets to William, encouraging him to marry Bridget De Vere. The boy was the reason why the sonnets were written. The event of his seventeenth birthday “called the sonnets into being”; had it not been for this anniversary, the sonnets would not have been written.

So maybe, in 1597, the author dedicated the seventeen sonnets to William Herbert with the words:

TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE SONNETS: Mr W.H. ALL HAPPINESS AND ETERNITIE.

The sonnets insistently advise the youth to marry and beget children in order to obtain happiness and “eternity” (immortality); thus, Mr WH would be immortalized both in the poet’s rhyme and in the life of his descendants:

“But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.” (Sonnet 17)

Another indication that this may be the case is the reference that Francis Meres makes in his pedantic Palladis Tamia ¹, published in 1598 (so within a year after William Herbert’s birthday on April 8, 1597). In his work, Meres refers to Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets.” Now, it would be difficult to think of the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets as “sugared.” In those 154 sonnets we find lines of love, envy, despair, regret, disappointment, etc.; in other words, Shake-speare's sonnets encompass the whole gamut of human emotions.

Whereas the first seventeen sonnets could well be described as “sugared.” The author is writing them for a young man of whom he is obviously fond, to be read during a private party, probably a family gathering, on occasion of his birthday and in reference to the marriage prospects about which he is making such difficulties. This seems to be confirmed by Meres’s clarification: his sugared sonnets among his private friends. Indeed, if the sonnets were NEVER BEFORE IMPRINTED, a private reading, possibly at Wilton House, in April of the previous year, was the only chance for anyone like Meres to have been acquainted with their “sugared” contents.

Eventually, Herbert seems to have rejected the sonnets as well as the proposed bride, so perhaps Marlowe left the batch (possibly with its dedication) either to Thorpe or to Edward Blount (or to Mary Sidney), who waited for the first opportunity to publish them.

Obviously, if a powerful man like Pembroke did not wish to be connected with the sonnets, Thorpe had to make his identification difficult (but eventually not impossible), and, just as the best place to hide a man is in a multitude, the best place to “hide” seventeen sonnets is among over one hundred sonnets dedicated to various people.

Pembroke must have been furious when the sonnets were published, especially because I suspect there are several, later, sonnets dedicated to the same man.²

Thorpe’s book seems to have disappeared shortly after publication. Daryl Pinksen quotes³ Kenneth Muir (1979) on this subject: “But as very few copies are extant, it seems possible that the volume was suppressed; (…) the publisher would not have withdrawn a profitable volume because of complaints from the author, but he would doubtless have succumbed to pressure from a member of the aristocracy.”

And now I would need to tie this first part of the Dedication to the second. Who is the well-wishing adventurer, setting forth?

With the reader’s permission I will deal, as I said, with this second part in a separate instalment.

© Isabel Gortázar, December 2010

Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
who wrote shakespeare's sonnets?emmerichdevere
Notes
¹Meres, Francis. 1598. Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury.
²See Gortázar, Isabel: Tamburlaine's Sonnets
³Pinksen, Daryl. 2008. Marlowe's Ghost. p. 202.

Worth Repeating: Shakespeare, Businessman...

Click here for Anthony Kellett's "William Shakespeare, Businessman - Forgotten Genius," one of this blog's most popular posts (and which has generated/provoked many reader comments).

Shakespeare: Why Was I Never Told This?

Click here for actor Keir Cutler on Shakespeare authorship.

Donna Murphy Wins Hoffman Prize

Congratulations to Donna N. Murphy for co-winning the 2010 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe. She is only the third person to do so for a work which supports the view that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare (the others being Peter Farey and Michael Rubbo). Her entry, “Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of Early English Anonymous Plays,” attempts to provide some evidence for the authorship of certain anonymous Elizabethan plays. Donna explains that her analysis "employs a new technique involving Matches and Near Matches."

Matches are word juxtapositions occurring no more than once elsewhere within forty years of the works in question in the searchable Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, while Near Matches are those occurring no more than fifteen other times within EEBO’s over 20,000 records. (For an example of how she elsewhere employed EEBO to ascertain authorship, see Donna N. Murphy, “The Cobbler of Canterbury and Robert Greene,” Notes & Queries 57 {2010}: 349-52). She is particularly intrigued by Matches that seem to occur at the subconscious level. For example:

Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage:

A woeful tale bids Dido to unfold,
Whose memory, like pale death’s stony mace,
Beats forth my senses from this troubled soul,
And makes Aeneas sink at Dido’s feet. (II.i.114-7)

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 1594 Quarto:

The poor remainder of Andronici
Will, hand in hand, all headlong cast us down,
And on the ragged stones beat forth our soules,
And make a mutuall closure of our house. (K3v-K4r)

The First Folio version of Titus replaces “souls” with “brains” (V.iii.131-4)

Not only do these two plays share the only occurrences in EEBO of “Ston*” within ten words of “beat* forth,” they additionally juxtapose “soul*” plus “and make*.” The passages share a deep connection, yet do not appear to be one man imitating another.

Despite winning the Prize, Donna has no immediate plans to publish her essay. Rather she sees it as a work in progress. "I hope to publish some of my findings in the next few years," she explains, "but not until I've undertaken further linguistic investigation of Thomas Nashe."

Click here for Donna's article "Could the Earl of Oxford Have Written the Works of Shakespeare?," which first appeared on this blog in November 2009. Emmerich Anonymous

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Allusion or Illusion? William Covell's Gaveston by Ros Barber

A Shakespeare allusion containing what has widely been considered an error, if read as correct, suggests that a Cambridge University contemporary of Christopher Marlowe understood "William Shakespeare" to be Marlowe’s pseudonym.

A belief is a perceptual framework. The nature of human neurology is such that our perceptions are filtered through our beliefs, and where we meet data which conflicts with a strongly held belief we will either not register the existence of the anomalous data at all, or will consider it to be an error and discard it as insignificant.

