Peter Farey on Marlowe Authorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations to my friend and MSC contributor, Daryl Pinksen.



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Góngora, Marlowe, and Hero and Leander

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

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

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

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

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

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

In British History Online we read the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, January 2010

Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.

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

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Marlowe and Shakespeare Similarities: What the Scholars Say

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

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

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

I. Marlowe’s problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. How WITSEC keeps people alive

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

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

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

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

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

III. “Shakespeare” and WITSEC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daryl Pinksen

© Daryl Pinksen, 2010

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, 2009

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

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

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Pinksen on Marlowe, Canadian Radio & Print

Did Christopher Marlowe write the works attributed to Shakespeare? Click here to listen to a podcast of Daryl Pinksen's December 14 interview on the CBC's "The St. John's Morning Show." Click here for a December 19 piece about Daryl in the Telegram, Newfoundland and Labrador's largest newspaper. 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.
Why Christopher Marlowe is Shakespeare




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Nor Oxford Either! by Isabel Gortázar

A few reasons why the Earl of Oxford could not have written Shakespeare

Some people commenting on my recent piece on Bacon have asked whether I could give equally cogent reasons against the Earl of Oxford’s claim. I can.

Even if I could believe for a split second that an Elizabethan Earl would stoop to the “indignity” of writing plays for the public theatres under cover of a front man, I would still find ample reasons to argue against the Earl of Oxford’s authorship of the Canon. I shall, however, leave to my colleagues arguments of style, character, etc., and concentrate here on two points: a) The class objection and, b) The dates of composition of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. I will also leave for another time my comments on the various attacks against Oxford that we find in the Canon, including the extraordinary All’s Well that Ends Well and, by omission, the unhistorical absence of the Earl of Oxford among King Hal’s small band of brothers, in the Battle of Agincourt.

Things that an Earl would not do

In the 1580s, writing plays for the public theatres was a mere notch above bear baiting. While monarchs, aristocrats and courtiers were busy writing poems, plays for private performances, such as the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius; and even some long narratives, such as Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, the job of entertaining the masses was left to the professionals, as indeed was being done in the continent, by the various Mecenas who sponsored composers and dramatists. The Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga (1562-1612), for example, was a conspicuous and generous patron of Opera and Drama, including the groundbreaking commedia dell’arte, but nobody has suggested that he wrote any of the plays or librettos, although he probably slept with the sopranos.¹

The much-discussed appearance of Oxford in Francis Meres' Palladis Tamia (1598) must be considered in this light. After assigning to Shakespeare all the Shakespearian comedies that had appeared so far, Mr. Meres includes the name of “Edward, Earl of Oxford” among “the best for comedy.” As he doesn’t explain to which comedies he refers, Oxfordian followers have taken for granted that he must be referring to the very comedies that he believes were written by Shakespeare. But how can that be?

By declaring the Earl of Oxford to be among “the best for comedy,” Meres is surely telling us that he has had the opportunity to watch at least one comedy that he knows to have been written by Oxford. So, either he is referring to a funny poem and not a play at all, or he must mean a private performance of some (untitled) play or masque written by the Earl for his guests or friends; otherwise we must believe that the Oxford/Shakespeare secret was so little a secret that the likes of Francis Meres knew about it. And, even worse, that he not only knew about it, but that despite the efforts made by the Earl to keep his authorship secret, he could not prevent/destroy/explain Mr. Meres’ tell-tale document.

We know that many aristocrats, courtiers and lawyers wrote masques and plays, often in Latin; quoting the sources for this information would be an endless task. Francis Meres’ reference would be most satisfactorily explained by one, or more, private performances he may have attended, of which fact he was proudly showing off; his comment cannot be but an attempt at flattery. Had he put his foot in it by disclosing an activity that Oxford was, allegedly, taking such pains to keep secret, his flattery could have backfired most distressingly. The Earl of Oxford was not a man to take such a faux pas sitting down; getting Palladis Tamia out of circulation would have been child’s play to him. The reason why he didn’t was surely because it never occurred to him that anybody would interpret Meres’ reference to mean what the modern Oxfordians, brought up in a class-less society, think it means.

