As You Like It by Marlowe and Shakespeare

Alex Jack grew up amid the authorship controversy. His grandfather, Rev. David Rhys Williams, was a pioneer Marlovian and introduced him as a child to Calvin Hoffman, author of The Murder of the Man Who Was ‘Shakespeare.’ Alex has written on Renaissance art and literature and edited Marlowe and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Mark Rylance invited him to introduce at the Globe Theatre in London in 2005. A teacher and authority on diet, environment, and the healing arts, Alex is the president of Planetary Health. His other books include The Mozart Effect with Don Campbell, The Cancer Prevention Diet with Michio Kushi, and Buddha Standard Time with Lama Surya Das. He lives in western Massachusetts and is on the faculties of the Kushi Institutes of America and Europe. 

The following excerpt is from Alex Jack’s just published As You Like It by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. It includes an annotated edition of the play and commentary setting the historical and literary context. The book is available on the author’s website www.christophermarlowe.org. 

The charges and accusations against Marlowe, retailed in the gossip, theologically freighted, and fragmented accounts that followed his reported slaying in Deptford in 1593, reflect the religious ignorance, bigotry, and hypocrisy that he wrote about in his early works and later shook his lance at in the Shakespearean plays. As Sonnet 140 puts it: “Mad slanders by mad ears believed be.”

By referring to the “Dead Shepherd,” invoking his powerful “saw of might,” and quoting one of his most famous lines from Hero and Leander, As You Like It silhouettes Marlowe’s brilliant life and tragic “death.” The couplet, delivered by Phoebe, the dark lady of the Arden forest, shines a revealing light on the play’s subtext: What happened to the Dead Shepherd? Did he really die or was his end feigned? Why is his name besmirched, and who is the real author of the sublime poem and plays attributed to Shakespeare — a question parodied in the scene in which Touchstone (representing Kit) vies with William (the country bumpkin channeling Will Shakespeare) for the hand of Audrey (representing the Elizabethan theatre audience)?

There are three or four widely recognized references to Marlowe’s death in the play, several more equivocal allusions, and many hitherto unrecognized glances.  Let's examine these briefly.
 

1. Dead Shepherd 

Phoebe. “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”  (3.5.82-83) 

Phoebe’s invocation of Marlowe’s memory and quotation from Hero and Leander are universally regarded as Shakespeare’s affectionate tribute to an admired predecessor. As You Like It is suffused with themes and imagery drawn from The Passionate Shepherd and Hero and Leander. The shepherdess’s apotheosis of Marlowe and his muse is but the crowning example. There is an element of immortality in Phoebe’s words that echoes the tributes of England’s literary fraternity, which recalled Marlowe as “kind,” “divine,” “the muses’s darling,” “an elemental wit,” and other paeans of the highest praise.

2. A Great Reckoning in a Little Room

Touchstone. I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most
capricious poet, honest Ovid was among the Goths.
Jaques. [Aside] O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a
thatched house! 
Touchstone. When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s
good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it
strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.
Audrey. I do not know what ‘poetical’ is. Is it honest in deed and
word? Is it a true thing?
Touchstone. No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most faining,
and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may
be said as lovers they do feign. (3.3.1–17)

This is the key passage in As You Like It alluding to the circumstances surrounding Marlowe’s death. The Coroner’s report, composed in Latin, stated that Marlowe and Frizer exchanged words over “le recknynge,” or bill for refreshments and use of the room. The “little room” refers to the upstairs chamber in Mistress Bull’s establishment where Kit and three associates reportedly met over the course of eight hours, dined, and came to blows . . . .

To order Alex Jack's As You Like It by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, click here.

Ros Barber Wins Desmond Elliott Prize!

Congratulations to MSC Blog contributor (and good friend) Ros Barber for winning the Desmond Elliott prize for her verse novel The Marlowe Papers.  Click here for The Guardian article.

A Marlovian Review of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt by Ros Barber and Peter Farey

Three weeks ago, the second book on the authorship question to be published by an academic press was published to considerable media attention.  The title of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt succinctly states the book’s aims: to settle the authorship question once and for all.  That it cannot do so is clear from the fact that the book – entirely in contravention of accepted scholarly practice – fails to address (or even mention, except buried in an "additional reading" list on page 247) the first academically published book on the subject, Diana Price's Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography (2001). 

