The Wrong Candidate? by Peter Farey

Are Oxfordians backing the wrong candidate? Click here for a fascinating analysis of how Marlowe compares with de Vere on Shakespeare authorship criteria.

Click here for the blog's home page and recent content. Ian McKellen, Edward II, Godot

On Venus and Adonis by Samuel Blumenfeld

While I agree with Daryl Pinksen that Marlowe wrote Venus and Adonis, I don’t think it was written to try to convince the Earl of Southampton to marry. The first 17 of the famous Sonnets were, as Daryl and I believe, written by Marlowe at the behest of Lord Burghley to persuade Southampton to marry his granddaughter Elizabeth. Apparently the poems failed to do the job.

But I think Venus and Adonis tells a different story, one of seduction by an aggressive female of a reluctant handsome young man. And it is only when Venus becomes totally passive that Adonis becomes sufficiently aroused to make love to her.

If the thesis I put forth in my book is correct, Marlowe is telling us exactly what took place between him and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. Of course, my thesis is pure speculation, but I believe that Marlowe was Philip Sidney’s page, engaged at the age of eight when in 1572 Sidney was embarking on his two-year tour of the Continent with a contingent of servants. I also believe that young Christopher stayed with Sidney until the age of fourteen when he entered the King’s School on Archbishop Parker’s scholarship.

During those six years in Sidney's employ, Marlowe traveled with the young nobleman and his servants all across Europe, was in Paris during the horrible St. Bartholomew massacre of the Huguenots, and on return to England remained with Sidney until 1578.

Apparently, Sidney’s sister Mary, two years older than Marlowe, became acquainted with her brother’s precocious page and recognized in him a highly intelligent, good looking, and personable young man with a talent for writing poetry.

At the age of fifteen, Mary Sidney married the elderly Second Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, who had had two wives, neither of whom bore him an heir. After two years of marriage, it became clear to Mary and the Earl that he was infertile. But the Earl wanted an heir to carry forth the Pembroke earldom. The great problem that many noble titled families had was the lack of a male heir to carry forth the title.

The Earl no doubt told Mary that she had to get him an heir, and he didn’t care how she went about doing it. But she had to be discreet, careful, and secretive about the whole affair. Who was available to impregnate her? The most convenient candidate was her brother’s former page, now fifteen and attending the King’s School. He was perfect: a social nobody, and therefore no threat, but physically healthy, highly intelligent, virginal, and full of teenage testosterone. And he greatly admired Mary. How Mary arranged for them to meet and what took place at that meeting we can never know. What we do know is that the Third Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert, or W.H., was born on April 8, 1580.

Which means that it was in the summer of 1579 that Mary found a convenient time and place to seduce young Christopher. And there is every likelihood that, as a result of this highly charged first sexual experience, Marlowe not only considered it a privilege to contribute his blood to the Sidney-Pembroke line, but also fell in love with the Countess.

It is my contention that Venus and Adonis tells the story of that seduction by the aggressive Countess, the resistance of Adonis, and how he discovered that women aroused him when they became completely passive. Some men enjoy aggressive women, but apparently Marlowe did not. Thus in Hero and Leander, Leander is the aggressor.

The Countess went on to have three more children: Katherine, Anne, and Philip Herbert, the future Earl of Montgomery. Who were their fathers? The best candidate is the poet Samuel Daniel, the rival poet, who lived with the Countess, and served as a tutor to young William.

We do know that throughout her life Mary Sidney bore a terrible burden of sin because of her aroused sexual desires. In other words, it was the Second Earl of Pembroke who forced his young wife to become a latent nymphomaniac.

As for the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton by the unknown Shakespeare, I believe it was done to give this highly erotic poem respectable and prestigious patronage. Marlowe undoubtedly knew Southampton, Burghley’s ward, and may have even tutored him at Cambridge, and it is quite likely that Southampton knew who the true author was.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote about political secrecy: “It is the thing most common to humanity that is most veiled by humanity. It is exactly because we all know that it is there that we need not say that it is there.” Perhaps this insight explains why secrets were so well kept during Elizabethan times. Chesterton says further: “We are asked to be silent about these things, but we are not asked to be ignorant about them.” (All Things Considered, New York, John Lane Co., 1910)

Samuel Blumenfeld

© Samuel Blumenfeld, September 2009

Samuel Blumenfeld, a regular contibutor to MSC, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. He is a former editor in the New York book publishing industry, and he has lectured in all 50 U.S. states. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others.

A recent anecdote Sam related to me from his fascinating life experiences: "I did meet Ayn Rand when I was editor at Grosset & Dunlap. Took her to lunch. I then attended the Objectivist lectures given by her protege Nathaniel Branden. Rand would come at the end of each lecture and answer questions. After the lecture, a group of us would retire to the bar in the hotel for further dicussion. Alan Greenspan was part of that group. Of course, Rand later broke off with Branden because he was in love with a younger woman."

See Sam on YouTube addressing the Shakespeare authorship controversy.

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Christopher Marlowe in Boston Globe

"If Marlovians seem more jovial than de Vere’s promoters, that is because 'Kit' Marlowe was cool," writes Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam. Click here for the fun September 25 article "The Shakespeare Truthers."

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Nicholas Skeres & the Earl of Essex by Peter Farey

At one point in Michael Rubbo's 2002 documentary Much Ado About Something, Rubbo is in Jonathan Bate's garden discussing with him the Marlowe "faked death" scenario at Deptford. Energetically "digging in" some compost, Bate protests, "But what it presupposes is that the three men in the room were all in on the plot to save him." "But of course they were," says Rubbo. "They were all employees of..." With some frustration Bate interrupts him: "But they weren't - they were with rival factions!" "That's what Nicholl says," Rubbo replies, "but that's very disputed." And that's pretty much where the discussion is left.

Yet Bate was making an important point, and it is one which Marlovians ignore at their peril. The Queen's favourite Essex had only recently been appointed to the Privy Council, and was viewed with the greatest mistrust and suspicion by the Cecils - Lord Burghley and his son Sir Robert Cecil - both of them also on the Council. As for Essex, he was waiting for the old man to die so that he could take over as the Queen's chief minister. A fierce, but civil, rivalry might best describe their relationship at this time.

Robert Poley was quite clearly working on the Cecil side of that divide, and Nicholas Skeres, having certainly served Essex in the past, had described him as his "Lord and Master" only a month earlier. Ingram Frizer wasn't really connected with either, although he was very closely associated with Thomas Walsingham, formerly employed by his father's cousin, the late spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, and it would be generally agreed that he was on the Cecil side of the Cecil/Essex split. Thomas Walsingham and Sir Robert Cecil are known to have been good friends later.

All three of them being there in the first place really makes no sense unless we assume that they were in some way representing their masters' interests. Marlovians believe that the most logical reason for their presence was to fake Marlowe's death on their masters' behalf, but this assumes Skeres to have been there in his capacity as a confidence trickster working for Frizer (and Walsingham?) rather than as a servant of Essex. That he so obviously was Essex's man does weaken the argument quite a lot - the point Jonathan Bate was making.

Fortunately for the Marlovian argument, however, an undated letter from Skeres to Essex's confidant Gelly Meyrick discovered by Paul Hammer¹ among the Devereux Papers at Longleat (MS.1, fol.306) casts considerable doubt upon his having still been with Essex at the end of May 1593, when Marlowe's apparent death occurred.

In this letter - "to my most esteemed friend Gelly Meyrick" - Skeres writes (the spelling modernized):

Sir, it is long since I made choice of your friendship, and that I have found you no more readier to do me good, hath (I think) rather proceded of my own negligence than your fault. Of which negligences I have in the wrong done to myself paid the price. But now I return to my self that have been long a stranger to my self, and do lay upon the love it hath pleased you to bear me, with this request to avoke your thoughts to help me in my present suit to my Lord [of Essex] which is for some employment and charge in these affairs that are now in hand which suit (being the only stay of my fortune and the readiest means for me to recover my umbered blemish) I present to you in his Lordship's favour to make me happy, and I shall be ready to do any service to the authors of my benefit. And though I have heretofore forsaken the ways of my good, I am so tired with those walks, as all my labour shall be spent to redress my life. Good Mr Meyrick respect my long service and travail the which I hope will not be so cast off and be now as ready to pleasure me as you have been willing before to show desire. I hope of your good will, I doubt not of your power, vowing if in this you make me happy to acknowledge you the only original and means of my good during life. Thus bending all my good in your goodness towards me, I wish you the happiness of your desires.

From this, we learn the following:

1. He has done long and arduous service for Essex in the past. In 1589 Skeres had carried messages between Essex, who was in Exeter, and Sir Francis Walsingham in London after Essex's return from Portugal. Whether he was actually working for Essex at the time is not certain, however, given that it was Walsingham who paid him, and that he had apparently been one of Walsingham's men involved in the discovery of the Babington Plot three years earlier. "He quietly drops from the story, almost certainly because he was Walsingham's man all along" as Charles Nicholl puts it.² The "long service and travail" he is referring to here, however, clearly means Essex's failed expedition to Normandy in 1591/2 when, having started with 4000 men in August 1591, the force lost about three quarters of them either from sickness or enemy action. Skeres managed to survive nevertheless, and returned some months after Essex in August the following year.

