The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum

It's been several years in the making, but well worth the wait. Donna N. Murphy's new book is out: The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the Authorship of Early Shakespeare and Anonymous Plays.  Inspired by Hoffman’s list of linguistic similarities between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Murphy refined the technique and became a specialist on the attribution of authorship of English Renaissance works, publishing a series of articles in Notes & Queries. 

When she co-won the Hoffman Prize in 2010 for her entry on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and anonymous plays, she said her submission was a work in progress, and she needed to further investigate Marlowe’s friend, Thomas Nashe. She has finally published her path-forging work, which develops a vast web of linguistic interconnections indicating Marlowe, sometimes with Thomas Nashe, wrote certain Shakespeare and anonymous plays. Let’s ask her about it.

Q:  You’ve said that The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum takes the Shakespeare authorship question directly to the doorsteps of Stratfordian scholars. What do you mean by this?

DM:  My approach is scholarly. I make my case using linguistic Matches, Near Matches, Rare Scattered Word Clusters, Image Clusters, Logic, Biographical Connections and other similarities. I indicate when language similarities are due to deliberate parody as in the cases, I believe, of Marlowe and Nashe’s The Taming of a Shrew and Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, as opposed to when they help flag authorship. Some Stratfordians claim that stylometrics or computational stylistics show that Marlowe didn’t “become” Shakespeare. I find that Marlowe co-authored certain Shakespeare plays with Thomas Nashe, so that works scholars have been using as “pure Shakespeare” to determine Shakespeareian attributes are actually by two authors. With these kinds of studies, you have to compare apples and apples. They’ve been comparing apples and oranges.

Q:  Why do you call it a “Continuum”?

DM:  “Both” Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s styles changed over time, and Eliot Slater found that in Shakespeare, uncommon words tended to cluster chronologically, so I think chronology is quite important. I present clues that point to Marlowe’s Edward II and the first versions of II Henry VI and III Henry VI all being composed c. 1590, and then show that linguistically and stylistically, they are amazingly similar. But with the first version of II Henry VI, you also have to factor in co-authorship by Thomas Nashe of the Jack Cade scenes.

Q:  The “Thomas Nashe” angle is something new for Marlovians. Why do you keep raising him?

DM:  Because Nashe is a key piece in the Shakespeare authorship puzzle, plus I want to give him his due. Nashe was an incredibly funny author who possessed a bottomless vocabulary. Here are two excerpts from I Henry IV, written c. 1596-7, one Marlovian, the other Nasheian. In The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum, I go into detail about how I attribute authorship, but you can hear the difference:

 

Marlowe:

King Henry IV. So shaken as we are, so wan with care,

Find we a time for frighted peace to pant

And breathe short-winded accents of new broils

To be commenced in strands afar remote.

No more the thirsty entrance of this soil

Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood.

Nor more shall trenching war channel her fields,

Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armed hoofs

Of hostile paces. Those opposèd eyes,

Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,

All of one nature, of one substance bred,

Did lately meet in the intestine shock

And furious close of civil butchery. (I.i.1-13)

Nashe:

Falstaff. Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since this last

action? do I not bate? do I not dwindle? Why my

skin hangs about me like an like an old lady's loose

gown; I am withered like an old apple-john. Well,

I'll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some

liking; I shall be out of heart shortly, and then I

shall have no strength to repent. An I have not

forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I

am a peppercorn, a brewer's horse: the inside of a

church! Company, villanous company, hath been the

spoil of me.  (III.iii.1-12)

Q:  So one person didn’t write everything in the Shakespeare canon?

DM:  No, although Marlowe wrote the lion’s share of it. Co-authorship of plays was common at the time, and in Shakespeare, Co-Author, Brian Vickers provided ample linguistic evidence of co-authorship in Shakespeare’s I Henry VI (with Thomas Nashe), Titus Andronicus (with George Peele), Pericles (with George Wilkins), Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), and Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both with John Fletcher). What scholars haven’t been able to do is break out a play between Marlowe and Shakespeare, because the “two” sound so much alike.

In the “Shakespeare” portion of Titus Andronicus, I present intriguing evidence of the presence of Marlowe and the presence of the author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, i.e., “Shakespeare.” For example, regarding Christopher Marlowe, we know that he read the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (FQ) at least three years prior to their publication in 1590 (the rest of FQ appeared in 1596). The language of FQ heavily influenced I and II Tamburlaine, c. 1587. The 1590 edition of FQ was 18,081 lines long (606 pages), not counting dedications.