An experiment by Bruner and Postman in 1949 demonstrated that subjects exposed to a pack of playing cards that included anomalous cards (a black four of hearts, for example) repeatedly failed to identify any problems with the pack. Only with longer and repeated exposures did certain individuals begin to register the anomalous cards, and even then, they often couldn’t identify what exactly was wrong with them. Some did not register the anomalies no matter how long or how often they were exposed to them.¹

It is important to our general functioning in the world that we keep our perceptual frameworks fairly rigid; thus even when the brain does identify a piece of data as anomalous, we tend to simply explain it away as an error or fluke. Fugelsang, Stein, Green and Dunbar, studying scientists at work in their laboratories, discovered that in over half of the scientific experiments they studied, the results were inconsistent with the scientists’ predictions, and that scientists were reluctant to consider that data as "real."² The surprising finding was usually classified as a mistake: "perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale."³ "The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn’t understand," said Kevin Dunbar, one of the neuroscientists involved. "It’s as if they didn’t want to believe it." Even after scientists had produced the anomaly consistently, they would often choose not to follow it up. The research of Fuselang, Dunbar and others demonstrates that despite their discipline’s reputation for impartiality, scientists are not immune from confirmation bias: the human tendency to seek out and give attention to data consistent with one’s initial theory.

Confirmation bias is probably the greatest danger to those of us with an interest in the Shakespeare authorship question. Non-Stratfordians are accused of it more than most – and often quite rightly – but as you would expect of a basic function of human neurology, it affects orthodox Shakespeareans too. Indeed, I would contend it is the orthodox scholars’ lack of engagement with significant quantities of anomalous data – that is, data inconsistent with the orthodox theory of authorship – that spawned the authorship question in the first place. Here, I will look at just one of the numerous anomalies that are no longer anomalous when viewed from a Marlovian perspective.

One of the earliest allusions to Shakespeare as an author is a marginal note in William Covell’s Polimanteia (1595). The note reads:

All praise
worthy.
Lucrecia
Sweet Shak-
speare.
Eloquent
Gaveston.
Wanton
Adonis.
Watsons
heyre.

Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R.Woudhuysen explain his apparent error thus:

Carried away with enthusiasm, Covell appears to have added Piers Gaveston (1594?) – strongly influenced by Shakespeare but written by Michael Drayton – to Shakespeare’s authentic poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594).⁴

It seems odd that Covell would make such a mistake given the prominence of Michael Drayton’s name on the dedicatory epistle accompanying Piers Gaveston, but an error must necessarily be assumed under the orthodox narrative.

However, it is perfectly possible that Covell was not making a mistake, but rather recognised that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were written by the same author who had depicted Piers Gaveston in Edward II, a play which preceded Drayton’s poem both in performance and publication. Gaveston in Marlowe’s play is at least as eloquent as Drayton’s narrator, and the play opens with Gaveston speaking for two dozen lines before anyone else says a word. It is worth noting that Covell is connected to Marlowe’s Cambridge years, being a student at Christ’s College, Cambridge – whose alumni included Marlowe’s "nemesis" Richard Baines - at the same time that Marlowe was a student at Corpus Christi. Covell gained his BA in 1585 (the same year as Marlowe) and his MA in 1588 (the year after Marlowe).

The idea that Covell believes Shakespeare to be a pseudonym for Marlowe is strengthened by his observation that the author is "Watson’s heyre." It is well-documented that Marlowe was a friend of Thomas Watson (nine years his senior), both from the legal accounts of the Hog Lane incident,⁵ and from the published dialogue between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey. There is no evidence whatsoever that Thomas Watson was connected with Shakespeare of Stratford, though it has long been recognised that the author of Shake-speares Sonnets was familiar with Watson’s work.⁶ If we allow ourselves to read Covell’s comment from a Marlovian perspective, no error exists – Covell is saying that Marlowe, the man who put eloquence in the mouth of Piers Gaveston and was the natural heir to Thomas Watson, was the author (as "Shak-speare") of Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece.⁷

This does not in any way count as proof of Marlowe’s authorship of Shakespeare’s narrative poems. It is, however, one of many examples of how the historical data reads differently when viewed through different interpretive frameworks, and demonstrates clearly how an "error" according to orthodox scholarship can be read at face value and treated as correct when viewed through a Marlovian lens.

© Ros Barber, November 2010

Ros Barber (www.rosbarber.com) is the first person in the world to complete a PhD in Marlovian authorship theory. Her PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Her first degree was in Biological Sciences. A founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society, she has published articles challenging the orthodox biography of Marlowe in academic books and journals, including the peer-reviewed Routledge journal Rethinking History. Her essay "Was Marlowe a Violent Man?," which was presented at the Marlowe Society of America conference in 2008, is featured in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman (Ashgate 2010). A published poet, her latest poetry collection, Material (Anvil 2008), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was funded by Arts Council England.

Notes
¹Bruner, J. S., and Postman, Leo (1949). "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm." Journal of Personality, XVIII, 206-23.
²Fugelsand, J. A., Stein, C. B., Green, A. E. and Dunbar, K. N. (2004). "Theory and Data Interactions of the Scientific Mind: Evidence from the Molecular and the Cognitive Laboratory." Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 86-95.
³Lehrer, J. (2009). "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up." Wired Magazine.
⁴Duncan-Jones, K. and Woudhuysen, H. R. (Eds.) (2007). Shakespeare's Poems, Arden Shakespeare, 5.
⁵Details of the Hog Lane affray can be found in any Marlowe biography, but the definitive account remains Eccles, M. (1934) Christopher Marlowe in London, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
⁶According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Watson's sonnets "appear to have been studied by Shakespeare." Harvey, P. S. (1969). The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 874.Emmerich Anonymous
⁷Unlike Shake-speares Sonnets, the hyphen here is accounted for by the requirements of the text’s layout.Shakespeare Anonymous


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"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)


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Book Collecting and the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy by Samuel Blumenfeld

(this article originally appeared in the Fall 2010 newsletter of The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies)

Anyone embarking on writing a book about the Shakespeare authorship question cannot know in advance what he or she will find in that solitary but wonderful search through the hundreds, if not thousands, of books already written about the Elizabethan era and its writers. And so I began my own journey at the age of 73 in 1999 and wrote the final chapter eight years later in 2007. In the interim I had gained a literary education equivalent to a Ph.D.