2. He regrets the way he has spent his life in the past, and is determined to put it right from now on. In 1593 he was thirty. He had been employed at the dishonest end of the money lending-business from his early teens and was still involved in it. So it seems very likely that it is this practice he means by having "forsaken the ways of his good," and that it is this life which he now intends to "redress," meaning that the letter was most probably written after May/June 1593.

3. He has become estranged from Essex because of something he did which damaged his image in Essex's eyes. Nicholl (p.438) and Hammer (p.228) come up with only two suggestions as to what this might have been: the Deptford incident of May 30,1593, or Skeres's appearance before the Star Chamber Court a month earlier. In the first of these he was apparently only a witness to what went on, and it is difficult to see what might have offended Essex unless what happened was the very opposite of what he had wanted - but there is little if any reason to suspect that Essex had any interest in Marlowe at that time, whether alive or dead! In the latter, Skeres had been summoned before the Star Chamber Court because of his having worked for ten years or more as an "instrument" to draw victims into the clutches of the loan shark John Wolfall. Nicholl plays this down as a possible cause of the disfavour, but unsurprisingly fails to mention that if this were the event in question his whole Essex-based thesis as to what happened (both the 1992 and 2002 versions) would be in ruins. What neither he nor Hammer mentions either is that the Earl of Essex himself was a member of the Star Chamber Court, and may of course have taken exception to someone "before the Star Chamber for extortion" as Hammer put it, drawing attention to the fact that Essex was his "Lord and Master." As a new member, his image mattered.

4. He is asking for support from Meyrick in his suit to Essex for employment in the "affairs that are now in hand." Both Nicholl and Hammer suggest that the affairs in question might be Essex's preparations for his Cadiz expedition of 1596. Nicholl has some reservations about this, however, saying that the word "affairs" does not seem quite right for a military expedition. He has obviously forgotten Richard II, in which the King uses the word twice with precisely that meaning, one even saying "affairs in hand."³ He floats the possibility of it being the so-called Lopez affair Skeres had in mind, but gives no indication of how Skeres would have known about it, nor how Meyrick would have known it was this he was talking about. The "affairs that are now in hand" are probably military ones, but the reference seems to be more general than just the Cadiz campaign, and Essex's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) may give us a clue.

Essex therefore threw himself into military administration, the appointment of army officers, intelligence-gathering, and an ever-growing number of foreign correspondences - areas of often frenetic activity which reflected his conviction that confronting Spain was England's most urgent task and which provided him with a steady supply of the political ammunition which he needed to impress this view upon a reluctant queen...Although Essex took over correspondence with Florence (through James Guicciardini) in 1593 and invested much time and money in intelligence-gathering from 1592, the full extent of his ambition to become a statesman of truly international significance emerged only in 1595.

It was these preparations that must have been fairly widely known and which Skeres most probably had in mind rather than any specific project, about which public knowledge would have been very limited indeed.

5. Since it is addressed to "Gellie Mericke" and he refers to "Mr Mireke" in the text, it must have been written before Meyrick was knighted in the summer of 1596. Skeres was also arrested and released in March 1595 when the record describes him as a "servant" of Essex, which suggests a date before this too, although this is something he may well have claimed on the basis of his long service even if he was still out of favour and being given no work to do. One is reminded of the imprisoned Christopher Marlowe claiming in Flushing to be well known to Lord Strange and the Earl of Northumberland, whilst almost certainly actually working for Lord Burghley at the time.

Given that Skeres had apparently done long service for Essex up until April 1593, and that the estrangement occurred "long since" some time before 1596, it seems highly likely that as a result of Skeres's Star Chamber appearance, Essex let it be known that he was displeased at having his name associated with that of a usurer's tout, and would prefer Skeres not to have the chance to do so again. The Star Chamber hearing was in April 1593 and the letter must have been written a year or two later, before Meyrick's knighthood in 1596 but after a sufficient time for the falling out to have happened "long since." And if this is so, then Skeres's presence at Deptford only a month later will have had nothing to do with Essex - even if he was brought back into the Essex fold later on, which his imprisonment following the executions of Essex and Meyrick might suggest.

We cannot say that this is certain, but it is undoubtedly very probable indeed, and enough for it to be no longer possible for people like Jonathan Bate to claim with any confidence that Poley and Skeres were with "rival factions" and therefore most unlikely to have collaborated on something like the faking of Marlowe's death.

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, September 2009

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 has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years, with over 4000 posts to internet newsgroups in that time, mostly about the Marlovian theory. Click here to reach Peter's website.

¹Hammer, Paul E.J. "A Reckoning Reframed: the 'Murder' of Christopher Marlowe Revisited." English Literary Renaissance 26.2, 1996, p.242.
²Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. London: Vintage, 2002. p.32.
³Richard II. 1.4.46-51.

We will ourself in person to this war,
And for our coffers with too great a court
And lib'ral largess are grown somewhat light,
We are enforc'd to farm our royal realm,
The revenue whereof shall furnish us
For our affairs in hand.

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On Concord Shakespeare Fest by Samuel Blumenfeld

A few weeks ago I attended an exhilarating Shakespeare conference in Concord, Massachusetts (July 31 - August 2), organized by Stuart Weeks, an Oxfordian who urged me, a Marlovian, to attend. This second annual Shakespeare festival was entitled, “Much Ado About Shakespeare – A Festive Conference.”

All of the Oxfordian conferences I’ve attended in the last year or so have had little to do about Edward de Vere and more to do with the works of Shakespeare. And now that my book has been published, I have been warmly accepted as the Marlovian in the crowd.

I have been told by Stuart that I will be able to give a Marlovian presentation at next year’s conference. That is real progress. While he organizes next year’s presenters, I will acquaint him with Daryl Pinksen and other wonderful contributors to this blog.

There were presenters from England, Minneapolis, Colorado, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston. All of the presentations were of high professional quality. There was music and dance by Maren and Alan Stott of England. A fascinating talk on the history of money, “Shakespeare: The Monetary Backdrop,” given by Richard Kotlarz of Minneapolis. As a result of the talk, I now see the Merchant of Venice in a different light. It is not an anti-Semitic play. It is a play about economics and money. And that also holds true for the Jew of Malta, which I suggested he read.

Lida McGirr, an actress, put on a wonderful show depicting the successive states of Margaret’s personality in the Henry VI trilogy: virgin, wife, mother, crone, and old woman. Since I, and many orthodox scholars, believe that Marlowe wrote the trilogy, Lida’s performance revealed the great genius of the playwright in his ability to create such a fascinating woman.

No doubt the most Oxfordian presentation at the conference was Hank Whittemore’s engrossing performance in which he asserted that the Earl of Oxford had an affair with Queen Elizabeth which resulted in the birth of the Earl of Southampton, or Henry IX. Whittemore quoted from the Sonnets, “written by Oxford,” which was to prove the truth of the story. And he connected all of that with the Essex rebellion, Southampton’s imprisonment, and later pardon by James. It made excellent theater, but since the basic premise is sheer fantasy, I enjoyed it with a large grain of Marlovian salt.

There was a very good presentation on “Shakespeare’s Women: Why Do They Have to Die?” Plus, two very stimulating talks on Shakespeare and music.

Kudos to Stuart Weeks, who managed to create a conference with something for everyone via a great variety of talents and subject matter. If, as expected, I am able to give a presentation on Christopher Marlowe next year, 2010’s Shakespeare festival will be even more exhilarating.

Samuel Blumenfeld

© Samuel Blumenfeld, August 2009

Samuel Blumenfeld, a World War II veteran of the Italian campaign, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. He is a former editor in the New York book publishing industry and has lectured widely. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others. He is a regular contributor to MSC.

See Sam on YouTube addressing the authorship controversy.

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The International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society

"Our Belief is that Christopher Marlowe – in his day England's greatest playwright – did not die in 1593 but survived to write most of what is now assumed to be the work of William Shakespeare. Our Plan is to present accurate information and well-reasoned argument related to this belief. Our Aim is to have this theory accepted by Shakespearian scholars and others as the only plausible alternative to the traditional 'Stratfordian’ position.”

Click here to visit the beautiful site of the new International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

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Who Wrote Venus and Adonis, and Why? by Daryl Pinksen

There has always been some mystery surrounding the writing of Venus and Adonis. Why was it written? What was the poet's connection to the Earl of Southampton? Did Shakespeare really write it? In 1593, his name was not known as a poet. From what we can infer from his life after 1593, he was an actor and aspiring entrepreneur, connected in some way to the theater industry, but he was not a scholar, and not then a gentleman, which makes the sophistication of the work¹ so remarkable.

Venus and Adonis is a beautiful poem, with an effusive dedication, but – its exquisite verse aside – there is general agreement that the poem was written with a specific purpose in mind. It delivered a message to the Earl of Southampton, to try and nudge him toward an arranged marriage that, as everyone knew, he had stubbornly refused for three years. If William Shakespeare was indeed its author, how did this virtual nobody decide to write a poem, one requiring months of intense concentration,² that dared to be so bold with a young Earl?