So far as I can determine, the earliest occurrence of the phrase “distressed plight” was in the FQ manuscript Marlowe read, where it appears twice: “Into most deadly danger and distressed plight” (II.12.11), and “To comfort me in my distressed plight” (III.5.35). Marlowe's I Tamburlaine picked up the last half of FQ’s III.5.35: “Ah, shepherd, pity my distressèd plight” (I.ii.7).

In the "Shakespeare" portion of Titus Andronicus, c. 1591-3, we find: “And rather comfort his distressèd plight” (IV.iv.32). Titus Andronicus did not take this language from I Tamburlaine, but rather directly from the line I Tamburlaine echoed in FQ, stitching on the word “comfort” from FQ III.5.35. It is not logical that two separate authors would remember the same line from Spenser’s 18,081-line poem.

Q:  Wow, that’s incredible! I can see that The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum has the potential to be a real game changer for the Shakespeare authorship debate.  You can read more about Donna’s book and order a copy at http://www.donnanmurphy.com

Donna Murphy is also the author of The Mysterious Connection between Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker and T. M.: An English Renaissance Deception? Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, November 2013 

A.D. Wraight and a Patron’s Property by Cecilia Busby

Having been inspired by Ros Barber’s recent The Marlowe Papers, I have been digging a little into the Shakespeare authorship question. For the most part, I find the arguments for Marlowe compelling – but I also have some sympathy with those orthodox Stratfordian scholars who take exception to the wild flights of fancy that have too often accompanied what would otherwise be strong arguments. Speculations like these do massive damage to the overall case, calling into question more firmly grounded arguments by association.¹

I’d like to give one example from my recent reading.  In A.D. Wraight’s fascinating and thought-provoking book on Marlowe, The Story that the Sonnets Tell, there is a curious little chapter dedicated to the publication of Marlowe’s translation of Lucan in 1600 by Thomas Thorpe, later publisher of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Wraight is particularly interested in the dedication of this book to Edward Blount, sometime publisher of Marlowe and associate of Thomas Walsingham. She is convinced that this dedication is a cryptic message to Blount that “he has seen Marlowe alive and in person, and has received a manuscript of a ‘booke’ that he is going to bring to Blount”.²

The dedication to Blount is given “in the memory of that pure elemental wit, Chr. Marlow; whose ghoast or Genius is to be seen walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets” – a reference that Wraight takes to indicate that Marlowe himself has been seen, perhaps wrapped in the “sheets” (robes) of a Moor to guard against being recognised. In a characteristic building of one supposition on another, Wraight suggests that Marlowe “was probably a very good actor” and “may well have been careful to adopt a disguise that would completely conceal him”. ³ Yet there is a simpler explanation for the remark: the “sheets” are the publications – the pages – in which his “genius” appears. If there is a hint of a cryptic message, it is likely to be in that parenthetical “at the least” which might hint that Thorpe was aware that more “sheets” in St Paul’s were haunted by Marlowe’s genius than was always (openly) acknowledged.

Wraight notes this “innocent reading” but dismisses it,⁴ mainly because she is so intrigued by the next part of the dedication, that appears tantalisingly conspiratorial. Thorpe instructs his friend to “be sure to have chang’d your lodgings” when he comes with his “booke”, and to make little marking of “your friends when you have found some way for them to come in at”.  At the beginning of this little section Thorpe seems even more clear about what he is proposing: “you are to accommodate your selfe with some fewe instructions, concerning the property of a Patron, which you are not yet possest of”.

For Wraight there is only one possible meaning of property here, that is, an object of ownership. What this object is, is made clear for her by Thorpe’s next statement, referring to “when I bring you the booke”. “Evidently Thorpe has been entrusted with a manuscript which he is to give to Blount”,⁵ and equally evidently, she argues, it cannot be the Book of Lucan since that “contains the letter from Thorpe that refers to the ‘booke’ he is promising to bring to Blount – which cannot mean itself”.⁶

However, a recent LRB review by John Kerrigan has made clear that in Shakespeare’s time there was another meaning of the word property which was considerably more dominant.⁷ In modern usage, property most often denotes objects which are owned, but it can also be understood as an innate characteristic of a thing, its properties. Thus, the property of ice is to be cold, of metal is to be pliable. For the Elizabethans, this meaning was also commonplace with respect to persons/statuses. Where Shakespeare uses the term he “usually employs the word to designate the quality of something”.⁸ In Elizabethan English, then, the “property” of a “Patron” would almost certainly have meant the characteristic qualities of such a man.