Writing on such a subject automatically turns one into a book collector, a haunter of antiquarian bookshops and internet sources. There is no greater delight than coming across a book which has that single bit of vital information you are looking for. At first I thought I would have to go to England for research, but I was amazed at how much information was available in books already published. But it also became clear that there were still many books that needed to be written about the events and people in the Elizabethan era. There is still a lot more to know.

Once the manuscript was completed, I was anxious to get it read and published. I had already sent out sample chapters to the usual trade publishers hoping to find an enthusiastic editor anxious to offer a contract. My old contacts in the New York book publishing business were gone, and the younger generation of editors were not interested in what I had written.

I then tried university presses and found a delightful editor at the University of Virginia Press who was intrigued by the subject. I sent her the manuscript of over a thousand pages, which she asked me to cut down. Which I did. She then sent copies to two scholarly reviewers who complimented me on my writing style, but did not think the book should be published. I could never understand why they came to such a negative conclusion. One of the reviewers never returned his copy.

In any case, after sitting on the book for almost a year, the Virginians turned it down. Fortunately, I found a publisher in North Carolina, McFarland, who specialized in publishing well-researched books for the library and academic market. Which meant that I would never be able to retire on the proceeds from the sales of the book, but at least I had a handsome looking tome I could hold in my hand and perhaps sell at lectures. Its final title was The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection.

I had actually become interested in the authorship controversy back in my days at Grosset & Dunlap, where I was editor of The Universal Library, their quality paperback line. One day, back in 1956, a man by the name of Calvin Hoffman came to my office to urge me to publish a paperback edition of his book, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Hoffman had studied the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare and came to the conclusion that they were all written by one man, Marlowe.

But hadn’t Marlowe been killed in a barroom brawl at the age of 29? Hoffman said he was not, and that the so-called murder was a faked death staged by his employers in the Secret Service to save him from Archbishop Whitgift’s inquisition. I read the book and became convinced that Hoffman was right. We published his book, and I’ve remained a Marlovian ever since.

Forty years later I decided to write my own book on the subject, using the methods of a detective to prove beyond any doubt that Christopher Marlowe was the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. That meant reading all of Marlowe and all of Shakespeare, which I did, and which proved to my satisfaction that Christopher Marlowe was indeed the author of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, most of which were written in exile. Shakespeare, a good businessman, was the perfect front for the hidden author.

In retrospect, I doubt that I would have embarked on this journey had I known in advance how difficult it would be to get such a book published. In those eight years I could have written perhaps a half-dozen books on subjects I already knew a lot about. My first ten books were on education and literacy. Again, my interest in literacy also began at Grosset & Dunlap where we published all of those series books for young readers.

An attorney friend, Watson Washburn, came to my office one day to enlist me as an advisor for his newly created Reading Reform Foundation. I asked him what the purpose of the Foundation was, and he told me that it was to get phonics back in the schools. Get phonics back in schools? Since when was it taken out? And how could you teach reading without it? He advised me to read Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, which I did. That’s what turned me into a critic of our public schools, and that is why years later I wrote The New Illiterates.

We book lovers deplore the decline of literacy not only in America but throughout the English-speaking world. Despite computers, the Internet, cable television and other forms of entertainment and distraction, there is no substitute for the actual book that one can hold in one’s hands and revere as a source of ageless wisdom. Book collecting speaks of a rational civilization which values ideas, lives, and history. And for that reason, as long as there is a humane civilization, there will be writers, publishers, readers and book collectors.

© Samuel Blumenfeld, 2010

Samuel Blumenfeld, a regular contibutor to MSC, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others. His Alpha-Phonics reading system has taught thousands of beginning and struggling readers.Emmerich Shakespeare

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Under an Old Oak by Isabel Gortázar

Following Mike Frohnsdorff’s suggestion¹ and Peter Farey’s further elaboration on the subject,² here are my own thoughts about Oliver’s speech in As You Like It, below.

For those of us who believe that Christopher Marlowe did not die in Deptford in 1593, but lived on to write the works that have been attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford, it is imperative to try and read in those works the information that any author, but particularly one in Marlowe’s circumstances, would have included about himself, his life in exile, his friends and his enemies, in the various texts.

As You Like It is one of the Shakespeare plays in which scholars and academics have recognized references to Marlowe, including his unclear relationship with “William of Arden," although all orthodox explanations of such references remain so far unconvincing. In this respect, I agree with Farey that Oliver’s speech may be providing us with significant information. Here is the speech again:

Oliver
Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity,
A wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back. About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush, under which bush's shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.(4.3.105-119)

Let me comment on these lines separately:

Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity,

There seems to be here an unnecessary emphasis on the fact that the oak is very old; in fact, its high top is bald with dry antiquity. The word “antiquity” evokes a mythical scene: According to one of the Arthurian legends, Merlin the magician was trapped in an oak tree by a sorceress; the magician was not dead but due to re-appear some day. Merlin was one of Marlowe’s nicknames, not only on account of the etymology of the name: Marl, Marlin, etc., but also because of Marlowe's identification with his creation, Dr. Faustus. About ten years later, yet another magician, Prospero (a Spanish name synonymous to Fausto), will find his spirit, Ariel, also trapped in a tree by a witch in The Tempest.

These possible references to the Merlin story, steeped in antiquity like Oliver’s tree, might be confirming the identity of our runaway friend. Also, the fact that he is asleep: in the induction of The Taming of the Shrew,³ Marlowe's absence of fifteen years is referred to as "a goodly nap."

Second Servingman
These fifteen years you have been in a dream;
Or when you waked, so waked as if you slept.
Sly
These fifteen years! by my fay, a goodly nap.

Back to As You Like It:

A wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back.

These lines are describing a man that has been on the run, probably in these same woods, long enough for his hair to be o'ergrown, and his clothes in rags. Considering that in As You Like It, the woods are the hiding habitat of the outlawed Duke and his followers, the fact that Oliver seems to be hiding/living in a wood would be another pointer to his being an outlaw.