When around 1586 a very young "Shakespeare"² wrote The Famous Victories of Henry the Fift (an anonymous play, the authorship of which is much debated by scholars), he did not disguise his flattering intentions towards the Earl of Oxford; unlike Henry V, written in 1599, The Famous Victories has an Earl of Oxford permanently present, both where his presence was historically correct and where it wasn’t. The fact that on 26th of June of that year, the Earl had just been granted by the Queen an annuity of one thousand pounds for no clear reason,³ has led to the conjecture that the sum was granted so that he could organize and pay for the production of “historical” plays that would enhance the virtues of the Lancastrian/Tudor Monarchs. If this were the case (and we don't know that it was), we can hardly wonder at the young "Shakespeare" lavishing praise on a glorified Oxford, King Hal’s friend and advisor. In that scenario, we can easily guess also that a man who, apparently, had a gift for comedy, would have added to such plays, written by one or more professional dramatists, a few speeches of his own, just as Hamlet does for his “Mousetrap." An officious Francis Meres would have considered any of such speeches excuse enough for his flattering homage to a powerful Earl.

But, as I say above, one would need to understand why the Earl of Oxford, if he were Shakespeare, when turning Famous Victories into Henry V, totally obliterated his ancestor from the play, thus depriving his own name of deserved fame and glory.

Henry V: Act IV, scene 3: Agincourt.
“….then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.”

Alas, poor Oxford! To have risked his life for King and Country in this glorious battle, and to be removed from the list of “household words” by his own descendant!

But wait! A new theory is now being aired that explains the absence of Oxford from Agincourt: According to the Oxfordians, Edward de Vere was not really the Earl of Oxford, (although he did use the title and, it seems fraudulently, passed it on to his own son), because he was Queen Elizabeth’s illegitimate child. As far as I know, there are already three would-be “Shakespeares” making the same claim: Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, and a new one, William Hastings.⁴

One wonders how the poor Queen managed to keep all those little bastards secret from the Puritans, and from her people in general, despite the amount of midwives, nurses and other necessary servants, both at the palace and in the homes of the respective foster parents, that would have known the truth and gossiped. But maybe it’s all true and Queen Elizabeth was for several years giving birth to sundry little Spear-shakers.

But then there is the puzzling fact that, except for Faulconbridge in King John, Shakespeare doesn’t like bastards very much; some of his most despicable villains, Prince John in Much Ado, and Edmund in King Lear, are illegitimate.

The dates

And now let me move on to more scholarly arguments. When arguing Oxford’s authorship of The Tempest, his followers wave aside the date of 1609 and the wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, saying, not unreasonably, that tempests are all very much the same.⁵ The tempest in The Tempest could have been any tempest, and since the the Earl had died in 1604, the tempest of 1609 could not be the tempest in The Tempest.

That is not the case for other historical events, though. The story of Prospero and Antonio surprisingly echoes the rivalry between the eccentric Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II and his brother Matthias. Matthias repeatedly betrayed Rudolph and, as early as 1606, convoked a family (Habsburg) meeting in order to have Rudolph declared incapable of ruling. However, it was not until, precisely, 1611 that Matthias succeeded in forcing his brother to abdicate so that he, Matthias, could be elected Emperor.

The description that Prospero makes of himself when he says that he, as Duke of Milan, had been for the liberal arts /without a parallel, matches Rudolph’s reputation as a lover of astronomy, alchemy and chemistry; he was a patron of Occultist painters, such as Arcimboldo, and scientists such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. He was obviously uninterested in politics, and had often left Matthias in charge of political concerns while he, like Prospero, remained rapt in secret studies. This strange Emperor, who died in 1612, is confusedly reputed to have been a scientist, a magician and a freethinker as well as a Catholic. He established his Court in Prague, which became the European centre of Occultism.

So, although perhaps all tempests are much alike, Occultist Habsburg rulers being dethroned by their brothers in connivance with their families don’t grow on trees. While looking at those Habsburg royals in The Tempest, acting towards each other in the play, more or less as they did in reality, one wonders what is Shakespeare trying to tell us. That this historical parallel may help us to fix once and for all the date of composition of The Tempest, sweeping the “comedy-loving” Earl of Oxford off the board, is a bonus, and, as far as this essay is concerned, it is a major bonus. However, the main object of our author for having all those Habsburgs on stage seems clear enough to me: To establish a firm link between Spain and the redeemed Magus, Prospero. The name Prospero is the Spanish/Italian name for the Latin Prosperus, and it is synonymous to Fausto/Faustus, and thereby hangs a tale, to be told in the ripeness of time.