Taking this as the meaning of the word makes the rest of Thorpe’s dedication completely clear as a satirical set of instructions for how to behave as a Patron. Blount, he instructs, must “study them for your better grace as our Gallants do fashions” (in order to put on a brave show as a proper “Patron”). The instructions include: “you must be proud and think you have merit enough in you, though your are ne’er so emptie”; then, when Thorpe appears to “bring … the book” (i.e., to present the book he has dedicated to this grand Patron, which is indeed, contra Wraight, the translation of Lucan), Blount should “take physic, and keep state, assign me a time by your man to come againe, and afore the day, be sure to have chang’d your lodging”. In the meantime, he should “sweat with the invention of some pitiful dry jest or two which you may happen to utter” but show “litle (or not at al) marking of your friends when you have found some way for them to come in at”, and “if by some chance something has dropt from you worth the taking up weary all that come to you with the often repetition of it”. Far from being instructions to (secretly) let hidden friends in at the back door of his (skilfully changed) lodgings, this is a satire on the way great men (those likely to be addressed for patronage) make their clients wait on them; over-rate and over-repeat their own wit; and do not mark (acknowledge) the wit of their friends, if they even give them a chance to say anything at all! Read in this way, the dedication is a hilarious in-joke between two publishers about the manners of great men.

If it needed any further proof that this reading fits, the end of the dedication says it all: while Thorpe doubts not that, were Blount to “mould himself to [these things]” it would not suit him, he goes on to say: “One special virtue in our Patrons of these daies I have promist myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing”, i.e., Thorpe, unlike usual dedicators, requires no money of his Patron, “yet, thy love I will challenge as my peculiar Object both in this, and (I hope) many more succeeding offices”.

This small correction of a small part of the much larger argument Wraight makes should not be taken as a wholesale criticism of the book – I think there is a great deal of merit in her main argument. But perhaps it could serve as an illustration of the temptation to build labyrinthine twists and turns of conspiracy on very flimsy suppositions, and the dangers of so doing. It is possible to read secret messages into almost anything. Had Wraight stepped back for a second, she might have wondered why the news that Thorpe had spotted Marlowe, or instructions to meet secretly and deliver an important manuscript, would ever have been inserted into a printed dedication (necessitating cryptic and heavily disguised hints) when presumably Thorpe simply had to cross the churchyard and go and knock on Blount’s door.

 © Cecilia Busby, October 2013

Cecilia Busby has a PhD from the London School of Economics and taught Social Anthropology for a number of years at the universities of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths and Kent. She has published The Performance of Gender (2000, Athlone) and a number of academic papers. More recently she has turned to writing fiction for children and, as C. J. Busby, is the author of the Frogspell series.

---

¹As one of the reviewers of this piece has pointed out, orthodox Stratfordians are not guiltless of this tendency to ‘flights of fancy’ either.

²A.D. Wraight, The Story that the Sonnets Tell, Adam Hart, London: 1993, p. 378.

³Ibid., p. 380.

⁴Ibid., p. 379. The following quotations form Thorpe’s dedication are all from this source, and page.

⁵Ibid., p.381.

⁶Ibid., p.380, original emphasis.

⁷John Kerrigan, Fathers Who Live Too Long: Review of Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare, LRB, 35 (17), pp. 17-19.

⁸Ibid., p. 17.

Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.

Director Jim Jarmusch: Christopher Marlowe Might Be Shakespeare

Director Jim Jarmusch, in an interview at Cannes this summer publicizing his latest film Only Lovers Left Alive, opines that Christopher Marlowe may have written the Shakespeare plays.  Click here for video clip (Marlowe conversation begins at 3:43, with interesting commentary by actor John Hurt, as well, who plays Marlowe in the film). 

Must Hear: Ros Barber vs. Charles Nicholl on Shakespeare Authorship

Click here to listen to an explosive debate between MSC contributor Ros Barber and author Charles Nicholl at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 4, 2013.

Shakespeare and Cambridge by Peter Farey

Way back in 1916, the Master of Cambridge's Jesus College, Arthur Gray, pointed out something very strange.¹  Shakespeare's plays seem to display a surprising familiarity with Cambridge University jargon. Illustrating this he explained the following.

From the earliest days to times comparatively recent a candidate for a degree at Cambridge was required to maintain a syllogistical dispute in the schools, which disputation was called 'the Act '. If he was successful and admitted to the full privileges of a graduate he was said 'to commence' in Arts or a Faculty, and the ceremony at which he was so admitted was, and is, called at Cambridge 'the Commencement'. If the candidate went on to a higher degree he was said 'to proceed'.