Though readable and more mannerly than other writings on the subject by the editors Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is a work of polemic.  The ad hominems invariably employed by those without substance to their arguments are now encoded in their altered terms: anti-Stratfordians, they decree, are now to be called anti-Shakespearians, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question will henceforth be known as the Shakespeare Authorship Conspiracy Theory.  This book rehashes the methods employed by James Shapiro in Contested Will (2010): analyse the psychology (or pathology) of early doubters, offer "evidence" that no-one disputes and claim it supports Shakespeare-of-Stratford's authorship, ignore scholarship from the last fifty years, and avoid Price's research.  Non-Stratfordians conversant with the evidence and arguments supporting Shakespeare scepticism will have no problem dismantling Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.

Unlike Shapiro's Contested Will, however, the book does make space for Marlowe as a major candidate: an indication, perhaps, of Marlovian progress in the last three years.  Chapter 3, "The Case For Marlowe," was written by Charles Nicholl, whose well-researched book The Reckoning (1992, 2002) is required reading for anyone wishing to consider the complex events surrounding Marlowe's apparent death in May 1593.  It is a shame that Nicholl's contribution to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt does not demonstrate the same quality of scholarship as The Reckoning.  His chapter contains numerous factual errors (A.D.Wraight's full name, for example), as well as evidence of some significant misunderstandings of the Marlovian case.

He states, for example, that Marlowe's "measurable quota of intellectual sophistication is stressed by Marlovians on the debatable assumption that the writing of great literature requires a university degree."  This is a misrepresentation.  It's not the university degree that we stress, but the opportunities Marlowe's life apparently provided both then and later for him to mix with the intellectual elite of the country – its statesmen, scientists, explorers, mathematicians, thinkers, and writers – and to be given access to magnificent libraries such as those of the "wizard" Earl of Northumberland to whom he claimed to be well known.  And that was all, of course, before he would have started off on the travels envisaged in the Marlovian theory.

In discussing the first exploration of this theory, Wilbur Gleason Zeigler's It Was Marlowe, Nicholl focuses on Zeigler's interest in the faulty account of John Aubrey, who claimed that Ben Jonson "killed Mr Marlow the poet on Bunhill, coming from the Green Curtain play-house."  Nicholl claims "This is an early paradigm of authorship controversialism, where invented evidence plays a determining role in what is presented as a genuine historical argument."  A "determining role"? Zeigler quoted Aubrey as just one example of the conflicting accounts of Marlowe's death that were to be found at the time, and considers the possibility that at least the date was correct. Although the novel does in fact end at the Curtain in 1598, with both Marlowe and Jonson present (watching Hamlet), nothing is suggested in any way about what happens after that.

Considering the support for the Marlovian claim provided by the (authorship-neutral) scientist Dr Thomas Corwin Mendenhall in 1901, Nicholl criticises Mendenhall's method on the basis of "the fluidity of spelling in [the early modern] period and the extent to which printed copy has been prey to the vicissitudes of transmission."  This criticism might be levelled at all stylometric studies, including those that orthodox scholars claim to support their position.  But in any case, it isn't a problem.  Although Mendenhall didn't tell us which texts he made use of, it is fairly clear from the method employed that they would have been printed editions with modernized spelling.

Further, Nicholl states, "It has also been shown that word-length distributions vary according to genre; an analysis of the works of Sir Philip Sidney by C. B. Williams (1975) gives very different readings for his prose and his poetry." Williams's analysis used only 1,552 of Sidney's verse (i.e. poems) and 1,553 words of his prose.  Yet such minimal data from one author is used to deduce a conclusion applicable to all English renaissance writers!  Nicholl claims Williams's conclusions would "affect a comparison of Shakespeare's plays with those of Marlowe, which feature much less prose."  Yet in our comparison of Marlowe's later works (9,452 words) with Shakespeare excluding the comedies (66,402), the former has about 86% verse (blank verse, not poems) and the latter about 81%.  Hardly enough of a difference to cause concern, even if Williams had been right.

On the basis that he considers Mendenhall's stylometry flawed, Nicholl then dismisses the extensions of that work by Daryl Pinksen and Peter Farey, which (contrary to Nicholl's assessment) took full account of these caveats, and used statistical and technological methods unknown to Mendenhall.  Recognising that authors may vary over time and between genres, Farey demonstrated that the pattern for Marlowe's later plays correlates (at r = .9998, where r = 1 is perfect correlation) more closely with Shakespeare's histories, tragedies and "Roman" plays than Shakespeare's own comedies do with them (.9986), or than Marlowe's earlier plays do with his later ones (.9943).