(…). About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush,

Given Frohnsdorff’s suggestion that the basic colour of ecclesiastical vestments changes to green at Pentecost (about the time of the Deptford episode), I agree with Farey that this green and gilded snake may well be a reference to Archbishop Whitgift, attempting to stop Marlowe’s heretical and seditious mouth. Apparently, the snake does not let go off his intended prey until this moment, when Oliver seems to be already an outlaw in the woods, and has obviously been on the run long enough to explain his wretched appearance.

(…) under which bush's shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead

Again, I agree with Farey that this lioness may be Queen Elizabeth; as we know she died in 1603 but she would certainly have been considered an old woman in 1593. However, I personally would feel much more comfortable imagining this lioness/Queen years later, allowing for the time necessary to justify the sleeping man's appearance.

While I personally cannot accept Farey’s theory that Whitgift would have agreed to Marlowe’s banishment, I can easily believe that, given the amount of people that seems to have been in the know as to Kit’s fate, Whitgift would have found out the truth within the next few years. Banishment does not stop anybody’s mouth, only death does that, and silencing heretics was as important as punishing them.

When Richard II banished Bolingbroke, that was perceived as punishment. When Romeo was banished, that was also perceived as punishment; it was Juliet who faked her death while Romeo was punished by exile. From a politico-religious point of view the accidental death staged at Deptford was no punishment in any practical sense, since it was not exemplary. In any case, the exiled life did not silence Marlowe as we know, and stopping Oliver’s mouth is what the snake seems to be intent on, until he leaves the job to the lioness.

Putting all these thoughts together, my personal reading of the speech in question is that Whitgift, having found out over the next few years that Marlowe was still alive, made sure the Queen would never allow him to come back to life, like Merlin.

The scene depicted in this metaphorical manner is covering a period between 1594 (let’s give at least a year for Oliver’s hair to overgrow and his clothes to become rags) and the first months of 1603, when both the “snake” and the “lioness” were still alive. However, the play was entered into the SR on August 4th 1600, although its publication was stayed. This suggests two possibilities: a) That Marlowe had lost his head and was cutting his own throat by writing this speech in 1599, or, b) That precisely in 1599, given Essex’s departure for, and expected failure in, Ireland, Marlowe’s situation was anyway hopeless, and he knew it, so he no longer cared which snake or lioness he might offend. (As I have said before, I believe it was the Earl of Essex who persuaded the Queen to save Marlowe’s life in 1593 and the man who gave him employment and financial support as an agent until 1599.)

A third possibility, and the one I prefer, is that this scene was revised after the Queen’s death, perhaps for that famous performance in the autumn of 1603, tantalizingly announced in Mary Sidney’s lost letter to her son, William, by then Earl of Pembroke.

I personally have no problem with that. Oliver’s is not the only speech and/or scene in As You Like It that seems to have been added after 1600 - the surmise that Marlowe, as most creative writers, may have revised his plays, adding information over the years, seems very reasonable to me.

In any case, this clue, picked up by Frohnsdorff and Farey, suggests to me that Whitgift may have been actively instrumental in preventing the Queen from “resurrecting” Marlowe before she herself died. If, as it appears by the involvement of her Coroner, William Danby, Queen Elizabeth had agreed to the Deptford scam, she must have had some plan for a future “happy ending."

Although, of course, it would not be as simple as that. I can imagine a changing scenario, with Marlowe’s release on the balance, as influence over the Queen shifted slowly, over the next five years, from Essex to Whitgift, with the Cecils swimming with the tide, as Essex insistently blotted his political copybook.

© Isabel Gortázar, October 2010

Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.
Roland Emmerich Shakespeare Anonymous
¹Frohnsdorff, Mike. The Marlowe Society Newsletter 18, Spring 2002, pp.31-33.
²Farey, Peter. 2010. "Christopher Marlowe: Flight or Banishment."
³See Gortázar, Isabel: The Clue in the Shrew (Revised): A Tumbling Trick.

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The Significance of Sir Oliver Mar-text in As You Like It by Maureen Duff

Sir Oliver Mar-text¹ is a minor character in the play As You Like It. He appears in Act III, sc. iii and is mentioned in Act V, sc. i. He has only three lines of dialogue. As there is already a major character called "Oliver" in the play, it is odd that there is also a minor one with the same first name. ²

In the first of the two scenes Touchstone, the clown, attempts to marry Audrey within the Forest of Arden. Sir Oliver Mar-text, a vicar summoned to marry them, is exposed by a witness, Jaques, as not being up to the task.  As a result, the marriage is halted until a more suitable vicar and place are found. In the second scene, Touchstone refers to Sir Oliver as "a most wicked Sir Oliver" and "a most vile Mar-text" before he turns his attention to seeing off a romantic rival, William, a "countryman," who lives in the Forest.

Some of those interested in the Shakespeare authorship question have wondered if Sir Oliver Mar-textʼs highly unusual name has a special significance. For example, Daryl Pinksen and Sam Blumenfeld both point out that "Marlo" can be read within the name. Blumenfeld goes further and wonders if "Mar-text" is a shortened form of "Marlowe's text," as does Calvin Hoffman and A.D. Wraight.³ "Marlo" is a known variant of the name "Marlowe."⁴

In the second of the two scenes, Touchstone and William compete for Audreyʼs hand. It has been suggested that a dim-witted character such as Audrey is an allegorical figure standing for the "auditors" or audience.⁵ Itʼs easy to guess who William might be. Touchstone dismisses William as vulgar and unlearned, and therefore unfit to marry Audrey. However, Touchstone (a pseudonym for Marlowe?) emphasizes his own fitness for the position of husband in classical form, viz ipse = he himself.⁶

I was struck by the introduction into the text of the Latin ipse and further by the description of Sir Oliver Mar-text as "wicked" and "vile" and therefore needing to be changed in some way – as an anagram, for example? As the two scenes are connected, this seemed to suggest that the name "Sir Oliver Mar-text" might hold a cryptic message in Latin. My knowledge of Latin is elementary, but I quickly saw that moving one of the two "iʼs" in the name into "text" made "texit" (3rd person, present tense) from texere = to compose.