The time involved, hundreds of hours, was too great for the poet to have written the poem on speculation. He would have needed financial support during its creation. And its message was too specific, and too well known to have been against the wishes of its dedicatee, to have been crafted with the hope of reward from Southampton. The impetus and the financing must have come from elsewhere. One explanation, as suggested by Stephen Greenblatt in his 2005 biography, Will in the World, is that:

It is possible that someone . . . had taken note of the fact that the young earl was excited by the talents or by the person of an actor who was also a promising poet. Whoever noticed this excitement . . . might well have had the clever idea of commissioning the poet to try his hand at persuading the narcissistic, effeminate young earl to marry.³

In order to determine if this explanation is credible, we need to explore the context within which the poem was written.

When Southampton's father (the 2nd Earl of Southampton) died, William Cecil⁴ – Lord Burghley – the most powerful of the Queen's ministers, and Master of the Wards, became his legal guardian. This gave Burghley full control over the young Earl's properties and inheritances. Until he reached the age of twenty-one, Lord Burghley would oversee, and profit, from the Earl’s interests, while Southampton would have to make do with a modest allowance. As Southampton’s guardian, the wardship also gave Burghley the right to impose a marriage contract on him.

Burghley had been born a commoner, but as the Queen’s most trusted minister he had grown steadily in wealth, influence, and power. When Southampton came to live at his estate, Burghley was the most powerful man in England. The one thing he lacked was a noble lineage for his offspring, so he used his position to make this a reality. In 1571, he saw to it that one of his earlier wards, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was married to his daughter Anne Cecil. That union resulted in a granddaughter for Lord Burghley, the Lady Elizabeth Vere.

In 1590 or thereabouts, when Southampton reached the age of 17, Lord Burghley arranged a marriage between his young charge and Lady Elizabeth. Southampton knew the contract was legally binding, and he knew the possible consequences of refusing, but he wanted no part of it. Like Adonis, he preferred to remain a bachelor, saying – with respect – that it was not the lady he objected to, but the idea of marriage itself. He was, after all, only seventeen.

In 1593, the year Venus and Adonis was published, the Earl of Southampton had been under pressure from Lord Burghley for several years, but he had not budged. It was not that he lacked fear - he knew that if he did not fulfill the marriage contract by his twenty-first birthday, Lord Burghley had the right to impose a crippling fine on his estate. Neither was Burghley’s blatant conflict of interest an impediment – it was he who held the power to determine the fine’s amount in cases of breached marriage contracts. But Southampton had made up his mind and thought, wrongly it turns out, that he could persuade Burghley to back down.

The potential fine, and its imagined size, was pressure enough. But, as Southampton’s guardian, another of the threats Burghley could use to try and force his ward to obey his wishes was to neglect Southampton’s properties in the final years of his wardship, leaving his estates and financial interests in shambles. This was not an idle threat, and Southampton was worried. As Akrigg tells us in his 1968 book, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton:

In 1592 we have an alarmed young Earl writing to Michael Hicks, Burghley's confidential servant, asking him to use his influence with Burghley, to avoid 'the greate decay and daunger' which threatened much of his inheritance through lack of maintenance.⁵

When Southampton finally did reach the age of majority, on October 6, 1594, he had still not fulfilled Burghley's marriage contract. As punishment for his disobedience, Burghley imposed a fine of ₤5000, then a staggering sum (a well-paid schoolmaster might earn a yearly salary of ₤20). To twist the knife, Burghley demanded payment immediately, forcing Southampton to borrow at interest.

When Venus and Adonis was published in June 1593, Southampton had just over a year left to fulfill Burghley’s contract. Venus and Adonis tells the tale of a young man who is desired by the goddess of Love, but spurns her advances, preferring the bachelor’s life. The story ends in tragedy, with Adonis killed by a boar, leaving Venus to lament the loss. Everyone in the know understood the message being sent to Southampton was, “Change your mind, and give in to Burghley's demands.”

It is hard to imagine that the writer of the poem believed it would be enthusiastically received by Southampton. Despite the flattery of the dedication, and the beauty of the poetry, the writer must have known that the message delivered by the poem was against Southampton's wishes. To Southampton, it would have represented more unwanted pressure. Under the circumstances it seems unlikely that its author would have written and published this poem without the bidding, or at least the blessing, of Lord Burghley, the person to whom it mattered the most that the poem achieve its intended result.

So how did its writer end up being given this task? Fortunately, there is a precedent which may help us answer that question. Venus and Adonis was not the first poem dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. In 1591, a Latin poem was published by a poet named John Clapham with a dutiful dedication to the Earl of Southampton. The poem’s title? Narcissus, the story of a young man who becomes so enthralled with his own image that he drowns while trying to find his fading reflection in a pool.

Clapham’s purpose was on full display in the poem, as Katherine Duncan-Jones tells us: “Clapham’s fairly undistinguished poem scarcely veils its propaganda purpose. In its echos sequence, for instance, line 17’s echo word is ‘vere’ no doubt alluding to Elizabeth Vere.”⁶ How would Southampton have received Clapham’s blunt message? Not well, one would think. To be called a Narcissus was hardly a compliment, and who did this John Clapham think he was, lecturing his superior? John Clapham, as it turns out, had nothing to fear from Southampton – he served a much more powerful, much richer, master. Clapham was a secretary of Lord Burghley. The message being delivered was Burghley’s, not Clapham’s. As Akrigg tells us:

The usual motive for a dedication, a handsome reward from the dedicatee, could not be looked for from seventeen-year-old Southampton, living on a pitifully small ‘exhibition’. It would be Burghley, gratified at seeing the treatment given the wretched young nobleman, who would supply Clapham with his reward.⁷

The message was Burghley’s, the reward was from Burghley; all that Clapham did was provide the medium. The poet was communicating Burghley’s wishes, not his own, and certainly not Southampton’s.⁸ Whoever wrote Venus and Adonis, although Burghley’s direct involvement cannot be proven, was performing the same service as Clapham.

And there exists the possibility that this was not the first time that the writer of Venus and Adonis had tried to persuade the young Earl to marry. When Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published in 1609, there was no preface from the poet, and no patron was named. Instead, the printer, one Thomas Thorpe, included a cryptic dedication to a “Mr. W.H.”, whose identity remains a mystery. The sonnets variously deal with a rival poet, one or perhaps several patrons, and a mysterious dark lady. The sonnets do not seem to be arranged in any kind of order. And while many of the poems sound like personal reflections on real situations with real people, none of the characters have been positively identified.

There is one sequence of sonnets, however, that appears to have been deliberately grouped. The first seventeen of the 154 Shakespeare’s Sonnets praise a young man’s beauty, and urge him to marry and procreate. The theme is so similar to Clapham’s Narcissus, and to Venus and Adonis, that there is wide agreement that the young man – at least in these first seventeen sonnets – was the Earl of Southampton. The fact that there are seventeen poems in the sequence, all with the same theme, suggests that they may have been commissioned specifically for Southampton’s seventeenth birthday in 1590.

The theme repeated throughout the first seventeen sonnets is insistent – marry and produce children. Although we cannot be sure which was written first, the writer of the first seventeen sonnets writes as if he were familiar with Clapham’s poem and is responding to it, but chooses a more subtle and ingenious path. Where Clapham’s Narcissus suggests that Southampton’s love of himself (he was, by all accounts, a striking young man) was a vice that, if uncorrected, would lead to his ruin, the sonneteer accepts the dedicatee’s self-love, and presents it in a novel way, not as impediment, but as the driving force behind the need to procreate.

The poet is gentler with Southampton than Clapham, more conscious of the psychology of privileged youth. He seeks to persuade Southampton through flattery. Where Narcissus gazed into a reflecting pool and became so enthralled with himself that he drowned, the sonneteer suggests that the love of one’s own image is natural, and rather than curb it, should be given full rein, leading naturally to the desire to re-create that image in a son:

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another. (Sonnet III, 1-2)

The poet reflects that time and age are enemies of life and beauty, but they can be cheated through producing an heir, in effect giving one’s youthful image a second life:

Die single, and thine image dies with thee. (Sonnet III, 14)

Thy unused beauty must be tomb’d with thee . . . (Sonnet IV, 13)

In the spring of 1593, the writer of Venus and Adonis is still conscious of Clapham’s poem, as Akrigg continues:

The text of Venus and Adonis supplies evidence that Shakespeare knew Clapham’s poem. The basic pattern is the same: the meeting with Venus, the departure of the young man, Venus’s lamentation, and the final metamorphosis – in Clapham’s poem into a narcissus, in Shakespeare’s into an anemone.⁹

Clapham’s Narcissus, Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets, and Venus and Adonis all perform the same function: to try and persuade Southampton to marry. And not to marry just anyone – he must marry Lady Elizabeth Vere and produce children with her, as Lord Burghley had commanded.

The writer of Venus and Adonis was most likely someone in Burghley’s circle; someone over whom he had influence; someone who could be relied upon to deliver verse of the highest quality, preferably someone whom Southampton was familiar with and respected. Shakespeare, as far as we know, had no association with Lord Burghley either before or after Venus and Adonis was published. But Christopher Marlowe did.

Marlowe had been recruited into the intelligence network at Cambridge, while Lord Burghley was Chancellor of the University. Marlowe's and Southampton’s time at Cambridge overlapped between 1585 and 1587, when Marlowe was emerging as the nation’s most promising new poet. It is safe to assume that Marlowe and his work were well known to Southampton.

