The Bassano Fresco by Peter Farey

In the comments on her essay "Marlowe and the Dark Lady" (September 2011), Maureen Duff mentioned a fresco in the town of Bassano del Grappa in Italy, some forty miles north-west of Venice, which appears to have been referred to in Othello. This connection was first suggested by Roger Prior in his article, "Shakespeare's Visit to Italy," ¹ where he argues that Shakespeare (whom he assumes is the man from Stratford-upon-Avon) must have visited Bassano at some time, so detailed is his apparent knowledge of the fresco itself and of the town's inhabitants. 

This suggestion seems to have been ignored by Shakespearian scholars, but has been picked up by some non-Stratfordians, such as John Hudson,² who proposes Emilia (Bassano) Lanier as the true author, and the Oxfordian Richard Whalen. Surprisingly, Richard Paul Roe's book ³ makes no mention of it, and although it gets a mention in Ros Barber's The Marlowe Papers (p.431) no Marlovian has as far as I know written about it in any detail.

The particular passage in Othello which apparently contains the "fresco" references is when Iago – having planted the idea of Desdemona's infidelity with Cassio in Othello's mind, thus driving him into a jealous rage – reacts to Othello's demand for proof. (3.3.405-411)

It is impossible you should see this,
Were they as prime as Goats, as hot as Monkeys,
As salt as Wolves in pride, and Fools as gross
As Ignorance, made drunk. But yet, I say,
If imputation, and strong circumstances,
Which lead directly to the door of Truth,
Will give you satisfaction, you might have't. 

This is a speech which clearly rankles in Othello, as later, having insulted and dismissed his wife in front of Lodovico, he exits with the words "Goats, and Monkeys." (4.1.265)

According to Prior, the fresco was on the front of a house in the "Piazzotto del Sale" – "the little square of salt." It was painted in 1539 by Bassano's most famous painter, Jacopo dal Ponte, usually known as Jacopo Bassano, having been commissioned by the Dal Corno family, whose house it was and who were the official sellers of salt in Bassano.⁴  
Before looking at this fresco, however, it is perhaps worth noting that in the main square of Bassano there were two apothecary's shops. The owner of one of these had been known as "the Moor" after the sign of a Moor's head which hung outside his shop and, although this particular apothecary had retired by 1585, his family carried on the business for many years. The other was part-owned by someone called Giovanni Otello, a familiar surname in Bassano at the time. Although Cinthio's Hecatommithi, the main source of Othello, concerned both "the Moor" and "Disdemona" (sic), it was Shakespeare who introduced the name Othello for the main protagonist.

Not having seen the fresco itself, which has now been transferred to the museum in Bassano, I have to rely on the descriptions given by Roger Prior and John Hudson. They explain that it is divided into four horizontal bands, the second highest of which is a frieze depicting animals and musical instruments. Two of these animals are a goat with a monkey sitting beneath it. On the third band, roughly underneath them, is a large painting of a naked woman – Truth – who stands between two arched windows, and beneath her, on the lowest band, is a painting of the Drunkenness of Noah. The windows were fitted with slatted blinds, called "jealousies," which when opened appeared as doors partly concealing the naked Truth. The juxtaposition of the goat, the monkey, salt, drunkenness, jealousy, and the "door of Truth" seem to be far too obvious to be only coincidental.

If so, when might the author Shakespeare have visited Bassano del Grappa? To establish this, we need to look at the Bassano family, of which Emilia Lanier was a member. This family originated in Bassano, specializing in the manufacture and playing of musical wind instruments. Probably of Jewish origin, they had left the town by 1515, however, because of the anti-semitic policies of the town council. They settled in Venice, but five (of six) brothers emigrated to England in 1540, becoming members of Henry VIII's King's Music, and founders of the first recorder consort at the English court. By 1590, all of these brothers were dead, but their offspring, including Arthur, Edward, Andrea and Jeronimo, sons of the late Anthony Bassano, continued as instrument makers and court musicians. Emilia Lanier (née Bassano), daughter of Anthony's brother Baptista, was their cousin.

In August 1593, three of Anthony's sons – Arthur, Andrea and Jeronimo – received from the Crown a surprising and lucrative grant, a licence to export an average of over 100,000 calf-skins a year over a period of seven years. In fact, it was a licence the family held until 1621, with Edward also being included in 1607. It is therefore hardly surprising that neither Arthur nor Andrea (nor Edward, in fact) collected their quarterly payment as court musicians in person for the next three quarters and appear to have been away from London for seven months or so. The brothers had inherited a house in Venice, and Bassano was an important centre of the leather-working industry. As it happens, the Otello family had been prominent among the leather handlers of the town, and possibly still were.

Roger Prior suggests that the brothers must have invited Shakespeare to accompany them, having picked up an expert knowledge of the leather trade from his father, who was a glover. We, however, might consider the alternative proposed by Maureen Duff – Christopher Marlowe.  His father was a shoemaker who had at one time actually been a "searcher" (inspector) of leather for the Shoemakers Company, the guild which covered virtually all leather-working trades. Was it in fact suggested by "the Crown" that they knew just the man for the job?

One thing we may still wonder is why the author of Othello seems to associate the fresco in Bassano so much with sexual arousal ("as prime as Goats, as hot as Monkeys, / As salt as Wolves in pride"). John Hudson, thinking that the author was Emilia Lanier, suggests that the brothers took their cousin on the trip with them. If, as is popularly believed, she was the "dark lady" of the Sonnets, perhaps he is right!

© Peter Farey, August 2013

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

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¹ Roger Prior. "Shakespeare's Visit to Italy," The Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, Vol. 9 (2008). The University of Malta. 
² John Hudson. "Goats and Monkeys" (accessed 12 August 2013). 
³ Richard Paul Roe. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy (2008). Harper Perennial.
⁴ The member of the family who probably had most influence on the fresco's symbolism and design, Lazzaro Dal Corno, had been awarded the title Conte Palatino by the Emperor Charles V, and the "County Palatine" was, of course, one of Portia's suitors in The Merchant of Venice.

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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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