I now had "Marlowe composes"; but what about the remaining six letters: s i r and v e r ? If this was a Latin anagram, the phrase must make sense and the grammar must fit exactly. At that point, I had a brief conversation with my uncle, Dr. William Anderson, research chemist and Latin scholar. It shortly became clear to us both that "Sir Oliver Mar-text" resolves into a straightforward Latin sentence with a meaningful English translation:

MARLO VIR RES TEXIT and the basic English translation:
THE MAN MARLOWE COMPOSES THE THINGS.⁷

So, why is a Latin anagram here at all? Who was it for? In 1598 William Shakespeare was identified in print for the first time as the author of the plays.⁸ Marloweʼs own name placed cryptically among the characters of As You Like It would serve as consolation for the real playwright. At least he would know it was there, even if no one else did.

I therefore suggest that the significance of Sir Oliver Mar-text is that it represents Christopher Marloweʼs claim to authorship of As You Like It - and possibly some of the other works attributed to Shakespeare.

© Maureen Duff, October 2010

Post-Script, October 2011

Appendix B of David Mateer's publication, "New Sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London," is a transcript, in the original Latin, of the charges brought against Christopher Marlowe by James Wheatley for the non-return of a horse. In it, "Marlowe" is twice spelled "Marlo." This shows that in 1589, "Marlo" was already a known Latin form of the poet's last name. (David Mateer, New Sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London, Early Theatre 11.2 [2008]: Article 2)

Thanks to Dr. W. Anderson and Peter Farey for their invaluable comments.

Maureen Duff was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was educated at the University of Glasgow (MA, English Literature and Philosophy). She has worked in the entertainment industry for many years, first as a theatrical agent, then as a casting director in films and television. She worked for Director Richard Attenborough on Closing the Ring and Director Danny Boyle on several films, including The Beach and 28 Days Later. Her filmography can be found on the imdb. She has won or been a finalist in several UK national magazine writing competitions, notably winning a trip for two to Hawaii for a short story entitled "Krakatoa, East of Java." She once cast As You Like It for the Northcott Theatre, Exeter. She lives and works in London.

Notes
¹ In the First Folio, 1623, Sir Oliver Mar-text was hyphenated and "Oliver" was spelled "Oliuer." At this time, "u" and "v" were the same letter but were sometimes written differently depending on position in a word.
²Oliver de Boys, son of Sir Rowland de Boys.
³Pinksen, Daryl. 2008. Marlowe's Ghost. p. 125.
Blumenfeld, Samuel. 2008. The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection. p. 295.
Hoffman, Calvin. 1955. The Man Who Was Shakespeare. p. 176.
Wraight, A.D. The Story That the Sonnets Tell. p. 342.
⁴Farey, Peter. 2002. "The Spelling of Marloweʼs Name." "Marlo" appears on the original title page of one of his plays (The Jew of Malta).
⁵Ben Jonson refers in "On Poet-Ape" to the "sluggish gaping auditor." A.D. Wraight: The Story That the Sonnets Tell, p. 341. Daryl Pinksen's Marloweʼs Ghost, pp. 118-121.
⁶Act V, sc. i
Touchstone: Give me your hand. Art thou learned?
William: No, sir.
Touchstone: Then learn this of me: to have, is to have; for it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now you are not ipse, for I am he.
⁷According to Lewis & Shortʼs Latin Dictionary (1879, Impression of 1958, Clarendon Press, Oxford):
VIR (noun, nom, or voc, sing) = man, brave man, man of principle, hero, husband.
RES (noun, accus, plu), = things, facts, truths, subject matter; (in a literary context) events, acts, stories, histories.
TEXIT (verb, 3rd person, present) = he weaves; makes; (in a literary context) contrives, composes.
Collins Gem Latin Dictionary (1996) also lists these English meanings of the Latin words, showing their common usage.
⁸Loveʼs Labourʼs Lost was the first play to be published under the name "William Shakespeare" in 1598. As You Like It was written between late 1598 and early 1600 but "staied" from publication at the Stationers Register in May 1600. It was not seen in print until the First Folio, 1623.
For the first time in print, an independent author, Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), named William Shakespeare as the "honey-tongued" author of twelve plays, two poems and a collection of "sugared" sonnets.
Daryl Pinksenʼs Marloweʼs Ghost (pp. 65-67) gives a list of the plays and dates of their publication.  Who wrote Shakespeare? Emmerich Anonymous
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The Tanner of Wingham by Peter Farey

In his introduction to William Urry's (1988) Christopher Marlowe
and Canterbury, Andrew Butcher wrote: "Furthermore, it seemed to Urry that the detailed local knowledge of East Kent which occurs in Henry VI Part II was certainly of a kind which Marlowe might have possessed and used. In describing Alexander Iden, Best, Wingham tanner, Emmanuel, the clerk of Chartham (or possibly Chatham), and Dick, the Ashford butcher, the dramatist seemed to be drawing on a knowledge of individuals who were demonstrably known to those living in Canterbury and its hinterland."

I don't know anything about the others, but it seems to me that Urry may well have had a point regarding that tanner's son:

Holland: I see them, I see them! There's Best's son, the tanner of Wingham. (2H6 4.2.21)

Mid-way between Canterbury and Wingham, which are about six miles apart, lies the parish of Bekesbourne. It is there that on 19 March 1582 (today's calendar) Joseph Best, the son of John Best, was christened. One may reasonably assume that he was a brother to Thomas Best, also baptized in Bekesbourne some three years earlier, on 22 February 1579. There was a Margaret Best (John's sister?) too, who had married John Silcock on 14 October 1566 in Goodnestone, which is less than two miles from Wingham. All of this information is from the International Genealogical Index of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Marlowe would have been two years old when Margaret was married. He was about fifteen - and only recently first recorded as a pupil at the King's School Canterbury - when Thomas arrived, and at Cambridge aged eighteen when Joseph was born. The Marlowes were at this time living in the parish of St. George, the Canterbury parish next to the city gate leading to Bekesbourne and Wingham.

We don't know whether this John Best was a tanner, of course - although Canterbury's "Old Tannery" isn't that far from "Best Lane" - but I quite like to imagine the young Kit Marlowe collecting leather for his shoemaker father from the Bests at Wingham and in a brief period away from school even visiting them around the time when his friend John’s wife was giving birth to young Thomas.