The Spanish links and sources

As it happens, the historical Duke of Milan in 1611 was the Spanish Habsburg King, Philip III, who was also King of Naples, which means that there are seven Spanish royals in The Tempest: Prospero, Antonio, Miranda, Alonso, Claribel, Sebastian and Ferdinand. Rudolph and Matthias were their Austrian cousins, so our author is keeping the parallel in the family. Moreover, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia (a good option for the nickname “Claribel”) was in fact “next heir of Naples," as we are told Claribel was, in the same scene⁶ where we are unnecessarily informed that Widow Dido’s Carthage and Claribel’s new kingdom, Tunis, are one and the same place.

The historical Infanta, later known as Archduchess Isabella, Regent of the Netherlands, was also heiress to the rest of the Spanish Empire, should her brother die childless (as is feared in the play), but more relevant to our story, she was the official Catholic Pretender to the English Throne, after the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Plots and counter-plots on Catholic issues in reference to England and the continent would have been discussed at the Catholic centres of power, such as the Jesuit-run Royal Seminarie College of St. Alban, in the city of Valladolid, where King Philip III settled his Court between 1601 and 1606, and the nearest of such colleges to the previous centre of power, Madrid. That the English government was taking Claribel’s claim seriously seems to be proven by, among other things, the fact that the Earl of Essex during his trial in February 1601, openly accused Robert Cecil of favouring her claim over King James’ of Scotland.⁷

But the links to Spain do not end there. Try as they may, Stratfordians have found it difficult to ignore Antonio de Eslava’s Noches de Invierno (Winter Nights).⁸ Eslava’s collection of tales was published in Pamplona in 1609 (so five years after Oxford’s death), but to believe that William Shakespeare could read books in Spanish is too much even for Stratfordian Bardolaters. There is no record that the book was translated into any language, until a German version appeared in Vienna in 1649: Winternächte…aus dem Spanischen in die Teutche Sprache, by Mateo Drummer. Some of the tales are ingenious, but their pseudo-philosophical background is rather trite. Despite the book’s lack of special merit, there are some coincidences worth mentioning.

Both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale are supposed to have been written late in 1610 or early 1611. We have a “digest” of The Winter’s Tale left by Dr. Simon Forman, who saw it at the Globe on 15th May 1611.⁹ In Eslava’s Winter Nights, the story of Milon and Berta and the birth of their son, Orlando/Roldan,¹⁰ nephew to the Emperor Charlemagne, has a happy ending after a series of adventures not altogether unlike the happenings in The Winter’s Tale, as we know it today, but no more than that.¹¹ The official source for The Winter’s Tale is Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), in which the falsely accused Queen really dies; sixteen years later, Pandosto falls in love with his recovered daughter not realizing who she is, and ends up committing suicide.

The Tempest and The Tale were performed at Court that same year, on November 1st and 5th respectively, and although none of Eslava’s stories are as obvious a source for The Winter’s Tale as his King Dardano’s tale is for The Tempest, it is nevertheless curious to find that in the corresponding Revels Accounts (5th November) the title of the play is A Winter Night’s Tale. So, in 1611, Shakespeare used Eslava’s title for one of the plays, and one of Eslava’s tales for the other.

In his Arden Edition of The Tempest, Prof. Kermode¹² gives a summary of the story of Niciforo and Dardano,¹³ and comments: “More attention has been paid to Eslava’s story, which has found supporters from Garnett to Hardin Craig. This tale has no magic island, but it has a dethroned king, skilled in magic, who is forced to sail away from his Kingdom, taking with him his daughter; he builds himself a palace under the sea and eventually leads to it the disinherited son of his enemy, as a husband for his daughter.” Etc. Kermode goes on to quote Hardin Craig: “This Spanish tale (...) in its political intrigues, its adventures and its use of tempest and sea, has much in common with The Tempest.”¹⁴

So we find that some Stratfordians have reluctantly agreed that Eslava’s tale may have to be considered as a source for Shakespeare’s play, while others have gone to much trouble trying to find the thread by which the man from Stratford could have possibly known/read the story; as usual, after much scholarly digging, the thread became so elaborate that the further they delved into it, the more questions it begged. Prof. Kermode gave up the struggle with the following comment: “This weird structure of Bulgarian, Byzantine, Latin, Italian, Spanish and German testimony is a prize mare’s nest, and it is politic to avoid stirring it any further.”¹⁵ Quite.