In 1587, when Marlowe was denied his M.A. because of rumours of Catholic leanings, and his frequent absences, the Privy Council, led by Lord Burghley, wrote a letter praising Marlowe for doing his country good service, dismissed all rumours against him as unfounded, and ordered the Cambridge Dons to bestow upon Marlowe his degree without delay. When Marlowe was arrested for “coining” in Flushing, Netherlands, in 1592, on a mission to expose Catholic plots against the Crown, Marlowe and his accuser (the now infamous Richard Baines) were sent back to Lord Burghley, by then the head of the intelligence network after assuming the role upon the death of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1590.

Like Clapham, Marlowe was in Lord Burghley’s employ. Lord Burghley knew Christopher Marlowe, both as poet and spy. But if Marlowe did write Venus and Adonis, this would still require an explanation of why his name does not appear on the dedication page.

Venus and Adonis had been registered at the Stationer’s Company, without attribution, on April 18, 1593, a little over a month before Marlowe's arrest on May 20. On May 30, Marlowe had his fateful meeting at Deptford, where he was either killed, or escaped into exile with the help of his friends. About two weeks later, Venus and Adonis was published, now with an author's name attached to the dedication. The occasion marked the first appearance of William Shakespeare's name as a writer – but Marlowe’s fingerprints are all over it.

A similar Ovidian poem by Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, assumed to have been written before Venus and Adonis, but not published until four years later in 1597, is often cited as an influence on Shakespeare when he wrote Venus and Adonis. John Bakeless argued that “Hero and Leander influenced Shakespeare directly and powerfully when he was writing Venus and Adonis¹⁰. . . . Shakespeare had read Hero and Leander since he quotes from it, since his scheme and treatment are essentially similar in Venus and Adonis.”¹¹

Jonathan Bate, in discussing the poet George Chapman’s later additions to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, completed in 1597, seems to feel that Chapman did not do a fair job. His opinion is that “in its playful sprightliness . . . Venus and Adonis was a far truer continuation of Hero and Leander than Chapman’s additions.”¹² Scholarship on Venus and Adonis must assume that Shakespeare had access to Marlowe’s unpublished Hero and Leander, even though no one else seems to have known it existed.

Between April 18, when Venus and Adonis was registered, and June of 1593, when the poem was published, much had changed for Marlowe’s once good name. He had been arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the “Baines Note” of Marlowe’s blasphemies, delivered days later, had administered the coup de grace on his reputation. Whether Marlowe was alive or dead in June 1593, publishing Venus and Adonis with Christopher Marlowe's name on it was no longer an option. It would have associated Southampton's name with a now despised atheist, heretic, and blasphemer. And for Burghley, this would have meant associating his (or so he thought) future grandson-in-law's, and granddaughter’s, names with Marlowe, a name that he correctly predicted would live in infamy. He would not have permitted this to happen.

The poet also supplied an epigram beneath the title which hints at his identity and circumstance. The Latin couplet,

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plene ministret aqua.

from the Roman poet Ovid’s Amores (1.15), had been translated several years earlier, by Christopher Marlowe. The epigram, as translated by Marlowe, read:

Let base-conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs.

Readers of Ovid would have immediately been reminded of the theme of the poem that the epigram was lifted from: a poet’s defiance of death through the immortality of verse. If Marlowe had indeed escaped into exile the previous month, and not been killed (as was claimed in the coroner’s report), then the decision to include a quote from Ovid’s Amores, Elegy 15, was a perfect choice. Inviting his readers to recall how book one of Amores ends, the epigram on the title page of Venus and Adonis would have been the perfect announcement of the “first heir of Marlowe’s invention” as a dead man:

Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire,
I’ll live, and as he pulls me down, mount higher.

Marlowe’s ruined name was no longer an option for Venus and Adonis, but why William Shakespeare’s? Printing the poem and dedication with no author’s name attached may have been regarded as an admission that the author was a persona non grata, and so a name would have been needed, but why him?

The man assigned the job of printing Venus and Adonis was Richard Field, a printer well known to Lord Burghley. Field began his career by publishing Lord Burghley’s The Copy of a Letter Sent out of England to Don Bernadin Mendoza in 1588. And there is further evidence that there were close connections between the two men. In 1589, Richard Field dedicated Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy to Lord Burghley.¹³

Richard Field was a native of Stratford, just a few years older than William Shakespeare, and his family and the Shakespeares were close. As David Kathman summarizes in his online essay, “Shakespeare and Richard Field”:

I think we can be virtually certain that William Shakespeare and Richard Field knew each other from childhood, and it's entirely reasonable to think that the relationship continued when they were both living in London.¹⁴

Shakespeare, as expertly illustrated in an article by Anthony Kellett,¹⁵ was a canny businessman who knew an opportunity when he saw it, and he knew how to capitalize on those opportunities. As a shareholder in a theater company, providing his name as a front for Marlowe – London’s premier playwright – had the potential to net huge profits. The details are unknowable, but we do know one thing: we can draw a direct line from Marlowe, through Lord Burghley, to Richard Field, and from him, to Shakespeare.

Understanding the historical background of Venus and Adonis is vitally important, because its registration and publication straddle the period between Marlowe’s reign as the greatest poet in England, and his subsequent pariah status as heretic and atheist. The simultaneous emergence of William Shakespeare as a name associated with poetry and drama, work universally described as being heavily influenced by Christopher Marlowe, appears to be no coincidence.

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, August 2009

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

¹“The poem is so smartly attuned to London literary fashions of the early 1590s that it must have been written if not in London, then in its literary atmosphere.” Burrow, Colin, ed. 2002. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.8.
²“There is every reason to think that Venus and Adonis was the product of unusually careful and studied labour. It may have taken a considerable time to perfect, perhaps between six and ten months.” Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2001. Ungentle Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning, p.60.
³Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, p.229-30.
⁴See Graves, Michael A.R. 1998. Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley. London: Addison-Wesley.
⁵Akrigg, G.P.V. 1968. Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p.32-3.
⁶Duncan-Jones, p.64.
⁷Akrigg, p. 34.
⁸ The Oxfordian claim that “only someone of equal or greater social standing to Southampton would dare to write a poem which treated the Earl like a disobedient child,” is hereby debunked. John Clapham did exactly that. He was a secretary.
⁹Akrigg, p.196.
¹⁰Bakeless, John. 1942. The Tragical History of Christopher Marlowe (Vol.2). Hamden, CT: Archon Books, p.263.
¹¹Bakeless, p. 293.
¹²Bate, Jonathan. 1997. The Genius of Shakespeare. London: Macmillan, p. 131.
¹³Burrow, p.12.
¹⁴See “Shakespeare and Richard Field,” at
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/field.html, accessed July 11 2009.
¹⁵See “William Shakespeare, Businessman – Forgotten genius,” at
http://marlowe-shakespeare.blogspot.com/2009/07/william-shakespeare-businessman.html, accessed July 11, 2009.




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Who Wrote Shakespeare? The Christopher Marlowe Theory

Worth repeating: Click here (or above) for Mike Rubbo's 8-minute YouTube clip on the Marlowe-as-Shakespeare theory.

Click on SHARETHIS widget below to share the clip with others (through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.).

The clip consists of excerpts from Rubbo's 2002 PBS/Frontline documentary, Much Ado About Something, as well as some recent commentary by the filmmaker. Some great snippets with Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate, Stanley Wells (chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust), actor Mark Rylance (former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe), and Marlovians Peter Farey and the late Dolly Wraight.

Click here for our exclusive Q & A with Mike Rubbo.

"Much Ado About Something is a film of ideas - well, notions, anyway - that are bound to stimulate discussion, an aspect long missing from documentary [. . .] Mr. Rubbo is an old-fashioned rabble-rouser, and he knows a good story when he finds it. And he's got one in this case, with its adherents to a cause and their whipsaw articulation of thoughts." Elvis Mitchell, New York Times

" . . . has enough wit, energy and geniality to please not only the fanatical adherents on either side, but also people who know nothing about the subject and think they're not interested." Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

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Stratfordian Absurdities by Samuel Blumenfeld

Robert A. Logan, professor at Hartford University and former president of the Marlowe Society of America, is a Stratfordian in that he accepts the orthodox version of Marlowe’s demise at Deptford and believes that Shakespeare was the great literary genius who wrote the 36 plays in the First Folio.

Like Marlowe biographers David Riggs and Constance Brown Kuriyama, Logan accepts the Coroner’s Inquest of Marlowe's alleged death as gospel truth and expresses no skepticism about any of its “facts.” But he has written an interesting book, Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry (Ashgate, 2007).

Apparently, Professor Logan has found so much of Marlowe in Shakespeare, that he felt compelled to put all of his findings in a book. And an interesting read it is, not so much for what he actually found of Marlowe in Shakespeare, but of the highly dubious scenario he creates to give credence to the idea that Shakespeare was actually a famous playwright as early as 1590 and collaborated with Marlowe in writing Titus Andronicus.