© Peter Farey, October 2010

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." He was also a founding member (with Derek Jacobi) of the UK's National Youth Theatre. Click here to reach Peter's website.    Sam Riley Marlowe Burgess Emmerich Anonymous

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More Doubts About Will - 4: The (Real) Death of Marlowe by Isabel Gortázar

And so we are coming to the end of my story: My hypothesis that Christopher Marlowe died, or killed himself, in the last months of 1621 is based on a series of events occurring between September 25th of that year and the summer of 1622, so six years after the death of William Shakespeare. (See Part I: "The Chancel"; Part II: "Enter Iago"; Part III: "The Swan Song"; and the Time-Schedule below).

The printing process of the First Folio (FF) started around April 1621,¹ to be stopped on 21st October by order of the Lord Chamberlain²(Mary Sidney’s eldest’s son); by then, all the Comedies except The Winter’s Tale were already printed. According to the dates for the Frankfurt Catalogue,³ by April 1622 it had already been decided to attribute the works in the FF to William Shakespeare.

The tantalizing flight of wishful thinking that emerges from a combination of all facts and dates is that Marlowe’s friends, including Edward Blount and Ben Jonson, angered by this injustice but powerless to redress it, undertook to plant a series of clues in the Introductory Pages of the FF and in the Chancel of Trinity Church in Stratford, where William Shakespeare had been buried.

In his Introductory Poem, dedicated to my beloved, the author, Mr William Shakespeare, Jonson hails him as one who had “small Latin and less Greek,” and, in another line, as the “Soul of the Age”. In those days, when the knowledge of Latin was taken for granted in every educated person, the contradiction between those two expressions would have sounded most bizarre. Theirs was the Age of the Renaissance, the “rebirth” of classical culture. No amount of creative genius could make a man with “small Latin and less Greek” the “soul” of such an “age."

To these and other oddities, Jonson added the puzzling words: “You are a Monument without a Tomb,” a line all the more remarkable if the Tomb had been there since 1616, while the Monument was just being erected.⁴

In the middle of an erratic process in which the publication of the FF was delayed by more than two years, The Tragedy of Othello was registered and published, as we have seen,⁵ with a villain named Iago, the Spanish name for King James. At the time when this registration and subsequent publication happened, the man who was responsible for giving it the green light was Sir George Buck, Master of the Revels (MR) since 1610. But Ben Jonson had been appointed Deputy Master of the Revels (DMR) on October 5, 1621.⁶ If Buck had really gone mad, as was later reported, Jonson could have taken advantage of the situation.

A letter dated May 3, 1619, forbidding publication of plays owned by the King’s Men without their consent, coincides in time with the period of publication of the Pavier Collection (see Time-Schedule). Since then Walkley had obtained permission to publish three plays owned by the King’s Men, all three by Beaumont and Fletcher.⁷ This suggests that perhaps the Lord Chamberlain was not so much interested in controlling the publication of the King’s Men’s plays, but of Shakespeare’s plays, maybe because the project for a Folio volume was already being discussed, and Marlowe was revising the plays for it. The Comedies show plausible signs of having been revised after 1618.⁸

If Othello had been the old Moor of Venice, the play would have belonged to the King’s Men. That being the case, I find it difficult to believe that with more than ten unpublished Shakespeare plays, Pembroke would have made an exception precisely with Othello. However, if the text were a new one, Walkley would have been in a position to equivocate, which he seems to have done, printing on the title page that the play had been diverse times acted at the Globe and at the Black Friars, by His Majesty’s Servants.

And here is another conjecture for what it is worth: Given his standing orders about publication, once the 1Q Othello appeared in print, the Lord Chamberlain would have seen it, made enquiries, realized the imposture, declared the Master of the Revels to be insane and had both Buck and Jonson sacked; but there was little else he could do if indeed the play, being new, did not belong to the King’s Men, had been properly registered by Buck, and no attempt was being made to show it in performance. Once 1Q Othello was published Jaggard could include the full text in 1623; leaving out of the FF a recently published “Shakespeare” play would have been more suspicious than including it.

But who had the MS of Othello? After months of rumours, Sir George Buck was officially declared insane in April 1622. Following the brief appointment of Sir John Astley, Sir Henry Herbert (a relative of the Lord Chamberlain) was appointed Master of the Revels in 1623. Buck’s family was requested to deliver to the new MR all papers from Sir George’s Library, and that’s the last we see of them. Ben Jonson’s library was burnt to the ground at about the time the FF was registered. It seems that as from November 1623, all possible Shakespeare MSS that were not under the direct control of the Herbert family had gone up in flames.

Whoever, and for whatever reason (presumably in agreement with, or by order of, King James), decided to obliterate Marlowe's name for posterity, it seems the Herbert family (and that includes, of course, “The Inimitable Pair”⁹) were instrumental in the cover up. As Oscar Wilde would put it: to lose one manuscript may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose thirty-six looks like carelessness.¹⁰ The destruction of those two libraries could have been an accident, but in view of all the circumstances, those fires smell as rotten as the State of Denmark.

Among the Poems of Ben Jonson, there is one with the title An Execration of Vulcan, published in December 1639 or early 1640, so two years after his death on August 6, 1637. Jonson addresses Vulcan thus:

And why to me this, thou lame lord of fire,
What had I done that might call on thine ire?

The Poem has 216 lines in which Jonson mentions just about every important book or literary character (including those in the learned Librarie of Don Quixote) he might have sacrificed to Vulcan “Had I fore-knowne of this thy least desire.” The general discourse of the Poem is obscure and the following lines struck me as intriguing:

All the madde Rolands and sweet Oliveer’s;
To Merlins marvailes and his Caball losse . . .

Merlins marvailes! Well, well, well!

For all the unanswered questions, theses conjectures, when seen together with the dates of refurbishment of the Chancel, the erection of the Monument,¹¹and the first visit of the “Poet’s” theatre friends to Stratford,"¹² plus the renewal of the printing process of the FF in November 1622, seem to present us with an intriguing scenario that runs broadly between May 1619 through to the end of 1623, with a flurry of activity heavily concentrated in just under one year, from October 1621 to the summer of 1622.