When assessing the evidence surrounding Marlowe's apparent death in 1593 – a death that would clearly preclude Marlowe's writing the Shakespeare canon – Nicholl falls victim to either a profound logical inconsistency or a personal blindspot.  "The desire of anti-Stratfordians," he says, "is always to create alternative narratives, with or without the backing of evidence, and despite this extensive scene-of-crime documentation Marlovians continue to claim that Marlowe's death was faked." But Charles Nicholl himself (in both editions of his book, The Reckoning) rejects the "extensive scene-of-crime documentation" as being based on lies, and in Mike Rubbo's documentary Much Ado About Something accepts the possibility, if not the probability, of there having been a faked death. The proper approach for an historian would therefore have been to show why the lies told by those present wouldn't have extended as far as the identity of the body, rather than simply appealing to the authority of other biographers, and making offensive (and false) remarks about his opponents' motives and reasoning.

Nicholl says Marlovians have "sought to prove" that the Deptford killing was not within the verge (a twelve mile radius around the queen) and that "the involvement of the Royal Coroner in the case was a suspicious intervention rather than a routine requirement." Follow up the references he gives for this allegation, however, and one will find they say exactly the opposite.  Despite the Queen actually being at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey (rather than at Greenwich, where Nicholl places her), Deptford was still within the verge, and it was certainly a requirement for him to have been involved.  However, the law required the inquest to be presided over jointly with a coroner from the county, in this case Kent, and according to the report of the inquest it wasn't.  This information, discovered by Marlovians, was gratefully picked up by Park Honan in his biography of Marlowe, but for some reason Charles Nicholl blatantly misrepresents it.

Having dealt at some length with the version of Marlovian theory espoused by Calvin Hoffman's [The Murder Of] The Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955), Nicholl claims that "There have been various further explorations and refinements of his theory, but no great changes or new directions." This is simply untrue, and as an attempt to dismiss nearly sixty years of more recent research, disingenuous.  Other than agreeing with the theory that Marlowe's death was faked and that he survived to write much of what is attributed to Shakespeare, modern Marlovian arguments contain very little of Hoffman's material. 

There are numerous other errors of both fact and reasoning in Nicholl's chapter, and also some evidence notable by its absence.  When writing that, "in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hugh Evans soothes his 'melancholies' by crooning a couple of stanzas from Marlowe's famous lyric, 'Come Live With Me'," Nicholl fails to mention that Evans mixes Marlowe's song up with one based upon Psalm 137 ("By the rivers of Babylon") which, as everyone would have known, is a lament for being in exile. Presumably, he has no explanation for why the author would do such a thing.

As with all convinced Stratfordians, where there is no good explanation for a piece of evidence, Charles Nicholl either ignores the evidence completely, or insults those who raise questions about it, insisting that questioning the received view is simply not legitimate.  He calls Marlovians "disingenuous" (definition: lacking in candour or frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent) for asking how and why Touchstone, making a clear reference to Marlowe's death in As You Like It, could have knowledge of the word "reckoning" (given in the inquest document as the reason for the knife-fight) when it was apparently not in the public domain until 1925.

Thus it is clear that despite the generally improved tone of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, the defenders of the orthodoxy continue to hold the line that authorship questioners are morally or logically deficient, and the question itself invalid.  Charles Nicholl demonstrates a clear distaste for "the interrogative syntax much favoured in authorship literature."  We, on the other hand, insist that questioning is a legitimate human activity, central to all research in both the humanities and the sciences.  And though it is possible that the Shakespeare authorship question will never be settled, we refer Charles Nicholl and the contributors and editors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt to this quote from French philosopher and humanist Joseph Joubert:

"It is better to debate a question without settling it,

than to settle a question without debating it."

© Ros Barber and Peter Farey, May 2013
   
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"Proving Shakespeare" Webinar Transcript

Click here for a transcript of the April 26 "Proving Shakespeare" webinar with our own Ros Barber, author of The Marlowe Papers, debating Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson.  Super job, Ros!


Editor's Note:  Congratulations to Ros Barber, whose "tour de force" The Marlowe Papers has made the Authors Club Best First Novel shortlist and Desmond Elliott Prize longlist.

Isabel Gortázar, R.I.P.

We are greatly saddened by the passing this week of International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society co-founder Isabel Gortázar, in Las Arenas-Getxo, Spain. Isabel was an extraordinary woman and a passionate and tireless Marlovian scholar. We will miss her immensely.

 

Free Webcast of April 26 Authorship Discussion!

Follow this link for free registration for this Friday's Shakespeare authorship discussion at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival between MSC contributor Ros Barber and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells.  This webinar is sponsored by Cambridge University Press.  Should be very interesting!

Praying We See the Light by Anthony Kellett

“There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.” 