He then referred to a passage from a speech in Timon of Athens (4.3) in which Timon is addressing Apemantus, and the words 'proceeded', 'degrees' and 'commence' all appear in quick succession:

Hadst thou, like us from our first swath proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords . . .
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in't.

Gray also pointed out how the words 'act' and 'commence' seem to be associated in Shakespeare's mind, citing the following examples:     

Learning is a mere hoard of gold till sack commences it and sets it in act and use.

(2 Henry IV, 4.3.24-26)

I from the orient to the drooping west,

Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold

The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
(2 Henry IV, Prologue 3–5)

When he to madding Dido would unfold
His father's acts, commenced in burning Troy!
(2 Henry VI , 5.2.117–8)

That the combination of 'acts' and 'commencement' was a peculiarly Cambridge thing is given support in Erasmus's Praise of Folie (tr. Thomas Chaloner, who was not a Cambridge alumnus), which has "At their Actes and Comencements ye dooe see theim swadled in with so many cappes, coyues, and furde hoodes as they weare." Erasmus spent five years (1510 to 1515) as Professor of Divinity at Queen's College there.

Making it clear that 'the Acts' were a peculiarly Cambridge procedure, Thomas Nashe, who was a contemporary of Marlowe at Cambridge also (according to the OED) wrote in his Strange Newes (p.279)

Acts are but idle wordes, and..Pumps and Pantofles...therefore do no Acts ... onelie ... to Oxford they trudge,..and there are confirmed in the same degree they took at Cambridge.

 

We should be careful not to jump to conclusions about the simple juxtaposition of the words 'act' and 'commence,' however, since 'commencement' was also used for the coming into force of some legislation, regulation, treaty or Act of Parliament.

Rather more interesting, therefore, is Gray's comment that the clearest evidence that it was from Cambridge, not from Oxford, that Shakespeare learnt University phrases is in Lear's complaint to Regan of his usage by Goneril: 

 'Tis not in thee ... to scant my sizes. 
(King Lear,  2.2.346–8)  

As Gray puts it, quoting Minsheu, Guide into Tonges (1617), a size "is a portion of bread and drink; it is a farthing [i.e. a small amount] which schollers in Cambridge have at the buttery." He continues, saying that "The 'abatement' of sizes was a College punishment, alternative to 'gating', to which there seems to be allusion in Lear's next words 'to oppose the bolt against my coming in'."

In 1923, Frederick Boas repeated Gray's observations, with approval, in his book Shakespeare and the Universities.²

Interestingly, however, there appears to be one bit of Cambridge jargon which was dismissed by Gray and ignored by Boas. It was the use of the word 'keep', in the sense of 'dwell'. Gray claimed that this was "common enough in Elizabethan English," but this is an opinion which I have so far been unable to substantiate. 

Quite the opposite in fact, as was argued by William Stanley Melsome in 1945.³ He noticed that the use of the word 'keep', meaning to live, lodge, dwell, or reside is purely a Cambridge University term and was "not used elsewhere in the British Empire." He claimed that it was not used in that sense at Oxford, and that it occurs in Shakespeare in one form or another nineteen times. Here are some of them. 

    Knock at his study, where they say he keeps

     To ruminate strange plots of dire revenge.

     (Titus Andronicus, 5.2.5–6)

    
     This Armado is a Spaniard that keeps here in court,

     (Love's Labour's Lost, 4.1.97)

 

     That his chief followers lodge in towns about him,

     While he himself keeps in the cold field?

     (3 Henry VI, 4.3.13–14)

 

      ... all the skyey influences

     That dost this habitation where thou keep'st

     Hourly afflict.

     (Measure for Measure, 3.1.8–11)

 

     Enquire me first what Danskers are in Paris,

     And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,

     (Hamlet, 2.1.7–8)

 

     I will see you hanged like clodpolls ere I come

     any more to your tents. I will keep where there is wit

     stirring, and leave the faction of fools.

     (Troilus and Cressida, 2.1.118–120)

 

     My Lord Ulysses, tell me, I beseech you,

     In what place of the field doth Calchas keep?

     (Troilus and Cressida, 4.4.16–2)

 

     We learn no other but the confident tyrant

     Keeps still in Dunsinane,

     (Macbeth, 5.4.8–9)

 

     ... it is in Gloucestershire.

     'Twas where the madcap Duke his uncle kept –

     (1 Henry IV, 1.3.241–2)

 

     It is the most impenetrable cur

     That ever kept with men.