Why? What had happened to justify this sudden interest in William Shakespeare six long years after his previously unnoticed death? My hunch (alas, I cannot prove it) is that Marlowe died in the last months of 1621, and his friends decided to direct our attention to the one place where, after the publication of the First Folio, “Shakespeare” would continue to be investigated: Stratford.

When that stone is rent,
And Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment,
Here we alive shall view thee still.¹³

To dissolve means also to solve: When...Time solves thy Stratford Moniment. The word Moniment, spelt with i instead of u appears twice in the Introductory Pages; it would derive from the Latin Monitio, “warning.”

So, perhaps Marlowe was finally dead. This possibility is particularly suggestive in the light of a theory, apparently propounded by Washington Irving, to the effect that an Englishman whom he thought was Christopher Marlowe died in Padua¹⁴ in 1627, at the home of one Pietro Basconi or Bosconi.¹⁵ Irving is supposed to have seen the relevant letter in 1843.

I found no Basconi or Bosconi families in the Padua records. The Padovan Archivists suggested that Irving may have misread the family name and advised me to look for the Bassani family in the relevant period; there I found one Antonio Bassanio curiously enough, though I could not find details about his life. And here is a tricky one for Stratfordians: Apart from three students called Rosenkrantz, and one Ioannes Gulderstiern¹⁶ I found the family of the Ottelli, (spelt variously as Otelli, Ottelli and Othelius), which means there would have been individuals walking the streets of Padua surnamed “Otello.”

As for the date 1627, during the Renaissance and later, the digit 1, as in 1621, was often written as the alpha letter in the Greek alphabet; if Irving misread the name Bosconi in the letter he saw, he might as easily have misread the date α62α (1621) for 1627.¹⁷

So here is the chain of events again:
1616: April 23rd: William Shakespeare dies.
1619: Thomas Pavier publishes a collection of “Shakespeare” plays, which contains ten titles, of which only three are accepted as Shakespearean texts.
1619: May 3rd: The Court of the Stationers’ Company receives a letter from the Lord Chamberlain (the Earl of Pembroke), forbidding the printing of any plays belonging to the King’s Men without their consent.
1621: April: The printing of the FF gets started.
1621: May 1st: Francis Bacon is convicted of taking bribes on twenty-three charges.
1621: September 25th: The Swan of Avon, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, dies in Wilton House.
1621: October 5th: Ben Jonson is appointed DMR.
1621: October 6th: Thomas Walkley registers the 1Q Othello.
1621: October 21: Printing of the FF is stopped by order of the Lord Chamberlain.
1622: Early months: Walkley publishes the 1Q Othello under the name of William Shakespeare.
1622: March: Ben Jonson is removed from his job as DMR. Rumours start that Sir George Buck has gone mad.
1622: March 29th: The reversion of the Mastership of the Revels is granted to Sir John Astley.
1622, April 12th: Sir George Buck is officially declared insane.
1622: c. April: The refurbishment in the Chancel begins and the Stratford Monument is finally erected.
1622: c. April: The Catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair is being prepared including the announcement of a Folio volume with the works of William Shakespeare.
1622: May 16th: Buck is required to surrender his office, and his relatives are requested to deliver all the Revels papers.¹⁸
1622: Summer: The King’s Players visit Stratford and receive 6 shillings in compensation (solatio) for not being allowed to play in the Hall. According to Fripp, there are no other records of payments to the King’s Men in the Minutes and Accounts, between 1616 and 1622. (See Part 1 for Edgar Fripp)
1622: c. November:  The printing of the FF is resumed.
1623: c. August: The Tragedy of Othello is included in the FF.
1623: Sir Henry Herbert succeeds Astley as master of the Revels. He will keep the post until 1642. During his mandate, Herbert said that many of Buck’s books and papers had been lost in a fire.
1623: November 8th: The FF is entered into the Stationers’ Register incomplete. Troilus and Cressida as well as the Introductory Pages will be included at a later date.
1623: c. November: The library of Ben Jonson is burned to the ground.¹⁹
1624: c. February: A maximum 1000, probably less than half, copies of the FF became ready for sale at one pound each.

The Earth covers him; the people mourn him; he is in Olympus.

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, August 2010    Dead Man in Deptford Riley Burgess
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. 

¹W.W. Greg: The Shakespeare First Folio. (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1955). Unless specified to the contrary, all information about the First Folio (FF) contained in this essay, has been obtained from Greg’s book, allegedly the most important work published on the subject.
²William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
³See Time-Schedule.
⁴See Part 1: "The Curious History of the Chancel."
⁵See Part II: "Enter Iago."
⁶The 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, but Buck was declared insane shortly afterwards.
⁷Greg. Op cit.
⁸My reasons for this conjecture are that I find information in the early Comedies on political events occurring after May 1618, which may be a coincidence, or perhaps not.
⁹The two sons of Mary Sidney, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, are The Inimitable Pair to whom Hemminge and Condell dedicate the First Folio, in a text that is suspected to have been written by Ben Jonson. Montgomery succeeded his brother as Lord Chamberlain in 1626, so the control of the Herbert family over Shakespeare’s plays continued after Pembroke died in 1630.
¹⁰Thirty-eight, if we count Cardenio and Pericles. My quotation is from O. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
¹¹As we know, the Monument was carved by “one Gerard Johnson," according to Sir William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in 1656. This is a complex subject that deserves to be treated separately.
¹²See Part I: "The Chancel."
¹³L. Digges: First Folio, Introductory Pages.
¹⁴The City of Padua was part of the Venetian Republic.
¹⁵I owe this information to my colleague, John Hunt, Vice Chairman of the Marlowe Society, who obtained it from a letter written by Calvin Hoffman to a German colleague on 23/7/83. Unfortunately, the information about Irving’s trip to Padua has inexplicable errors.
¹⁶The spelling of the names varies. I am indebted to my colleague Dr. Bastian Conrad of Munich for confirming the existence of students with these names also at the University of Wittemberg.
¹⁷The “death records” in Padua are listed alphabetically; no Marlowe, Marlin, Marley or similar name, appears in those years, but he may have been using another name.
¹⁸Some of these dates I have obtained from Gwynneth Bowen: "The Incomparable Pair and 'The Works of William Shakespeare.'" Shakespearean Authorship Review (English): Autumn 1961.
¹⁹The date of this fire is not known. Sources vary between the beginning of 1624 and November 1623, the month when the FF was entered into the SR.