Logan’s first error is in accepting Robert Greene’s “Shake-scene” as a reference to William Shakespeare instead of the actor Edward Alleyn (this blog has addressed "Shake-scene" in significant detail already). It should be noted that it was a scholar by the name of Thomas Tyrwhitt who happened to read Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) in 1766 and decided that "Shake-scene" was a reference to Shakespeare. Obviously, Tyrwhitt did not have the information we have today about Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Alleyn. But because Greene also mimics a line from Henry VI, Part III, Stratfordians, including Logan, assume that Shakespeare was already in 1592 capable of writing the highly complex Henry VI trilogy about the War of the Roses. Anyone who reads these three remarkable historical plays knows that they could not have been written by anyone without a profound knowledge of history and, most likely, a university education, and there is no documentary evidence that William Shakespeare ever attended any school, let alone a university.

What’s more, Anthony Kellett, in his eye-opening article on this blog, describes what it took for Shakespeare to become wealthy in difficult Elizabethan times. William did not want to suffer the economic woes and humiliation of his father, and so, the last thing he probably would have done is write plays. But he found he could make a lot of money fronting them. He also could earn money doing a bit of acting and owning a piece of the Globe Theatre. William Shakespeare clearly spent most of his time learning the ins and outs of commodity trading, real estate, money lending, litigation, and whatever else it took to become a successful businessman and an affluent country gentleman. It is a real stretch of the imagination, therefore, to believe that he would have spent several years of hard intellectual labor writing plays about the War of the Roses.

But Logan simply reflects stultifying academic orthodoxy when he writes: “Scholarly consensus holds that, with the possible exception of the influence of the Henry VI trilogy on Edward II, the flow of influence has gone in one direction, from Marlowe to Shakespeare.”

In other words, orthodox scholars now believe that Shakespeare - and let me be clear, between 1585 to 1593, we know nothing about Shakespeare - wrote the Henry VI trilogy before Marlowe wrote Edward II around 1592. But, as I explain in my book, Marlowe wrote the Henry VI trilogy probably because the Countess of Pembroke suggested that he write historical dramas based on English history, and it is most likely that she paid him to do so. Otherwise, why would any writer take on a project of that magnitude and complexity without support from some source? Also, prior to the publication of the trilogy in the First Folio, no author’s name was originally applied to any of the three plays – and so why should we assume that these highly intricate works were written by the "green" (if we accept the Stratfordian premise that he was a writer in the early 1590s), poorly educated playwright Shakespeare, who had to be devoting significant time, as Kellett so finely argues, to his business endeavors?

Logan promotes the standard Stratfordian belief that Marlowe's work influenced Shakespeare, echoed by scholars since the late 1800s (with A.W. Verity) up till today (via Stephen Greenblatt): “Shakespeare’s engagement with Marlowe’s plays after he died only expanded the opportunities for influence." And Logan wouldn't be the first to suggest that the two actually worked together: “If in fact there was dual authorship in the writing of Titus Andronicus, then it would suggest that, during the period that Marlowe and Shakespeare were in London together working side by side (1590-93), Shakespeare was receptive to collaboration.” What a delightful and tantalizing fairy tale. How else would a Stratfordian explain the close similarities between the two?

Logan makes no reference to the lack in Shakespeare’s biography of any documentary evidence proving that he was a writer or had the education to write the highly sophisticated plays attributed to him. Yet, the assumptions abound: “The catalogue of works that may be considered as possibly bearing the marks of Marlowe’s influence number a remarkable twenty. Eight…actually quote lines from Marlowe’s works.…Marlowe had the strongest continuing impact on Shakespeare’s psychology as he composed his works.” Again, where's the hard evidence that Shakespeare led a literary life? I'm amazed at how much Shakespeare scholarship also seems to focus on the psychology of the "writer" Shakespeare - heavy doses of speculation, so much of it emotive, to fill in the glaring blanks of a life seemingly devoid of a passion for literature.

Would it surprise Professor Logan to know that the reason why there is so much of Marlowe in the works of Shakespeare is because Marlowe probably wrote them? The notion that Shakespeare was a front man for the true author who lived in exile and could not reveal his identity is beyond the professor’s imagination. Yet similar circumstances have occurred in America in recent times. During the Red Scare in Hollywood in the 1950s, as Daryl Pinksen has demonstrated, several screen writers were forced into exile but continued to send scripts back to Hollywood fronted by other colleagues. Those who fronted for the exiled were actually given awards for scripts they did not write. Yet, no one was the wiser, and it is only recently that the truth has come out.

Logan, of course, does not dare entertain the notion that Marlowe survived a faked death in 1593 and continued to write plays which in 1623 were collected by his faithful friend and executor Edward Blount and published in the First Folio. All of which has led the good professor and other Stratfordians to invent all kinds of absurd scenarios to explain the inexplicable.

© Samuel Blumenfeld, July 2009

Samuel Blumenfeld, a World War II veteran of the Italian campaign, has authored more than ten books. His latest, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, was published by McFarland. He is a former editor in the New York book publishing industry and has lectured widely. His writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, Reason, Education Digest, Vital Speeches of the Day, Boston, and many others. He is a regular contributor to MSC.

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William Shakespeare, Businessman – Forgotten Genius by Anthony Kellett

The world’s libraries are awash with portraits of Stratford’s William Shakespeare, contrived through painstaking, line-by-line analysis of the literary works he supposedly wrote. This is frequently clever stuff and very laudable . . . but somewhat irrelevant if you have the wrong man.

Imagine if we were to write a psychological analysis of screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter by analyzing the text of the film Roman Holiday (1953). Prior to 1991, that would have seemed perfectly legitimate. The screenplay is obviously not autobiographical (there was nothing in Hunter’s life that would move him to write a story about a high-society figure hiding her identity!); but we had unequivocal proof that he had written the story. Hunter was known to William Wyler, the producer and director, and probably by Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, too. The posters promoting the film all provided documentary evidence of his authorship, as did the film review in the New York Times. Certainly, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “knew” he had written Roman Holiday and awarded him an Oscar for it. I assume the representatives of the motion picture industry, applauding as he went on stage to collect his award, believed the same. It was not until some forty years later that Dalton Trumbo (blacklisted as part of the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ communist witch hunt) was finally recognized as the true author and awarded a posthumous Oscar. As Daryl Pinksen highlights in his excellent book Marlowe’s Ghost, if this can happen in the 20th century with all the media coverage, security agencies, central government records, communication channels etc., then what would be possible in the late 16th century? Moreover, if it were not for a timely intervention, we may still not know the truth and scholars would simply hold up the posters and film reviews with a condescending grin to all those that questioned these “undoubted facts."

What is often obscured, by the uncloaking of these various deceptions, is the life of the front man who, to subsequent generations, is seen merely as a parasite, taking glory for others’ achievements. This is simply not true of Hunter, for example, who was a relatively successful writer in his own right. He wrote screenplays for at least twenty movies and co-wrote various works for the theatre, one (somewhat ironically) being a musical called Foxy based on Ben Jonson’s Volpone. He also wrote for television (including Robin Hood and The Defenders).

So, what does this have to do with William Shakespeare of Stratford? Well, I am of the opinion that it is time someone sung the praises of the Stratford merchant by looking at the life we know he had, rather than the starry-eyed, romantic intellectualizing we are normally fed. It is unfair that his real achievements are completely ignored and this “square peg” has been hijacked by Stratfordian academics to fit a “round hole” they have vacant. Shakespeare of Stratford did not write Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet or the plethora of other works ascribed to him. He was a trader, an opportunist and an entrepreneur; this man was a goal-setter with a single-minded determination to succeed - and succeed he did.

William’s father, John, was a glover by trade, but also an ambitious businessman, seizing any opportunity to increase his wealth and standing in the community. We see this through his lending (at substantial interest rates) and his dealings in wool, an illegal activity for those, like John Shakespeare, not chartered by the state to do so. Anti-Stratfordians are often labelled snobs for suggesting someone of William’s background could not have the skill-set required to write the plays. I find it somewhat amusing that these accusers are oblivious to their condescension towards the skills of the entrepreneur. It is assumed, when discussing the learning of the university wits, that their abilities were honed from years of dedicated study, an opinion with which I concur. However, when it comes to trading tithes, grains, wool, land etc., it seems to be dismissed as something anyone can choose to participate in on a whim. William, we are asked to believe, was a commodity dealer, property investor and moneylender in his spare time; presumably it was an impulsive decision, displaying the same blasé attitude with which he (for no apparent reason and with no prior display of aptitude) deigned to write plays and compete with the greatest literary minds in England. I often wonder why this same course is not more frequently followed by our modern academics, if for no other reason than to fund their research projects, rather than spending time soliciting funding from wealthy entrepreneurs.

In 16th-century England, wool (accounting for around three quarters of England’s foreign trade) was heavily controlled from London. John Shakespeare was involved in transactions as large as two tons of it, valued at hundreds of pounds at a time when a reasonable house could be bought for £30-£40. Trading on this scale requires a network of suppliers and customers and an awareness of volatile market conditions. Whilst the volume of wool traded in England was large, growth had stagnated by the second half of the century and the wool market was turbulent, in much the same way as the world’s stock markets are today. There were dramatic market slumps just at the time that John was seemingly most active. The years 1562-4 and 1571-3 saw particularly bad bear markets and these would have heightened John’s awareness to the fact that profit was hard won. Constant vigilance was essential to successful trading and he would have ensured William was minded of this fact. Subsequently, it seems that John’s carelessness (through either bad dealings and/or in evading the authorities) led directly to his downfall, and this too would have been an early lesson for an impressionable youngster.