     (Merchant of Venice, 3.3.18–19

We may also note that it is a usage familiar to Marlowe too.

 

     And more. Of my knowledge, in one cloister keep

     Five hundred fat Franciscan friars and priests:

     (Massacre at Paris, 1.2.84–85) 

 

The Oxford English Dictionary supports this specifically Cambridge usage of 'keep' (intransitive) as "To reside, dwell, live, lodge." It is noted that it is still used in this sense colloquially at Cambridge, and the quotations they give are helpful.

1504   in S. Tymms Wills & Inventories of Bury St. Edmunds (1850) 102,   I wyll yt he or they shall keep at Cambryge at scoole.

1601   P. Holland tr. Pliny History of the World I. 127   Among the mountaines of this tract, the Pygmæans, by report do keepe. [Philemon Holland was at Trinity College, Cambridge.]

1633   P. Fletcher Purple Island v. xxv. 53   Here stands the palace of the noblest sense; Here Visus keeps. [Phineas Fletcher was at King's College, Cambridge.]

1719   in R. Willis & J. W. Clark Architectural History of the University of Cambridge. (1886) II. 214   In ye Room where Mr Maynard keeps there was acted..a Pastoral.  

Although Shakespeare's use of such Cambridge terms has been known about for many years, subsequent biographers have not had much to say on the subject. In fact, a quick look through a dozen or so of the more recent ones revealed nothing at all. Boas himself hazarded a guess as to how it might have happened, derived from Gray's original suggestion. 

Kempe and two of his fellows in the first folio list of players were Cambridge graduates, while many of Shakespeare's dramatic predecessors and contemporaries – Marlowe, Greene and Nash, among others – had come from the same nursery of arts. This probably accounts for the curious fact that the dramatist shows familiarity with certain distinctively Cambridge terms.  

Perhaps, if they knew about it at all, other biographers have found this explanation unconvincing, and preferred to remain silent. Non-Stratfordians, on the other hand, have naturally been less reticent. Knowing that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn't go to university at all, let alone Cambridge, how do the main alternative authors fair?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, attended St John's College, Oxford (1572–6?), so no points for him. 

According to the Oxfordian Ramon Jiménez,⁴ Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford "matriculated at Cambridge at age eight, and was later awarded Masters’ Degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge," but this is slightly misleading. In fact Oxford matriculated as an impubes (immature) fellow-commoner of Queens' College, Cambridge, in November 1558, remaining for only one academic year and taking no degree. In August 1564, however, he accompanied the queen on progress to Cambridge, and to Oxford in September 1566 and, like others in the queen's retinue, was granted an unearned MA on both occasions. Being a fellow-commoner meant that he had the privilege of dining at the Fellows' table, and was therefore probably untroubled by the size of his 'sizes'.

Francis Bacon and his elder brother Anthony, being the sons of the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, were also fellow-commoners. They went up to Cambridge on 5 April 1573 and matriculated from Trinity College on 10 June. According to the ODNB, they stayed there until December 1575, although their period of residence was twice interrupted when plague broke out in the Cambridge area. Venn⁵ tells us that Francis "resided for two years." In 1594, on a trip north on behalf of the Queen, illness prevented him from getting any further than Huntingdon, so he took this opportunity to visit Cambridge and take his MA degree.

Bacon is certainly likely to have been familiar with the terms discussed here, but Christopher Marlowe, with six and a half years 'keeping' at Cambridge as a pensioner, is by far the most likely to have a Cambridge vocabulary in his blood. He went up to Corpus Christi College in late 1580, and left early in 1587. There is also, of course, very copious evidence of his being a regular customer at the buttery, from which those 'sizes' were privately ordered.

Of the other authorship 'candidates' with any sort of following these days only Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (although he was another privileged fellow-commoner) seems able nearly to match Marlowe for time spent at Cambridge.⁶

© Peter Farey, September 2013 

Peter Farey is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society and twice joint winner of the Hoffman Prize for "a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe."

---

¹ Gray, Arthur (1916) "Shakespeare and Cambridge," in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, p.262.
² Boas, Frederick S. (1923) Shakespeare and the Universities. Blackwell, Oxford.
³ Melsome, W. S. (1945).  The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy.  G. Lapworth. p.188.
⁴Jiménez, Ramon. The Case for Oxford Revisited.
⁵Venn, J. & Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). Alumni Cantabrigienses. Cambridge University Press.
⁶Venn, as above. Jarmusch Swinton 
  
Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.