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History Play: a question for author Rodney Bolt

(this post originally appeared on January 4, 2009)

We caught up with writer Rodney Bolt, whose immensely enjoyable 2004 speculative biography, History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, imagines Christopher Marlowe faking his own death, escaping England, and going on to write the works we attribute to Shakespeare. Of the novel, Judith Flanders of the Spectator (UK) praises: "A triumph . . . It has both a serious remit and enough puns and anagrams to make Shakespeare (or possibly Marlowe) blush. It made me laugh out loud. And, most of all, it made me want to go back to the plays. This was a book that needed to be done perfectly or not at all. It is perfect."

Rodney’s latest biography, The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte – Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario (2006), has been lauded as “irresistible reading” by Megan Marshall in the New York Times.

Rodney was born in South Africa and was educated at Rhodes University in South Africa and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is an award-winning travel writer and has also written and directed for the theatre. He presently resides in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Q: Rodney, thanks for taking time to chat with us. I’m curious. Did Marlowe channel you while you were at Cambridge, or is the explanation for your writing History Play a bit more conventional and rooted in perhaps your skepticism with Shakespeare biographies? And certainly you had to know you were delving into the kind of territory that unsettles a lot of Shakespeare lovers and that you were perhaps placing yourself in the middle of some academic crossfire.

Rodney: At Cambridge, I studied English at Marlowe’s old college – so I guess he was always a presence looking over my shoulder. Perhaps, unconsciously, that was where it all began. Certainly, while I was writing History Play I was aware of wanting his ghost’s approval. More than that of living academics. I realized that what I was doing was going to create quite some huffing and puffing – though in the end, I was surprised at how few howls of anger there were. But this awareness did mean that History Play had to be absolutely watertight in its play with historical fact – if Marlowe and Montaigne have a conversation, it has to be completely possible that they were both in that place at the time; the plot that Marlowe becomes embroiled in (which leads to his staged death) is a real one, and his involvement perfectly feasible: that sort of thing. (For that reason, the Spectator review you quote is quite my favourite.)

But as you suggest, the main impetus for writing the book was indeed a scepticism about Shakespearean biography as a whole. We have just so many facts about Shakespeare. Those and no more. Every single Shakespearean biography there is has only this handful of hard fact to work with – the rest is speculation and (though authors generally deny they are doing it) extrapolation from the works themselves. One of my favourite quotes unearthed during research was Mark Twain’s, likening writing a biography of Shakespeare to reconstructing the skeleton of a brontosaurus, using "nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris." I wanted to throw those old bones in the air, and let them land in a different pattern. To show that, using the same method, you could create an entirely different story. So I am not a true Marlovian, in the sense that History Play is a work of fiction (although it looks and reads like a straight biography). I’m probably closer to the people who in the UK recently signed a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about William Shakespeare. The deeper I got into the research, the more sceptical I became – and certainly, for me, Marlowe is the most feasible candidate for an alternative authorship.

Q: Of all the things you uncovered in your impressively detailed research (many of the characters and events mentioned in History Play, by the way, have been discussed here at our blog), is there any one thing that really floored you about Marlowe, Shakespeare, a shadowy figure, or perhaps some historical incident? Any eureka moments, perhaps?

Rodney: The discovery that absolutely fascinated me was that there were troupes of English players travelling through continental Europe, hugely popular for performing in English. This struck me as an ideal cover for a spy, given the mobility of players. A poet-player (especially a university man like Marlowe) would have access both to servant’s gossip, and to the lords themselves (more often as not when they were drunk and relaxed after a meal), as well as a jester’s immunity in crossing borders (both social and political). And indeed, the same troupes performed for both sides in the war between the Spanish and the Dutch (a war in which England had a crucial role, and from which Queen Elizabeth’s court would be most desirous of inside information). This discovery was made even more exciting by my realization that Marlowe’s mysterious absences from Cambridge, doing "her majesty good service" in "matters touching the benefit of his Country" coincided with the players’ prime touring season. It also makes sense that high-action dramas such as Tamburlaine were written with one eye on a non-English-speaking audience . . . and there was a troupe present at the festivities surrounding the inauguration of Kronborg Castle at Elsinore (Kronborg’s topography bears a startling resemblance to that of the castle in Hamlet), a troupe that included the Shakespearean clown Will Kempe.

Q: I need to ask you about Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” argument. Should an author’s identity matter when we’re interpreting a text?

Rodney: For me, the plays written by (or attributed to) Shakespeare are unassailable. Having worked with them practically (as a theatre director) as well as academically, I stand in awe . . . and it does not matter one jot who wrote them. So, in that sense perhaps, I’m with Barthes. But with works so great, one cannot help but be intrigued to find out more about the hand behind them. I can be very cynical about academics who claim that you cannot move from the works to information about the author – and then go right ahead and do so, to fill out the pages of a biography that would be naked without such speculation. And I find the whole industry that surrounds the man Shakespeare – up there with Queen Victoria and Churchill as great national symbols, an icon subject to extraordinarily lucrative commercial, tourist and academic exploitation – most offensive.

Q: Care to clue us in on what you’re working on now?

Rodney: I’ve moved to the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian period for a (true) book about the Benson family – the spouse and offspring of an Archbishop of Canterbury. When the domineering, stuffy archbishop died, his wife changed her name from Mary to Ben, and took one Lucy Tait into her bed. Her brood were all famous in their own right (E.F. Benson for his Mapp and Lucia books, Arthur as the author of England’s unofficial national anthem "Land of Hope and Glory," Maggie for her archaeological excavations in Egypt, and more). They knew everyone, from Queen Victoria to Oscar Wilde, and not one of them (to use the idiom of the time) was "the marrying sort."


Q: Rodney, many thanks for sharing some thoughts with our audience. Please join us again, we hope? We’ll do lunch in downtown Sarasota when you’re on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Rodney: Great!

(Bolt photo by Armando Guerra)



© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, January 2009

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