John Shakespeare’s ambition for “position” within his community is clearly discernible. He was an alderman in 1565, a year after William’s birth, and was to rise to High Bailiff by 1569. Around this time, John applied for a coat of arms, reinforcing the assertion that he craved social rank. It is in this household and atmosphere that young William was raised. These values would have been instilled in him from an early age and, his actions show, they remained in focus for the rest of his life.

By 1576 (when his wool dealing brought about John’s fall from grace), William saw the effects that his father’s floundering business dealings had both on the family and his own life. John’s social standing was in tatters and he later avoided council meetings until he was eventually dismissed by the town authorities in 1586. William certainly would have witnessed his father’s humiliation, which would have taught him another valuable lesson: the value of income-generating assets and the security they bring. John had to sell property to cover his losses and focus on his glove-making business. William set out never to be in a similar position. He would avoid overt risk-taking and accumulate assets that generate income. He would protect those assets as best he could and work them to his advantage. William, we are told, was removed from school at 13 (I will not argue the point of school attendance, for the purpose of this article) and worked, in glove production, alongside his father. He was educated in the ways of business, buying raw materials and selling product on to customers. Equally important, William was learning a trade that might give him his opportunities in life.

William was married at age 18 and had a daughter shortly after his 19th birthday. He now had more reason to safeguard his future financial security and started looking for the opportunities to take advantage of his knowledge. This may have presented itself in 1587 (when it appears William was still residing in Stratford) with the visit of the Queen’s Men (one man short due to a fatal duel some days before in Thame). Perhaps William had some acting experience at this time or maybe the Queen’s Men just needed anyone to fill the less-demanding roles now vacant, as their previous, more experienced incumbent was required to replace William Knell (the recently deceased). Perhaps his ability to work leather (and sew presumably) would have been useful to a travelling theatre company to maintain its costumes, so he could fulfill a dual role. The specifics we may never know; but we do know William was probably in London connected to the theatre world by about 1593 or thereabouts.

Let us pause here to consider this man’s position. He knows (from bitter experience) that he must accumulate some wealth. He has learned, from his new associates, of the wealth of company shareholders such as Burbage and Alleyn. William would have noted that actors shared the assets - not writers. Playwrights were poorly paid and relied on the patronage of benevolent aristocrats for their day-to-day living. Moreover, when one considers the time involved in producing the sophisticated works being created by the university wits, the hourly rate would have been very unappealing to a business-minded, budding-entrepreneur like William. In fact, if he had bothered to write anything, it would have been masques for court consumption. Masques typically attracted triple the fee of a play and all for a fraction of the effort involved in a Shakespearean work. Furthermore, masque writing would have brought William to the attention of the aristocracy far more easily than playwriting, and would have sated his need for social status. Plays were predominantly fodder for the masses and, as we shall see, William was not so keen to ingratiate himself to them.

However, it would not have gone unnoticed that, though little was paid for plays by producers, few seemed to be publishing these plays for general consumption. If we were to believe the picture painted by The Arte of English Poesie, any self-respecting intellectual (with aristocratic connections) would have baulked at the idea of selling theatre plays to the masses. William, however, had no such hesitation; this would be a chance to supplement his income. The idea that this man, at this point, sat down and started writing plays to compete with a band of university educated, ground-breaking visionaries is frankly barmy. If anyone had suggested, to William, that he should study historical texts for the next several months and write plays based on them, he would have thought them insane. Why would he do that? He needs money now; he wants to start accumulating the assets he needs to secure his future. With plays just lying around, begging to be exploited, it would be a folly to consider writing new ones. Thereby, William hits on his first masterstroke. He approaches playwrights and asks them if he can sell their plays to other theatre companies and publishers. In exchange for this, William would take a hefty commission and give them money they would not otherwise have received. Authors would gladly agree and, if they wished to be disassociated with these plays, their names would remain either undisclosed or substituted for his (maybe by William himself or by the publishers, as William Shakespeare would be the only name they had available). We catch occasional glimpses of William’s play-brokering activities, such as when Henslowe’s Diary records payments to a group of writers for the play Sir John Oldcastle. It was likely William brokered the play for the anonymous first quarto in 1600. By the second printing (in the False Folio of 1619), it appears as by William Shakespeare, together with other plays William had probably brokered over the years such as A Yorkshire Tragedy, King Lear and Henry V.

The foresight of William here should not be understated. Arts in general had prospered since an earlier relaxation in censorship and a shift of focus from the church as being the main source of funding for visual and written works. The theatres were gaining huge popularity thanks to a number of factors, not least the quality of new works being produced by Marlowe and others. However, this would count for nothing without an audience, which grew from a burgeoning population with disposable income. Though published plays may have to sell through two or three editions to prove profitable, perhaps publishers too saw that this might be increasingly possible. Education flourished alongside Protestantism and publishing went through a boom in the latter part of the 16th century. Around 800 books were printed in the 1520s compared to 3000 in the 1590s and many of these seemed to trickle down to the lower levels of society. For example, 8% of Canterbury household inventories, in the 1560s, listed books. By 1620, that figure had risen to 45% and William was quick to recognize this although, conspicuously, he did not appear to follow the trend, for William did not mention a single book in his detailed will. That said, if I had made my millions by selling ladies underwear, I would not necessarily find it suitable for my personal use! Plays were simply another commodity to William and he knew what to do with commodities.

This idea catapulted the now 29-year-old William into the big league and enabled him to purchase a share in a theatre company, his first major asset and a considerable income-earning asset, too.

As with most successful traders, William was very familiar with his "products" and knew their “unique selling points” by rote. As such, he would be the perfect point of reference for George Buc, when he sought information about the origins of these plays. Specifically, when Buc wanted an author’s name, for the anonymously published George a Greene, whom else would he turn to but the trader in anonymous plays, William Shakespeare? Buc simply wrote (in his copy of the play) that it was written by a minister “Teste W. Shakespea” (as testified by W. Shakespeare). Some have questioned the authenticity of this reference to Shakespeare by Buc. I see no reason to doubt its validity, although the dates ascribed to Buc’s various inscriptions on his 1599 copy of George a Greene are still open to debate.

This was only the start and William continued to accumulate assets, which would both generate income and re-establish the social standing of his family directly. He purchased New Place in May 1597, the second largest house in Stratford, and probably revelled in the fact that it was built and occupied by Hugh Clopton (financier of Stratford’s Clopton Bridge) and a former Mayor of the City of London. Stratford’s largest house was occupied by John Combe, one of William’s few identifiable friends, and a useful one at that (the only kind of friend that would interest William). Combe was a “devilish usurer,” perhaps with whom he could discuss interest rates on loans to the local residents and thereby maximize returns. His completion of the quest for a family coat of arms (commenced by his father nearly 30 years earlier) finally realized his goal of restoring his family’s respectability.

Having secured a share in the theatre company, William was not required to spend all his time living and working in London and was therefore able to devote himself to expanding his business interests back in Stratford. He would have spent many hours developing business relationships for dealing in grains and keeping abreast of commodity prices to avoid the pitfalls to which his father fell foul.

It is sometimes assumed that William is buried in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church due to either his social status or even his supposed literary achievements. In fact, the reason is that he purchased a 21-year lease to some of the tithe privileges (formerly owned by the Collegiate Church, based there until the Reformation) for £440 (yielding £43 per annum net) in 1605. Therefore, William secured a right to be buried there because he had a share in the revenues and administrative duties of the church. Even in death, William would continue his quest for status.

As mentioned earlier, William followed his father’s practice of money lending and was not averse to using the legal system to recover unpaid debts as they fell due.In 1604, he sued the apothecary, Rogers, for an unpaid debt. From August 1608 until June 1609, William pursued John Addenbrooke through the courts for the sum £6 (plus 24s damages). When Addenbrooke absconded, William sought to recover the full amount from Addenbrooke’s surety, the blacksmith Thomas Horneby. William purchased land near Stratford (including 107 acres from his fellow “loan shark” John Combe). In the winter of 1597/98, he owned 80 bushels of grain (or 640 gallons - showing the extent of William’s Stratford-based commodity trading within four or five years of arriving in London) which he hoarded during a famine, appearing to have no regard for the suffering of his fellow Stratford residents.

Amusingly, we are asked to believe that this man also wrote the sensitive, heartfelt and heart-rending plays and sonnets of the author Shakespeare. Can you really imagine our William, aged 33, writing Romeo and Juliet – a passionate love story about a girl roughly the same age as his own daughter? Moreover, we are asked to accept that William didn’t even bother publishing more than half the plays he wrote; valuable assets were simply left abandoned somewhere to gather dust – by the same man who sold stone to the Stratford Corporation for 10d. Can these two men really be the same person?

When he died, William did not have a single manuscript because assets were used to the full; and he had long since sold any rights he may have held. He did not own a single book because they held no interest for him. Time spent reading was time not earning money. It was about as fruitless a pastime as writing plays; after all, what did men like Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd or even the great Kit Marlowe get out of it? No, William had entered the theatre world as a trader and had shown that he could make it pay. He was one of the survivors.