And here is Eslava’s tale: Dardano, King of Bulgary, being dethroned by his enemy Nicífero, Emperor of Greece, has to flee in a boat with his daughter, Serafina. He builds a magic palace at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea where he teaches his daughter philosophy and history. They live there happily until such time as Serafina reaches a marriageable age. Meanwhile, Nicífero has died, disinheriting his eldest son, Valentiniano, a nice, amiable man, in favour of his second son, Juliano, proud and arrogant. Fearing for his life, Valentiniano approaches a port in the Adriatic Sea, looking for a ship. An old man, no other than Dardano, offers to take him in his small boat; Valentiniano is then transported by magic to the sea palace where he falls in love with Serafina. Meanwhile, Juliano has taken sail in order to marry the daughter of the Emperor of Rome. During the return voyage, a fierce tempest breaks out. At this point, Dardano emerges from the bottom of the sea and shows himself to all those who believe him dead. He then accuses Juliano of being worse than the cruel Hyrcanian tiger. Shortly after the tempest, Valentiniano and Serafina become the king and queen of the joint kingdoms.

Well, if this is not a source for The Tempest, I don’t know what is. Which means, among other things, that the author of the play had to read Eslava’s book in Spanish and after 1609, either in the edition published in 1609 in Pamplona, or in the edition published in Brussels in 1610. Which doesn’t look good for William Shakespeare or, indeed, for the Earl of Oxford, dead since 1604. And if anybody is tempted to suggest that both The Tempest and Eslava’s story may derive from a common, earlier source, they will still need to explain the coincidence in time of The Tempest with the title of The Winter Night’s Tale.

Isabel Gortázar

© Isabel Gortázar, December 2009  Emmerich Anonymous Shakespeare
Isabel Gortázar is an independent scholar, specializing in Shakespeare and Marlowe studies. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Marlowe Society (UK) and a founding member of the International Marlowe Society. She divides her time between London and Bilbao, Spain.

¹Bellonci, Maria. Segreti dei Gonzaga. Milan, 1947.
²A revision of the original Famous Victories of Henry the Fift was published anonymously in 1598. This revised version, which contains heavy Marlovian clues, introduced the character of Sir John Oldcastle, turning him into a clownish figure. This instantaneous transformation of Sir John in the very first act, is accepted by scholars to be the origin of Falstaff.
³The National Archives E 403/2597, ff.104v-105 1.
⁴Nield, Robert. Breaking the Shakespeare Codes. CC Publishing, 2007.
⁵Stritmatter, Roger and Lynne Kositsky. "Shakespeare and the Voyagers Revisited." Review of English Studies 58, 2007. p. 447-472. I am grateful to Donna Murphy for bringing this essay to my attention.
⁶The Tempest, Act II, scene 1.
⁷THE HELMINGHAM MS: The Arraignment, conviction and condemnation of Rob. Earle of Essex, and Henrie Earle of South­ampton houlden at Westminster the XlXth. of Febr.. 1600 43rd Reg. before the Lord high Steward1 appoynted for that daye beeing the Lord Treasurer of England, as followeth: ETC.
⁸Antonio de Eslava’s Noches de Invierno, 1609, Pamplona, Spain. I must thank my late friend Roberta Ballantine for bringing Eslava’s book to my attention, well before I found the Stratfordian comments on it.
⁹Forman, Dr. Simon. Book of Plays. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1611.
¹⁰Eslava, Antonio de. Winter Nights, Chapter VIII: Do se cuenta los amores de Milan de Aglante con Berta y el nacimiento de Roldán y sus niñerias.
¹¹In his synopsis of the play, Dr. Forman does not mention the statue of Hermione, so either he was a forgetful spectator or the statue was not there in May 1611; Perdita, however, was duly “lost” (as befits her name) for sixteen years, like the girl in Pandosto. Which means that the happy ending, as far as the slandered Queen was concerned, was not in the original play as seen by Dr. Forman.
¹²Prof. Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest, in the Arden series, is dated 1954, revised 1961-2.
¹³Eslava, Antonio de. Winter Nights. Chapter IV: Do se cuenta la soberbia del rey Nicifero y incendio de sus naves y la arte mágia del rey Dardano.
¹⁴Craig, Hardin. Interpretation of Shakespeare. 1948. p.345.
¹⁵Kermode op cit. p. 66.