Harold Bloom, in his foreword to Living with Shakespeare, a new anthology by Susannah Carson.

In 2003, preceding Bloom’s revelation, Bill Browning, then Head of English at King’s School, Canterbury, quoted Jonathan Bate when he said, “As soon as you have a God, you have apostates."

So, let’s examine that statement.  Rephrased, it could be stated as: “Shakespeare is a God, and therefore you will always get people who renounce their faith in him and who may be shunned by the members of their former religion."

Yes, I think Jonathan Bate was correct; that is exactly how it is with the Stratford man and his followers. But should we really tolerate such an attitude in academics, studying and teaching a factual subject to our children?

Bill Browning went on, in that same interview in Mike Rubbo's documentary film Much Ado About Something, to claim that looking at the authorship issue is just a substitute activity for studying the plays. “It doesn’t really help us," he commented.  Is that true, too?  Carson’s book claims “we live in Shakespeare’s world,” an environment that has been “fine-tuned for us” by a poet whose vision is so potent “that it’s difficult to conceive who we would be” if he’d never existed.  If true, is it not valid that we examine the author of these works?  Carson’s book speaks of the poet’s vision, of how he, the poet, affects our lives.  Surely, this compels us to examine more than the works alone.

Notwithstanding this, does it not strike anyone else as a little sad that a Head of English, at the school of Christopher Marlowe, Hugh Walpole and Somerset Maugham, believed that the biography of the author should be considered irrelevant and that we should read the works in isolation from their creator?  I wonder what Somerset Maugham would think of that viewpoint.  

It was sometimes said that Maugham’s years as a medical student were unproductive, creatively.  Yet Maugham himself said in his Summing Up: 

I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face; I saw courage and steadfastness. I saw faith shine in the eyes of those who trusted in what I could only think was an illusion and I saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of death with an ironic joke because he was too proud to let those about him see the terror of his soul.

How can anyone reading that quote for the first time fail to have a heightened emotional awareness when they read a Maugham passage which may have been coloured by these experiences?

When he wrote Liza of Lambeth, Maugham drew on experiences he had as a midwife in Lambeth.  At other times, he drew on knowledge gained as a secret service agent in Russia during the 1917 revolution, as did Walpole, in no small way.

Walpole sets one of his most famous books in Cumberland, so it comes as no great surprise he had a house near Derwentwater in that county.  He tentatively explored an ecclesiastic career before abandoning the idea, yet it manifested itself in his writing, along with his exploits for the Propaganda Bureau in Russia.

I have no doubt that many people enjoyed the writings of these men, oblivious to their background.  If all one wants from a book is a "good yarn," then that is neither to be criticized nor lamented.  However, surely the Head of English, at such an eminent school, should have higher goals and aspirations than that, should he not?  Should we not be illustrating to students how the life of the author influenced the themes within his works, so that they may become more connected, too?  It seems to me that the expression of "self" in any art, be it written, painted, sculpted, designed or composed, is exactly the kind of skill that will yield the next generation of artistic talent. If students are taught creativity is born solely from imagination, without any personal emotional content, is art not bound for a bland, formulaic, and sterile future?  

The authorship debate is gold dust, in this respect.  It is not only a perfect vehicle for exploring personal content in varied works, by numerous authors, then relating those to the Shakespeare canon, for what that might reveal about its author; it is also a way to teach young people how to question preconceived ideas and dogma.  It can teach them how to reason from basic principles. It teaches them not to blindly accept what they are presented as fact, to analyze data for themselves, and to debate their findings with others.
 
It seems to me that the authorship debate is the perfect vehicle to introduce pupils to the art of debating and thereby to political debate and politics itself.  It can teach them the application of logic, history, scientific method, archaeology, documentary research, economics, philosophy — as well as the genius of the plays themselves.  Moreover, all these myriad "angles" open the possibility that pupils will find these works far more interesting and alluring.  At present, we merely sit them down to learn what they perceive as a foreign language, as something serving no purpose other than to pass a meaningless exam, which they do not value.  I think it is time for a different approach, and we may yet produce a generation excited by Shakespeare and the works we all love. 

I want young people to start their lives, in this complex world, with a knowledge and understanding of the lessons in Shakespeare.  Unfortunately, most never learn them; and even those that do, tend to do so far too late in life.

 © Anthony Kellett, March 2013

Also by Anthony Kellett:  "Shakespeare's Anonymous Death"; "William Shakespeare, Businessman - Forgotten Genius"; "Shakespeare Scholars: A Lament"; "A Case for Marlowe - Made Simple"

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