Creators of true art focus on little other than the art itself. They have a burning desire to create, to the exclusion of all else. Great entrepreneurs have many of these same qualities: a single-minded and unwavering desire to create wealth, to which they are fully dedicated. Academics that have spent their entire lives in school have no spare time, or inclination, to develop and build a diversified business portfolio (even though, legitimately, they might see themselves as intellectually superior). Yet they imagine that a hard-nosed, multi-disciplined businessman could, and would, devote the thousands of hours of research and practice required to become proficient at writing dramatic blank verse. I am here to tell you that such a supposition is wrong.

This is the final insult to both great playwrights and this exceptional (albeit ruthless) entrepreneur. To suggest that a boy could go to school from ages 7-13, subsequently work as a glove-maker in Stratford for maybe nine years, and still write the detailed, historically aware and exquisitely perceptive works of Shakespeare is, to put it mildly, disrespectful to academics everywhere. Similarly, to say that the achievements of this successful entrepreneur, starting from such a low base and culminating in such financial success, could be achieved, in his spare time, by a prolific writer of the most sophisticated and brilliant plays, is a huge misapprehension (let alone a real stretch of the imagination) and I take exception to it.

Anthony Kellett

© Anthony Kellett, July 2009

Sources:

Miscellaneous Documents, Birthplace Museum, Stratford.

Miscellaneous Documents, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office.

Bucholz, Robert and Newton Key. Early Modern England, 1485-1714. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.

Greene, Robert. Groat’s-Worth of Wit (1592).keir cutler

Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford, 2000.

Kozuka, Takashi and J.R. Mulryne. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography. Ashgate, 2006.

Lee, Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare. Smith, Elder & Co., 1915.

Lee, Sidney. Stratford-on-Avon from the Earliest of Times to the Death of Shakespeare. Lippincott, 1907.

Phillips, Owen Hood. Shakespeare and the Lawyers. Methuen, 1972.

Pinksen, Daryl. Marlowe’s Ghost. IUniverse, 2008.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie (1589). Cornell, 2007.who wrote shakespeare?

Rowse, A.L. and John Hedgecoe. In Shakespeare’s Land. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.

Thomson, Peter. Shakespeare's Professional Career. Cambridge, 1992.keir cutler video

Zell, Michael. "Accounts of a Sheep and Corn Farm, 1558-60." AgHistRev 27, 1979, p. 122.

Also by Anthony Kellett: "Shakespeare's Anonymous Death" and "Shakespeare Scholars: A Lament"

Click here for the blog's home page and recent content. roland emmerich's anonymous rylance

The Stratford References in The Taming of the Shrew by Peter Farey

"The small, seemingly inconsequential details are what constitute the unique fingerprint. The plays ascribed to William Shakespeare were written by a man who knew of a fat alewife called Marian Hacket in the village of Wincot near Stratford-upon-Avon (she is mentioned in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew and parish records reveal the historical reality of the Hackets of Wincot)." - Jonathan Bate.

Thanks to Daryl Pinksen, we have seen that Jonathan Bate's arguments concerning the uniqueness of the eddies below Stratford's Clopton Bridge (in his essay from Shakespeare's Face, 2002) are without substance. Immediately after Bate refers to this, he moves on to dandelions: "In one of his loveliest songs, the dramatist writes,'Golden lads and girls all must,/ As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.' In Warwickshire vernacular dialect, a dandelion is a 'golden lad' when in flower, a 'chimney-sweeper' when ready to be blown to the wind. This is no lord's memory. It belongs to a local country boy in a Warwickshire field."

This is a very appealing idea. After all, the head of a dandelion does look rather like a chimney-sweep's brush, doesn't it? Think Mary Poppins! Unfortunately for this theory, however, the Oxford English Dictionary makes it clear that in Shakespeare's time a "chimney-sweeper" was the lad who climbed up inside the chimney to clean it, a practice which continued right up to their replacement by the sweep's brush in about 1805. The local country boy in a Warwickshire field (as elsewhere) may well have used this term for a dandelion head some time after that happened, but there is no way that Shakespeare could have.

When Jonathan Bate writes of the Warwickshire references in The Taming of the Shrew, however, he is probably right. There was a hamlet of Wincot (now marked only by Wincot Farm, apparently on the site of a former manor house) about four miles south of Stratford. Wincot was on the border of two parishes - Quinton and Clifford Chambers - and a "Sara, the daughter of Robert Hacket" was baptized in Quinton church on 21 November 1591. That the Hostess who starts off The Taming of the Shrew by throwing Sly out of her ale-house was based upon a Marian Hacket of Wincot, and that there was also a Cicely Hacket (her daughter?) working there as a maid at the time seems very likely.

In the same speech, Christopher Sly also says that he is "old Sly's son of Burton-heath," which most scholars take - not unreasonably - to be Barton-on-the-Heath, a village about 16 miles south of Stratford, where Shakespeare's aunt Joan Lambert lived. Later on he is said to have talked of Stephen Sly, and there was indeed a Stephen Sly living in Stratford in 1615. Sly's mention of a "thirdborough" is also interesting. According to Brian Morris, quoting in the Arden (2) edition of the play Dalton's Country Justice (1620), "There be officers of much like authority to our constables, as the borsholders in Kent, the thirdborow in Warwickshire, and the tythingman and burrowhead or headborow, or chief-pledge in other places." Sly also apparently mentioned a "John Naps of Greece," which it is thought might mean "Greete," not far from Stratford, but this may be taking the search for Stratfordisms a bit too far?

Nevertheless, the associations with the area around Stratford seem fairly clear, and we would be wrong to ignore them. So what about the character Christopher Sly himself? For me the description he gives of himself as "by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd" is conclusive. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a card-maker was "one who makes cards for combing wool" and a bearherd the "keeper of a bear, who leads him about for exhibition." What an extraordinary juxtaposition! Yet there is someone we know whose childhood was spent in the home of an occasional dealer in wool (his father, John) and who, after a complete change of circumstances, did some work for a man (Philip Henslowe) who owned and ran a bear-baiting arena. It was, of course, William Shakespeare. That he also describes himself as a pedlar (OED 2 fig. "A person who deals in an abstract commodity") and a tinker (also "applied to itinerant beggars, traders, and performers generally") does no harm to the identification either. An Act of 1597 referred to "All Juglers Tynkers Pedlers and Petty Chapmen wandring abroade." It therefore seems beyond doubt that, for whatever reason, Christopher Sly in some way represented the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare. Furthermore, the name "William" is even obliquely suggested by the fact that the real name of one of the most probable actors in The Taming of the Shrew was William Sly, and that Christopher Sly says that his family "came in with Richard Conqueror."

Some time between 1594 (when a play called The Taming of a Shrew was first published) and 1623 (when The Taming of the Shrew was), some interesting changes were made to what was in most of its essentials the same play. Amongst these was the addition of all the items mentioned above. When considering the possibility that the supposed death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593 was faked, but that whatever he wrote or said after that was strictly controlled (and using the "front" William Shakespeare), it is naturally of interest to see what other changes seem to have been made. Could any of them in some way represent what Shakespeare would have seen happening to Marlowe?

The first is, of course, the title. It does suggest that the play is now concerned with a specific and identifiable individual, rather than just a typical example of the shrewish type. (We tend to think of a shrew in this context as being female, incidentally, but this was not always so. The OED gives us "A wicked, evil-disposed, or malignant man; a mischievous or vexatious person; a rascal, villain" and quotes Dekker: "Such as were shrewes to their wiues.")

As in the earlier version, the Lord wonders if the "body" they have found is dead, and is told that it is not. In the later one, however, he says (rather unnecessarily): "Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image." It makes some sense, perhaps, if we know that Sly (Shakespeare) is about to be presented as the "image" of the supposedly dead Marlowe.

The location of the play Sly watches is changed from Athens to Padua which, according to the Marlovian version of events, may well have been one of Marlowe's first stopping-places in Italy. The names are also made more obviously Italian, of course, but one may nevertheless notice that the name "Kate Minola" is interestingly similar to that of "Kit Marlowe"(or "Morley" or "Marlin" as he was also called at times).

One of the first things offered to the new "Lord" Sly is a painting of: "Adonis painted by a running brook,/ And Cytherea (Venus) all in sedges hid," and according to Marlovians it was, of course, Venus and Adonis which was the very first piece of art given to Shakespeare to present as his own work.

In both versions of the story the "Shrew" is persuaded - by force majeure and initially against her will - to stop saying whatever she feels like saying, and to conform to whatever her husband requires of her. She will now say that what (to her) is obviously the sun is the moon, or whatever he wants it to be. Within the Marlovian context, we can see that Marlowe would, also because of irresistible pressure on him, no longer be able to say what he wanted to say in his works, but must (whether he agreed with it or not) now toe the party line.

There is an interesting change in what Kate tells us is the reason for her obedience, however. In The Taming of a Shrew it is because (she says) her husband must be obeyed because he is a sort of proxy God to her. She says:

The King of Kings the glorious God of heaven;
Who in six days did frame his heavenly work,
And made all things to stand in perfect course.
Then to his image he did make a man,
Old Adam, and, from his side asleep,
A rib was taken, of which the Lord did make,
The woe of man so term'd by Adam then,
Woman for that, by her came sin to us,
And for her sin was Adam doom'd to die,
As Sara to her husband, so should we,
Obey them, love them, keep, and nourish them,
If they by any means do want our helps,
Laying our hands under their feet to tread,
If that by that we might procure their ease,
And for a precedent I'll first begin,
And lay my hand under my husband's feet.