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Questions All Oxfordians Must Answer by Peter Farey

In my earlier piece "Oxfordians and the 1604 Question," I showed how in dramatic verse between the 1580s and 1620s there was a steady move away from the constant repetition of the regular end-stopped iambic pentameter by the increasing use of open lines and feminine endings.

I also showed graphically how Shakespeare’s plays exhibited a change in the same direction although—if the dates used are similar to those estimated by most Shakespearean scholars—the rate with which his use of these techniques increased was even greater than that of his contemporaries. The increase was nevertheless surprisingly consistent and the correlation between the estimated latest date for when the play was written and the frequency with which either or both of these techniques was used extremely high.I have shown these figures with an extended range, because I want to compare this chart with one based upon dates assumed by Oxfordians, and their dating necessarily starts much earlier.

In fact there is no agreed Oxfordian chronology as such, although there have been various theories and conjectures about when the plays were written. The nearest thing to a recently published one at the moment appears to be in a Wikipedia entry entitled “Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays – Oxfordian” which is largely based upon estimates given by Charlton Ogburn in his seminal Oxfordian work, The Mysterious William Shakespeare.¹ We are promised a more generally accepted one eventually, but as yet this is all we have to work with. Let’s see (below) what happens when we use the latest dates they suggest instead of those given by Elliott and Valenza.²

The reason I use the latest date in each case is that the counts of both open lines and feminine endings were obtained from the texts of plays as they have come down to us—in fact the Riverside edition—so what is needed is the nearest date we can find to the one in which the verse must have stabilized to more or less what it is today. This means that earlier versions of the plays, no matter who actually wrote them, are for these purposes quite irrelevant. What can be seen quite clearly is that the hugely valid trend identified with orthodox dating is completely wrecked, the necessary correlation between the date and the usage rate ignored, and the need to squeeze everything in before Oxford’s death (in 1604) shamelessly evident. The difficulty Oxfordians must necessarily have in finding a chronology which avoids these problems is that it is also essential for them to provide evidence, whether internal or external, in support of each chosen date, and it seems that they have as yet found no way in which this can be done.

Even this, however, is by no means the greatest problem created for them by the increasing use of the two techniques over the years, since most Oxfordians tend to claim that almost all of Shakespeare’s plays had in fact been written by 1598.

Here I have listed all of the Shakespeare plays considered by Elliott and Valenza, and sorted them in ascending order according to the rate of their usage of open lines and feminine endings. Where appropriate, I have indicated in each case (1) if the play was included in the list of Shakespeare plays published by Francis Meres in 1598, (2) if it’s been shown not to have been in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire when Meres’s list was published, and/or (3) if Elliott and Valenza gave it a date after 1604.


Here then are those questions which—according to the title—I say must be answered by anyone before they have really earned the right to call themselves true Oxfordians.

1) As most Oxfordians claim that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays had been written by 1598, what explanation would you give for Meres including in his list, published that year, only those with the lowest frequency of open lines and feminine endings?

2) As the use of open lines and feminine endings is no longer of any real significance in the way plays are dated by Shakespearean scholars, what explanation would you give for all 11 plays given a "post-1604" date by Elliott and Valenza appearing among the 13 plays with the highest usage rates?

The odds against either of these things happening just by chance are so astronomical that there must be a reason for each of them. The obvious reasons are that Meres referred only to those “Shakespeare” plays which had been written and performed by then, and that the Elliott and Valenza chronology is fairly accurate. Unfortunately, neither of these options is available to Oxfordians.

So, over to you guys!

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, November 2009  Emmerich Anonymous

Peter Farey has been manning the Marlovian barricades on the internet for the past 11 years. His Marlowe Page is one of the most respected sites about Marlowe on the web. He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

¹Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man and the Myth. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984.
²Elliott, Ward and Robert Valenza. "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants." Computers and the Humanities 30, 1996. pp. 191-245.

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