In The Taming of the Shrew, however, a new imperative has appeared. Instead, she speaks of "thy lord, thy king, thy governor." The precedence of the political over the divine is inescapable:

Thy husband is thy Lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign: one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance. Commits his body
To painful labour, both by sea and land:
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands,
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the Prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband:
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving Lord?

It is hard for me not to see this as Marlowe insisting that he has now learned his lesson, is demonstrating how his works can be used to support the idea of an essential obedience to the monarchy, and that he has every intention of toeing the party line from now on!

One of the most puzzling things about the change from "a Shrew" to "the Shrew," however, is the loss of any conclusion to the Christopher Sly tale. It cries out for the resolution, which was there in every le dormeur éveillé story preceding it, where the subject awakes to find himself back in the "real" world in which the story started. May I suggest that this is being used (since nature hates a vacuum) to point out that the true story was indeed still unresolved at the time of the First Folio's printing, or at any time before that? This omission leaves an unsatisfactory void which I suspect is fully intentional, since Shakespeare's "return" could be achieved only by a pardon of Marlowe and the public acknowledgment of his role as the ghost-writer. The absence of such a scene in the First Folio could also in part be a comment on the fact that, with Shakespeare's death, such a return to things as they had been was no longer possible.

One may wonder, I suppose, why Shakespeare would have apparently portrayed himself, or allowed himself to be portrayed, as a drunken beggar. This leads me to think that while the other changes may have happened very much earlier, the Warwickshire references (of which as far as I know there is no evidence before the First Folio) may not have been included until after William's death in 1616. For example, is it possible that the alleged "merry meeting" of Shakespeare with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton might have played a part?

© Peter Farey, June 2009

Peter Farey 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." Click here to reach Peter's website.

For more on the mysterious Induction in The Taming of the Shrew, click here for a piece by Isabel Gortázar in the Marlowe Society Research Journal (Vol. 6, 2009).

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Philip Yordan: A Modern-Day Shakespeare? by Daryl Pinksen

The authorship of Shakespeare’s plays has been questioned for well over a century. The cause of this skepticism depends on whom you ask: Stanley Wells attributes doubt to either snobbery or mental illness, while Jonathan Bate explains the phenomenon as a form of heresy against the worship of Shakespeare. Perhaps, but there are troubling facets of Shakespeare’s biography on which most scholars agree: while there is ample evidence of his business life, there is sparse evidence of any literary life. Filmmaker Mike Wood suggests Shakespeare’s remarkably low profile as a writer may have been the result of a "secret Catholicism" which forced him, out of fear, to keep his literary self hidden. Others speculate that the lack of evidence of a literary life tells us Shakespeare was not the writer of his plays, but instead acted as a "front" for some other writer.

In Marlowe’s Ghost, I argue that Shakespeare, as a shareholder in the theatre company that performed the plays attributed to him, used his position to act as a front for Christopher Marlowe, a writer I speculate had fled from prosecution and was in hiding. I also compare the political climate in the 1590s to Hollywood in the 1950s. Change the location and time, substitute "Atheist" for "Communist," and a close parallel becomes apparent. In the 1950s, with the Cold War ramping up, domestic Communists were branded as enemies of the state. In Marlowe’s day, with England under threat from continental Catholic Europe, those branded with Atheism – never an entirely safe position in any age – provoked the same kind of visceral hatred.

In the 1950s, dozens of writers fled Hollywood for Mexico, New York, London, Paris and Madrid, fearing imprisonment if they were subpoenaed. In 1593 London, a new law passed in Parliament – authorizing search, seizure, and torture – spurred Christopher Marlowe to warn his friend and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd to flee to Scotland. Marlowe was adamant that he would be leaving soon to go "unto the King of Scots," and he was busy making the rounds of his literary friends pressuring them to leave England as well. Of course, Hollywood Communists’ greatest fear was imprisonment; that was the least of Marlowe’s worries. He, and those of like mind, could be tortured and executed, and many were.

We now know that both Kyd and Marlowe were arrested before they had a chance to escape the repression. I argue in Marlowe’s Ghost that the May 1593 Deptford meeting between Marlowe and three associates in the English intelligence network, where it is reported that Marlowe was killed by one of these men, was actually a cover for Marlowe to escape to Scotland with the assistance of master spy Robert Poley, another of the men at the Deptford meeting. In exile, Marlowe would have continued to write – just as blacklisted Hollywood writers did in Mexico in the 1950s – but he would have needed a way to get his work into production.

Shakespeare, essentially a 16th-century producer, was perfectly positioned to bring playscripts to the company, claim them as his own, and share in the wealth from their production. The recognized anomalies of Shakespeare’s biography - plenty of evidence of a business life in the theatre, but no evidence of a literary life, save for his name on a collection of fine plays which echo the mind and work of Christopher Marlowe - could be explained with this scenario.

An interesting theory, but could Shakespeare actually have gotten away with this? I argue yes, and offer as a historical parallel the career of Oscar-winning¹ screenwriter-producer Philip Yordan, active during the era of the Hollywood blacklist.

Much of our information about Yordan’s career as a screenwriter-producer comes from Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted writer employed and fronted by Yordan in the period following the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) hearings. Despite working alongside Yordan for years, Gordon was never able to say for sure whether Yordan was a brilliant and prolific writer or a complete fraud. Studio executives had been suspicious of the origins of Yordan’s scripts during the blacklist years, and if the blacklist had not been broken, those suspicions would probably be familiar only to a small number of Hollywood insiders. In Gordon’s blacklist memoir Hollywood Exile he introduces Philip Yordan:

For many years, Philip Yordan was the talk of Hollywood. Regarded by some as a fraud, by others – including important stars and directors – as a genius, he amassed an improbable number of screen credits and seemed incredibly prolific.²

Yordan, whose name appears in the credits of a large and impressive body of films, was rumored to have employed uncredited writers. According to Bernard Gordon in Hollywood Exile (1999):

From 1944 until 1960 Yordan had a unique whirlwind career in Hollywood, principally as a writer, but also as a producer. He is credited officially with fifty to sixty screenplays and productions, an output that seems inordinate. For that reason, as well as others, he is widely said to have run a script factory. Of course, the same was said about the literary output of Zola and Dumas. Personally, I know of instances when Yordan put his own name on scripts that were written by blacklisted screenwriters (including my own), but there was real justification for that.³

Gordon was aware of the rumors, and while working for Yordan as a writer was able to observe him up close for many years, helping to develop script ideas, discussing production problems like funding, locations, and casting, but he was never able to come to a decision about Yordan. Was Yordan the great writer that his screen credits lead us to believe? Did he write some of the scripts he is credited with? Did he write anything?

In an interview with Patrick McGilligan for Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (1997), McGilligan puts it to Gordon outright:

Do you think he was once a great writer who decided to channel his energies into business and promotion? Or is he one of Hollywood’s greatest hoaxes as a writer, someone who never actually wrote?⁴

Clearly uncomfortable answering the question (Yordan had employed Gordon while Gordon was blacklisted and had paid him well while other blacklistees’ careers were in ruins), Gordon answers:

Look, I can’t answer that question, and I don’t want to answer that question. I don’t want to make a judgment. I consider him a friend. It’s not possible for me to say what he did during his better days. When he was writing scripts for important directors and producers, I can’t believe he was incapable of writing a good scene or a good script. He must have been. But I didn’t see it.⁵

During years of working together on films, while Yordan sold many scripts to Hollywood studios with his name on them as writer, Bernard Gordon never saw Yordan write anything. Gordon did, though, see Yordan put his name on scripts which he did not write, including his own.

Suppose now for a moment that the Hollywood blacklist had never been broken, and the label “Communist” still induced a revulsion similar to that felt toward “Atheists” in the Elizabethan period. If Bernard Gordon had never been un-blacklisted, he would never have gotten Hollywood Exile published, and would never have been interviewed by Patrick McGilligan about his experience as a blacklisted writer. As the years passed, and the studio heads’ skepticism of Yordan faded with them from memory, all that would remain of Philip Yordan would be his name on dozens of films as writer and producer.⁶ Those credits would be cited as unassailable proof of Yordan’s contribution to 20th-century screenwriting.

Was Philip Yordan a fraud? Bernard Gordon does not want to believe it, but this may have more to do with Yordan’s impressive capacity for secrecy – and Gordon’s gratitude – than the truth.

If Philip Yordan could get away with a deception of this magnitude in the 1950s, William Shakespeare could have gotten away with a similar deception in the 1590s.

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, June 2009

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

¹Yordan was nominated for an Oscar three times, and won the award in 1954 for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story for the film Broken Lance.
See http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0948634/awards.
²Gordon, Bernard. Hollywood Exile: Or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1999. p. xiii.
³Gordon, 1999. p.106.
⁴McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. p.277.
⁵McGilligan and Buhle, 1997. p.277.
⁶See Philip Yordan’s IMDB profile at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0948634/. Out of sixty-five writing credits, four are listed as “front for Ben Maddow," and two are listed as “front for Bernard Gordon." The rest are still attributed to Yordan, with no indication of any doubt.

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